His father-in-law took him to stand in front of a portrait Brunetti guessed to be sixteenth-century Veneto. The painting, no more than sixty by fifty centimetres, showed a bearded young man with his right hand placed rather artfully on his heart. His left hand pressed open the pages of a book while he assessed the viewer with intelligent eyes. Behind his right shoulder a window gave on to a view of mountains that made Brunetti think the painter might have been from Conegliano, perhaps from Vittorio Veneto. The subject’s handsome face was painted against a dark brown curtain, contrast provided by the high white collar of his shirt. Beneath it, he wore a red over-garment of some sort, and on top of that a black doublet. Two more flashes of white appeared at his cuffs, fluffy and frilly and very well painted, as were his face and hands.
‘Do you like it?’ the Conte asked.
‘Very much. Do you know anything about it?’
Before answering, the Conte stepped closer to the painting and drew Brunetti’s attention to the coat of arms just beside the subject’s right shoulder. The Conte held his finger in the air above it and turned to Brunetti to ask, ‘Do you think this could have been painted later?’
Brunetti stepped back to allow a longer perspective. He held up a hand to cover the coat of arms and saw that the proportions improved. He studied the portrait for a few moments more, then said, ‘I think so. Yes. But I don’t think I’d notice it unless someone pointed it out to me.’
The Conte gave a murmur of agreement.
‘What do you think happened?’ Brunetti asked.
‘I’m not sure,’ the Conte answered. ‘There’s really no way to know. But my guess is that this man somehow gained a title after the portrait was finished, so he took it back to the painter and asked him to add the coat of arms.’
‘Like backdating a cheque or a contract, isn’t it?’ Brunetti asked, interested that the impulse towards deceit should have remained so constant over the centuries. Then he said, ‘No new fashions in crime, I suppose.’
‘Is that your way of leading me to a discussion of Cataldo?’ the Conte asked, then quickly added, ‘And I mean that quite seriously, Guido.’
‘No,’ Brunetti said levelly. ‘All I’ve learned is that he’s rich. There’s no suggestion of crime.’ He looked at his father-in-law. ‘Do you know something I don’t?’
The Conte moved aside to look at another painting, a life-sized portrait of a fat-faced woman bedecked in jewels and brocade. ‘If only she weren’t so vulgar,’ he said, glancing back at Brunetti. ‘It’s so beautifully painted, I’d buy it in a minute. But I couldn’t stand to live with her in the house.’ He reached out his hand and literally dragged Brunetti to stand in front of the painting. ‘Could you?’
Fashions in beauty and body size changed over the centuries, Brunetti knew, and so her girth might have been appealing to some seventeenth-century lover or husband. But her look of swinish gluttony would be offensive through the ages. Her skin glistened with grease, not with health; her teeth, however white and even, were those of an eager carnivore; the creases in the fat of her wrists spoke of embedded dirt. The gown from which her bosom spilled did not so much cover her flesh as restrain it from bursting out.
But, as the Conte had observed, she was gloriously well painted, with brush strokes that captured the glint of her eyes, the rich abundance of her golden hair, even the plush red brocade of the gown that exposed too much of her bosom.
‘It’s a remarkably modern painting,’ the Conte said and took Brunetti aside to a pair of velvet-covered armchairs that might originally have been made to seat members of the senior clergy.
‘I don’t see it,’ Brunetti said, surprised at how comfortable the formidable chair was. ‘Not modern.’
‘She represents consumption,’ the Conte said, waving back at the painting. ‘Just have a look at the size of her and think of the amount she’s had to eat in her lifetime to create that mass of flesh, to make no mention of what she’d have to eat to maintain it. And look at the colour of those cheeks: that’s a woman much given to drink. Again, just imagine the quantities. And the brocade: how many silkworms perished to produce her dress and mantle, or the silk on her chair? Look at her jewellery. How many men died in the gold mines to produce it? Who died digging out the ruby in the ring? And the bowl of fruit on the table next to her? Who cultivated those peaches? Who made the glass next to the fruit bowl?’
Brunetti looked at the painting with this new optic, seeing it as a manifestation of the wealth that feeds consumption and is in turn fed by it. The Conte was right: it could easily be read this way, but just as easily it could be seen as an example of the skill of the painter and the tastes of his age.
‘And are you going to make some connection in all of this to Cataldo?’ Brunetti asked in a light voice.
‘Consumption, Guido,’ the Conte went on as if Brunetti had not spoken. ‘Consumption. We’re obsessed by it. Our desire is to have not one, but six, televisions. To have a new telefonino every year, perhaps every six months, as new models are produced. And advertised. To upgrade our computers every time there is a new operating system, or every time the screens become bigger, or smaller, or flatter or, for all I know, rounder.’ Brunetti thought of his request for his own computer and wondered where this speech was going.
‘If you’re wondering where all of this is leading,’ the Conte astonished him by saying, ‘it’s leading into the garbage.’ The Conte turned to him as though he had just delivered the final proof of the validity of a syllogism or an algebraic formula, and Brunetti stared at him.
The Conte, no mean showman, allowed time to pass. From the other room of the gallery, they heard the owner turn a page of his book.
At last the Conte said, ‘Garbage, Guido. Garbage. That’s what Cataldo wanted to propose to me.’
Brunetti remembered the list of Cataldo’s businesses and began to study them in a new light. ‘Aha,’ he permitted himself to say.
‘You at least did some research on him, didn’t you?’ the Conte asked.
‘Yes.’
‘And you know what businesses he’s involved in?’
‘Yes,’ Brunetti said, ‘at least some of them. Shipping: cargo ships and trucks.’
‘Shipping,’ the Conte repeated. ‘And heavy equipment for excavation,’ he added.’ He has a shipping line, and trucks. And earth-moving equipment. He also — and I found out about this only through my own people, who are sometimes as good as yours — has a waste disposal business that gets rid of all of those things I was just talking about that we don’t want any more: telefonini, computers, fax machines, answering machines.’ The Conte glanced back at the portrait of the woman and said, ‘Most desirable model one year; the next year, useless junk.’
Brunetti, who knew where this was leading, decided to remain silent.
‘That’s the secret, Guido: new model one year, junk the next. Because there are so many of us and because we consume so much junk and throw away so much junk, someone has to be around to pick it up and dispose of it for us. It used to be that people were happy to be handed old junk: our kids took our old computers or our old televisions. But now everyone has to have new junk, their own junk. So now we not only have to pay to buy it; we also have to pay to get rid of it.’ The Conte’s tone was calm, descriptive. Brunetti had heard his daughter and granddaughter give much the same speech, but the Conte’s descendants delivered it with anger, not with his cool dispassion.