The Count nodded, but really not in acknowledgement of what Brunetti said. He cleared his throat. He He said - he told Maurizio this later - he said that he got curious, wondered why we'd bothered to sent him halfway across Europe to bring back a suitcase and that he wanted to see what was in it. He thought it might be gold or precious stones. Because it was so heavy.' He paused, then said, 'It was lined with lead.' He stopped again, and Brunetti wondered what would make him continue. said - he told Maurizio this later - he said that he got curious, wondered why we'd bothered to sent him halfway across Europe to bring back a suitcase and that he wanted to see what was in it. He thought it might be gold or precious stones. Because it was so heavy.' He paused, then said, 'It was lined with lead.' He stopped again, and Brunetti wondered what would make him continue.

'Did he want to steal them?' Brunetti asked.

The Count looked up. 'Oh, no, Roberto would never steal anything, and certainly not from me.'

"Then why?'

'He was curious. And I suppose he was jealous, thinking that I would trust Maurizio to know what was in the suitcase, but not him.'

'And so he opened it?'

The Count nodded. 'He said, he used the old-fashioned sort of can opener they had in the hotel, you know, the sort with the triangular point, the kind we used to use for opening beer.'

Brunetti nodded.

'If it hadn't been in the room, he wouldn't have been able to open the suitcase, and then none of this would ever have happened. But it was Belorussia, and that's the kind they have. So he forced the lock and opened the suitcase.'

'What was inside?'

The Count looked across at him, surprised. 'You just told me what was in it'

'I know, but I want to know how it was being shipped. What form was it in?'

'Small blue pellets. They look like rabbit droppings, only smaller' The Count held up the first two fingers of his right hand to indicate the correct size to Brunetti and repeated, 'Rabbit droppings.'

Brunetti said nothing; experience had taught him that there was a time when people had to be left alone to go ahead on their own, at their own pace, or they would simply stop.

Eventually the Count continued. 'He closed the suitcase again after that, but he had left it open long enough' It wasn't necessary for the Count to explain long enough for what. Brunetti had read the symptoms of what that exposure had done to him.

'When did you find out that he had opened it?'

'When we sent the material on, to our buyer. He called me to tell me that the lock had been tampered with. But that didn't happen for almost two weeks. It went by ship.'

Brunetti let that go for now. 'And how soon did he begin to have trouble?'

Trouble?'

'Symptoms'

The Count nodded. 'Ah' After a short pause, he continued, 'About a week. At first I thought it was influenza or something like that. We still hadn't heard from our buyer. But then he got worse. And then I found out that the suitcase had been opened. There was only one thing that could have happened.'

'Did you ask him?'

'No, ho. There was no need for that.' 'Did he tell anyone?'

'Yes, he told Maurizio, but not until he was very bad.' 'And then?'

The Count looked down at his hands, measured a small distance with the fingers of his right, as if again measuring out the size of the pellets that had killed his son, or that had led to the killing of his son. He looked up. 'And then I decided what I had to do.'

'Had to do?' Brunetti asked before he could stop himself.

'Yes.' At first, he thought the Count wouldn't explain this, but he went on. 'If it had come out, what was wrong with him, then all the rest would have come out, too, about the shipments.'

'I see,' Brunetti said, nodding.

It would have ruined us, and it would have disgraced us. I couldn't let that happen. Not after all these years. These centuries.'

'Ah, yes,' Brunetti whispered.

'So I decided what had to be done, and I spoke to those men, Frasetti and Mascarini'

'Whose idea was it about how it should be done?'

The Count shook this aside as unimportant. 'I told them what to do. But the important thing was that my wife not be made to suffer. If she had learned what Roberto was doing, what had caused his death ... I don't know what would have happened to her.' He looked at Brunetti, then down at his hands. 'But now she knows.'

'How?'

'She saw me with Maurizio.'

Brunetti thought of the curved bird-woman, her tiny hands grasped around the handle of her cane. The Count wanted to spare her from suffering, spare her from shame. Ah, yes.

'And the kidnapping? Why didn't they send a third note?'

'He died,' the Count said in a barren voice.

'Roberto? He died?'

That's what they told me.'

Brunetti nodded, as if he understood this and as if he were following with sympathy the twisted path the Count was taking him down. 'And so?' he asked.

'And so I told them they had to shoot him, to make it look like that's what killed him.' As the Count continued to explain all of this, Brunetti began to understand that the man was persuaded of the inner logic of everything that had been done, of the rightness of it. There was no doubt in that voice, no uncertainty.

'But why did they bury him there, near Belluno?'

'One of them has a small house in the woods, for the hunting season. They kept Roberto there, and when he died, I told them to bury him up there.' The Count's face softened momentarily. 'But I told them to bury him in a shallow grave. With his ring.' Seeing Brunetti's confusion, he explained, 'So that he would be found, and for his mother. She would have to know. I couldn't think of her not knowing, of never knowing whether he was alive or dead. It would have killed her.'

'Yes,I See' Brunetti whispered, and in a lunatic way he did. 'And Maurizio?'

The Count c.o.c.ked his head to one side, perhaps recalling that other young man, dead now too. 'He didn't know any of it. But then when it all began again, when you started asking questions:... well, he began to ask questions about Roberto and about the kidnapping. He wanted to go to the police and tell what had happened.' The Count shook his head here at the young man's weakness and folly. 'But then my wife would know. If he went to the police, she'd know what had happened, what was going on'

'And you couldn't permit that?' Brunetti asked levelly.

'No, of course not. It would have been too much for her' 'I see'

The Count stretched out one hand towards Brunetti, the same hand that had measured out those small b.a.l.l.s of radium, or plutonium, or uranium. Count stretched out one hand towards Brunetti, the same hand that had measured out those small b.a.l.l.s of radium, or plutonium, or uranium.

If he had turned a dial and adjusted the clarity of a television screen, or suddenly removed some sort of static interference from a radio reception, the change could have been no more apparent, for it was at this point that the Count began to lie. There was no change in his voice as it went seamlessly from his agitation at the thought of his wife's pain to what he next began to explain, but it was as audible and evident to Brunetti as if the Count had suddenly jumped on the desk and begun to tear off his clothing.

'He came to me that night and said he understood what I'd done. He threatened me. With the shotgun' The Count couldn't keep himself from looking over towards Brunetti to see how he received this, but Brunetti gave no indication that he was at all aware of what was happening.

'He came in with the shotgun' the Count continued. 'And he pointed it at me and told me he was going to go to the police. I tried to reason with him, but men he came closer and put the gun up against my face. And I think, then, that I did go a little bit crazy because I don't remember what happened. Just that the gun went off.'

Brunetti nodded, but what he nodded at was the correctness of his belief that anything the Count said from now on would be a lie.

'And your client?' he asked. 'The person who bought the materials?'

The Count's hesitation was infinitesimal. 'Only Maurizio knew who he was. He arranged everything.'

Brunetti got to his feet. 'I think that's enough, Signore. If you'd like; you can call your lawyer. But then I'd like you to come to the Questura with me.'

The Count was visibly surprised by this. 'Why there?'

'Because I'm arresting you, Ludovico Lorenzoni, for the murder of your son and the murder of your nephew.'

The confusion on the Count's face could not have been more real. 'But I just told you. Roberto died of natural causes. And Maurizio tried to murder me.' He pushed himself to his feet but stayed behind his desk. He reached down, moved a paper from one side to the other, pushed the computer keyboard a bit more to the left. But he found nothing further to say.

'As I told you, you can call your lawyer, but then you must come with me'

He saw the Count give in, a change as subtle as that which marked the beginning of the lies, though Brunetti knew that they would never stop now.

'May I say goodbye to my wife?' he asked. 'Yes. Of course.'

Wordlessly, the Count came around the desk, walked in front of Brunetti, and left the room.

Brunetti went over to the window behind the desk and looked out over the rooftops. He hoped the Count would do the honourable thing. He had let him go, uncertain about what other guns might be in the house. The Count was trapped by his own admission, his wife knew him to be a killer, his reputation and that of his family was soon to be in ruins, and a weapon might be somewhere in the house. If he were an honourable man, the Count would do the honourable thing.

Yet Brunetti knew he would not.

27.

'But what does it matter if he's punished or not?' Paola asked him three nights later, after the feeding frenzy of the press that had greeted the Count's arrest had quieted down. 'His son is dead. His nephew's dead. His wife knows he killed them. His reputation is ruined. He's an old man, and he'll die in prison.' She sat on the side of the bed, wearing one of Brunetti's old bathrobes and a heavy woollen sweater on top of it. 'What else do you want to happen to him?'

Brunetti was sitting in bed, covers drawn up to his chest, and had been reading when she came into the room, bringing him a large mug of heavily honeyed tea. She handed him the mug, nodded to tell him that, yes, she'd thought to add cognac and lemon, and sat down beside him.

As he took his first sip, she pushed aside the newspapers that lay scattered on the floor beside their bed. The Count's face looked up from page four, pushed there by a Mafia killing in Palermo, the first in weeks. In the time that had elapsed since the Count's arrest, Brunetti had not spoken of him, and Paola had respected his silence. But now she wanted him to talk, not because she relished discussing a parent who murdered a child, but because she knew from long experience that it would help Brunetti to rid himself of the pain of the case.

She asked him what he thought would happen to the Count, and as he answered, she took the mug from him now and again and sipped at the hot liquid as he explained the manoeuvres of the Count's lawyers, now three of them, and his general feeling about what was likely to happen. It was impossible for him to disguise, especially from Paola, his disgust at the thought that the two murders would most likely go unpunished and the Count to jail only for the transport of illegal substances, for he now claimed that Maurizio had masterminded the kidnapping.

Already the force of the paid press had been called into action, and every front page in the country, not to mention what pa.s.ses for editorial comment in Italy, had carried stories lamenting the sad fate of this n.o.bleman, this n.o.ble man, to have been so deceived by a person of his own blood, and what crueller fate could there be than to have nursed this viper in the bosom of his family for more than a decade, only to have him turn and bite, strike to the heart. And gradually, popular feeling responded to the prevailing wind of words. The idea of traffic in nuclear armaments faded, smothered under the weight of euphemism that trans.m.u.ted the crime into 'trafficking in illegal substances', as though those deadly pellets, strong enough to vaporize a city, were the equivalent of say, Iranian caviare or ivory statuettes. Roberto's temporary grave was checked by a team of men carrying Geiger counters, but no trace of contamination was found.

The books and records of the Lorenzoni companies had been sequestered, and a team of police accountants and computer experts had pored over them for days, trying to trace the shipment that would have taken the contents of the suitcase on to the client the Count still said he couldn't identify. The only shipment they found that seemed at all suspicious was ten thousand plastic syringes sent from Venice to Istanbul by ship two weeks before Roberto's disappearance. The Turkish police sent back word that the company in Istanbul had records which showed that the syringes had been sent on by truck to Tehran, where the trail ended.

'He did it,' Brunetti insisted, his voice and his feelings no less fierce than they had been days ago, when he'd taken the Count to the Questura. Even then, at the very beginning, he'd been outmanoeuvred, for the Count had insisted that a police launch be sent for him: Lorenzonis do not walk, not even to prison. When Brunetti had refused, the Count had called a water taxi, and he and the policeman who arrested him arrived at the Questura a half hour later. There they found the press already in place. No one ever discovered who made the call.

From the very beginning, the whole affair had been presented to appeal to pity, replete with the sort of vacuous sentimentality Brunetti so disliked in his countrymen. Photos had appeared, summoned up by the magician's hand of cheap emotion: Roberto at his eighteenth birthday party, sitting with his arm around his father's shoulder; a decades' old photo of the Countess dancing in the arms of her husband, both of them sleek and gleaming with youth and wealth; and even poor Maurizio managed to get his face shown, walking along the Riva degli Schiavoni, a poignant three steps behind his cousin Roberto.

Frasetti and Mascarini had presented themselves at the Questura two days after the Count's arrest, accompanied there by two of Conte Lorenzoni's lawyers. Yes, it was Maurizio who had hired them, Maurizio who had planned the kidnapping and told them what to do. They insisted that Roberto had died of natural causes; it was Maurizio who had ordered them to shoot his dead cousin and thus disguise the cause of death. And they had both insisted that they be given complete medical exams to determine if they had suffered contamination during their time with their victim. The tests were negative.

'He did it,' Brunetti repeated, taking the mug back and finishing the tea. He turned to the side and reached out to place it on the table beside the bed, but Paola took it from him and cradled the still-warm mug in her hands.

'And he'll go to jail,' Paola said.

'I don't care about that,'. Brunetti said.

Then what do you care about?'

Brunetti sank lower on the bed, hiked the covers up closer to his chin. 'Would you laugh if I said I cared about the truth?' he asked.

She shook her head. 'No, of course not. But does it matter?'

He slipped one hand out from under the covers, took the mug from her and placed it on the table, then took her hands in his. 'It matters to me, I think.'

'Why?' she asked, though she probably knew.

'Because I hate to see people like this, people like him, going through life and never having to pay for what they do.'

'Don't you think the death of his son and his nephew is enough?'

'Paola, he sent the men to kill the boy, to kidnap him and then kill him. And he killed his nephew in cold blood.'

'You don't know that,' she answered.

He shook his head. 'I can't prove it, and I'll never be able to prove it. But I know it as well as if I had been there.' Paola said nothing to this, and their conversation stopped for a minute or so.

Finally Brunetti said, "The boy was going to die. But think of what happened to him before that, the terror, the uncertainty about what was going to happen to him. That's what I'll never forgive him.'

It's not your place to forgive, is it, Guido?' she asked, but her voice was kind.

He smiled at this and shook his head. 'No, it's not. But you know what I mean.' When Paola didn't answer, he asked, 'Don't you?'

She nodded and squeezed his hand. 'Yes.' And then again, 'Yes.'

'What would you do?' he asked her suddenly.

Paola released his hand and brushed back a lock of hair that had fallen across her eyes. 'What do you mean? If I were a judge? Or if I were Roberto's mother? Or if I were you?'

He smiled again. 'That sounds like you're telling me to leave it alone, doesn't it?'

Paola stood and then bent to pick up the newspapers. She folded and stacked them, then turned to the bed. 'I've been thinking lately about the Bible,' she said, amazing Brunetti, who knew her to be the most unreligious of people.