‘I knew right then, you know,’ he said to Brunetti, man to man, though Brunetti thought more women than men would understand this, ‘that she was the one. And nothing in all these years has changed that.’
‘You’re a lucky man,’ Brunetti repeated, thinking that any man, or any woman, who spent decades wrapped in this feeling was a lucky person. Why, then, had they never married? He recalled the thuggish first impression Morandi had made and wondered if perhaps he had an inconvenient family lodged somewhere. Paola often referred to men who had a Mrs Rochester in the attic: did Morandi have one?
‘I think so,’ Morandi said, the key still in his hand.
‘How long has Signora Sartori been here?’ Brunetti asked, waving his hand to take in all that stood around them, as innocently as if copies of all of the payments for her care from the day she entered were not sitting on his desk to be checked at a glance.
‘Three years now,’ he said, a time that began, as Brunetti knew, with the deposit of the first of Turchetti’s cheques.
‘It’s a very good place. She’s very lucky to be here,’ Brunetti said. He would not allow himself to mention his mother’s experience, and so he said only, ‘I know that some of the other places in the city don’t take as good care as the sisters here do.’ When Morandi failed to answer, Brunetti said, ‘I’ve heard stories about the public places.’
‘We were very lucky,’ Morandi said earnestly, failing to take the bait, or avoiding it; Brunetti was not sure.
‘I’ve heard it’s very expensive,’ Brunetti said, using the voice of one citizen to another.
‘We had a little put by,’ Morandi said.
Brunetti leaned forward and took the key from Morandi’s hand. ‘Is this where they are?’ he asked, holding it up. When the old man did not answer, Brunetti slipped the key into the watch pocket of his trousers.
Morandi placed his right hand on his thigh, as if to cover the place where the key had been. Then he put the left on the other thigh. He looked at Brunetti, his face paler than it had been. ‘Did she tell you?’
Brunetti did not know if he meant Signora Sartori or Signora Altavilla, and so he answered, ‘It doesn’t matter who told me, does it, Signore? Just that I have the key and know what’s there.’
‘They don’t belong to anyone, you know,’ the old man insisted. ‘They’re all dead, all the people who wanted them.’
‘How did you get them?’
‘The old French woman had them in the house. Inside a hamper for the washing.’ He must have read the flash of concern on Brunetti’s face for he said, ‘No, they were in a plastic case on the bottom. They were safe.’
‘I see,’ Brunetti said. ‘But how did you get them?’ He used the plural form of ‘you’.
Morandi reacted to the word this time. ‘Maria didn’t know anything about them. She wouldn’t have liked it. Not at all. She wouldn’t have let me take them.’
‘Oh, I see, I see,’ Brunetti said, wondering how many more times he would have to say this same thing when, as now, what he heard was unlikely to be true? Morandi had had them in his possession for decades, and she had not known?
‘Cuccetti gave them to me. The same night we witnessed the paper.’ Brunetti noticed the man could not bring himself to call it a will. Then Morandi added, sounding angry, ‘I made him do it.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I didn’t trust him,’ Morandi said with great force.
‘And the apartment?’ Brunetti asked, in lieu of pursuing the subject of Cuccetti’s honesty.
‘That was what he promised me at the beginning, when he asked me if we’d sign something. I didn’t trust him then, and I didn’t trust him later. I knew what he was like. He’d give me the apartment, then he’d find a way to take it back. Some legal way. After all, he was a lawyer,’ Morandi said in much the same way he would say that a bird was a vulture.
Brunetti, wise in the way of lawyers, nodded.
‘So I told him what I wanted.’
‘How did you know about them and what they were?’
‘The old woman used to talk to Maria, and she told her about them, about how much they were worth, and Maria told me.’ Then, before Brunetti could get the wrong opinion, he quickly added, ‘No, it’s not what you think. It was just something she told me, when she talked about work and the patients and the sort of things they told her.’ He looked away for a moment, as if embarrassed to find himself in the company of a man capable of thinking such a thing of Signora Sartori. ‘It was my idea, not hers. She didn’t know about it. And she’s never known I have them.’
Then, Brunetti found himself thinking unkindly, how did she know about the key?
‘What did Cuccetti say?’
‘What could he say?’ Morandi asked harshly. ‘The old woman wasn’t going to last very long.’ Then to explain things further, he said, ‘Anyone could see that, so I knew he had to hurry.’ Brunetti remained silent in the face of Morandi’s failure to realize what this said about himself.
‘I told him I wouldn’t sign anything until he gave them to me.’ As the old man told his story, Brunetti was reminded of why he had thought him a thug. His voice hardened, as did his eyes; his mouth grew tighter in the telling of the tale. Brunetti’s face was impassivity itself.
‘And then the old woman had some sort of crisis – I forget what it was. Breathing, something like that. And he panicked, Cuccetti, and he must have gone to her place and got them, and he brought them to the hospital and put them in her closet.’
‘Why would he do that?’ Brunetti asked.
Morandi answered immediately. ‘If anyone asked, he could say she asked him to bring them to her so she could look at them again.’ His nod showed how clever he judged this move on Cuccetti’s part to have been. ‘But she didn’t see them. She was gaga by then.’
Brunetti thought again of Dante’s lizards and of the way they repeatedly changed shape, returning ineluctably to the form of what they had once been.
‘So you signed it?’
‘Yes,’ Morandi said.
‘And was that really Signora Sartori’s signature?’
Morandi blushed again, far more strongly than at any time in the past. The fight went out of him; he actually seemed to deflate again. ‘Yes,’ he said and bowed his head to await the blow of Brunetti’s next question.
‘What did you tell her?’
Morandi started to speak but then burst into nervous coughing. He bowed his head over his knees and kept it there until the coughing fit ended, then pushed himself up and against the back of the sofa and closed his eyes. Brunetti would not let him go to sleep again, would poke him in the side before he’d allow that. The old man opened his eyes and said, ‘I told her that I’d watched the old woman write it. That Cuccetti and I had been there and she’d written it by herself.’
‘Who really wrote it?’ Brunetti asked.
Morandi shrugged. ‘I don’t know. It was on the table when I went into the room.’ He looked at Brunetti and said, making no attempt to disguise his eagerness, ‘So she could have written it, couldn’t she?’
Brunetti ignored this. ‘It could have been anyone who signed it?’ Brunetti demanded levelly. ‘But you and Signora Sartori witnessed her signature?’
Morandi nodded, then covered his eyes with his right hand, as if the sight of Brunetti’s knowledge was too much for him to bear. Brunetti glanced away for a moment, and when he looked back he saw that tears were seeping from beneath his fingers.
For some time the old man sat like that, then heaved himself to one side and pulled an enormous white handkerchief from his pocket. He wiped his eyes and blew his nose, folded the handkerchief carefully, and put it back in his pocket.