Donna Leon - The Golden Egg

‘Why does it concern you so much?’ Signora Ghezzi asked. Griffoni turned and looked at him, as curious as the other woman.

‘Because everything I’ve been told since he died means something different, and everyone I talk to has something to hide or that they don’t want me to know.’ He remembered the stone-blank faces of the neighbours and their truculent refusal to speak. Solidarity with an unfortunate woman who had lost her only son? Shame at having been part of the even greater silence that had filled the life of the deaf man?

Brunetti shoved his chair back and got to his feet. He took two steps away from the table but turned back and sat down again. He looked across at Signora Ghezzi’s lined face, feeling himself reduced to honesty. ‘What should I know, Signora?’

Slowly she got to her feet and stood for a moment to steady herself, the way many old people did when standing up after having been sitting for any length of time. She stacked her cup and Brunetti’s but, before she could reach for Griffoni’s, the younger woman stood and carried her cup to the sink. Taking the plastic box to the counter, she put on the cover and snapped it closed.

She took the other cups from Signora Ghezzi, put them in the sink and ran cold water in them. After that she stood by the window, leaving it to the others to decide what was going to happen.

Signora Ghezzi kept one palm flat on the table. ‘I think you should find out who owns the house where Ana lives,’ she said. ‘And I think you should bear in mind that most people don’t change as they go through life, and as life goes through them.’

‘Do you mean Ana?’

‘I mean all of them,’ she said. She appeared to consider this, then added, ‘Lucrezia is the best of them. Of all the people you’ll meet because of this, she’s the only honest one.’

‘Not Ana?’

‘Ana Cavanella is a cold-hearted viper,’ she said with no inflection whatsoever. ‘But Signora Lembo was worse.’

If this kind-eyed old woman had hurled herself to the floor in a fit of demonic possession and begun to scream obscenities at him and Griffoni, Brunetti could have been no more startled. That would have shocked him only for herself, but her quietly spoken words spurred him to re-examine most of the people he had spoken to or heard about during the last days.

Ana Cavanella was the bereaved mother; Lucrezia was a ruin; Signora Lembo the much-photographed wife, mother, and saint. The King of Copper remained an enigma: powerful, potent, always away on business.

In a voice softer than Brunetti had ever heard her use, Griffoni broke the silence to ask, ‘Will you tell us more, Signora?’

Neither woman moved, then Signora Ghezzi lowered herself into her chair, looked at both of them and finally said, ‘Most of them are dead, you know. All that’s left is the money, and it’s never done them any good. Now all they can do is fight over that. No, I don’t think I want to tell you any more. Because it doesn’t make any difference.’

Brunetti opened his mouth to speak, perhaps to protest, but she raised a hand, and he stopped. ‘I’m older than you are, Signore,’ she told him and then, with a kind look towards Griffoni, ‘and much older than the Signora, and I have my own ideas about this, different from yours.’

There was a ring of liquid on the surface of the table, and she stuck a forefinger into it and rubbed at it until it was gone. She looked at Brunetti and addressed him. ‘They all did things because of the way they are, you know, not because they wanted something or because of something special that happened. It’s just the way they are. And that doesn’t change.’

She leaned forward, as if to push herself to her feet again, but gave up the effort and settled back into her chair. ‘You can go now, and thank you for the visit. It’s nice for old people to see new faces. It’s not good for us always to look at the faces from the past.’ She smiled after she said this and waved a hand as a signal of some sort: to brush them out of her house; to wish them well; to sum up the futility of human desires. It could have been any one of these. Or all of them. They left.

‘Do we go and talk to her?’ Griffoni asked.

It was convenience that decided him. They were less than a hundred metres from the Celestia stop, and he could hear the boat approaching from the right. Instead of answering, he turned away and walked quickly to the imbarcadero ; she followed in his wake.

As the boat pulled up, Brunetti turned and said, ‘Go back and find out who owns the house. Call me as soon as you know. I’ll be at the hospital.’

Griffoni was walking away even before he was on the boat for the one-stop trip to the Ospedale. When he asked at the desk in the entrance hall, Brunetti was told that Signora Cavanella had been taken to Geriatria, the only ward with free beds.

Brunetti made his way through the courtyard, decided to take the steps, and heard the ward as soon as he turned into the last flight. A high-pitched voice, no telling its sex, began to climb up the scales, dully repeating ‘No, no, no, no,’ until it reached the top of its vocal range and fell back down into the lower notes, only to begin again. Brunetti emerged at the nurses’ desk and asked where he could find Signora Cavanella.

‘Room fifteen,’ the nurse said, without glancing up from her magazine.

He passed the room from which the voice was coming, turned right and then left at the end of the corridor, the voice growing fainter, but no less agonized, with each turn. He stopped just before the next to last room in the corridor, not certain how he was going to deal with a woman who had, with a phrase, been transformed from a bereaved mother to a cold-hearted viper. Deciding that he would leave it to events to resolve that, he knocked lightly on the side of the open door and went in.

An old man slept in the bed closest to the door, toothless mouth agape. In the other bed, a long, mountainous form lay under the blankets; Brunetti didn’t even have to look at the bearded face to know it was a man and that he’d entered the wrong room. He turned and took one step towards the door and suddenly stopped as he saw a man he knew pass by, coming from the direction of the last room on the ward. Leaving him enough time to get beyond the door, Brunetti moved quickly over and put his head out into the corridor.

He recognized the portly form that moved away, feet splayed to either side, forced there by thick thighs. From his right hand hung the battered brown leather briefcase that had, over the years, become a metaphor for the man: Beni Borsetta, aka Beniamino Cresti, lawyer to the masses, paladin of the lower orders in their endless fight against the myriad injustices of the wealthy and successful. For a mere 50 per cent, it was rumoured in some circles.

As Brunetti watched, Cresti turned right at the end of the corridor, showing in profile the out-thrust paunch that Brunetti had several times seen clear a path from the courtrooms in which Avvocato Cresti had worked in the pursuit of justice.

He glanced at his watch, propped his shoulders against the wall of the corridor, and began to draw up a list of reasons why Beni Borsetta might have taken his briefcase on a visit to the hospital. He could come up with none he liked, but he found all of them interesting. He let a few minutes pass before he went down to the door from which the lawyer had emerged. Standing slightly to the side, he knocked and said, in a normal voice, ‘Signora Cavanella?’

He heard a voice answer and went in. She was sitting up in bed today, looking much better, though her face was worse. That is, though she recognized him and seemed fully conscious, the entire left side, from the eye to her hairline and down across her cheekbone and almost to her chin, had turned a light grey-red that Brunetti knew would, in two days, turn almost black.