Donna Leon - The Golden Egg

‘But it’s impossible,’ said a scandalized Vianello. ‘We should be able to find him.’

Brunetti refrained from comment, and Pucetti spoke. ‘I looked everywhere, Commissario, even in our arrest files, but he’s not there. Nothing. I even went down to the archives, but there’s no file on him.’ Then, hesitantly, as if afraid he might have gone too far, Pucetti continued, ‘I did find a Cavanella in the files, sir.’

Vianello turned to face the young officer, and Brunetti said, ‘Good. Did you bring it?’

‘Yes, sir,’ he said, taking a discoloured Manila folder from a larger one that lay on his lap and handing both across the desk to Brunetti. ‘Cavanella, Ana,’ was written on the file; handwritten, Brunetti was surprised to note. The Manila cover had once been light blue, but the years, exposure to light, and the penetrating humidity of the archive had turned it a sickly grey and rendered the cover unpleasant to the touch.

‘Have you looked in it?’ Brunetti asked.

‘No, sir,’ Pucetti said. Then, risking a small smile, he confessed ‘But I’d like to.’

‘Then let’s,’ Brunetti said and opened it. He discovered an outdated form with the elaborate seal of the Ministry of the Interior stamped on the top, taking up almost a quarter of the page, and below it two typewritten paragraphs. ‘ Mirabile visu ,’ Brunetti said and held up the page to show them.

‘Wow!’ Pucetti said in the English that had now become international.

‘Never seen typing before?’ Vianello asked, smiling, but not joking.

‘Of course I’ve seen it,’ said an embarrassed Pucetti.

Brunetti, reading the report, barely heard them. ‘6/9/68,’ he read aloud. ‘Suspect apprehended in Standa, carrying four unopened parcels of women’s stockings, two unused lipsticks, and brassiere (size 3) with price tag still attached, in her bag. At the police station at San Marcuola, she presented her carta d’identità , which stated that she was born in 1952.

‘Her employer, with whom she lives, sent her secretary. This woman identified her as Ana Cavanella, showed a copy of a contract of employment signed by the girl’s mother, and took the girl home. Because of her age, no charges will be brought, though a report of this incident has been sent to the social services.’

He looked at the others, who had become a silent audience.

‘Nice touch, the size of the bra,’ Vianello said.

‘Nineteen sixty-eight,’ Pucetti said, speaking of it as though it were light years away, as in many ways it was, at least for him.

‘And Davide bore her name, not his father’s,’ Brunetti said, putting the paper inside and closing the file. He opened the file and looked for the name of the woman who took her away, but it was not given. An address in Dorsoduro was, however.

He slid the paper across the table to Pucetti, saying, ‘This is the address given for them. Have a look at the Anagrafe files and see who lived there.’

‘You think they’ve put things on line?’ Pucetti asked. ‘That far back, I mean.’

Though Brunetti was only a child then, he hardly thought of it as ‘far back’, but he did not pass on this observation to Pucetti. Instead, he said, ‘I don’t know. If you call them, they should be able to tell you. If not, go over and see if they still have paper files.’

‘Why do you want to know?’ Vianello took the liberty of asking.

Brunetti thought about his very brief meeting with the woman. In his experience, the motive that most often drove people to distance themselves from horror or tragedy was guilt. Were they her pills, the pills that Davide had swallowed? Had she made him hot chocolate and given him some biscuits, and had he, stomach full and a ring of chocolate around his mouth, found her sleeping pills and taken them, perhaps having seen her take them before bed and thinking that he should, too?

Guilt made sense; it fitted with what he had observed of her behaviour. How better to keep it at bay than by refusing to discuss or even accept what had happened?

‘Well?’ Vianello asked. Pucetti watched his two superiors, silent.

‘Let’s go and talk to her,’ Brunetti said and got to his feet.

10

Brunetti decided it would be better for all three of them to go. He and Vianello represented, he thought, the serious aspect of the law: men of a certain age and sobriety of bearing. Pucetti, looking more like a student, with the fresh-faced eagerness of a boy just in from the countryside, might clothe the law in less fearful garb. Pucetti had – rare in a man so young – the uncanny ability to induce people to confide in him. He had not learned it or studied it, any more than a cat studies how to make people scratch its neck. He smiled, he looked them in the eye, curious to know about them, and they spoke to him.

Foa, who was idling in the cabin of the police launch, took them over to San Polo, commenting on the freshening wind as they went up the Grand Canal, convinced that this was a sign of approaching rain, and lots of it. Brunetti was glad to hear it: it had been an unusually dry summer, a fact that Chiara had drummed into their heads with relentless frequency; the arrival of rain, especially heavy rain, would put an end to her sermons about Armageddon, at least for a while.

When they were still two bridges from the Cavanella address, Brunetti told Foa to stop and let them out. The arrival of three men, one of them an officer in uniform, would be sufficiently unsettling for Signora Cavanella: no need to pull up in a police launch and attract the attention of the entire neighbourhood.

Seeing that it was almost six, he sent Foa back to the Questura. The three of them could go home directly after the visit.

He rang the bell, and after a full minute he heard the window above him open. Ana Cavanella stood there. ‘You again?’ she said. ‘What do you want now?’

‘There are some things I’d like to tell you, Signora. About your son. And there’s some information we have to get. For our files.’ This was certainly true. Behind him, he heard the sound of a window being opened, but when he turned to look at the house opposite he saw no one, nor any sign of motion at the windows.

When he looked back at Signora Cavanella, her attention had moved to the house opposite and to the windows on the floor above hers. She said something, but Brunetti heard only the last word, ‘ . . . cow’. Then, looking down at them, she said, ‘I’m coming.’ Almost as an afterthought, she added, ‘But only one of you can come in.’

The men moved closer to the door. Brunetti told Pucetti to position himself so that he would be the first person she saw when she opened it. Without consultation, Vianello moved behind them, allowing most of his bulk to be hidden by Brunetti’s body.

The door opened. Just as she became visible, Pucetti raised his hand to his head and removed his uniform hat in a gesture he turned into one of great deference. He did not bow his head, but he did lower his eyes before her gaze. Chiara had once shown Brunetti a book about dog behaviour, and what he sensed of Pucetti’s made him want to shout out, ‘Beta Dog, Beta Dog!’

Remaining a careful distance from the door, Pucetti said. ‘Excuse me, Signora’, his nervousness audible in his voice and evident in the way he moved his hat around in his hands. His glance was fleeting and he pulled his eyes away as soon as hers met them. And then, as though unable to contain his desire to speak, he asked, ‘Did your son play soccer in San Polo?’

Her eyes grew sharp. ‘What?’

‘Did he play soccer? In San Polo?’

‘How do you know that?’ the woman demanded, as though he had told in public some shameful family secret.