‘What did the doctor tell you?’ Brunetti asked, nodding in the direction of the casa di cura.
‘Why do you ask?’ Morandi asked with a return to his former sharpness.
‘Because you seemed so worried. Before, when you talked about it.’
‘And that’s enough to make you want to know?’ Morandi asked, as though he were an anthropologist being exposed to an entirely new form of behaviour.
‘She seemed like a woman who has had enough trouble in her life,’ Brunetti risked saying. ‘I hoped she wouldn’t have any more.’
Morandi’s eyes drifted towards the windows of the second floor of the casa di cura, windows which Brunetti thought might be those of the dining room where he had first seen Signora Sartori. ‘Oh, there’s always more,’ Morandi said. ‘There’s more and more, and then it’s over and there’s no more.’ He turned to Brunetti and asked, ‘Isn’t that right?’
‘I don’t know,’ was the best thing Brunetti could think of, though it took him some time to bring himself to speak. ‘I hoped she would have some peace.’
Morandi smiled at the last word, but it wasn’t a pleasant thing to see. ‘We haven’t had any of that since we moved.’
‘To San Marco?’ Brunetti asked.
He nodded, loosening one of the strands of hair, which shifted over to lean against its neighbour. ‘Things were all right before then. We worked, and we talked, and I think she was happy.’
‘Weren’t you?’
‘Oh,’ he said, and this time it was a real smile, ‘I’ve never been so happy in my life.’
‘But then?’
‘But then Cuccetti offered me the house. We were renting a place, down in Castello. Forty-one square metres; ground floor. We were like sardines in there,’ he said, his mind obviously wandering back to that tiny place. Then, with another smile, he said, ‘But we were happy sardines.’
He took another deep breath, pulling the air through his nostrils and pushing himself up again. ‘And then he talked about the house we could have. More than a hundred metres. Top floor, two baths. It could have been a castle, it sounded so wonderful.’
He looked at Brunetti as if willing this man who had no idea what it meant to live in a forty-one-metre apartment to imagine what this would represent for people like them. Brunetti nodded. ‘So I said I’d do it. And get Maria to do it because Cuccetti said he needed two witnesses. And then I thought about the drawings that the old woman had. She’d told Maria about them.’ He tilted his chin to one side and asked, a real question, ‘Do you think that’s what made it go wrong? That I got greedy and told him I wanted the drawings?’
‘I don’t know, Signor Morandi,’ Brunetti said. ‘I can’t make a judgement like that.’
‘Maria knows that’s when it all went wrong. But she doesn’t know why,’ the old man said, his despair audible. ‘So it doesn’t matter what I think about it, or what you do. She knows something bad happened.’ Morandi shook his head and then continued to shake it, as if each motion renewed his guilt at what he had done.
‘What happened when you went to Signora Altavilla’s?’ Brunetti asked.
His head stopped moving. He stared at Brunetti and suddenly crossed his arms over his chest, as if to show he had had enough of this and would say no more. But then he surprised Brunetti by saying, ‘I went to talk to her, to try to make her understand that I needed the key. I couldn’t tell her about the drawings. She might have told Maria, and then she’d know what I did.’
‘She didn’t know?’
‘Oh no, nothing,’ he said very quickly. ‘She never saw them. They were never in the house. When Cuccetti gave them to me, I took them right to the bank, and I paid them in cash once a year for the box. There was no way Maria could know about them.’ The very possibility infused his voice with fear.
‘But she knew you had the key?’ Brunetti said, thinking that, over the years, she would surely have figured out what the key was for.
‘Maria’s not stupid,’ Morandi said.
‘I’m sure she’s not.’
‘She knew the key was important, even if she didn’t know what it was. So she took it and gave it to her.’
‘You know that?’
Morandi nodded.
‘Did she tell you?’
‘Yes.’
‘When? Why?’
‘At first she wouldn’t tell me anything. But – I told you she couldn’t lie – after a while she told me she’d taken it. But she wouldn’t tell me what she did with it.’
‘How did you find out?’
Morandi looked across at the front of the building, like a sailor seeking a lighthouse. His mouth pulled back and he made an animal noise of pain, then he leaned forward again and put his face in his hands. This time he started to sob the way a child sobs, suddenly and brokenly, all hope of future happiness gone.
Brunetti could not endure it. He got to his feet and walked over to the church, stood in front of the stone announcing that it was the baptismal church of Vivaldi. Minutes passed. He thought he could still hear the sobs, but could not bring himself to turn and look.
After reading the inscription again, Brunetti went back to the bench and resumed his seat.
Morandi reached out suddenly and grabbed Brunetti’s wrist. ‘I hit her.’ His face was blotched and red, and two strands of hair had fallen down on either side of his nose. He hiccuped with residual grief, then said it again, as if confession would purge him, ‘I hit her. I never did that, not in all the years we were together.’ Brunetti looked away but heard the old man say, ‘And then she told me she’d given her the key.’
He pulled at Brunetti’s wrist until he was turned round and facing him. ‘You have to understand. I had to have the key. They won’t let you into the box unless you have it, and I had to pay for the casa di cura. Or else she’d go to the public place. But I couldn’t tell her that because then I’d have to tell her everything.’ His grip intensified to add significance to what he had to say. He started to speak, coughed, and then said in a whisper, ‘And then she wouldn’t respect me any more.’
Brunetti’s mind flashed to Signora Orsoni’s account of her brother-in-law’s justification for his every act of violence. And here he was listening to the same story. But what a gulf between them. Or was there? With his right hand he prised Morandi’s fingers, one by one, from his wrist. To enforce the action, he took the old man’s hand and placed it on Morandi’s thigh.
‘What happened when you went to see Signora Altavilla?’ Brunetti asked.
The old man seemed taken aback. ‘I told you. I asked her for the key.’ As if aware of his disarray, he ran his hands up over his face, pulling his hair free to hang across his collar.
‘Asked?’
Morandi showed no surprise at either the word or the tone in which Brunetti repeated it. ‘All right,’ he said reluctantly. ‘I told her to give me the key.’
‘Or else?’
This startled him. ‘There was no or else. She had the key and I wanted her to give it to me. If she didn’t want to, there wasn’t anything I could do about it.’
‘You could have threatened her,’ Brunetti suggested.
Morandi’s face showed bafflement as well as confusion, and Brunetti thought it was genuine. ‘But she’s a woman.’
Brunetti refrained from saying that Signora Sartori was a woman, too, and that had not prevented him from hitting her. Instead, voice calm, he asked again, ‘What happened?’
Morandi looked at the ground again, and Brunetti watched his head flush with embarrassment. ‘Did you hit her?’ asked Brunetti, stopping himself from adding, ‘too.’
Keeping his eyes on the ground, like a child attempting to escape a reprimand, Morandi shook his head a few times. Brunetti refused to allow himself to be manipulated by the other man’s silence and asked again, ‘Did you hit her?’
Morandi spoke so softly as to be almost inaudible. ‘Not really.’