Donna Leon - The Golden Egg

They went to bed, and the next day dawned bright, but much colder.

Well, he’d gone this far, animated by nothing more noble than curiosity, he told himself as he studied the face of the man in the mirror, pushing his collar down over his neatly knotted tie. The man’s mind slipped into English: The cat’s got your tongue. Curiosity killed the cat. To stay in vein, the man in the mirror gave a Cheshire smile, and Brunetti left the house.

He could have gone anywhere. Because he was a commissario and there was little crime in the city at the moment, he probably could have got on a boat and gone out to the Lido to walk on the beach, but he walked the same old, familiar old, calli to the hospital and went to Geriatria, where his mother – she too having lost her mooring to language during her long descent – had once spent some months. Things looked cleaner, but the smell was the same.

He went in without knocking and found Ana Cavanella sitting in an orange plastic chair, staring out the window. A woman attached to a number of plastic tubes, like a ship unloading liquid cargo while taking on fuel at the same time, lay in the other bed, sailing on some other sea, not docked there with them.

Cavanella looked up at him, face impassive and unfriendly. The left side was almost black, darkest at the point on her forehead where the closing door had hit her.

Brunetti went and stood with his back to the window so at least what little light there was would shine on her face and into her eyes. ‘I’ve spoken to Lucrezia Lembo,’ he said.

‘About me?’ she asked.

‘The Signora and I have nothing else in common.’

‘You’re a policeman: what interest can you have in me?’

‘I’m curious about how you plan to prove it.’

‘Prove what?’ she asked, but her eyes slid across to the sleeping woman.

‘That Ludovico Lembo was Davide’s father.’

She was silent for a long time, and he watched her search for a way to answer him.

He watched her fight the desire to show him that she was clever, too. She lost. ‘There’s that test. DNU.’ She still hadn’t learned, yet she allowed herself the self-satisfied smile of the dullest student who believed she knew something the others didn’t.

‘And what will that prove?’

‘That he is. The father. Because of his other children. They can match them. It’s scientific.’

He decided not to tell her yet and, instead, asked, ‘And if no judge will order the test? After all, anyone can make that claim about any rich man, can’t they?’ To himself at least, his question sounded entirely reasonable.

She gave it long thought, consulted with the somnolent woman in the bed, with the tops of the pine trees

that rose up from the courtyard below. ‘Really?’ she asked, just as though she believed she could ask him to work in her best interests and suggest some other outcome.

‘You need stronger evidence.’

She tried, and failed, to repress a smile. He marvelled that he had ever seen signs of beauty in this face. ‘I have a letter,’ she said.

‘From him.’

‘His lawyer wrote to tell me about the house and about the money.’ To show her expertise, she added, ‘It’s dated, too,’ and could not repress a smile. Then, her voice a mixture of anger and self-satisfaction, ‘Any judge would believe that. People don’t give money away unless you force them.’

He’d let her go on believing for a while yet. ‘And you’re Davide’s heir, aren’t you?’ he asked as if the thought had just come to him.

‘Yes.’

‘First it goes to his estate, and then it passes to you?’

‘Yes.’ She was incapable of disguising how excited she was by this possibility, which to her was a fact. The right side of her face flushed pink at the thought: the other side remained close to black.

‘And the house and the money in the bank?’

‘That doesn’t matter now, does it?’ she asked, speaking with what life had taught her was the arrogance of wealth. A house with no rent to pay, three thousand Euros a month: these had suddenly become small change to the likes of Ana Cavanella, soon to be the heiress to one third of an immense inheritance. What did such paltry things mean to the mother of the son and heir of the King of Copper?

‘His death was very unfortunate,’ Brunetti said.

It was clear that she didn’t know who Brunetti was talking about, her son or her son’s father. But her face soon found a pious expression that suited both, and she said, ‘Yes. Very.’

‘But fortunate, in a way,’ Brunetti encouraged her. ‘Davide never would have appreciated all that money.’

She tried to suppress her smile and managed it after only an instant, but the sight of her teeth had been enough to seize Brunetti with the desire to strike her. He took a small step back, but it was to distance himself from her physically, not from the temptation of violence, which had only flashed through him, leaving him shocked.

‘I could have bought him so many things,’ she said with falsity so palpable Brunetti was amazed the woman in the other bed didn’t wake up screaming.

‘A radio, for instance,’ Brunetti suggested.

‘But he was deaf.’

‘Was he, Signora?’

‘What do you mean?’

There it was again, that question that was really an answer. ‘I mean there was nothing wrong with his ears. With his hearing, that is. The autopsy showed that.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Everyone in the neighbourhood understands, Signora.’

He watched her move from idea to idea, excuse to excuse, pose to pose. She couldn’t ask him again what he meant, so she settled on an angry noise instead of words.

‘They know, Signora.’

‘They don’t know anything,’ she hissed.

‘And once you make your claim to the inheritance, they’ll know about what happened to Davide, too. And if it comes to law, they’ll learn about the hot chocolate and biscuits he had, along with the little yellow candies.’

This time, one half of her face went white while the other remained suffused with the signs of the blow. She tried to speak, to give voice to the indignation she knew she was supposed to show, but she failed, tried again, choking with rage. Choking. He was conscious of that. Finally she managed to spit it out: ‘It doesn’t matter. Let them think what they want.’

A loud noise came from behind him; when Brunetti turned, he saw an immensely tall building crane slam a metal ball into the remaining wall of one of the old hospital buildings alongside the laguna . A piece of wall crumbled to the pile of rubble below, and an enormous cloud of white dust climbed up the wall that remained. Through the new opening, Brunetti saw, across the water, the wall of the cemetery and the tower of the church behind it, the tips of the peaceful cypress trees.

Brunetti decided not to tell her. Let her follow Beni Borsetta’s advice and demand a ‘DNU’ test. And please let some compassionate judge grant it to her, and let Lucrezia and – if she ever appeared – Lavinia give a sample of their DNU, and let the test show that their father was not the father of Ana Cavanella’s child. And let her live with that: with no home and no monthly cheque and with former neighbours, he hoped, pushed past the point of tolerance and the acceptance of what can’t be proven and needing a way to punish someone for their own guilt. And without her son. Though nothing he had seen so far suggested that this would bother her much.

Wasting no more words on her Brunetti left the hospital to go and get the boat to the Lido to go for a walk on the beach.