Drawing Conclusions - Donna Leon [76]
Maria Sartori had been a practical nurse, first at the Ospedale al Lido, and then at the Ospedale Civile, from which she had retired more than fifteen years before. Never married, she had lived at the same address as Benito Morandi for most of their adult lives. She had kept an account at the same bank during her working life, into which modest sums were deposited and then withdrawn. She had never been in hospital, nor had she ever come to the attention of the police. And that was all: no mention of joy or sorrow, dreams or disappointments. Decades of work, retirement and a pension, and now a room in a private casa di cura, paid for by her pension and the contribution of her companion.
Attached was a photocopy of her carta d’identità; Brunetti barely recognized the soft-featured woman who gazed out at the world from the photo: surely she could not be the ancestor of the woman with the deeply lined face he had seen. He fought off the temptation to whisper to the younger face how right she had been: trouble comes.
As he handed the second sheet to Vianello, Brunetti turned his attention to her companion. Morandi had served in the Second World War. Brunetti’s first thought was that Morandi must have lied about that, but then he did the numbers and saw that it was just barely possible.
Brunetti’s father had often referred to the chaos that had prevailed during those dreadful years, so he believed that a boy in his early teens might have been allowed to enlist at the very end. But then Brunetti read Morandi’s service record, stating that he had seen service in Abyssinia, Albania, and Greece, where he had been wounded, sent home, and discharged back into civilian life.
‘No, eh?’ Brunetti heard himself say aloud, startling Vianello, who turned to look at him. If the date of birth in this file was true, then Morandi would have gone off to Greece when he was as young as twelve, and he would have been only sixteen when Italy surrendered to the Allies. No matter how eager to name their son ‘Benito’ his family might have been, few families would have allowed their adolescent son to follow the other Benito off to war.
A few years after Morandi’s return – or at least after documentary evidence of his war service had entered the record – he took a job at the port of Venice and remained there for more than a decade, though no more precise job description than ‘manual labourer’ was provided. Brunetti learned that he had been dismissed from this job without explanation.
Some years later, he began working as a cleaner at the Ospedale Civile. Brunetti leaned aside and picked up the papers Vianello had set on his desk; Signora Sartori was already working at the Ospedale by then.
Morandi had worked as a portiere and cleaner for more than two decades and had retired about twenty years before, entitled to a minimal pension.
Brunetti recognized the seal of the Ministry of Justice on the next three sheets of paper, which catalogued Morandi’s relationship with the forces of order, to which he was no stranger. He had first been arrested when he was in his early thirties, charged with selling smuggled cigarettes to tobacco shops on the mainland. Five years later, he was arrested for selling items stolen from ships being unloaded at the port and was given a one-year suspended sentence. Seven years after that he was arrested for having assaulted and seriously injured a colleague at work. When the man failed to testify against him, the charges were dropped. He had also been arrested for resisting arrest and for passing stolen goods to a fence in Mestre. There was some sort of clerical error in the processing of evidence in that case, and after five years it was abandoned, though by then Signor Morandi seemed to have passed to the side of the angels, for he had not been arrested since the time he had begun work at the hospital.
The last sheets of paper concerned Signor Morandi’s life as a fiscal being. About the time of his retirement, Morandi bought an apartment in San Marco without