A Noble Radiance (27 page)

He went back into the
corridor, thinking of what he must do, wondering whether anyone, in the wake of
his sudden departure from the Questura, would have thought to send the crime
team.

The Count was nowhere
to be seen. Vianello came out behind him. His breath was as laboured and forced
as it had been when he came into Brunetti's office. 'Will you call them and see
if they've sent a team?' Brunetti asked.

Vianello started to
talk but then stopped and nodded.

'There's got to be
another phone,' Brunetti said.

Try one of the
bedrooms’ Viahello nodded, ‘You?'

Brunetti tilted his
chin back towards the stairs. ‘I’ll go and talk to them’ 'Them?' 'Him.'

This time Vianello's
nod signalled that he was again in control. He turned and went back down the
corridor, not looking into the room where Maurizio's body lay.

Brunetti forced
himself to go back to the door of the room and look inside. The shotgun lay to
the right of the body, its glossy stock just a centimetre from the pool of
blood that seeped towards it. Two small rugs lay unevenly bunched together,
pushed up in parts, silent witnesses to the struggle that had taken place above
them. A man's jacket lay in a heap just inside the door; Brunetti could see
that the front was covered with blood.

He turned, pulling
the door closed behind him, and went back to the stairs. He found the Count and
Countess as he had left them, though there was no longer any blood on the Count's
hands. When he went inside, the Count looked up at him again.

'Could I speak to
you?' Brunetti asked. The Count nodded and again released his wife's hand.

In the hall, Brunetti
said, 'Where can we go to talk?'

Here's as good as
anywhere,' the Count answered. ‘I want to keep an eye on her.' 'Does she know
what's happened?' 'She heard the shot,' the Count said. 'From up here?'

'Yes. Yes. But then
she came downstairs.'

To that room?'
Brunetti asked, incapable of disguising his horror. The Count nodded. 'Did she
see
...
him?'

This time the Count
shrugged. 'When I heard her coming - I could hear her slippers in the hall - I
walked towards the door. I thought she'd see me, that I could block him out.'

Brunetti, remembering
the jacket that lay inside the door downstairs, wondered what difference this
would make.

The Count suddenly
turned away. 'Maybe we had better go down here,' he said, leading Brunetti into
the next room. There was a desk and chair and a bookcase filled with ledgers.

The Count sat just
inside the door, lowering himself into a padded armchair. He rested his head
against the back, closed his eyes momentarily, then opened them and looked at
Brunetti. But he said nothing.

'Can you tell me what
happened?'

'Last night, late,
after my wife had gone to bed, I asked Maurizio if I could speak to him. He was
nervous. So was I. I told him that I'd begun to rethink everything about the
kidnapping, about how it happened and how the people who did it must have known
a lot about the family and what Roberto was doing. To know to wait for him at
the villa, they would have to know that he was going there that night.'

The Count bit his
lip, looking off to the left. ‘I told him, told Maurizio, that I no longer
could believe that it was a kidnapping, that someone wanted money for Roberto.'

He stopped here until
Brunetti prodded, 'What did he say?'

'He seemed not to
understand me, said that ransom notes had come, that it had to be a kidnapping.'
The Count pulled his head away from the back of the chair and sat up straight.
'He's lived with me most of his life. He and Roberto grew up together. He was
my heir.'

As he pronounced that
word, the Count's eyes filled with tears. 'That's why,' he said in a voice
suddenly grown so soft that Brunetti had to strain to hear him. He said nothing
else.

'What else happened
last night?' Brunetti asked.

'I told him I wanted
him to tell me what he did when Roberto disappeared.'

'It says in the file
that he was here with you’

'He was. But I
remember that he cancelled a date that night, a business dinner. It was as if
he wanted to be here, with us, that night.'

'Then he couldn't
have done it,' Brunetti said.

'But he could have
paid someone to do it,' the Count said, and Brunetti didn't doubt that this was
what he believed.

'Did you tell him
that?'

The Count nodded. ‘I
told him that I was going to give him time to think about this, what I
suspected. That he could go to the police himself.' The Count sat up
straighter. 'Or do the honourable thing.'

'Honourable?'

'Honourable,' the
Count repeated but didn't bother to explain. 'And then?'

'He was gone all day
yesterday. Not in the office, because I called and asked. Then tonight - my
wife had already gone to bed - he came into the room -he must have gone up to
the villa to get it - he came into the room with the gun. And he said
...
he said
...
that I was right. He said horrible things about Roberto, things that weren't
true.' Here the Count could no longer contain his tears; they streamed down his
face, but he made no attempt to wipe them away.

'He said Roberto was
worthless, a spoiled playboy, and that he, Maurizio, was the only one who
understood the business, the only one who was good enough to inherit it.' The
Count looked at Brunetti to see if he could comprehend his own horror at having
raised this monster.

'And then he came
towards me with the gun. At first I couldn't believe him, didn't believe all
the things he said. But then he said that it would have to look like I'd done
it myself, out of grief for Roberto. And then I knew he meant it.'

Brunetti waited.

The Count swallowed
and wiped at his face with the back of his sleeve, covering his cheeks with
streaks of Maurizio's blood. 'He came up in front of me, holding the gun, and
he put it against my chest. Then he raised it up under my chin, saying he'd
thought about it, and it had to be done that way.' The Count paused, recalling
the horror of the scene.

'When he said that, I
must have gone mad. No, not because he would kill me, but that he would be so
cold-blooded about it, could have planned it like that. And because of what he
did to Roberto.'

The Count stopped
talking, mind pulled away by this memory. Brunetti ventured a question. 'What
happened?'

The Count shook his
head. ‘I don't know. I think I kicked him or pushed him. The only thing I
remember is pushing the gun towards him and shoving at it with my shoulder. I
hoped to knock him over on to the floor. But then the gun went off, and I felt
it all over me, his blood. Other things.' He stopped talking and brushed
violently at his chest, caught up in the memory of that violent cascade.

He looked at his
hands, clean now. 'And then I heard my wife coming down the hall, towards the
room, calling my name. I remember seeing her at the door, and I remember going
towards her. But I don't remember anything else, at least not clearly.'

'Calling us?'

The Count nodded. ‘Yes,
I think so. But then you were here.'

'How did you and your
wife get back upstairs?'

The Count shook his
head.’
I
don't
remember. Really, I don't remember much between when I saw her at the door and
when you came in.'

Brunetti looked at
the man, saw him for the first time stripped of all the trappings of wealth and
position, and what he saw was a tall, gaunt old man, face covered with tears
and mucus, his shirt damp with human blood.

'If you want to clean
yourself,' Brunetti suggested, the only thing he could think of to say. Even
as he said it, he knew it was entirely unprofessional and that the Count should
be made to keep those clothes on until the crime squad had photographed him in
them. But the idea revolted Brunetti, and so he said again, 'Perhaps you'd like
to change.'

At first, the Count
appeared confused by Brunetti's remarks, but then he looked down at himself,
and Brunetti watched his mourn twist with disgust at what he saw. 'Oh, my God’
he muttered and got to his feet, pushing himself up by the arms of the chair.
He stood awkwardly, arms held clear of his body, as if afraid for his hands to
come into contact with his soiled clothing.

He saw Brunetti
watching him and turned away. Brunetti followed him out of the room and saw him
stop once and tilt wildly towards the wall, but before Brunetti could move
towards him, he had braced himself against it with an outstretched hand. The
Count pushed himself away from the wall and, at the end of the hallway, went
into a room on the right, not bothering to close the door after him. Brunetti
followed down the hallway and paused at the door. At the sudden sound of
rushing water, he looked in and saw the trail the Count's abandoned doming had
made across the floor as he made towards the door of what must be a guest
bathroom.

Brunetti waited for
at least five minutes, but the sound of the water continued to be the only
thing he heard. He was still listening, undecided about whether to go and see
if the Count was all right, when it stopped. It was then, in the silence that
expanded towards him, that he heard the other sounds from below, the familiar
thumps and clangs that told him the crime squad had arrived. Abandoning his
role as protector of the Count, Brunetti went downstairs, back towards the room
where the second heir of the Lorenzonis had met his grim death.

23

Brunetti passed
through the next few hours in much the same way as the survivor of an accident
remembers the arrival of the ambulance, being wheeled into the emergency room,
perhaps even the descent of the mask bringing blessed anaesthesia. He stood in
the room where Maurizio had died, he told people what to do, he answered
questions and asked his own, but all the while he had the strange sensation of
not being fully present.

He remembered the
photographers, even remembered the vicious obscenity one of them muttered when
his tripod collapsed, crashing the camera to the floor. And he remembered thinking,
even then, how ridiculous it was to be offended by his language, in that place,
in the midst of what was being photographed. He recalled the arrival of the
Lorenzoni lawyer and then of a private nurse to take care of the Countess. He
spoke to the lawyer, whom he had known for years, and explained that Maurizio's
body would not be released for days, not until an autopsy could be performed.

And, as he explained
this, he found himself thinking how absurd it was. The evidence of what had
happened was all there, all over one side of the room: on the curtains, on the
rugs, seeped already between the thin strips of parquet, just as it had been on
the sordid clothes the Count had shed on his way to the shower. Brunetti had
led the lab men to those clothes, told them to gather and label them, just as
he had told them to test the Count's hands for any traces of graphite that
might remain. And Maurizio's.

He had spoken to the
Countess, or had tried to speak to her, but she responded to his every question
by calling out the name of one of the mysteries of the rosary. He asked if she
had heard anything, and she answered, 'Christ accepts his cross’ He asked if
she had spoken to Maurizio, and she answered, 'Jesus is laid in his tomb’ He
abandoned the attempt, left her to the nurse, and to her god.

Someone had thought
to bring a tape recorder, and he used it as he led the Count slowly through the
events of the previous day and of this afternoon. The Count had washed away
only the physical signs of what had happened; his eyes still registered the
moral cost of what he had done, of what Maurizio had tried to do. He told the
story once, haltingly and with many long pauses during which he seemed to lose
the thread of the story he was telling. Each time, Brunetti gently reminded him
of where they were, asked what had happened next.

By nine, they were
finished, and there was no longer a reason to remain in the
palazzo.
Brunetti
sent the lab and camera crews back to the Questura and himself took his leave.
The Count said goodbye but didn't seem able to remember that people shook hands
upon leaving one another.