A Noble Radiance (25 page)

Issued six years ago
and renewed every year until Roberto's disappearance, the passport gave
Roberto's date of birth, height, weight, and permanent residence. Brunetti
turned to the first pages of the passport: there were of course no stamps from
the EC member nations, but there were for the United States, followed by those
for Mexico, Colombia, and Argentina. Then immediately following in
chronological order, Poland, Bulgaria, and Romania. After that, chronological
order broke down, as though the customs officers had simply stamped the
document at any convenient page it happened to fall open to.

Brunetti went into
the kitchen to get paper and pen, then began to list Roberto's trips in strict
chronological order. After fifteen minutes, he had. two sheets of paper covered
with columns of places and dates, all complicated by the many insertions he had
to make when he came upon stamps that had been made at random.

After noting down the
places and dates of all of the stamps, he recopied the list in a more ordered
form, this time covering three sheets of paper. The last place Roberto had
visited, ten days before the date of his kidnapping, was Poland, which he had
entered via Warsaw airport. His exit visa showed that he had stayed only a day.
Before that, three weeks before his kidnapping, he had travelled to two
countries whose names were given in Cyrillic letters and which Brunetti took to
be Belorussia and Tadzhikistan.

He went down the
corridor and stood at the door of Paola's study. She looked up at him over the
top of her glasses. ‘Yes?' 'How's your Russian?'

'Do you mean my
boyfriend or my language?' she asked, setting down her pen and removing her
glasses.

'No, what you do with
your boyfriend is your own business’ he said with a smile. 'Your language’

'Somewhere between
Pushkin and road signs, I'd say’

'City names?' he
asked.

She stretched out her
hand towards the passport he held up in front of him. He went over to the desk,
handed her the passport, and went to stand behind her, absently brushing a
piece of woollen thread from the shoulder of her sweater.

Taking the passport’
she asked, 'Which one?'

In the back, on that
extra page’

She opened the
passport and pulled the page out to its full length. 'Brest.'

'Where is it?'

'Belorussia.'

'We have an atlas?'
Brunetti asked.

'In Chiara's room, I
think.'

By the time he was
back, she had copied out the names of the cities and countries on a piece of
paper. When he placed the book beside her, she said, 'Even before we bother to
look, we ought to see what year it was printed’

'Why?'   

'Lots of the names
have been changed. Not only countries, but cities.'

She took the book and
opened it to the title page.

'Maybe this will do’
she said. 'It's last year's edition.' She turned to the index, looking for
Belorussia, then flipped back to the map.

For a moment, they
studied the map of the small country lodged in between Poland and Greater
Russia. 'If s one of what are now called "breakaway republics"

‘Pity it's only the
Russians who get to break away,' Brunetti said, imagining what glory it would
be for northern Italy to be free of Rome.

Paola, used to this,
ignored him. She replaced her glasses and bent down over the map. She placed a
finger on a name, 'Here's the first one. On the border with Poland.' Keeping
her finger mere, she continued to study the map. After a few moments, she used
her other hand to point to another place. 'Here's the second. It seems to be
only a hundred kilometres from the other’

Brunetti placed the
open page of the passport beside her and looked again at the visas. The numbers
and dates were written in Western style. 'Same day,' he said.

'Meaning?'

That he went by land
from Poland to Belorussia and stayed there only one day, perhaps even less,
before coming back’

Is that strange? You
said he was a sort of errand boy for the business. Maybe he had to deliver a
contract or make a pick-up.'

'Hmm’ Brunetti
agreed. He reached down and picked up the atlas and began to turn pages.

'What are you looking
for?'

‘I’d like to know
what route he'd take to get back here’ he answered, studying the map of Eastern

Europe and running his
finger across the most likely route. ‘Probably Poland and then Romania, if he
was driving’

Paola interrupted
him. 'Roberto doesn't sound like someone who'd travel by bus.'

Brunetti grunted,
finger still on the map. 'And then Austria and down through Tarvisio and
Udine.'

'Do you think it's
important?' Brunetti shrugged.

Losing interest,
Paola folded the long page back into the passport and handed it up to Brunetti.
If it is important, then I'm sorry you'll never know. He'll never tell you,'
she said and turned her attention to the book that lay open in front of her.

"There are more
things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio’ he
dropped on her, a phrase she had used with him more than once.

'And what does that
mean?' she asked, smiling up at him, glad he'd won a round.

'I mean that this is
the age of plastic’

'Plastic?' she
repeated, lost.

'And computers.'

When Paola still
failed to understand, he smiled and said, his voice the perfect imitation of a
television announcer's, 'Never leave home without your American Express card’
As he saw comprehension dawning in her
eyes,
he added, 'And then I can follow
your movements on . . .' and Paola, understanding at last, joined him in
finishing the sentence, 'Signorina Elettra's computer’

21

'Of course you can
charge prostitutes on your credit card’ Signorina Elettra insisted to an astonished
Brunetti. He stood beside her desk two days later, holding a four-page printout
of the charges made to Roberto Lorenzoni's three credit cards in me two months
before his kidnapping.

By any standards,
these expenses were tremendous, a total in excess of fifty million lire, more
than most people made in a year. The expenses had been converted into lire from
a wide range of currencies, both familiar and strange: pounds, dollars, marks,
lev, zloti, roubles.

Brunetti was on the
third page, looking at the charges from a hotel in St Petersburg. In a period
of two days, Roberto had run up more than four million lire in room service.
It might have seemed the young man had never left his room, having all meals
sent in to him, drinking nothing but champagne, were it not that the printout
also listed enormous expenses from restaurants and what sounded like discos or
night clubs: Pink Flamingo, Can Can, and Elvis.

'There's nothing else
it could be,' Signorina Elettra insisted.

'But Visa?' Brunetti
asked, unable to believe what seemed to be staring him in the face.

'The men from the
bank did it all the time,' she said. 'In almost all the Eastern countries you
can do that now. It goes down as room service or laundry or valet service,
depending on how the hotel has decided to list it. But if s just a way they get
a cut. And keep an eye on who goes into and out of the hotel.' Seeing that she
had caught Brunetti's attention, she continued. 'The lobbies are full of them.
They look just like us. Westernized, that is. Armani, Gucci, Gap, and really
quite beautiful. One of the vice-presidents told me he'd been approached by one
of them, in English. This must have been about four years ago. Perfect English,
could have been an Oxford professor. And she was. A professor, that is, at the
university there, not at Oxford. She made about fifty thousand lire a month,
teaching English poetry. So she decided to supplement her income.'

'And improve her
English?' Brunetti asked.

Italian, in this
case, I think, sir.'

Brunetti looked back
down at the papers. His imagination superimposed upon the information contained
in them the map of Eastern Europe which he and Paola had studied two nights
before. He followed Roberto's path east, traced the purchase of petrol just at
the edge of Czechoslovakia; a new tyre, shockingly expensive, somewhere in Poland,
and then more petrol at the city where he'd obtained his entry visa to
Belorussia. There was a charge for a hotel room in Minsk, far more expensive
than in Rome or Milan, and a very expensive dinner. Three bottles of Burgundy
were on the bill - the only word it contained that Brunetti could understand -
so it must have been a dinner for more than Roberto alone, probably one of
those business dinners he was so richly paid to extend to clients. But in
Minsk?

Because this list was
in chronological order, Brunetti could also trace Roberto's movements as he
made his way back across the continent, following pretty much the path
Brunetti had sketched out for him: Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, and then
back down into Italy, where he'd bought fifty-thousand lire in petrol in
Tarvisio. Then, about three days before his kidnapping, the charges ended, but
not before he had paid more than three hundred thousand lire at a pharmacy near
his home.

'What do you think?'
Brunetti asked.

‘I think I wouldn't
have liked him very much’ Elettra said coolly.

'Why not?'

‘I
usually
don't like people who don't pay their own bills.' 'And didn't he?'

She flipped the
report back to the first page and pointed to the third line, which gave the
name of the person to whom the bill was to be sent. 'Lorenzoni Industries’

'It's his company
card, then.'

‘For business
expenses?' she asked.

Brunetti nodded. It
seems like that to me’

'Then what’s this?'
she asked, pointing to a charge for two million seven hundred thousand lire
from a tailor in Milan. 'Or this?' This time she pointed to a receipt for a
seven hundred thousand lire handbag from Bottega Veneta.

'It's his father's
company’ Brunetti argued.

She shrugged.

Brunetti wondered why
it was that Signorina Elettra, a woman from whom he had not come to expect
conventional morality, would find Roberto's behaviour so objectionable.

'Don't you like rich
people?' he finally asked. 'Is that it?'

She shook her head.
'No, that's not the case at all. Maybe I just don't like spoiled young men who
spend their daddy's money on whores.' She pushed the papers towards him and
turned back to her computer.

'Even if he's dead?'
Brunetti asked.

'That changes
nothing, Dottore.'

Brunetti made no
attempt to hide his surprise, perhaps even his disappointment. He took the
papers and left.

From the pharmacy he
learned that the prescriptions had been written by Roberto's family doctor, no
doubt part of the doctor's attempt to treat the symptoms of malaise and general
lack of energy. No one in the pharmacy remembered Roberto, nor could they
recall having filled the prescriptions.

Feeling himself at a
dead end, possessed only of a sense that something was wildly wrong with both
the kidnapping and the Lorenzoni family, Brunetti decided to make use of the
family he had married into and dialled the Count's number. This time it was his
father-in-law who answered.

‘It’s me’ Brunetti
said.

'Yes?' the Count
asked.

‘I wondered if you'd
heard anything else about the Lorenzonis since I spoke to you’

'I've spoken to a
number of people’ the Count said. They say the mother's in very bad shape’ In
any other person, that would have been a request for gossip, not a statement of
fact.

‘Yes, I've seen her.'

'I'm sorry’ the Count
said and then added, 'She was a lovely woman. I knew her years ago, before she
was married. She was vibrant, funny, wonderfully beautiful’