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?’