Free Dressed for Death by Donna Leon

distinction created ahead of him, he ordered a third glass
of mineral water and looked at the next name on the list.
     
    Francesco Crespo lived only four
blocks from Feltrinelli, but it might as well have been a world away. The
building was sleek, a tall glass-fronted rectangle which must have seemed, when
it was built ten years ago, right on the cutting edge of urban design. But
Italy is a country where new ideas in design are never prized for much longer
than it takes to put them into effect, by which time the ever-forward-looking
have abandoned them and gone off in pursuit of gaudy new banners, like those
damned souls in the vestibule of Dante’s Inferno, who circle round for
all eternity, seeking a banner they can neither identify nor name.
     
    The decade that had elapsed since
the construction of this building had carried fashion away with it, and now the
building looked like nothing so much as an upended box of spaghettini. The glass in the windows gleamed, and a small patch of land between it and the
street was manicured with precision, but none of that could save it from
looking entirely out of place among the other lower, more modest buildings
amidst which it had been erected with such futile confidence.
     
    He had the apartment number and
was quickly carried to the seventh floor by the air-conditioned elevator. When
the door opened, Brunetti stepped out into a marble corridor, also
air-conditioned. He walked to the right and rang the bell of apartment D.
     
    He heard a sound inside; but no
one came to the door. He rang again. The sound wasn’t repeated, but still no
one came to the door. He rang the bell a third time, keeping his finger pressed
to it. Even through the door he could hear the shrill whine of the bell and
then a voice calling, ‘Basta. Vengo.’
     
    He took his finger off the bell,
and a moment later the door was yanked open by a tall, heavy-set man in linen
slacks and what looked like a cashmere turtle neck. Brunetti glanced at the man
for an instant, saw two dark eyes, angry eyes, and a nose that had been broken
a number of times, but then his eyes fell again to the high neck of the sweater
and found themselves imprisoned there. The middle of August, people collapsing
on the street from the heat, and this man wore a cashmere turtle neck. He
pulled his eyes back to the man’s face and asked, ‘Signor Crespo?’
     
    ‘Who wants him?’ the man asked,
making no attempt to disguise both anger and menace.
     
    ‘Commissario Guido Brunetti,’ he
answered, again showing his warrant card. This man, like Feltrinelli, needed
only the slightest of glances to recognize it. He suddenly stepped a bit closer
to Brunetti, perhaps hoping to force him back into the corridor with the
offensive presence of his body. But Brunetti didn’t move, and the other man
stepped back. ‘He’s not here.’
     
    From another room, both of them
heard the sound of something heavy falling to the floor.
     
    This time it was Brunetti who
took a step forward, backing the other man away from the door. Brunetti
continued into the room and walked over to a thronelike leather chair beside a
table on which stood an immense spray of gladioli in a crystal vase. He sat in
the chair, crossed his legs, and said, ‘Then perhaps I’ll wait for Signor
Crespo.’ He smiled. ‘If you have no objection, Signor...?’
     
    The other man slammed the front
door, wheeled towards a door that stood on the other side of the room, and
said, ‘I’ll get him.’
     
    He disappeared into the room
beyond, closing the door behind him. His voice, deep and angry, resounded
through it. Brunetti heard another voice, a tenor to the bass. But then he
heard what seemed to be a third voice, another tenor, but a full tone higher
than the last. Whatever conversation went on behind the door took a number of
minutes, during which Brunetti looked around the room. It was all new, it was
all visibly expensive, and Brunetti would have wanted none of it, neither