‘What were they like?’ Chiara asked, interested enough to stop eating.
‘As I said, polite and helpful. The city was a mess, very overcrowded and polluted, but once you get behind the walls — one of the officers invited me to his home — you find lots of gardens and trees.’
‘What are the people like?’ Chiara asked.
‘Very sophisticated and cultured, at least the ones I dealt with.’
‘They’ve had three thousand years to become cultured,’ Paola interrupted.
‘What do you mean?’ Chiara asked.
‘That when we were still living in huts and wearing animal skins, they were building Persepolis and wearing silk.’
Ignorant of the patent exaggeration of this remark, Chiara asked only, ‘What’s Persepolis?’
‘It’s the royal city where the kings lived. Until a European burned it down. I’ve got a book and I’ll show you after dinner, all right?’ Paola asked. Then, to all of them, ‘Dessert?’
Like Persepolis itself, interest in thousands of years of history fell to ruin, this time in the face of apple cake.
The next morning Brunetti’s phone was ringing as he walked into his office. He answered with his name while struggling to remove his coat, the receiver pressed between ear and shoulder as he tried to pull his arms from the sleeves.
‘It’s me,’ a man’s voice said, and it took Brunetti a second to realize it was Claudio. ‘I have to see you.’ In the background, Brunetti heard the loud roar of what sounded like a boat’s motor, so Claudio was out in the city, somewhere near the water.
Brunetti pulled his coat back on to his shoulders, took the phone with his free hand, and said, responding to the note of urgency in the old man’s voice, ‘I can come over right now if you want to meet at your office.’ Brunetti was already plotting the course to Claudio’s, deciding to have himself taken there in a launch.
‘No, I think it would be better if we met at. . at that place where your father and I always went for a drink.’
Doubly alarmed now by Claudio’s use of these guarded directions, Brunetti said, ‘I can be there in five minutes.’
‘Good, I’ll be there,’ Claudio said and ended the call.
Brunetti remembered the bar, on a corner facing the pillared gates of the Arsenale: Claudio must be out on the Riva degli Schiavoni to be able to reach it in five minutes. Many times in his youth, he had sat there, listening to his father’s friends talk about the war as they played endless, inconsequential games of scopa, sipping at small glasses of a wine so tannic it left their teeth almost blue. His father had never said much, nor had he been interested in playing cards, but he was there as a veteran and as Claudio’s friend, and that had sufficed for the others.
As soon as he hung up, the phone rang again, and, thinking it might be Claudio calling back, Brunetti picked it up and held it to his ear.
‘Brunetti,’ barked Vice-Questore Patta. ‘I want to talk to you now.’ His tone matched his words, and they no doubt matched his mood. Silently, Brunetti replaced the receiver and turned to leave the office. By the time he had reached the door, the phone was already ringing again.
Brunetti barely noticed the lions when he reached the entrance to the Arsenale and walked directly into the bar, looking for the familiar face. When he saw no sign of Claudio, he checked his watch and found that it had been only six minutes since he left the Questura. He ordered a coffee and turned to face the door. After another five minutes, he saw the old man at a distance, walking with the aid of a stick, coming down the bridge that led to the Arsenale.
At the bottom of the bridge, Claudio went over and stood in front of the stone lions, studying them slowly, pausing in front of each one until he could have committed its face and form to memory. After that, he strolled back to the bottom of the bridge and looked left through the gates of the Arsenale and out towards the laguna. Then he turned and ambled alongside the canal in the direction of the bacino. To an idle spectator, the man with the cane could be a sightseer interested in the area around the Arsenale; to a policeman, he was someone checking to see if he was being followed.
Claudio turned around and came towards the bar. When he entered, Brunetti left it to him to make the first move. He came and stood next to Brunetti at the bar but gave him no greeting. When the barman approached, Claudio asked for a tea with lemon, then reached aside and pulled that day’s Gazzettino towards him. Brunetti asked for another coffee. Claudio kept his eyes on the paper until his tea arrived, when he laid the newspaper aside, looked out the window at the empty campo, then at Brunetti, and said, ‘I was followed yesterday afternoon.’
Brunetti spooned sugar into his coffee, and inclined his head in Claudio’s direction.
‘There was only one man, and it was easy to lose him. Well, I think I lost him.’
‘How far did he follow you?’
‘To the train station. I waited for the 82, and when it came it was crowded the way it always is. So I waited inside the imbarcadero until the sailor was sliding the gates closed, and then I pushed ahead and started shouting that, with all the tourists, there’s no room for Venetians.’ He looked at Brunetti and gave a sly smile. ‘So he pulled the gate back and let me on. Only me.’
‘Complimenti,’ Brunetti said, making a note to use the tactic, should it ever be necessary.
Claudio took some artificial sweetener and poured it into his tea, stirred it round, and said, ‘I spoke to a few people yesterday and sent some stones to someone I know in Antwerp.’ He took a sip of tea, set his cup down, and added, ‘And I took a few to show to a colleague here. It was when I was leaving his shop that I noticed this man.’
‘How much did you tell these people?’ Brunetti asked, wondering which one of them might have been the weak link.
‘Let me finish,’ Claudio said and took a sip of his tea. ‘I asked someone I know in Vicenza if he had been offered any African diamonds recently. He doesn’t have a shop and works the way I do, but he’s the most important dealer in the North.’
When it seemed that the older man was finished, Brunetti asked, uncertain if he could inquire as to the reliability of his friends, ‘Is he someone that many people know about?’
‘That he buys and sells? Yes, most of the people in the North know him. He’d be the logical choice for anyone who wanted to sell a lot of stones, well, for anyone who knew anything about the market.’
‘And?’
‘And nothing,’ Claudio said. ‘No one has approached him with diamonds like these.’
Brunetti knew better than to question this. ‘Where are the stones?’ he finally asked.
‘The ones you gave me?’
‘Yes.’
‘In a safe place.’
‘Don’t be clever, please, Claudio. Where are they?’
‘In the bank.’
‘Bank?’
‘Yes. Ever since. . ever since then, I’ve kept my best stones in a safety deposit box in the bank. I put yours there, too.’
‘They aren’t mine,’ Brunetti corrected him.
‘They’re yours far more than they’re mine.’
Brunetti realized there was little to be gained by arguing back and forth about this, so he asked, ‘If you think no one would talk, why should anyone follow you?’
‘I was awake thinking about it most of the night,’ Claudio answered. ‘Either the place where you got them was being watched, and you were followed until you came to see me, though I think you would have noticed had you been followed, so we can exclude that. Or the fact that I’m the best-known dealer in the city makes me an obvious person to keep an eye on, just as security. Or my friend’s phone is being tapped.’ He closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them and added, ‘Or I’m a foolish old man who can’t learn to distrust his friends. Take your pick.’
Like Claudio, he excluded the first. His love for the old man made him want to discount the last and choose one of the others, but he thought they were in fact equally likely. ‘Did you learn anything about the stones?’
‘I showed five stones to my friend — two of yours and three that I know are from Canada. At first he said only that he’d like to buy them.’ The old man paused and then added, ‘I suppose that’s what I thought he’d do.’ He shot a glance at Brunetti, then out of the window, then back to Brunetti. ‘But when I told him they weren’t for sale and I only wanted to know where he thought they came from, he said three of them were Canadian and two African. The right two.’
‘Is he certain?’ Brunetti asked.
Claudio gave him a long, speculative glance, as if deciding how best to explain. ‘More certain than I am,’ Claudio said, ‘because he knows more.’ When Claudio saw that Brunetti was not going to be persuaded by this appeal to authority, the old man went on, ‘He didn’t explain why he thought that about those specific stones. I’d be a liar if I told you he did, Guido, but he knows about these things. Other people can do it, but they need to use machines. I know you like information and facts, so I can tell you that at the chemical level, the machines measure the other minerals that are trapped along with the carbon crystals. They differ from pipe to pipe — what you’d call mine to mine. If you know enough about which minerals come from which place, then the machines let you identify stones by measuring the different colours.’ Claudio paused, then added, ‘But it’s really a question of feeling. If you’ve looked at millions of stones, you just know.’ He smiled and said, ‘That’s the way it is with this man. He just knows.’
‘Do you believe him?’
‘If he said they came from Mars, I’d believe him. He’s the best.’
‘Better than you?’
‘Better than anyone, Guido; he has the gift.’
‘Just Africa? Can he be more specific than that?’
‘I didn’t ask. All I asked him to do was to give me an estimate of their value so I could be sure the price I was asking was right. He told me he thought that they were African just as a passing comment, to show me how much more he knows about stones than I do.’
‘And the value?’ Brunetti asked.
‘If cut well, he said the minimum would be thirty-five thousand Euros.’ Seeing Brunetti’s surprise, Claudio added, ‘That’s for each stone, Guido, and I didn’t give him the best ones.’
Brunetti remembered then what he had failed so far to ask. ‘How many were there altogether, after the salt was gone?’
‘One hundred and sixty-four, all of them gem quality and all about the same size.’ Then, before Brunetti could work it out, Claudio said, ‘If you use it as an average price, that’s just under six million Euros.’
The value of the stones astonished Brunetti, but it was what Claudio told him about being followed that most concerned him. ‘Tell me what the man looked like,’ he said.
‘About as tall as you, wearing an overcoat and a hat. He could have been any one of a thousand men. And before you ask, no, I wouldn’t recognize him if I saw him again. I didn’t want him to know that I saw him, so once I noticed him I ignored him.’ Claudio picked up his cup and took a small sip of tea.
Allowing hope to enter his voice, Brunetti asked, ‘Then he might not have been following you?’
Claudio set his cup down and fixed Brunetti with a firm expression. ‘He was following me, Guido. And he was very good.’
Brunetti decided not to ask how Claudio had learned to distinguish in this matter, and asked, instead, ‘The men you spoke to, can you trust them?’
Claudio shrugged. ‘In this business you can, and you can’t, trust people.’
‘Not to talk about the stones?’
Again, Claudio gave a casual shrug. ‘I doubt they’d say anything unless they were asked.’
‘And if they were?’
‘Who knows?’
‘Are they friends?’ Brunetti asked.
‘People who deal in diamonds don’t have any friends,’ Claudio answered.
‘The man in Antwerp?’ Brunetti asked.
‘He’s married to my niece.’
‘Does that mean he’s a friend?’
Claudio allowed himself a small smile. ‘Hardly. But it does mean I can trust him.’
‘And?’
‘And I asked him to tell me where the stones come from, if he can.’
‘When can you expect to hear from him?’
‘Today.’
Brunetti could not hide his surprise. ‘How did you send them?’
‘Oh,’ Claudio said with studied casualness, ‘I have a nephew who does odd jobs for me.’
‘Odd jobs like carrying diamonds to Antwerp?’
‘It wouldn’t be the first time,’ Claudio insisted.
‘How did he go?’
‘On a plane. How else would you go to Antwerp? Well,’ he temporized, ‘on a plane to Brussels, and then by train.’
‘You can’t do this, Claudio.’
‘I thought you were in a hurry,’ the old man said, sounding almost offended.
‘I am, but you can’t do that for me. You have to let me pay you.’
Claudio waved this away almost angrily. ‘It’s good for him to travel, see how things are done there.’ He looked at Brunetti with sudden affection. ‘Besides you’re a friend.’
‘I thought you said people who deal in diamonds don’t have friends,’ Brunetti said, but he said it with a smile.
Claudio reached over and picked a loose thread from the seam of Brunetti’s overcoat, pulled it away, and let it fall to the floor. ‘Don’t play the fool with me, Guido,’ he said and reached for his wallet to pay for the drinks.
19
When they were ready to leave the bar, Brunetti had to fight the impulse to offer to accompany Claudio to his home. Good sense, however, intervened and made him accept that he was the one person Claudio should not be seen with, so he let the old man leave first and then spent five minutes looking at the pages of the Gazzettino before he himself left, consciously choosing to go back to the Questura, not because he particularly wanted to, but because Claudio had gone in the other direction.
The officer at the door saluted when he saw Brunetti and said, ‘Vice-Questore Patta wants to see you, sir.’
Brunetti gestured his thanks with a wave of his hand and started up the steps. He went to his office, took off his coat, and dialled Signorina Elettra’s extension. When she answered, Brunetti asked, ‘What does he want?’
‘Oh, Riccardo,’ she said, recognizing his voice, ‘I’m so glad you called back. Could you come to dinner on Thursday, instead of Tuesday? I forgot I have tickets for a concert, so I’d like to change the day, if that’s possible.’ Aside, he heard her say, ‘One moment, please, Vice-Questore,’ then she came back to him. ‘Eight on Thursday, Riccardo? Fine.’ Then she was gone.
‘Oh, Riccardo,’ she said, recognizing his voice, ‘I’m so glad you called back. Could you come to dinner on Thursday, instead of Tuesday? I forgot I have tickets for a concert, so I’d like to change the day, if that’s possible.’ Aside, he heard her say, ‘One moment, please, Vice-Questore,’ then she came back to him. ‘Eight on Thursday, Riccardo? Fine.’ Then she was gone.
Tempting as the thought was, Brunetti refused to believe that she was suggesting he leave the Questura and not return until Thursday evening, so he went back downstairs and into Signorina Elettra’s office. He noticed that Patta’s door was ajar, so he said as he went in, ‘Good morning, Signorina. I’d like to speak to the Vice-Questore if he’s free.’
She rose to her feet, went over to Patta’s door, pushed it fully open, and went inside. He heard her say, ‘Commissario Brunetti would like a word with you, sir.’ She came out a moment later and said, ‘He’s free, Commissario.’
‘Thank you, Signorina,’ he said politely and went through the open door.
‘Close it,’ Patta said by way of greeting.
Brunetti did so and, uninvited, sat in one of the wooden chairs in front of Patta’s desk.
‘Why did you hang up on me?’ Patta demanded.
Brunetti pulled his eyebrows together and gave evidence of thought. ‘When, sir?’
Tiredly, Patta said, ‘Entertaining as you might find it, I can’t play this game with you this morning, Commissario.’ Instinct warned Brunetti to say nothing, and Patta went on. ‘It’s this black man. I want to know what you’ve done.’
‘Less than I want to do, sir,’ Brunetti said, a remark that was both the truth and a lie.
‘Do you think you could be more specific?’ Patta asked.
‘I’ve spoken to some of the men who worked with him,’ Brunetti began, thinking it best to skate over the details of this meeting and the methods used to bring it about, ‘and they refused to give me any information about him. I no longer know how to get in touch with them.’ He thought he would suggest he believed that Patta took some interest in what was going on in the city and so said, ‘You’ve probably noticed that they are no longer here.’
‘Who, the vu cumprà?’ Patta asked with no genuflection to politeness of phrase.
‘Yes. They’ve disappeared from Campo Santo Stefano,’ Brunetti said, making no reference to the absence of at least some of them from their homes. He had no way of knowing if it was true or not, but still he said, ‘They seem to have disappeared from the city.’
‘Where have they gone?’ Patta asked.
‘I have no idea, sir,’ Brunetti admitted.
‘What else have you done?’
Putting on his best voice, Brunetti lied. ‘That’s all I’ve been able to do. There was no useful information in the autopsy report.’ That was certainly true enough: Rizzardi’s report on the signs of torture had come after the official one, and by the time it arrived, the original report — Brunetti’s thoughts turned to a phrase he had adopted from Spanish colleagues — had been disappeared. ‘Everything that happened suggests that he was a Senegalese who somehow angered the wrong people and didn’t have enough sense to leave the city.’
‘I hope this information has been passed on to the investigators from the Ministry of the Interior,’ Patta said.
Tired of lying but also aware that any more passivity would only feed Patta’s suspicions, Brunetti said, ‘I hardly thought that necessary, sir. They seemed quite able to get to it without my help.’
‘It’s their job, Brunetti. If I might remind you,’ Patta said.
This was too much for Brunetti, and he shot back, ‘It’s my job, too.’
Patta’s face flushed suddenly red, and he pointed an angry finger at Brunetti. ‘Your job is to do what you’re told to do and not to question your superiors’ decisions.’ He slapped his hand on the top of his desk for emphasis.
The sound reverberated in the office, and Patta waited for silence before he spoke again, though something in Brunetti’s manner made him hesitate a second before he said, ‘Does it ever occur to you that I might know more about what’s really going on than you do?’
Given Patta’s apparent lack of familiarity with most of the staff at the Questura and what they did, Brunetti’s first impulse was to laugh the question to scorn, but then he thought that Patta might be speaking of the powers behind the Questura, indeed, the powers behind the Ministry of the Interior, in which case he might well be right.
‘Of course that’s occurred to me,’ Brunetti said. ‘But I don’t see what difference it makes.’
‘It makes the difference that I know when certain cases are more in the province of other agencies,’ Patta said in an entirely reasonable voice, as though he and Brunetti were old schoolfriends chatting amiably about the state of the world.
‘That doesn’t mean they should be allowed to have them.’
‘Do you think you’re a better judge of when we should and should not handle things?’ Patta asked, the familiar scorn slipping back into his voice.
It was on the tip of Brunetti’s tongue to say that no one should decide when the investigation of a man’s murder was to be buried in sand, but this would make it clear to Patta that he had no intention of abandoning the case. He contented himself with the lie and answered with a cranky, ‘No.’ He put as much pained resignation as he could muster into his voice and added, ‘I can’t decide that.’ Let Patta make of it what he would.
‘I’ll take that to mean you’re now willing to behave reasonably in this, Brunetti, shall I?’ Patta asked, his voice giving no indication of either satisfaction or triumph.
‘Yes,’ Brunetti said. ‘If the Ministry is going to take this over, should I continue with the university?’ he asked, referring to the newly opened investigation of the Facoltà di Scienze Giuridiche, where some of the professors and assistant professors of the history of law were suspected of selling advance copies of the final exams to students.
‘Yes,’ Patta said, and Brunetti waited for the corollary, as certain to follow as the final section of a da capo aria. ‘I’d like it to be handled discreetly,’ Patta satisfied him by adding. ‘Those fools at the university in Rome have a major scandal on their hands, and the Rector would like to avoid something similar here, if possible. It can only damage the reputation of the university.’
‘Yes, sir,’ Brunetti said and, to Patta’s apparent surprise, got to his feet and left the office. His wife had taught at the university for almost two decades, so Brunetti had a pretty fair idea of how much reputation the university had to save.
Signorina Elettra was not at her desk, but she was outside in the corridor leading to the stairs. ‘You had a call from Don Alvise,’ she said.
‘You know him?’ Brunetti asked, surprised to realize she might.
‘Yes, for a number of years. He sometimes asks me for information.’
Helpless to resist, Brunetti asked, ‘What sort of information?’
‘Nothing to do with the police, sir, or with what I do here; I can assure you of that.’ And that was all she said.
‘You spoke to him?’
‘Yes.’
‘What did he say?’
‘That he spoke to a number of people, and some of them said the man you asked about was a good man, and some of them said he was bad.’ Brunetti felt a sudden jolt of anger: the Cumaean Sibyl could do better than that, for God’s sake.
He waited a moment for his anger to pass and asked, ‘Didn’t he express an opinion?’
‘No,’ she answered.
‘Did he know him?’ Brunetti asked, almost demanded.
‘You’d have to ask him that, sir.’
Brunetti let his gaze wander off beyond her, to a photograph of a former Questore. ‘Anything else?’ he finally asked.
‘I spent some time following the tracks of the person or persons who broke into my computer,’ she said. ‘The tracks lead back to Rome.’
‘Where in Rome?’ he asked peevishly. Instantly contrite, he added, ‘Well done,’ and smiled. He knew she would be pleased to be able to tell him it was the Ministry of the Interior, so he asked only, ‘Who was it?’
‘Il Ministero degli Esteri.’
‘The Foreign Ministry?’ he asked, unable to disguise his surprise.
‘Yes.’ Then, before he could ask, she added, ‘I’m sure.’
Brunetti’s imagination, already halfway up the steps of the Ministry of the Interior, had to hopscotch across the city to an entirely different building, and the mental list of possibilities he had prepared had to be tossed away and a new one prepared. For more than a decade, the two ministries had vied with one another in seeing who could best ignore the problem of illegal immigration, and when some disaster at sea or incident at the border made denial temporarily difficult, they switched to mutual recrimination and then to deceit. Numbers could be adjusted, nationalities altered, and the press could always be counted on to slap a photo of a bedraggled woman and child on to the front page, whereupon popular opinion would lapse into sentimentality long enough to allow the current shipload of refugees into the country, after which people lost interest in the subject, thus permitting the ministries to return to their normal policy of willed ignorance.
But that still did not explain the interference of the Foreign Ministry — if Signorina Elettra said it was they, then so it was — in a case of such apparent insignificance. He had no idea why they should choose to concern themselves with the murder of an itinerant street pedlar, though there were certainly many reasons why they might choose to concern themselves with the murder of a man in possession of six million Euros in diamonds.
‘I’ve already started asking questions,’ she said. During recent years, Brunetti’s understanding of her methods had expanded sufficiently that he no longer pictured her sitting at her desk, making phone call after phone call or, like the Little Match Girl, walking from person to person in search of aid. This understanding, however, stopped far short of a firm grasp of the arcana of her contacts and of the skill with which she pilfered from the supposedly secret files of both government and private agencies. Not only government ministries were capable of willed ignorance.
‘And Bocchese wants to see you,’ she said.
That seemed to be all she wanted to tell him, so he thanked her and went down to Bocchese’s office. On the steps, he encountered Gravini, who held up a hand both in greeting and to stop Brunetti.
‘They’re gone, sir, the ambulanti,’ he said, looking concerned, as if he feared Brunetti would hold him responsible for the men’s disappearance. ‘I spoke to my friend Muhammad, but he hasn’t seen anyone from that group for days and says that their house is empty.’
‘Does he have any idea of what might have happened to them?’
‘No, sir. I asked him, but all he knew was that they were gone.’ Gravini raised his hand again to display his disappointment and said, ‘I’m sorry, sir.’
‘That’s all right, Gravini,’ Brunetti said. Then he added, knowing that everything that was said in the Questura was repeated, ‘We’ve been relieved of the case, so it doesn’t matter any more.’ He patted Gravini on the shoulder to show his good faith and continued down the stairs.
When he entered the lab, Brunetti found the technician bent over a microscope, the fingers of one hand busy adjusting a knob on the long barrel.
Bocchese, one eye pressed to the instrument, made a noise that could have been a greeting or could just as easily have been a grunt of satisfaction at whatever he saw under the lens. Brunetti walked over and had a look at the plate of the microscope, expecting to see a glass slide. Instead, he saw a dark brown rectangle, half the size of a pack of cigarettes, that appeared to be metal of some sort.
‘What’s that?’ he asked without thinking.
Bocchese didn’t answer him. Adjusting the knob, he studied the object for a few moments more, then drew back from the eyepiece, turned to Brunetti and said, ‘Take a look.’
He slid down from the stool, and Brunetti took his place. He had looked at slides in the past, usually when Bocchese or Rizzardi wanted to show him some detail of human physiology or the processes that constituted its destruction.
He placed his right eye to the sculpted eyepiece and closed the other. All he saw was what appeared to be an enormous eye, but black and metallic, with a round hole in the centre as its iris. He braced his open palms on the table, blinked once, and looked again. The image still resembled an eye, with the thinnest of lines indicating the eyelashes.
He stood upright. ‘What is it?’
Bocchese moved beside him and slid the metal piece from its place under the lens. ‘Here, take a look,’ he said, handing it to Brunetti.
The rectangle certainly had the weight of metal; on its surface Brunetti saw a sword-wielding knight mounted on a caparisoned horse no bigger than a postage stamp. The man’s armour was carved in great detail, as was that of the horse. His head and face were covered by a helmet, but the horse wore only some sort of protection on its ears, and a thin line of damask material down the front of its face. It was the horse’s eye, he realized, that he had seen. Without the magnification, he had to hold the plaque to the light to be able to see the tiny hole of the iris.
‘What is it?’ Brunetti asked again.
‘I’d say it’s from the studio of Moderno, which is what my friend wanted me to tell him.’
Utterly at a loss, Brunetti asked, ‘What friend and why did he want you to tell him?’
‘He collects these things. So do I. So whenever he’s offered a really good piece, he asks me to check it for him to see that it’s what the seller says it is.’
‘But here?’ Brunetti asked, indicating the laboratory.
‘The microscope,’ Bocchese said, giving it the sort of affectionate pat one might give a favourite dog. ‘It’s much better than the one I have at home, so I can see every detail. It helps me be certain.’
‘You collect these?’ Brunetti asked, holding the rectangle up close to his face, the better to examine the scene. The horse reared up, nostrils flared in fear or anger. The knight’s left hand, covered in a thick mailed glove, pulled the reins tight while his right arm poised just at the farthest point of backward extension. In less than a second, both horse and man would crash forward, and God pity anything that stood before them.
Bocchese’s answer was an exercise in caution. ‘I’ve got a few.’
‘It’s beautiful,’ Brunetti said, handing it back carefully. ‘I’ve seen them in museums, but if you can’t get close to them, then you can’t really see the detail, can you?’
‘No,’ Bocchese agreed. ‘And you miss the patina, and the feel of it.’ To display that last, he held out his hand, the bronze piece cushioned in his palm, and hefted it up and down a few times. ‘I’m glad you think it’s beautiful.’ Bocchese’s expression was as warm as his voice had suddenly become.