A Noble Radiance (13 page)

'Yes, I think that's
better. But what if the dentist says it isn't Roberto?'

'In that case, I'll
call you and tell you. At this number?'

'No, let me give you
the number of my cellular,' he answered. Brunetti made a note.

'I'll be there at
seven,' Brunetti said, intentionally omitting any qualification about what he'd
do if the dental records didn't match.

'Yes, at seven,'
Lorenzoni said and hung up without bothering to give the address or
instructions about how to get there. Presumably, in Venice the name would
suffice.

Brunetti immediately
called down to Vianello's office and asked him to come up and get the dental
X-rays. When the sergeant came in, Brunetti told him where Doctor Urbani's
office was and asked Vianello to call from there with the results.

What would it be like
to have a child kidnapped? What if the victim had been Raffi, his own son? The
very thought of it made Brunetti's stomach tighten with fear and disgust. He
remembered the rash of kidnappings that had taken place in the Veneto during
the 1980s and the burst of business it had provided for private security firms.
That gang had been broken up a few years ago, and the leaders sentenced to fife
imprisonment. With a twinge of guilt, Brunetti found himself thinking that
this was not severe enough to punish them for what they had done, though the
topic of capital punishment was such a red flag in his own family that he
didn't pursue the logical consequences of this judgement.

He'd need to see the
wall, to see how easy it would be to climb over it, or to see how else the
stone might have been put behind the gates. He'd have to contact the Belluno
police to ask about kidnappings in the area: he'd always thought it the most
crime-free province in the country, but perhaps that was the Italy of memory.
Enough time had passed, so the Lorenzonis, if they had managed to borrow enough
money to pay the ransom, might be willing to say so now. And if they had, how
had they paid it, and when?

Years of experience
warned him that he was assuming the boy's death without final proof; the same
years told him that final proof was unnecessary here. Intuition would suffice.

His thoughts shifted
to his conversation with Count Orazio and his reluctance to accept the other
man's intuition. In the past, Paola had sometimes said that she felt old, that
the best of life was past, but Brunetti had always been able to lure her away
from such ideas. He didn't know anything about menopause: the very word embarrassed
him. But could this be a sign that something like that was happening? Weren't
there hot flashes? Strange cravings for food? - He realized that he wished it
would be something like that, something physical and, therefore, something for
which he was in no way responsible and about which he could do nothing. As a
schoolboy, he had been told by the priest who gave religious instruction that
it was necessary, before confession, to examine his conscience. There were, the
priest had explained, sins of omission and sins of commission, but even then
Brunettihad found it difficult to distinguish between the two. Now that he was
a man, the distinction was even more difficult to grasp.

He found himself
thinking that he should take Paola flowers, take her out to dinner, ask her
about her work. But even as he considered such gestures, he realized how
transparently false they were, even to him. If he knew the source of her
unhappiness, he might have some idea of what to do.

It wasn't anything at
home, where she was as consistently explosive as she'd always been. Work, then,
and from what Paola had been saying for years, he could not imagine an
intelligent person who would not be driven to despair by the Byzantine politics
of the university. But usually the situation there enraged her, and no one
embraced battle as joyously as did Paola. The Count had said she was unhappy.

Brunetti's thoughts
went from Paola's happiness to his own, and he surprised himself by realizing
that it had never before occurred to him to wonder whether he was happy or not.
In love with his wife, proud of his children, capable of doing his job well,
why would he worry about happiness, and what more than these things could
happiness be comprised of? He dealt every day with people who believed they
weren't happy and who further believed that by committing some crime - theft,
murder, deceit, blackmail, even kidnapping - they would find the magic elixir
that would transform the perceived misery of their lives into that most desired
of states: happiness. Brunetti found himself too often forced to examine the
consequences of those crimes, and what he saw was often the destruction of all
happiness.

Paola frequently
complained that no one at the university listened to her, indeed that few
people ever bothered to listen to what anyone else said, but Brunetti had never
included himself in that denunciation. But did he listen to her? When she
railed on about the plummeting quality of her students and the grasping
self-interest of her colleagues, was he attentive enough? No sooner had he
asked himself this, than the thought snaked into his mind: did she listen to
him when he complained about Patta or about the various incompetencies that
were part of his daily life? And surely the consequences Of what he observed
were far more serious than those of some student who didn't remember who wrote
I
Promessi Sposi
or didn't know who Aristotle was.

Suddenly disgusted
with the futility of all of this, he got up and went over to the window.
Bonsuan's boat was back at its moorings, but the pilot was nowhere in sight.
Brunetti knew that his refusal to recommend Lieutenant Scarpa for promotion had
cost Bonsuan his promotion, but Brunetti's near certainty that the Lieutenant
had betrayed a witness and caused her death made it difficult to be in the
same room with him, impossible for him to go on record as approving of his
behaviour. He regretted that the price of his contempt for Scarpa would have to
be paid by Bonsuan, but Brunetti could see no way clear of it.

The thought of Paola
returned, but he pushed it away and turned from the window. He went downstairs
and into Signorina Elettra's office. 'Signorina,' he said as he went in, 'I
think if s time to begin taking another look at the Lorenzoni case.'

'Then it was the
boy?' she asked, looking up from her keyboard.

‘I think so, but I'm
waiting for Vianello to call me. He's checking the dental records.'

'The poor mother,'
Elettra said and then added, ‘I wonder if she's religious.'

my?'

'It helps people when
terrible things happen, when people die’

'Are you?' Brunetti
asked.

'Per
carita’
she
said, pushing the idea back towards him with raised hands. "The last time
I was in church was for my confirmation. It would have upset my parents if I
hadn't done it, which was pretty much the same for all my friends. But since
then I've had nothing to do with it.'

'Then why did you say
that it helps people?'

'Because it's true’
she said simply. 'The fact that I don't believe in it doesn't prevent it from
helping other people. I'd be a fool to deny that.'

And Signorina Elettra
was no fool, well he knew that. 'What about the Lorenzonis?' Brunetti asked,
and before she could ask, he clarified the question. 'No, I'm not interested in
their religious ideas. I'd like to know anything I can about them: their marriage,
their businesses, where they have homes, who their friends are  the name of
their lawyer’

1 think a lot of this
would be in
Il Gazzettino’
she said. ‘I can see what's in the files.'

'Can you do this
without leaving fingerprints, as it were?' he asked, though he wasn't sure why
he didn't want to make it evident that he was looking into the family.

'Like the whiskers of
a cat’ she said with what sounded like real pleasure, or pride. She nodded down
at the keyboard of her computer.

'With that?' Brunetti
asked.

She smiled.
'Everything's in here’

'Like what?'

'Whether any of them
has ever had any trouble with us’ she answered, and he wondered if she was
aware of how entirely unconscious her use of that pronoun had been.

‘I suppose you could’
Brunetti said. 1 hadn't thought of that’

'Because of his
title?' she asked, one eyebrow raised, the opposite side of her mouth curved up
in a smile.

Brunetti, recognizing
the truth of this, shook his head in silent negation. 'I don't remember ever
hearing their name mixed up with anything. Aside from the kidnapping, that is.
Do you know anything about them?'

'I know that Maurizio
has a temper that sometimes works to other people's cost.'

'What does that
mean?'

'That he doesn't like
not to get his way, and when he doesn't, his behaviour is unpleasant.' 'How do
you know?'

'I know it the way I
know many things about the physical health of people in the city’ 'Barbara?'

'Yes. Not because she
was the doctor involved - I don't think she'd tell me then. But we were at dinner
with another doctor, the one who substitutes for her when she's on vacation,
and he said that he had a female patient whose hand had been broken by Maurizio
Lorenzoni.'

'He broke her hand?
How?'

'He slammed his car
door on it'

Brunetti raised his
eyebrows. 'I see what you mean by "unpleasant".'

She shook her head.
'No, it wasn't as bad as it sounds, not really. Even the girl said he didn't
intend to do it. They'd had an argument. Apparently they'd been to dinner out
on the mainland somewhere, and he'd invited her to the villa, the one where
the other boy was kidnapped. She refused and asked him to drive her back to
Venice. He was very angry, but he did finally drive her back. When they got to
the garage at Piazzale Roma, someone was in his parking space, so he had to
park right up against the wall. That meant she had to get out on the driver's
side. But he didn't realize that and slammed his door just as she was reaching
up to grab onto the frame to help pull herself out.'

'She was sure he
didn't see her?'

'Yes. In fact, when
he heard her scream and saw what he had done, he was terrified, almost to
tears, or so she told Barbara's friend. He got her downstairs and called a
water taxi and took her to the
pronto
soccorso
at the civil
hospital, and the next day he drove her up to a specialist in Udine who set her
hand.'

'Why was she seeing
this other doctor?'

'She had some sort of
skin infection under the cast. He was treating her for that. So of course he
asked her how she had broken her hand.'

'And that's the story
she gave?'

"That’s what he
said. He apparently thought she was telling the truth.'

'Did she bring a
civil suit against him for damages?
⁷

'No, not that I know
of’

'Do you know her
name?'

'No, but I can get it
from Barbara's friend’

'Please do’ Brunetti'
asked. 'And see what else you can find out about any of them.'

'Only criminal
things, Commissario?'

Brunetti's impulse
was to agree to this, but then he thought of the apparent contradiction in
Maurizio, said to have flown into a rage when a woman refused his invitation,
yet to have been moved almost to tears when he saw her broken hand. He began to
grow curious about what other contradictions might be lurking amidst the
Lorenzoni family. 'No, lef s see what we can find out about them, anything.'

'All right, Dottore,'
she said, turning her chair to bring her hands over the keys of her computer.
'I’ll start with Interpol, then see what
Il
Gazzettino
might have’

Brunetti nodded
towards her computer. 'You really can do it with that, instead of the
telephone?'

She looked at him
with infinite patience, just the sort of look his high school chemistry teacher
used to give him after each unsuccessful experiment. "The only people who
ring me today are the ones who make obscene calls.'

'And everyone else
uses that?' he said, indicating the little box on her desk.