A Question of Belief - By Donna Leon Page 0,88

across his desk. ‘The man is a bank director. Have you any idea of the trouble this would cause?’

Thus the workings of Patta’s mind. Those of the mechanism controlling the bells of Madonna dell’Orto were no less strange, they having ceased to work two weeks before. The parocco, when Brunetti spoke to him, explained that it was impossible, during the long holiday, to find anyone who would come to fix them, and so they tolled neither the passing hours nor the passing of life.

Prompted by his curiosity about why one of the Fulgonis should lie, Brunetti began to wonder about the other. Banks must be like any other business, he reflected, different only because their product was money, not pencils or garden forks. This similarity dictated that employees would gossip and that the reputations of the people in power would be coloured – if not entirely fashioned – by that gossip. It was common knowledge at the Questura that Signorina Elettra – for reasons that she had never fully explained and that no one had ever fathomed – had left her job at the Banca d’Italia to come and work at the Questura, so Brunetti asked her to check among her friends who still worked in that sector to see what rumours existed about bank director Lucio Fulgoni.

Signorina Elettra came up to his office on the afternoon of the day he had made his request. He waved her to a chair. ‘I take it you’ve discovered something, Signorina?’

‘Not much, and nothing definite, I’m afraid,’ she said, sitting opposite him.

‘What does that mean?’ he asked.

‘That there is a certain amount of talk about him.’

He did not interrupt to ask what sort of talk: even if the man was a bank director, gossip would most likely centre on his sexual life.

‘What speculation exists – at least this is what two people have told me – concerns his sexual preference.’ Before Brunetti could comment, she added, ‘Both of these people told me they’d heard others say they thought he was gay, but no one seems able to provide any evidence of this.’ She shrugged, as if to suggest how common this situation was.

‘Then why is there talk?’ Brunetti asked.

‘There’s always talk,’ she answered immediately. ‘All a man has to do is behave a certain way, make a particular remark, and someone will start to talk about him. And once it starts, it can only get worse.’ She looked across at him. ‘The fact that there are no children is used as evidence.’

Brunetti closed his eyes for a moment, then asked, ‘Has he ever approached anyone at the bank?’

‘No. Never, at least not that my friends have heard about.’ She thought for a moment and then added, ‘If anything had actually happened, everyone would know about it. You have no idea how conservative bankers are.’

Brunetti steepled his fingers and pressed his lips against them. ‘The wife?’ he asked.

‘Rich, socially ambitious, and generally disliked.’

Brunetti decided to keep to himself the observation that this would describe the wives of many of the men he dealt with.

‘One gets the sense, listening to people,’ she permitted herself to say, ‘that the third would be true of her, even without the first two.’

‘Have you met her?’ he asked.

She shook the question away and said, ‘But you have.’

‘Yes,’ Brunetti answered. ‘I can see why people might not like her.’

Signorina Elettra did not bother to ask for an explanation.

‘Maybe we’re asking the wrong people for information about him,’ Brunetti finally said, giving in to the temptation that had nagged at him since his conversation with Patta.

‘And we should be asking rent boys, instead of bankers?’

‘No. We should be asking the Fulgonis directly.’ He realized, as he said it, that his soul was tired of backstairs gossip, tired of listening from the eaves and consorting with informers. Ask them directly and have done with it.

Brunetti, as a kind of anticipatory punishment for going against Patta’s direct warning not to persecute the Fulgonis, submitted himself to the flagellation of the sun as he walked to their apartment. As he passed the wall relief of the Moor leading his camel, Brunetti was tempted to consult with him on how best to treat the Fulgonis, but all the Moor had wanted to do for centuries was to lead his pack-laden beast off that palazzo wall in Venice and back to his home in the East, so Brunetti resisted the impulse.

He announced himself to Signora Fulgoni, who buzzed him into the courtyard without question or protest.