A Noble Radiance (21 page)

'Did he say anything
else about this?'

'No, no, he didn't.
Roberto and I hadn't been all that close in the last few years.'

'Since you started to
work for the business?'

The look Lorenzoni
gave him was as devoid of friendliness as it was of surprise. 'What do you mean
by that?'

‘It would seem
perfectly natural to me if he resented your presence in the business, especially
if your uncle seemed to find you useful or placed trust in you or your
judgement.' - Brunetti was expecting Lorenzoni to comment on this, but the
young man surprised him by turning away silently and starting up the three
broad steps that led to the villa. To his retreating back, Brunetti called, 'Is
there anyone else I could talk to about him?'

At the top of the
steps, Lorenzoni turned towards them. 'No. No one knew him. No one can help.'
He turned back towards the door and went into the villa, closing the door
behind him.

18

Because the following
day was Sunday, Brunetti left the Lorenzonis to themselves and returned his
attention to the family only the next morning, when he attended Roberto's
funeral, a rite as solemn as it was grim. The mass was celebrated in the church
of San Salvador, which stood beyond one end of Campo San Bartolomeo and which,
because of its proximity to Rialto, received a constant flux of tourists during
the day and hence during the mass. Brunetti, seated at the back of the church,
was conscious of their invasive arrival, overheard the buzz of their exchanged
whispers as they discussed how to photograph the Titian
Annunciation
and
the tomb of Caterina Cornaro. But during a funeral? Perhaps, if they were very,
very quiet and didn't use the flash. The priest ignored their whispers and
continued the millennium-old ritual, speaking of the transitory nature of our
time upon this earth and of the sadness which must surround the parents and
family of this child of God, cut off so soon from this earthly life. But then
he enjoined his listeners to think of the joy which awaited the faithful and
the good, gone to find their home with their Heavenly Father, He the source of
all love. Only once was the priest distracted from his duties: a crash sounded
from the back of the church as a chair fell over, this followed by a muttered
exclamation in a language other than Italian.

Ritual swallowed up
the interruption; the priest and his servers walked slowly around the closed
coffin, chanting prayers and sprinkling it with holy water. Brunetti wondered
if he were the only one moved to consider the physical state of what lay
beneath that elaborately carved mahogany lid. No one within the church had
actually seen it: Roberto's identity rested upon nothing more than some dental
X-rays and a gold ring, recognition of which, Commissario Barzan had told
Brunetti, reduced the Count to choking sobs. Brunetti himself, even though he
had studied the autopsy report, had no idea of how much of the physical
substance that had once been Roberto Lorenzoni actually lay there at the front
of the church. To have lived twenty-one years and to have left so little behind
save parents burdened with grief, a girlfriend who had already borne another
man's child, and a cousin who had quickly manoeuvred himself into the position
as heir. Of Roberto, son to both earthly and heavenly fathers, so little seemed
to remain. He had been a common type, the indulged only son of wealthy parents,
a boy of whom little had been asked and less expected. And now he lay, a pile
of clean bones and tatters of flesh, in a box in a church, and even the
policeman sent to find his killer could summon up no real grief at his early
death.

Brunetti was spared
from further reflection by the end of the ceremony. Four middle-aged men
carried the coffin from the altar towards the back of the church. Close behind
them followed Count Ludovico and Maurizio, the Contessa supported between them.
Francesca Salviati was not present. Brunetti was saddened to realize that
almost all of the mourners who trailed out of the church were elderly people,
apparently friends of the parents. It was as if Roberto had been robbed not
only of his future life but of his past, for he had left behind no friends to
come and wish him farewell or to say some prayer for his long-departed spirit.
How immeasurably sad, to have mattered so little, to have his passing marked by
no more than a mother's tears. His own death, Brunetti realized, would pass
unmarked even by those: his mother, bound within her madness, was long beyond
the time when she could distinguish between son or father, life or death. And
what if the coffin were to hold all that remained of his own son?

Brunetti stepped
suddenly into the aisle and joined the trickle of people making towards the
door of the church. On the steps, he was surprised to see the sunlight pouring
down on the
campo,
the people trailing past on their way to Campo San Luca or
Rialto, utterly unmoved by thoughts of Roberto Lorenzoni or his death.

He decided not to
follow the coffin to the water's edge and see it placed upon the boat that
would carry it to the cemetery. Instead, he went back towards San Lio and the
Questura, stopping on the way for a coffee and a brioche. He finished the coffee
but could eat only one bite of the brioche. He put it down on the counter,
paid, and left;

He went up to his
office, where he found a postcard from his brother on his desk. On the front
was a photo of the Fountain of Trevi and on the back, in Sergio's neat square
lettering, this message: ‘Paper a success, both of us heroes’ followed by his
scrawled name, and then a scribbled addition: 'Rome dreadful, squalid.'

Brunetti tried to see
if the cancellation of the stamp bore a date. If it did, it was too smeared for
him to be able to read it He marvelled that the postcard could have arrived
from Rome in less than a week, he had had letters take three to get to him from
Torino. But perhaps the post office gave priority to postcards, or perhaps
they preferred them, as they were smaller and lighter. He read through the rest
of his mail, some of it important, none of it interesting.

Signorina Elettra was
at the table by her window, arranging irises in a tall vase that stood in a bar
of light that splashed across the table and the floor. She wore a sweater
almost the same colour as the flowers, stood as slim and straight as they.

'They're very
beautiful’ he said as he came in.

'Yes, they are,
aren't they? But I've always wondered why the cultivated ones have no scent.'

‘Don't they?'

'Very little’ she
answered. 'Just smell them.' She moved to one side.

Brunetti bent
forward. They had no scent at all, other than a faintly generic odour of
vegetable.

Before he could
remark on this, however, a voice behind him asked, 'Is that a new investigative
technique, Commissario?'

Lieutenant Scarpa's
voice purred with curiosity. When Brunetti straightened up and glanced towards
him, Scarpa's face was a mask of respectful attention.

'Yes, Lieutenant,' he
answered. 'Signorina Elettra was just telling me that, because they're so
pretty, it's very difficult to tell when they're rotten. So you have to smell
them. And then you know.'

'And are they
rotten?' Lieutenant Scarpa asked with every appearance of interest.

'Not yet,'
interrupted Signorina Elettra, moving in front of the Lieutenant and back
towards her desk. She paused a short distance from Scarpa and ran her eyes up
and down his uniform. 'If s harder to tell with flowers’ She stepped past him
and went back to her desk. Then, with a smile as false as his, she asked, 'And
was there something you wanted. Lieutenant?'

'The Vice-Questore
asked me to come up,' he answered, voice thick with emotion.

Then by all means go
in,' she said, waving towards the door to Patta's office. Saying nothing,
Scarpa walked in front of Brunetti, knocked once on the door, and went in
without waiting to be told to do so.

Brunetti waited for
the door to close before saying, 'You should be careful of him’

'Him?' she asked, no
attempt made to disguise her contempt.

'Yes, of him’
Brunetti repeated. 'He's got the Vice-Questore's ear.'

She reached forward
and picked up a brown leather notebook. 'And I've got his appointment book.
That cancels things out.'

‘I wouldn't be so
sure’ Brunetti insisted. 'He could be dangerous.'

'Take his gun away
and he's no different from any other
"terron
maleducato"'.'

Brunetti wasn't sure
if it was correct for him to countenance both disrespect for a lieutenant's
rank and racist remarks about his place of origin. Then he recalled that it was
Scarpa they were talking about and let it pass. 'Signorina, did you ever speak
to your boyfriend's brother about Roberto Lorenzoni?'

'Yes, I did, Dottore.
I'm sorry but I forgot to tell you.'

Brunetti found it interesting
that she appeared more troubled by this than about her comments on Lieutenant
Scarpa. 'What did he say?'

'Not much. Maybe
that's why I forgot. All he said was that Roberto was lazy and spoiled and that
he got through school by reading other students' notes.'

'Nothing else?'

'Only that Edoardo
told me Roberto was always getting into trouble because he kept putting his
nose into other people's business - you know, going to other students' houses
and opening drawers and looking through their things. He sounded almost proud
of him. He said once Roberto arranged to get locked into the school building
after school one day and went through all the teachers' desks.'

'Why did he do that,
to steal things?' 'Oh, no. He just wanted to see what they had.' 'Were they
still in touch when Roberto was kidnapped?'

'No, not really.
Edoardo was doing his military service. In Modena. He said they hadn't seen one
another for more than a year when it happened. But he said he liked him.'

Brunetti had no idea
what to make of any of this, but he thanked Signorina Elettra for the information,
decided against warning her again about Lieutenant Scarpa, and went back up to
his office.

He looked down at the
letters and reports on his desk and pushed them aside. He sat and pulled the
bottom drawer open with the toe of his right foot, then crossed his feet on top
of it. He folded his arms on his chest and glanced off at the space above the
wooden wardrobe that stood against one wall. He tried to summon up some emotion
for Roberto, and it was at the thought of him locked into school and poking
through his teachers' desks that Brunetti finally began to have a real sense of
this dead boy. It took no more than that, a consciousness of his inexplicable
humanity, and Brunetti finally found himself moved to that terrible pity for
the dead with which his life was too often filled. He thought of the things
that could have happened in Roberto's life; he might have found work he liked,
a woman to love; he might have had a son.

The family died with
him; at least the direct line from Count Ludovico. Brunetti knew that the
Lorenzonis could trace themselves back into the dim centuries where history and
myth blended and became one, and he wondered what it must be to see it end.
Antigone, he remembered, said that the chief horror of her brothers' deaths lay
in the fact that her parents could never again have children, and so the family
died with those bodies rotting under the walls of Thebes.

He turned his
thoughts to Maurizio, now the presumptive heir to the Lorenzoni empire. Though
the boys had been raised together, there was no evidence of any great
affection or love between them. Maurizio's devotion seemed entirely directed at
his aunt and uncle. That would make it unlikely he would deliver such a
terrible blow as to rob them of their only child. But Brunetti had heard enough
of the limitless self-justification of criminals to know that it would be the
work of an instant for Maurizio to convince himself it would be an act of
charity and love to provide them with a diligent, devoted, hard-working heir,
someone who would so fully live up to their expectations of what a son should
be, that the loss of Roberto would soon cease to pain them. Brunetti had heard
worse.

He called down to
Signorina Elettra to ask if she had found the name of the girl whose hand
Maurizio had broken. She told him it was given on a separate page at the end of
the list of the Lorenzoni financial holdings. Brunetti turned to the final
pages. Maria Teresa Bonarnini, with an address in Castello.