The Golden Egg (25 page)

He believed her. ‘Then tell me, but don't tell it slant.'

‘My mother did not like my father, and my father did not like my mother. That is, the man I've spent my life calling my father did not like my mother, and my mother did not like the man I've spent my life calling my father.'

‘But he married her?'

‘He married her because she was pregnant and asked him to marry her.'

‘Pregnant by him or some other man?'

‘Good heavens: a man like my father would never have had sex before marriage – not with the woman he hoped to marry. It was not done: not if you're an upstart engineer and the girl is the daughter of your boss, and the company is one of the biggest in the country.'

‘So he married her to get the business?'

‘My father was a businessman before he was anything else. He loved it, loved making things work and loved making money from that.'

‘You automatically call him your father,' Brunetti pointed out.

‘I loved him. He was a good man and very kind to the two of us. I've never met our real father – at least not knowingly – and so he was the man I loved as my father. Lavinia, too.'

‘She wasn't his daughter, either?'

‘Haven't I just said that?' she asked and turned to fill her glass.

‘Of course, of course,' Brunetti assured her when she was again facing him.

‘But were they never . . .' he didn't know how to say it, not while speaking to a lady. ‘Were they never really husband and wife?'

‘I have no idea of that, and I don't want to know,' she said heatedly, speaking quickly, the faster to have it said. ‘They always had separate rooms and separate lives. And my mother went off to see her cousin in the convent every month, didn't she?' she asked, leaving Brunetti to make of that whatever he pleased.

‘And then Ana Cavanella came into the
palazzo
,' he said.

‘Indeed. She was our age. That is, near to our age. I'm sure the psychiatrists would have a wonderful time with that: talking about his hidden lusts for us. None of which either of us ever detected.'

‘How did she behave?'

‘I don't know. That is, I don't remember. I was at an age when I found life difficult and revolting.' Then, with a shrug, she added, ‘I suppose I still do to a certain degree,' and Brunetti realized he was beginning to like her.

‘Does your sister remember?'

‘She was at school. In Ireland. With the sisters.'

‘I see,' Brunetti said, though he didn't.

‘And then Ana became pregnant?' he asked.

‘Yes. And my mother went wild. I'd never seen her like that.'

‘Jealousy?'

She laughed. ‘Hardly. She raged on about the insult to her honour, to her family.'

‘What happened?'

‘Ana left.'

‘And the house and the payments?'

‘My father bought the house in my name. I was nineteen then, and he asked me if I'd do it for him: allow for the
usufrutto
and allow the payments to go in my name. I signed the papers: he was a good man.'

Brunetti picked up the glass and drank some of the water. He could not reconcile this conservatively dressed and clearly spoken woman with the raving wreck they had met the day before. He had a growing suspicion that this woman had outwitted them, and the victim of deceit had been Griffoni.

‘Why did you think I was here to arrest you, Signora?'

‘Because of what I did to Ana Cavanella.'

‘You mean hitting her?'

‘Is that what she says?' she asked, unable to hide her surprise.

‘No. Would you tell me what happened?'

‘She came here two days ago, and I let her in. I didn't recognize her: forty years is a long time. She had to tell me who she was. That's when I let her in.'

‘What happened?'

‘She told me that her son was dead. And I told her I knew that.

‘She came because she'd received a letter from my lawyer, telling her that the death of her son Davide changed the nature of our existing fiscal relationship. She came to ask me what that meant.'

‘Did you explain it to her?'

With something close to irritation, Lucrezia said, ‘I don't know why lawyers can't say things clearly. Just tell her there would be no more money. And she'd have to leave the house.' She looked across at Brunetti. ‘I tried to explain it to her, but I don't think she understood. Or didn't want to. I told her my obligation was to Davide, not to her.'

Curious as he was at her use of the word, ‘obligation', Brunetti said nothing.

‘She got angry and said the family couldn't lie about him any more, or about her.' She followed that with a puff of incredulity and went on. ‘I told her she was nothing to me and told her to leave, but she said Davide was my half-brother and was entitled to a third of my father's estate.'

She made a shivering motion. ‘She'd read something about the law that was passed last year, and she said there was proof.'

‘Proof of what?'

‘That my father – that is, my mother's husband – was also Davide's father. And then when I told her there could be no proof, she said something about what she called DNU. I didn't understand at first what she was talking about, and then she said it was the proof in the body, in the blood, that people were related.'

‘DNA,' Brunetti whispered and breathed a silent prayer to be delivered from the hands of the ignorant.

‘Yes. DNA. God knows where she got the information. She didn't understand anything, but she kept talking about the DNU test and that it would prove he was Davide's father. I told her to go ahead and try to prove it.'

‘Did you tell her anything else?'

‘No. She wouldn't stop talking, and then she was shouting. We were still standing at the door. I opened it and told her to get out: we'd been talking in the courtyard all this time. I didn't want her in the house. She kept shouting that she deserved to be helped, and I told her all she deserved was to be put away in jail or an institution.' Lucrezia's emotions overcame her, and she stopped, breathing heavily.

‘I raised my hand to her. It frightened her. I grabbed her shoulders, shoved her out into the
calle
and slammed the door in her face before she could come back in. Then I went into the house.' She smiled then, speaking to Brunetti as though he were an old friend. ‘I have to confess I've never enjoyed anything so much in my life.'

‘In her face?'

‘I meant it figuratively,' she said. ‘She stood out there, howling like a hyena. It must have been ten minutes. But then it stopped. She went away.'

She finished her glass of water and placed it behind her on the counter.

‘What did you mean about her belonging in prison or in an institution?'

In that same, easy voice, still speaking to a friend, she said, ‘For what she did to Davide.'

‘What did she do?'

Her eyes widened. ‘You mean you don't know? I thought everyone in the neighbourhood knew.'

‘I don't know what you're talking about, Signora.'

‘Really?'

‘Really.'

‘About the room?'

‘What room?'

‘Oh my God,' she said, honestly stricken. ‘I swear by my father's memory I thought you knew, that you'd found out from the people in the neighbourhood.'

‘I don't know anything, Signora,' Brunetti said, feeling the profound truth of this.

She leaned forward and put her palms flat on the table, thumbs barely touching, and she looked at them as she spoke. It took her a long time to find the energy to continue speaking. ‘When my father told her she had to leave our home, she refused, and when he said he'd make sure she and the baby were taken care of, all she said was that she'd take care of the baby.' She stopped, and swallowed twice. Then she pulled out a chair and sat, facing him.

‘We didn't know what she meant. At first she went and lived in the house, but then she disappeared. Later, she came back to live with her mother. And she got some sort of job, but I think that was only to keep her out of the house.'

‘And the mother?'

‘She helped her.'

‘With what?'

Her hands gave the only indication, beyond her voice, of her emotions. The fingers contracted into fists, and the veins on the back of her hands stood out.

‘They didn't talk.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘They didn't talk to the baby. To the boy. He was there. Maybe she even had him there and no one ever knew.
He lived in a room, and they fed him and cleaned him – I suppose. But they didn't talk to him. That's what she meant when she said she'd take care of the baby.'

She looked up then. ‘Don't think she's crazy, Signore. She's not. She's bad. They both were.'

‘How long did this go on?'

‘Years, a decade or more. Then the old woman left or died or disappeared. I don't know. I was busy making a ruin of my own life: I had no time to pay attention to hers. Theirs.'

‘How did you learn all of this?'

‘Signora Ghezzi. But not until years later.' Brunetti fabricated a confused shake of his head. ‘My mother's maid. She had friends in that neighbourhood, and she heard the talk. Nothing certain, only rumours. No one wanted to get involved. No one had the courage to interfere in what she was doing. No one trusted the police.'

She pushed herself to her feet, then sat down again. ‘And one day the old woman was gone and the boy was there, her son, her disabled and retarded son. She told people he had been raised by relatives in the country; even then no one dared to ask questions.'

‘And you kept paying?'

‘My father did. Through my account. When he died, I kept paying. I'd promised him that.'

‘Did he know about the boy?'

‘What she did to him?'

Unable to say the word, Brunetti nodded.

‘No one ever had the courage. He had moved to the Giudecca by then.' She paused and gazed into the middle distance. ‘He might have killed her if he had known. Davide was his only son, you know.'

She met his gaze. ‘If you do the research, you'll find out that's what happens. If you don't talk to them, that is. They're like animals. Like Davide.'

Then she rose to her feet, saying, ‘I think that's enough, don't you?'

He did. He left.

Brunetti let himself out, being especially careful to close the door to the apartment very quietly, descend the steps with the silence of a wraith, cross the courtyard and emerge into the
calle
with thief-like care. It was still raining, but he did not notice until he was back at the Accademia, when he bought another umbrella from another Tamil.

Since his shoes were soaked through, he decided to walk. Plod, more like, but he thought of it as walking. Not talked to, not spoken to, no language, no contact, no words, no communication, no meaning, no sense to anything, no words to think in, no names for things. Nothing more terrible. No way to sort it all out; no way to distinguish between the sound of a dog and the words of a lullaby; ‘yes' sounding the same as ‘no', and both words the same as ‘upside down'.

He stopped at the door to their building. His pocket was sodden, the keys colder than he had ever known them to be. Tonight there were three hundred steps to the apartment. He closed the umbrella and dropped it outside the door, let himself in, kicked off his shoes, and bent to put them out on the landing. There were sounds from the kitchen: words, phrases: ‘he's such a good . . .' ‘she never says what . . .', ‘five more minutes'. They all meant something, those snatches. Those words created the possibility for larger categories or for larger, more encompassing ideas. Praise, criticism, time.

He went into the bathroom and shed his clothing, socks first, draping them all, sodden and dark, on the edge of the bathtub. He wanted to take a shower, but resisted the desire and merely wiped at his hair with a towel, draping that next to his shirt. He put on his terrycloth robe and went down the hall to their room. He found an old pair of woollen slacks he had refused for years to allow Paola to throw away. He took comfort from their familiar, shapeless softness. He pulled on a T-shirt and an old green cashmere sweater he had saved time and time again from her discarding impulses. He pulled on socks and slipped his feet into leather slippers.

He went down the corridor and into the kitchen. At his entrance, Chiara said, ‘Your hair's a mess,
Papà
. Come over here and let me fix it for you.' She hopped to her feet and Brunetti sat in her chair, amazed at the way ‘fix' was just right for this sentence, even though hair couldn't be fixed, probably because it couldn't be broken, but when hair was a mess, it could be set right again by being fixed, just as though it were broken, and wasn't that an amazingly flexible thing to do with words?

Chiara spread her fingers and ran them through his still-wet hair, brushing at it repeatedly until she had it looking more or less the way it was supposed to look. When he didn't say anything, she snaked her way around his shoulders and pulled her face close to his. ‘What's the matter, cat got your tongue?' she asked in English.

How remarkable that it happened in different languages, too, and that phrases could have two meanings. Obviously, there was no cat biting his tongue, but it was a wonderful metaphor for a motionless tongue. Like Davide's.

‘Just thinking,' he said and smiled round at them all.

‘What about?' Paola asked. Raffi was interested, but he was more interested in his risotto.

‘About a joke my mother told me when I was a kid. I wouldn't eat carrots one night, and she told me that carrots were good for my eyes.'

Chiara slapped her hands over her ears, knowing what was coming. Paola sighed; Raffi ate.

‘When I asked her how she knew that, she asked me if . . .' and he paused to give them time to join in the chorus, as they did every time he told this story . . . ‘I'd ever seen a rabbit wearing glasses.' Sure enough, they all joined in with his mother's question, her mother-in-law's question, their grandmother's question, and Brunetti was left marvelling that his mother could have all those different names.

He ate the rest of the dinner, though he didn't know what it was he was eating. He drank a glass of wine, left the second one unfinished, drunk with the words that crossed the table, their different meanings, the fact that they indicated time: future and past; that they indicated whether something had been done or was still to do; that they expressed people's feelings: anger was not a blow, regret was not tears. At one point, Paola expressed a wish and used the subjunctive, and Brunetti felt himself close to tears at the beauty of the intellectual complexity of it: she could speak about what was not, could invent an alternative reality.

He began to return to the real world with dessert, helped in the descent by a cake topped with red plums. As Paola cut a second slice and put it on his plate, he asked her, ‘Do you think God is language?'

Raffi was having none of this. He held up a forkful of cake. ‘God is plum cake,' he said and took communion.

Later, he sprawled on the sofa in Paola's study and told her all about it, every detail, starting with his first conversation with Ana Cavanella and finishing with his quiet exit from the Lembo
palazzo.

Paola sat in stunned silence for a long time and then did what she could to fight her way back to human understanding: she talked about what she had read. ‘There's Kaspar Hauser, and there's that girl in the United States. I've read about them, and I've read a bit of the theory.'

She looked his way, and he nodded. ‘They're pretty much agreed – the people who write about this – that if you don't learn language by about twelve, then the wiring is formed in your brain without language and you've missed the chance, and you'll never get it, never understand how it works.'

‘Talking?' he asked.

‘Language. The concept of it. That a noise can equal a thing, or an action.'

‘Or an idea,' Brunetti added. ‘Or a colour.'

‘She would have been less a monster if she had poked out his eyes,' Paola said with sudden ferocity. ‘He would still have been human.'

‘Don't you think he was?'

‘Of course he was,' she said. ‘But he wasn't like us.'

‘Is that rhetorical exaggeration?'

‘I suppose so,' she admitted. ‘But he really wasn't. He'd never understand what we do. Or what anything meant.'

‘You think he understood other things?' Brunetti asked, not knowing fully what he meant by that, but thinking of those drawings.

‘Of course.' She ran her hands across her face and through her hair. ‘It's so hard to talk about this without sounding like the worst sort of eugenic monster, placing different values on different people.'

‘Or defining what people are by what they can do?' Brunetti suggested.

‘Can we go to bed now?' she asked like a petulant child.

‘I think we'd better. We can't answer any of these questions.'

‘Neither of us was asking questions,' she said.

For a moment, Brunetti thought he'd contest that, but he was too tired for it. Instead, he said, ‘Besides, there aren't any answers.'

They went to bed, and the next day dawned bright, but much colder.

Well, he'd gone this far, animated by nothing more noble than curiosity, he told himself as he studied the face of the man in the mirror, pushing his collar down over his neatly knotted tie. The man's mind slipped into English: The cat's got your tongue. Curiosity killed the cat. To stay in vein, the man in the mirror gave a Cheshire smile, and Brunetti left the house.

He could have gone anywhere. Because he was a commissario and there was little crime in the city at the moment, he probably could have got on a boat and gone out to the Lido to walk on the beach, but he walked the same old, familiar old,
calli
to the hospital and went to Geriatria, where his mother – she too having lost her mooring to language during her long descent – had once spent some months. Things looked cleaner, but the smell was the same.

He went in without knocking and found Ana Cavanella sitting in an orange plastic chair, staring out the window. A woman attached to a number of plastic tubes, like a ship unloading liquid cargo while taking on fuel at the same time, lay in the other bed, sailing on some other sea, not docked there with them.

Cavanella looked up at him, face impassive and unfriendly. The left side was almost black, darkest at the point on her forehead where the closing door had hit her.

Brunetti went and stood with his back to the window so at least what little light there was would shine on her face and into her eyes. ‘I've spoken to Lucrezia Lembo,' he said.

‘About me?' she asked.

‘The Signora and I have nothing else in common.'

‘You're a policeman: what interest can you have in me?'

‘I'm curious about how you plan to prove it.'

‘Prove what?' she asked, but her eyes slid across to the sleeping woman.

‘That Ludovico Lembo was Davide's father.'

She was silent for a long time, and he watched her search for a way to answer him.

He watched her fight the desire to show him that she was clever, too. She lost. ‘There's that test. DNU.' She still hadn't learned, yet she allowed herself the self-satisfied smile of the dullest student who believed she knew something the others didn't.

‘And what will that prove?'

‘That he is. The father. Because of his other children. They can match them. It's scientific.'

He decided not to tell her yet and, instead, asked, ‘And if no judge will order the test? After all, anyone can make that claim about any rich man, can't they?' To himself at least, his question sounded entirely reasonable.

She gave it long thought, consulted with the somnolent woman in the bed, with the tops of the pine trees
that rose up from the courtyard below. ‘Really?' she asked, just as though she believed she could ask him to work in her best interests and suggest some other outcome.

‘You need stronger evidence.'

She tried, and failed, to repress a smile. He marvelled that he had ever seen signs of beauty in this face. ‘I have a letter,' she said.

‘From him.'

‘His lawyer wrote to tell me about the house and about the money.' To show her expertise, she added, ‘It's dated, too,' and could not repress a smile. Then, her voice a mixture of anger and self-satisfaction, ‘Any judge would believe that. People don't give money away unless you force them.'

He'd let her go on believing for a while yet. ‘And you're Davide's heir, aren't you?' he asked as if the thought had just come to him.

‘Yes.'

‘First it goes to his estate, and then it passes to you?'

‘Yes.' She was incapable of disguising how excited she was by this possibility, which to her was a fact. The right side of her face flushed pink at the thought: the other side remained close to black.

‘And the house and the money in the bank?'

‘That doesn't matter now, does it?' she asked, speaking with what life had taught her was the arrogance of wealth. A house with no rent to pay, three thousand Euros a month: these had suddenly become small change to the likes of Ana Cavanella, soon to be the heiress to one third of an immense inheritance. What did such paltry things mean to the mother of the son and heir of the King of Copper?

‘His death was very unfortunate,' Brunetti said.

It was clear that she didn't know who Brunetti was talking about, her son or her son's father. But her face soon found a pious expression that suited both, and she said, ‘Yes. Very.'

‘But fortunate, in a way,' Brunetti encouraged her. ‘Davide never would have appreciated all that money.'

She tried to suppress her smile and managed it after only an instant, but the sight of her teeth had been enough to seize Brunetti with the desire to strike her. He took a small step back, but it was to distance himself from her physically, not from the temptation of violence, which had only flashed through him, leaving him shocked.

‘I could have bought him so many things,' she said with falsity so palpable Brunetti was amazed the woman in the other bed didn't wake up screaming.

‘A radio, for instance,' Brunetti suggested.

‘But he was deaf.'

‘Was he, Signora?'

‘What do you mean?'

There it was again, that question that was really an answer. ‘I mean there was nothing wrong with his ears. With his hearing, that is. The autopsy showed that.'

‘I don't understand.'

‘Everyone in the neighbourhood understands, Signora.'

He watched her move from idea to idea, excuse to excuse, pose to pose. She couldn't ask him again what he meant, so she settled on an angry noise instead of words.

‘They know, Signora.'

‘They don't know anything,' she hissed.

‘And once you make your claim to the inheritance, they'll know about what happened to Davide, too. And if it comes to law, they'll learn about the hot chocolate and biscuits he had, along with the little yellow candies.'

This time, one half of her face went white while the other remained suffused with the signs of the blow. She tried to speak, to give voice to the indignation she knew she was supposed to show, but she failed, tried again, choking with rage. Choking. He was conscious of that. Finally she managed to spit it out: ‘It doesn't matter. Let them think what they want.'

A loud noise came from behind him; when Brunetti turned, he saw an immensely tall building crane slam a metal ball into the remaining wall of one of the old hospital buildings alongside the
laguna
. A piece of wall crumbled to the pile of rubble below, and an enormous cloud of white dust climbed up the wall that remained. Through the new opening, Brunetti saw, across the water, the wall of the cemetery and the tower of the church behind it, the tips of the peaceful cypress trees.

Brunetti decided not to tell her. Let her follow Beni Borsetta's advice and demand a ‘DNU' test. And please let some compassionate judge grant it to her, and let Lucrezia and – if she ever appeared – Lavinia give a sample of their DNU, and let the test show that their father was not the father of Ana Cavanella's child. And let her live with that: with no home and no monthly cheque and with former neighbours, he hoped, pushed past the point of tolerance and the acceptance of what can't be proven and needing a way to punish someone for their own guilt. And without her son. Though nothing he had seen so far suggested that this would bother her much.