Donna Leon - The Golden Egg

Her eyes widened, but then she smiled. ‘It was too much for me, I think,’ she said.

‘What was?’

‘Doing that to that poor woman.’

‘Doing what?’

‘Getting her to tell me about her mother and the way she prayed the rosary.’ Then, after a moment and with deadly seriousness, ‘What a monster.’

‘That poor thing?’ Brunetti asked, nodding his head back towards the closed door to the palazzo .

‘No, the mother.’

23

Deciding she needed something to drink, Brunetti helped Griffoni to stand and waited while she steadied herself. At her nod, he latched his arm in hers, and they set off together. They turned to the right, crossed the bridge, then went into the bar. Luckily, a small table at the back was free. ‘A chamomile,’ she said in response to his look: Brunetti went back to the bar and asked for the tea and a coffee, then changed it to two pots of tea. His mother had said it was good for emergencies, and this seemed close to being one.

He went back to the table. He heard the swish of steam, the clatter of crockery, and soon the waitress brought their teas. He put her teabag into the pot, then did the same with his own. He added two packets of sugar to Griffoni’s cup, ignoring her protest that she didn’t want any, and two to his own.

Her face was stiff, the way the kids’ used to be when they first went walking, then skiing, in the mountains. He decided hers would thaw: it just took time and a warm place.

He picked up his cup and blew at the surface then stirred it a few times, and blew on it again: she mirrored his actions. Finally he chanced it and took a small sip: still hot but no longer boiling. He set the cup down and began to stir it again. When the temperature was right, Brunetti said, ‘Tell me.’

She sipped at her tea a few times, then added more to the cup without adding more sugar, as if to show him how she liked it. Another sip. Then she said, ‘“Purity”. That was the word that set her off, I think. Her mother was mad for it. Baths, hand-washing, clean clothing twice a day. They had maids, so they could do that. Then,’ she continued, pausing to drink more tea, ‘when they got older, she started talking to them about a different type of purity. There was a nun living with them, and priests all over the place.’

Griffoni stopped speaking and finished her cup of tea. With undisguised exasperation, she demanded, ‘Why do people make such a mess of everything?’

Brunetti shrugged. He had never found an answer to that one.

‘When they got bigger, she sent them to a girls’ school in Ireland, but then she got sick – the mother – and Lucrezia had to come back and take care of her.’

‘Sick with what?’

‘I didn’t understand,’ she said and glanced at Brunetti, as if weighing how far she could go. ‘It sounded like one of those diseases rich women in novels get.’

‘And the father during all of this?’

‘I don’t know, really,’ Griffoni said, her confusion audible. ‘It’s as if he didn’t exist.’

‘How can you be the King of Copper and not exist?’

‘I don’t know,’ she repeated, her voice tight. ‘I asked her about him, but she said he never counted for anything: the company belonged to her mother’s family: he was in charge only because he married her. He was always away, working. They had mines everywhere, and he would go off to see them.’

To Brunetti, it sounded like the stories he had heard about the days of La Serenissima Repubblica, when the merchants who sailed with their fleets came home once a year, stayed long enough to unload and reload their cargos and impregnate their wives, and then off again in pursuit of gain.

Colour had returned to her face, and her voice had steadied. First Pucetti befriended Ana Cavanella and now Lucrezia Lembo had confided in Griffoni: was he trapped in a nest of vipers able to worm themselves into people’s sympathies? Was he another one?

Brunetti finished his tea and looked towards the bar, hoping to catch the waitress’ eye. Griffoni leaned her head back and closed her eyes, much in the manner of Lucrezia Lembo.

Then she opened them, tried to smile, and said, ‘I’m sorry, Guido. I just feel so sorry for her. For them all.’

‘It shouldn’t happen,’ Brunetti said, ‘that stupidity costs so much.’

This time, it was she who didn’t understand: he saw it in her face. ‘Her mother and her talk of purity,’ he said, and then, with no introduction, added, ‘The doctor who treated Ana Cavanella and her son said she never tried to get him any help: no tests, no teaching, nothing.’ He saw Griffoni’s astonishment. ‘He said she was so stupid she was ashamed of the fact that he was deaf. That she saw it as God’s punishment for her sin, so she let him grow up like an animal. And die like one.’

‘Is any of this enough to make you want to stop?’ she asked, waving her hand as if to take in the room, the palazzo across the bridge, Ana Cavanella, and her dead son.

‘No.’

‘What next, then?’ The eagerness with which she asked this pleased him.

‘We keep looking until we find something, I suppose,’ he said.

‘Good.’

Brunetti considered going back to the Questura for an hour to begin to hunt through the public record for further traces of the Copper King’s family but dismissed the idea. He could not invite Claudia Griffoni back to the house and tell his wife that they would be working on the computer for a while and she should just go about making dinner, perhaps set an extra plate for their guest,

could he?

When he saw how exhausted Griffoni looked, he suggested they start the next morning, knowing she would agree. She did and stopped him from offering to take her home by saying she felt much better. ‘It was bad, but not terrible, doing that to her,’ she said. Then, trying to sound casual about it, she added, ‘It’s the part I dislike most: getting people to trust you and then using that to get things from them.’

‘It’s part of the job,’ Brunetti added, ‘though I don’t like it, either.’

They walked slowly towards the imbarcadero . She stopped and faced him to say, ‘Sometimes, though, with the bad ones, there’s satisfaction in it.’ When Brunetti remained impassive, she added, ‘It’s hard at times, especially with the younger officers, to listen to them talk about the way people are victims of society or circumstances

or their families.’

‘What about Lucrezia Lembo?’ Brunetti couldn’t stop himself from asking, though there was no evidence that she was bad in any way, just weak and unstable.

She smiled. ‘I set myself up for that one, didn’t I?’

‘Yes.’

She started towards the Accademia stop again. ‘I meant the ones who beat up their girlfriends or kill or rob someone and then kick him in the face just to show how tough they are. Those are the ones.’

Brunetti agreed with her but said nothing. They heard her boat approaching and hurried on to the covered dock. He patted her arm a few times and waited while she got on, then turned and went to the other dock to wait for his own boat.

He woke and looked out the window of their bedroom; the moral hangover from the evening before glowered back at him from the grey clouds hanging motionless over the city. He turned aside, but Paola was not there, and when he stretched out a hand under the covers – complimenting himself on his instincts as a policeman – he felt that her place was cold. He looked at the clock: almost nine.

Pyjama-clad, he went into the kitchen but found no one. The only sign of life was a coffee cup in the sink and the Moka still on the stove. Like Paola’s place in their bed, it was cold. He rinsed it out, put in water and coffee, and set it back on a low flame. From the window that looked at the far-off Dolomites, he saw that the clouds stretched all the way up there, darkening in the distance.