Wilful Behaviour (18 page)

He paused for a long time, perhaps considering
the
explanation he’d just given, then went on. ‘He was terrified. Just as I reached up to cover his eyes, he wet his pants. I felt no pity for him then; I suppose I even felt good about it, that we had so reduced this German to such shameful terror. It would have been kinder to ignore it, but there was no kindness in me then, nor in any of us. I looked down at the stain on his pants and he saw me looking. Then he started to cry, and I understood enough German to understand what he said. “I want my mother. I want my mother,” and then he couldn’t stop sobbing. His chin was down on his chest, and I couldn’t tie the handkerchief around his eyes, so I moved away from him, and they shot him. I suppose I could have used the handkerchief to wipe away his tears but, as I said, I was a young man then, and there was no pity in me.’

The Count turned away from the lights and back towards Brunetti. ‘I looked down at him after they shot him, and I saw his face covered with snot, and his chest with blood, and the war ended for me then, in that instant. I didn’t think about it, not in big terms, I suppose not in anything I could call ethical terms, but I knew that what we had done was wrong and that we’d murdered him, just as much as if we’d found him sleeping in his bed, in his mother’s house, and cut his throat. There was no glory in what we were doing, and no purpose whatsoever was served by it. The next day, we shot three more. With the first one I was party to it and I still thought it was right, but after that, even when I realized what we were doing, I still didn’t have the courage to try to stop the
others
from doing it because I was afraid of what would happen to me if I did. So, to answer your question again, no, I’m not proud of what I did in the war.’

The Count emptied his glass and set it on a table. He stood. ‘I don’t think there’s anything more I want to say about this.’

Brunetti stood and, compelled by an impulse that surprised him, walked over to the Count and embraced him, held him in his arms for a long moment, then turned and left the study.

17

PAOLA WAS ASLEEP
when he got home, and though she swam up long enough to ask him how it had gone with her father, she was so dull that Brunetti simply said that they’d talked. He kissed her and went to see if the kids were home and in bed. He opened Raffi’s door after knocking lightly and found his son lying face down, sprawled in a giant X, one arm and one foot hanging off the edge of the bed. Brunetti thought of the boy’s heritage: one grandfather come back from Russia with only four toes and half a spirit, the other willing executioner of unarmed boys. He closed the door and checked on Chiara, who was neatly asleep under unwrinkled covers. In bed he lay for some time thinking about his family, and then he slept deeply.

The next day he went first to Signorina Elettra’s office, where he found her besieged by regiments of paper advancing across her desk.

‘Am I meant to find all of that promising?’ he asked as he came in.

‘What was it Howard Carter said when he could finally see into the tomb, “I see things, marvellous things”?’

‘Presumably you don’t see golden masks and mummies, Signorina,’ Brunetti responded.

Like a croupier raking in cards, she swept up some of the papers on her right and tapped them into a pile. ‘Here, take a look: I’ve printed out the files in her computer.’

‘And the bank records?’ he asked, pulling a chair up to her desk and sitting beside her.

She waved disdainfully at a pile of papers on the far side of her desk. ‘Oh, it was as I suspected,’ she said with the lack of interest with which one mentions the obvious. ‘The bank never called the attention of the Finanza to the deposits, and it seems they never troubled to ask the bank.’

‘Which means what?’ he asked, though he had a fair idea.

‘The most likely possibility is that the Finanza simply never bothered to cross-check her statements with the reports on money transfers arriving in the country.’

‘And that means?’ he asked.

‘Negligence or bribery, I’d say.’

‘Is that possible?’

‘As I have told you upon more than one
occasion
, sir, when you are dealing with banks, anything at all is possible.’

Brunetti deferred to her greater wisdom and asked, ‘Was this difficult for you to get?’

‘Considering the laudable reticence of the Swiss banks and the instinctive mendacity of our own, I suppose it was more difficult than usual.’

Brunetti knew the extent of her friendships, and so let it go at that, always uneasy at the thought of the information she might some day be asked to provide in return, and whether she would.

‘These are her letters,’ Signorina Elettra said, handing him the pile of papers. ‘The dates and the sums mentioned correspond to bank transfers made from her account.’

He read the first, to the orphanage in India, saying that she hoped her contribution would help the children have better lives, and then one to a home for battered women in Pavia, saying much the same thing. Each letter explained that the money was being given in memory of her grandfather, though it did not give his name nor, for that matter, her own.

‘Are they all like this?’ he asked, looking up from the page.

‘Yes, pretty much. She never gives her name or his, and in each case she expresses the hope that the enclosed cheque will help people have a better life.’

Brunetti hefted the pile of papers. ‘How many are there?’

‘More than forty. All the same.’

‘Is the amount always the same?’

‘No, they vary, though she seemed to like ten million lire. The total is close to the amount that went into her account.’

He considered what a fortune one of these transfers would be to an Indian orphanage or for a shelter for battered women.

‘Are there any repeated donations?’

‘To the orphanage in Kerala and the AIDS hospice. Those seemed to be her favourites but, so far as I can see, all of the others are different.’

‘What else?’ he asked.

She pointed to the closest pile. ‘There are the papers she wrote for her literature classes. I haven’t had time to read through all of them, though I must say her dislike of Gilbert Osmond is quite ferocious.’

It was a name he’d heard Paola use; she shared Claudia’s dislike. ‘What else?’ he asked.

Indicating a thick pile to the left of her computer, Signorina Elettra said, ‘Personal correspondence, none of it very interesting.’

‘And that?’ he asked, pointing to the single remaining sheet.

‘It would cause a stone to weep,’ she said, handing it to him.

‘I, Claudia Leonardo,’ he read, ‘declare that all of the worldly goods of which I am in possession should, at my death, be sold and the profits distributed to the charities listed below. This is hardly enough to make up for a life of rapacious acquisition, but it is, if nothing else, an attempt to do so.’ Below were listed the names and addresses
of
sixteen charities, among them the Indian orphanages and the women’s home in Pavia.

‘“Rapacious acquisition”?’ he asked.

‘She had three million, six hundred thousand lire in the bank when she died,’ was Signorina Elettra’s only reply.

Brunetti read through the will again, pausing at ‘rapacious acquisition’. ‘She means her grandfather,’ he said, finally perceiving the obvious.

Signorina Elettra, who had heard from Vianello some of the history of Claudia’s family, agreed instantly.

He noticed that there was no signature on the paper. ‘Is this your print-out?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’ Before he could ask, she said, ‘There was no copy among her papers.’

‘That makes sense. People that young don’t think they’re going to die.’

‘And they usually don’t,’ Signorina Elettra added.

Brunetti put the will down on the desk. ‘What was in the personal correspondence?’

‘Letters to friends and former classmates, letters to an aunt in England. These were in English, and she usually talked about what she was doing, her studies, and asked about her aunt’s children and the animals on her farm. I really don’t think there’s anything in them, but you can take a look if you want.’

‘No, no, that’s all right. I trust you. Any other correspondence?’

‘Just the usual business things: the university, the rough draft of what looks like a letter of
application
for a job, but there’s no address on it.’

‘A job?’ Brunetti interrupted. ‘She was being sent more than a hundred million lire a year: why would she want a job?’

‘Money isn’t the only reason people work, sir,’ Signorina Elettra reminded him with sudden force.

‘She was a university student,’ Brunetti said.

‘What does that mean?’

‘She wouldn’t have had time to work, at least not during the academic year.’

‘Perhaps,’ Signorina Elettra conceded with a scepticism suggesting a certain measure of familiarity with the academic demands made by the university. ‘Certainly there was no change in her finances that would indicate she had another source of income,’ she said, pushing some of the papers aside until she found Claudia Leonardo’s bank account. ‘Look, she was still drawing out the same amounts every month when she died. So she didn’t have any other income.’

‘Of course she might have been working for nothing, as a volunteer or an apprentice,’ Brunetti said. ‘It’s a possibility.’

‘You just said she was a university student, sir, and wouldn’t have had the time.’

‘It could have been part time,’ Brunetti insisted. ‘Do you remember anything in the letters that suggests she might have been working?’

Signorina Elettra considered this for a while and finally said, ‘No, nothing, but I wasn’t looking for anything specific when I read the letters.’ Without asking, she picked up the copies of Claudia
Leonardo
’s letters, divided the pile in two, and handed half to Brunetti.

He moved his chair back from her desk, stretched out his legs and began to read. As he read his way through these records of Claudia’s truncated life, he recalled a present an aunt of his had once, decades ago, given him for Christmas. He had been disappointed when he opened the matchbox and found nothing more than what looked like a bean made out of paper. Unable to disguise his disappointment, he had asked his aunt, ‘But what’s this for?’ and in answer she had filled a pan with water and told him to put the bean into it.

When he did, it swam magically on the surface of the water and then, under his marvelling eyes, gradually began to move and twist around, as the water unfurled what seemed like hundreds of tiny folds, each one pulling another one open after it. When it was finally still, he found himself gazing down at a perfect white carnation, the size of an apple. Before the water could soak and ruin it, his aunt plucked it out and set it on the windowsill, in the pale winter sun, where it stood for days. Each time Brunetti looked at it, he recalled the magic that had turned one thing into such a wonderfully different other.

Much the same process took place as he read Claudia’s words and heard her natural voice. ‘These poor Albanians. People hate them as soon as they learn where they’re from, as though their passports (if the poor devils even have passports) were pairs of horns.’ ‘I can’t stand to hear my
friends
complain about how little they have. We live, all of us, better than the Emperors of Rome.’ ‘How I long to have a dog, but who could make a dog live in this city? Perhaps we should all keep a pet tourist, instead.’ Nothing she said was particularly insightful, nor was the language distinguished, but then that pale dollop of compressed paper had hardly merited a second glance; yet how it had blossomed.

After about ten minutes he looked up and asked, ‘Found anything?’

She shook her head and kept reading.

After another few minutes he observed, ‘She seemed to spend a great deal of time in the library, didn’t she?’

‘She was a student,’ Signorina Elettra said, looking up from the papers. Then she added, ‘But, yes, she did, didn’t she?’

‘And it never sounds like she’s doing research there, I’d say.’ Brunetti asked, turning back a page and reading out, ‘“I had to be at the library at nine this morning, and you know what a horror I am that early, enough to frighten anyone away.”’

Brunetti set the page down. ‘Seems a strange concern, doesn’t it? Turning people away?’

‘Especially if she’s going there to read or study. Why would it matter?’ Though Signorina Elettra’s question was rhetorical, both of them considered it.

‘How many libraries are there in the city?’ Brunetti asked.

‘There’s the Marciana, the Querini Stampalia, the one at the university itself and then those in the
quartieri
and maybe another five.’

‘Let’s try them,’ Brunetti said, reaching for the phone.

Just as quickly, Signorina Elettra opened the bottom drawer of her desk, pulled out the phone book and flipped to ‘Comune di Venezia’. One after the other, Brunetti called the city libraries in Castello, Cannaregio, San Polo and Giudecca, but none of them had an employee or a volunteer working there called Claudia Leonardo nor, when he called them, did the Marciana, the Querini Stampalia, or the library of the university.

‘Now what?’ she asked, slapping the directory shut. Brunetti took it from her and looked under the B’s. ‘You ever heard of the Biblioteca della Patria?’ he asked.

‘Of the what?’ she asked.

‘Patria,’ he repeated and read out the address, saying, ‘Sounds like it might be down at the end of Castello.’ She pressed her lips together and shook her head.

He dialled the number and, when a man answered, asked if someone named Claudia Leonardo worked there. The man, speaking with a slight accent, asked him to repeat the name, told him to hold on a moment, and set the phone down. A moment later he was back and asked, ‘Who’s calling, please?’

‘Commissario Guido Brunetti,’ he answered, then asked, ‘And Claudia Leonardo?’

‘Yes, she worked here,’ the man said, making no reference to her death.

‘And you are?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Maxwell Ford,’ he answered, all the Italianate
softness
of his voice slipping away to reveal the Anglo-Saxon bedrock. In response to Brunetti’s demanding silence, he explained, ‘I’m co-director of the Library.’