Drawing Conclusions

than to excise from them the necessity of going to work each morning and perhaps to add the possibility of travelling a bit, but not often, and not too far. He knew no one who had bought a new home upon retirement or who had considered changing address.

What, then, would explain the sudden acquisition, at the conclusion of his working life, of a new apartment by Signor Morandi? Could there be some other Morandi? Was this an error on Signorina Elettra’s part. Error? What was he thinking? Brunetti put his fingers to his mouth, as if to stifle that rash word.

‘Why did he buy an apartment?’ Vianello asked from his side of the room.

‘What did he buy it with?’ Brunetti asked. ‘There’s no mention of a mortgage.’

Vianello returned to his chair, leaned forward to place his palm on the papers, saying, ‘Nothing in here suggests a man who saved all his life to buy a home.’

Brunetti dialled Signorina Elettra’s number.

‘Si, Commissario?’ she answered.

‘The Inspector and I are curious about how Signor Morandi managed to buy his apartment,’ he said.

She allowed a moment to pass and then asked, ‘Did you see the date of purchase?’

Brunetti raised his shoulder and propped the phone against his ear then used both hands to leaf through the papers. He found the date and said, ‘It’s three months after he retired. But I don’t see why it’s significant.’

‘Perhaps if you looked at the date of Madame Reynard’s death,’ she suggested.

He found the copy of her death certificate and saw that Morandi had bought the apartment exactly one month after her death. He made a noise.

When no comment or question followed, she asked, ‘Did you see the name of the person selling the apartment?’

He looked. He said, ‘Matilda Querini.’ He caught Vianello’s confused glance and switched on the speaker, then replaced the receiver.

Again, he did not comment. ‘You and the Inspector don’t remember the case, then?’ she asked.

‘I remember that those people witnessed it and that Cuccetti inherited the lot.’

‘Ah,’ she said, drawing the syllable out and letting it end on a dying fall.

‘Tell me,’ Brunetti said.

‘Matilda Querini was his wife.’

‘Ah, his wife,’ Brunetti let himself say in conscious imitation. Then, a few heartbeats later, he asked, ‘Is she still alive?’

‘No. She died six years ago.’

‘Wealthy?’

‘Money without limit.’

‘And where did it go? The son was the only child, wasn’t he?’

‘Rumour has it that she left it to the Church.’

‘Only rumour, Signorina?’

‘All right,’ she said. ‘Fact. She left it to the Church.’ Before he could ask, she explained, ‘I have a friend who works in the Patriarch’s office. I called and asked him, and he told me it was the biggest sum they’ve ever been left.’

‘Did he say how much?’

‘I thought it impolite to ask.’ Vianello made a small moaning noise.

‘So?’ he asked, knowing she’d be unable to leave something like that alone.

‘So I asked my father. Her money wasn’t at his bank, but he knows the director of the one where it was, and he asked him.’

‘Do I want to know?’

‘Seven million euros, give or take a few hundred thousand. And the patent for that process, and at least eight apartments.’

‘To the Church?’ Brunetti asked, at the sound of which question Vianello put his head, rather melodramatically, in his hands and shook it violently from side to side.

‘Yes,’ she answered.

An idea came to him and he asked, ‘Have you looked at Cuccetti and his wife’s bank accounts?’ For her to do so was for her to break the law. For him to know that she had done so and then do nothing was for him to break the law.

‘Of course,’ she answered.

‘Let me guess,’ Brunetti said, unable to resist the temptation to show off a little, ‘there was no money put into either account after the sale?’

‘Nothing,’ she answered. ‘Of course, she may have given Morandi the apartment from the goodness of her heart,’ she said, her tone excluding this possibility a priori.

‘Cuccetti’s reputation makes that unlikely, wouldn’t you say?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Yes,’ she agreed, then added, ‘But it also makes his wife’s decision to leave it all to the Church…’ she began and then paused to search for the suitable word.

‘Grotesque?’ Brunetti suggested.

‘Ah,’ she said in appreciation of the justness of his choice.

22

Brunetti filled Vianello in on the missing half of his conversation with Signorina Elettra. ‘I shouldn’t laugh, I know,’ Vianello said, sober-faced, ‘but the thought that everything that greedy old bastard Cuccetti stole during his miserable life ended up in the pockets of the Church is…’ He gave a resigned nod, either in admiration or astonishment, and said, ‘Like them or not, you have to admit they’re the best.’

‘The priests?’

‘Priests. Nuns. Monks. Bishops. You name them. They’ll have their snouts in the soup before you set the plate on the table. They got to her in the end, and they sucked it all up. My compliments to them,’ he said, shaking his head in what Brunetti took to be real – however grudging – admiration.

Deciding he had nothing to oppose that sentiment, Brunetti suggested they would both be better off at home with their families, an opinion in which Vianello joined him. They left the Questura together, going their separate ways just outside the front door.

Brunetti decided to walk, needing the sense of motion and freedom that came from moving through the city without having to give conscious thought to where he was going. Memory and imagination, tranquillized by walking, floated back to consider the names Cuccetti and Reynard. The first brought only a sense of vague distaste, while the second brought pathos and loss.

He paused at the bottom of the Rialto and reeled in his thoughts. The prospect of walking home along the less crowded riva appealed to him, but he decided to go down to Biancat and get Paola some flowers: it had been an age since he had. He found the florist closed. Having got the idea of flowers in his head, he was irritated – more than that – not to be able to take them to Paola. He stood in front of the window and looked at the irises he wanted, a white plastic cylinder of them visible behind the humidity-clouded window, beautiful and all the more desirable because he could not have them. ‘How like a man,’ he muttered to himself and turned away and down his own calle. He was on time; that would have to take the place of flowers.

Brunetti was not a man of faith, at least not in a way that posited a supreme being that concerned itself with the doings of men: as a policeman, Brunetti knew enough about the doings of men to make him hope the deity would be warned away from them in search of some more rewarding species. But at odd times during his life he found himself racked with a sense of limitless gratitude: it could come upon him at any time, and it always leaped upon him with maximum surprise. This evening it hit him as he turned into the last flight of steps leading to the apartment. He was healthy, he didn’t think he was crazy or violent, he had a wife he loved to the point of folly, two children in whom he had invested every hope of happiness on this earth. And, to date, misery and pain and privation and sickness had stayed outside the ring of fire he liked to think encircled them. What he thought of as