Read Online Anonymous Venetian by Donna Leon - Free Book Online Page A

Feltrinelli
said tiredly and opened the door wider, stepping back to let Brunetti enter.
     
    ‘Permesso ,’ Brunetti said and stepped
inside. Perhaps the title on the door didn’t lie: the apartment had the
symmetrical look of a living space that had been planned with skill and
precision. The living-room into which Brunetti walked was painted a flat white,
the floor a light herring-bone parquet. A few kelims, colours muted with age,
lay on the floor, and two other woven pieces -Brunetti thought they might be
Persian - hung on the walls. The sofa was long and low, set back against the
far wall, and appeared to be covered in beige silk. In front of it stood a long
glass-topped table with a wide ceramic platter placed on one side. One wall was
covered with a bookshelf, another with framed architectural renderings of
buildings and photographs of completed buildings, all of them low, spacious,
and surrounded by wide expanses of rough terrain. In the far corner stood a
high draughting table, surface tilted to face the room and covered with
outsized sheets of tissue paper. A cigarette burned in an ashtray which perched
at a crazy angle on the slanted surface of the draughting table.
     
    The symmetry of the room kept
pulling the viewer’s eye back to its centre, to that simple ceramic platter.
Brunetti sensed strongly that this was being done, but he didn’t understand how
it had been achieved.
     
    ‘Signor Feltrinelli,’ he began, ‘I’d
like to ask you to help us, if you can, in an investigation.’
     
    Feltrinelli said nothing.
     
    ‘I’d like you to look at a
picture of a man and tell us if you know him or recognize him.’
     
    Feltrinelli walked over to the
draughting table and picked up the cigarette. He drew hungrily at it, then
crushed it out in the ashtray with a nervous gesture. ‘I don’t give names,’ he
said.
     
    ‘Excuse me?’ Brunetti asked,
understanding him but not wanting to show that he did.
     
    ‘I don’t give the names of my
clients. You can show me all the pictures you want, but I won’t recognize any
of them, and I don’t know any names.’
     
    ‘I’m not asking you about your
clients, Signor Feltrinelli,’ Brunetti said. ‘And I’m not interested in who
they are. We have reason to believe that you might know something about this
man, and we’d like you to take a look at the sketch and tell us if you
recognize him.’
     
    Feltrinelli walked away from the
table and went to stand beside a small window in the wall on the left, and
Brunetti realized why the room had been constructed the way it had: the whole
purpose was to draw attention away from that window and from the bleak brick
wall that stood only two metres from it. ‘And if I don’t?’ Feltrinelli asked.
     
    ‘If you don’t what, recognize
him?’
     
    ‘No. If I don’t look at the
picture?’
     
    There was no air-conditioning and
no fan in the room, and it reeked of cheap cigarettes, an odour which Brunetti
imagined he could feel sinking into his damp clothing, into his hair. ‘Signor
Feltrinelli, I am asking you to do your duty as a citizen, to help the police
in the investigation of a murder. We are seeking merely to identify this man.
Until we do, there is no way we can begin that investigation.’
     
    ‘Is he the one you found out in
that field yesterday?’
     
    ‘Yes.’
     
    ‘And you think he might be one of
us?’ There was no need for Feltrinelli to explain who ‘us’ were.
     
    ‘Yes.’
     
    ‘Why?’
     
    ‘It’s not necessary for you to
know that.’
     
    ‘But you think he’s a
transvestite?’
     
    ‘Yes.’
     
    ‘And a whore?’
     
    ‘Perhaps,’ Brunetti answered.
     
    Feltrinelli turned away from the
window and came across the room towards Brunetti. He extended his hand. ‘Let me
see the picture.’
     
    Brunetti opened the folder in his
hand and drew a Xerox copy of the artist’s sketch from it. He noticed that the
damp palm of his hand had been stained a brightblue by the