Blood from a stone - Donna Leon

He went back to his chair, curious as to what could be taking Moretti so long. He had seen only three officers downstairs when he came in: how long could it take them to look at a photo? He took out his notebook and found a blank page. At the top, he wrote ‘Christmas Gifts’, carefully underlined both words, and then, in small letters to the left, wrote, in a neat column, ‘Paola’, ‘Raffi’, and ‘Chiara’. Then he stopped, unable to think of anything else to write.

He was still staring at the names when Moretti came back into the office and sat at his desk. He held the photo out to Brunetti and shook his head. ‘No one recognizes him.’

Brunetti refused the photo with an upraised hand and said, ‘Keep it. I have more in my office. I’d like you to ask anyone who’s had anything to do with the ambulanti if they recognize him.’ Moretti nodded and Brunetti, remembering the years they had worked together amicably, said, ‘And I’d like you to talk only to me about this, not to anyone else.’ A glance showed him that Moretti, however curious about the reason for the remark, understood its meaning.

‘For whatever it’s worth,’ Moretti volunteered, ‘we’ve had no encouragement to look into his murder.’

‘And won’t have,’ Brunetti said shortly.

‘Ah,’ was the only comment Moretti permitted himself for a moment, and then added, ‘I’m up for retirement in two years, so I have less and less patience with being told which crimes I can and cannot investigate.’ He picked up the photo and looked at it again. ‘I know I’ve seen this face somewhere. . All I’ve got is a vague memory, and somehow it seems that it didn’t have anything to do with this,’ he said, waving the photo in a half-circle to indicate the police station.

‘What do you mean?’ Brunetti asked.

Moretti turned the photo to display the face to Brunetti. ‘Seeing him like this, with his eyes closed and knowing that he was murdered, I’m sorry for him. He’s young and he’s a victim. And the last time I saw him, he was a victim too, or that’s the way the memory feels to me. But it was because of work I saw him; I’m sure of that.’ He set the photo, face down, on the desk, looked at Brunetti and said, ‘If it comes to me, or if anyone recognizes him, I’ll call you.’

‘Good. Thanks,’ Brunetti said and got to his feet. The men shook hands and Brunetti went down the stairs and out into the Piazza.

Had he not had this mildly encouraging conversation with Moretti, Brunetti might have seen himself as a man abandoned by his wife at lunchtime, then might have added that her behaviour was even more heartless given the Christmas season. But Moretti had recognized the man, or thought he recognized him, and so Brunetti could not give himself over wholeheartedly to playing the role of the neglected spouse. He could, however, treat himself to a good lunch. Aunt Federica, apart from her temper, was known for the skill of her cook, so Paola was sure to arrive at their meeting sated not only with the latest family gossip but with the results of the recipes the Faliers had spent the last four centuries enjoying.

He took the public gondola beside the Gritti and arrived at the other side chilled to the bone and much in need of sustenance. This he found at Cantinone Storico in the form of a risotto with tiny shrimp which the waiter promised him were fresh and a grilled orata served with boiled potatoes. Asked if he’d like dessert, Brunetti thought of the heavy eating that lay ahead of him in the next weeks and, feeling quite pleased with himself, said all he wanted was a grappa and a coffee.

He finished just a little after three and so decided to walk to Campo San Bortolo. As he reached the crest of the Accademia bridge, he looked down into the campo on the other side and was surprised to find no sign of the vu cumprà. That morning’s Gazzettino had warned him how little time there remained for Christmas shopping. This made it all the stranger that the black men were not at their usual places. Like sharks in a feeding frenzy, most of the people of Italy — he among them — always seemed to use these last days to buy their gifts. If it was the busiest times for the shops, then it had to be the busiest time for the ambulanti, and yet there was no sign of them.

When he turned right at the church and started into Campo Santo Stefano, he did see some sheets on the ground. At first he thought they must be the forgotten groundsheets of the crime scene, but then he saw the line of wind-up toys and linked wooden train carriages, carved to look like individual letters, spelling names across the sheet. The men stationed behind the sheets were not Africans but Orientals and Tamils, and off to the left he saw a band of poncho-draped Indios and their strange musical instruments. But as for Africans, the more Brunetti looked, the more they were not there.

He walked past the various vendors but resisted the idea of speaking to any of them. Innocent curiosity about the Africans would make no sense, and police questions could provoke flight. As he studied the men and the segregation of their products, he noticed that all of the items had been mass produced, and that caused him to wonder who decided which group would sell which things. And who supplied them? Or determined the prices? And who housed them? And who got them residence and work permits, if they had such things? If the black men from Castello had disappeared, they must have gone somewhere, but where? And as a result of whose decision and with whose help?

Pondering all of these questions and again amazed that this subterranean world could exist in the city where he lived, he continued down Calle della Mandola, through Campo San Luca, and into San Bortolo.

Paola was, as she had promised, waiting for him, right where she had waited for him for decades: beneath the statue of a perpetually dapper Goldoni. He kissed her and wrapped his right arm around her shoulder. ‘Tell me you ate badly and I’ll get you any Christmas present you want,’ he said.

‘We ate gloriously well, and there’s nothing I want,’ Paola answered. When he failed to respond, she went on, ‘Fettucine with truffles.’

‘White or black?’ he asked.

To goad him, she asked, ‘The truffles or the fettucine?’

He ignored the question and asked, ‘And what else?’

‘Stinco di maiale with roast potatoes and a zucchini gratin.’

‘If I hadn’t gone to Cantinone, I’d probably have to divorce you.’

‘And who would help with the Christmas shopping, then?’ she asked. Into his silence, she said, as if by way of consolation, ‘I didn’t have dessert.’

‘Good, me neither. So we can stop on the way home.’

She grabbed his arm and squeezed it and said, ‘Where do we start?’

‘Chiara, I think,’ Brunetti answered. ‘I have no idea. None at all.’

‘We could get her a telefonino,’ she suggested.

‘And thus undo two years of resistance at a single stroke?’ he asked.

‘All her friends have them,’ Paola said, sounding just like Chiara.

‘You sound just like Chiara,’ said Brunetti in dismissal. ‘Clothes?’

‘No, she’s got too many already.’

Brunetti stopped in his tracks, turned to her, and said, ‘I think that is the first time in my life, perhaps in recorded history, that a woman has admitted the concept of too much clothing might exist.’

‘Over-reaction to the truffles,’ she suggested.

‘Perhaps.’

‘I’ll get over it.’

‘Doubtless.’

Telefonino and clothes excluded, Paola suggested books, so they went down towards San Luca, in the general area of which there were three bookstores. In the first they found nothing that Paola thought Chiara would like, but in the second she bought a complete set of the novels of Jane Austen, in English.

‘But you have those,’ Brunetti said.

‘Everyone should have them,’ Paola said. ‘If I thought you’d read them, I’d get you a set, too.’

He started to protest that he had read them once, when Paola’s attention swung away from him and riveted itself to the far wall. He turned, following the direction of her gaze, but all he saw was an enormous poster of a young man who looked vaguely familiar; perhaps, he found himself thinking, this was the way the black man was familiar to Moretti. So intently did Paola stare that Brunetti finally waved his hand in front of her face and said, ‘Earth to Paola, Earth to Paola, can you hear me? Come in, please.’

She looked back at him for an instant and then, her eyes returning to the poster, said, ‘That’s it. That’s perfect.’

‘What’s perfect?’ he asked.

‘The poster. She’ll love it.’

‘The poster?’ he repeated.

‘Yes.’ Before he could ask who the boy was, Paola grew serious and said, ‘Guido, there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you.’

He imagined the worst: Chiara running off to follow a rock group, joining some sort of sect. ‘What?’

‘Chiara is in love with the future heir to the British throne,’ she said, pointing at the poster.

‘An Englishman?’ Brunetti asked, shocked, remembering everything he’d ever heard about them: Battenberg, Windsor, Hanover, whatever they called themselves. ‘With someone from that family?’ he asked.

‘Would you rather have her be in love with one of the male issue of our own dear Savoia family?’ she asked sweetly.

Brunetti was too stunned to speak. He started to answer her, recalled everything he had ever heard about that family, and pursed his lips. Easily, brightly, surprising not a few people in the bookstore, Brunetti began to whistle ‘Rule, Britannia!’

18

The bookseller suggested they buy a heavy cardboard tube for the poster, which turned out to be a good idea, so thick was the press of people on the streets. Three or four times, bodies bumped into Brunetti with such force that an unprotected print would surely have been crushed. After the third time, Brunetti toyed with the idea of holding the cylinder at one end and using it as a club to beat their way through the crowds, but his awareness of how much at variance this would be with the Christmas spirit, to make no mention of his position as an officer of the law, prevented him from acting on that thought.

After three hours, two coffees, and one pastry, both Brunetti’s mind and his wallet were empty. He subsequently remembered going into a CD store and marvelling as Paola reeled off a list of outlandish names, then watching, hypnotized by the colours and designs on the covers, as the clerk wrapped two separate stacks of discs. He chose a sweater for Raffi, exactly the colour of one of his that his son had taken to borrowing, and refused to listen to Paola’s protest that cashmere was wasted on Raffi. His long-term plan included a casual switch of sweaters after a month or two. In a computer store, she bought two games with equally garish covers and, he was certain, equally garish contents.

After that, Paola agreed that she had had enough and turned towards home. As they were coming back towards San Bortolo and the bridge, Brunetti stopped in front of a jewellery store and studied the rings and necklaces in the window. Paola stood silent beside him.

Just as he started to speak, she said, ‘Don’t even think about it, Guido.’

‘I’d like to give you something nice.’

‘Those things are expensive. That doesn’t make them nice.’

‘Don’t you like jewellery?’

‘You know I do, but not like that, with enormous stones looking as if they’ve been tortured into place.’ She pointed to a particularly infelicitous combination of minerals and said, ‘It looks like something Hobbes would give to one of his wives.’ When Paola had first used this name to refer to the current head of government, Brunetti’s puzzled look had forced her to explain that she had chosen the name because of the English philosopher Hobbes’s description of human life: ‘Nasty, brutish, and short’. Brunetti had been so taken with its appropriateness that he now substituted the name, not only when reading newspaper headlines, but also in ministerial documents.

He realized that he was going to get no help from Paola in selecting her own gift, so he abandoned the attempt and went home with her to try to find a place to hide their haul from their prying children. The only thing he could think of was to put them all at the bottom of their wardrobe, but not before attaching to them carefully printed cards bearing Paola’s name, her mother’s, and her father’s. He hoped thus to deflect the children’s sorties. The thought of hiding things took his mind back to the box of salt and its strange contents.

It was too soon to call Claudio, but he did call Vianello at home, careful to use the telefonino registered to Roberto Rossi. Telling himself that he was a commissario of police, he refused to disguise his voice or speak in tongues, but he did confine himself to asking, when Vianello answered, ‘Anything new?’

‘Nothing,’ came Vianello’s laconic reply.

Brunetti broke the connection.

Dinner was peaceful, Raffi artlessly attempting to get his parents to say what they would like for Christmas, and Chiara asking if Muslims had Christmas, too. Paola explained that, because Muslims considered Jesus a great prophet, they probably respected the holiday, even if they didn’t celebrate it officially.

When Brunetti asked why she wanted to know, Chiara answered, ‘I have a new friend at school, Azir. She’s Muslim.’

‘Where’s she from?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Iran. Her father’s a doctor, but he isn’t working.’

‘Why is that?’ Brunetti asked.

Helping herself to more pasta, Chiara said, ‘Oh, something to do with papers. They haven’t come or something, so he’s working in the lab at the hospital, I think.’

‘I was there once,’ Brunetti surprised the children by saying. ‘In Tehran. After the Revolution.’

‘What for?’ Chiara asked, instantly curious.

‘Work,’ Brunetti answered. ‘Drugs.’

‘And?’ Raffi interrupted. ‘What happened?’

‘They were very helpful and polite and gave me the information I needed.’ The faces which greeted this remark reminded him of a line Paola often quoted, something about sheep looking up but not being fed, so he explained, ‘It was when I was working in Naples. There was someone who was bringing in drugs on trucks from Iran, and they agreed to help us arrest him.’ He did not tell them that this had happened only after it was discovered that a great deal of the man’s merchandise was finding its way on to the streets of Tehran, as well.

‘What were they like?’ Chiara asked, interested enough to stop eating.

‘As I said, polite and helpful. The city was a mess, very overcrowded and polluted, but once you get behind the walls — one of the officers invited me to his home — you find lots of gardens and trees.’

‘What are the people like?’ Chiara asked.