A Noble Radiance (22 page)

He called the number
and asked for Signorina Bonamini, and the woman who answered said she was at
work. When asked, making no attempt to discover who was calling, she told
Brunetti that she worked as a salesgirl at Coin, in women's clothing.

He decided he would
prefer to speak to her in person and so, telling no one what he was doing, he
left the Questura and headed back in the direction of the department store.

Since the fire,
almost ten years ago now, he had found it difficult to enter the store; the
daughter of a friend of his had been one of the victims killed when a careless
worker set fire to sheets of plastic that had, within minutes, turned the
entire building into a smoke-filled hell. At the time, the fact that the girl
had died from smoke inhalation and not from fire had seemed some consolation;
years later, only the fact of her death remained.

He took the escalator
to the second floor and found himself enveloped in brown, Coin's choice that
year for summer's colour: blouses, skirts, dresses, hats - all blended together
in a swirl of earth tones. The saleswomen, unfortunately, had decided or been
told to wear the same colours, so they blended in, almost invisible in this sea
of umber, chocolate, mahogany, chestnut. Luckily, one of them moved towards
him, distinguishing herself from the rack of dresses in front of which she had
been standing. 'Could you tell me where I might find Teresa Bonamini?' Brunetti
asked.

She turned and
pointed towards the back of the store. 'In furs,' she said and moved off
towards a woman in a suede jacket who raised a hand in her direction.

Brunetti followed her
gesture and found himself moving between racks of fur coats and jackets, a
hecatomb, of fauna, the sale of which was apparently not affected by the season.
There was longer furred fox, glossy mink, and one particularly dense pelt he
couldn't identify. Some years ago, a wave of social consciousness had swept the
Italian fashion industry, and for a season women had been enjoined to buy
'la peilliccia  ecologica',
wildly-patterned and coloured furs that made no attempt to
disguise the fact that they were fake. But no matter how inventive the design
or high the price, they could never be made to cost as much as real furs, and
so the call of vanity was not sufficiently satisfied. They were symbols of
principle, not of status, and they quickly passed out of fashion and were given
to cleaning ladies or sent to refugees in Bosnia. Worse, they had turned into
an ecological nightmare, vast swatches of bio-undegradable plastic. So real
fur had returned to the racks.

'Si, Signore’
the salesgirl who approached Brunetti asked, pulling him
back from reflections upon the vanity of human wishes. She was blonde,
blue-eyed, and almost as tall as he.

'Signorina Bonamini?'

'Yes,' she answered,
giving Brunetti a careful look instead of a smile.

'I'd like to talk to
you about Maurizio Lorenzoni, Signorina’ he explained.

The transformation of
her face was immediate. From passive curiosity, it changed instantly to irritation,
even alarm. 'All of that's settled. You can ask my lawyer.'

Brunetti stepped back
from her and smiled politely. 'I'm sorry, Signorina, I should have introduced
myself.' He took his wallet from his pocket and held it up so that she could
see his photo. ‘I’m Commissario Guido Brunetti, and I'd like to talk to you
about Maurizio. There's no need of a lawyer. I merely want to ask you a few
questions about him.'

'What sort of
questions?' she asked, the alarm still in her voice.

'About what sort of
man he is, what sort of character he has.'

'Why do you want to
know?'

'As you probably
know, his cousin's body has been found, and we've reopened the investigation of
his kidnapping. So we have to start all over again, gathering information about
the family.'

'It's not about my
hand?' she asked.

'No, Signorina. I
know about the incident, but I'm not here to talk about it'

'I never made
una denuncia,
you
know. It was an accident.'

'But your hand was
broken, wasn't it?' Brunetti asked, resisting the impulse to look down at her
hands, which hung at her sides.

Responding to his
unspoken question, she raised her left hand and waved it in front of Brunetti,
opening and closing the fingers. 'There's nothing at all wrong with it, is
there?' she asked.

'No, nothing at all,
I'm glad to see,' Brunetti said and smiled again. 'But why did you speak of a
lawyer?'

'I signed a
statement, after it happened, saying that I would never make a complaint, never
bring charges against him. It really was an accident, you know,' she added
warmly. 'I was getting out of the car on his side, and he closed the door
before he knew I was there’

'Then why did you
need to sign that statement, if it was an accident?'

She shrugged. ‘I
don't know. His lawyer told him I should do it’

'Was there any
payment made?' Brunetti asked.

Her ease of manner
disappeared with the question. It's not illegal’ she insisted with the
authority of one who has been told as much by more than one lawyer.

'I know that,
Signorina. I was merely curious. It has nothing at all to do with what I'd like
to know about Maurizio.'

A voice spoke behind
him, addressed to Bonamini. 'Do you have the fox in size forty?'

A smile flowed on to
the girl's face. 'No, Signora. They've all been sold. But we have it in
forty-four.'

'No, no’ the woman
said vaguely and drifted away, back towards the skirts and blouses.

'Did you know his
cousin?' Brunetti asked when Signorina Bonamini returned her attention to him.

'Roberto?'

'Yes.'

'No, I never met him,
but Maurizio did talk about him once in a while.'

'What did he say
about him? Can you remember?'

She considered this
for a while. 'No, nothing specific’

'Then can you tell me
if, by the way Maurizio spoke about him, they seemed to like one another?'

"They were
cousins,' she said, as if that were explanation enough.

I know that,
Signorina, but I wondered if you can remember Maurizio's ever saying something
of Roberto or if you had some idea -1 don't think it matters how you formed it
- about what Maurizio thought about him.' Brunetti tried another smile.

Absently, she reached
out and straightened a mink jacket. 'Well’ she said, paused a while, and then
continued, 'if I had to say, then I'd say that Maurizio was impatient with
him.'

Brunetti knew better than
to interrupt or question her.

'There was one time
when they sent him - Roberto, that is - to Paris. I think it was Paris. A big
city, anyway, where the Lorenzonis had some sort of business deal going. I
never really understood what happened, but Roberto opened a package or
something like that or saw what was in a contract, and he talked about it to
someone he shouldn't have told about it. Anyway, the deal was cancelled.'

She glanced up at
Brunetti and saw the look of disappointment on his face. ‘I know, I know it
doesn't sound like very much, but Maurizio was really angry when it happened.'
She weighed up the next comment but decided to say it. 'And he's got a terrible
temper, Maurizio.'

'Your hand?' Brunetti
asked.

'No’ she answered
instantly. 'That really was an accident. He didn't mean to do it. Believe me,
if he had, I would have been down at the
Cardbinieri
station the next morning,
straight from the hospital.' She used the hand in question to adjust another
fur.
He
just gets mad and shouts. I've never known him to
do
anything.-
 But you can't talk to him when he's like that; it's like he becomes someone
else.'

'And what is he like
when he's being himself?'

'Oh, he's serious.
That's why I stopped going out with him: he was always calling up and saying he
had to stay and work, or we had to take other people to dinner, business
people. And then this happened’ she said, waving the hand again, 'and so I told
him I didn't want to see him any more’ How did he take that?'

'I think he was
relieved, especially after I told him I'd still sign the paper for his lawyers’

'Have you heard from
him at all since then?'

'No. I see him on the
street, the way you always do, and we say hello. No talk, nothing really, just
"How are you?" and things like that’

Brunetti pulled out
his wallet again and took one of his cards from it. 'If you think of anything
else, Signorina, would you call me at the Questura?'

She took the card and
slipped it into the pocket of the brown sweater she was wearing. 'Of course’
she said neutrally, and he doubted that his card would survive the afternoon.

He extended his hand
and shook hers, then made his way back through the racks of furs, towards the
stairs. As he walked down towards the main exit, he wondered how many
undeclared millions she had been given in return for her signature on that
paper. But, as he so often reminded himself, tax evasion was not his business.

19

When he returned to
work after lunch, Brunetti was told by the guard at the front door that
Vice-Questore Patta wanted to see him. Fearing that this might be the
repercussions of Signorina Elettra's behaviour towards Lieutenant Scarpa, he
went up immediately.

If Lieutenant Scarpa
had said anything, however, it was in no way apparent, for Brunetti found Patta
in an uncharacteristically friendly mood. Brunetti was instantly on his guard.

Have you made any
progress on the Lorenzoni murder, Brunetti?' Patta asked after Brunetti had
taken his seat in front of the Vice-Questore's desk.

'Nothing yet, sir,
but I've got a number of interesting leads.' This measured lie, Brunetti
thought, would suggest that enough was happening to keep him on the case, yet
would not seem so successful as to prompt Patta to ask for details.

'Good, good,' Patta
muttered, enough for Brunetti to infer that he was not at all interested in the
Lorenzonis. He asked nothing; long experience had shown him that Patta
preferred people to worm news out of him, rather than to tell them
straightforwardly. Brunetti wasn't going to help him out.

'It’s about this
programme, Brunetti,' Patta finally said:

'Yes, sir? Brunetti
inquired politely.

'The one RAI is doing
about the police.'

Brunetti remembered
something about a police programme to be produced and edited in a film studio
in Padova. He'd had a letter some weeks ago, asking if he would agree to serve
as consultant, or was it commentator? He'd tossed the letter into his
wastepaper basket and forgotten about it. 'Yes, sir?' he repeated, no less
politely.

'They want you.'

'I beg your pardon,
sir.'

'You. They want you
to be the consultant and to give them a long interview about how the police
system works.'

Brunetti thought of
the work that waited for him, thought of the Lorenzoni investigation. 'But that’
s absurd.'

'That's what I told
them,' Patta agreed. 'I told them they needed someone with broader experience,
someone who has a wider vision of police work, can see it as a whole, not as a
series of individual cases and crimes.'

One of the things
Brunetti most disliked about Patta was the fact that the cheap melodrama of his
life always had such bad scripts.

'And what did they
say to this suggestion, sir?'

'They have to call
Rome. That's where the original suggestion came from. They're supposed to get
back to me tomorrow morning.' Patta's inflection turned this into a question
and one that demanded an answer.

1 can't imagine who
could have suggested me for this sort of thing, sir. If s not anything I like
or anything I want to be involved with.'