Donna Leon - The Golden Egg

Little rivulets, looking like something between a U and a V, hung below her eyes, the flesh above them darker than the skin of her face. She stared, first at the man

and then the woman, with eyes devoid of curiosity or interest. ‘ Sì? ’ she asked. Had they been coming to collect the rent or to tell her the house was on fire, her response to their presence would have been the same.

‘Signora Lembo?’ Brunetti asked.

‘ Sì ,’ she answered neutrally.

‘I’m Commissario Brunetti, and this is Commissario Griffoni. We’d like to speak to you.’

‘About what?’

‘Ana Cavanella.’

Her eyes changed, came alive, though not in a manner Brunetti found particularly appealing. She looked at Griffoni, and when Brunetti glanced aside at her he saw that his colleague had assumed a slumped posture that took centimetres off her height. Her posture had also managed to become graceless and awkward, her face so reduced in expression or signs of interest as to be almost plain; certainly not attractive.

‘What do you want to know about her?’ Lucrezia Lembo – for this must be Lucrezia – asked. She moved her hand from behind her and took a deep pull on her cigarette, almost as if she had thought, until then, that she had to hide it. Tilting her head back, she blew a long line of perfect smoke rings into the air. Brunetti could not repress a smile of appreciation, which she saw.

‘Come with me,’ she said. ‘It’s cold out here.’

She turned and went across the small courtyard to a door, opened it, and climbed stiffly up a single steep flight of steps. They followed, Brunetti averting his eyes from the sight of her broad buttocks ahead of him on the steps. The hallway they entered was even colder than the courtyard had been. The only sound was their footsteps, his and Griffoni’s: when he did look, he saw that the woman wore bedroom slippers. No wonder they had not heard her cross the courtyard.

At the end of the corridor she opened a door that led to another corridor. She left it to them to follow her and close it, which Brunetti did. He thought of how many times he had watched this scene in films, both good and bad: the innocent welcomed into the home of the killer; the killers coming into the home of the innocent.

The woman paused in front of another door long enough to poke her cigarette into a brimming ashtray that stood on a walnut table. This door led to a dimly lit room that must once have been a library. Most of the shelves were empty, and what books remained lay like rectangular drunks, any which way, on the shelves. There was even a rolling wooden ladder attached to the shelves, leading up to the highest, they too almost completely devoid of books.

There was no smell of cigarettes in the room. No dust lingered on the books; the carpet was so freshly vacuumed that their shoes left prints on the pile. What little light remained in the day came effortlessly through the windows, which showed no trace of dirt or grime.

Lucrezia lowered herself into the middle of a plush sofa, her feet flat on the floor in front of her. She motioned them to the chairs which sat opposite. ‘What about her?’ she asked.

‘She worked for your family, didn’t she?’ Brunetti asked. Griffoni had, to all intents and purposes, become a deaf mute.

‘Yes. Many years ago.’

It was only then, hearing the way her voice pounded the words, that Brunetti realized she was drunk or drugged, at least enough for her speech to be affected. She moved her ponderous glance to Griffoni but seemed to find her as inert as Brunetti had. Was this all that was left of drugs, sex, and rock and roll? Surely no one could have imagined this.

‘What services did she perform for your family?’

A sudden flash of anger lit Lucrezia’s eyes and her hands drew themselves involuntarily into fists. But, within a second, her face was calm and her hands relaxed. ‘She was a maid, if that’s what you mean,’ she said stolidly.

‘For your mother?’ Brunetti asked, remembering a time when wealthy women had what were called ‘ladies’ maids’.

Again, that lightning flash, the involuntary motion of her hands followed by the instant calm. ‘No. She was the maid for the entire family.’

‘She was very young, wasn’t she?’

‘She was fifteen when she came here,’ she said. Her displeasure hit harder on the words this time, again giving voice to whatever she had drunk or used. ‘It depends on how young you consider that.’ Brunetti thought the age uninteresting; it was her response to it that struck him: why would she remember something like that from half a century ago?

‘It’s a dangerous age,’ Griffoni stunned him by saying, not so much for the words as by the fact that he had all but forgotten about her, sitting there, humble, plain, silent. Waiting.

Lucrezia’s eyes swivelled in the direction of the woman next to Brunetti and she studied this suddenly vocal thing. Griffoni was looking at the hands clasped in her lap, but enough of her face was visible for the other woman to see the suddenly furrowed brow and tightened mouth.

‘Dangerous,’ Lucrezia repeated with no expression at all. It might as easily have been a shoe size she was giving. With no explanation, she got to her feet, crossed the room, and went out, leaving the door open behind her.

Brunetti turned to his colleague with an inquisitive glance, but she, perhaps thinking of Lucrezia’s silent feet, held a finger to her lips and shook her head. He looked around the room again, made uncomfortable by the contrast between the spotless cleanliness and the disorderly state of the books.

Griffoni apparently incommunicado, he turned his thoughts to Davide Cavanella. He had no determinable age: he could have been born when Ana Cavanella worked here, or after. The family had watched her grow up, ripen, mature. He recalled, as if he had photographed them, Lucrezia’s tight hands, replayed the scene of her slowly relaxing them, forcing them, perhaps, to open and look natural. He recalled the look in her eyes when he asked what Ana’s services – such an inopportune choice of word – to the family had been. Who could know if she had been a ladies’ maid or a maid of all work, or what she had been? Or what her services were? And for whom?

Lucrezia Lembo came back into the room. Both Brunetti and Griffoni could see the difference: she was calmer, her body relaxed and her walk more fluid. Her hair, Brunetti thought, was the same, as was her body, but she looked refreshed, even younger; certainly happier.

She returned to her place on the sofa and lowered herself into it with another sigh. ‘We were saying?’ she asked, trying to smile in Brunetti’s direction but unable to keep her attention from returning to the silent Griffoni.

‘I was asking you about Ana Cavanella, who once worked for your family,’ Brunetti reminded her.

‘Yes, I think I remember her,’ Lucrezia said in a voice that had grown almost languid. ‘Pretty girl, wasn’t she?’

‘I didn’t know her then,’ Brunetti said, not thinking it expedient to tell her that he had been a child at the time. Then, deciding to lie, he added, ‘But my father might have.’

Her eyes turned to him, and only then came into focus. ‘How is that?’ she asked.

‘He ran a boat service, a kind of taxi, but he also transported precious objects for antique dealers.’ Brunetti put on his easiest smile, one filled with the remembrance of past times, happier times, in his father’s case, times that had never existed. ‘He had a delicate touch. That’s what the dealers said. So they trusted him to move things.’ Again, that smile. ‘I remember him speaking of your father.’ Given his age at the time, this was highly unlikely, but he doubted she would consider this.