The Golden Egg

24





That took some time. Brunetti finally, after explaining that he and Commissario Griffoni needed her help, enlisted Signorina Elettra to access the records of the state pension fund, where she found the names of two former employees of the Lembo family, a maid and a man whose job was listed as ‘major-domo’. But the man had arrived after Lucrezia’s marriage, so he would know nothing of the early history of either the marriage or the company.

The maid, however, had worked for the Lembo family all the time that Ana Cavanella had been there and had then remained on for another thirty years. Griffoni sat opposite him, with between them some sheets of paper that Signorina Elettra had delivered. Brunetti, while appearing to pay no attention, had been acutely conscious of the way the two women dealt with each other during Signorina Elettra’s brief apparition in the room and, like those seeking Signs of Peace from Heaven, had seen them.

‘So the maid would have seen it all,’ he remarked to Griffoni.

‘One trembles at the thought of what that might have been,’ Griffoni answered.

‘Perhaps,’ he began, reaching forward and picking up one of the papers, ‘. . . Maria Annunziata Ghezzi can

tell us.’

Maria Annunziata Ghezzi, it turned out, lived down towards the end of Castello, behind San Francesco della Vigna, and was easy to find in the phone book. She answered Brunetti’s phone call with her name, and when he spoke to her in Veneziano, answered readily. Yes, she had worked for the Lembo family. No, she was no longer in touch with them, aside from receiving her pension, and that came from the state, not from them.

Brunetti asked her if she would be willing to talk to him. ‘It’s about that boy who died, isn’t it?’ she replied.

‘Davide Cavanella?’ he asked.

‘Yes. Ana’s boy.’

‘Yes, Signora. It is.’

There followed a long silence; Brunetti chose not to break it. Finally she said, ‘Then you better come here, and we’ll talk.’

He debated, but for only an instant, the wisdom of taking Griffoni with him. Against her failure to speak Veneziano, he weighed her femininity and the ease of her presence. ‘Feel like a walk?’ he asked.

‘Let me go and get my coat.’

On the way there, they talked about her investigation of the fire in the factory. ‘No one saw anything. No one heard anything,’ Griffoni said.

‘You sound as if you don’t believe it,’ Brunetti said.

She paused at the bottom of the bridge that led to San Francesco. ‘I don’t,’ she said. ‘The fire started inside the factory. It had been broken into years ago, and people used it. I don’t want to know what they used it for. It looks as if it started in a room where old paint and rags were stored.’

Years ago, Brunetti would have interjected here, ‘or put’, but time had taught him to control the impulse to insert trouble where it was not at first found. He had not read the report of the arson squad, and if ‘stored’ was good enough for them, it was good enough for him. From the very first suggestion, at a city council meeting – it must have been six years ago – that the building was suitable for transformation into a hotel, Brunetti had been interested only in how it would be brought to pass.

They continued towards Signora Grezzi’s address. ‘I’ve been thinking,’ Griffoni said.

‘Always a dangerous thing for a woman,’ Brunetti replied flatly.

As if he had not spoken, she said, ‘About how we’re always being made conscious of our regional differences: dialect, food, customs, even our appearance.’ This came from a Neapolitan who was a clear-eyed blonde almost as tall as he.

‘And then I think about the way no one is going to bother to investigate this fire or go to the trouble of finding out what might have caused it. If anything did cause it. Deliberately, I mean.’

‘And your point?’

‘That those differences of dialect and food and customs are all meaningless.’

‘Because?’

‘Because in the end, we’re all the same: beaten down by this system that is never going to change, by the people who are on top and who do exactly what they want to do.’ She sounded not in the least angry. If anything, she sounded relieved, but that might be from nothing other than being able, finally, to say this to someone.

Brunetti stopped to try to remember which was Ramo Sagredo or when he had last been near it. His feet suddenly remembered and took him to the left.

He led her through the underpass and stopped at the corner. ‘Well?’ she asked.

Brunetti gave her a level look. ‘It’s the twenty-first century, Griffoni. And that’s the future.’

‘You don’t mind?’ she asked.

‘Of course I mind,’ he answered. ‘But there’s nothing we can do.’

She turned and looked at the slice of laguna exposed between the buildings. ‘Except talk to Signora Ghezzi?’ she finally guessed.

‘Exactly.’

The old woman lived on the fourth floor, the windows of her kitchen, where she asked them to come to talk to her, looking out at the laguna and the cemetery. Though Brunetti knew from her pension records that she was eighty-four, Signora Ghezzi appeared at least a decade younger. White-haired and round-faced, she had the apple-skin wrinkles he had seen on the faces of his mother’s friends. Her expression, however, was that of a younger person, quick and intelligent. She offered them coffee, and both accepted.

Griffoni went and stood at the window, watching the boats and clouds chase one another to the east. ‘How beautiful, to stand here,’ she said. Signora Ghezzi turned from taking cups and saucers from the cupboard and smiled at her, but Brunetti wondered uneasily if this were simply another attempt to flatter a witness into confiding in them.

The coffee bubbled up and was quickly served. When it was put in front of them – Griffoni having taken her place at the table – Signora Ghezzi asked, ‘What is it you’d like to know?’

‘We wondered if you could tell us about Ana and about the Lembo family,’ Brunetti said, deciding that subterfuge was not likely to work with this woman.

Signora Ghezzi spooned sugar into her coffee; Brunetti noticed the faint tremor in her hand, the grains of sugar on the table and in the saucer. ‘Why?’ she asked.

‘Because I don’t like the way Davide lived,’ Brunetti surprised himself by saying.

He surprised Signora Ghezzi, too, who asked, ‘What do you mean?’

‘He was born with physical and mental problems, and his mother never did anything about them – to help him. That’s one thing, and it’s terrible. But no one else ever did anything to help. No doctor or social worker and no city office. Nothing. No one paid attention, and he grew up the way he did.’

‘I never saw him as a baby, you know.’

They were speaking in Veneziano, hers the accent of deepest Castello, the one he loved the most. He glanced at Griffoni, who seemed to be following everything; not that he could stop to ask this, not now. What was it Ana Cavanella had never done? Helped? Cared enough? Had the intelligence to know how to help? Did what he, four decades later, thought she should have done? ‘She never tried to get him help,’ he repeated.

‘How do you know this?’ Signora Ghezzi asked.

Brunetti opened his hands in a display of candour. ‘We’ve checked all the city records, and there’s no sign of Davide: no health card, and he never went to school, and he had no pension.’

She looked away from Brunetti and out the window, as if only the long view across the water could help relieve her feelings. Neither Brunetti nor Griffoni said anything. ‘She must have done it like that,’ she said.

Alert to her remark but not wanting her to realize that he was, Brunetti contented himself with saying, ‘Would you tell me about her, Signora?’

‘There’s not much to tell, really.’ She took a sip of coffee, reached her spoon towards the sugar bowl, but pulled it back, as if she heard the reproachful voice of her doctor telling her not to use so much sugar.

‘Ana was a simple girl. When she came. I don’t know how much schooling she’d had: maybe until a year before she came to us.’ Absently, she stirred her coffee.

‘There was a woman who did the laundry and the ironing – the signora was crazy for having things washed and ironed, and it took this woman three days a week to keep everything looking the way she wanted it.’ She took another sip of coffee, then got up and went to the cabinet for a plastic box filled with biscuits. She set them on the table and took one, dipped it into her coffee and bit off the very end of it. Both of them reached in and took a biscuit.

‘Where was I?’ she asked, looking from one to the other of them.

‘The ironing woman,’ Griffoni said.

‘Ah, of course. She left. No explanation. That happened a lot to the Signora. But before she went she told her that she knew a girl who could do the ironing and clean, too. She said she was a good girl.’ She stopped and looked at Brunetti.

‘Ana?’ he asked and took another biscuit.

‘Yes. Her mother brought her round, and she talked to the Signora. I wasn’t there. But two days later, Ana moved into a room up on the fourth floor and was in the storeroom all day long, ironing. Then she started to help me with the beds and cleaning.’ The woman’s eyes travelled to that distant past, when she could eat as much sugar as she pleased and had a young girl to help with the heavy work.

‘Did you talk to her, Signora?’ Griffoni asked. ‘She must have been lonely in such a big place,’ she added and took another biscuit.

‘I think she was. At the beginning. But the signora kept us busy.’

So casually that Brunetti could do nothing but marvel at her skill, Griffoni dipped her biscuit into the coffee, bit off only the damp end, and smiled in continuing delight, then asked, ‘What was she like, the Signora?’ It was seamless, and Brunetti, if he had been asked, would have told her everything he knew.

‘She was very religious,’ Signora Ghezzi said, but it was a neutral word, without the least suggestion of approval. She might as well have been saying that the Signora was tall or right-handed. ‘There was a relative, a nun, who lived in the palazzo. We never saw much of her, but the Signora did. And the girls.’ She reached for another biscuit but resisted and settled for finishing her coffee. She looked across at Griffoni. ‘Have more of them. My daughter-in-law makes them.’

‘They’re wonderful,’ Griffoni said, taking another. She dipped it into her coffee and ate it with something approaching glee. Griffoni, he knew, hated coffee without milk and disliked sweets or pastries of any sort. She started to dip the stub end of the biscuit into the coffee but stopped herself, holding it up in the air as visual proof of how arrested she was by her own thought. ‘It can’t have been a very exciting place for young girls,’ she began, as though the idea had flashed upon her, then let her voice trail off, looked at Brunetti and said, ‘Sorry, Commissario.’ Then, to Signora Ghezzi, ‘I don’t mean to . . .’ and let that trail off, too, though this time she managed to blush. To cover that, she finished her coffee.

Signora Ghezzi smiled and leaned forward to pat her arm. ‘Don’t worry, dear. You’re exactly right. And it was religion that made the Signora find out.’

‘Excuse me?’ Brunetti said for both of them.

‘She was away at one of her religious retreats. The Signora. She had another relative – I think it was an aunt – in a convent in Assisi, and she went to stay with her for a week every month. Her confessor was there – she was very close to him – and she told us how she lived with the sisters, following their rules: getting up and going to bed when they did, and eating with them. But not talking. For a week.’ She smiled at Brunetti and said, ‘We were all very impressed with that at the time, I can tell you.’

‘At the time.’ Brunetti was struck by Signora Ghezzi’s language. He smiled back at her but did not interrupt.

‘Well, anyway, this time the Signora was away for ten days, and when she came back, Ana didn’t come to work for three days, so when she did, the Signora hadn’t seen her for almost two weeks, so she noticed the change in her.’ Signora Ghezzi touched the tips of her forefingers together and drew a wide arc above her stomach.

Both Brunetti and Griffoni stared at her.

‘You hadn’t noticed?’ Griffoni asked. Better that she ask, Brunetti thought: this was women’s business.

‘Well, I knew something was wrong. But I wasn’t sure.’

‘Did anyone else in the house know?’ Griffoni asked.

‘Lavinia was away at school, and Lucrezia wasn’t paying attention to much of what was happening around her.’

Like so much of what the old woman had said, that cried out for clarification. Brunetti nodded and waited for her to go on.

‘What happened?’ Griffoni asked.

Signora Ghezzi shook her head. ‘I don’t know. The Signora spoke to her, and then she was gone. That’s when the Signora got sick. At the time, as I told you,’ she repeated, ‘I thought it must be because she was so religious.’ She stopped speaking and took another biscuit. She put it in her mouth all in one piece and chewed.

Silence fell. From the direction of the laguna, they heard the motor of a large boat go past. Neither Brunetti nor Griffoni paid attention to it, not with the interesting sounds that were on offer here.

Few people liked betrayal, he knew. To avoid it or the accusation of it, people would dodge around facts or present them in a way that hid them at the same time as it showed them. ‘“At the time,”’ Signora,’ Brunetti repeated in a level voice. When Signora Ghezzi responded with only a glance in his direction, he added, ‘We saw Lucrezia yesterday, Signora. She’s still not paying much attention to what’s going on around her.’

He noticed Griffoni suddenly remove her arms from the table and sit farther back in her chair, as if to create a distance between herself and Signora Ghezzi. The old woman noticed it, too.

‘Did Signora Lembo ever mention Ana again?’ Brunetti asked.

Surprised, Signora Ghezzi asked, ‘Did you know the Signora, then?’

‘No, Signora. I never met her.’

‘Ah,’ she said. She folded her hands on the table in front of her and looked down at her knuckles. Like Ana’s hands, hers had spent a great deal of time in cold water and harsh detergents. Like his mother’s hands, as well. She looked quickly across the table at him. ‘But you’ve learned enough about her to understand her,’ she observed.

‘Why do you say that?’

‘Because of your question. That was her way: if she didn’t like something, she made it not exist any more.’ She folded her hands in her lap.

Griffoni interrupted to ask, ‘So she made Ana not exist any more?’

The old woman nodded.

‘And her baby?’ Griffoni asked.

‘Oh,’ she said in a normal voice, ‘She made him not exist, either.’