Donna Leon - Blood from a stone

After a time, Paola took both the platter and the bowl back to the sink and refilled them, leaving Brunetti impressed at how she had foreseen this adolescent plague of locusts. Azir, after saying that she had never eaten radicchio and had no idea what it was, allowed Paola to pile some on her plate. While no one was watching, it disappeared.

When offers of more food met with honest protests, Paola and Azir cleared the table, and Paola handed the girl smaller plates and fruit dishes. Then she opened the refrigerator and pulled out a large bowl of chopped fruit.

Paola asked who wanted macedonia, and Azir asked, ‘Why is it called that, Dottoressa?’

‘I think because of the country, Macedonia, which is made up of small groups of people who have been all cut up and segmented. But I’m not sure.’ She turned to Chiara and, as was usual in such situations, said, ‘Get the Zanichelli, Chiara.’

Because the dictionary was now kept in Chiara’s room, she disappeared and returned with the heavy volume. She opened the book and started flipping pages, muttering under her breath as she went: ‘macchia’, ‘macchiare’, ‘macedone’, until she finally found the right place and read out, ‘Macedonia’, and the origin, proving Paola’s guess correct. After that her voice dropped into the mumble of a person reading to herself. She slid her plate to one side and replaced it with the open book. Then, as if the other people at the table had evaporated along with the rice, she began to read the other entries on the page.

Azir finished her fruit, refused a second helping, and got to her feet saying, ‘May I help you with the dishes, Signora?’

Brunetti pushed back his chair and went into the living room, thinking that perhaps he had been mistaken about Chiara all these years and Azir really was the most wonderful daughter in the whole world.

When Paola came in about half an hour later, Brunetti asked, ‘Do you want to say it or shall I?’

‘What, that she can say, “only a vu cumprà ”, at the same time she can be concerned that her Muslim friend isn’t served pork?’ Paola asked as she sat down beside him. She set a book and her glasses to one side of the low table in front of them.

Brunetti might not have phrased it this way, but nevertheless he answered, ‘Yes, I suppose so.’

‘She’s an adolescent, Guido.’

‘And that means?’

Absently, Paola pulled a cushion from behind her and tossed it on to the table, then kicked off her shoes and put up her feet. ‘It means that the only constant in her life is that she’s inconsistent. If enough people approve of an idea or an opinion, then she’s likely to think it’s a reasonable proposition; if enough people object, then she’ll probably reconsider it and perhaps change her mind. And because of her age, there’s all that adolescent static flying around in her head, so it’s difficult for her to think straight for a long time without worrying what her friends will think of her for saying or doing what she does.’ She paused, then said, ‘Or, for that matter, for wearing or eating or drinking or liking or listening to or watching what she does.’

‘But isn’t she aware of the inconsistency?’ he asked doggedly.

‘Between attending to one foreigner’s needs and casually dismissing the death of another?’ Paola inquired, again phrasing it bluntly.

‘Yes.’

Adjusting to a more comfortable position, Paola leaned her shoulder up against his chest. ‘She knows Azir, likes her, so she’s real to Chiara: the black man was a faceless stranger,’ Paola said, then added, ‘And she’s probably still too young to be affected by how beautiful they are.’

‘By what?’ asked Brunetti.

‘By how beautiful they are,’ Paola repeated.

‘The vu cumprà?’ Brunetti asked with open surprise.

‘Beautiful,’ Paola repeated. She watched Brunetti’s face and then asked, ‘Have you ever looked at them, Guido? Really looked? They’re beautiful men: tall and straight and in perfect shape, and many of them have the sort of faces you see on carvings.’ When he still looked unpersuaded, she asked, ‘Would you prefer to look at fat tourists in shorts?’

Accepting that he was not going to answer, she went back to the original subject. ‘It’s also about class, I think, much as I don’t like to say it.’

‘Class?’ he asked, still puzzling over the idea of the beauty of the Africans.

‘Azir’s parents are professionals. The black man was a street pedlar.’

‘Is it better or worse if that’s the reason she said it?’ asked a genuinely confused Brunetti.

Paola gave this a great deal of thought and finally answered. ‘I’d say it’s better, in a perverse sort of way.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it’s more easily corrected.’

‘I’m lost,’ Brunetti confessed, which was often the case when Paola’s mind moved to consideration of the abstract.

‘Think of it this way, Guido: if it’s based on the difference in race, thinking that one race is superior, then it’s lodged in some inner space in her mind, some atavistic place where sweet reason is unlikely to penetrate. But if it’s based on the belief that people are better than others because they have more money or are better educated, then she’s bound sooner or later to encounter enough counter-examples of this to see how ridiculous the idea is.’

‘Should we point it out to her?’ he asked, dreading her answer.

‘No,’ Paola’s response was instant. ‘She’s intelligent, so she’ll figure this one out by herself.’ When Brunetti said nothing, Paola added, ‘If we’re lucky, and she is, too, then she’ll figure both out.’

‘Because you did?’ Brunetti had never been satisfied with any explanation she had ever given him of how a person from a family as limitlessly wealthy as hers could have ended up with social and economic ideas so different from those of her class and most of her relatives.

‘It was easier for me, I think,’ Paola said. ‘Because I never actually believed it. There was never any suggestion, when I was growing up, that we were better than other people. Different, for sure: it would have been hard to disguise that, with all that money washing around.’ She turned to him and tilted her head to one side, the way she did when new ideas sneaked up on her. ‘You know, Guido, hard as this will be for you to believe, I think it never occurred to me — at least when I was young — that we really were rich. After all, my father went off to work every day, just like everybody else’s: we didn’t have a car; we didn’t go on expensive vacations. But it was more than that, I think,’ she said, and he turned to watch the play of thought on her face as she worked this out.

‘It was more a question of what was approved of or disapproved of, sort of without saying. At home, I mean. What I learned to be important about people.’

‘Give me an example,’ he said.

‘The worst, I think — the worst disapproval, that is — was of people who didn’t work. It didn’t much matter to my parents what work a person did, whether they ran a bank or a workshop: the important thing was that they worked and that they thought their work was important.’

Paola pulled away and turned to face him. ‘I think that’s why my father has always liked you so much, Guido, because your work is so important to you.’

Discussion of Paola’s father, his likes and dislikes, always made Brunetti faintly edgy, so he turned back to the matter at hand. ‘And Chiara?’

‘She’ll be all right,’ Paola said with what Brunetti suspected she forced to sound like certainty. Then, after a long pause, she added, ‘At first, I thought I’d reacted too strongly to what she said about him, but now I think I was right.’

‘Better than hitting her, at any rate,’ Brunetti said.

‘And probably more effective,’ Paola added. She leaned back against him and said, ‘We’ll just have to wait and see.’

‘See what?’

‘How she turns out,’ Paola said and reached forward to pick up her glasses and her book.

22

When he left the house soon afterwards, Brunetti felt no regret that he had escaped a longer discussion of the vagaries of the adolescent female psyche. The decades had eased his own memory of adolescence, removing the visceral fear of not fitting in or not being accepted by his companions. He knew these uncertainties beset his daughter, but he no longer felt their power; thus he was uncomfortable at the ease with which he had forgiven her.

He remembered enough of his study of logic to recognize a slippery slope when he saw it, even in his own thinking, but still it felt right to suspect that Chiara’s failure to give sympathy might somehow lead to a refusal to give aid. He was in a hurry to get back to his office, so he stifled the voice asking him if, for example, his own habitual suspicions of southerners would, in comparable fashion, affect his treatment of them.

There was a message on his desk, asking him to call Signor Claudio at home. He did so immediately, using Signor Rossi’s telefonino, and was relieved to hear the old man give his name.

‘It’s me, Claudio,’ Brunetti said. ‘I got your message.’

‘Good, I’m glad you called; I spoke to my friend, and I thought you’d want to know what he told me.’

‘The one in Antwerp?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Yes.’

‘And?’

‘I spoke to him twice, actually,’ the old man clarified. ‘The first time he told me they were from Africa, but I told him I already knew that much, so he said he’d call back. When he did, he said he’d shown them to someone else.’

Brunetti could not stop himself from asking, ‘Someone discreet, I hope?’

Claudio’s voice was cool when he said, ‘Guido, no one’s more discreet than an Antwerp diamond merchant. They make Swiss bankers seem like blabbermouths.’

‘All right,’ said a relieved Brunetti. ‘I’m sorry I interrupted. What did he say?’

‘That they’re from the Kansai. My friend says he agrees.’

‘What’s that?’ Brunetti asked, never having heard the word.

‘A region of West Africa. It’s in the Congo, but some of the pipes cross over into eastern Angola, and so both countries lay claim to the diamonds. It’s pretty much a war zone, and the border doesn’t mean much to anyone any more.’

‘And he’s sure?’ Brunetti asked. He had no idea whether this mattered, but he was tired of almosts and guesses and uncertainty and longed to have definite information, regardless of whether he knew what importance it might have.

After a pause, Claudio said, ‘Not entirely,’ and, with greater patience, added, ‘The other man kept them long enough to check where they come on the colour spectrum,’ as if this should be enough to convince anyone, then went on: ‘You’d understand it if you knew the technology, but you can believe him: it’s a ninety per cent probability that that’s where they come from.’ At Brunetti’s answering silence, Claudio said, ‘No one can make it more certain than that, Guido.’

‘All right,’ Brunetti said. ‘Please thank him for me.’ He let a moment pass and then asked, ‘Anything else?’

‘A friend of mine said he was approached by an African about a week ago.’

‘A friend where?’

‘Here. A jeweller.’

‘Approached with diamonds?’

‘Yes.’

‘Could they have been the same diamonds?’ Brunetti asked.

‘I have no way to know that, Guido. All I know is that the man was African and he had diamonds he wanted to sell.’

‘And?’

‘And my friend looked at them and declined the opportunity to buy them.’

‘Why? Too expensive.’

‘No. The opposite.’

‘What?’

‘They were cheap. The man was asking about half their value. My friend didn’t tell me how many stones were involved, but he did tell me that the man who tried to sell them let it be known that there were more than a hundred of them.’ Before Brunetti could ask, he said, ‘It was a situation where I couldn’t really ask him, not for anything more than he told me.’

‘Did he tell the man he didn’t want to buy them?’

‘Yes.’

‘And?’

‘And he seemed surprised, which my friend thought meant he knew how good the price was.’

‘Why did he?’ Brunetti asked. ‘Your friend. Turn them down, I mean.’

Claudio’s answer took a moment to come. ‘Some of us won’t deal in conflict diamonds or stones that we think are: there’s too much blood on them. It’s as simple as that. And my friend said it was pretty clear that’s what these were.’

‘He wouldn’t buy them even at that price?’ Brunetti asked.

‘No,’ Claudio said, then added, by way of explanation, ‘We all make enough money with our business. We don’t need this on our consciences.’

‘How many of you feel this way?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Ah,’ Claudio began, ‘not a lot.’

‘Then why bother?’

‘I told you: there’s too much blood on them,’ Claudio said. ‘I know people who do buy them. They say it’s not their business where the stones come from or what happens with the money that they pay for them, who gets killed with the weapons that are usually bought with it. They buy the stones and that’s the end of it.’

‘You don’t agree?’

‘I’ve asked you not to play the fool, Guido,’ Claudio said with uncommon heat. Brunetti heard the other man take a deep breath, and then Claudio said, ‘Don’t provoke me. I’m an old man, and I want to live in peace.’

‘I think you do, Claudio,’ Brunetti said, regretting that he had, indeed, provoked him. He asked, ‘Did your friend say what he looked like, the man selling the diamonds?’

‘No. Only that he was African.’ Before Brunetti could respond, Claudio said, ‘I know, I know: they all look the same.’

‘Did he say what language they spoke?’ Brunetti asked, recalling that Angola had once belonged to Portugal.

‘Italian, and he said the man spoke it reasonably well,’ Claudio answered without hesitation.

‘Did he say anything about an accent?’

‘No, but if he was from Africa, he’d have an accent, wouldn’t he?’ Claudio asked.

‘Yes, of course,’ Brunetti said, deciding not to pursue this. Instead, he asked, ‘Do you have any idea where he would be likely to go after your friend turned him down?’ Then without allowing Claudio to speak, Brunetti asked, ‘When did this happen?’

‘Last week some time. Let me think,’ Claudio said and then went silent. Brunetti waited as the older man searched his memory and then said, ‘Last Friday.’ He paused again. ‘That’s two days before the man was killed, isn’t it?’

‘Yes. So maybe he didn’t have enough time to talk to anyone else. But if he did, who would he have gone to?’ Brunetti asked.