‘What does that mean?’
‘I grabbed her,’ he said, shot a look at Brunetti and went back to staring at the pavement. Again, Brunetti decided on silence. ‘She told me to leave, that there was nothing I could say that would make her give me the key. And then she moved towards the door.’
‘What was she going to do with the key?’ Brunetti asked.
Morandi raised a blank face to Brunetti. ‘I don’t know. She didn’t say.’ Brunetti’s imagination vied with his knowledge of the law. The only person who had the right to open the box was the keyholder, accompanied by a representative of the bank with the second key. For anyone else to use it, a court order was necessary, and to get that, evidence of a crime was necessary. But after so many years, there was no longer a crime.
Morandi could have told the bank he had lost it. It would have taken time, but eventually he would have been given access to the box and its contents. Possession of the key was meaningless: it conveyed no power and no authority to the person who had it; only the authorized person could open the box. Signora Altavilla did not know this, and apparently neither did Morandi. Empty threats. Empty menaces.
Relentless, Brunetti asked, ‘What happened?’
It took a long time, and Morandi had no obligation to answer, but he didn’t know that, either, and so he said, ‘She walked over to the door, and I tried to stop her.’ As he spoke, Morandi raised his hands in front of him and cupped his fingers. ‘I said her name, and when she turned around, I put my hands on her shoulders, but when I saw her face, I remembered my promise.’ He looked at Brunetti. ‘I started to move my hands away, but she pulled herself free and went to the door and opened it.’
‘And you?’
Voice even smaller, softer, Morandi said, ‘I felt so ashamed of myself. First I hit Maria, and then I put my hands on this other woman. I didn’t even know her, and there I was, holding her by the shoulders.’
‘That’s all you did?’ Brunetti insisted.
Morandi covered his eyes with one hand. ‘I was so ashamed I couldn’t even apologize. She opened the door for me and told me to get out, so there was nothing else I could do.’ He reached a hand towards Brunetti but then, remembering what had happened when he touched him before, he pulled it back. ‘May I tell you something?’
‘Yes.’
‘I started to cry on the staircase, on the way down. I hit Maria and then I frightened that poor woman. I had to stand inside the door until I stopped crying. That time, when I hit Maria, I made a promise that I’d never do a bad thing again, never in my life, but there I was, doing a bad thing again.
‘So I told myself that, if I loved Maria the way I said I did, I’d never do another thing like that again in my life.’ He stopped at the sound of his words, looked at Brunetti with an embarrassed grin and added, ‘Not that there’s much of that left.’ The smile faded and he went on. ‘And I told myself I’d never lie again and never do a single thing that Maria wouldn’t like.’
‘Why?’
‘I told you why. Because I was so ashamed of what I’d done.’
‘But what did you think would happen if you did what you promised?’ Brunetti asked.
Morandi put the tip of his right forefinger on the centre of his thigh and pushed it in a few times, each time waiting for the small impression to disappear before pushing it down again.
‘What would happen, Signor Morandi?’
Pushing, waiting, pushing, waiting, the right moment would come. Finally Morandi said, ‘Because maybe, if she knew, she’d love me.’
‘You mean go back to loving you?’ Brunetti asked.
Morandi’s astonishment was totaclass="underline" Brunetti read it in the wide blankness of his eyes as he turned to look at him. ‘No. Love me. She never has. Not really. But I came along when she was almost forty, and so she took me and lived with me. But she never loved me, not really.’ The tears were back, falling on to his shirt, but Morandi was unaware of them. ‘Not the way I love her.’
Again, he gave that doglike shake. ‘We’re the only people who know that,’ he said to Brunetti, placing his hand fleetingly on his arm, touching it and quickly off, as if afraid for his hand. ‘Maria doesn’t know it, or she doesn’t know that I know. But I do. And now you do.’
Brunetti didn’t know what to say in the face of these awful truths and their even more awful consequences. There was no answer to be had, neither from the façade of the church nor from the casa di cura.
Brunetti got to his feet. He reached a hand down for the old man to take and helped him to stand. ‘Why don’t you let me walk you home?’
29
The old man had to be helped up the stairs. Brunetti disguised this fact by saying he was curious about the view a top floor apartment in this area would have of the Campanile and the Basilica and asked Signor Morandi if he would show it to him. Brunetti, his grip under the old man’s arm secure, paused on every landing, inventing an old knee injury that slowed him down. They arrived at the top, Morandi pleased to have had less trouble than a much younger man, and Brunetti pleased that the old man had been protected from acknowledging his own infirmities.
Morandi opened the door and stepped back to let his guest enter first. Knowing that this old man had been living alone in the apartment for three years, Brunetti had prepared himself to find disorder, if not worse, but nothing could have prepared him for what he found. The late afternoon sun flowed down the corridor from a room at the end. The light glistened up from the high-polished cotto Veneziano. It looked like the original surface, rarely seen in the higher floors of palazzi and today all but impossible to imitate and difficult to repair. Though the ceiling was not particularly high, the entrance hall was large, and the corridor was unusually broad.
‘You can see the Basilica from this room,’ Morandi said, starting down the corridor and leaving Brunetti to follow. There was no furniture against the walls, and there were no doors to the rooms on either side. Brunetti glanced into one room and saw that it was entirely empty, though the windows glistened and the floor gleamed up at him. After a moment, Brunetti realized how very cold it was, how the cold seeped up from the floor and through the walls.
In the last room, the view was, indeed, splendid, but there was so little furniture – a table and two chairs – that it had the feel of a house that was no longer lived in and was open only for inspection by prospective buyers. Off in the distance the domes bubbled up, their crosses poking the tiny balls that topped them at the sky, and beyond them Brunetti saw the back of the wings of the angel that looked out over the bacino. Behind him, Morandi said, ‘Maria used to stand there for hours, looking at it. It made her happy to see this. In the beginning.’ He came and stood next to Brunetti, and together they looked at the signs of the power of God and the power of the state, and Brunetti was struck by the majesty those things had once had, and had no longer.
‘Signor Morandi,’ he said, speaking in the formal ‘Lei’ and making no grammatical concession to the things the old man had told him, ‘were you telling me the truth when you said that, about wanting to lead a better life?’
‘Oh, yes,’ he answered instantly, sounding just like Brunetti’s children, years ago, doing their drills for catechism class.
‘No more lies?’ Brunetti asked.
‘No.’
Brunetti thought of those mind-twisters they had been given when they were in school. There was one about getting a hen and a fox and a cabbage across a river, and one about nine pearls on a scale, and one about the man who always lied. He had vague memories of the puzzles, but the answers had all fled. If Morandi always lied, then he would have to lie about not lying, wouldn’t he?