Chapter Eleven

 

At the bottom of the Rialto Bridge, he slipped under the covered passageway to the right of the statue of Goldoni, heading back towards SS. Giovanni e Paolo and Brett’s apartment. He knew she was home because the officer who had sat outside her hospital room for a day and a half had reported back to the Questura when she checked herself out and returned to her apartment. No guard had been posted at her home because a uniformed policeman could not stand in one of the narrow calli of Venice without being asked by everyone who passed what he was doing there, nor could a detective who was not a resident of the neighbourhood stand around for more than half an hour without the Questura receiving phone calls reporting his suspicious presence. Non-Venetians thought of it as a city; residents knew it was just a sleepy little country town with an impulse towards gossip, curiosity and small-mindedness no different from that of the smallest paese in Calabria or Aspromonte.

Though it had been years since he had been in her apartment, he found it with little difficulty, on the right side of Calle dello Squero Vecchio, a street so small that the city had never bothered to paint its name on the wall. He rang the bell and, moments later, a voice came through the intercom asking who he was. He was glad they were taking at least this minimum precaution; too often the people of this peaceful city merely clicked open their doors without bothering to learn who was there.

Though the building had been restored within the last few years and the stairwells newly plastered and painted, salt and humidity had already begun their work, devouring the paint and scattering large droppings of it on the floor, like scraps under a table. As he turned into the fourth and final flight of steps, he looked up and saw that the heavy metal door to the apartment was open, held back by Flavia Petrelli. However nervous and strained it was, that actually did seem to be a smile.

They shook hands at the door, and she stepped back to allow him to enter. They spoke at the same time, she saying, ‘I’m glad you came,’ and he, ‘Permesso,’ as he stepped inside.

She wore a black skirt and a low-necked sweater in a canary yellow that few women would risk. Flavia’s olive complexion and nearly black eyes glowed in response to the colour. But on closer inspection he saw that the eyes, however beautiful, were tired, and small lines of tension radiated from her mouth.

She asked for his coat and hung it in a large armadio that stood on the left of the hallway. He had read the report of the officers who responded to the attack, so he couldn’t keep himself from looking down at the floor and at the brick wall. There was no sign of blood, but he could smell strong cleansers and, he thought, wax.

Flavia made no motion to go back into the living room but kept him there and asked, her voice low, ‘Have you found out anything?’

‘About Dottor Semenzato?’

She nodded.

Before he could answer, Brett called out from the living room, ‘Stop plotting, Flavia, and bring him in here.’

She had the grace to smile and shrug, then turned and led him back into the living room. It was as he remembered it, filled, even on this dreary day, with light that filtered in from the six immense skylights cut into the roof. Brett sat, dressed in burgundy slacks and a black turtleneck sweater, on a sofa placed between two tall windows. Brunetti could see that parts of her face, though far less swollen than they had been in the hospital, were still angry blue. She shifted herself to the left, leaving him a space next to her, and extended her hand.

He took her hand and sat beside her, looking at her more closely.

‘No more Frankenstein,’ she said, smiling to show not only that her teeth were free of the wires that had bound them together for most of the time that she was in the hospital, but that the cut on her lip had healed sufficiently for her to be able to close her mouth.

Brunetti, familiar with the assumed omniscience of Italian doctors and their concomitant inflexibility, asked in real surprise, ‘How did you get them to let you out?’

‘I made a scene,’ she said quite simply.

Offered no more than that, Brunetti glanced at Flavia, who covered her eyes with her hand and shook her head at the memory.

‘And?’ he asked.

‘They said I could go if I’d eat, so now my diet has progressed to bananas and yoghurt.’

With the talk of food, Brunetti looked more closely at her and saw that, under the bruises and scrapes, her face was indeed thinner, the lines finer and more angular.

‘You should eat more than that,’ he said. From behind him, he heard Flavia laugh, but when he turned to her, she recalled him to the business at hand by asking, ‘What about Semenzato? We read about it this morning.’

‘It’s pretty much as they wrote. He was killed in his office.’

‘Who found him?’ Brett asked.

‘The cleaning woman.’

‘What happened? How was he killed?’

‘He was hit on the head.’

‘With what?’ asked Flavia.

‘A brick.’

Suddenly curious, Brett asked, ‘What kind of brick?’

Brunetti remembered where he had first seen it, beside the body. ‘It’s dark blue, about twice the size of my hand, but there are some markings on it, in gold.’

‘What was it doing there?’ Brett asked.

‘The cleaning woman said he used it as a paperweight. Why do you want to know?’

She nodded as if in answer to a different question and pushed herself up from the sofa and walked across the room to the bookshelves. Brunetti winced at the gingerly way she walked, at how slowly she raised her arm to pull a thick book down from a high shelf. Tucking it under one arm, she came back towards them and placed the book on the low table that stood in front of the sofa. She flipped it open, riffled through a few pages, then pushed it open and held it there with both palms pressed down on the outer edge of the pages.

Brunetti bent forward and looked at the coloured photo on the page. It appeared to be an immense gate, but all scale was missing because it wasn’t attached to walls of any sort; instead, it stood free in a room, perhaps a museum gallery. Immense winged bulls stood in protective posture on either side of the opening. The background was the same cobalt blue of the brick that had been used to kill Semenzato, the body of the animals the same vibrant gold. A closer look showed him that the wall was entirely constructed of rectangular bricks, the form of the bulls raised up upon its surface in low relief.

‘What is it?’ he asked, pointing down at the photo.

‘The Ishtar Gate of Babylon,’ she said. ‘Much of it’s been reconstructed, but that’s where the brick came from. That or a structure like it, from the same place.’ Before he could ask, she explained, ‘I remember that some of the bricks were in the storerooms of the museum when we were working there.’

‘But how did it get on to his desk?’ Brunetti asked.

Brett smiled again. ‘The perks of the job, I suppose. He was the director, so he could have pretty well anything he wanted from the permanent collection brought up to his office.’

‘Is that normal?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Yes, it is. Of course, they can’t have a Leonardo or a Bellini hanging there just for them to look at, but it’s not unusual for pieces from a museum’s holdings to be used to decorate an office, especially the director’s.’

‘Are records kept of this kind of borrowing?’ he asked.

From the other side of the table, Flavia crossed her legs with a slither of silk and said softly, ‘Ah, so that’s how it is.’ Then she added, as if Brunetti had asked, ‘I met him only once, but I didn’t like him.’

‘When did you meet him, Flavia?’ Brett asked, ignoring Brunetti’s question.

‘About a half hour before I met you, cara. At your exhibition at the Palazzo Ducale.’

Almost automatically, Brett corrected her, ‘It wasn’t my exhibition.’ Brunetti had the feeling that this same correction had been made many times before.

‘Well, whosever it was, then,’ Flavia said. ‘It had just opened, and I was being shown around the city, given the full treatment — visiting diva and all that.’ Her tone made the idea of her fame sound faintly ridiculous. Since Brett must know this story of their meeting, Brunetti assumed the explanation was directed at him.

‘Semenzato showed me through the galleries, but I had a rehearsal that afternoon, and I suppose I might have been a bit brusque with him.’ Brusque? Brunetti had seen Flavia’s ill humour, and brusque was hardly an adequate term to describe it.

‘He kept telling me how much he admired my talent.’ She paused and leaned towards Brunetti, placing a hand on his arm while she explained, ‘That always means they’ve never heard me sing and probably wouldn’t like it if they did, but they’ve heard enough to know that I’m famous, so they feel they have to flatter me.’ That explanation given, she removed her hand and sat back in her chair. ‘I had the feeling that, while he was showing me how wonderful the exhibition was—’ here she turned to Brett and added, ‘and it was,’ then turned her attention back to Brunetti and continued — ‘what I was supposed to be registering was how wonderful he was for having thought of it. Though he didn’t. Well, I didn’t know that at the time — that it was Brett’s show — but he was pushy about it, and I didn’t like it.’

Brunetti could well imagine that she wouldn’t like the competition of pushy people. No, that was unfair, for she didn’t push herself forward. He had to admit that he had been wrong the last time he met her. There was no vanity here, only the calm acceptance of her own worth and of her own talent, and he knew enough about her past to realize how hard that must have been to achieve.

‘But then you came by with a glass of champagne and rescued me from him,’ she said, smiling at Brett.

‘That’s not a bad idea, champagne,’ Brett said, cutting short Flavia’s flow of memory, and Brunetti was struck at how very similar her reaction was to Paolas whenever he began to tell people about the way they met, crashing into one another at the end of one of the aisles in the library of the university. How many times in their years together had she asked him to get her a drink or otherwise interrupted his story by asking someone else a question? And why did the telling of that story bring him such joy? Mysteries. Mysteries.

Taking the hint, Flavia got out of her chair and went across the room. It was only eleven thirty in the morning, but if they felt like drinking champagne, he hardly thought it his place to contradict or try to prevent them.

Brett flipped a page in the book, then sat back in the sofa, and the pages floated back into place, showing Brunetti the gold bull, part of which had killed Semenzato.

‘How did you meet him?’ Brunetti asked.

‘I worked with him on the China show, five years ago. Most of our contact was through letters because I was in China while most of the arrangements were being made. I wrote and suggested a number of pieces, sending photos and dimensions, and weights, since they all had to be air-freighted from Xian and Beijing to New York and London for the exhibition there, and then to Milan, and then trucked and boated here.’ She paused for a moment and then added, ‘I didn’t meet him until I got here to set the show up.’

‘Who decided what pieces would come here from China?’

This question caused her to grimace in remembered exasperation. ‘Who knows?’ When he failed to understand, she tried to explain. ‘Involved in this were the Chinese government, their ministries of antiquities and foreign affairs, and, on our side’— he noticed that Venice was, unconsciously, ‘our side’ — ‘the museum, the department of antiquities, the finance police, the ministry of culture, and a few other bureaus I’ve forced myself to forget about.’ She allowed the memory of officialdom to flow across her. ‘Here, it was awful, far worse than for New York or London. And I had to do all this from Xian, with letters delayed in the mail, or held up by the censors. Finally, after three months of it - this was about a year before it opened - I came here for two weeks and got most of it done, though I had to fly down to Rome twice to do it.’

‘And Semenzato?’ Brunetti asked.

‘I think, first, you have to understand that his was pretty much a political appointment.’ She saw Brunetti’s surprise and smiled. ‘He had museum experience, I forget where. But his selection was a political payoff. Anyway, there were—’ she corrected herself immediately - ‘there are curators at the museum who actually take care of the collection. His job was primarily administrative, and he did that very well.’

‘What about the exhibition here? Did he help you set it up?’ From the other side of the apartment, he could hear Flavia moving around, hear drawers and cabinets being opened and closed, the clink of glasses.

‘To a small degree. I told you how I more or less commuted back and forth from Xian for the openings in New York and London, but I came here for the opening.’ He thought she was finished, but then she added, ‘And I stayed on for about a month after it.’

‘How much contact did you have with him?’

‘Very little. He was on vacation for much of the time it was being set up, and then when he got back, he had to go to Rome for conferences with the Minister, trying to arrange an exchange with the Brera in Milan for another exhibition they were planning.’

‘But certainly you dealt with him personally at some time during all of this?’

‘Yes, I did. He was utterly charming and, when he could be, very helpful. He gave me carte blanche with the exhibition, allowed me to set it up as I pleased. And then, when it closed, he did the same for my assistant.’

‘Your assistant?’ Brunetti asked.

Brett glanced across towards the kitchen and then answered, ‘Matsuko Shibata. She was my assistant in Xian, on loan from the Tokyo Museum, in an exchange policy between the Japanese and Chinese governments. She’d studied at Berkeley but gone back to Tokyo after she got her degree.’

‘Where is she now?’ Brunetti asked.

She bent down over the book and turned a block of pages, her hand coming to rest beside a delicate Japanese screen painting that showed herons in flight above a tall growth of bamboo. ‘She’s dead. She was killed in an accident on the site.’

‘What happened?’ Brunetti spoke very softly, aware that Semenzato’s death made this accident into something that Brett had already begun to examine in an entirely new fashion.

‘She fell. The dig in Xian is little more than an open pit covered by an aeroplane hangar. All of the statues were buried, part of the army that the emperor would take into eternity with him. In some places, we’ve had to dig down three or four metres to reach them. There’s an outer perimeter above the dig, and there’s a low wall that protects tourists from falling into it or from kicking dirt down on us when we’re working. In some areas, where tourists aren’t permitted, there’s no wall. Matsuko fell,’ she began, but Brunetti watched as she continued to process new possibilities and adjusted her language accordingly. She restated this. ‘Matsuko’s body was found at the bottom of one of these places. She’d fallen about three metres and broken her neck.’ She glanced across at Brunetti and made open admission of her new doubts by changing that last sentence. ‘She was found at the bottom, with a broken neck.’

‘When was she killed?’

A loud shot rang out from the kitchen. Entirely without thinking, Brunetti pivoted out of his chair and crouched in front of Brett, his body placed between her and the open door to the kitchen. His hand was underneath his jacket, pulling at his revolver, when they heard Flavia shout, ‘Porco vacca,’ and then both of them heard the unmistakable sound of champagne splashing from the neck of a bottle on to the floor.

He released his hold on the pistol and moved back into his seat without saying anything to Brett. In different circumstances, it might have been funny, but neither of them laughed. By silent consent, they decided to ignore it, and Brunetti repeated his question: ‘When was she killed?’

Deciding to save time and answer all of his questions at once, she said, ‘It happened about three weeks after I’d sent my first letter to Semenzato.’

‘When was that?’

‘In the middle of December. I took her body back to Tokyo. That is, I went with it. With her.’ She stopped, voice dried up by memory that she was not going to let Brunetti have any part of.

‘I was going to San Francisco for Christmas,’ she continued. ‘So I left early and spent three days in Tokyo. I saw her family.’ Again, a long pause. ‘Then I went to San Francisco.’

Flavia came back from the kitchen, balancing a silver tray with three tall champagne flutes on one hand, the other wrapped around the neck of a bottle of Dom Perignon as if she were carrying a tennis racquet. No stinting here, not on the after-breakfast champagne.

She had heard Brett’s last words and asked, ‘Are you telling Guido about our happy Christmas?’ The use of his first name did not go unnoticed by any of them, nor did her emphasis on ‘happy’.

Brunetti took the tray and set it down on the table; Flavia poured champagne liberally into the glasses. Bubbles rushed over the rim of one of them, spilled down the side and over the edge of the tray, racing towards the book that still lay open on the table. Brett nipped it closed and placed it on the sofa beside her. Flavia handed Brunetti a glass, put one on the table in front of the place where she had been sitting, and passed the third to Brett.

‘Cin Cin,’ Flavia toasted with bright artificiality, and they raised their glasses to one another. ‘If we’re going to talk about San Francisco, then I think I need at least champagne.’ She sat down facing them and took something too big to be called a sip from her glass.

Brunetti gave her an inquiring glance, and she rushed to explain. ‘I was singing there. Tosca. God, what a disaster.’ In a gesture so consciously theatrical it mocked itself, she placed the back of her hand to her forehead, closed her eyes for a moment, then continued, ‘We had a German director who had a “concept”. Unfortunately, his concept was to update the opera to make it relevant,’ which word she pronounced with special contempt, ‘and stage it during the Romanian Revolution, and Searpia was supposed to be Ceaucescu, or however that terrible man pronounced his name. I was still supposed to be the reigning diva, but of Bucharest, not Rome.’ She draped the hand over her eyes at the memory but forged ahead. ‘I remember that there were tanks and machine guns, and at one point I had to hide a hand grenade in my cleavage.’

‘Don’t forget the telephone,’ Brett said, covering her mouth and pressing her lips closed so as not to laugh.

‘Oh, sweet heavens, the telephone. It tells you how much I’ve tried to put it out of my memory that I didn’t remember it.’ She turned to Brunetti, took a mouthful far more suited to mineral water than champagne, and continued, eyes alive at the memory. ‘In the middle of “Visse d’arte”, the director wanted me to try to telephone for help. So there I was, stretched across a sofa, trying to convince God that I didn’t deserve any of this, and I didn’t, when the Searpia — I think he was a real Romanian - I certainly never understood a word he said.’ She paused a moment and then added, ‘Or sang.’

Brett interrupted to correct her. ‘He was Bulgarian, Flavia.’

Flavia’s wave, even encumbered with the glass, was airily dismissive. ‘Same thing, cara. They all look like potatoes and stink of paprika. And they all shout so, especially the sopranos.’ She finished her champagne and paused long enough to refill her glass. ‘Where was I?’

‘On the sofa, I think, pleading with God,’ Brett suggested.

‘Ah, yes. And then the Scarpia, a great, lumbering clod of a man, he tripped over the telephone wire and pulled it out of the wall. So there I lay on the sofa, line to God cut off, and, beyond the baritone, I could see the director in the wings, waving at me like a madman. I think he wanted me to plug it back in and use it, put the call through any way I could.’ She sipped, smiled at Brunetti with a warmth that drove him to sip at his own champagne, and continued. ‘But an artist has to have some standards,’ glancing now at Brett, ‘or as you Americans say, has to draw a line in the sand.’                  

She stopped and Brunetti picked up his cue. He said it. ‘What did you do?’

‘I picked up the receiver and sang into it, just as if I had someone on the other end, just as if no one had seen it pulled from the wall.’ She set her glass down on the table, stood and stretched her arms out in agonized cruciform, then, utterly without warning, she began to sing the last phrases of the aria. ‘ “Nell’ora del dolor perch è , Signor, ah perch è me ne rimuneri cosi?” ‘ How did she do it? From a normal speaking voice, with no preparation, right up to those solidly floated notes?

Brunetti laughed outright, spilling some champagne down the front of his shirt. Brett set her glass on the table and clapped both hands to the sides of her mouth.

Flavia, as calmly as if she’d just gone into the kitchen to check on the roast and found it done, sat back down in her chair and continued her story. ‘Scarpia had to turn his back on the audience, he was laughing so hard. It was the first thing he’d done in a month that made me like him. I almost regretted having to kill him a few minutes later. The director was hysterical during the intermission, screaming at me that I’d ruined his production, swearing he’d never work with me again. Well, that’s certain, isn’t it? The reviews were terrible.’

‘Flavia,’ Brett chided, ‘it was the reviews of the production that were terrible; your reviews were wonderful.’

As if explaining something to a child, Flavia said, ‘My reviews are always wonderful, cara,’ Just like that. She turned her attention to Brunetti. ‘It was into this fiasco that she came,’ she said, pointing to Brett, ‘for Christmas with me and my children.’ She shook her head a few times. ‘She came in from taking that young woman’s body to Tokyo. No, it wasn’t a happy Christmas.’

Brunetti decided that, champagne or not, he still wanted to know more about the death of Brett’s assistant. ‘Was there any question at the time that it might not have been an accident?’

Brett shook her head, glass forgotten in front of her. ‘No. At one time or another, almost all of us had slipped when walking on the edge of the dig. One of the Chinese archaeologists had fallen and broken his ankle about a month before. So at the time we all believed that it was an accident. It might have been,’ she added with an absolute lack of conviction.

‘She worked on the exhibition here?’ he asked.

‘Not the opening. I came here alone for that. But Matsuko oversaw the packing, when the pieces left for China.’

‘Were you here?’ Brunetti asked.

Brett hesitated a long time, glanced across at Flavia, bowed her head, and answered, ‘No, I wasn’t.’

Flavia reached again for the bottle and poured more champagne into their glasses, though hers was the only glass that needed filling.

No one spoke for a while, and then Flavia asked Brett, making it a statement, not a question, ‘She didn’t speak Italian, did she?’

‘No, she didn’t,’ Brett answered.

‘But both she and Semenzato spoke English, as I remember.’

‘What difference does that make?’ Brett asked, her voice edged with an anger Brunetti sensed but couldn’t fathom.

Flavia made a tsking sound with her tongue and turned in feigned exasperation to Brunetti. ‘Maybe it’s true what people say about us Italians, and we do have a greater sympathy with dishonesty than other people. You see, don’t you?’

He nodded. ‘It means,’ he explained to Brett when he saw that Flavia would not, ‘that she couldn’t deal with people here except through Semenzato. They had a common language.’

‘Wait a minute,’ Brett said. She understood now what they meant, but that didn’t mean she liked it. ‘So now Semenzato is guilty, just like that, and Matsuko is, too? Just because they both spoke English?’

Neither Brunetti nor Flavia said a word.

‘I worked with Matsuko for three years,’ Brett insisted. ‘She was an archaeologist, a curator. You two can’t just decide she was a thief, you can’t sit there and play judge and jury and decide she’s guilty without any information, any proof.’ Brunetti noted that she seemed to have no problem with their equal assumption of Semenzato’s guilt.

Still, neither of them answered her. Almost a full minute passed. Finally, Brett sat back in the sofa, then reached forward and picked up her glass. But she didn’t drink, merely swirled the champagne around in the glass and then put it back down on the table. ‘Occam’s Razor,’ she finally said in English, voice resigned.

Brunetti waited for Flavia to speak, thinking this might make some sense to her, but Flavia said nothing. So he asked, ‘Whose razor?’

‘William of Occam,’ Brett repeated, though she kept her eyes on her glass. ‘He was a medieval philosopher. English, I think. He had a theory that said the correct explanation to any problem was usually the one that made the simplest use of the available information.’

Signor William, Brunetti caught himself thinking, was clearly not an Italian. He glanced across at Flavia and would have sworn that her raised eyebrow carried the same message.

‘Flavia, could I have something different to drink?’ Brett asked, holding out the half-full glass. Brunetti noticed Flavia’s initial hesitation, the suspicious glance she cast at him, then back at Brett, and he thought how very similar it was to the look Chiara gave him when she was told to do something that would take her out of the room where he and Paola were talking about something they wanted to keep secret from her. With a fluid motion, she got up from her chair, took Brett’s glass, and walked towards the kitchen. At the door, she paused long enough to call back over her shoulder, ‘I’ll get you some mineral water. I’ll see that it takes me a long time to open the bottle.’ The door slammed and she was gone.

What was that all about? Brunetti wondered.

When Flavia was gone, Brett told him. ‘Matsuko and I were lovers. I never told Flavia, but she knows anyway.’ A hard clang from the kitchen confirmed the truth of this.

‘It began in Xian, about a year after she got to the dig.’ Then, to make things clearer, ‘We worked on the exhibition together, and she wrote a chapter for the catalogue.’

‘Whose idea was it that she collaborate on the show?’ Brunetti asked.

Brett made no attempt to hide her embarrassment. ‘Mine? Hers? I don’t remember. It just happened. We were talking about it one night.’ Under the bruises, she blushed. ‘And, in the morning, it had been decided that she would write the article and come to New York to help set up the show.’

‘But you came to Venice alone?’ he asked.

She nodded. ‘We both went back to China after the New York opening. I went back to New York to close things down there and then Matsuko came to London to help me set up for the opening. We both went back to China right after that. Then I went back to pack it up for Venice. I thought she’d join me here for the opening, but she refused. She said she wanted . . .’ Brett’s voice dried up. She cleared her throat and repeated, ‘She said she wanted at least this part of the show to be all mine, so she wouldn’t come.’

‘But she came when it was over? When the pieces were sent back to China?’

‘She came from Xian for three weeks,’ Brett said. Brett stopped speaking and looked down at her clasped hands, muttering, ‘I don’t believe this. I don’t believe this,’ which, to Brunetti, suggested that she did.

‘Things were over between us by then, when she came here. I’d met Flavia at the opening. I told Matsuko when I got back to Xian about a month after the show opened here.’

‘How did she react when you told her?’

‘How would you expect her to react, Guido? She was gay, little more than a kid, caught between two cultures, raised in Japan and educated in America. When I went back to Xian after the Venice opening — I’d been away almost two months - she cried when I showed her the Italian catalogue with her article in it. She’d helped mount the most important show in our field in decades, and she was in love with her boss, and she thought her boss was in love with her. And there I was, breezing in from Venice to tell her everything was over, that I was in love with someone else, and when she asked why, I stupidly said something about culture, about the difficulty of ever really understanding someone from a different culture. I told her that she and I didn’t share it but that Flavia and I had a common culture.’ Another loud crash from the kitchen was enough to show this up as the lie it was.

‘How did she react?’ Brunetti asked.

‘If it had been Flavia, I suppose she would have killed me. But Matsuko was Japanese, no matter how long she had been in America. She bowed very deeply and left my room.’

‘And after that?’

‘After that, she was the perfect assistant. Very formal and distant and very efficient. She was gifted in what she did.’ She paused for a long time and then said, ‘I don’t like what I did to her, Guido,’ in a soft voice.

‘Why did she come here to send things back to China?’

‘I was in New York,’ Brett said, as if that explained things. To Brunetti, it didn’t, but he decided to leave that until later. ‘I called Matsuko and asked her if she would oversee the closing here and send things back to China.’

‘And she agreed?’

‘I told you, she was my assistant. The exhibition meant as much to her as it did to me.’ Hearing how that sounded, Brett added, ‘At least I thought it did.’

‘What about her family?’ he asked.

Obviously surprised by the question, Brett asked, ‘What about them?’

‘Are they rich?’

‘Ricca sfondata,’ she explained. Bottomless wealth. ‘Why do you ask that?’

‘To understand if she did it for money,’ he explained.

‘I don’t like the way you simply assume that she was involved in this,’ Brett protested, but weakly.

‘Is it safe to come back?’ Flavia asked in a loud voice from the kitchen.

‘Stop it, Flavia,’ Brett shot back angrily

Flavia came back, carrying a single glass of mineral water, bubbles swirling up happily from the bottom. She set it down in front of Brett, looked at her watch, and said, ‘It’s time for you to take your pills.’ Silence. ‘Do you want me to get them?’

With no warning, Brett slammed her fist down on the surface of the marble table, causing the tray to rattle and a jolt of bubbles to swirl up from the bottom of all the glasses. ‘I’ll get my own pills, damn it.’ She pushed herself up from the sofa and walked quickly across the room. Seconds later, the sharp crack of another slammed door echoed back into the living room.

Flavia sat back in her chair, picked up her champagne glass, and took a sip. ‘Warm,’ she remarked. The champagne? The temperature of the room? Brett’s temper? She poured the contents of her glass into Brett’s champagne glass and emptied the bottle into her own. She took a tentative sip, then smiled across at Brunetti. ‘Better.’ She set the glass on the table.

Not knowing if this was a piece of theatre or not, Brunetti decided to wait her out. Companionably, they sipped at their drinks for a while, until Flavia finally asked, ‘How necessary was the guard in the hospital?’

‘Until I have some clearer idea of what’s going on here, I won’t know how necessary anything is,’ he answered.

Her smile was broad. ‘How refreshing it is to hear a public official admit to ignorance,’ she said, reaching forward to place her empty glass on the table.

The champagne gone, her voice changed and grew more serious. ‘Matsuko?’ she asked.

‘Probably.’

‘But how would she know Semenzato? Or know enough about him to know he’d be the person to contact?’

Brunetti considered this. ‘It seems he had a reputation, at least here.’

‘The kind of reputation Matsuko would know about?’

‘Perhaps. She’d worked with antiquities for years, so she probably heard things. And Brett said her family was very rich. Maybe the very rich know about this sort of thing.’

‘Yes, we do,’ she agreed with an offhandedness he was sure was real. ‘It’s almost a private club, as if we’d taken a vow to keep one another’s secrets. And it’s always easy, very easy, to know where to find a crooked tax lawyer - not that there’s any other type, at least not in this country — or someone who can get drugs, or boys, or girls, or someone who’s willing to see that a painting gets from one country to another, and no questions asked. Of course, I’m not sure how these things work in Japan, but I don’t see why there should be any difference. Wealth carries its own passport.’

‘Had you heard anything about Semenzato?’

‘I told you, I met him only that one time, and I didn’t like him, so I wasn’t interested in anything that was said about him. And it’s too late to find out now, since everyone will be busy talking well of him.’ She reached forward and took Brett’s drink and sipped at it. ‘Of course, that will change in a few weeks, and people will go back to telling the truth about him. But now’s not the time to try to find that out.’ She set the glass back on the table.

Though he thought he knew what the answer would be, he still asked, ‘Has Brett said anything about Matsuko? That is, since Semenzato was killed?’

Flavia shook her head. ‘She hasn’t said much about anything. Not since this began.’ She leaned forward and shifted the glass a few millimetres to the left. ‘Brett is afraid of violence. That doesn’t make any sense to me because she’s very brave. We Italian women aren’t, you know. We’re brash and brazen, but we have little physical courage. She’s off in China, living in a tent half of the time, roaming around the country. She even went to Tibet on a bus. She told me that when the Chinese officials refused to give her a visa, she simply forged the papers and went. She’s not afraid of that sort of thing, of the things that most people are terrified of, of getting into official trouble or being arrested. But actual physical violence terrifies her.   I think it’s because she lives in her mind so much, solving things there and working them out there. She hasn’t been the same since this happened. She doesn’t want to answer the door. She pretends she doesn’t hear or she waits for me to go and do it. But the reason is that she’s afraid.’                 

Brunetti wondered why Flavia was telling him all of this. ‘I’ve got to leave next week,’ she said, answering his question. ‘My children have been skiing with their father for two weeks, and they come home then. I’ve cancelled three performances, but I can’t cancel any more. And I don’t want to. I’ve asked her to come with me, but she refuses.’

‘Why?’                                      

‘I don’t know. She won’t say. Or she can’t.’          

‘Why are you telling me this?’

‘I think she’d listen to you.’                     

‘If I said what?’                               

‘If you asked her to go with me.’                 

‘To Milan?’                      

‘Yes. Then, in March, I have to go to Munich for a month. She could come with me.’

‘What about China? Isn’t she supposed to go back there?’

‘And end up with her neck broken on the floor of that pit?’ Even though he knew her anger wasn’t directed at him, he still winced at the sound of it.

‘Has she talked about going back?’ he asked.

‘She hasn’t talked about anything.’

‘Do you know when she was supposed to leave?’

‘I don’t think she had any plan. When she arrived, she said she didn’t have a return reservation.’ She met Brunetti’s inquisitive look. ‘That depended on what she learned from Semenzato.’ From her tone, it was clear that this was only part of the explanation. He waited for her to finish it. ‘But part of it depended on me, I suppose.’ She paused, looked away from Brunetti, then quickly back. ‘She’s managed to get me an invitation to teach master classes there, in Beijing. She wanted me to go back with her.’

‘And?’ Brunetti asked.

Flavia dismissed the idea with a wave of her hand but said only, ‘We hadn’t discussed it before this happened.’

‘And not since?’

She shook her head.

All of this talk of Brett made Brunetti suddenly realize that she had been gone from the room for a long time. ‘Is that the only door?’ he asked.

His question was so sudden that Flavia took a moment to understand it and then to understand everything it meant.

‘Yes. There’s no other way out. Or in. And the roof is separate. There’s no access to it.’ She got up. ‘I’ll go and see how she is.’

She was gone a long time, during which Brunetti picked up the book that Brett had left on the sofa and paged through it. He stared at the photo of the Ishtar Gate for a long time, trying to see which part of the figure appeared on the brick that had killed Semenzato. It was like a jigsaw puzzle, but he proved incapable of fitting the single missing piece that lay in the police laboratory at the Questura into the whole picture of the gate that lay in front of him.

It was almost five minutes before Flavia came back. She stood by the table while she spoke, letting Brunetti know that their conversation was over. ‘She’s asleep. The pain pills she’s taking are very strong, and I think there’s a tranquillizer, too. The champagne didn’t help things. She’ll sleep until the afternoon.’

‘I need to speak to her again,’ he said.

‘Can it wait until tomorrow?’ It was a simple question, not an imperious demand.

It really couldn’t, but he had no choice. ‘Yes. Is it all right if I come at about the same time?’

‘Of course. I’ll tell her you’re coming. And I’ll try to limit the champagne.’ The conversation might be over, but the truce apparently held.

Brunetti, who had decided that Dom Perignon was an excellent mid-morning drink, thought this an unnecessary precaution and hoped that Flavia might change her mind by the next day.

* * * *