A Noble Radiance (18 page)

16

Good sense told
Brunetti it was foolish to expect the Lorenzoni family to talk to him before
the boy was buried, but it was charity which prevented his asking. The
newspaper accounts had given Monday as the day for the funeral, the church of
San Salvador its place. Before then, however, there was still a good deal of
information Brunetti wanted to obtain about Roberto.

Back at his desk, he
called the office of Doctor Urbani and asked the dentist's secretary if the
name of Roberto's family doctor was on record. It took her a few minutes to
check, but it turned out the name was listed, given on the original file that
was opened for Roberto when he first went to Doctor Urbani's office ten years
ago.

The doctor's name,
Luciano DeCal, was vaguely familiar to Brunetti; he had gone to school with a De
Cal, but his name was Franco, and he was a jeweller. The doctor, when Brunetti
called him in his office and explained the reason of his call, said that, yes,
Roberto had been his patient for most of his life, ever since the original
family doctor of the Lorenzonis had retired.

When Brunetti began
to ask about Roberto's health in the months before his disappearance. Doctor De
Cal excused himself for a moment and went to get the boy's file. He had come in
about two weeks before his disappearance. Doctor De Cal said, complaining about
lethargy and continuing stomach pain. The doctor had first thought it was
colic, to which Roberto was prone, especially in the first weeks of cool
weather. But when he didn't respond to treatment, De Cal had suggested he see
an internist.

'Did he see that
doctor?' Brunetti asked.

‘I don't know.'

'Why not?'

‘I went on holiday,
to Thailand, soon after I gave him Dottor Montini's name, and when I got back,
he had been kidnapped.'

'Did you ever have
cause to speak to this Doctor Montini about him?'

'About Roberto?'

'Yes.'

'No, never. He's not
someone I know socially: he's a professional colleague.'

'I see,' Brunetti
answered. 'Could you give me his number?'

De Cal set the phone
down, and came back with the number. It's in Padova,' he explained and gave
Brunetti the number.

Brunetti thanked him
and asked, 'You thought it might be colic, Dottore?'

Brunetti heard the
rustle of a page. 'Well, it could have been’ Again, the sound of turning pages
came down the line. 'I have it recorded here that he came to see me three times
in a period of two weeks. That was in September, the tenth, the nineteenth and
the twenty-third.'

The last appointment,
then, would have been five days before he was kidnapped.

'How did he seem?'
Brunetti asked.

‘I have a note here
that he seemed irritated and nervous, but I really don't have a clear memory of
it’

'What sort of a boy
did he seem to you. Doctor?' Brunetti asked suddenly.

De Cal answered after
a moment. ‘I suppose he was pretty typical’

'Of what?' Brunetti
asked.

'Of that sort of
family, that social circle’

He remembered now
that his classmate. Franco, had been a committed Communist. That sort of thing
very often ran in families, so he asked the doctor, 'You mean of the wealthy
and idle?'

De Cal had the grace
to laugh at Brunetti's tone. ‘Yes, I suppose I do. Poor boy, there was no bad
in him. I knew him since he was about ten, so there was little I didn't know
about him.'

'Such as?'

'Well, he wasn't very
bright. I think it was a disappointment to his father, that Roberto should be
so slow.'

Brunetti sensed that
there was an unsaid half to that sentence, and so he suggested a way to end it

TJnlike his cousin?'
'Maurizio? 'Yes.'

'Have you met him?'
De Cal asked. 'Once.'

'And what did you
think?'

‘You couldn't say he
isn't bright'

De Cal laughed and
Brunetti smiled at the answer.

'Is he your patient
as well, Doctor.'

'No, only Roberto.
I'm really a paediatrician, you know, but Roberto kept coming to me when he got
older, and I never had the heart to suggest he start seeing another doctor.'

'Not until Doctor
Montini’ Brunetti reminded him.

'Yes. Whatever it
was, it wasn't colic. I thought it might be Crohn's Disease - I've even made a
note of it in the file here. That's why I sent him to Montini. He's one of the
best men around here for Crohn's.'

Brunetti had heard of
the disease but could remember nothing. 'What are the symptoms?' he asked.

'Intestinal pain to
begin with. Then diarrhoea, blood in the stool. It's very painful. Very
serious. He had all of those symptoms.'

'And did you ever
have your diagnosis confirmed?'

'I told you,
Commissario. I sent him to Montini, but when I got back from vacation, he had
been kidnapped, so I didn't pursue it. You could ask Montini.'

1 will, Dottore,'
Brunetti said and bade the doctor a polite farewell.

He immediately called
the Padova number-. Doctor Montini was making his rounds at the hospital and
wouldn't be back in his office until the following morning at nine. Brunetti
left his name, office and home numbers, and asked that the doctor call him as
soon as he could. There was no special need for haste, but Brunetti felt a dull
impatience with not knowing what he was looking for or what was important, and
he thought that haste would at least disguise that ignorance.

His phone rang as
soon as he set it down. It was Signorina Elettra, saying that she'd prepared a
file on the Lorenzoni businesses, both in Italy and abroad, and wondered if he
would like to see it. He went downstairs to get it.

The file was as thick
as a package of cigarettes. 'Signorina,' he began, 'how did you manage to
accumulate something like this in so little time?'

‘I spoke to some
friends who are still working at the bank and asked if they could ask around.'

'You did all this
since I asked you?'

'If s easy, sir. It
all comes to me through that.' As had by now become ritual, she waved in the
direction of her computer, the screen of which glimmered behind her.

'How long would it
take a person to learn to use one of them, Signorina?'

'You, sir?' she
asked.

'Yes.'

Tt would depend on
two things, no, three.' 'And what are they?'

'How intelligent you
are. How much you want to learn. And who teaches you.' Modesty prevented his
asking her assessment of the first, uncertainty kept him from answering the
second. 'Could you teach me?' 'Yes.'

'Would you?'

'Certainly. When
would you like to begin?'

'Tomorrow?'

She nodded, then
smiled.

'How much time will
it take?' Brunetti asked.

'That depends, as
well.'

'On what?'

Did her smile grow
even wider? 'On the same three things’

He started to read
while still on the steps, and by the time he was again at his desk, he had read
through lists of holdings that totalled billions of lire, and he had begun to
understand why the kidnappers would have chosen the Lorenzonis. Little order
had been imposed upon the papers in the file, but Brunetti made an attempt at
that by separating them into piles, placing the papers in rough correspondence
to their location on the map of Europe.

Trucks, steel,
plastics factories in the Crimea: he followed a trail of perpetual expansion to
meet new markets, a veritable explosion towards the East, as more and more of
the Lorenzoni interests and holdings slipped behind the place where the Iron
Curtain no longer stood. In March, two clothing factories in Vercelli had been
closed, only to reopen two months later in Kiev. A half hour later, he set the
last paper down on his desk and saw that most of them lay to his right, even
though he was vague about the exact location of many of the places to which the
Lorenzoni interests were expanding.

It did not take Brunetti
long to remember the stories that had recently filled the press about the
so-called Russian Mafia, the bands of Chechens, who, if these accounts were to
be believed, had taken over most business in Russia, both legitimate and
illegitimate. It was a short leap from there to the possibility that these men
could somehow have been responsible for the kidnapping. After all, the men who
took Roberto had not spoken at all, had merely shown him their guns and led him
away.

But then how would
they have ended up in that field below Col di Cugnan, a place so small that
even most Venetians had probably never heard of it? He pulled out the file on
the kidnapping and paged through it until he found the plastic-covered ransom
notes. Though the block letters could have been printed by anyone, there were
no errors in the Italian, though Brunetti admitted to himself that that proved
nothing.

He had no idea of
what Russian crime would feel like, but all his instincts told him that this
wasn't one. Whoever had kidnapped Roberto would have had to know about the
villa, been able to wait there undetected until he turned up. Unless, of
course, Brunetti added to himself, they already knew when Roberto would appear.
This, in fact, was yet another one of those questions that had not been asked
during the original investigation. Who had known of Roberto's plans for the
evening and of his intention to go to the villa?

As often happened,
Brunetti was struck by restlessness as he read the reports prepared by other
people, in this instance people no longer involved in the case.

Feeling not a little
uncomfortable at the ease with which he succumbed to his feelings, he picked up
the phone and dialled the internal number for Vianello. When the sergeant
answered, Brunetti said, 'Lef s go look at the gate’

17

Although Brunetti was
as urban a man as could be imagined, never having lived anywhere but in a city,
he took a peasant's delight in the abundance of nature and in any sign of its
beauty. Since childhood he had loved the springtime most, felt for it a
passion that was tangled up with memories of the joy that came with the first
warm days after the endless cold of winter. And there was, too, delight at the
return of colour: the bold yellow of forsytrria, the purple of crocuses, and the
happy green of new leaves. Even from the rear window of the car that sped north
on the
autostrada,
he could see these colours, and he gloried in them.
Vianello, riding in the passenger seat beside Pucetti, discussed with him the
strangely mild winter, far too warm to have frozen and thus destroyed the
seaweed in the
laguna,
which in its turn meant that the beaches would be tilled
with it this summer.

They turned off at
Treviso, then doubled back on the state highway in the direction of Roncade.
After a few kilometres, they saw a sign on the right, directing them towards
the church of Sant Ubaldo.

'It’s down here,
isn't it?' Pucetti asked, having checked the map before they set off from Piazzale
Roma.

‘Yes,' Vianello
answered, 'supposed to be on the left in about three kilometres.'

'Never been up here,'
Pucetti said. 'Pretty.'

Vianello nodded but
said nothing.

After a few minutes,
a turn in the narrow road brought them within sight of a thick stone tower up
ahead on their left. A high wall ran off at right angles from two sides of the
tower and was soon lost among the budding trees that stood on either side of
it.

At a tap on his
shoulder from Brunetti, Pucetti slowed as they reached the wall, and they drove
along it for a few hundred metres. When Brunetti saw gates ahead of them, he
tapped Pucetti on the shoulder again, signalling him to stop. He pulled on to
the broad arc of gravel in front of the gates, angling the front of the car
towards them. The three men got out.