by Donna Leon
She raised her right hand and waved one finger back and forth in a strong negative. ‘No. Nothing.’ Then, more thoughtfully, ‘Not even the sex.’
‘Not high or low?’ he asked.
‘No. Whoever spoke was forcing their voice, the way you do when you sing falsetto.’
Brunetti thought of jigsaw puzzles, the old wooden ones his father had played with in the last years of his life, and he remembered those magic moments when a single piece, perhaps containing half an eye and a dab of flesh, opened up a new colour and made sudden sense of those beige pieces lined up at the edge of the table that had been, until then, meaningless.
‘Are you a singer?’
Her eyes widened and she said, ‘I want to be. But not yet. I have years of work before that.’ With that infusion of passion, her natural voice returned, leaving behind the whisper and the stress, freeing its beauty.
‘Where are you studying?’ Brunetti asked, tiptoeing towards a place he could only suspect might be nearby.
‘Paris. At the Conservatory.’
‘Not here?’ he asked.
‘No, my school’s closed for the spring holiday, so I’ve come here to study with my father for a few weeks.’
‘Does he teach here?’
‘At the Conservatory, but only part time. He’s also one of the freelance ripetitori at the theatre. I’ve been working with him there.’
‘La Fenice?’ Brunetti asked, as if the city were full of theatres.
‘Yes.’
‘Ah, I see,’ Brunetti said. ‘Does he approve of what the French are teaching you?’
She smiled and, as happened when young people smiled, grew prettier. ‘My father’s always enthusiastic,’ she said with becoming modesty.
‘Only your father?’
She started to speak, and Brunetti saw her stop herself.
‘Who was it?’ he asked.
‘Signora Petrelli,’ she whispered, as though she had been asked who she thought could heal her broken arm and had replied, ‘La Madonna della Salute.’
‘How is it she heard you singing?’
‘She was going to her rehearsal room, and she passed the door where I was with my father, and she . . .’ The girl closed her eyes. And then a soft snoring sound came from her nose, and Brunetti knew he would get no more information from her that morning.
10
Brunetti went back to the nurses’ station, but the woman he had spoken to was not there. He pulled out his phone and, feeling ridiculous for his continued reluctance to go and talk to Rizzardi, called the pathologist’s number.
Rizzardi answered by asking, ‘You talk to her yet, Guido?’
‘Yes.’
‘What can you do about it?’
Brunetti had been thinking exactly this since he had spoken to the girl. ‘Try to find out if we have a camera over there.’
‘Camera?’ Rizzardi asked.
‘There are some in different places in the city,’ Brunetti explained. ‘Although it’s not likely there’d be one there.’
After a pause that could have been polite or impolite, Rizzardi inquired, ‘Too few tourists?’
‘Something like that.’
All irony fled Rizzardi’s voice and he asked, ‘Why would anyone do something like that?’
‘I have no idea.’ The son of a friend of Brunetti’s had been attacked on the street by a drug addict five years before, but this sort of random attack – a kind of vandalism against persons – was virtually unknown in the city. Rizzardi had no need to know that the girl’s assailant had spoken to her, so all Brunetti did was thank his friend for calling him.
‘I hope you find out who did it,’ Rizzardi said, then added, ‘I’ve got to go,’ and hung up.
Left to his own thoughts, Brunetti mentally listed the agencies that had installed telecameras in the city. The ACTV, he knew, had them on the imbarcaderi, both to see that the ticket sellers did not cheat their clients and to identify vandals. He knew that many buildings were protected or at least kept under surveillance by them, but who would bother to put one on a bridge that was likely to be used only by Venetians?
He recalled seeing a report about the surveillance cameras his own branch of the police had installed but failed to remember where they were; the Carabinieri certainly had some; and he had seen one in the alley that led to the offices of the Guardia di Finanza near Rialto.
He walked back to take another look at the young woman, but even before he reached her bed, he could hear her quiet snoring. He left the ward and made his way out into Campo SS Giovanni e Paolo.
The scaffolding still climbed both sides of the Basilica. Although it had been in place for years, Brunetti could not remember the last time he’d seen any workmen on it. On an impulse, he went into the Basilica, only to be stopped by a word from a man sitting in a wooden booth to the right of the door. Neither the booth nor the man had been there the last time Brunetti went into the church.
‘Are you a resident?’ the man asked.
A flash of outrage struck Brunetti, doubled by the fact that the man spoke Italian with a foreign accent. What else would he be, a man in a suit, at nine in the morning, going into a church? He lowered his head and stared through the glass at the man who had questioned him.
‘Scusi, Signore,’ the man said deferentially, ‘but I have to ask.’
This calmed Brunetti. The man was doing his job, and he was being polite about it. ‘Yes, I am,’ Brunetti said, then, though it was hardly necessary, ‘I’ve come to light a candle for my mother.’
The man smiled broadly and just as quickly covered his mouth to hide his missing teeth. ‘Ah, good for you,’ he said.
‘Would you like me to light one for yours?’
His hand fell from his mouth, and it opened in an ‘O’ of astonishment. ‘Oh, yes, please,’ he said.
Brunetti started to walk towards the main altar, his spirit uplifted by the lightness of everything before him. The sun streamed in from the east, tracing coloured patterns on the waving floor. Signs of the city’s majesty – doges and their wives sleeping away the centuries – lined both sides of the nave. He refused to look at the Bellini triptych on the right, still scandalized by the violence of the last restoration it had been subjected to, poor thing.
Halfway down the right aisle, he paused to study one segment of the stained-glass windows: with advancing years, Brunetti had lost the ability to soak in too much beauty at one time and thus tried to limit the dose when he could by studying only one thing, or two. He gazed up at the quartet of muscular, spear-bearing saints.
His mother had always harboured a special devotion to the mounted dragon-killer on the left, though she alternated between believing him to be San Giorgio or San Teodoro. Brunetti had never thought to ask her why she liked them so much, but now that she was gone, he had come to believe it was because she so hated bullies, and what greater bully than a dragon? He took a euro coin from his pocket and let it clank into the metal box. He took the two candles to which this entitled him and lit the wicks of first one, and then the other, from a burning candle. He placed them in the middle row and stepped back, watching until he was sure the flames would hold.
‘One’s for the mother of the guy at the door,’ he whispered, just to make sure they didn’t confuse things and credit both candles to his mother’s account. He took a final look at the saint, an old friend after all these years, nodded and turned away. As he went along the aisle, Brunetti kept his eyes down to avoid overloading himself, but he could hardly avoid the glory of the pavement.
At the door, he bent down, caught the man’s eye, and said, ‘Done.’
On the way to the Questura, he thought of the things he would need to know: first the location of the telecamere and then the name of the organs of state in charge of them. He also had to consider how willingly the different branches of the forces of order would disclose their activities, even to each other, and whether they would be willing to do this cooperatively and not insist upo
n a request from a magistrate.
He went immediately to the squad room and found Vianello at his desk. Open in front of him was an enormous file of documents with the name ‘Nardo’ on the cover. At Brunetti’s approach, the Sergeant looked up at him and, pasting a tortured expression on his face and reaching out a hand he was careful to make tremble, whispered, ‘Save me, save me.’
Having often been constrained to look at the same file, Brunetti raised his hands as if to ward off a malign apparition, and said, ‘Not the Marchesa again?’
‘The very same,’ Vianello said. ‘This time she’s accusing her neighbour of keeping wild cats in the courtyard.’
‘Lions?’ Brunetti asked.
Vianello tapped the back of his fingers on the page he had been reading and said, ‘No, the cats in the neighbourhood. This time, she claims he lets them in every night and feeds them.’
‘Even though he lives in London?’
‘She says she’s seen his butler feeding them,’ Vianello explained.
‘Who also lives in London,’ Brunetti offered.
‘She’s mad,’ Vianello said. ‘This is the seventeenth complaint we’ve had.’
‘And have to investigate?’ Brunetti asked.
Vianello closed the file and looked longingly at the wastepaper basket on the other side of the room. Resisting the impulse, he shoved the papers to the side of his desk and said, ‘If she weren’t the godmother of a cabinet minister, do you think we’d be wasting our time on this?’
Instead of answering the question, Brunetti said, ‘I’ve got something more interesting.’
They found Signorina Elettra seated at her desk, turned away from her computer and reading a magazine she made no attempt to hide. They would have been no more shocked to see a painting of Eve without Adam, a statue of Saint Cosmas without Saint Damian at his side.
When he noticed that the computer screen was blank, Brunetti’s shock doubled, and he could think only of turning it into a joke. ‘Are you on strike, Signorina?’
She looked up, surprised, and shot a glance at Vianello. ‘Did you tell him?’
‘Nothing,’ Vianello answered.
‘Tell me what?’ Brunetti asked, directing the question at both of them.
‘Then you don’t know?’ she asked, closing the magazine and opening her eyes in feigned innocence.
‘No one’s told me anything,’ Brunetti insisted, although that was hardly true. The young woman had told him she’d been pushed down the steps. Beside him, Vianello folded his arms, making it clear he was going to sit this one out.
‘Oh, it’s nothing,’ she said and looked back at the magazine.
Brunetti approached her desk. Vogue. He’d thought so.
She caught his glance and said, ‘It’s the French edition.’
‘Don’t you read the Italian one?’
She half closed her eyes for an instant and did something with her eyelids that dismissed the worth and accuracy of the Italian edition of Vogue at the same time as calling into question the taste of anyone who would ask such a ridiculous question.
‘What may I do for you this morning, gentlemen?’ she asked, turning to Vianello, as if she had just noticed them coming in.
‘You can start by telling me,’ Brunetti began, glancing at the still-silent Vianello to include him in the accusation, ‘what’s going on.’
Something he didn’t follow passed between her and Vianello, and then she said, ‘I want Lieutenant Scarpa’s head.’
Over the last few years, the black spite that existed between Signorina Elettra, secretary to Vice-Questore Giuseppe Patta, and Lieutenant Scarpa, his closest confidant and assistant, had grown more intense. She and the Lieutenant delighted in blocking any initiative put forward by the other, Scarpa with utter disregard for the cost to the rest of the people working at the Questura, and Signorina Elettra handicapped by concern for it. If she suggested compiling a list, not only of the names and convictions of repeat offenders, but of the frequency and severity of their crimes, Scarpa was sure to criticize it as an attempt to stigmatize and discriminate against reformed criminals. If Scarpa recommended someone for promotion, his letter was bound to have attached to it her list of any reprimand the officer had ever received.
‘As an office decoration?’ Brunetti asked, looking around as though to search for the best place to set Scarpa’s head, perhaps there on the windowsill next to the silent Vianello.
‘That’s a charming idea, Commissario,’ she said. ‘I’m amazed it hadn’t occurred to me. But no, I was speaking figuratively, and all I want is that he be gone from here.’
He knew her well enough to hear the clash of iron and steel behind the joking words. He adjusted his voice accordingly and asked, ‘What’s he done?’
‘You know he hates Alvise?’ she asked, surprising him by speaking the truth so candidly. Lieutenant Scarpa, upon his arrival at the Questura some years ago, had at first appeared to court Alvise but had quickly discovered that the officer’s amiability was distributed equally to everyone, not to the new arrival in particular. Thus had things quickly gone wrong, and since then the Lieutenant had not missed a chance to point out Alvise’s many inadequacies. For all his slowness of wit, however, Officer Alvise was generally acknowledged to be decent, loyal, and brave, qualities not shared by some of his more intelligent colleagues. But hate, like love, came even when not summoned and did what it willed.
‘Yes,’ Brunetti finally answered.
‘He’s sent an official complaint about him.’
‘To him?’ Brunetti asked, adding to this breach of protocol by tilting his head in the direction of the office of Vice-Questore Giuseppe Patta.
‘Worse: to the Prefetto and to the Questore,’ she said, naming the two highest law enforcement officials in the city.
‘What’s he complaining about?’
‘He’s accusing Alvise of using criminal force.’
Unable to believe this, Brunetti turned to Vianello, who said, ‘Alvise. Criminal force’, as if to allow Brunetti to hear the absurdity of the conjunction of words. The Sergeant looked in Signorina Elettra’s direction to pass Brunetti’s attention back to her.
‘The Lieutenant’s accusing him of assaulting one of the protestors last week,’ she told him.
‘When did he say this?’ Brunetti demanded. He’d been at the protest in Piazzale Roma, a hastily organized thing that involved about a hundred unemployed men who had managed to block all traffic into or out of the city. Because there had been no warning and no request for a permit from the protestors, the police were slow in arriving, and by the time they did, they found drivers and protestors screaming abuse at one another and little way to distinguish between them unless the drivers were still in their vehicles. The arrival of the police, wearing face masks and helmets that turned them into a sinister species of beetle, along with a sudden burst of rain, dampened the spirits of the protestors, who began to disperse.
One of them, however, had fallen or been knocked to the ground, where he’d hit his head on the kerb and had to be taken to the hospital in an ambulance. At the time, a witness had said the man had tripped over one of the flags that had been abandoned by the protestors.
Two days afterwards, four protestors had arrived at the Questura to make a formal statement attesting that their colleague had been knocked to the ground by the nightstick of Officer Alvise – they knew his name – for they had seen it happen. It turned out that they were all members of the same union as the victim of the purported attack. The Vice-Questore, reached by phone, had given the investigation to Lieutenant Scarpa, who had begun by asking that Officer Alvise be suspended without salary until such time as the investigation was completed.
Brunetti heard this with mounting astonishment: when had anything like this ever been done? And how in God’s name was Alvise to pay his rent?
‘An hour after Alvise was informed,’ Signorina Elettra continued, ‘we had three calls from the press, two national editions, and Il
Gazzettino.’ She glanced at Vianello and then at Brunetti, and continued, ‘None of the reporters would tell me how they’d heard of this, and one asked if it was true that Alvise had a history of violence.’
Brunetti turned at the sound of a hooted laugh from Vianello, who said, ‘Alvise couldn’t be violent if his life depended on it.’ Brunetti, who was of the same opinion, said nothing.
‘When I realized how the press must have learned about Alvise’s supposed history of violence, I decided to go on strike.’ After waiting a moment, she added, ‘But I am not failing to report for work: I am merely limiting the amount of work I’ll accept.’
‘I see,’ Brunetti said. ‘Then to what extent is it a strike?’
‘As I made clear to the Vice-Questore earlier this morning, I will not do anything that aids the Lieutenant: I will not distribute his memos, I will not transfer calls to him, I no longer speak to him – however much pleasure that might afford him – but chiefly, I will neither search for nor pass on any information to him.’ By the end of this list she was smiling, and her expression became absolutely beatific as she added, ‘I have already told three people who phoned that I have no idea who Lieutenant Scarpa is and suggested they try calling the Corpo Forestale.’
It came to Brunetti that, years ago, she had acquired – to choose the least incorrect term – the Lieutenant’s password to the computer system, but he thought it improper to ask if that fact would be of any importance, or use, at the moment. ‘Might I ask what the Vice-Questore’s response to this has been?’ he asked, instead.
‘Strangely enough, he seemed able to tolerate it, so I had to tell him that, for each day Alvise remains suspended, I will work two hours fewer for him, as well, so by the end of the week I will be doing almost nothing for him, as I am now doing nothing at all for the Lieutenant.’ The woman was calm, but no less terrible for that.
‘What was his response, if I might ask?’