Free Wilful Behaviour by Donna Leon Page A

two decades, by his first name, he asked, ‘But how do you know about it? From your father?’
    ‘Yes, at least part of it. Orazio told me the rest.’
    ‘I didn’t know you knew him that well, Lele.’
    ‘We fought together with the Partisans for two years.’
    ‘But he said he was only a boy when they left Venice.’
    ‘That was in 1939. Three years later, he was a young man. A very dangerous young man. He was one of the best. Or worst, I suppose, if you were a German.’
    ‘Where were you?’ Brunetti asked.
    ‘Up near Asiago, in the mountains,’ Lele said, paused, and then added, ‘Anything else you want to know about this, I think you better ask your father-in-law.’
    Taking that as the command it so clearly was, Brunetti went back to the subject at hand. ‘Tell me more about your father, before he was arrested.’
    ‘Before that, he’d taken only his ten per cent, and he’d done his best to try to get as much as he could for the things his clients had to sell. And, for whatever it’s worth, he never bought anything from them. No matter how good the price they offered him, and no matter how much he wanted to own the object, he refused to buy anything for himself.’
    ‘And Guzzardi?’ Brunetti asked, bringing the story back where he wanted it to be.
    ‘They were a perfect team. The father was the money man and the son was the artist.’ Lele’s voice dribbled acid on the word. ‘They got into the antiques business almost by accident. They must have smelled how much money they could make at it. People like that always do. At the beginning, they hired someone to work as an appraiser for them, and because both of them were senior Party members, they had no trouble in getting themselves into the cartel. And before you knew it, people here, and in Padova and Treviso, who wanted to sell things and needed to do it fast, well, they ended up dealing with the Guzzardis. And they sold. The Guzzardis sucked up everything. Like sharks.’
    ‘Did they have anything to do with your father’s arrest?’
    Lele said, cautious as always, given his belief that all phone conversations were monitored by some agency of the state, ‘It’s always wise business procedure to eliminate the competition.’
    ‘Did they buy only for themselves or also for clients?’
    ‘When they started out – because neither of them had any taste at all – they bought for clients, people who might have heard that a certain collection was for sale and who didn’t want to get their hands dirty by being seen to buy things openly. This happened more and more, the closer it got to the end of the war. People wanted the art works, but they didn’t want it to be seen that they’d bought them.’
    ‘And the Guzzardis?’ Brunetti asked.
    ‘Toward the end, they are said to have bought only for themselves. By then Luca had developed a fairly good eye. Even my father admitted that. He wasn’t stupid, Luca, not at all.’
    ‘What sort of things?’
    ‘The father bought paintings; Luca was interested in drawings and etchings.’
    ‘Is that what Luca was good at?’
    ‘Not particularly, no, I don’t think so. But they’re very portable, and because there’s always more than one etching and because very often painters made a few sketches or drawings before a painting, it’s harder to trace them than if they were unique. And they’re very easy to hide.’
    ‘I had no idea any of this went on,’ Brunetti said when it seemed that Lele had finished speaking.
    ‘Few people do. And even fewer want to know anything about it. That’s what we did, right after Liberation: we all decided that we’d forget what had happened during the last decade, especially in the years since the beginning of the war. Besides, we finished on the winning side, so it was even easier to forget. That’s what we’ve had since then, the politics of amnesia. It’s what we wanted and it’s what we’ve got.’
    Brunetti had seldom heard it better named. ‘Anything