A Noble Radiance Read Online Free PDF

Vice-Questore Patta's secretary had
been to order a bi-weekly delivery of flowers, often quite spectacular flowers,
and never fewer than a dozen. Patta, who was concerned only that his expense
allotment from the city extend to his frequent lunches - usually quite as
spectacular as the flowers - never thought to question the expense, and so her
antechamber had become a source of pleasure to the entire Questura. It was
impossible to tell if the staff's delight resulted from what Signorina Elettra
decided to wear that day, the flowers in the small room, or from the fact that
the government was paying for them. Brunetti, who took equal delight in all
three, found a line, he thought from Petrarch, running through his memory,
where the poet blessed the month, the day, and the hour when he first saw his
Laura. Saying nothing about any of this, he took the file and placed it on the
desk in front of him.
    He opened the file
when she left and began to read. Brunetti had remembered only that it happened
in the autumn; September 28th, sometime before midnight on a Tuesday. Roberto's
girlfriend had stopped her car (there followed the year, make, and licence
number) in front of the gates of the Lorenzbni family villa, rolled down the
window, and punched the numerical code into the digital lock that controlled
them. When the gates failed to open, Roberto got out of the car and walked over
to see what was wrong. A large stone lay just inside the gates, and its weight
prevented them from opening.
    Roberto, the girl
said in the original police report, bent to try to move the rock, and when he
was stooped down, two men emerged from the bushes beside him. One put a pistol
to the boy's head, while the other came and stood just outside her window,
pointing his pistol at her. Both wore ski masks.
    She said that, at
first, she thought it was a robbery, and so she put her hands in her lap and
tried to remove the emerald ring she was wearing, hoping to drop it to the
floor of the car, safe from the thieves. The car radio was playing, so she
couldn't hear what the men said, but she told the police she realized it wasn't
a robbery when she saw Roberto turn and walk into the bushes in front of the
first man.
    The second man
remained where he was, outside her window, pointing his gun at her but making
no attempt to speak to her for another few moments, and then he backed into the
bushes and disappeared.
    The first thing she
did was to lock the door of the car. She reached between the seats of the car
for her telefonino, but its batteries had run down, and it was useless. She
waited to see if Roberto would come back. When he didn't - she didn't know how
long she waited - she backed away from the gate, turned, and drove towards
Treviso until she came to a phone booth at the side of the highway. She dialled
113 and reported what had happened. Even then, she said, it didn't occur to her
that it could be a kidnapping; she had even thought it might be a joke of some
sort.
    Brunetti read through
the rest of the report, looking to see if the officer who spoke to her had
asked why she would think such a thing could be a joke, but the question didn't
appear. Brunetti opened a drawer and looked for a piece of paper; finding none,
he leaned down and pulled an envelope from his wastepaper basket, turned it
over and made a note on the back, then went back to the report.
    The police contacted
the family, knowing no more than that the boy had been taken away at gunpoint.
Count Ludovico arrived at the villa at four that morning, driven there by his
nephew, Maurizio. The police were, by then, treating it as a probable
kidnapping, so the mechanism to block all the family funds had been put into
motion. This could be done only with those funds in the country, and the family
still had access to their holdings in foreign banks. Knowing this, the commissario from
the Treviso police who was heading the investigation attempted to impress upon
Count Ludovico the futility of giving