A Noble Radiance讲义教程

A Noble Radiance讲义教程 A Noble Radiance A splendid series ... with a backdrop of the city so vivid you can almost smell if SundayTelegraph One of the pleasures offered by crime fiction is the sense of a place evoked... for DonnaLeon the scene is Venice’ and she offers a fresh exhilarating take on that ambiguous city ...Leon evokes memorably La Serenissimas unsettling mixture of faded beauty and fecundcorruption Sunday Times This series has become one of the adornments of current crime fiction... a gem The Scotsman Donna Leons crime novels have everything going for them. A Venice backdrop beautifullyobserved a dazzling page-turning writing style a central character in Commissario Brunettiwho deserves to be as famous as Maigret and a wife who deserves canonisation Daily Post Leon gets better and better Express on Sunday Donna Leon has lived in Venice for many years and previously lived in Switzerland Iran SaudiArabia and China where she was a teacher. She now combines writing with teaching EnglishLiterature at a university near Venice. Her novels featuring Commissario Brunetti have all beenhighly acclaimed and regularly top the bestseller lists in Switzerland Austria Germany andthe UK. Donna Leon A Noble RadiancePublished in the United Kingdom in 1999 by Arrow Books 7 9 10 8 Copyright ?? Donna Leon and Diogenes Verlag AG Zurich 1998 The right of Donna Leon to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her inaccordance with the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise belent resold hired out or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in anyform of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similarcondition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. First published in the United Kingdom in 1998 by William Heinemann Arrow Books The Group Random House Limited 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road London SW1V2SA Random House Australia Ply Limited 20 Alfred Street Milsons Point Sydney New South Wales2061 Australia?? Random House New Zealand Limited 18 Poland Road Glenfield Auckland 10 NewZealand Random House Pty Limited Endulini Sa Jubilee Road Parktown 2193 South Africa The Group Random House Limited Reg. No. 954009 www.randomhouse.co.uk A CJP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Papers used by Random House are natural recyclable products made from wood grown insustainable forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations ofthe country of origin.Typeset by SX Composing DTP Rayleigh Essex. Printed and bound in GreatBritain by Bookmarque Ltd Croydon SurreySBN 0 09 926929 The nobility has honesty painted in its eyes Don Giovanni ??Mozart 1 There was nothing much to notice about the field a hundred-metre square of dry grass below asmall village in the foothills of the Dolomites. It lay at the bottom of a slope covered withhardwood trees which could easily be culled for firewood and that was used as an argument toincrease the price when the land and the two-hundred-year-old house upon it came to be sold.Off to the north a slant-faced mountain loomed over the small town of Ponte nelle Alpi ahundred kilometres to the south lay Venice too far away to influence the politics or customsof the area. People in the villages spoke Italian with some reluctance felt more at home inBellunese dialect. The field had lain unfilled for almost half a century and the stone house had sat empty. Theimmense slates that made up the roof had shifted with age and sudden changes in temperature perhaps even with the occasional earthquake thathad struck the area during the centuries the roof had protected the house from rain and snowand so it no longer did that for many of the slates had crashed to earth leaving the upperrooms exposed to the elements. Because the house and property lay at the heart of a contestedwill none of the eight heirs had bothered to repair the leaks fearful that they would neverget back the few hundred thousand lire the repairs would cost. So the rain and snow drippedthen flowed in nibbling away at plaster and floorboards and each year the roof tilted moredrunkenly towards the earth. The field too had been abandoned for the same reasons. None of the presumptive heirs wantedto expend either time or money working the land nor did they want to weaken their legalposition by being seen to make unpaid use of the property. Weeds flourished made all the morevital by the fact that the last people to cultivate the land had for decades manured it withthe droppings of their rabbits. It was the scent of foreign money that settled the dispute about the will: two days after aretired German doctor made an offer for the house and land the eight heirs met at the home ofthe eldest. Before the end of the evening they had arrived at a unanimous decision to sell thehouse and land their subsequent decision was not to sell until the foreigner had doubled hisoffer which would bring the selling price to four times what any local resident would - orcould - pay. Three weeks after the deal was completed scaffolding went up and the centuries-old hand-cutslates were hurled down to shatter in the courtyard below. The art of laying the slates haddied with the artisans who knew how to cut them and so they were replaced with mouldedrectangles of prefabricated cement that had a vague resemblance to terra cotta tiles. Becausethe doctor had hired the oldest of the heirs to serve as his foreman work progressed quicklybecause this was the Province of Belluno it was done honestly and well. By the middle of thespring the restoration of the house was almost complete and with the approach of the firstwarm days the new owner who had spent his professional life enclosed in brightly litoperating rooms and who was conducting the restorations by phone and fax from Munich turnedhis thoughts to the creation of the garden he had dreamed about for years. Village memory is long and it recalled that the old garden had run alongside the row of walnuttrees out behind the house so it was there that Egidio Buschetti the foreman decided toplough. The land hadnt been worked for most of his own lifetime so Buschetti estimated thathis tractor would have to pass over the land twice once to cut through the metre-high weedsand then once again to disc up the rich soil lying underneath. At first Buschetti thought it was a horse - he remembered that the old owners had kept two -and so he continued with his tractor all the way to what he had established a s the end of thefield. Pulling at the broad wheel he swung the tractor around and headed back proud of therazor-straightness of the furrows glad to be out in the sun again happy at the sound and thefeel of the work sure now that spring had come. He saw the bone sticking up crookedly from thefurrow he had just ploughed the white length of it sharply visible against the nearly blackearth. No not long enough to be a horse but he didnt remember that anyone had ever keptsheep here. Curious he slowed the tractor somehow reluctant to ride over the bone and shatterit. He shifted into neutral and drew to a stop. Pulling on the hand brake he climbed down from hishigh metal seat and walked over towards the cantilevered bone that jutted up towards the sky.He bent and reached out to shove it away from the path of the tractor but a sudden reluctancepulled him upright again and he prodded at it with the toe of his heavy boot hoping thus todislodge it. It refused to move so Buschetti turned towards the tractor where he kept ashovel clamped in back of his seat. As he turned his eyes fell upon a gleaming white oval abit farther along the bottom of the furrow. No horse no sheep had ever gazed out from so rounda skull nor would they leer up at him through the sharpened carnivore teeth so frighteninglylike his own. 2 The intuition of the news in just a country town never spreads faster than when it deals withdeath or disaster so the news that human bones had been discovered in the garden of the oldOrsez house was common knowledge throughout the village of Col di Cugnan before dinnertime. Itwas not since the death of the mayors son in that automobile accident down by the cementfactory seven years ago that news had spread so quickly even the story about Graziella Rovereand the electrician had taken two days to become common knowledge. But that night thevillagers all seventy-four of them switched off their televisions or talked above themduring dinner trying to think of how it could be and more interestingly who it could be. The mink-sweatered news reader on RAI 3 the blonde who wore a different pair of glasses eachnight went ignored as she reported the latest horrors in the ex-Yugoslavia and no one paidthe slightest heed to the arrest of the former Minister of the Interior on charges ofcorruption. Both were by now normal but a skull in a ditch behind the home of the foreignerthat was news. By bedtime the skull had been variously reported to have been shattered by ablow from an axe or a bullet and to display signs that an attempt had been made to dissolveit with acid. The police had determined people were certain that they were the bones of apregnant woman a young male and the husband of Luigina Menegaz gone off to Rome twelve yearsago and never heard from since. That night people in Col di Cugnan locked their doors andthose who had lost the keys years ago and never bothered about them slept less easily than didthe others. At eight the next morning two Carabinieri-driven all-terrain vehicles arrived at the home ofDoctor Litfin and drove across the newly planted grass to park on either side of the two longrows ploughed the day before. It was not until an hour later that a car arrived from theprovincial centre of Belluno carrying the medico legale of that city. He had heard none of therumours about the identity or cause of death of the person whose bones lay in the held and sohe did what seemed most necessary: he set his two assistants to sifting through the earth tofind the rest of the remains. As this slow process advanced both of the Carabinieri vehicles took turns driving across thesoon-destroyed lawn and up to the village where the six officers had coffees in the small barthen began to ask the residents of the village if anyone was missing. The fact that the bonesseemed to have been in the earth for years did not affect their decision to ask about recentevents and so their researches proved ineffective. In the field below the village the two assistants of Doctor Bortot had set up a fine meshscreen at a sharp angle. Slowly they poured buckets of earth through it bending downoccasionally to pick out a small bone or anything that looked like it might be one. As theypulled them out they displayed them to their superior who stood at the edge of the furrowhands clasped behind his back. A long sheet of black plastic lay spread at his feet and as hewas shown the bones he instructed his assistants where to place them and together they slowlybegan to assemble their macabre jigsaw puzzle. Occasionally he asked one of the men to hand him a bone and he studied it for a moment beforebending to place it somewhere on the plastic sheet. Twice he corrected himself once bending tomove a small bone from the right side to the left and another time with a mutteredexclamation moving another from below the metatarsal to the end of what had once been a wrist. At ten Doctor Litfin arrived having been alerted the previous evening to the discovery in hisgarden and having driven through the night from Munich. He parked in front of his house andpulled himself stiffly from the drivers seat. Beyond the house he saw the countless deeptracks cut into the new grass he had planted with such simple joy three weeks before. But thenhe saw the three men standing in the field off in the distance almost as far away as the patchof young raspberry plants he had brought down from Germany and planted at the same time. Hestarted across the destroyed lawn but stopped in his tracks at a shouted command that came fromsomewhere off to his right He looked around but saw nothing except the three ancient appletrees that had grown up around the ruined well. Seeing no one he started again towards thethree men in the field. He had taken only a few steps before two men dressed in the ominousblack uniforms of the Carabinieri burst out from under the nearest of the apple trees machineguns aimed at him. Doctor Litfin had survived the Russian occupation of Berlin and though that had happened fiftyyears before his body remembered the sight of armed men in uniform. He put both of his handsabove his head and stood rock-still. They came out fully from the shadows then and the doctor had a hallucinogenic moment of seeingthe contrast of their death-black uniforms against the innocent backdrop of pink apple blossom.Their glossy boots trampled across a carpet of fresh-fallen petals as they approached him. ‘What are you doing here the first one demanded. Who are you the other asked in the same angry tone.In Italian made clumsy by fear he began ‘I’m Doctor Litfin. Im the . . ‘ he said butstopped to search for the appropriate term. ‘I’m the padrone here. The Carabinieri had been told that the new owner was a German and the accent sounded realenough so they lowered their guns though they kept their fingers near the triggers. Litfintook this as permission to lower his hands though he did that very slowly. Because he wasGerman he knew that guns were always superior to any claim to legal rights and so he waitedfor them to approach him but this did not prevent him from turning his attention momentarilyback to the three men who stood in the newly ploughed earth they now as motionless as hetheir attention on him and the approaching Carabinieri. The two officers suddenly diffident in the face of the person who could afford therestorations to house and land evident all around them approached Doctor Litfin and as theydrew nearer the balance of power changed. Litfin perceived this and seized the moment. What is all of this he asked pointing across the field and leaving it to the policemen toinfer whether he meant his ruined lawn or the three men who stood at the other side of it. Theres a body in your field’ the first officer answered. ‘I know that but what’s all this... he sought the proper word and came up only withdistruzione. The marks of the tyre treads seemed actually to grow deeper as the three men studied themuntil finally one of the policemen said We had to drive down into the field’ Though this was an obvious lie Litfin ignored it. He turned away from the two officers andstarted to walk towards the other three men so quickly that neither of the officers tried tostop him. When he got to the end of the first deep trench he called across to the man who wasobviously in charge What is it Are you Doctor Litfin asked the other doctor who had already been told about the Germanwhat he had paid for the house and how much he had spent so far on restorations. Litfin nodded and when the other man was slow to answer asked again What is it Id say it was a man in his twenties’ Doctor Bortot answered and then turning back to hisassistants motioned them to continue with their work. It took Litfin a moment to recover from the brusqueness of the reply but when he did hestepped on to the ploughed earth and went to stand beside the other doctor. Neither man saidanything for a long time as they stood side by side and watched the two men in the trenchscrape away slowly at the dirt. After a few minutes one of the men handed Doctor Bortot another bone which with a quickglance he bent and placed at the end of the other wrist. Two more bones two more quickplacements. There on your left Pizzetti Bortot said pointing to a tiny white knob that lay exposed onthe far side of the trench. The man he spoke to glanced at it bent and picked it from theearth and handed it up to the doctor. Bortot studied it for a moment holding it delicatelybetween his first two fingers then .