Donna Leon - Drawing Conclusions

He lowered his hand and said, not looking at Brunetti when he spoke, ‘She shouldn’t have told her. Maria, that is. But ever since she… since this happened to her, she hasn’t been careful about what she says, and she…’ He trailed off, patted his hair into place again, though it was not necessary, and looked across at Brunetti, as though he expected some response to what he had said. ‘She drifts,’ he finally said.

‘What do the doctors say?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Oh, doctors,’ Morandi answered angrily, waving his hand at some place behind him, as if the doctors were lined up there and, hearing him, should be embarrassed. ‘One of them said it was a small stroke, but another says it might be the beginning of Al… of something else.’ When Brunetti said nothing and the invisible doctors did not contest his remarks, Morandi went on. ‘It’s just old age. And worry.’

‘I’m sorry she’s worried,’ Brunetti said. ‘She deserves peace and quiet.’

Morandi smiled, bowed his head as at a compliment he did not deserve, and said, ‘Yes, she does. She’s the most wonderful woman in the world.’ Brunetti heard the real tremor in his voice. He waited, and Morandi added, ‘I’ve never known anyone like her.’

‘You must know her very well to be this devoted to her, Signore,’ Brunetti said.

Because Morandi had again lowered his head, Brunetti could see only his pink scalp and the dark strands of hair that transected it. But as he watched, the pink grew darker and Morandi said, ‘She’s everything.’

Brunetti let some time pass before he said, ‘You’re lucky.’

‘I know that,’ Morandi said, and again Brunetti heard the tremor.

‘How long have you known her?’

‘Since the sixteenth of July, nineteen fifty-nine.’

‘I was still a child,’ Brunetti said.

‘Well, I was a man by then,’ Morandi said, then added in a softer voice, ‘but not a very good one and not a very nice one.’

‘But then you met her?’ Brunetti encouraged him.

Morandi looked up then, and Brunetti saw that same smile, strangely childlike. ‘Yes.’ Then, as an afterthought, ‘At three-thirty in the afternoon.’

‘You’re lucky to remember the day so clearly,’ Brunetti said, surprised that he could no longer remember the date he met Paola. He knew the year, certainly, and remembered why he was in the library, the subject of the essay he had to write, so if he checked his university records for when he took that class, he could probably work out at least the month, but the date was gone. He would be embarrassed to ask Paola because, if she knew it off by heart, he’d feel a cad for not remembering it. But she might just as easily say he was a sentimental fool for wanting to remember something like that, which was probably true. Which made Morandi a sentimental fool, he supposed.

‘How did you meet her?’ Brunetti asked.

Morandi smiled at the question and at the memory. ‘I was working as a porter at the hospital and I had to go into a room to help lift one of the patients on to a stretcher so they could take him down for tests, and Maria was there already, helping the nurse.’ He looked at the wall to the left of Brunetti, perhaps seeing the hospital room. ‘But they were both very small women and couldn’t do it, so I asked them to get out of my way, and I lifted the man onto the stretcher, and when they thanked me, Maria smiled, and… well, I suppose…’ His voice trailed off but his smile remained.

‘I knew right then, you know,’ he said to Brunetti, man to man, though Brunetti thought more women than men would understand this, ‘that she was the one. And nothing in all these years has changed that.’

‘You’re a lucky man,’ Brunetti repeated, thinking that any man, or any woman, who spent decades wrapped in this feeling was a lucky person. Why, then, had they never married? He recalled the thuggish first impression Morandi had made and wondered if perhaps he had an inconvenient family lodged somewhere. Paola often referred to men who had a Mrs Rochester in the attic: did Morandi have one?

‘I think so,’ Morandi said, the key still in his hand.

‘How long has Signora Sartori been here?’ Brunetti asked, waving his hand to take in all that stood around them, as innocently as if copies of all of the payments for her care from the day she entered were not sitting on his desk to be checked at a glance.

‘Three years now,’ he said, a time that began, as Brunetti knew, with the deposit of the first of Turchetti’s cheques.

‘It’s a very good place. She’s very lucky to be here,’ Brunetti said. He would not allow himself to mention his mother’s experience, and so he said only, ‘I know that some of the other places in the city don’t take as good care as the sisters here do.’ When Morandi failed to answer, Brunetti said, ‘I’ve heard stories about the public places.’

‘We were very lucky,’ Morandi said earnestly, failing to take the bait, or avoiding it; Brunetti was not sure.

‘I’ve heard it’s very expensive,’ Brunetti said, using the voice of one citizen to another.

‘We had a little put by,’ Morandi said.

Brunetti leaned forward and took the key from Morandi’s hand. ‘Is this where they are?’ he asked, holding it up. When the old man did not answer, Brunetti slipped the key into the watch pocket of his trousers.

Morandi placed his right hand on his thigh, as if to cover the place where the key had been. Then he put the left on the other thigh. He looked at Brunetti, his face paler than it had been. ‘Did she tell you?’

Brunetti did not know if he meant Signora Sartori or Signora Altavilla, and so he answered, ‘It doesn’t matter who told me, does it, Signore? Just that I have the key and know what’s there.’

‘They don’t belong to anyone, you know,’ the old man insisted. ‘They’re all dead, all the people who wanted them.’

‘How did you get them?’

‘The old French woman had them in the house. Inside a hamper for the washing.’ He must have read the flash of concern on Brunetti’s face for he said, ‘No, they were in a plastic case on the bottom. They were safe.’

‘I see,’ Brunetti said. ‘But how did you get them?’ He used the plural form of ‘you’.

Morandi reacted to the word this time. ‘Maria didn’t know anything about them. She wouldn’t have liked it. Not at all. She wouldn’t have let me take them.’

‘Oh, I see, I see,’ Brunetti said, wondering how many more times he would have to say this same thing when, as now, what he heard was unlikely to be true? Morandi had had them in his possession for decades, and she had not known?

‘Cuccetti gave them to me. The same night we witnessed the paper.’ Brunetti noticed the man could not bring himself to call it a will. Then Morandi added, sounding angry, ‘I made him do it.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I didn’t trust him,’ Morandi said with great force.

‘And the apartment?’ Brunetti asked, in lieu of pursuing the subject of Cuccetti’s honesty.

‘That was what he promised me at the beginning, when he asked me if we’d sign something. I didn’t trust him then, and I didn’t trust him later. I knew what he was like. He’d give me the apartment, then he’d find a way to take it back. Some legal way. After all, he was a lawyer,’ Morandi said in much the same way he would say that a bird was a vulture.

Brunetti, wise in the way of lawyers, nodded.

‘So I told him what I wanted.’

‘How did you know about them and what they were?’

‘The old woman used to talk to Maria, and she told her about them, about how much they were worth, and Maria told me.’ Then, before Brunetti could get the wrong opinion, he quickly added, ‘No, it’s not what you think. It was just something she told me, when she talked about work and the patients and the sort of things they told her.’ He looked away for a moment, as if embarrassed to find himself in the company of a man capable of thinking such a thing of Signora Sartori. ‘It was my idea, not hers. She didn’t know about it. And she’s never known I have them.’