Donna Leon - Blood from a stone

‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it?’ Vianello asked.

‘Yes, wonderful,’ Brunetti agreed. He turned it upside down, exposing the rough edges of wood on the bottom.

‘Snapped off at the neck, I’d say,’ Brunetti said. He rewrapped the head and slipped it into his own pocket.

Vianello went over to the bed and knelt down to push aside the edges of the blankets. He pulled out a cardboard box, got to his feet, and set it on the bed.

There was nothing else in the room: no toilet, no source of water, no cabinet or wardrobe of any sort. Brunetti pointed to the metal cup. Turning to Vianello, he said, ‘He must have heated water in this.’

Vianello gave no sign that he thought this worthy of comment. He looked down at the box, pushed the contents around with his forefinger, and said, ‘Nothing here.’ He knelt beside the bed again and reached for the box.

‘What’s in it, Vianello?’

‘Just some food.’

‘Wait a minute,’ Brunetti said. Vianello sat back on his heels.

Brunetti bent over the box and saw a packet of plain biscuits, a bag of shelled peanuts, an open box of rough cooking salt, four tea bags, a piece of cheese he thought might be Asiago, two oranges, and a transparent bag filled with the paper envelopes of sugar that bars served with coffee.

‘Why salt?’ he asked.

‘Excuse me?’

Brunetti used the same hand to gesture around the room. ‘Why would he have a box of salt? There are no pans. He doesn’t cook. So why does he have salt?’

Vianello said, ‘Maybe he uses it to brush his teeth,’ then stuck his forefinger in his mouth and made a scrubbing motion to show how it could be done.

Brunetti leaned forward and picked up the box of salt. ‘No, look at it. It’s sale grosso, for cooking. You can’t brush your teeth with this: the pieces are too big.’ The top of the box had been sliced open on three sides and the top partly pulled back to allow easy pouring. Brunetti saw the clumsy grains, the size of lentils, on the top. He licked his finger and stuck it into the salt, pulled it out and tasted it. Saltiness filled his mouth.

Brunetti set the box on the bed, pulled out his handkerchief and spread it smooth on top of the blanket. Then he poured the salt slowly out on to his handkerchief. Towards the middle of the box, the size and colour of the grains began to change: they lost the dull opacity of salt and, as if the subject of some beneficent transformation, grew in clarity and size until they fell from the box absolutely clear, some of them almost the size of peas.

‘Dio mio,’ Vianello said involuntarily.

Brunetti looked at the pile on the handkerchief, silenced by possibility. In the dull light from the single bulb, the stones lay there, inert and clear. Perhaps sunlight would bring them to life: he had no idea. He was not even certain what they were: no facets had been cut or ground into them to give them recognizable shape or lustre as gemstones. For all he knew, they could have been the castoffs of some Murano glass-blower, little chunks of clarity meant to form, say, the ears of glass bears or the noses of transparent bunnies.

But if that was all these glassy things were, they were unlikely to be hidden in the room of a murdered man.

Vianello got to his feet. ‘What do we do with them?’ he asked. Brunetti thought of some of his colleagues at the Questura and how, were one of them to ask the question, he would interpret it as an inquiry into the best way of pocketing the stones. From Vianello, however, the question was no more than an echo of his own concern about how to keep them from falling into those other hands. How many villas had sprung from police evidence rooms? How many vacations had been paid for by sequestered drugs and money?

‘Give me your mittens,’ Brunetti said.

‘What?’ asked a startled Vianello.

‘Your mittens. We can put them in there to carry them out of here.’

‘We’re going to take them?’

‘Would you leave them here?’ Brunetti asked. ‘When the men downstairs know we’re interested in him, and when Cuzzoni knows?’

‘You said you trusted him.’

Brunetti pointed at the squat pyramid on the bed. ‘Until I know if these are real, I don’t trust anyone.’

‘And when you do know? Who will you trust then?’ Vianello asked, pulling his mittens from the pockets of his jacket.

Ignoring the question, Brunetti picked up the handkerchief by the four corners and jiggled it until he created a chute that would allow it to pour easily. The salt and stones hung heavily, a fat lump at the bottom of a not entirely clean white handkerchief. Vianello held the first mitten under it, and Brunetti poured until they came within a few centimetres of the top. Vianello shook the stones until the thumb stood out rigid from the side. He set it on the bed while he slipped his watch off and tried to wrap the expandable band around the stuffed mitten, but it did not work, so he replaced the watch and contented himself with giving the mitten a few more shakes. He slipped it into the right pocket of his jacket and zipped the pocket closed.

They did the same with the second mitten, which went into Vianello’s left hand pocket. That left Brunetti with a pile the size of an orange at the bottom of his handkerchief. He tied the corners together, then slipped it into the inside pocket of his jacket and buttoned the pocket.

Careful of the box now that it might carry fingerprints, he used the keys to slit open the bottom flap, then pressed the box flat and slid it into the outside pocket of his jacket. When that was done, he took out his telefonino and called the number of the technical squad at the Questura. He told them where the apartment was, said it might be the home of the man who was murdered, and asked them to send someone over to fingerprint the room. He was not to be in uniform and was to ring the top bell in front of the house. Yes, he and Vianello would wait.

When he hung up, Vianello said, ‘You didn’t answer my question.’

‘Which one?’ asked a distracted Brunetti.

‘Who you’ll trust, once you find out if they’re real?’

For the first time since they had entered the building, Brunetti smiled. ‘No one.’

The technician took almost an hour to get there, which left Brunetti and Vianello to sit side by side on the bed in the freezing room and discuss possibilities. When the cold became too intense, they went down one floor to the other apartment and let themselves in again. There, at least, it was minimally warmer, and one of them could stand at the partially open door to see that no one went past it and up to the next floor.

Brunetti went into the kitchen and came out with two plastic bags. At his request, Vianello unzipped his pockets and put both mittens in one of the bags. Brunetti tied the neck of the bag closed and slipped it into the other. While they did all this, they talked about what they had found, but neither of them could come up with a satisfactory explanation, though Brunetti did think of someone whom he could ask about the stones. While Vianello stood at the door, he called Claudio Stein and asked if he could come and talk to him the following morning.

Claudio, like most people Brunetti knew, believed that a telephone was an open conduit to various offices of the government, and so he asked no questions and said that he would be in his office after nine and would, of course, be delighted to see Brunetti. When Brunetti hung up, Vianello asked, ‘Who is he?’

‘A friend of my father’s. They were in the war together.’

‘How old is he, then?’

‘Past eighty, I’d say,’ Brunetti answered, then, ‘I don’t really know.’ He had no idea if Claudio was older or younger than his father, only that he had been one of the few men his father trusted and one of the even fewer who had remained a friend all during the long twilight of his father’s last years.

The sound of the doorbell announced the arrival of the man from the technical squad. When he got to the second floor, Brunetti explained that he wanted prints from the room on the floor above. He pulled the salt box from his pocket and, holding it by a corner, waited for the technician to take an evidence bag out of his briefcase. ‘The prints on this should match the dead man’s; the others should be mine,’ Brunetti said. ‘I’d like to know if there are any others.’ He told the man that the door upstairs was open and added that he’d like Bocchese to get on to this as quickly as he could. As the man turned towards the stairs, Brunetti said, as an afterthought, ‘When you’re finished, wipe off any sign that you’ve been up there, all right? And then do this place here.’

The man waved a hand over his head in acknowledgement and started up the steps. There was no reason for them to remain, and so they went downstairs. Brunetti stopped at the doorway to the first floor apartment and knocked, but no one answered the door.

‘You think they’re gone?’ Vianello asked.

Brunetti looked down at his watch, surprised to see that it was after seven, which meant they had spent more than two hours inside the building. ‘If nothing else, they’ve gone to work.’ Both of them knew that, to avoid direct competition with shop owners, the vu cumprà worked primarily when the shops were closed for lunchtime or after they closed in the evening. ‘There’s no way they’ll be back here before midnight,’ Brunetti said.

‘And so?’

‘So we go home for dinner, and then tomorrow I’ll go and see Claudio.’

‘Would you like me to come with you?’ Vianello asked.

‘To protect me again?’ Brunetti joked, pointing to the door behind which the black men lived.

‘If he’s in the business I think he’s in, perhaps it’s Signor Claudio who could use a bit of protecting,’ Vianello answered, but he smiled when he said it.

‘Claudio and my father walked back from Berlin in 1946. I don’t think danger has any real meaning for a person who did that,’ Brunetti said, thanked Vianello nonetheless for his offer, and went home to his pork with olives and tomato sauce.

Claudio Stein ran his business from a small apartment over near Piazzale Roma, at the end of a blind calle near the prison. Brunetti had been there many times. In his youth, he had gone with his father and had listened while the two men spoke of their shared past, both as young men in Venice before the war and then as young soldiers in Greece and in Russia. Over the course of the years spanned by the friendship of the two men, Brunetti had come to know all their stories: the priest in Castello who told them it was a sin not to join the Fascist party, the woman in Thessaloniki who gave them a bottle of ouzo, the wild artillery captain who had tried to kidnap them into his unit and had been turned away only by the sight of a pistol. In all of their stories, the two men emerged victorious: but then the fact that they had survived the war at all was, all things considered, sufficient sign of victory.

After years of listening to their stories, Brunetti eventually realized that the hero of all of the adventures that took place before the war was his father: extroverted, generous, clever, a natural leader of the neighbourhood boys. After the war, however, command passed to the far less volatile Claudio: cautious, honest, reliable and, in his relationship with his friend, protective and loyal. Claudio had learned how to deflect the retelling of stories when they veered towards subjects that might bring on one of the elder Brunetti’s cataclysmic rages: he always turned the conversation away from politicians, officers, or equipment and back to their repeated triumphs in the search for food and amusement. How many of these stories were true? Brunetti had no idea, nor did he care. He loved them and had always loved hearing them because of the pictures they gave him, however out of sequence or distorted by the lens of the teller, of the man his father had been before the war had had its way with him.

Claudio opened the door soon after his first ring, and the first thing Brunetti thought was that the old man had forgotten to put his shoes on. They embraced, and Brunetti took the opportunity to look down the back of the old man’s legs, but there indeed were the heels of his shoes. He stepped back and took another look and saw that it was nothing more than the inevitable betrayal of age that had slipped in and stolen five or more centimetres from Claudio since the last time they met.

‘How good to see you, Guido,’ the old man said in the same deep voice that had been a beacon of calm to Brunetti during most of his youth. He led Brunetti into the apartment, saying, ‘Here, give me your coat.’ Brunetti set his briefcase on the floor and removed his coat, waiting as Claudio hung it up. It had been Claudio, he remembered, who had given him a thousand lire for his sixteenth birthday, a fortune then, money he had taken to the neighbourhood bar and spent in a single night on buying drinks for his friends. Such were the times that most of the money had been spent on Coca-Cola and limonata: after all, wine was available at home, so why celebrate with that?

Claudio led them down the corridor and into the room he always referred to as his office, though it was simply a room in an apartment with a large desk, three chairs, and an enormous safe as tall as a man. In all the years Brunetti had come here, the surface of the desk had always been empty. Only once, and that was six years ago when he had come to interview Claudio in his official capacity as a policeman, had anything appeared on the desk. Then it had been nothing more than the soft suede jeweller’s case that had been left by a pair of swindlers who had somehow substituted it for the one Claudio had himself filled with the stones they claimed they were going to buy.

The case was a classic, a well-prepared sting that had probably taken the pair more than a year to set up. They had studied Claudio’s behaviour, befriended members of his family, and in the process had learned enough about his private life and his business to persuade him that they were old clients of his father, who had run the business before leaving it to Claudio.

On the day of sale, they had come to this same office, and Claudio had given them the pride of his collections, gems to a value so large that he had begun to sob after confessing everything to Brunetti. Carefully they had selected the stones, letting Claudio place them, one by one, in the suede case. At the very last, the one who subseuently turned out to be the leader had selected an enormous diamond solitaire ring and had placed it in the centre of the case, then watched as Claudio folded it closed and secured it with its bands of black elastic. ‘That way,’ the man had said, pointing at the little leather bump that indicated the ring, ‘you’ll be sure which case is ours.’

And it had happened then, in the half-second between the time Claudio finished securing the package and the moment when he inserted it on the top shelf of the safe. Had one of them asked him a question, pulled out a cigarette case? Later, when he discovered the substitution, Claudio could not remember anything about that crucial moment when the two cases had been switched. He realized what had happened only two days later, when the men did not come back to pay him and collect their stones. Later, he said he knew already when he opened the safe and took the case, knew it though he could never believe that it was possible, that they could have managed to switch the cases, not with him there, not with him paying attention. But they had.