He looked up at Brunetti, then at Vianello, then back to Brunetti. ‘I didn’t want it back. I never asked, never said anything. I wanted to help him. He was my friend.’
Neither Brunetti nor Vianello spoke, and after a time dalla Lana went on. ‘He said he saw what would get the money, then he said something about television, but he wasn’t making sense. I didn’t understand him. I still don’t. He said he did one good thing in his life, and now he’d do another because he remembered something, and everything would be all right.’
Dalla Lana stopped and looked back and forth between the two men again.
‘Did he tell you what he remembered?’
‘No.’ Suddenly his mouth contracted in pain and he said, ‘I told him to go to sleep and call me the next day. I don’t think he understood, but he hung up. And the next I knew, he was dead.’ Then, before Brunetti could ask if Cavanis had called again, dalla Lana said, ‘When he didn’t call, I figured he’d forgotten all about it.’
Out of simple curiosity and to draw dalla Lana away from the thought of his friend’s death, Brunetti asked, ‘And the poetry?’
‘I don’t have the talent,’ he said, as though Brunetti had asked him the time and he’d said he wasn’t wearing a watch.
The three men sat silent after that until Vianello asked, ‘If you don’t mind telling me, why did you remain such good friends all these years?’
Dalla Lana moved restlessly at that, pulled his jacket tighter around him, making Brunetti conscious that the day had suddenly lost what little warmth it had had. Dalla Lana got to his feet and ran his curved palm up and down the trunk of one of the trees a few times. Then he came back to the bench and looked at them. ‘Because he was brave and decent and worked hard when he had a job, until his health betrayed him. And because he read my poetry all these years and told me how good it was, how much it moved him.’
He kicked an empty cigarette packet away. ‘Is there anything else you’d like to know, gentlemen?’
Brunetti got to his feet and took dalla Lana’s hand. ‘No, thank you. You’ve told us a great deal.’
Vianello stepped up and offered his hand. ‘Thank you. I’m sorry for your friend.’
Dalla Lana said goodbye and turned to walk back to where the Billa had been before gentrification had discovered Campo San Giacomo dell’Orio.
22
They stopped on the way to the vaporetto and had a few tramezzini, but they were so filled with mayonnaise that they left Brunetti feeling stuffed but not satisfied. As they headed for the stop at Riva di Biasio, he pulled out his telefonino and called Signorina Elettra. He’d had enough of going by the official route, so he gave her Cavanis’ telefonino number and asked if she could somehow obtain a list of the numbers he’d phoned, starting on the Monday before he died.
‘ “Somehow obtain”,’ she repeated. ‘How elegant, Commissario. Yes, I’m sure I can obtain them. Somehow.’ She paused and then asked, ‘Is there any need for haste?’
‘As in: is there time to wait for a magistrate to authorize the search?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
‘No.’
‘Ah,’ she said, dragging out the sound while she, no doubt, considered methods. ‘Are you coming back to the Questura?’
‘Yes, we’re on the way now.’
‘I’ll have the numbers for you when you get here.’
He and Vianello had fallen into step, and as he walked, Brunetti repeated, silently, ‘I do not want to know, I do not want to know ’, coming down hard with the step that synchronized with the last word of the phrase. To Vianello, he said, ‘She’ll have the numbers he called for us when we get there.’
Vianello turned to look at Brunetti and smiled. ‘When they fire us all, I wonder if we’ll still be eligible for pensions.’
When they arrived half an hour later, they went directly to Signorina Elettra’s office. She greeted them with evident pleasure and handed Brunetti a sheet of paper. He took it but kept his thoughts to himself. On it were listed only three phone calls. On Monday and Saturday, Cavanis had called a number belonging to Stefano dalla Lana: the first call went unanswered; the next one, made at 11.11 on Saturday evening, lasted eight minutes. The final call, made at 11.22, was a wrong number, made to the office of the Fine Arts Commission. This call lasted six seconds.
‘Too drunk to dial,’ Vianello said.
‘Strange that he didn’t try again with the right number,’ Brunetti said.
‘Drunks are strange,’ Vianello observed.
‘He didn’t make any calls the day he was killed,’ Brunetti said, holding up the paper for both of them to see.