About an hour later, Signorina Elettra came into Brunetti’s office to say goodbye. He lacked the courage to ask her where she was going and contented himself with nothing more than to wish her ‘Buone vacanze .’ She failed even to suggest she’d be in touch during the next three weeks, and he did not presume to ask if she would be reachable by SMS. He thought of going over to the door to shake her hand but did not. Impervious to his awkwardness, she gave a small wave and wished him ‘Buon lavoro. ’
As if crime had decided to take advantage of her absence, towards the end of the first week, thieves managed to remove three pieces of jewellery on exhibition in the Palazzo Ducale from under the amiable gaze of one of the video cameras set up to protect the objects. The video from one surveillance camera showed the two thieves idly gazing at the cabinets, keeping close attention on the other people in the room. Then, when they were alone, a camera on the other side of the room showed one of them opening the display case with surprisingly little effort, slipping the three pieces into his pocket, and following his accomplice from the room. They ambled to the main exit and mingled with the other visitors, hands in their pockets – calm, calm, calm – even when the alarms began to sound.
The personnel at the Palazzo shut some of the exits and tried to stop the flood of tourists from leaving the building. This all served no good: the two men and the three objects were gone, subsumed into the crowds of tourists strolling along the Riva degli Schiavoni or pushing their way through the crowds of other tourists on their way to the Rialto, or to the Accademia, or down to Florian’s for a coffee.
Vianello and Pucetti took charge of all communication and exchange of information with the staff of the Palazzo. Within hours, they had photos of the missing pieces, photo stills of the two thieves taken from the video cameras trained on all of the display cases, and copies of the provenance and insurance documentation for every object in the show. They worked in the officers’ staff room, no one daring to use Signorina Elettra’s desk. Her computer sat abandoned, and a rumour circulated that she had extracted the hard disk before she left, although no one could be found to admit to knowing this for a fact. Nor was anyone willing to approach her desk to check, far less to seek a way to insert their hand into the side of her computer to verify the presence or absence of the hard disk; and of course there were those like Brunetti who would not have recognized it had it appeared in a vision and spoken to them. The investigation, handed over entirely to experts from the Art Fraud squad in Rome, continued; it did not advance.
The third week was to bring death, but apparently not crime. Usually, at least in fiction, death comes in the middle of the night, waking people from sleep that is always heavy or troubled or deep. The news of the death of Gonzalo Rodríguez de Tejeda reached Brunetti on his telefonino at eleven-fifteen in the morning of the last day of Signorina Elettra’s vacation. Like everyone else at the Questura, he had taken to marking dates by how long it was until her return, and so it was in this manner that he would in future recall and refer to it.
It was his father-in-law who relayed the news to Brunetti, having received it from Gonzalo’s sister, Elena, who ‘… called me this morning. He was there to visit, and they were on their way to the Thyssen, when he fell forward on to the pavement. Just like that, she said. One second he was walking beside her, saying how much he wanted to see the Goyas again, and the next he was on the pavement, dead.’
‘She’s the retired doctor, isn’t she?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Yes,’ his father-in-law answered. ‘By the time she understood what had happened and knelt down to try to do CPR, there was nothing to do. In seconds,’ il Conte said, voice trailing off, as if he’d just then realized how short those seconds were, and how close they could be. ‘She thinks it was a cerebral haemorrhage.’
‘This morning?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Yes. She called me a half-hour ago.’
‘What’s going to happen?’ Brunetti asked. ‘Will they do an autopsy? And the funeral?’ He was trying to think of those things one never thought of during an emergency, shock still spinning through the brain, the veins, the heart.
‘She didn’t say anything,’ il Conte said. ‘She was still at the hospital.’
‘Poor woman,’ Brunetti whispered, meaning it.
‘She said she’d call me, but I have no idea when that will be.’
‘Will you go?’ Brunetti asked.
Il Conte made no answer; Brunetti said nothing, determined to wait him out. ‘That depends on Elena, I suppose,’ he finally answered.
‘If she invites you?’ Brunetti asked in confusion.
‘No, I’m waiting to hear whether she thinks Gonzalo would have wanted me to come.’
Without thinking, Brunetti asked, ‘Was it that bad?’
‘Was what so bad?’ il Conte asked angrily. ‘He fell down and died.’ Brunetti heard the other man take in a heavy breath, forcing himself to calm down.
‘I wasn’t clear, Orazio,’ Brunetti said. ‘I meant your last meeting with him. You told me he left you in the restaurant.’
‘Ah,’ il Conte said, extending the exhalation for what seemed a long time. ‘I forgot I told you that.’ Brunetti listened to the other man breathing for some time, and then il Conte finally said, ‘No, it wasn’t so bad. We’d had arguments before, far worse ones, but I was afraid of what he might have said to her about me while he was there, that I was spying on him.’
‘She called you, didn’t she?’ Brunetti asked. ‘Certainly that means a lot.’
‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ il Conte said, then was silent. He finally continued, a certain tightness gone from his voice. ‘She must still think of me as his best friend.’
‘Well, you were, weren’t you?’ Brunetti asked.
Instead of answering him, il Conte said, ‘I’ll go, then.’
‘And Donatella?’
‘She’ll come. Gonzalo was her friend as much as mine.’
Brunetti and his father-in-law exchanged some further remarks, then Brunetti ended the call by suggesting that il Conte keep his line free to receive any information Gonzalo’s sister might want to give him.
After they hung up, Brunetti went to the window and glanced down at the Canale di San Lorenzo: it would be too symmetrical if the tide were going out. He saw a red plastic bag floating on the surface and watched it until he saw that it was going to the left, past the old people’s home. The tide was coming in. So much for symmetry.
He called Paola, who was at the university, and told her. ‘Ah, the poor man,’ was her response, then she asked how her father had taken the news.
‘Badly. They’ll go to the funeral.’
‘Ah,’ was all she found to say.
‘Will you be back for lunch?’ he asked, knowing this was her day to spend an hour in her office, seeing students.
‘I’ll put a sign on the door.’
‘Good. I’ll see you at home, then,’ Brunetti said and replaced the phone. For no reason he could understand, he was swept with the desire to read the final scenes of The Trojan Women. Gonzalo’s life had been put a stop to, like a door slammed in his face: the people who loved him had had no time to prepare themselves for loss. Brunetti thought he remembered what was going to happen to those women and hoped that advance warning would make learning their fates easier to bear. Not bothering to tell anyone where he was going, he left his office, left the Questura, left it all and went home.
It took him an hour to finish reading the play, so dense did he find the text. Hecuba, Queen of Troy, is to become a slave of Odysseus, ‘that vile lying man’, ‘a monstrous beast’. Andromache’s son is taken from her to be cast to his death from the walls of Troy, and she is led from the scene to be raped and enslaved by Agamemnon. In the third relentless blow of fate, her child’s battered corpse is given to his grandmother, Hecuba, who can do nothing but provide burial for him, even though, in her ruin, she has realized that ‘the dead care little about burial. It is the vanity of the living.’ Then she is taken from the stage, now the slave of Odysseus, a man she knows to be ‘as false in hate as in love’. There, below, the Greek ships wait.
He closed the book and set it aside. Paola was always banging on about how vital to our spirits the reading of the classics is because they use beautiful language to tell us important things. Because he was reading the text in translation, he had no idea of how beautiful the original language was: the Italian read easily, with the occasional wondrous phrase, but was that Euripides’ or the translator’s merit?
He thought for a moment about what the important things might be. War and greed drag in the innocent and kill or maim them. Men go off and play at being heroes; women get raped and widowed and see their children die, or are murdered on a whim and tossed aside. Men ride off to battle and fame; women stay home and wait. We’ve been reading and listening to that for two and a half millennia, Brunetti thought, and still we run whooping off to war
He got to his feet and went into the kitchen to get himself a glass of wine before lunch.
The news of Zio Gonzalo’s death troubled the kids when they learned of it at dinner that evening. Chiara still had the teddy bear he’d given her when she was seven, and Raffi still had his first book in English, Treasure Island, which Gonzalo had sent him from London for his eleventh birthday. Both of them were shocked by the terrible suddenness of it: one moment walking, next moment dead. It ran counter to everything life had shown them so far. Life was not meant to be merciless. They hadn’t lived long enough to understand what grace it was to die in an instant and not to linger.
When they were alone in the living room, night in full possession of the city, Brunetti sat for a long time after drinking his coffee before he asked Paola, ‘Did you speak to your father?’
‘They fly to Madrid tomorrow. The funeral’s the next day, and they’ll come back on Monday afternoon.’
‘I wish …’ Brunetti began and then stopped speaking, not sure what he wanted to say.
‘Wish what?’ Paola asked.
‘That I had listened to Gonzalo the last time I saw him or had the courage to ask if he’d already adopted him.’
‘Do you think he could have?’
‘He said it was too late for your father to stop him, but I chose to believe that meant he’d made up his mind, and there would be no changing it. But it could just as easily mean he had already done it.’
‘Is there any way you can find out?’ she asked.
‘I suppose I could, once Signorina Elettra’s back: have her check the files in the Tribunale and see if he made the request and if it was granted,’ he said.
‘Will you?’
Brunetti considered this for some time and finally said, ‘There’s no sense to it, is there?’
Paola raised her eyebrows, so he continued, ‘Either he adopted him or he didn’t. Either he’ll inherit or Gonzalo’s brother and sisters will …’
‘Maybe my father could …’ Paola said.
‘Don’t ask him, Paola. Your father wouldn’t think it decent to stick his nose into this.’ His voice was sharper than he had intended it to be.
Paola was seldom embarrassed to be called out for what she said, but this time she looked away, perhaps to hide her blush, and then nodded a few times. ‘You’re right, Guido.’ After a moment’s reflection, she added, ‘Besides, if Gonzalo’s estate passes to this young man, the whole city will know about it soon enough.’ He saw her listening to her own conclusion, after hearing which, she added, ‘And after that, the city will talk about it for days.’
Brunetti thought of Gonzalo and what a gentleman he had been and how fine his sense of privacy, and that prompted him to add, ‘Poor Gonzalo: he’d hate this.’
Seeing Paola’s confusion, he explained. ‘Being gossiped about. Just think what they’ll make of this,’ he said, not believing it necessary to name the friends and well-wishers who had accepted Gonzalo’s invitations and dined at his table for years.
‘“Foolish old man, ready to do anything to satisfy his lover.” “Ageing queen, having to pay for sex.”‘ Brunetti tried to put into his voice the disgust he knew some people would use when speaking of Gonzalo’s life, but his heart wasn’t in it. He stopped and took a few breaths then went on, more calmly, ‘“Blessed are the merciful.”‘
‘In a city where gossip is the lymph that travels through the body politic,’ Paola said, ‘there’s not a lot of mercy lying around to be picked up from the streets.’
Brunetti started to get up, and his copy of The Trojan Women fell from the sofa to the floor. He bent and picked it up, saying, ‘I finished it.’ Then, almost sulking, ‘Now I don’t have anything to read.’
Paola smiled up at him. ‘You’ve got three long shelves in my study, Guido. Surely there’s something to read there.’
He nodded. ‘I know. It’s really that I don’t know what I want to read.’
‘Go and take a look,’ she said, adding, ‘Perhaps something light.’
‘Light?’
Paola pulled her book down from the arm of the sofa and her glasses down from on top of her head. Peering over the top of them, she smiled and said, ‘Sturmtruppen, for example. I found the copy I had at university a few days ago and had a look. It’s still very funny. It’s on my desk.’
He remembered the comics from his student days. Hell, why not Sturmtruppen ?
Two hours later, his face was tired from smiling, even laughing, at this absurdist vision of the military. Ordinary soldiers suffered and died under the command of various incompetents, speaking in their broken German-Italian about putting things in their ‘tasken ,’ suffering under the abuse of the Sergenten and the even worse Uffizialen Superioren, who added senility to their uselessness. Even the Eroiken Portaferiten, the medics, were too busy looting the bodies of the dead and nearly dead to be of any use to the wounded or dying.
He took it to bed and laughed until he turned out the light. It was only then he realized that, in its own light way, Sturmtruppen was as strong an anti-war book as was The Trojan Women.