by Donna Leon
‘He didn’t say, “Sei mia”?’ Griffoni asked, making no effort to disguise her disbelief. ‘To someone he’s pushing down the steps?’ The girl had told Brunetti twice that her attacker had addressed her formally, and both times he, like Claudia, had been surprised by this. Her youth was beyond question, and her attacker might well have been older. To address her with the formal was absurd. In that case, he was referring to some other woman: ‘She’s mine.’
14
‘I think he was telling me I was his,’ Francesca said, still not understanding that she might not have been the attacker’s main target. ‘That’s what’s so awful, that he just decides who belongs to him.’ Hearing her anger, Brunetti began to think she would come out of this unscathed: it was a much healthier response than fear and caution.
‘You said you didn’t see anyone following you,’ Brunetti reminded her.
It took her some time to answer. ‘On the bridge, I felt it.’
As she spoke, Brunetti saw her begin to fade, like a child who has played too hard all day and now needs to sleep. He turned to Griffoni and said, ‘I think that’s enough information for us to go on with, don’t you, Claudia?’
She closed her notebook and picked up her handbag. She put it over her shoulder and approached the bed. ‘Thank you for talking to us, Signorina Santello.’ Claudia reached down and placed her hand on the girl’s arm. She gave it a small squeeze and stepped back, leaving space for Brunetti.
‘Does your father know what’s happened?’ he remembered to ask.
‘He’s gone to Florence for a few days,’ she said in a voice that was sinking towards sleep. ‘He works there, for the Festival, playing for auditions.’
‘Did you tell him what happened?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Only that I fell and broke my arm,’ she said, drifted a bit and then came back to add, ‘I didn’t want to frighten him.’ Her lips turned up, either at the thought of her father or of having spared him worry, and then she was asleep.
They watched her for a while and then left. At the desk, Brunetti asked the nurse if anyone had been to visit her and was told that an aunt had come that morning and would return the next day and take her home the day after. ‘The aunt told me her parents are divorced and the mother lives in France,’ the nurse said, then shrugged. ‘Modern times, Commissario.’
Brunetti thanked her for her help; he and Griffoni left the hospital and started back to the Questura.
As they were crossing the campo, Claudia said. ‘“È mia.” Of course he was talking about another woman. He wouldn’t call her “Lei”. She’s little more than a kid, and he’s trying to kill her, for the love of God. He’d hardly address her formally.’
‘And the other woman?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Don’t be coy with me, Guido,’ she said with real irritation. ‘I believe in the possibility of what you said.’
‘Only the possibility?’ he asked, doing his best not to sound coy.
Griffoni smiled and punched at his arm. ‘All right, more than the possibility.’ They turned left at the bottom of Ponte dell’Ospedaleto and walked along the canal, Brunetti completely unconscious of choosing the direction and Griffoni tagging along like a pilot fish beside a shark, content to let it lead the way.
They came down the next bridge and stopped. She asked, ‘What do you want to do?’
‘Send Vianello to talk to people in the neighbourhood to see if they’ve seen anyone spending a lot of time near the place where she’s staying,’ Brunetti answered, then added, ‘I’d like to have someone keep an eye on the girl, but staffing’s so short with Alvise gone, I don’t know if there’s any way to do it.’
‘Why not ask him?’ she asked.
‘Who? Alvise?’
Griffoni nodded and said, ‘I haven’t known him very long, but he’s loyal and able to follow simple orders. And he’s bound to be eager to get back to work. So if he’s told this is a special assignment, to see that nothing happens to her at the hospital, he’ll jump at the chance to do it.’
‘He’s been suspended, which, as I understand it, means he cannot work and is not being paid,’ Brunetti said. ‘I can’t ask him to take the risk of working, and I certainly can’t ask him to do it for nothing.’
Griffoni looked thoughtful, then said, ‘I don’t think that will be a problem, Guido.’
‘Of course it is. How do we pay him – by going around and collecting from the rest of the staff?’ Even as he said it, he realized how bizarre this conversation was. Would they ask Scarpa to contribute to Alvise’s salary and thus make sure that Patta found out what they were doing?
Griffoni looked at him and started to speak but then stopped and studied the water in the canal. Finding no answer there, she returned her attention to Brunetti and said, ‘It’s possible that Signorina Elettra failed to file the request that his pay be stopped before she stopped working herself.’
‘She did not stop working,’ Brunetti said emphatically, trying to introduce some sense into this conversation. ‘She’s on strike.’ Was this how Alice felt, he wondered, lost in a forest of words she didn’t know how to escape?
Griffoni did not dispute this, and so he sought to enforce his argument.
‘Besides, he’s paid from Rome, not from here,’ Brunetti explained. ‘We all are.’ Surely, she must know at least this.
‘The order to stop his salary would originate here, wouldn’t it?’ Griffoni inquired. ‘From Lieutenant Scarpa, countersigned by the Vice-Questore.’ Taking his silence for assent, she added, ‘There are, however, ways to circumvent that.’
Brunetti put his right hand to his face and rubbed at the short hairs that had grown up under his bottom lip since he’d shaved that morning. He scratched them lightly, telling himself he could actually hear them springing up as soon as his nails passed over them. ‘“Circumvent”,’ he repeated.
Griffoni’s face remained strangely immobile as she said, ‘If that order were not passed on to Rome, and if he were assigned to a new employment category, then there would be no interruption in his salary.’
‘“If he were”?’ Brunetti repeated the subjunctive, a mood which tended to creep into many conversations with both Commissario Griffoni and Signorina Elettra. And then, ‘“New employment category”?’
Griffoni raised an eyebrow and both hands, as if to suggest the limitless meaning of that phrase.
Brunetti studied Griffoni’s face. Had it changed since her friendship with Signorina Elettra began? Was there not a certain veiled quality about her eyes that had not been there before?
He could not prevent the question escaping him. ‘She did all of this?’
‘Yes.’
‘What’s he been told?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Only that there will be a change of assignment while this matter is settled.’ She looked away, looked back. ‘He’s been helping in the archives.’
‘Helping how?’
‘To the degree that he is capable of helping,’ she answered, nothing more.
Brunetti looked at the buildings on the other side of the canal. The shutters on the largest of them were sun-bleached, some of them hanging askew. A drainpipe had come loose, and water had made a trail down the façade.
‘Tell him to go over to the hospital and check on her a few times a day, would you?’ he asked her. ‘Plainclothes work. He’ll like that.’ How easily these two women could suck a person into complicity.
‘And when she goes home?’ Griffoni asked. ‘What then?’
‘If she stays in the city, he can still go and check on her,’ he said. It wasn’t much. Alvise wasn’t much. But it was something.
He continued down the embankment towards the Questura.
She followed him. ‘I’d like to hear her sing,’ she surprised him by saying.
‘Why?’
‘Her voice is beautiful. Seems strange, though, coming from that wisp of a girl.’
As they entered the Questura, Claudia asked, ‘Is there anything you’
d like me to do after I talk to Alvise?’
The fact that she was not Venetian had at first made Brunetti reluctant to ask her to go to the theatre, for people there might be reluctant to talk to a foreigner. Well, he tempered the word: a non-Venetian. But he had begun to suspect that her charm and beauty might be enough to overcome that handicap. ‘See if anyone at the theatre has noticed anything or anyone that ought not to be there.’
Without commenting on how broad that request was, she nodded and left him at the top of the stairs to go to her own office. Brunetti went into Signorina Elettra’s and found her sitting upright at her desk, the magazine replaced by a book. ‘Using the strike to catch up on your reading?’ he asked.
She didn’t bother to look at him, either because he was now included in her strike or because she was enthralled by the book.
Brunetti came closer and, reading upside down, made out the name on the binding.
‘Sciascia?’ he asked. ‘Don’t you learn enough about crime and the police by working here?’
His question proved sufficient to distract her. ‘I’m trying to limit my direct contact.’
‘With crime?’
She glanced in the direction of the door to the Vice-Questore’s office. ‘With the police,’ she said, then, responding to Brunetti’s false agitation of hands, she clarified, adding, ‘But only those of certain ranks.’
‘I hope I’m not included.’
She took the red ribbon hanging from the binding and slipped it between the pages before closing the book. ‘Hardly. In what way can I be useful to you, Commissario?’
He saw no reason to tell her he knew about Alvise’s salary or his new employment category: so long as he didn’t know, he would not have to do anything.
‘The girl we saw,’ he began, waving at the computer, ‘told me she received compliments about her singing from no one less than Flavia Petrelli.’ He gave her the chance to ask about this, but all she did was set her book to the side of the computer and continue to look at him attentively.
‘She – Signora Petrelli – has a fan whose behaviour is, well, is excessive,’ he continued. Still she said nothing.
‘So far, all he’s done is send flowers, hundreds of them, both to her dressing room and to her home.’
After a long pause, Signorina Elettra asked, ‘“So far”?’
Brunetti shrugged to express his own unease. ‘I have no concrete reason to believe this has anything to do with what happened on the bridge. It’s all supposition.’
She considered that, face impassive. ‘Do you have any idea who this fan is?’
‘None,’ he said but then realized he really hadn’t given his identity much thought. ‘It’s got to be someone with enough money to travel to where she’s singing and buy that many flowers. And who is clever and rich enough to get the flowers delivered pretty much wherever he wants.’ He tried to imagine what else this man would have to know and be able to do. ‘He’d have to know the city well enough to be able to follow the girl without being seen or losing track of her.’
‘And without her seeing him. You think that means he’s Venetian?’
‘Possibly.’
‘Shall I try to find out about the flowers?’ she asked with the enthusiasm of a hunter set loose in the fields.
‘Yellow roses. There were so many of them, it must have been a special order. The florist would probably have to have them sent in from the mainland.’
She leaned forward to switch on her computer. ‘Have you missed it?’ Brunetti risked asking, nodding towards the screen.
‘No more than my friends miss their children when they go off to university,’ she said, waiting for the screen to light up.
Brunetti was struck by how little, after all these years, he knew about her. She had friends who had children of university age, yet she was surely not old enough to have a child ready to begin studying. He didn’t even know how old she was. If he had chosen, he could easily have had a look at her file, learned her date of birth and her educational history. But he had never done it, just as he would never read a friend’s letters – at least would not have done so in the era when people still wrote letters. Paola, whose mother was a passionate reader, had inherited the sense of ethics and honour of the gentlemen heroes of nineteenth-century novels. While he, strangely enough, had been given pretty much the same ethical grounding by a woman who had never gone beyond the fourth year of middle school and a perpetually unemployed dreamer whose health had been ruined and mind affected by years as a prisoner of war.
‘Excuse me,’ he said, having not attended to her last remarks.
‘I said that I’m allowing myself to use it selectively.’ She indicated the computer screen. ‘I use it as I always have, only there are now two people for whom I don’t use it.’ He was impressed at how very reasonable she made it sound.
‘Since I’m among those for whom you still work,’ Brunetti said, speaking with false earnestness to demonstrate how sincere was his hope that he was, ‘I’d like you to find out whatever you can about the girl on the bridge. Francesca Santello: parents divorced; mother lives in France; she lives with her father when she’s here; somewhere in Santa Croce. She’s studying singing at the Conservatory in Paris.’ He spoke slowly when he saw that she was taking notes.
‘I’ve asked Claudia to see if she can find out about anything strange that might have happened at the theatre. Even though she’s not Venetian.’
Signorina Elettra nodded, as she would if he had mentioned the limitations created by a physical handicap.
‘Do you know anyone who works there?’ he asked, adding, ‘The only person I know retired about five years ago and moved to Mantova.’
It took her only a second to answer. ‘Someone I was at school with works in the bar on the corner, just opposite the theatre. I can ask him if he’s heard them talking about anything strange. Most of the stage crew and staff go in there for coffee, so he might have heard something.’ She made a note of that and looked at Brunetti. ‘Anything else?’
‘I’d like you to see what you can find out about fans,’ he said.
She held up her pencil to get his attention. ‘It might be more accurate to refer to stalkers.’
‘Of?’
‘Signora Petrelli.’
‘And the girl?’ he asked, though he thought he knew.
‘She was someone who got in the way.’
‘“In the way”,’ Brunetti repeated, pleased to hear her confirm his own opinion.
‘Shall I take a look at Signor Petrelli’s ex-husband?’ she asked.
‘Yes. And see if you can find out – do gossip magazines have an online edition?’
‘I have no idea,’ she answered blandly. ‘I always read them at the hairdresser’s.’
‘If they do, could you go back through the last few years and see who Signora Petrelli’s been involved with?’
‘Are you thinking the same thing I am?’
‘Probably,’ Brunetti said. ‘Just check the magazines,’ he added, thinking that it would save a great deal of Signorina Elettra’s time if he simply asked Flavia directly. If nothing else, it would allow Signorina Elettra more time to get on with her strike-breaking.
15
In his office, he turned on his own computer and, telling himself he was a man and not a mouse and could certainly do basic research, looked at the crime statistics about stalkers: yet another term, like ‘serial killer’, that English had brought into the language. Well, he told himself, they’ve also given us ‘privacy’, so take the bad with the good.
He began to read the Questura’s internal documents and statistics, then turned to the wider world of the records kept by the Ministry of the Interior. He read with growing interest and increasing distress, and after an hour he said aloud, ‘So much for the Latin lover.’
Two women a week, or close to it, were judged by the police to have been murdered, and usually the killer was an ex of some sort. There were countless other cases of acci
dental deaths and various vicious attacks, and when had it become fashionable to throw acid in women’s faces?
He remembered, years ago, attending a seminar in Rimini, where a pathologist in a suit and tie who could easily have been mistaken for a small-town pharmacist had spoken of the many murders that passed undetected each year: falls were very common, as were overdoses of pills taken by women who had also been drinking. Women sometimes hit their heads and drowned in the bathtub, the doctor had told them: he had once performed an autopsy on one whose husband had come home from work to find her floating there, having, he told the police, left her asleep in bed that morning. A very wealthy man, he was also a very careless one, for he had forgotten the surveillance cameras in the house that had filmed his wife going into the bathroom, only to be followed by him eight minutes later, naked and carrying a large sheet of bubble wrap, traces of which the pathologist had found under her fingernails. ‘Young, healthy people don’t fall in the bathtub. Please remember that, ladies and gentlemen,’ he had said before moving on to his next case.
And young girls don’t trip and fall down bridges, Brunetti added, though he was the only one listening.
He called up the statistics for the last few years, and saw that aggression against women kept inverse pace with the crumbling economy: one went up as the other went down. Quite a large number of men, when faced with fiscal ruin, had opted for suicide, but more of them turned their rage or despair – or whatever the emotion that drove them was – against the women nearest to them, killing or maiming them with a frequency that frightened Brunetti.
These, he reflected, were women they knew and said they loved or had once loved, in many cases women with whom they had raised children. They were not some distant, unattainable diva on the stage, singing for thousands and not for you.
He closed the program and stared at the verdant hillside of the screen saver that had been in the computer when it had come to share his office, and his life. Green hills, one rolling to the left and, behind it, one to the right, almost as if the photographer had told them how to pose. He leaned forward and opened Google and tapped her name into the window provided, hit the Return key, and, within seconds, had Flavia Petrelli smiling upon him, as if to thank him for his attempt to help her. There she was, costumed, beautiful, radiant. He looked at the clothing and tried to figure out the roles that would require it. He got the Contessa in Nozze right and, having just seen the same production, Tosca. The cowboy hat and pistol identified her as Minnie, even though Brunetti had never seen La Fanciulla. In the next photo, she wore a bosom-exposing gown with a crinoline and with her hair – or her wig – piled high on her head. He didn’t bother to read the caption.