Donna Leon - The Golden Egg

‘Perhaps,’ he began, reaching forward and picking up one of the papers, ‘. . . Maria Annunziata Ghezzi can

tell us.’

Maria Annunziata Ghezzi, it turned out, lived down towards the end of Castello, behind San Francesco della Vigna, and was easy to find in the phone book. She answered Brunetti’s phone call with her name, and when he spoke to her in Veneziano, answered readily. Yes, she had worked for the Lembo family. No, she was no longer in touch with them, aside from receiving her pension, and that came from the state, not from them.

Brunetti asked her if she would be willing to talk to him. ‘It’s about that boy who died, isn’t it?’ she replied.

‘Davide Cavanella?’ he asked.

‘Yes. Ana’s boy.’

‘Yes, Signora. It is.’

There followed a long silence; Brunetti chose not to break it. Finally she said, ‘Then you better come here, and we’ll talk.’

He debated, but for only an instant, the wisdom of taking Griffoni with him. Against her failure to speak Veneziano, he weighed her femininity and the ease of her presence. ‘Feel like a walk?’ he asked.

‘Let me go and get my coat.’

On the way there, they talked about her investigation of the fire in the factory. ‘No one saw anything. No one heard anything,’ Griffoni said.

‘You sound as if you don’t believe it,’ Brunetti said.

She paused at the bottom of the bridge that led to San Francesco. ‘I don’t,’ she said. ‘The fire started inside the factory. It had been broken into years ago, and people used it. I don’t want to know what they used it for. It looks as if it started in a room where old paint and rags were stored.’

Years ago, Brunetti would have interjected here, ‘or put’, but time had taught him to control the impulse to insert trouble where it was not at first found. He had not read the report of the arson squad, and if ‘stored’ was good enough for them, it was good enough for him. From the very first suggestion, at a city council meeting – it must have been six years ago – that the building was suitable for transformation into a hotel, Brunetti had been interested only in how it would be brought to pass.

They continued towards Signora Grezzi’s address. ‘I’ve been thinking,’ Griffoni said.

‘Always a dangerous thing for a woman,’ Brunetti replied flatly.

As if he had not spoken, she said, ‘About how we’re always being made conscious of our regional differences: dialect, food, customs, even our appearance.’ This came from a Neapolitan who was a clear-eyed blonde almost as tall as he.

‘And then I think about the way no one is going to bother to investigate this fire or go to the trouble of finding out what might have caused it. If anything did cause it. Deliberately, I mean.’

‘And your point?’

‘That those differences of dialect and food and customs are all meaningless.’

‘Because?’

‘Because in the end, we’re all the same: beaten down by this system that is never going to change, by the people who are on top and who do exactly what they want to do.’ She sounded not in the least angry. If anything, she sounded relieved, but that might be from nothing other than being able, finally, to say this to someone.

Brunetti stopped to try to remember which was Ramo Sagredo or when he had last been near it. His feet suddenly remembered and took him to the left.

He led her through the underpass and stopped at the corner. ‘Well?’ she asked.

Brunetti gave her a level look. ‘It’s the twenty-first century, Griffoni. And that’s the future.’

‘You don’t mind?’ she asked.

‘Of course I mind,’ he answered. ‘But there’s nothing we can do.’

She turned and looked at the slice of laguna exposed between the buildings. ‘Except talk to Signora Ghezzi?’ she finally guessed.

‘Exactly.’

The old woman lived on the fourth floor, the windows of her kitchen, where she asked them to come to talk to her, looking out at the laguna and the cemetery. Though Brunetti knew from her pension records that she was eighty-four, Signora Ghezzi appeared at least a decade younger. White-haired and round-faced, she had the apple-skin wrinkles he had seen on the faces of his mother’s friends. Her expression, however, was that of a younger person, quick and intelligent. She offered them coffee, and both accepted.

Griffoni went and stood at the window, watching the boats and clouds chase one another to the east. ‘How beautiful, to stand here,’ she said. Signora Ghezzi turned from taking cups and saucers from the cupboard and smiled at her, but Brunetti wondered uneasily if this were simply another attempt to flatter a witness into confiding in them.

The coffee bubbled up and was quickly served. When it was put in front of them – Griffoni having taken her place at the table – Signora Ghezzi asked, ‘What is it you’d like to know?’

‘We wondered if you could tell us about Ana and about the Lembo family,’ Brunetti said, deciding that subterfuge was not likely to work with this woman.

Signora Ghezzi spooned sugar into her coffee; Brunetti noticed the faint tremor in her hand, the grains of sugar on the table and in the saucer. ‘Why?’ she asked.

‘Because I don’t like the way Davide lived,’ Brunetti surprised himself by saying.

He surprised Signora Ghezzi, too, who asked, ‘What do you mean?’

‘He was born with physical and mental problems, and his mother never did anything about them – to help him. That’s one thing, and it’s terrible. But no one else ever did anything to help. No doctor or social worker and no city office. Nothing. No one paid attention, and he grew up the way he did.’

‘I never saw him as a baby, you know.’

They were speaking in Veneziano, hers the accent of deepest Castello, the one he loved the most. He glanced at Griffoni, who seemed to be following everything; not that he could stop to ask this, not now. What was it Ana Cavanella had never done? Helped? Cared enough? Had the intelligence to know how to help? Did what he, four decades later, thought she should have done? ‘She never tried to get him help,’ he repeated.

‘How do you know this?’ Signora Ghezzi asked.

Brunetti opened his hands in a display of candour. ‘We’ve checked all the city records, and there’s no sign of Davide: no health card, and he never went to school, and he had no pension.’

She looked away from Brunetti and out the window, as if only the long view across the water could help relieve her feelings. Neither Brunetti nor Griffoni said anything. ‘She must have done it like that,’ she said.

Alert to her remark but not wanting her to realize that he was, Brunetti contented himself with saying, ‘Would you tell me about her, Signora?’

‘There’s not much to tell, really.’ She took a sip of coffee, reached her spoon towards the sugar bowl, but pulled it back, as if she heard the reproachful voice of her doctor telling her not to use so much sugar.

‘Ana was a simple girl. When she came. I don’t know how much schooling she’d had: maybe until a year before she came to us.’ Absently, she stirred her coffee.

‘There was a woman who did the laundry and the ironing – the signora was crazy for having things washed and ironed, and it took this woman three days a week to keep everything looking the way she wanted it.’ She took another sip of coffee, then got up and went to the cabinet for a plastic box filled with biscuits. She set them on the table and took one, dipped it into her coffee and bit off the very end of it. Both of them reached in and took a biscuit.

‘Where was I?’ she asked, looking from one to the other of them.

‘The ironing woman,’ Griffoni said.