repeated, ‘Snobbery.’ Brunetti, studying her face, saw that some of the plumpness of adolescence had given way to the angles of maturity, making her resemblance to her mother even stronger.
‘Which means what?’ Raffi said, turning his attention to his dinner.
‘To impress people,’ Chiara said. ‘With how sophisticated they are and how good their taste is.’ Before Raffi could say anything, she added, ‘People do it all the time, with everything. Cars, what they wear, what they say they like.’
‘Why say you like something when you don’t?’ Raffi asked with what sounded to Brunetti like honest confusion, forcing him to wonder if, unbeknownst to either him or Paola, their son had been spending his free time on some other planet for the last few years.
Chiara set her fork down, rested her chin on one hand, and stared across the table at her brother. He ignored her. Finally she said, ‘It’s why you want a pair of Tod’s and not a plain old pair of shoes.’
Raffi ignored her and continued to eat.
‘Or why my friends’ parents all think they have to go to the Maldives or the Seychelles for vacation,’ she persisted.
Raffi poured himself a glass of water, ignoring the champagne. He drank the water and set the glass on the table, then pushed his chair back and turned to face his sister. He held up one foot and extended it in her direction. ‘Bought at the Lignano market this summer for nineteen euros,’ he said proudly, waving his foot in a circle, the better to display his shoe. ‘No Tod’s, no label.’ He lowered his foot and turned his chair, pulling himself back into place at the table. He picked up his fork and resumed eating.
Crestfallen, Chiara looked at her mother and then at her father. Had she been a boy, she and Raffi would probably have got into a scuffle of some sort, and Brunetti suspected he would have broken it up to protect the smaller child. Why was it, then, that when the combatant used only words, she had to be left alone to protect herself?
Brunetti had been in what he assumed was the normal number of fights when he was growing up: nothing had ever passed beyond a few punches and a good deal of shoving. He could not remember ever having been hurt, nor indeed hurting anyone, and none of the fights had left any clear memory. But he still remembered an afternoon when Geraldo Barasciutti, who sat next to him in mathematics class, had laughed when Brunetti made a grammatical error, mixing Veneziano with Italian.
‘What’s the matter with you? Does your father unload ships for a living?’ Geraldo had asked, poking him in the ribs as he said it.
He had meant it as a joke: it was common enough for kids to confound the two languages. But the truth had sliced into Brunetti’s sense of self – a sense made delicate by having to wear his brother’s cast-off shoes and jackets – for his father had indeed once worked at the docks, unloading ships for a living. It was that day and that remark that Brunetti remembered as the worst thing that had happened to him as a child. His university education, his position as a commissario of police, the stature and wealth of his wife’s family: all of these things could be called into question by the memory of those words and the pain caused by their unintentional truth.
‘The strange thing,’ Brunetti said, holding up his glass to Raffi though speaking in defence of Chiara’s position, ‘is that I probably couldn’t tell the difference between this, and the prosecco we drink every day.’
‘
‘The prosecco we normally drink,’ he said, correcting the ambiguity. He finished his champagne, picked up the empty bottle, and went to the refrigerator in search of a second. He settled for their everyday prosecco and took it back to the table.
‘What your father is doing,’ Paola said to the children as Brunetti unpeeled the foil wrapping, ‘is giving an example of the scientific method. He is not prepared,’ she continued, ‘to allow his remark to go untested.’
‘Which one?’ Raffi asked. ‘About the difference between champagne and prosecco or that you drink it every day?’
‘Two pigeons with one bean,’ Brunetti said, a remark that was followed by a very loud ‘Pop.’
23
The following morning, Brunetti woke early and went to make himself coffee. While he was waiting for the coffee to boil, he went to the back window, hoping the mountains would be visible, but they were not. He stared at the distant haze while he considered the strange case of Madame Reynard. There was no way of knowing, short of asking them directly, how Sartori and Morandi had come to sign the will. And why had a woman of Madame Reynard’s age – to make no mention of her wealth – been in the Ospedale Civile and not a private clinic?
The spluttering of the coffee distracted him. He poured it out, stirred in some sugar, and added cold milk, though he would have preferred it to be heated. He returned to his thoughts. In what conjunction had the orbits of those four people intersected in a hospital room: a dying heiress and the lawyer who became her heir; the witnesses to the handwritten will that named him as such? As if fallen from the heavens, a practical nurse and a man with a criminal record had witnessed the will that saw to the transfer of millions. An odd constellation, and how large was the apartment which one of the witnesses bought soon thereafter?
His thoughts turned to the woman who had been living with Signora Altavilla. Brunetti recalled with some uneasiness his initial willingness to suspect, not her, but her lover, the chemistry teacher with the courage to come and warn Signora Altavilla of the cuckoo in her nest. The southerner.
He stared at the painting on the kitchen wall, of the Grand Canal as it had appeared centuries before, then he pictured Signora Altavilla’s apartment as they had found it. He looked again at their painting, and the sight conjured up the memory of the lonely nails on Signora Altavilla’s walls. He retrieved his
As soon as the doctor heard his name, he said, ‘Commissario, I was going to call you today.’
‘About what, Dottore?’ Brunetti asked, relieved that he was being spared an exchange of pleasantries, though there was nothing pleasant either man had to say to the other.
‘My mother’s apartment. Some things are missing,’ Niccolini said, sounding troubled, not angry.
‘How do you know this, Dottore?’
‘I went there yesterday. With a friend. Just to see. He came with me to…’ His voice faded, but Brunetti, at the memory of what there was to see in that apartment, decided it would be kinder to let him find his voice.
‘To help.’
Brunetti certainly understood that.
‘Could you tell me what’s missing?’ Brunetti prodded.
‘Three drawings,’ the doctor answered. ‘They were all quite small.’
‘Is that all?’
‘I think so. So far, that is.’
‘Missing from where?
‘One was in the guest room. And two were in the hallway just outside it.’
Brunetti remembered the ghost shadows under the nails in the guest room, was vaguely conscious of two in the hallway. He did not remember seeing any others. But surely, if Gabriela Pavon had decided to add them to her last-minute packing, then those were the easiest to grab. What nerve she must have had, to take them while the other two women were just down the corridor.
‘What were they, the drawings?’
‘One was a Corot. The other two were by Salvator Rosa. Small, but good quality.’
The doctor remained silent for a long time, and then he said, sounding weak and hesitant, ‘I thought I should tell you. It might mean something.’ Brunetti thanked the doctor and hung up.
He sat and looked at the painting for some time, and then he finished his coffee, set the cup in the sink, and went to take a shower.
Forty minutes later, he emerged on to the embankment of San Lorenzo. He rested his elbows on the railing and watched the boats pass by, trying to think of how he might convince Patta to pursue more actively an official investigation into the death of Signora Altavilla. He imagined the statue of blindfolded Justice, in her hand the
