The Golden Egg

13





Though it was just quarter to eleven, Brunetti decided to go down to the bar and wait for Bianchini. He looked out the window and saw that it was still raining, so he took the umbrella. The bar was only down at the bridge, so he didn’t bother with his raincoat.

Inside, he said hello and exchanged a few words with Bambola, the tall Senegalese who ran the place most days. Brunetti studied the pastries and, seeing that there was only one of its kind left, told Bambola he’d like the apple and ricotta, but not until the man he was meeting there arrived. Bambola took a pair of metal tongs and placed the pastry on a small plate that he set to the left of the coffee machine. The door was pushed open and smacked against the wall. Two straw-hatted gondolieri, who worked at the boat station on the corner, came in and walked to the bar.

They were, unsurprisingly, loud and vulgar, in the middle of a conversation that consisted of boasts about their sexual conquests of clients. Bambola served them with a kind of exalted deference behind which they were unable to see a contempt so palpable as almost to scream its presence in the room. He never failed to call each of them, ‘Signore’, and insisted upon using the formal ‘Lei’ with them, though they called him, unasked, ‘tu’. Each man had a glass of white wine and a tramezzino and Brunetti was astonished when each of them paid for his own separately. The experience of life had taught him to believe there was a genetic peculiarity in Italian men that prevented them, ever, from letting someone else pay for his drink. But then he remembered that they were gondolieri and thus had an entirely different genetic structure. They remained at the bar, leaning back against it, from which position they could see down the canal to the gondola stop, and they continued their conversation, which he sensed was aimed, somehow, at Bambola.

He moved away from the bar, taking the newspaper with him. He sat at his usual table at the back and opened the paper, looked at the headlines, and thought about what Bianchini might have to tell him.

A man came in, very tall, thin, about Brunetti’s age but almost entirely bald. What hair remained was cut short and encircled the back of his head, as if he scorned any attempt to disguise his baldness. Brunetti saw the look he gave the gondolieri but they, eyes alert for business at the dock at the end of the canal, did not. He approached Bambola, nodded to him. The African made a graceful gesture towards Brunetti; the man nodded again in thanks and turned away.

‘One of them was a Black American, ass as big as a horse,’ Brunetti overheard. ‘But hot; this one was hot, the way the Blacks are.’

Bianchini stopped and stood perfectly still for a slow count of five, then turned back towards them. With a motion neither of the gondolieri missed, he unbuttoned his jacket and planted his feet solidly. ‘Excuse me,’ he said in a normal speaking voice, and then after a pause, ‘Signori.’ They turned to look at him, and Brunetti could read the astonishment in their faces.

‘I think it might be time you went back to your boats.’ His voice was very deep, calm, utterly devoid of emotion.

The taller of the two gondolieri lifted a foot as if to take a step towards the stranger, but his companion – older, wiser, quicker – placed a hand on his arm and swung him around until they were facing one another. Keeping his hand on his companion’s arm, he gave a small shake of his head and turned towards the door. He had to pull at the other’s arm, then he lowered his head and said something to him. The younger one turned his head to look at Bianchini and then followed his companion out of the bar.

Bianchini looked at the barman, who met his gaze with a smile. ‘Would you like your coffee now, Commissario?’ he called to Brunetti.

‘Yes, please,’ Brunetti said, face blank as though he had just dragged his attention away from the newspaper.

The man walked over to him, and Brunetti slipped his legs from under the table to stand. ‘Bianchini, Sandro,’ the man said as he extended his hand. His grasp was firm, but it was only a handshake, not a test of male dominance.

Bianchini was taller than Brunetti, though much thinner, wiry. The skin on his forehead showed the old scars of acne; his light beard was perhaps an attempt to disguise the same marks on his cheeks. His dark eyes were set deep below heavy brows, but his full-lipped mouth and easy smile countered any suggestion of roughness one might see in them.

‘Thank you for coming,’ Brunetti said and sat. Bianchini sat opposite.

Bambola was suddenly there. He set the plate and pastry before Brunetti and a coffee in front of each man. There were also two small glasses of water, which he put down silently before he went back to his place behind the bar.

‘My cousin said you were curious about the vigili,’ Bianchini said, wasting no time. Then, after a pause, ‘He’s a good man, Roberto.’

‘Yes, he is,’ Brunetti agreed. He poured an envelope of sugar into his coffee and swirled it around, then used his spoon to cut the pastry in half.

‘Did he tell you what it was about?’ Brunetti asked.

‘That mask shop in San Barnaba.’

Brunetti nodded. He picked up a piece of pastry with one of the napkins on the plate and took a bite. ‘Would you like the other half?’ he asked.

‘No, thanks,’ Bianchini said with an easy smile. ‘I can’t eat things like that.’ In response to Brunetti’s furrowed brow, he added, ‘Diabetes.’ Saying that, he took a tube of artificial sweetener from the inside pocket of his jacket and dropped two tiny white pills into his coffee.

Brunetti took a sip of coffee, then said, having decided this was not a man with whom one wasted time, ‘I’ve been told that the vigili are being paid to ignore the tables in front of the shop.’ Hearing himself say this filled Brunetti with sudden embarrassment. Was he, like Scarpa, Patta’s creature, obliged to do his bidding at every turn? ‘The licence holder is the fiancée of the mayor’s son, so there’s a possibility of scandal if this becomes public. The Vice-Questore wants to avoid that.’ He stopped speaking and finished his coffee. He no longer wanted the rest of the pastry and pushed the plate aside.

‘Is that all?’ Bianchini asked, making no attempt to disguise the surprise in his voice and on his face.

‘I think so. What I’m supposed to do is safeguard the mayor’s reputation.’

‘My, my, my,’ Bianchini said with a smile, ‘how very delicate our politicians are becoming. Next thing you know, they’ll be committing hara-kiri if they’re caught with their hands in the till.’

‘I think that’s only in Japan,’ Brunetti said drily, ‘and nowadays even they don’t do it as often as they should.’

‘Pity,’ Bianchini said, ‘I’ve always thought it was a fine example.’

‘It’s not “Made in Japan” any more,’ Brunetti said. ‘Now it’s “Made in China”, and standards have fallen.’

Again Bianchini couldn’t hide his surprise. ‘So you know about what’s going on?’ he asked.

Brunetti didn’t, at least not specifically to do with this subject, but that didn’t stop him from saying, ‘It’s hard not to know, isn’t it?’

Bianchini shook his head and let a long time pass. ‘We don’t have to go into it, but you can be sure there’ll be no trouble for the mayor.’

‘Would you be willing to tell me more?’ Brunetti asked.

Bianchini looked away, out the window of the bar, down towards the place where the gondolieri were now standing by their boats. He sat silent, sipping at his water, then placed the glass back on the table.

Brunetti sat still, waiting.

‘People are fed up with the Chinese,’ Bianchini said, with no introduction. ‘They buy stores and no one asks them where the cash comes from. Their shops are filled with Chinese workers, and no one ever bothers to ask for their work permits or residence permits. The Guardia di Finanza never goes in to check their receipts.’ He waited to see what Brunetti would say, and when he said nothing, Bianchini added, ‘Everyone leaves them alone and lets them go about their business.’

Brunetti’s experience as a policeman had given him a strong suspicion of urban myths, but that same experience had proven to him that some of them were true.

‘And so?’ he asked.

Bianchini finished his water. ‘And so we’ve sort of decided to even up the odds. There are some violations we don’t see and aren’t going to see.’ He met Brunetti’s glance, then went on, ‘And if we’re given something in return for this, then there’s no Venetian who’ll think it’s wrong.’ He spoke with conviction, including himself among those Venetians.

Bianchini drank the last of his coffee, set his cup down and said, ‘The mayor doesn’t have to worry about any consequences.’ He spoke with such finality that there was no doubting him.

Bianchini slid to the end of the bench and got to his feet. He reached his hand behind him for his wallet.

‘No, no,’ Brunetti said, thinking of the way he had driven the gondolieri from the bar. ‘Bambola won’t take your money.’ He pushed the plate and saucer forward and got to his feet. Standing beside Bianchini, he felt the difference in their heights: he was a tall man, looking at Bianchini’s chin.

Brunetti went to the door, made a rolling sign with his hand to tell Bambola he would pay him later, and walked outside with the other man.

Both men looked down to the end of the embankment, where one of the gondolieri was talking to a pair of young Japanese tourists. As they watched, he led them to his gondola and helped them down into it, then jumped aboard. With one foot, he pushed the boat away from the riva and bent in a graceful gesture to pick up his oar. The boat disappeared to the right. Bianchini turned towards San Marco, and Brunetti, after thanking him for his time, opened his umbrella and headed back to the Questura.

He stopped in the officers’ squad room on the way to his office, but there was no sign of Pucetti. Upstairs, he checked his email and found the report from the ambulance squad that had answered the call to the Cavanella home. ‘Time of call: 6.13; time of arrival: 7.37; name of person who let them into the house: Ana Cavanella; condition of subject: deceased; condition of deceased: in bed, in pyjamas, signs of vomiting: arrival at morgue: 8.46.’ And that was all.

There was also one from Rizzardi, attached to which he found the rough draft of his autopsy report. Brunetti scrolled down, past the height and weight and probable age, past the chocolate drink and biscuits, to the parts of the body, and thus to the teeth. There were two amalgam fillings and signs that a wisdom tooth on the upper left had been removed. None of the work appeared to be recent and all, ‘conformed to the standards and style of Italian dentistry’.

‘Such as they are,’ Brunetti, who went to a Dutch dentist on Lido, said under his breath.

He wrote back to Rizzardi and explained that they might need dental evidence to prove the boy’s identity and asked him to take X-rays of the work. He went downstairs to talk to Signorina Elettra.

She considered the problem for a few minutes and said she would have to get a list of the email addresses of the dentists registered with the union of dentists in the province of Venezia and send them the X-rays, along with a photo of the dead man and a description of his disability. Thus, if Davide’s dentist worked in the province of Venice, they might discover more about him. ‘Assuming that the work wasn’t done in some other province,’ she said.

‘His mother doesn’t seem like the sort of person who would take him to a specialist out the province,’ Brunetti said, but then decided to exhaust other possibilities before attempting this.

Signorina Elettra ran the fingers of her left hand through her hair and said, ‘How strange all of this is.’

‘What?’

‘That you refer to Signora Cavanella as his mother while you’re still trying to identify him.’

Brunetti nodded in swift agreement. ‘I’m not in any doubt about who he is. But it’s not enough that she looks like him or that she calls him her son. Not legally.’

She put her elbows on her desk and rested her face in her hands. He noticed the way her skin was pulled tighter by her hands, removing a number of years: he didn’t like having to admit that he noticed the difference.

‘You’d think, in this world where we’re all registered from the time we’re born – from even before, with prenatal tests – that something like this would be impossible,’ she said, her confusion evident in her voice. ‘If he were a foreigner, I’d understand: check the hotels, find out where his shoes and clothing come from, put a photo in the papers, contact the embassies. That’s all pretty standard.’

She looked at Brunetti, but he had no suggestions to offer.

‘You’ve got his body. You’ve got his mother. He was taken out of the house where he was living. And you can’t identify him.’ He knew she had no personal stake in any of this, so the best he could assume was that the patent disorder of it offended her. ‘A person can’t live somewhere all his life and not leave any traces. It just can’t happen.’

Brunetti agreed, and for some reason his mind moved away from the dead man to his mother; he wondered if the same would be true of her. There had to be a reason for the obstacles she was placing in the way of the identification of her son; in that case, she was certainly not going to tell them what it was. But traces there had to be. ‘Let me go and get something,’ he said.

Back in his office he shifted through the files and loose papers that had accumulated on his desk, telling himself, as he always did when searching for something, that he had to be more orderly with documents and files, and just think of the time tossed away looking for things, when, if he’d only think to . . .

He found her file and still disliked the sensation of his hand on the bleached, warped paper. He opened it and found the address, took the copy of Calli, Campielli e Canali from his drawer and looked for the building. And there it was, an enormous beige rectangle on the opposite side of the canal from Campiello degli Incurabili and looking quite enormous. He tried to run his memory over the area, but it was decades since he had been there, and he had no clear image of it.

He took the book downstairs, keeping the page open with his finger, and in Signorina Elettra’s office opened it on the desk beside her computer. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘it’s in Dorsoduro.’

‘What is?’ she asked in honest confusion.

‘The place where Ana Cavanella lived in 1968, when she was arrested for shoplifting.’

‘How old was she?

‘Sixteen,’ Brunetti answered.

‘What happened?’

‘Nothing. She was underage. Her employer sent someone to get her, and that was the end of it.’ Seeing that she was not satisfied with this, he added, ‘Pucetti couldn’t find anything about the son, but there was

an old file on her down in the archives, so he brought

it up.’

He angled the book towards her and she ran her finger across the bridges and down the calli leading to 616. She picked it up and flipped to the end and then forward again until she found the pages with the names of the various buildings. He watched her finger run down the list of buildings until it stopped and she read aloud, ‘Palazzo Lembo.’ She looked at Brunetti. ‘That mean anything to you?’

‘The King of Copper,’ he said.

‘I beg your pardon,’ Signorina Elettra answered.

Brunetti smiled. ‘It was before your time. Lembo – I don’t remember his first name – the King of Copper. His family had mines somewhere; Africa, I think, or maybe South America. But way back, at the beginning of the last century. There was some other mineral, but I can’t remember which one it was. Tin, maybe. But copper was the main business.’

‘I was at school with a girl named Lembo. Margherita. But they were from Torino, I think.’

‘No, no, these Lembos have been here since the crusades,’ Brunetti said. The Brunettis had been, too, he knew, but that sort of thing seemed to matter only in the case of nobility or wealth. Poor people had grandparents; the rich had ancestors.

‘The palazzo was probably broken up into separate apartments,’ Signorina Elettra suggested.

‘Only one way to find out,’ Brunetti said.

She gave him a very quizzical look. ‘You’re really taken with this, aren’t you, Commissario?’

From her tone, he could not tell whether she approved or not. The silence around Davide Cavanella could be an example of bureaucratic oversight, but it might be something else. ‘I think I’ll ask Foa to take me over to have a look at the palazzo.’