Donna Leon - Drawing Conclusions

‘Maria doesn’t let me smoke in the house,’ he said, sounding almost proud of the fact.

‘For your health?’ Brunetti asked.

The old man turned to him, face washed clean of emotion at the idea. ‘Oh, I wish,’ he whispered and looked quickly away.

Morandi glanced around the entire campo , as if seeking someone who would care about whether he smoked or not. Turning his attention to Brunetti, he said, ‘You have to give me the key, Signore.’ He tried his best to sound reasonable but managed only to sound desperate. He looked earnest, tried a friendly smile, then let it fade away.

‘How many are left?’ Brunetti asked.

Morandi’s eyes narrowed, and he started to ask, ‘What do you…’ but gave up the attempt and stopped. He folded his hands, rammed them between his thighs, and leaned forward. He noticed the birds then; showing no fear, hopping closer, they began to peep up at the familiar face. He reached into his jacket and pulled out a few pinches of grain, which he let fall between his feet. The birds picked at them avidly.

Head still bent, attention apparently on the birds, he said, ‘Seven.’

‘Do you know what they are?’

‘No,’ the old man said, shaking the idea away. ‘I’ve tried to go into galleries to look at other ones, or into the museums. I get in for free now, because of my age. But I can’t remember what I see, and the names don’t mean anything to me.’ He unfolded his hands and raised them apart as an indication of his ignorance and confusion. ‘So I just have to trust the man who tells me what they are.’

‘And what they’re worth,’ Brunetti added.

Morandi nodded. ‘Yes. He was a patient when Maria still worked in the hospital; she told me about him then. I remembered him when… when I had to sell them.’

‘Do you trust him?’

Morandi looked at him, and Brunetti saw a flash of intelligence as the old man said, ‘I don’t have any choice, do I?’

‘You could go to someone else, I suppose,’ Brunetti suggested.

‘They’re a mafia,’ Morandi said with absolute certainty. ‘Go to one, go to another: it’s all the same thing. They’ll all cheat you.’

‘But maybe someone else would cheat you less,’ Brunetti suggested.

Morandi shrugged away this possibility. ‘By now they all know who I am and who I belong to.’ He spoke as though he was sure that this was true.

‘What happens when they’re gone?’ Brunetti asked.

Morandi lowered his head to consider the birds that still crowded round his feet, looking up and demanding food. ‘Then they’re gone.’ He sounded resigned. Brunetti waited and finally the old man said, ‘I might get enough to make the difference for two years.’

‘And then?’ Brunetti asked with bulldog tenacity.

The old man’s shoulders rose as he gave an enormous sigh. ‘Who knows what will happen in two years?’

‘What did the doctor tell you?’ Brunetti asked, nodding in the direction of the casa di cura .

‘Why do you ask?’ Morandi asked with a return to his former sharpness.

‘Because you seemed so worried. Before, when you talked about it.’

‘And that’s enough to make you want to know?’ Morandi asked, as though he were an anthropologist being exposed to an entirely new form of behaviour.

‘She seemed like a woman who has had enough trouble in her life,’ Brunetti risked saying. ‘I hoped she wouldn’t have any more.’

Morandi’s eyes drifted towards the windows of the second floor of the casa di cura , windows which Brunetti thought might be those of the dining room where he had first seen Signora Sartori. ‘Oh, there’s always more,’ Morandi said. ‘There’s more and more, and then it’s over and there’s no more.’ He turned to Brunetti and asked, ‘Isn’t that right?’

‘I don’t know,’ was the best thing Brunetti could think of, though it took him some time to bring himself to speak. ‘I hoped she would have some peace.’

Morandi smiled at the last word, but it wasn’t a pleasant thing to see. ‘We haven’t had any of that since we moved.’

‘To San Marco?’ Brunetti asked.

He nodded, loosening one of the strands of hair, which shifted over to lean against its neighbour. ‘Things were all right before then. We worked, and we talked, and I think she was happy.’

‘Weren’t you?’

‘Oh,’ he said, and this time it was a real smile, ‘I’ve never been so happy in my life.’

‘But then?’

‘But then Cuccetti offered me the house. We were renting a place, down in Castello. Forty-one square metres; ground floor. We were like sardines in there,’ he said, his mind obviously wandering back to that tiny place. Then, with another smile, he said, ‘But we were happy sardines.’

He took another deep breath, pulling the air through his nostrils and pushing himself up again. ‘And then he talked about the house we could have. More than a hundred metres. Top floor, two baths. It could have been a castle, it sounded so wonderful.’

He looked at Brunetti as if willing this man who had no idea what it meant to live in a forty-one-metre apartment to imagine what this would represent for people like them. Brunetti nodded. ‘So I said I’d do it. And get Maria to do it because Cuccetti said he needed two witnesses. And then I thought about the drawings that the old woman had. She’d told Maria about them.’ He tilted his chin to one side and asked, a real question, ‘Do you think that’s what made it go wrong? That I got greedy and told him I wanted the drawings?’

‘I don’t know, Signor Morandi,’ Brunetti said. ‘I can’t make a judgement like that.’

‘Maria knows that’s when it all went wrong. But she doesn’t know why,’ the old man said, his despair audible. ‘So it doesn’t matter what I think about it, or what you do. She knows something bad happened.’ Morandi shook his head and then continued to shake it, as if each motion renewed his guilt at what he had done.

‘What happened when you went to Signora Altavilla’s?’ Brunetti asked.

His head stopped moving. He stared at Brunetti and suddenly crossed his arms over his chest, as if to show he had had enough of this and would say no more. But then he surprised Brunetti by saying, ‘I went to talk to her, to try to make her understand that I needed the key. I couldn’t tell her about the drawings. She might have told Maria, and then she’d know what I did.’

‘She didn’t know?’

‘Oh no, nothing,’ he said very quickly. ‘She never saw them. They were never in the house. When Cuccetti gave them to me, I took them right to the bank, and I paid them in cash once a year for the box. There was no way Maria could know about them.’ The very possibility infused his voice with fear.

‘But she knew you had the key?’ Brunetti said, thinking that, over the years, she would surely have figured out what the key was for.

‘Maria’s not stupid,’ Morandi said.

‘I’m sure she’s not.’

‘She knew the key was important, even if she didn’t know what it was. So she took it and gave it to her.’

‘You know that?’

Morandi nodded.

‘Did she tell you?’

‘Yes.’

‘When? Why?’

‘At first she wouldn’t tell me anything. But – I told you she couldn’t lie – after a while she told me she’d taken it. But she wouldn’t tell me what she did with it.’

‘How did you find out?’

Morandi looked across at the front of the building, like a sailor seeking a lighthouse. His mouth pulled back and he made an animal noise of pain, then he leaned forward again and put his face in his hands. This time he started to sob the way a child sobs, suddenly and brokenly, all hope of future happiness gone.