He stood at the window for some time, until he was distracted by Signorina Elettra’s cheerful ‘Buon giorno.’ Today she was in yellow, a soft silk dress that fell to her knees, and heels so sharp he was glad his floor was stone and not parquet. Like the flowers and the gulls and the soft breezes, she brought grace into the room with her, and he smiled with something that felt like joy.
‘Buon giorno, signorina,’ he said. ‘You look especially lovely today. Like spring itself.’
‘Ah, this rag,’ she said dismissively and flipped fingers down towards the skirt of the dress that must have cost her more than a week’s salary. Her smile was at odds with her words, so he didn’t insist.
She handed him two files with a letter clipped to the top of them. ‘This needs your signature, Dottore.’
‘La Capra?’ he asked.
‘Yes. It’s your statement about why you and Officer Vianello went into the palazzo that night.’
‘Ah, yes,’ he muttered while he read quickly through the two-page document, written in response to the complaint of La Capra’s lawyers that Brunetti’s entrance into his home two months before had been illegal. Addressed to the Praetore, it explained that, during the course of his investigation, he had become increasingly convinced that La Capra had played some role in Semenzato’s murder and cited as evidence the fact that Salvatore La Capra’s fingerprints had been found in Semenzato’s office. Acting upon that and spurred by Dottoressa Lynch’s disappearance, he had gone to the La Capra palazzo with Sergeant Vianello and Signora Petrelli. Upon arriving, they had found the door to the courtyard open (as mentioned in the statements given by both Sergeant Vianello and Signora Petrelli) and had entered when they heard what sounded like the screams of a woman. His report carried a full description of events pursuant to their arrival (again, confirmed by the statements of Sergeant Vianello and Signora Petrelli); he offered this explanation to the Praetore to set his mind at rest that their entrance into the property of Signor La Capra had been well within the limits of the law, as it is, beyond question, the right, indeed, the duty, of even a private citizen to answer a call for help, especially if easy and legal access is available to do so. There followed a respectful closing. He took the pen Signorina Elettra held out to him and signed the letter.
‘Thank you, signorina. Is there anything else?’
‘Yes, Dottore. Signora Petrelli called and confirmed your meeting with her.’
More proof of spring. More grace.
‘Thank you, signorina,’ he said, taking the files and returning the letter to her. She smiled and was gone.
* * * *
The first file was from Carrara’s office in Rome and contained a complete list of the articles in La Capra’s collection that the art fraud police had been able to identify. The list of provenance read like a tourist’s, or policeman’s, guide to the plundered troves of the ancient world: Herculaneum, Volterra, Paestum, Corinth. The Orient and Middle East were well represented: Xian, Angkor Wat, the Kuwait Museum. Some of the pieces appeared to have been acquired legitimately, but they were in the minority. More than a few pieces had been declared to be fakes. Good ones, but still fakes. Documents sequestered in La Capra’s home proved that many of the illegal pieces had been acquired from Murino, whose shop was closed to allow the art police to make a complete inventory of the pieces there and in the warehouse he kept in Mestre. He denied all knowledge of illegally acquired pieces and insisted that they must have been brought in by his former partner, Dottor Semenzato. Had it not been for the fact that he had been arrested while accepting delivery of four boxes of alabaster ashtrays made in Hong Kong and of the four statues contained with them, he might have been believed. As it was, he was under arrest, and his lawyer had the responsibility of producing the invoices and dockets that would implicate Semenzato.
La Capra, in Palermo, where he had taken his son’s body for burial, seemed to have lost all interest in his collection. He had ignored all orders to produce further documents that could prove either purchase or ownership. The police, therefore, had confiscated all pieces known or believed to be stolen and were continuing to search for the source of those few which had still not been identified. Brunetti was pleased to note that Carrara had seen to it that the pieces taken from the Chinese show at the Ducal Palace were not listed in the inventory of objects found in La Capra’s house. Only three people - Brunetti, Flavia and Brett - knew where they were.
The second file contained the mounting papers on the case against La Capra, his late son, and the men arrested with him. Both of the men who had beaten Dottoressa Lynch had been in the palazzo that night and were arrested along with La Capra and another man. The first two admitted the beating but claimed that they had gone there to rob her apartment. They insisted they knew nothing about the murder of Dottor Semenzato.
La Capra, for his part, maintained that he had no idea that the two men, whom he identified as his driver and his bodyguard, had attempted to rob the apartment of Dottoressa Lynch, a woman for whom he had the highest professional regard. At the beginning, he also asserted that he neither knew nor had dealings of any sort with Dottor Semenzato. But as information flowed in from those places where he and Semenzato had met, as various dealers and antiquarians signed statements linking the two men together in a host of business dealings, La Capra’s story ebbed away as did the waters of acqua alta with the turning of the tide or a favourable change in the wind. And with the change of this particular tide came the memory that he had, in the past, perhaps bought a piece or two from Dottor Semenzato.
He had been ordered to return to Venice or risk being carried back by the police, but he had placed himself under doctor’s care and had been committed to a private clinic, suffering from ‘nervous collapse resulting from personal grief. He remained there, physically and, in a country where only the bond between parent and child remained sacred, legally untouchable.
Brunetti pushed the files away from him and stared at the empty surface of his desk, imagining the forces that had already been brought into play in this. La Capra was a man not without influence. And he now had a dead son, a young man of violent temper. Hadn’t the two thugs, the day after they’d spoken to their lawyer, recalled hearing Salvatore once say that Dottor Semenzato had treated his father without respect? Something about a statue that he had bought for his father that turned out to be false - something like that. And, yes, they thought they could remember hearing him say he would make the Dottore sorry he had ever recommended false artifacts for his father or for him to buy for his father.
Brunetti had no doubt that, as time passed, the two thugs would remember more and more, and all of it would point to poor Salvatore, bent on nothing else but the mistaken defence of his father’s honour and his own. And they’d probably recall the many occasions when Signor La Capra had tried to persuade his son that Dottor Semenzato was an honest man, that he had always acted in good faith when he endorsed pieces that were then sold by Murino, his partner. Perhaps the judges, if the case ever got that far, would have to listen to a tale of Salvatore’s desire to give his father nothing but pleasure, devoted son that he was. And Salvatore, not at all a sophisticated boy, but good, good at heart, would have tried to procure these presents for his beloved father in the only way he could think of, by seeking the advice of Dottor Semenzato. And given his devotion to his father, his intense desire to please him, it was but a short step to imagine his rage when he discovered that Dottor Semenzato had attempted to take advantage of both his innocence and his generosity by selling him a copy instead of an original piece. From there, it was but no distance at all to the injustice of adding to a father’s grief, a father who had to bear in one blow the death of his beloved only son and the sad knowledge of the lengths to which that son was capable of going in his attempts both to give his father pleasure and to defend their family honour.