Drawing Conclusions - Donna Leon [103]
‘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.’
‘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