‘And that you are a man with a certain… how shall I put it?’ Turchetti said, pausing as if in search of the most flattering term. Brunetti, for his part, sat, resisting the impulse to tell the other man he didn’t much care what he called anything, so long as he told him about Benito Morandi. Instead, he tilted his head rather in the manner of Santa Caterina but in a fashion he hoped would suggest mild curiosity rather than angelic rapture.
‘… sense of justice? Is that the term I’m searching for?’
Brunetti thought it probably was and so nodded.
Turchetti renewed his smile. ‘Good, then.’ He sat back and crossed his legs, suggesting that, now that the preliminaries were established, they could start talking. ‘Morandi is a client of mine in that he has occasionally sold me things.’
Brunetti smiled as at the hearing of truth, already known, universally acknowledged. So Turchetti must remember, perhaps regret, writing those cheques to Morandi. Had he been short of cash? Had he needed to delay payment? Or had he paid with cheques so as to allow time to have whatever he bought authenticated? Or to verify the provenance?
‘What things?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Oh, this and that,’ Turchetti said with an easy smile and an airy wave of his hand.
‘What things?’
Displaying no surprise whatsoever at Brunetti’s tone, he said, ‘Oh, the occasional drawing.’
‘What drawings?’
While Turchetti thought about how to answer this, Brunetti reached into his pocket and pulled out his notebook. He opened it to the page that had the name of Chiara’s teachers and looked down the list.
Before he could repeat his question, Turchetti said, ‘Oh, minor artists, no one you’ve ever heard of, I’d guess.’
Brunetti took a pen from his inside pocket, opened it, gave Turchetti a neutral glance, and said, ‘Try me.’
Turchetti’s smile was gracious. ‘Johann von Dillis and Friedrich Salathe,’ he said, pronouncing the first name of the second painter as though he were a man nursed on Goethe and Heine.
Brunetti had heard of the first, but he nodded as though both names were familiar to him and wrote them down. Though he had never heard his father-in-law mention either name, the Count was a collector and spent a lot of time in galleries, and so he might have seen them, had Turchetti shown them in his gallery, and thus Brunetti might learn their resale price.
‘And the others?’ Brunetti asked.
Turchetti smiled. ‘I’d have to check my records. It was so long ago.’
‘But the last sale was only…’ Brunetti said, trying to recall the papers Signorina Elettra had given him as he turned a page of his notebook, ‘about three months ago.’
Had Turchetti been a fish, Brunetti would have seen him squirming around as he tried to free himself from the hook in such a manner as to do himself as little harm as possible. Turchetti did not gasp, at least not in the way of a fish: he drew in two long breaths and finally said, ‘Shall we save time, Commissario, and you tell me what it is you want?’
‘I want to know what he sold you and how much they were worth.’
With a smile that would have been flirtatious, had it been directed at a woman, the dealer asked, ‘You don’t want to know what I paid him?’
Brunetti felt the urge to swipe him aside, but Turchetti did not know that since Morandi had so conscientiously deposited the money into his account Brunetti already knew what he had been paid. It was probably impossible for an art dealer to conceive of a person who would sell something and deposit that amount in the bank.
‘No, Signore,’ Brunetti said, removing Turchetti’s title, ‘only what they were worth.’
‘May I estimate?’ Turchetti asked directly, as if he had tired of the game. He no longer bothered talking about his ‘records’. Brunetti had grown up hearing priests speak of indulgences, so he well knew how malleable was the interpretation of value.
‘Feel free,’ Brunetti told him.
‘The Dillis was worth about forty thousand; the Salathe a bit less.’
‘And the others?’ Brunetti said, glancing down at the names of Chiara’s history and geometry teachers.
‘There were some prints: Tiepolo, not worth more than ten or twelve. I think there were six or seven of them.’
‘You didn’t offer him a price for the lot?’
‘No,’ Turchetti said, unable to disguise his irritation. ‘He insisted on bringing them in one at a time.’ Then, unable to disguise his satisfaction at a job well done, he added, ‘He thought he’d get more for them that way.’ So much, his tone stated, for
Brunetti refused to give him the satisfaction of a response and asked, ‘What else?’
‘You want to know everything?’ Turchetti asked with carefully orchestrated surprise and another flirtatious smile.
With careful slowness, Brunetti clipped his pen to the inside of the notebook and closed it. He looked across at Turchetti and said, ‘Perhaps I’m not making myself clear enough, Signore.’ He moved his lips in something that was not meant to be a smile. ‘I have a list, with amounts and dates, and I want to know what he gave in exchange for the money he received.’
‘And I assume you have the authorization to ask for such information?’ Turchetti asked. All smiles stopped together.
‘Not only can I have it if I ask for it,’ Brunetti said, ‘but I also have the attention of my father-in-law.’
Turchetti could not hide his surprise, nor could he disguise his uneasiness. ‘What does that mean?’
‘That I have only to suggest to him that the provenance given to some of the objects in this gallery is questionable, and I’m sure he’d call around to his friends to ask if they’ve heard the same thing.’ He waited for a moment, and then added, ‘And I suppose they’d call their friends. And so it would go.’ Brunetti returned to smiling and reopened his notebook. He bent over it and said, ‘What else?’
Turchetti, with a precision that Brunetti found exemplary, gave him a list of drawings and prints, approximate dates, and values. Brunetti made a note of them, using the space to the right of the names of Chiara’s teachers and then turning to a blank page to finish the list. When Turchetti finished, Brunetti did not bother to ask him if he had mentioned everything.
He closed the notebook and put it and his pen back in his pocket, then got to his feet. ‘Have you sold them all?’ he asked, though the question was not necessary. They belonged to whoever had them, and even if the law could get them back, to whom did they now belong?
‘No. There are two left.’ Brunetti saw Turchetti start to say something, force himself to stop, and then give in to the impulse. ‘Why? Do I have to give you one?’
Brunetti turned and left the gallery.
26
Well, well, well. Brunetti walked back towards the bridge. The Dillis was worth forty thousand and poor silly Morandi got four, and why was he thinking of Morandi as poor, or silly? Because the Salathe was worth almost as much and he let Turchetti pay him three?
Brunetti was aware that, no matter how right his own ethical system might feel to him, he still found it difficult to explain, even to himself. He had read the Greeks and Romans and knew what they thought of justice and right and wrong and the common good and the personal good, and he had read the Fathers of the Church and knew what they said. He knew the rules, but he found himself, in every particular situation, bogged down in the specifics of what happened to people, found himself siding with or against them because of what they thought or felt and not necessarily in accord with the rules that were meant to govern things.
Morandi had once been a thug, but Brunetti had seen his protective look at that solitary woman across the room, and so he could not believe Morandi had wanted to keep her from talking to him so much as he wanted to keep anyone from disturbing whatever peace remained to her.
He waited for the Number Two, watching the people cross the bridge. Boats passed in both directions, one of
