by Donna Leon
‘As safe as anyone is there.’
He had thought of asking Vianello to go along with him after lunch, but the girl had still been so groggy she might not remember having spoken to him: better she wake up to see a woman standing near her bed. He phoned Claudia Griffoni and asked if she could meet him at the front door of the hospital at three, to serve as ‘a calming feminine presence’ when he questioned a young woman who had been assaulted.
That done, he walked home, dawdling through the nearly empty streets while he still could. In Campo Santa Marina, he noticed that the small tables in front of Didovich were all full, most of the customers sitting, eyes closed, faces towards the sun. Seeing them, Brunetti remembered overhearing an American tourist say, ‘Sunscreen’s for sissies.’ He also remembered that his repeating it to Rizzardi had provoked one of the pathologist’s rare smiles.
As he suspected, he found his family lined up in a row on the terrace much like the clients at Didovich: Paola, wearing gloves and with a woollen scarf wrapped around her neck, sat reading. Chiara wore a T-shirt the sight of which made goose bumps break out on Brunetti’s arms. She sat, chair tipped back, feet on the railing, eyes closed, with every evidence of having slipped into a deep coma. Raffi wore headphones and sat, eyes closed, shaking his head from side to side as though in the grip of Parkinson’s or St Vitus’s dance.
None of them registered his arrival. He stood and studied them. His wife had been transported by her worship of words, his daughter by the sun, and his son by something Brunetti refused to call music. In their flight to altered states, they’d left all thought of him behind. And, it seemed, all thoughts of lunch.
He retreated to the kitchen and saw the red light that said the oven was on, so there would be something to eat once the living dead arose and joined him. Having nothing better to do, Brunetti set the table, being careful to make as much noise as possible. He let the plates clunk on the wooden surface, clanged two of the forks against the plates, slid the knives to the other side of them, one making a very satisfactory scraping sound. Napkins, disappointingly silent things, glasses that went cling. There was a loaf of bread in a paper bag on the counter, and he made a great fuss of unwrapping it, thought for a moment of blowing air into the bag and popping it but decided that would be unfair. He pulled out the wicker bread basket and sliced half of the loaf into pieces of the thickness he liked and no one else did, deciding to content himself with one of life’s smaller victories.
He took out a bottle of mineral water, then opened the fridge and found an unfinished bottle of Pinot Grigio. Once they were on the table, Brunetti saw no reason to continue waiting: besides, it was well after lunchtime and he was hungry.
He went back to the the terrace and saw them, petrified as the plaster casts of the victims of Pompeii. ‘Shall we have lunch now?’ he asked in a normal voice. None of them responded, something he could forgive only Raffi, who was now drumming out a spasmic rhythm on his thighs.
‘Shall we have lunch now?’ Brunetti repeated, louder this time. Paola looked away from her book and towards him but, he was sure, didn’t see him. Her eyes remained focused on some inner place or world where people spoke in well-considered, full sentences and did not make a fuss about what time they ate their lunch.
Chiara opened her eyes, raised a hand to shade them from the sun and saw him. ‘Oh, you’re here,’ she said, smiling. ‘How nice.’ Irritation packed its bags, opened the door and, pulling impatience along by its sleeve, began the long walk downstairs.
Paola set her book face down on the wall of the terrace and got to her feet. ‘What time is it?’ she asked. ‘I didn’t hear you.’
‘I just got here,’ Brunetti explained.
She moved towards him, still seeming slightly dazzled, either by the sun or by her book. As she reached him, she placed her hand on his arm and aimed a kiss at his left ear. ‘There’s frittata with zucchini and stuffed turkey breast,’ she said.
‘Am I taking you away from anything important?’ he asked with a glance at the book she had abandoned.
‘Truth, beauty, elegant prose, lacerating psychological penetration, thrilling dialogue,’ she listed.
‘Just can’t stay away from Agatha Christie, can you?’ Brunetti said and turned back towards the kitchen.
Paola retrieved her book, set it down in front of Raffi and prised off his earphones, then moved her lips as though she were speaking.
It took Raffi a moment to realize she was joking, and then he had the grace to laugh. ‘I’m starved,’ he said to his mother’s retreating back, quite as if he had not said this at least once every day since he first learned to speak.
He and Chiara followed their mother into the kitchen and took their places. Paola bent over the oven and said over her shoulder, ‘Thanks for setting the table, Chiara.’
Chiara looked at her in surprise, then at Raffi, who shook his head and, keeping his right hand close to his chest and covering it with his left, pointed a finger at Brunetti, who held a finger to his lips, a gesture which freed Chiara to say, ‘Well, you always do all the cooking, Mamma. It seemed the least I could do.’
This time Raffi jabbed his forefinger repeatedly into his open mouth but said nothing to reveal his sister’s perfidy.
The meal passed quietly, with the idle chat of people who were at ease with one another. Paola asked Raffi if Sara would be coming home from Paris for Easter, and when he said she would, Paola asked him if he missed her.
Raffi looked up from his dessert, a pumpkin and raisin cake, set his fork on his plate, and clasped one hand to his heart. ‘I think of nothing else. I long for her as a shipwrecked sailor longs for the sight of a sail on the horizon, as a man lost in the desert longs for the sight of a trickling stream, as . . .’
‘A starving man longs for a crust of bread. As a . . .’ Chiara began, only to be interrupted herself by Paola.
‘Isn’t it interesting,’ she said in the voice she used for speculation, ‘that longing is so often expressed in physical terms: hunger, thirst, physical safety?’
‘What should we long for instead?’ Brunetti asked. ‘Universal peace?’
‘That’s not what I’m saying,’ Paola insisted. ‘I find it interesting that longing is usually expressed in physical terms rather than in spiritual or intellectual ones.’
‘It’s more immediate,’ Chiara said. ‘You suffer from physical need: water, food, sleep. You feel it.’
‘You suffer more from the lack of freedom or peace of mind, I’d say,’ Brunetti offered.
Raffi continued with his cake, as if he found it far more interesting than this sort of speculation.
‘But physical pain hurts,’ Chiara insisted. ‘Nobody dies of a broken heart.’
Paola placed a hand on her own anguished heart. She reached across the table and grabbed at Brunetti’s hand. ‘Guido, we’ve raised a savage.’
Time, Brunetti decided, to go and meet Griffoni.
13
Claudia was there at three. Tall, blonde, blue-eyed, her appearance gave the lie to every Venetian preconception about Neapolitans, while her quick intelligence and perception confirmed another. The kindness of the day invited them to stand on the steps of the hospital while Brunetti explained about the attack and the film footage from the bridge.
‘All you see of him is the coat and the scarf?’ Griffoni asked.
‘Yes.’ Brunetti took a step away from her and stopped, then swung around to face her again, letting his arm mimic the scarf swirling out to the side. A woman coming across the campo gave them a strange look before entering the hospital.
‘He just stood there and looked?’
Brunetti nodded. ‘Then turned around and went back down the other side of the bridge.’
Griffoni glanced aside at the bridge leading down into the campo, as if trying to imagine the same events taking place there. ‘Shall we go and talk to her?’ she finally asked.
Brunetti led the way across a courtyard filled with the scent of
earth yearning to open itself to springtime. Letting his feet follow the serpentine of memory as they made their way through the hospital, he told Griffoni the little he knew of the girl: she was studying singing in Paris but was here on school holiday and practising at the theatre with her father, one of the ripetitori.
‘Is she a good singer?’ Claudia asked.
‘Her father must think so.’ Brunetti considered the possible, but not very likely, link between Francesca Santello and Flavia Petrelli. They both sang: they had both been provoked, though he realized this was a feeble word for what had happened to Francesca. Finally he decided to say it, as much to test how it sounded as for any other reason. ‘She was complimented for her singing by Flavia Petrelli. Someone might have overheard it.’
Claudia came to a sudden stop. ‘Would you say that again, please?’
‘Signora Petrelli has a fan who seems to have followed her here,’ Brunetti said, speaking slowly to allow himself time to shape the story. ‘He sends her flowers, enormous quantities of them. It started in London; happened in St Petersburg, and then he sent more to her dressing room after the opening night here. When she got home, she found more of them inside the building where she’s staying, outside the door of her apartment. No one had let anyone in.’
Claudia rubbed at her cheek, then ran her fingers up into her hair and tugged at a few strands. ‘And the girl? I don’t understand what connection you’re trying to make.’
Neither did he; not in a linear way that anyone else would find plausible. He started walking again, with Claudia beside him. They passed the bar and barely noticed the people in slippers and bathrobes standing inside and drinking their coffee.
‘I’d say sending someone flowers . . .’ she continued, turned and saw the look on his face, and added, ‘all right, a lot of flowers, is different from trying to kill them.’ She tried for irony but achieved only scepticism.
‘They’re both excessive actions,’ he insisted.
‘Does that mean one leads to the other?’ she asked in the voice he had been hearing prosecutors use for years.
He stopped. ‘Claudia, stop playing bad cop, all right? If you think about this as the behaviour of a person with an unbalanced mind, you might see what I mean.’
She stared back at him, obviously unpersuaded. ‘If you’re trying to relate two unrelated things, nothing’s better than saying a crazy person did them, is there? You don’t need a reason because there’s the crazy person to blame.’
‘That’s exactly what I’m saying,’ Brunetti insisted. ‘It’s crazy to send hundreds of flowers to someone over a period of months and in three countries and not tell them who you are.’
‘Hundreds?’ she asked, clearly surprised.
‘Yes.’
‘Ah.’ Her pause was long-drawn-out. ‘Did you see them?’
‘The ones on the stage, yes. And she told me there were at least ten bouquets in her dressing room on opening night, and more in front of the door of her apartment when she got back there.’
‘You spoke to her?’
‘Paola’s parents invited her to dinner a few nights after the opera, and she told us about it.’
‘Was she telling the truth?’
Reluctant to ask Claudia why she would doubt Flavia’s word, Brunetti answered mildly, ‘I think so. She seems a reliable witness.’ Freddy, when Brunetti phoned him, had verified the story of the roses inside their building but had added that he thought Flavia was overreacting to them. ‘After all, Guido,’ he’d added, ‘this is Venice, not the Bronx.’
Brunetti’s voice must have revealed his frustration at Claudia’s reluctance to believe him, for she said, just as they started up the stairs to cardiologia, ‘I don’t need confirmation, Guido: I believe you. And her. It’s just hard for me to believe that someone would be this . . .’
‘Crazy?’ Brunetti suggested.
She stopped at the door to the ward and turned to him. ‘Yes. Crazy.’
He reached in front of Griffoni and pushed open the door, then followed her into the ward. When they walked up to the nurses’ station, he saw the same nurse who had been on duty that morning standing behind the desk.
Looking up, she recognized him and said, ‘We’ve found her a room.’ The nurse seemed genuinely pleased to be able to tell him this. The girl had been rebranded as a victim, Brunetti recalled, so now she was everyone’s darling.
‘Good,’ he answered and smiled. He thought it best to explain who the attractive blonde was, so he indicated Griffoni and said, ‘I’ve brought a colleague with me. It might be better to have a woman with me when we speak.’ The nurse nodded in agreement.
‘How is she?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Better. The doctor changed the painkiller, so she’s much less groggy than she was this morning.’
‘May we see her?’ Griffoni asked with the deference beautiful women – if they are intelligent – use when dealing with women who are less attractive than they are.
‘Of course,’ the nurse said. ‘Come with me.’
She led them down the corridor and stopped at the second door, opened it and went in without knocking. Griffoni put a firm hand on Brunetti’s arm and stopped him from following the nurse into the room. ‘Let her invite us in,’ she said.
After a moment, the nurse came back and said, addressing them both, ‘She’d like you to come in.’
Brunetti stepped back to allow Griffoni to precede him. It was a double room with a view over the tops of tall trees just coming into leaf. The other bed was empty, though the covers were turned back, the pillows propped up and dented by the head of the person who had been resting against them.
Griffoni stopped two metres from the bed and stood still to allow Brunetti to approach the girl. She looked better: her hair was brushed, and there was some colour in her face. From her expression, it was evident that she remembered Brunetti and was glad to see him again.
Her smile broadened, and he again saw the beauty there. ‘I’m glad to see you looking better,’ he said and extended his hand. She took it with her good hand, saying, ‘Thank God I’m not a pianist.’ She lifted the cast a few centimetres to show her other hand, swollen and blue. Again, that sweet voice and precise diction.
Brunetti turned to Griffoni, who joined him next to the bed. ‘This is my colleague, Claudia Griffoni.’ Thinking truth would sit well with the girl in the bed, he added, ‘I thought I should bring a woman along.’
‘So I would be less frightened?’
‘Something like that.’
The girl looked at Griffoni and caught her eye. She pulled her lips together and raised her eyebrows in surprise at the quaintness of Brunetti’s remark. ‘Thank you.’ Then, looking at Griffoni, she added, ‘She doesn’t look very threatening.’
Griffoni laughed, and Brunetti felt strangely excluded from this feminine affinity. To re-establish his position, he said, ‘I’d like you to tell me again about last night, at least as much as you remember.’
Griffoni moved a step closer, set her bag on the floor by the wall, and took a pad and pen from it.
The girl smiled, as if not yet ready to take the risk of moving for fear of the whack her head had taken. ‘I’ve been thinking about it since I saw you this morning, trying to remember, but it’s hard because of what happened. I know that he pushed me. I don’t want to invent things that might have happened before that or let them change my memory.’
She raised her hand and let it fall helplessly back on the bed. ‘I’m sure of it: I really did hear something when I was walking, maybe from the time I left the pizzeria, or I sensed something, but I’m not sure what it was.’ She paused, and Brunetti again saw just how clear her eyes were, strangely at odds with her dark hair. Were she an older, or a vainer, woman, he’d suspect she dyed it. As it was, he thought she’d merely had the luck of the genetic grab that had put that chestnut hair above those clear blue eyes and that very pale skin.
‘Did you look back to see what it was?’ Griffoni ask
ed.
The girl’s face relaxed at the ease with which Griffoni posed the question, as if she already believed the girl had indeed been aware of something and needed only a clearer idea of what it might have been.
‘No. It’s Venice. That doesn’t happen.’
Brunetti nodded. And waited.
‘When I got on to the bridge, I heard steps behind me, but before I could turn I heard him say, “È mia”, in a really creepy voice, and then I felt this shove. All I could think about then was not falling, of somehow getting to the bottom of the steps on my feet. But I didn’t. Then there was that man kneeling over me and asking me if I was all right.’
‘And here we are,’ Griffoni said, lifting her pen from the page and waving it at the room. Then, more seriously, she asked, ‘What do you mean by “creepy voice”?’
Francesca closed her eyes, and Brunetti knew she was putting herself back on the bridge. ‘It had too much breath,’ she said and opened her eyes. ‘Like it had been hard for him to follow me or come up the steps. I don’t know. There was a gasping sort of sound. Like you’d use to frighten children.’
‘Could he have been trying to disguise his voice?’ Brunetti asked.
The blue eyes looked out of the window and studied the trees for a long time. Singers, he had once been told, often had extraordinary memories. Had to have them. He imagined her remembering the voice on the bridge, and then she said, ‘Yes, that could be it. It wasn’t a real voice. I mean, it wasn’t a person’s real voice.’
‘You’re sure you heard correctly?’ Brunetti asked. ‘He said you were his.’
‘Yes.’ Her response was instant and unhesitating.
Brunetti glanced aside at Griffoni, wondering what she would make of his next question, but decided to ask it anyway. ‘Are you sure he meant you?’
‘Of course he did,’ she answered heatedly. ‘I told you, he said, “È mia.” He was talking to me.’
He heard Griffoni’s sudden intake of breath, but it was the girl who asked, ‘What?’
Brunetti watched as Claudia worked out the grammar. At the same time, he saw her studying Francesca’s face, her youth displayed there and in the small body under the covers.