He woke and looked out the window of their bedroom; the moral hangover from the evening before glowered back at him from the grey clouds hanging motionless over the city. He turned aside, but Paola was not there, and when he stretched out a hand under the covers complimenting himself on his instincts as a policeman he felt that her place was cold. He looked at the clock: almost nine.

Pyjama-clad, he went into the kitchen but found no one. The only sign of life was a coffee cup in the sink and the Moka still on the stove. Like Paola's place in their bed, it was cold. He rinsed it out, put in water and coffee, and set it back on a low flame. From the window that looked at the far-off Dolomites, he saw that the clouds stretched all the way up there, darkening in the distance.

Was this what it would be like if he were single, if he lived alone and had never married? Paola's grandmother's china would not be in the cabinets, there would be no Canaletto on the wall, nor would the corner of the counter display the herd of ceramic statues of animals that Chiara had been bringing home for years. No yellow duck, no pink elephant, nor giraffe, nor family of penguins. Liberation from these thoughts came from the bubbling noise of the Moka. He took the cup from the sink, poured in the coffee, and added sugar.

An hour later, he and Griffoni sat in front of Brunetti's new computer, a copy of the late King of Copper's carta d'identita on the screen before them: Ludovico Fadalti. 'I thought his name was Lembo,' Griffoni said. 'Not Fadalti.' She put her finger on the screen, almost as if she thought Brunetti incapable of reading the name printed there.

'She told you the company was the mother's, didn't she?' Brunetti asked.

'Yes, she did. But the company is called Lembo.'

Brunetti hit a key, and a new carta d'identita appeared: same date and place of birth, same photo, but the surname was now 'Lembo'.

'He had it changed,' Brunetti said. He had never heard of anyone actually doing this and was curious about how much the man born Fadalti had been willing to renounce on his path to becoming the King of Copper. 'The children could then be called by the mother's name.'

He looked at the other documents they had accessed: birth and death certificates, driver's licence, marriage certificate, health system registration. Lembo had had no travel pass, as these had been initiated only a few years ago, but perhaps wealthy men in their eighties were not given to taking the vaporetto. His passport had been registered and re-registered up until four years before his death, and his bank accounts and credit cards had been closed only after his death.

On all official documents, beginning soon after the marriage, his name was given as Lembo. He recalled Lucrezia's birth certificate: he could not remember having seen any sign of 'Fadalti' there, so the metamorphosis had been complete before her birth.

He retrieved her birth certificate, then the wedding certificate of her parents. Same year, yes, but only six months apart. He nudged Griffoni and pointed to the two dates.

'Mamma mia,' she said. 'Even in dissolute Naples, that sort of thing wasn't common sixty years ago certainly not among people of their class.'

'Even less so here,' Brunetti added.

Official sources exhausted, he went back to Google and put in the name Ludovico Lembo. Pages of articles appeared, though when he read quickly through the listings, he saw that although in many his name appeared, they didn't centre on him. He began a new search, using Ludovico Fadalti, but there was no reference in the press to a church wedding: no basilica, bride arriving in a white gondola, blessing by the Patriarch. A few subsequent articles reported on the early years of Lucrezia's wild ride through life, listing Ludovico only because he was her father.

They found a few articles about him, when he was still Ludovico Fadalti: son of a Venetian engineer, only child, degree from the University of Padova. There were a number of articles about Lembo Minerals that provided information about the company and its success under the 'dynamic direction' of Ludovico who-knew-when-his-name-had-become-Lembo the engineer whose 'skills and initiative' gave direction to a traditional company while maintaining the 'family-centred concepts' that had propelled its success during the early years of the century. The earliest of these articles, it seemed, had been written years after the 'dynamic' new path had been set for the company. There was a meagre record of the early years of Lembo's Brunetti decided he might as well give in and call him that leadership. There were references to the honours he later received from business and industrial organizations, culminating in his nomination, two years before he left the company, as 'Cavaliere del Lavoro'.

Starting in the mid-1970s, articles began to appear about the women in the family, featuring the haughty Signora Lembo and her two beautiful daughters. Seeing them posed in photo after photo, the mother's arms encircling her teenaged daughters in a gesture redolent of love, Brunetti thought of the Mother of the Gracchi, she too glowing with pride as she displayed her jewels. Signora Lembo, he learned, was distinguished by her intense faith and ceaseless good works in the cause of Holy Mother Church. There was even a photo of her kneeling, unrecognizable in a black veil, head bowed over the extended hand of the Pope.

Then, slowly, during the next decade, the articles disappeared, replaced by articles about the woman, no longer young, whom they had apparently decided to call 'The Princess of Copper'.

He stood to stretch his back, leaving the computer to Griffoni. She continued reading while he walked over to the window, bent to feel the radiator, which was still cold, and began to study the figures in the campo on the other side of the canal.

The father, he realized, was yet another disappearing person, though this one had given up only his name. Was it worth it, in order to become King of Copper, and what was the rest of the price? To marry the woman whom the gutter press presented as a saint? His first-born daughter had married a gigolo half her age and was now cushioning her final years with drugs or drink. The second had gone off to God-haunted Ireland to study and work, apparently to settle there. The last-born had died at twenty, and her mother had decamped soon after, leaving the former King of Copper, in his eighties, with a new companion, to die on the Giudecca.

He turned back towards Griffoni and watched her work for a minute or two. She had become enthralled in the search for information: nothing else was. Brunetti was too far away to be able to read the screen, but he could see each page flash up, flash away, only to be replaced by another, and then another.

At last she pulled her hands away from the keys and turned towards him. 'Most of the articles about the parents are public relations nonsense. Worthless. Especially the obituaries.'

'Only saints die,' Brunetti said.

'What?'

'Only saints die. In obituaries, everyone is a saint; everything else is washed away.'

'I'm afraid you're right,' she said and killed the page. 'What do you suggest we do?'

He waved a hand at the computer. 'Why don't we take a look in there for the name of someone who might

have known them?'

24.

That took some time. Brunetti finally, after explaining that he and Commissario Griffoni needed her help, enlisted Signorina Elettra to access the records of the state pension fund, where she found the names of two former employees of the Lembo family, a maid and a man whose job was listed as 'major-domo'. But the man had arrived after Lucrezia's marriage, so he would know nothing of the early history of either the marriage or the company.

The maid, however, had worked for the Lembo family all the time that Ana Cavanella had been there and had then remained on for another thirty years. Griffoni sat opposite him, with between them some sheets of paper that Signorina Elettra had delivered. Brunetti, while appearing to pay no attention, had been acutely conscious of the way the two women dealt with each other during Signorina Elettra's brief apparition in the room and, like those seeking Signs of Peace from Heaven, had seen them.

'So the maid would have seen it all,' he remarked to Griffoni.

'One trembles at the thought of what that might have been,' Griffoni answered.

'Perhaps,' he began, reaching forward and picking up one of the papers, '. . . Maria Annunziata Ghezzi can

tell us.'

Maria Annunziata Ghezzi, it turned out, lived down towards the end of Castello, behind San Francesco della Vigna, and was easy to find in the phone book. She answered Brunetti's phone call with her name, and when he spoke to her in Veneziano, answered readily. Yes, she had worked for the Lembo family. No, she was no longer in touch with them, aside from receiving her pension, and that came from the state, not from them.

Brunetti asked her if she would be willing to talk to him. 'It's about that boy who died, isn't it?' she replied.

'Davide Cavanella?' he asked.

'Yes. Ana's boy.'

'Yes, Signora. It is.'

There followed a long silence; Brunetti chose not to break it. Finally she said, 'Then you better come here, and we'll talk.'

He debated, but for only an instant, the wisdom of taking Griffoni with him. Against her failure to speak Veneziano, he weighed her femininity and the ease of her presence. 'Feel like a walk?' he asked.

'Let me go and get my coat.'

On the way there, they talked about her investigation of the fire in the factory. 'No one saw anything. No one heard anything,' Griffoni said.

'You sound as if you don't believe it,' Brunetti said.

She paused at the bottom of the bridge that led to San Francesco. 'I don't,' she said. 'The fire started inside the factory. It had been broken into years ago, and people used it. I don't want to know what they used it for. It looks as if it started in a room where old paint and rags were stored.'

Years ago, Brunetti would have interjected here, 'or put', but time had taught him to control the impulse to insert trouble where it was not at first found. He had not read the report of the arson squad, and if 'stored' was good enough for them, it was good enough for him. From the very first suggestion, at a city council meeting it must have been six years ago that the building was suitable for transformation into a hotel, Brunetti had been interested only in how it would be brought to pass.

They continued towards Signora Grezzi's address. 'I've been thinking,' Griffoni said.

'Always a dangerous thing for a woman,' Brunetti replied flatly.

As if he had not spoken, she said, 'About how we're always being made conscious of our regional differences: dialect, food, customs, even our appearance.' This came from a Neapolitan who was a clear-eyed blonde almost as tall as he.

'And then I think about the way no one is going to bother to investigate this fire or go to the trouble of finding out what might have caused it. If anything did cause it. Deliberately, I mean.'

'And your point?'

'That those differences of dialect and food and customs are all meaningless.'

'Because?'

'Because in the end, we're all the same: beaten down by this system that is never going to change, by the people who are on top and who do exactly what they want to do.' She sounded not in the least angry. If anything, she sounded relieved, but that might be from nothing other than being able, finally, to say this to someone.

Brunetti stopped to try to remember which was Ramo Sagredo or when he had last been near it. His feet suddenly remembered and took him to the left.

He led her through the underpass and stopped at the corner. 'Well?' she asked.

Brunetti gave her a level look. 'It's the twenty-first century, Griffoni. And that's the future.'

'You don't mind?' she asked.

'Of course I mind,' he answered. 'But there's nothing we can do.'

She turned and looked at the slice of laguna exposed between the buildings. 'Except talk to Signora Ghezzi?' she finally guessed.

'Exactly.'

The old woman lived on the fourth floor, the windows of her kitchen, where she asked them to come to talk to her, looking out at the laguna and the cemetery. Though Brunetti knew from her pension records that she was eighty-four, Signora Ghezzi appeared at least a decade younger. White-haired and round-faced, she had the apple-skin wrinkles he had seen on the faces of his mother's friends. Her expression, however, was that of a younger person, quick and intelligent. She offered them coffee, and both accepted.

Griffoni went and stood at the window, watching the boats and clouds chase one another to the east. 'How beautiful, to stand here,' she said. Signora Ghezzi turned from taking cups and saucers from the cupboard and smiled at her, but Brunetti wondered uneasily if this were simply another attempt to flatter a witness into confiding in them.

The coffee bubbled up and was quickly served. When it was put in front of them Griffoni having taken her place at the table Signora Ghezzi asked, 'What is it you'd like to know?'

'We wondered if you could tell us about Ana and about the Lembo family,' Brunetti said, deciding that subterfuge was not likely to work with this woman.

Signora Ghezzi spooned sugar into her coffee; Brunetti noticed the faint tremor in her hand, the grains of sugar on the table and in the saucer. 'Why?' she asked.

'Because I don't like the way Davide lived,' Brunetti surprised himself by saying.

He surprised Signora Ghezzi, too, who asked, 'What do you mean?'

'He was born with physical and mental problems, and his mother never did anything about them to help him. That's one thing, and it's terrible. But no one else ever did anything to help. No doctor or social worker and no city office. Nothing. No one paid attention, and he grew up the way he did.'

'I never saw him as a baby, you know.'

They were speaking in Veneziano, hers the accent of deepest Castello, the one he loved the most. He glanced at Griffoni, who seemed to be following everything; not that he could stop to ask this, not now. What was it Ana Cavanella had never done? Helped? Cared enough? Had the intelligence to know how to help? Did what he, four decades later, thought she should have done? 'She never tried to get him help,' he repeated.

'How do you know this?' Signora Ghezzi asked.

Brunetti opened his hands in a display of candour. 'We've checked all the city records, and there's no sign of Davide: no health card, and he never went to school, and he had no pension.'

She looked away from Brunetti and out the window, as if only the long view across the water could help relieve her feelings. Neither Brunetti nor Griffoni said anything. 'She must have done it like that,' she said.

Alert to her remark but not wanting her to realize that he was, Brunetti contented himself with saying, 'Would you tell me about her, Signora?'

'There's not much to tell, really.' She took a sip of coffee, reached her spoon towards the sugar bowl, but pulled it back, as if she heard the reproachful voice of her doctor telling her not to use so much sugar.

'Ana was a simple girl. When she came. I don't know how much schooling she'd had: maybe until a year before she came to us.' Absently, she stirred her coffee.

'There was a woman who did the laundry and the ironing the signora was crazy for having things washed and ironed, and it took this woman three days a week to keep everything looking the way she wanted it.' She took another sip of coffee, then got up and went to the cabinet for a plastic box filled with biscuits. She set them on the table and took one, dipped it into her coffee and bit off the very end of it. Both of them reached in and took a biscuit.

'Where was I?' she asked, looking from one to the other of them.

'The ironing woman,' Griffoni said.

'Ah, of course. She left. No explanation. That happened a lot to the Signora. But before she went she told her that she knew a girl who could do the ironing and clean, too. She said she was a good girl.' She stopped and looked at Brunetti.

'Ana?' he asked and took another biscuit.

'Yes. Her mother brought her round, and she talked to the Signora. I wasn't there. But two days later, Ana moved into a room up on the fourth floor and was in the storeroom all day long, ironing. Then she started to help me with the beds and cleaning.' The woman's eyes travelled to that distant past, when she could eat as much sugar as she pleased and had a young girl to help with the heavy work.

'Did you talk to her, Signora?' Griffoni asked. 'She must have been lonely in such a big place,' she added and took another biscuit.

'I think she was. At the beginning. But the signora kept us busy.'

So casually that Brunetti could do nothing but marvel at her skill, Griffoni dipped her biscuit into the coffee, bit off only the damp end, and smiled in continuing delight, then asked, 'What was she like, the Signora?' It was seamless, and Brunetti, if he had been asked, would have told her everything he knew.

'She was very religious,' Signora Ghezzi said, but it was a neutral word, without the least suggestion of approval. She might as well have been saying that the Signora was tall or right-handed. 'There was a relative, a nun, who lived in the palazzo. We never saw much of her, but the Signora did. And the girls.' She reached for another biscuit but resisted and settled for finishing her coffee. She looked across at Griffoni. 'Have more of them. My daughter-in-law makes them.'

'They're wonderful,' Griffoni said, taking another. She dipped it into her coffee and ate it with something approaching glee. Griffoni, he knew, hated coffee without milk and disliked sweets or pastries of any sort. She started to dip the stub end of the biscuit into the coffee but stopped herself, holding it up in the air as visual proof of how arrested she was by her own thought. 'It can't have been a very exciting place for young girls,' she began, as though the idea had flashed upon her, then let her voice trail off, looked at Brunetti and said, 'Sorry, Commissario.' Then, to Signora Ghezzi, 'I don't mean to . . .' and let that trail off, too, though this time she managed to blush. To cover that, she finished her coffee.

Signora Ghezzi smiled and leaned forward to pat her arm. 'Don't worry, dear. You're exactly right. And it was religion that made the Signora find out.'

'Excuse me?' Brunetti said for both of them.