‘Ciao, Guido, come stai?’ Then, without waiting for an answer, he explained. ‘Not enough light today. I went out to the Zattere this morning, but I came back without doing anything. The light’s flat, dead. So I came back here to fix lunch for Claudia.’
‘How is she?’
‘Fine, fine. And Paola?’
‘Good, so are the kids. Look, Lele, I’d like to talk to you. Can you spare me some time this afternoon?’
‘Talk talk or police talk??
‘Police talk, I’m afraid. Or I think it is.’
‘I’ll be at the gallery after three if you want to come over then. Until about five.’ From the background, Brunetti heard a hissing sound, a muttered, ‘Puttana Eva,’ and then Lele said, ‘Guido, I’ve got to go. The pasta’s boiling over.’ Brunetti barely had time to say goodbye before the phone went dead.
If anyone would know about Semenzato’s reputation, it was Lele. Gabriele Cossato, painter, antiquarian, lover of beauty, was as much a part of Venice, it seemed, as were the four Moors, poised in eternal confabulation to the right of the basilica of San Marco. For as far back as Brunetti could remember, there had been Lele, and Lele had been a painter. When Brunetti remembered his childhood, he recalled Lele, a friend of his father, and he remembered the stories, told then even to him, for he was a boy and so was expected to understand, about Lele’s women, that endless succession of donne, signore, ragazze, with whom Lele would appear at the Brunettis’ table. The women were all gone now, forgotten in his love for his wife of many years, but his passion for the beauty of the city remained, that and his limitless familiarity with the art world and all it encompassed: antiquarians and dealers, museums and galleries.
He decided to go home for lunch and then go to see Lele directly from there. But then he remembered that it was Tuesday, which meant that Paola would be having lunch with the members of her department at the university, and that in its turn meant that the children would eat with their grandparents, leaving him to cook and eat a meal alone. To avoid that, he went to a local trattoria and spent the meal thinking about what could be so important about a discussion between an archaeologist and a museum director that it had to be prevented with such violence.
A little after three, he crossed the Accademia Bridge and cut left towards Campo San Vio and, beyond it, Lele’s gallery. The artist was there when he arrived, perched on a ladder, a torch in one hand, a pair of electrical clippers in the other, reaching into a spaghetti-like mass of electrical wires housed behind a wooden panel above the door to the back room of the gallery. Brunetti was so accustomed to seeing Lele in his three-piece pin-striped suits that, even though the painter was perched at the top of the ladder, his position seemed not at all incongruous. Looking down, Lele greeted him, ‘Ciao, Guido. Just a minute while I join these together.’ So saying, he laid the torch on the top of the ladder, peeled back the plastic covering off one wire, twisted the exposed part around a second wire, then took a thick roll of black tape from his back pocket and bound the two together. With the point of the clippers, he poked the wire back among the others that ran parallel to it. Then, looking down at Brunetti, he said, ‘Guido, go into the storeroom and throw the switch for the current.’
Obedient, he went into the large storeroom on the right and stood for a moment at the door, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the deeper darkness.
‘Just on the left,’ Lele called.
Turning, he saw the large electrical panel attached to the wall. He pulled the main circuit breaker down, and the storeroom was suddenly flooded with light. He waited again, this time for his eyes to adjust to the brightness, then went back into the main room of the gallery.
Lele was already down from the ladder, the panel closed above him. ‘Hold the door,’ he said and walked towards Brunetti, carrying his ladder. He quickly stored it in the back room and emerged, brushing dust from his hands.
‘Pantegana,’ he explained, giving the Venetian name for rat, a word which, though it named them clearly - rat - still managed to make them, in the naming, somehow charming and domestic. ‘They come and eat the covering on the wires.’
‘Can’t you poison them?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Bah,’ Lele snorted. ‘They prefer the poison to the plastic. They thrive on it. I can’t even keep paintings in the storeroom anymore; they come in and eat the canvas. Or the wood.’
Brunetti looked automatically at the paintings hanging on the walls of the gallery, vividly coloured scenes of the city, alive with light and filled with Lele’s energy.
No, they’re safe. They’re too high up. But some day I expect to come in and find the little bastards have moved the ladder in the night and climbed up to eat them all.’ The fact that Lele laughed when he said this made him sound no less serious about it. He dropped the clippers and tape into a drawer and turned to Brunetti. ‘All right, what is this talk that might be police talk?’
‘Semenzato, at the museum, and the Chinese exhibition held there a few years ago,’ Brunetti explained.
Lele grunted in acknowledgement of the request and moved across the room to stand under a wrought-iron candelabrum attached to the wall. He reached up and bent one of the leaf-shaped prongs a bit to the left, stepped back to examine it, then leaned forward to bend it a tiny bit more. Satisfied, he went back to Brunetti.
‘He’s been at the museum for about eight years, Semenzato, and he’s managed to organize a number of international shows. That means he’s got good connections with museums or their directors in foreign countries, knows a lot of people in lots of places.’
‘Anything else?’ Brunetti asked, voice neutral.
‘He’s a good administrator. He’s hired a number of excellent people and brought them to Venice. There are two restorers he all but stole from the Courtauld, and he’s done a lot to change the way the exhibitions are publicized.’
‘Yes, I’ve noticed that.’ At times, Brunetti felt that Venice had been turned into a whore forced to choose between different Johns: first the city was offered the face from a Phoenician glass earring, saw the poster reproduced a thousand times, then that was quickly replaced with a portrait by Titian, which in turn was driven out by Andy Warhol, himself then quickly banished by a Celtic silver deer as the museums covered every available surface in the city and vied endlessly for the attention and box office receipts of the passing tourists. What would come next, he wondered, Leonardo T-shirts? No, they already had them in Florence. He’d seen enough posters for art shows to last a lifetime in hell.
‘Do you know him?’ Brunetti asked, wondering if that was the reason for Lele’s uncharacteristic objectivity.
‘Oh, we’ve met a few times.’
‘Where?’
‘The museum has called me in a few times to ask about majolica pieces they were offered, if I thought they were genuine or not.’
‘And you met him then?’
‘Yes.’
‘What did you think of him personally?’
‘He seemed a very pleasant, competent man.’