‘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.’