Donna Leon - The Golden Egg

He found her file and still disliked the sensation of his hand on the bleached, warped paper. He opened it and found the address, took the copy of Calli, Campielli e Canali from his drawer and looked for the building. And there it was, an enormous beige rectangle on the opposite side of the canal from Campiello degli Incurabili and looking quite enormous. He tried to run his memory over the area, but it was decades since he had been there, and he had no clear image of it.

He took the book downstairs, keeping the page open with his finger, and in Signorina Elettra’s office opened it on the desk beside her computer. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘it’s in Dorsoduro.’

‘What is?’ she asked in honest confusion.

‘The place where Ana Cavanella lived in 1968, when she was arrested for shoplifting.’

‘How old was she?

‘Sixteen,’ Brunetti answered.

‘What happened?’

‘Nothing. She was underage. Her employer sent someone to get her, and that was the end of it.’ Seeing that she was not satisfied with this, he added, ‘Pucetti couldn’t find anything about the son, but there was

an old file on her down in the archives, so he brought

it up.’

He angled the book towards her and she ran her finger across the bridges and down the calli leading to 616. She picked it up and flipped to the end and then forward again until she found the pages with the names of the various buildings. He watched her finger run down the list of buildings until it stopped and she read aloud, ‘Palazzo Lembo.’ She looked at Brunetti. ‘That mean anything to you?’

‘The King of Copper,’ he said.

‘I beg your pardon,’ Signorina Elettra answered.

Brunetti smiled. ‘It was before your time. Lembo – I don’t remember his first name – the King of Copper. His family had mines somewhere; Africa, I think, or maybe South America. But way back, at the beginning of the last century. There was some other mineral, but I can’t remember which one it was. Tin, maybe. But copper was the main business.’

‘I was at school with a girl named Lembo. Margherita. But they were from Torino, I think.’

‘No, no, these Lembos have been here since the crusades,’ Brunetti said. The Brunettis had been, too, he knew, but that sort of thing seemed to matter only in the case of nobility or wealth. Poor people had grandparents; the rich had ancestors.

‘The palazzo was probably broken up into separate apartments,’ Signorina Elettra suggested.

‘Only one way to find out,’ Brunetti said.

She gave him a very quizzical look. ‘You’re really taken with this, aren’t you, Commissario?’

From her tone, he could not tell whether she approved or not. The silence around Davide Cavanella could be an example of bureaucratic oversight, but it might be something else. ‘I think I’ll ask Foa to take me over to have a look at the palazzo .’

14

Foa, glad of the chance to go for what Brunetti did not tell him was little more than a joyride, gave him a hand getting on to the boat. Over to Dorsoduro to look at a building: this made as much sense to Foa as taking the Vice-Questore to lunch and was certainly much more fun because Brunetti at least stood on deck and enjoyed the ride rather than sitting in the cabin talking on his telefonino . Brunetti learned all of this indirectly, just as he learned much of what he knew. Foa never criticized their superior openly, but perhaps because they were speaking in Veneziano, he could make use of a wide range of references and expressions that were virtually untranslatable.

Foa took the Canale della Giudecca, rather than the Grand Canal because the more direct route was around the back, he said. He knew the building, of course: was there a water door in the city he had not taken a boat past in the last twenty years? They turned into Rio delle Toresele, Foa slowing to make the turn. He slowed down even more as they approached Calle Capuzzi on the left. ‘That’s it,’ Foa said, pointing to a high-arched dark green door that stood at the top of three moss-covered steps leading down to the water.

Brunetti had never noticed the door, but who would notice a door that looked exactly like thousands in the city? ‘You know anything about the place?’ Brunetti asked.

Foa pulled the boat up at the entrance to the next calle and switched the motor to idle. ‘Some rich people used to live there. I remember because there was a very nice boat they used to tie up here.’

‘When was this?’

‘Must have been twenty years ago. Maybe more.’ Then, after a moment’s reflection, Foa added, ‘Boat hasn’t been there for years.’

‘Can you get in a little closer to the riva ?’ Brunetti asked. ‘I’d like to go around and take a look at the place.’

Foa pulled the boat up beside the riva . Luckily, it was high tide, so Brunetti could avoid the slippery stairs and step directly on to the pavement of the riva . He walked down the narrow calle to the door of 616, a ponderous oak slab varnished dark brown and divided into four high rectangles by thick, bevelled strips of the same colour. There was a modern brass lock, dulled nearly green by the humidity.

To the left was a tarnished brass plaque with the name ‘Lembo’ incised below the single bell. The Copper King, or was it tin? Brunetti stepped back and studied the façade of the palazzo. Narrow, it rose four floors: the grey plaster had flaked away in many places, exposing the brick beneath. Two simple arched windows stood to the left of the door and one to the right, all three of them heavily grilled with iron bars that were not free of the rust of neglect. The quadrifora of the first floor was blackened at the top, as though smoke had leaked out of the four narrow windows for centuries and stained the carved marble above them, which might well have been the case.

The windows of the floor above appeared almost twice as tall as those on the floor below, making them seem curiously etiolated in relation to the building. The frames and glass were obviously modern and the marble pilasters dividing them were a shocking white, smooth and almost entirely devoid of ornamentation, unlike the worn fluted columns of the windows below.

Brunetti took another step back and leaned against the building opposite. Above the windows he saw a row of small barbacani supporting a marble drain, though the much later addition of a low top floor had turned the drain into a mere ornamental motif. The real drain, metal and jarringly noticeable, corroded in more than one place, ran under the tiled roof and leaked two dark feathers of mould and rust down the façade.

Brunetti turned to his right, out to the fondamenta and down to the bridge at San Vio. He crossed it and went into the bar on the left, where he had often stopped for a coffee and was familiar with the people working there without knowing their names. He asked for a glass of white wine, glanced around at the people at the tables, looking for someone he knew, but he recognized no one.

When the barman brought the wine, Brunetti thanked him. Nodding at the calle with his chin, he asked, careful to speak Veneziano, ‘Does the Lembo family still live in that palazzo ?’ The man, who was short, stocky, balding, with a thick nose and the rugged skin of a drinker, set the glass on the counter and took a small step back, as if to put a greater distance between himself and the question.

There followed a process Brunetti had been observing for decades. The barman might not know his rank or branch of service, but he was certain to know, however vaguely, that Brunetti, a client for decades, was involved with the police. Thus his question was not innocent, nor was it idle. This meant that the man had to weigh up his sense of duty to the state (which one could probably estimate as zero) with his accumulated memories of Brunetti’s behaviour over time, and then against that he had to weigh any obligation he might have to the Lembo family. This calculation was immediate, and Brunetti was probably more conscious of it than was the man engaged in it.