14

They spent another quarter-hour talking of many things but not returning to Torrebardo, nor to Gonzalo. The room gradually filled, and Brunetti decided they had occupied the table long enough. He caught the waiter’s attention and feigned writing in the air. The waiter was soon back and handed the bill to Brunetti, ignoring Padovani’s upraised hand.

Brunetti saw that they had been given the lower rate that was given to locals: he paid the waiter and added a tip that would do Padovani proud the next time he came. They emerged into the Piazza to feel that springtime had scampered back down south, leaving them with damp air and a breeze that must have passed through Siberia on the way to Venice.

‘We just have to get through the next few weeks,’ Brunetti said, ‘and the weather will come to its senses.’

Padovani stopped and said, in a surprisingly serious voice, ‘I think the weather’s lost its senses.’ He sounded remarkably like Chiara. The journalist shook Brunetti’s hand and walked off in the direction of the Accademia.

When Brunetti reached the Questura, the guard at the door stopped him, saying, ‘Commissario, there’s a man upstairs in your office, waiting for you.’

The officer was young and new to the force, so Brunetti used a moderate tone to ask, ‘Who is he?’ wondering what magistrate or official might have come to talk to him.

The man looked down to inspect his boots and mumbled something.

‘Excuse me, Coltro, I didn’t hear that.’

Still attentive to his boots, the officer said, ‘He wouldn’t say, sir.’

‘And you let him into my office?’

‘Well, sir, he’s a man of a certain age, and he’s dressed very well.’

‘That’s all it takes to get into my office?’ Brunetti asked, trying to remember what files had been on his desk, the desk he never bothered to lock.

‘He walked right past me, Commissario, and started up the stairs, and I had to get the key from my desk and lock the front door before I went after him, and by the time I got to him, he was going up to the second floor, but he was leaning over the railing and looked awful. He was gasping from the climb. His face was white and covered with sweat.’

Telling himself to speak normally, Brunetti asked, ‘What did you do?’

‘Rugoletto was coming down the stairs, and we sort of helped him – really, sir, it was more like we carried him – up to your office. I’m afraid we couldn’t think of anything else to do.’

‘Is he still there?’

‘I think so, sir. It was only a few minutes ago. Rugoletto went to his office to get him a glass of water, and I had to come back to open the entrance door. That’s when you came in.’

‘I see,’ Brunetti said and turned away. He walked to the steps and started up. At the first landing, he turned to Coltro and waved him back into his room. He continued up the stairs, walking quickly but taking the steps one at a time.

When he was halfway up, he heard loud footsteps pounding up the stairs behind him and turned to see Rugoletto leaping up two at a time. He was carrying a bottle of mineral water and a glass. When he reached Brunetti, the young officer stopped and held the glass up in a semi-salute. ‘Coltro told you, sir?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ Brunetti answered.

‘Do you want me to come along, sir?’

‘No, I’ll go and talk to him.’ Brunetti took the bottle and glass from the other man, thanked him, and continued up the stairs. At the door to his office he stuck his head inside to see who it was.

Gonzalo Rodríguez de Tejeda sat in one of the two chairs in front of Brunetti’s desk, elbow propped on one of the arms, head supported by his hand, the other hand hanging limp in his lap. A crumpled white handkerchief lay on the floor at his feet.

‘Ah, Gonzalo,’ Brunetti said in his most casual voice. ‘How nice of you to come and visit. It’s been too long since we’ve had a chance to talk.’ He set the bottle and glass on the desk and moved papers around for a moment, then turned to the seated Gonzalo and patted him a few times on the shoulder. ‘Let me get another glass,’ he said in his best housekeeping voice and went over to his bookcase, where he moved things around slowly until he found a glass and came back with it.

When Brunetti returned, Gonzalo was sitting upright, hands on the arms of his chair; there was no sign of the handkerchief.

‘May I give you a glass of water?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Yes, please, Guido,’ the older man said.

Brunetti filled a glass and handed it to him, then poured another one and set it on the desk in front of the second chair. He bent over Gonzalo, resting his hand on his shoulder for a moment, then shifted the second chair to face the older man’s, and sat. ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t here when you arrived, Gonzalo. I was having a coffee with an old friend I haven’t seen in years.’ He closed his eyes at the memory. ‘He was at university with me and Paola.’

Sitting so much closer to Gonzalo now, and without any obstruction, he noticed how much his friend had aged in the time since their meeting in Campo Santi Apostoli. The smudges under his eyes had turned into ripples of dry skin. His lips had tightened and looked as though they would cave in, had his teeth not been there to offer resistance. His eyes had faded and grown faintly cloudy. But he sat up straight, no matter the effort it took him, had even managed to cross his legs in a decidedly casual manner.

‘How long has it been since you saw one another?’ Gonzalo asked, managing to make it sound as though he were really interested in casual conversation and catching up on what had happened to each of them since their last meeting. There was a new, exaggerated sibilance in his speech, a sound Brunetti associated with dentures, as he did the white perfection of Gonzalo’s smile.

‘I can’t remember exactly, but more than fifteen years. Paola keeps in touch with him.’

Setting his glass on the desk, Gonzalo said, ‘It can be a good thing, to stay in touch with old friends.’

Deciding not to take this as a reproach, Brunetti told himself to display no curiosity about why Gonzalo was there, to behave as though it were the most normal thing in the world for him to drop in to talk about the value of maintaining old friendships.

Seeing that Gonzalo’s glass was empty, Brunetti drank the rest of the water in his own and refilled them both. When in doubt, talk about the weather, he knew. ‘It’s wonderful to have the feeling the warm weather is coming back,’ he said. When Gonzalo made no response, Brunetti added, ‘And that it stays light an hour later.’ Having exhausted his interest in things meteorological, he stopped talking and drank some more water, determined to let Gonzalo speak when he wanted to.

The older man leaned forward and placed his empty glass on the desk with a loud clack, having misjudged the distance. Brunetti started at the sound, but Gonzalo seemed not to have noticed it. He put his hands on the arms of his chair, extended the forefinger of his right hand and began to rub it back and forth across the wood. After a moment, his middle finger joined it, and together they rubbed away at the surface. Brunetti tightened his grip on the arms of his own chair and told himself not to speak.

Time passed. The room was so quiet that Brunetti thought he could hear the faint rubbing sound of Gonzalo’s fingers, though he knew that was impossible. Brunetti began to count to four and then to four again, something he had done at the beginning of his career to make the hours of surveillance pass, waiting for someone to leave a building or return to it at night. Doing so had never speeded things up, he recalled, but it had relieved some of the anxiety he felt at the need to endure nothingness.

Gonzalo gave in and broke the silence first. ‘I’ve come to ask you to do me a favour, Guido,’ he said in a firm voice. ‘It’s about Orazio.’

‘Yes?’ Brunetti asked neutrally.

‘It seems he’s going around the city asking questions about me.’ Brunetti heard the undercurrent of anger in the older man’s voice and saw it in the hands now anchored on the arms of his chair.

‘What is he asking questions about?’ Brunetti asked.

Gonzalo looked at him, making no attempt to hide his surprise. ‘If you weren’t Paola’s husband, I’d get up and leave,’ he said roughly. Then, accusingly, “He talked to you, too, didn’t he?” The anger took a few steps closer to Brunetti.

‘Yes, he did: he asked me when I’d seen you last and how you were.’ Brunetti decided that this was how he’d remember the conversation with il Conte, for both of these things had happened.

‘Did he speak about a young man?’

With no hesitation, Brunetti answered, ‘Yes, he did.’

‘Did he ask if you’d seen us together?’

Brunetti let out a puff of air to suggest exasperation, something that occasionally happened when he dealt with the children. ‘I saw a young man at the dinner at Lodo’s, and I noticed that you spoke to him, but I didn’t pay it any special attention. I wasn’t introduced to him, and we never spoke.’

Gonzalo closed his eyes for long enough to allow Brunetti to refill both of their glasses. When he opened them, his face had grown calmer. ‘You and Paola were both there, I know, but we didn’t have time to talk. I’m sorry,’ he said.

Brunetti leaned towards him and patted the back of his hand. ‘We’re talking now, aren’t we, Gonzalo?’

Gonzalo pulled his lower lip inside his mouth. When he released it, Brunetti saw the marks his teeth had left. Gonzalo took the handkerchief from the pocket of his jacket and wiped it across his face before replacing it. He looked back at Brunetti and, with no introduction, said, ‘We’d had an argument. Before dinner.’

‘You and this young man?’ Brunetti asked, believing that Gonzalo lacked the energy to continue without being prodded into doing so. Gonzalo nodded.

‘What about?’ Brunetti asked, knowing it would lead him into a discussion he wanted to avoid.

‘Money,’ the older man said.

‘Ah,’ Brunetti sighed.

‘I was trying to persuade him to take a job as a researcher. I’ve been out of the art world for some time, and I haven’t stayed in touch with the people in it. I haven’t kept an eye on the market, well, not seriously, so I don’t know who’s up and who’s down.’ He paused to give Brunetti a chance to show that he was following. While Brunetti considered what to say, the older man’s eyes moved across the room, stopped at the government-issue print on the far wall, and quickly veered away.

Brunetti said, ‘I see,’ and Gonzalo picked up where he had left off.

‘I need someone who knows how to work a computer and can find the hammer prices in important auctions and tell me what sold in Hong Kong and at Art Basel and for how much. Unless I can get a sense of what’s happening, it would be a mistake even to think of getting involved again.’

Then why, Brunetti wondered, did he want to get involved again? Brunetti had little familiarity with the art business, but he suspected that no price list, however long or detailed, would provide sufficient information from which to launch Gonzalo’s re-entry into the art world. His understanding was that this world was much like any other cult: people talked to fellow believers in the language of belief, and dogma changed to follow the market. Both were about faith in winning entrance to Paradise, either final or fiscal.

‘You want to go back to working in that world?’ Brunetti asked, trying to pump enthusiasm into his voice.

Gonzalo gave one of his old full-power smiles. Even with the new teeth and the old face, it radiated the energy and charm that Brunetti had always seen in it. ‘It’s the only thing I ever knew much about,’ Gonzalo said and then, with the sense of timing that was so much a part of his humour, added, ‘except cattle farming, and I don’t see much of a future for that in Venice.’

Brunetti laughed, and the tension between them eased. ‘Did you go ahead with the plan?’ he asked, thinking this a better question to ask Gonzalo than whether he was going to disrupt his life with a rash decision only to give this young man a job.

Gonzalo shook his head. ‘He – Attilio – suggested I call around to my friends who still worked in the business and ask what they thought of the idea.’ His voice drifted away from this sentence and from whatever would have followed it.

‘Did you?’

Gonzalo nodded and said, shortly, ‘They told me not to do it.’

‘Ah,’ was all Brunetti managed to say. Like a dog jumping up to protect the home at the sound of the doorbell, his conversational feet slipped repeatedly on the polished marble floor of his mind, scratching back and forth, finding no purchase. ‘Perhaps better,’ he risked. ‘If your friends told you.’ How could he sound interested but not invasive?

As if he sympathized with Brunetti’s discomfort, Gonzalo said, ‘So I’ll remain a retired gentleman, and Attilio will not work for me.’

Brunetti could think of nothing to do but nod and smile, as if in approval.

Then, unsolicited, unasked, Gonzalo said the thing that dragged Brunetti, nails still leaving marks on the polish, to the opening of the door. ‘So I decided to find a better way to help him.’

‘I beg your pardon?’ Brunetti yipped out.

‘To adopt him.’

‘Is that possible?’

Gonzalo considered this for some time before he answered. ‘With the right lawyers, yes.’

‘Ah,’ Brunetti managed to say again. Then, ‘Why are you telling me this, Gonzalo?’

The older man, surprised by the question, answered without thinking, ‘Because Orazio loves you and trusts you, so he might listen to you.’

‘If I said what?’ Brunetti asked, though he knew, he knew.

‘That it’s too late to stop me,’ Gonzalo began, his voice growing stronger with every phrase, though his face remained that of a tired old man. ‘He can stop asking my friends to try to dissuade me and stop trying to find evidence that I’ve lost my mind or that I’ve fallen into bad hands.’

Did this mean, Brunetti wondered, that Gonzalo had already adopted Attilio or that his decision would not be changed? He pressed his palms together and held them to his mouth. Releasing them, he asked, ‘Can’t you tell him yourself?’ then added, in an amiable, reasonable tone, ‘You’ve been friends for longer than I’ve been alive, after all.’

Gonzalo turned suddenly cold eyes on Brunetti. ‘Don’t try to discourage me, please, Guido.’

‘That’s not my intention, nor is it my business,’ Brunetti said instantly. ‘I simply don’t want to get involved in this.’

‘Well, you are involved in it,’ Gonzalo said coolly.

Brunetti had learned early in his life that the best way to defend a weak position was to attack. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ he asked, releasing all of the irritation this situation was causing him.

‘That you’re related to Orazio – by law and by love – and you have a chance to stop him from doing something foolish, something he’ll regret.’

Brunetti resisted the temptation to tell this old man that neither he nor his friend Orazio had enough life left to risk soiling and spoiling it with something like this. Paola was forever telling him that every interchange men had was about power and who had more of it, and here was more evidence.

Thoroughly out of patience, he said, ‘This is not my business, Gonzalo. I assume you’re doing this in order to ensure this man inherits everything from you, rather than providing him with only a part of it.’ Gonzalo held up a hand in protest, but Brunetti’s feet were on the carpet now, and he had more than enough traction to take himself wherever he wanted to go. ‘You could simply start giving him whatever you want. Now. Just take it from wherever you keep it and give it to him, and name him as the heir of whatever portion the law allows you to give him in your will. If anything happens that makes you change your mind about him, then you can change your will. Until then, you simply liquidate any assets you want and give it to him. In cash. No tax. No traces.’

Gonzalo leaned forward then and said in a tight voice, ‘And this from the man who said he didn’t want to get involved.’ Then, almost with disdain, ‘But who conveniently has it all worked out already.’ He raised his hands and made a brushing gesture with his fingers that removed Brunetti from his life.

‘If I tell you what your lawyer would tell you …’ Brunetti began, pulling himself back from anger. When he saw the flash of uneasiness in Gonzalo’s eyes, he added, ‘and probably has already told you, I’m not getting involved; I’m merely giving you the advice any lawyer would give you.’

It was obvious from the way Gonzalo stared that he had not expected to hear this from Brunetti. He was surprised at the source, Brunetti was convinced, not at the remarks.

Deciding to spare Gonzalo nothing, he went on. ‘Once you adopt him – or anyone – there’s no going back, Gonzalo. You can’t open the door and offer everything you own to a person, then change your mind and close it in his face.’

Brunetti’s anger dissipated as soon as he stopped speaking, and he felt guilty about the way he’d spoken to this old man, slapping him in the face with the law. He was ashamed of his own cowardice in not admitting to Gonzalo that he knew far more than he seemed to know or would admit to knowing. And what did it matter to him, anyway, where Gonzalo’s money went, whether he left it to this young man or let it go to his brother and sisters? Or lost it on the slot machines, as so many retired people did every month?

Brunetti looked at Gonzalo’s face then and saw him nod, then try to speak. A noise, but no words, emerged. He held up a hand, asking Brunetti to be patient, and cleared his throat a few times. Finally, he said, ‘That’s all right, Guido. I know your heart.’ Brunetti thought he said something else, but he couldn’t make it out.

‘Excuse me, Gonzalo. I didn’t hear.’

The older man looked at him directly. ‘It’s because you can’t understand, Guido,’ he said. Then, almost as though he were afraid of having offended him, he placed his veined hand on Brunetti’s and said, ‘It’s because you’re surrounded by love, Guido. You swim in it. You have Paola, and Chiara, and Raffi; you even have Orazio and Donatella, who love you, too. You have so much of it,’ he began and then broke into a smile, ‘that you probably don’t even notice it.’

Gonzalo stopped, and Brunetti sat, mute, resisting the impulse to take his hand away or, worse, make a joke. He waited.

‘I miss it, Guido. Being loved. I had it in the past, so I know what’s gone from my life.’ He gave Brunetti’s hand a pat and then released it. Brunetti pulled his hand back and put it in his lap with the other.

‘I’m thirsty for someone to love,’ Gonzalo said. And then he added, ‘And I’ve found him.’

‘Are you sure?’ Brunetti couldn’t stop himself from asking.

Gonzalo looked across at him again and said, ‘Don’t pity me, Guido. The pity of the people we love is worse than the pity of strangers.’

‘I don’t pity you, Gonzalo,’ Brunetti said, telling the truth. ‘I’m merely worried that this is fake.’ There. He’d said it, delivered his warning. But he felt no better.

Gonzalo raised his chin and put his hand over his heart, both gestures that spoke of exaggeration. ‘But what I feel isn’t fake, Guido.’

Brunetti sat, unable for a minute to speak. Finally he said, ‘I’m sorry, Gonzalo. This is none of my business, and I should keep my mouth shut. It’s your right to do whatever will make you happy.’

The lines on Gonzalo’s face seemed to have deepened in the last half-hour; his mouth seemed set in sad resignation. ‘That’s what’s wrong, that’s what I don’t know.’

‘What?’

‘What will make me happy.’