Drawing Conclusions

Brunetti rummaged through the stories that had been dislodged in his memory and came up with the one he sought: ‘They turned out not to be relatives but people who had read about her fortune and thought they’d have a try at it.’ He let more information seep in and then added, ‘But yes, they were French.’

Both sat for a while, letting their memories gather up bits and pieces. ‘And wasn’t there an auction?’ Vianello asked.

‘Yes,’ Brunetti said. ‘One of the last great ones. After she died. They sold everything.’ Then, because it was Vianello he was talking to, and he could say such things to him, Brunetti added, ‘My father-in-law said every collector in the city was there. Every collector in the Veneto, for that matter.’ Brunetti knew of two drawings from that auction. ‘He got two pages from a notebook of Giovannino de Grassi.’

Vianello shook his head in ignorance.

‘Fourteenth century. There’s a whole notebook in Bergamo, with drawings – paintings, really – of birds and animals, and a fantasy alphabet.’ His father-in-law kept his two drawings in a folder, out of the light. Brunetti held up his hands about twenty centimetres apart. ‘These are only loose pages, about this big. Beautiful.’

‘Valuable?’ asked the far more pragmatic Vianello.

‘I don’t know exactly,’ Brunetti said. ‘But I’d guess so. In fact, my father-in-law said that most collectors went because of her husband’s collection of drawings – it wasn’t like today, when you could check everything that was in the auction by going online. He said there were always surprises. But this time, the surprise was that there were so few drawings. Still he managed to get those two.’

‘Pity about Cuccetti, isn’t it?’ Vianello asked, surprising Brunetti by remembering the name of the lawyer who had swept the board.

‘What, that he died so soon after? What was it, two years?’

‘I think so. And with his son. The son was driving, wasn’t he?’

‘Yes, and drunk. But it was all hushed up.’ Both of them knew a fair bit about this sort of thing. ‘Cuccetti had a lot of important friends,’ Brunetti added.

As if Brunetti’s statement were the night, and his question the day, Vianello asked, ‘The will was never contested, was it?’

‘Only by those French people, and that didn’t last a day.’ Leaning across his desk Brunetti retrieved the papers Signorina Elettra had given him and said, ‘This is what she found.’ He read the first sheet and passed it to Vianello. In amiable silence, neither thinking it necessary to comment, they read through the papers.

Maria Sartori had been a practical nurse, first at the Ospedale al Lido, and then at the Ospedale Civile, from which she had retired more than fifteen years before. Never married, she had lived at the same address as Benito Morandi for most of their adult lives. She had kept an account at the same bank during her working life, into which modest sums were deposited and then withdrawn. She had never been in hospital, nor had she ever come to the attention of the police. And that was all: no mention of joy or sorrow, dreams or disappointments. Decades of work, retirement and a pension, and now a room in a private casa di cura, paid for by her pension and the contribution of her companion.

Attached was a photocopy of her carta d’identita; Brunetti barely recognized the soft-featured woman who gazed out at the world from the photo: surely she could not be the ancestor of the woman with the deeply lined face he had seen. He fought off the temptation to whisper to the younger face how right she had been: trouble comes.

As he handed the second sheet to Vianello, Brunetti turned his attention to her companion. Morandi had served in the Second World War. Brunetti’s first thought was that Morandi must have lied about that, but then he did the numbers and saw that it was just barely possible.

Brunetti’s father had often referred to the chaos that had prevailed during those dreadful years, so he believed that a boy in his early teens might have been allowed to enlist at the very end. But then Brunetti read Morandi’s service record, stating that he had seen service in Abyssinia, Albania, and Greece, where he had been wounded, sent home, and discharged back into civilian life.

‘No, eh?’ Brunetti heard himself say aloud, startling Vianello, who turned to look at him. If the date of birth in this file was true, then Morandi would have gone off to Greece when he was as young as twelve, and he would have been only sixteen when Italy surrendered to the Allies. No matter how eager to name their son ‘Benito’ his family might have been, few families would have allowed their adolescent son to follow the other Benito off to war.

A few years after Morandi’s return – or at least after documentary evidence of his war service had entered the record – he took a job at the port of Venice and remained there for more than a decade, though no more precise job description than ‘manual labourer’ was provided. Brunetti learned that he had been dismissed from this job without explanation.

Some years later, he began working as a cleaner at the Ospedale Civile. Brunetti leaned aside and picked up the papers Vianello had set on his desk; Signora Sartori was already working at the Ospedale by then.

Morandi had worked as a portiere and cleaner for more than two decades and had retired about twenty years before, entitled to a minimal pension.

Brunetti recognized the seal of the Ministry of Justice on the next three sheets of paper, which catalogued Morandi’s relationship with the forces of order, to which he was no stranger. He had first been arrested when he was in his early thirties, charged with selling smuggled cigarettes to tobacco shops on the mainland. Five years later, he was arrested for selling items stolen from ships being unloaded at the port and was given a one-year suspended sentence. Seven years after that he was arrested for having assaulted and seriously injured a colleague at work. When the man failed to testify against him, the charges were dropped. He had also been arrested for resisting arrest and for passing stolen goods to a fence in Mestre. There was some sort of clerical error in the processing of evidence in that case, and after five years it was abandoned, though by then Signor Morandi seemed to have passed to the side of the angels, for he had not been arrested since the time he had begun work at the hospital.

The last sheets of paper concerned Signor Morandi’s life as a fiscal being. About the time of his retirement, Morandi bought an apartment in San Marco without taking out a mortgage to do so. A note in Signorina Elettra’s handwriting informed Brunetti that he and Signora Sartori had moved into that apartment soon thereafter, for both of them had changed residence to that address within months of the purchase.

His bank account, completely undisturbed by the purchase of the apartment, showed much the same routine seen in Signora Sartori’s: modest deposits and withdrawals, and, since the purchase of the apartment, the monthly payment of a condominium fee. This fee had risen during the years and was now more than four hundred euros a month and thus could no longer easily be offset by his modest pension.

From the time Signora Sartori had entered the nursing home Signor Morandi’s banking habits had changed. A month before her first bill was due, his account had been credited with a deposit of almost four thousand euros. Since then, every three or four months, a deposit of between four and five thousand euros was made, and each month more than twelve hundred euros was routinely transferred from his account to that of the nursing home.

That seemed to be that. Brunetti leafed back through the papers to check the dates and saw that, though the apartment had been purchased after Morandi’s retirement, Signora Sartori continued working at the hospital. It was unlikely that people holding such jobs could have managed, even jointly, to save enough to buy an apartment: given the absence of a mortgage and the low salary of the one still working, it became almost impossible. Neither Brunetti’s brief meeting with Morandi nor the contents of these papers suggested a man whose behaviour would be characterized by fiscal prudence.

Brunetti got to his feet and went over to the window, resuming his study of the two facades on view. He returned his attention to the wall, considering the report and wondering why it had caught Signorina Elettra’s attention. He knew her well enough to know that all of the information she had acquired would be in these papers: not to provide it would be – he was struck by the word that came to mind – to cheat. He waited for Vianello to conclude his contemplation and pass some observation on the papers.

While he waited, Brunetti considered the phenomenon of retirement. People in other countries, he had been told, dreamed of retirement as a chance to move to a warmer climate and start a whole new chapter: learn a language, buy a scuba outfit, take up taxidermy. How utterly alien that desire was to his own culture. The people he knew and those he had been observing all his life wanted nothing more, upon retirement, than to settle more deeply into their homes and the routines they had constructed over decades, making no change to their lives other