'The Presentation of Jesus in the Temple,' she said in an entirely different voice, solemn, deep, reverent. 'Fruit of the Mystery: Purity. Obedience.' Brunetti watched her hands move as the invisible beads slowly passed through her fingers. Her lips moved. It looked to Brunetti as if she were repeating the last two words.

In the same type of voice, falling into the same rhythmic incantation, Griffoni said, 'Better to think of the Crucifixion, Signora. Fruit of the Mystery: Salvation, Forgiveness.' The hair rose on the back of Brunetti's neck, and he thought of her duplication of Signorina Elettra's voice.

Lucrezia's eyes opened slowly and she looked across at Griffoni, with a softer smile. 'My mother taught us obedience.' Her smile dimmed, and she said, 'She taught it to my father, too.'

She turned her attention to Brunetti and, in an entirely normal voice, said, 'People called him the King of Copper, I know. But it was my mother who ruled, not him.'

Brunetti was overwhelmed by fear of suffocation, trapped in a world of distorted femininity: Griffoni appeared to have taken leave of her senses and fallen into a religious trance, while the Lembo woman summoned up the spirits of her dead parents, and both of them recited the names of the decades of the rosary he had not

heard since he was a boy, staying with his grandparents and listening to the old women as they fell to their devotions.

He got to his feet and went to the nearest window and pulled it open. Cold air swept into the room. Lucrezia

did not notice, but Griffoni gave him a sharp look and jerked her head to the side, commanding him to close the window. He did so but remained beside it. From there, he could see both of them, but he turned away and looked to the north, where he saw the bell tower of Santo Stefano looking even more crooked than from the ground. 'Everything tilts but nothing falls,' he had heard his fellow Venetians say all his life.

Behind him their voices murmured: Brunetti had no idea whether it was the rosary they were saying or whether one of them was confessing to the other. He had not seen, nor had he heard, anything pass between the two women, but he had felt the moment when the rosary had united them in spirit. The memory of that look from Griffoni, however, sent him cringing away from the fraudulence of whatever union had been struck between them while leaving him eager for any advantage it would provide.

The light had diminished across the city while they had been inside. The tower of Santo Stefano was outlined against darkness only by the lights that glowed up from around it. Luminous and heaven-reaching, the tower was out of true and looked as though it would soon collapse: of how many of us could the same thing be said? Brunetti wondered.

Their voices drifted across him like smoke; Brunetti was unable to turn to look at the women and unwilling to know what they were saying: let them swap the names of the decades back and forth, tell each other what virtues they encouraged, but keep him free of it.

Though he tried to block or filter the words, they continued to float past him: 'Contempt of the World', 'Grace of a Happy Death', 'Desire for Holiness', 'Mortification', 'Purity'. Hadn't they had that one already? Why this obsession with sexual purity? he asked himself. What a distorting way to look at life.

The voices droned on. Finally, unable to endure it, Brunetti turned and looked at them. Lucrezia Lembo's head was pressed against the back of her chair, her face covered with her hands. Griffoni was leaning forward, speaking to her in a voice so low Brunetti could not hear it.

Something in him snapped at this grotesque religious theatre. 'Griffoni,' he said, so loudly that both women turned to him in alarm. 'That's enough.'

She knew better than to dispute this with him. She got to her feet, leaned down over Lucrezia, who uncovered her eyes and whispered to her. Griffoni nodded and reached out to touch her arm with her right hand.

Brunetti ignored them both and started for the door. He held it open for Griffoni, who gave the back of the other woman's hand a few pats and came obediently to Brunetti's side. Together they left; silently they walked down

the stairs and across the courtyard. Brunetti found the handle and opened the door. Together they stepped out into the narrow calle.

He resisted the urge to slam the door and turned to the left, toward the Accademia stop. Hearing a muffled noise behind him he turned to see Griffoni standing with her arm pressed against the front of the house on the other side of the calle. The night's chill hit him as Griffoni took a step towards him, grabbed his arm, and fell against him. Without thinking, he wrapped his arm around her and tried to hold her upright. But she started to sink away from him, and he stepped up in front of her to wrap his other arm around her. Her head banged against his shoulder, and one arm slapped against his side.

There was a low barred window nearby, and he half carried, half pushed her towards it. He lowered her until she was sitting on the sill, leaning forward, her

head against his stomach. He crouched down, one hand bracing her against the bars, the other feeling for her pulse, though he had little idea of what he was supposed to

feel there.

Her head fell back and rested against the bars. Her eyes opened, and Brunetti watched her confusion as she saw the wall of the building on the other side of the calle. Suddenly she was aware of him and pulled away, backing against the bars. Then she recognized him, and her face relaxed.

'What happened?' she asked and raised a hand to wipe her eyes.

Brunetti relaxed minimally. 'I think you fainted.'

'I never faint,' she said, managing to sound offended.

'Perhaps it was a vision of the Madonna,' Brunetti risked saying.

Her eyes widened, but then she smiled. 'It was too much for me, I think,' she said.

'What was?'

'Doing that to that poor woman.'

'Doing what?'

'Getting her to tell me about her mother and the way she prayed the rosary.' Then, after a moment and with deadly seriousness, 'What a monster.'

'That poor thing?' Brunetti asked, nodding his head back towards the closed door to the palazzo.

'No, the mother.'

23.

Deciding she needed something to drink, Brunetti helped Griffoni to stand and waited while she steadied herself. At her nod, he latched his arm in hers, and they set off together. They turned to the right, crossed the bridge, then went into the bar. Luckily, a small table at the back was free. 'A chamomile,' she said in response to his look: Brunetti went back to the bar and asked for the tea and a coffee, then changed it to two pots of tea. His mother had said it was good for emergencies, and this seemed close to being one.

He went back to the table. He heard the swish of steam, the clatter of crockery, and soon the waitress brought their teas. He put her teabag into the pot, then did the same with his own. He added two packets of sugar to Griffoni's cup, ignoring her protest that she didn't want any, and two to his own.

Her face was stiff, the way the kids' used to be when they first went walking, then skiing, in the mountains. He decided hers would thaw: it just took time and a warm place.

He picked up his cup and blew at the surface then stirred it a few times, and blew on it again: she mirrored his actions. Finally he chanced it and took a small sip: still hot but no longer boiling. He set the cup down and began to stir it again. When the temperature was right, Brunetti said, 'Tell me.'

She sipped at her tea a few times, then added more to the cup without adding more sugar, as if to show him how she liked it. Another sip. Then she said, '"Purity". That was the word that set her off, I think. Her mother was mad for it. Baths, hand-washing, clean clothing twice a day. They had maids, so they could do that. Then,' she continued, pausing to drink more tea, 'when they got older, she started talking to them about a different type of purity. There was a nun living with them, and priests all over the place.'

Griffoni stopped speaking and finished her cup of tea. With undisguised exasperation, she demanded, 'Why do people make such a mess of everything?'

Brunetti shrugged. He had never found an answer to that one.

'When they got bigger, she sent them to a girls' school in Ireland, but then she got sick the mother and Lucrezia had to come back and take care of her.'

'Sick with what?'

'I didn't understand,' she said and glanced at Brunetti, as if weighing how far she could go. 'It sounded like one of those diseases rich women in novels get.'

'And the father during all of this?'

'I don't know, really,' Griffoni said, her confusion audible. 'It's as if he didn't exist.'

'How can you be the King of Copper and not exist?'

'I don't know,' she repeated, her voice tight. 'I asked her about him, but she said he never counted for anything: the company belonged to her mother's family: he was in charge only because he married her. He was always away, working. They had mines everywhere, and he would go off to see them.'

To Brunetti, it sounded like the stories he had heard about the days of La Serenissima Repubblica, when the merchants who sailed with their fleets came home once a year, stayed long enough to unload and reload their cargos and impregnate their wives, and then off again in pursuit of gain.

Colour had returned to her face, and her voice had steadied. First Pucetti befriended Ana Cavanella and now Lucrezia Lembo had confided in Griffoni: was he trapped in a nest of vipers able to worm themselves into people's sympathies? Was he another one?

Brunetti finished his tea and looked towards the bar, hoping to catch the waitress' eye. Griffoni leaned her head back and closed her eyes, much in the manner of Lucrezia Lembo.

Then she opened them, tried to smile, and said, 'I'm sorry, Guido. I just feel so sorry for her. For them all.'

'It shouldn't happen,' Brunetti said, 'that stupidity costs so much.'

This time, it was she who didn't understand: he saw it in her face. 'Her mother and her talk of purity,' he said, and then, with no introduction, added, 'The doctor who treated Ana Cavanella and her son said she never tried to get him any help: no tests, no teaching, nothing.' He saw Griffoni's astonishment. 'He said she was so stupid she was ashamed of the fact that he was deaf. That she saw it as God's punishment for her sin, so she let him grow up like an animal. And die like one.'

'Is any of this enough to make you want to stop?' she asked, waving her hand as if to take in the room, the palazzo across the bridge, Ana Cavanella, and her dead son.

'No.'

'What next, then?' The eagerness with which she asked this pleased him.

'We keep looking until we find something, I suppose,' he said.

'Good.'

Brunetti considered going back to the Questura for an hour to begin to hunt through the public record for further traces of the Copper King's family but dismissed the idea. He could not invite Claudia Griffoni back to the house and tell his wife that they would be working on the computer for a while and she should just go about making dinner, perhaps set an extra plate for their guest,

could he?

When he saw how exhausted Griffoni looked, he suggested they start the next morning, knowing she would agree. She did and stopped him from offering to take her home by saying she felt much better. 'It was bad, but not terrible, doing that to her,' she said. Then, trying to sound casual about it, she added, 'It's the part I dislike most: getting people to trust you and then using that to get things from them.'

'It's part of the job,' Brunetti added, 'though I don't like it, either.'

They walked slowly towards the imbarcadero. She stopped and faced him to say, 'Sometimes, though, with the bad ones, there's satisfaction in it.' When Brunetti remained impassive, she added, 'It's hard at times, especially with the younger officers, to listen to them talk about the way people are victims of society or circumstances

or their families.'

'What about Lucrezia Lembo?' Brunetti couldn't stop himself from asking, though there was no evidence that she was bad in any way, just weak and unstable.

She smiled. 'I set myself up for that one, didn't I?'

'Yes.'

She started towards the Accademia stop again. 'I meant the ones who beat up their girlfriends or kill or rob someone and then kick him in the face just to show how tough they are. Those are the ones.'

Brunetti agreed with her but said nothing. They heard her boat approaching and hurried on to the covered dock. He patted her arm a few times and waited while she got on, then turned and went to the other dock to wait for his own boat.