Drawing Conclusions - Donna Leon [93]
He closed the notebook and put it and his pen back in his pocket, then got to his feet. ‘Have you sold them all?’ he asked, though the question was not necessary. They belonged to whoever had them, and even if the law could get them back, to whom did they now belong?
‘No. There are two left.’ Brunetti saw Turchetti start to say something, force himself to stop, and then give in to the impulse. ‘Why? Do I have to give you one?’
Brunetti turned and left the gallery.
26
Well, well, well. Brunetti walked back towards the bridge. The Dillis was worth forty thousand and poor silly Morandi got four, and why was he thinking of Morandi as poor, or silly? Because the Salathé was worth almost as much and he let Turchetti pay him three?
Brunetti was aware that, no matter how right his own ethical system might feel to him, he still found it difficult to explain, even to himself. He had read the Greeks and Romans and knew what they thought of justice and right and wrong and the common good and the personal good, and he had read the Fathers of the Church and knew what they said. He knew the rules, but he found himself, in every particular situation, bogged down in the specifics of what happened to people, found himself siding with or against them because of what they thought or felt and not necessarily in accord with the rules that were meant to govern things.
Morandi had once been a thug, but Brunetti had seen his protective look at that solitary woman across the room, and so he could not believe Morandi had wanted to keep her from talking to him so much as he wanted to keep anyone from disturbing whatever peace remained to her.
He waited for the Number Two, watching the people cross the bridge. Boats passed in both directions, one of them filled to the gunwales with the possessions, and perhaps the hopes, of an entire family that was moving house. Down to Castello? Or turn in to the left and back into San Marco? A shaggy black dog stood on a table precariously balanced on a pile of cardboard boxes at the prow of the boat, its nose pointing forward as bravely as that of any figurehead. How dogs loved boats. Was it the open air and the richness of scents passing by? He couldn’t remember whether dogs saw at long distance or only very close, or perhaps it differed according to what breed they were. Well, there’d be no determining breed with this one: he was as much Bergamasco as Labrador, as much spaniel as hound. He was happy, that was evident, and perhaps that’s all a dog needed to be and all Brunetti needed to know about a dog.
The arrival of the vaporetto cut off his reflections but did not remove Morandi from his mind. ‘People don’t change.’ How many times had he heard his mother say that? She had never studied psychology, his mother. In fact, she had never studied much at all, but that did not prevent her from having a logical mind, even a subtle one. Presented with an example of uncharacteristic behaviour, she would often point out that it was merely a manifestation of the person’s real character, and when she reminded people of events from the past, she was often proven right.
Usually people surprised us, he reflected, with the bad they did, when some dark impulse slipped the leash and brought them, and others, to ruin. And then how easy it became to find in the past the undetected symptoms of their malice. How, then, find the undetected symptoms of goodness?
When he got to his office, he tried the phone book again and found that Morandi was listed, but the phone rang unanswered until the eighth ring, when a man’s voice said he was not at home but could be reached on his telefonino. Brunetti copied the number and dialled it immediately.
‘Sì,’ a man’s voice answered.
‘Signor Morandi?’
‘Sì. Chi è?’
‘Good day,