Blood from a stone - Donna Leon

‘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.

‘Very sophisticated and cultured, at least the ones I dealt with.’

‘They’ve had three thousand years to become cultured,’ Paola interrupted.

‘What do you mean?’ Chiara asked.

‘That when we were still living in huts and wearing animal skins, they were building Persepolis and wearing silk.’

Ignorant of the patent exaggeration of this remark, Chiara asked only, ‘What’s Persepolis?’

‘It’s the royal city where the kings lived. Until a European burned it down. I’ve got a book and I’ll show you after dinner, all right?’ Paola asked. Then, to all of them, ‘Dessert?’

Like Persepolis itself, interest in thousands of years of history fell to ruin, this time in the face of apple cake.

The next morning Brunetti’s phone was ringing as he walked into his office. He answered with his name while struggling to remove his coat, the receiver pressed between ear and shoulder as he tried to pull his arms from the sleeves.

‘It’s me,’ a man’s voice said, and it took Brunetti a second to realize it was Claudio. ‘I have to see you.’ In the background, Brunetti heard the loud roar of what sounded like a boat’s motor, so Claudio was out in the city, somewhere near the water.

Brunetti pulled his coat back on to his shoulders, took the phone with his free hand, and said, responding to the note of urgency in the old man’s voice, ‘I can come over right now if you want to meet at your office.’ Brunetti was already plotting the course to Claudio’s, deciding to have himself taken there in a launch.

‘No, I think it would be better if we met at. . at that place where your father and I always went for a drink.’

Doubly alarmed now by Claudio’s use of these guarded directions, Brunetti said, ‘I can be there in five minutes.’

‘Good, I’ll be there,’ Claudio said and ended the call.

Brunetti remembered the bar, on a corner facing the pillared gates of the Arsenale: Claudio must be out on the Riva degli Schiavoni to be able to reach it in five minutes. Many times in his youth, he had sat there, listening to his father’s friends talk about the war as they played endless, inconsequential games of scopa, sipping at small glasses of a wine so tannic it left their teeth almost blue. His father had never said much, nor had he been interested in playing cards, but he was there as a veteran and as Claudio’s friend, and that had sufficed for the others.

As soon as he hung up, the phone rang again, and, thinking it might be Claudio calling back, Brunetti picked it up and held it to his ear.

‘Brunetti,’ barked Vice-Questore Patta. ‘I want to talk to you now.’ His tone matched his words, and they no doubt matched his mood. Silently, Brunetti replaced the receiver and turned to leave the office. By the time he had reached the door, the phone was already ringing again.

Brunetti barely noticed the lions when he reached the entrance to the Arsenale and walked directly into the bar, looking for the familiar face. When he saw no sign of Claudio, he checked his watch and found that it had been only six minutes since he left the Questura. He ordered a coffee and turned to face the door. After another five minutes, he saw the old man at a distance, walking with the aid of a stick, coming down the bridge that led to the Arsenale.

At the bottom of the bridge, Claudio went over and stood in front of the stone lions, studying them slowly, pausing in front of each one until he could have committed its face and form to memory. After that, he strolled back to the bottom of the bridge and looked left through the gates of the Arsenale and out towards the laguna. Then he turned and ambled alongside the canal in the direction of the bacino. To an idle spectator, the man with the cane could be a sightseer interested in the area around the Arsenale; to a policeman, he was someone checking to see if he was being followed.

Claudio turned around and came towards the bar. When he entered, Brunetti left it to him to make the first move. He came and stood next to Brunetti at the bar but gave him no greeting. When the barman approached, Claudio asked for a tea with lemon, then reached aside and pulled that day’s Gazzettino towards him. Brunetti asked for another coffee. Claudio kept his eyes on the paper until his tea arrived, when he laid the newspaper aside, looked out the window at the empty campo, then at Brunetti, and said, ‘I was followed yesterday afternoon.’

Brunetti spooned sugar into his coffee, and inclined his head in Claudio’s direction.

‘There was only one man, and it was easy to lose him. Well, I think I lost him.’

‘How far did he follow you?’

‘To the train station. I waited for the 82, and when it came it was crowded the way it always is. So I waited inside the imbarcadero until the sailor was sliding the gates closed, and then I pushed ahead and started shouting that, with all the tourists, there’s no room for Venetians.’ He looked at Brunetti and gave a sly smile. ‘So he pulled the gate back and let me on. Only me.’

‘Complimenti,’ Brunetti said, making a note to use the tactic, should it ever be necessary.

Claudio took some artificial sweetener and poured it into his tea, stirred it round, and said, ‘I spoke to a few people yesterday and sent some stones to someone I know in Antwerp.’ He took a sip of tea, set his cup down, and added, ‘And I took a few to show to a colleague here. It was when I was leaving his shop that I noticed this man.’

‘How much did you tell these people?’ Brunetti asked, wondering which one of them might have been the weak link.

‘Let me finish,’ Claudio said and took a sip of his tea. ‘I asked someone I know in Vicenza if he had been offered any African diamonds recently. He doesn’t have a shop and works the way I do, but he’s the most important dealer in the North.’

When it seemed that the older man was finished, Brunetti asked, uncertain if he could inquire as to the reliability of his friends, ‘Is he someone that many people know about?’

‘That he buys and sells? Yes, most of the people in the North know him. He’d be the logical choice for anyone who wanted to sell a lot of stones, well, for anyone who knew anything about the market.’

‘And?’

‘And nothing,’ Claudio said. ‘No one has approached him with diamonds like these.’

Brunetti knew better than to question this. ‘Where are the stones?’ he finally asked.

‘The ones you gave me?’

‘Yes.’

‘In a safe place.’

‘Don’t be clever, please, Claudio. Where are they?’

‘In the bank.’

‘Bank?’

‘Yes. Ever since. . ever since then, I’ve kept my best stones in a safety deposit box in the bank. I put yours there, too.’

‘They aren’t mine,’ Brunetti corrected him.

‘They’re yours far more than they’re mine.’

Brunetti realized there was little to be gained by arguing back and forth about this, so he asked, ‘If you think no one would talk, why should anyone follow you?’

‘I was awake thinking about it most of the night,’ Claudio answered. ‘Either the place where you got them was being watched, and you were followed until you came to see me, though I think you would have noticed had you been followed, so we can exclude that. Or the fact that I’m the best-known dealer in the city makes me an obvious person to keep an eye on, just as security. Or my friend’s phone is being tapped.’ He closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them and added, ‘Or I’m a foolish old man who can’t learn to distrust his friends. Take your pick.’

Like Claudio, he excluded the first. His love for the old man made him want to discount the last and choose one of the others, but he thought they were in fact equally likely. ‘Did you learn anything about the stones?’

‘I showed five stones to my friend — two of yours and three that I know are from Canada. At first he said only that he’d like to buy them.’ The old man paused and then added, ‘I suppose that’s what I thought he’d do.’ He shot a glance at Brunetti, then out of the window, then back to Brunetti. ‘But when I told him they weren’t for sale and I only wanted to know where he thought they came from, he said three of them were Canadian and two African. The right two.’

‘Is he certain?’ Brunetti asked.

Claudio gave him a long, speculative glance, as if deciding how best to explain. ‘More certain than I am,’ Claudio said, ‘because he knows more.’ When Claudio saw that Brunetti was not going to be persuaded by this appeal to authority, the old man went on, ‘He didn’t explain why he thought that about those specific stones. I’d be a liar if I told you he did, Guido, but he knows about these things. Other people can do it, but they need to use machines. I know you like information and facts, so I can tell you that at the chemical level, the machines measure the other minerals that are trapped along with the carbon crystals. They differ from pipe to pipe — what you’d call mine to mine. If you know enough about which minerals come from which place, then the machines let you identify stones by measuring the different colours.’ Claudio paused, then added, ‘But it’s really a question of feeling. If you’ve looked at millions of stones, you just know.’ He smiled and said, ‘That’s the way it is with this man. He just knows.’

‘Do you believe him?’

‘If he said they came from Mars, I’d believe him. He’s the best.’

‘Better than you?’

‘Better than anyone, Guido; he has the gift.’

‘Just Africa? Can he be more specific than that?’

‘I didn’t ask. All I asked him to do was to give me an estimate of their value so I could be sure the price I was asking was right. He told me he thought that they were African just as a passing comment, to show me how much more he knows about stones than I do.’

‘And the value?’ Brunetti asked.

‘If cut well, he said the minimum would be thirty-five thousand Euros.’ Seeing Brunetti’s surprise, Claudio added, ‘That’s for each stone, Guido, and I didn’t give him the best ones.’

Brunetti remembered then what he had failed so far to ask. ‘How many were there altogether, after the salt was gone?’

‘One hundred and sixty-four, all of them gem quality and all about the same size.’ Then, before Brunetti could work it out, Claudio said, ‘If you use it as an average price, that’s just under six million Euros.’

The value of the stones astonished Brunetti, but it was what Claudio told him about being followed that most concerned him. ‘Tell me what the man looked like,’ he said.

‘About as tall as you, wearing an overcoat and a hat. He could have been any one of a thousand men. And before you ask, no, I wouldn’t recognize him if I saw him again. I didn’t want him to know that I saw him, so once I noticed him I ignored him.’ Claudio picked up his cup and took a small sip of tea.

Allowing hope to enter his voice, Brunetti asked, ‘Then he might not have been following you?’

Claudio set his cup down and fixed Brunetti with a firm expression. ‘He was following me, Guido. And he was very good.’

Brunetti decided not to ask how Claudio had learned to distinguish in this matter, and asked, instead, ‘The men you spoke to, can you trust them?’

Claudio shrugged. ‘In this business you can, and you can’t, trust people.’

‘Not to talk about the stones?’

Again, Claudio gave a casual shrug. ‘I doubt they’d say anything unless they were asked.’

‘And if they were?’

‘Who knows?’

‘Are they friends?’ Brunetti asked.

‘People who deal in diamonds don’t have any friends,’ Claudio answered.

‘The man in Antwerp?’ Brunetti asked.

‘He’s married to my niece.’

‘Does that mean he’s a friend?’

Claudio allowed himself a small smile. ‘Hardly. But it does mean I can trust him.’

‘And?’

‘And I asked him to tell me where the stones come from, if he can.’

‘When can you expect to hear from him?’

‘Today.’

Brunetti could not hide his surprise. ‘How did you send them?’

‘Oh,’ Claudio said with studied casualness, ‘I have a nephew who does odd jobs for me.’

‘Odd jobs like carrying diamonds to Antwerp?’

‘It wouldn’t be the first time,’ Claudio insisted.

‘How did he go?’

‘On a plane. How else would you go to Antwerp? Well,’ he temporized, ‘on a plane to Brussels, and then by train.’

‘You can’t do this, Claudio.’

‘I thought you were in a hurry,’ the old man said, sounding almost offended.

‘I am, but you can’t do that for me. You have to let me pay you.’

Claudio waved this away almost angrily. ‘It’s good for him to travel, see how things are done there.’ He looked at Brunetti with sudden affection. ‘Besides you’re a friend.’

‘I thought you said people who deal in diamonds don’t have friends,’ Brunetti said, but he said it with a smile.

Claudio reached over and picked a loose thread from the seam of Brunetti’s overcoat, pulled it away, and let it fall to the floor. ‘Don’t play the fool with me, Guido,’ he said and reached for his wallet to pay for the drinks.

19

When they were ready to leave the bar, Brunetti had to fight the impulse to offer to accompany Claudio to his home. Good sense, however, intervened and made him accept that he was the one person Claudio should not be seen with, so he let the old man leave first and then spent five minutes looking at the pages of the Gazzettino before he himself left, consciously choosing to go back to the Questura, not because he particularly wanted to, but because Claudio had gone in the other direction.

The officer at the door saluted when he saw Brunetti and said, ‘Vice-Questore Patta wants to see you, sir.’

Brunetti gestured his thanks with a wave of his hand and started up the steps. He went to his office, took off his coat, and dialled Signorina Elettra’s extension. When she answered, Brunetti asked, ‘What does he want?’

‘Oh, Riccardo,’ she said, recognizing his voice, ‘I’m so glad you called back. Could you come to dinner on Thursday, instead of Tuesday? I forgot I have tickets for a concert, so I’d like to change the day, if that’s possible.’ Aside, he heard her say, ‘One moment, please, Vice-Questore,’ then she came back to him. ‘Eight on Thursday, Riccardo? Fine.’ Then she was gone.