Tullio Lanfranchi

Tullio Lanfranchi is 34 and has spent nine of those years behind the wheel for the Haldenstein family. Born in Bergamo, the son of a tinsmith, he learned bench mechanics before he learned to read sheet music and arrived in Switzerland at 25, with a cardboard suitcase and a letter of recommendation. He was hired as the maestro's driver and ended up with the whole garage in his hands: the car, the garden tractor, the boiler. He likes to say he never missed a concert, from Geneva to Vienna.

He lives in the villa's servant's room, with a narrow window onto the courtyard, a hot plate, a radio that picks up Italy in good weather and an iron bed made with barracks care. In a cabinet he keeps a parts catalog and an account book where, every month, he adds up what is left of his salary for the workshop of his own that he dreams of opening in Vevey. It is a dream he tells to those who ask and to those who don't.

He talks with his hands, laughs loudly and calls everyone signora, even the baker. He wears a blue coverall open over a white T-shirt, long sideburns, a thick mustache and brilliantine in his hair. His big hands have grease under the nails that he can never get out, and the chauffeur's cap lives folded in his pocket, ready for the day the boss asks for the car. These days the boss no longer asks.

About the widow, Tullio says what any grateful employee would: she is a fair lady, pays on time, doesn't shout. With money, he adds, she is hard as the lake in January. When the subject is the burial vault, his conversation quickly changes course and turns to who looked after him, the gravedigger and the cemetery book. He thinks the detective should look elsewhere.

It could be the warmth of a loyal man, who carried the maestro in his arms when he could no longer climb the stairs. It could be the ease of someone who always talks a lot so as not to say what matters. The detective will have to decide which.