Donna Leon - The Golden Egg

‘You are a saint,’ Brunetti repeated. ‘You are probably also a martyr.’

‘I am a martyr.’

‘What does he want?’

‘This office,’ she surprised him by saying.

‘What?’ he asked and then, as the obvious dawned, he changed that to the even more obvious, ‘For whom?’

‘Lieutenant Scarpa,’ she said, as if this could be the only answer. As it certainly was.

‘But why?’

‘So their symbiosis can grow even stronger, I imagine,’ she said angrily. Brunetti wondered when he had ever seen her really angry, to the extent that her face was red and her voice tight, as was the case now.

‘Can’t you stop it?’ Brunetti asked, realizing how tentative his voice sounded.

‘Of course I can,’ she said. ‘But I don’t want to.’

‘Why?’ he asked, unable to hide his astonishment.

‘Because I don’t want to have to leave.’

His heart stopped. Brunetti was not given to excessive reactions, nor to excessive language, but he felt his heart stop, well, at least miss a few beats and then begin again with a faster rhythm.

‘But you can’t even think about that,’ he bleated before he could adjust the tone. ‘I mean, if you’re going to leave, then you should have a better reason for it than that.’

He thought about offering her his office but knew Patta would never accept that. He felt as though he had walked into a wall.

‘I don’t mean leave leave, I mean leave this floor.’

‘For where?’ Brunetti asked, disguising his relief and running his mind through the building.

‘All I have to do is change a few offices around,’ she said, her anger subsiding.

There was something in the ease with which she

said this, as if the task were no more complicated than prising the cork from a bottle of prosecco, that jangled Brunetti’s nerves. He sent his memory through the building again, seeking out the offices that might be suitable to her and the names of the persons who currently used those offices. And there it was, on the same floor as his but on the other side of the building, a much smaller room with a view of the garden in the back. The room was currently crowded with two enormous cupboards no one had thought to move when the desk was put in and the office was given to Claudia Griffoni.

He stopped himself from slapping his palm to his forehead and crying out ‘Aha!’ but that did not dull the clarity of his revelation. Signorina Elettra felt little simpatia for her: it was as simple as that. Brunetti had no idea of the reason: he did not want to attribute it to feminine jealousy and, to avoid discussion of that, he had chosen never to talk to Paola about it.

His wiser self told him to stay out of this, to make no comment, and to pretend it did not concern or interest him, so long as she found an office. ‘Well,’ he said idly, ‘I hope you can work it out.’ He tried to think of a quid pro quo he could offer Patta. The consequences of non-intervention here, he knew, would not be peace in our time.

Careful to make it clear that what he was about to offer was much more interesting than any talk of offices and who would move into them, he said, ‘I have a name for you.’

‘For?’

‘For you to have a look at.’ Seeing that this had caught her attention, he said, ‘I went over to Dorsoduro to have a look at the palazzo .’ In an attempt to relax things further, he added, ‘And I came back with a name.’

‘Which is?’ she said, turning the computer screen to

face her.

‘Lucrezia Lembo.’

‘The wife of the Copper King?’

‘The daughter. There are at least two, and they apparently still live at that address.’

Signorina Elettra smiled a real smile, relaxed and easy, and he watched tension and anger seep away from her. ‘I’ll see what I can find,’ she said.

‘The person who gave me her name said she’s had a troubled life: men, trouble with her kids, divorce, alcohol.’

She pulled her lips together. ‘That’s more than enough for anyone.’

‘I’d like anything you can find about either of the sisters: I don’t know the name of the other one,’ he said. He had a vague memory that both of the parents had died.

She hit a few keys, then a few more; she read for a moment, hit some more keys, and when Brunetti saw her begin to smile again he wondered if it was at the thought of being back at work or at the prospect of being able to access the data banks of the various institutions of the city without having to bother about pesky things like warrants or permissions or orders from magistrates.

He thanked her and started back to his office, proud of having returned an angry, petulant woman to her rightful place as a buccaneer utterly without respect for rules or regulations.

15

At the bottom of the flight of steps that would take him to his office, Brunetti glanced at his watch and saw that it was after two. It was likely to be one of the last temperate days of the year, and he felt himself entitled, after what he chose to think of as his morning’s work, to lunch with his wife. Paola had told him that the kids would not be there, so he could be as late as he pleased, and he decided to take her at her word.

As he made his way towards Rialto, he played at something he told himself resembled that three-dimensional oriental chess game he had read about but not understood and that might be called Go. He had no idea of the rules and so invented his own: he assumed that the people he shifted to another office on another floor would go without complaint and without rancour, emulating the man in the Bible who picked up his bed and walked away.

Scarpa to Signorina Elettra’s, Signorina Elettra to Claudia Griffoni’s. The large cabinets to the archive, where their high shelves would save some papers from the effects of mildew and time. And where was Griffoni supposed to go? Into the converted cupboard which had been Lieutenant Scarpa’s office for years?

He said nothing about the problem of Signorina Elettra’s office during the meal, finding the calamaretti con piselli more interesting than the territorial disputes of his colleagues. He waited until he was standing beside Paola, drying the dishes and putting them back in the cabinet, but drying them very slowly and not paying attention to what he was doing. He continued to dry a wine glass until she reached out with a wet hand, took the glass from him and set it on the counter. ‘What’s bothering you?’ she asked.

‘Women.’

It was seldom that Brunetti managed to stop Paola in her tracks, so her expression gave him a certain satisfaction. ‘In general? Or specifically?’ she asked. She rinsed her hands and took the towel from him to dry them.

‘Specifically,’ Brunetti answered.

Appearing to ignore him, she said, ‘How nice it would be to live on the first floor.’

‘With damp and no light?’ Brunetti asked, thinking of the ground-floor offices in the Questura; he had not even dared to consider moving any of the players in his game to them.

‘With only one flight of steps if we want to go out to get a coffee in a bar,’ she corrected. She reached up for the caffetiera , added water, put in the coffee, screwed the top on tightly, and set it on the stove. Paola was certain to return to the subject of women, so he went back into the living room and stood at the window. The clouds had grown heavier during lunch, and a light rain was falling.

She came in with two cups, sugar already added. She handed him one, stood stirring hers, and asked, ‘Which ones, specifically?’

‘Signorina Elettra and Claudia Griffoni,’ he answered.

‘They’ve come to blows?’ she asked.

He sipped at his coffee, finished it, and set the cup on a table. ‘You always talk about feminine jealousy.’