by Donna Leon
He saw the moment when she understood. ‘And I’m that other woman?’ she asked, sounding as if she couldn’t – or wouldn’t – believe it.
Brunetti chose not to answer this and, instead, asked, ‘Can you remember what you said to the girl and who was there when you said it?’
She looked at her hands, clasped together in her lap, as she tried to reconstruct the scene. ‘I was with my ripetitore, Riccardo Tuffo. I’ve always worked with him here. I heard someone singing in one of the other rehearsal rooms and wanted to know who it was: she was that good. So Riccardo knocked on the door, and when he opened it, another pianist came out, and then I recognized the girl. She’d been waiting inside the stage door after the performance the night before. The same night you came. She wanted to thank me for the performance.’
Flavia looked up from the consideration of her hands and said, ‘She has a remarkable voice: it’s a real contralto, deep and true.’
‘What did you say to her?’
‘The usual things: that she was very good and would have an important career.’
‘Was anyone else there who might have heard what you said?’
She thought about this for a moment. ‘No, only the four of us: me, the girl, Riccardo, and the other ripetitore, who is her father. That’s all.’
‘No one else could have heard you?’ Brunetti insisted.
Most people, when asked to verify their memory of a conversation or incident, answered immediately, as if to demonstrate that to question their memory was to insult it, and them. But Flavia looked at her hands again, then swivelled on her chair to look at the necklace. ‘After Riccardo and I left and were going down to our rehearsal room, some people walked towards us from the other end of the corridor. I was still praising the girl, and they might have heard me.’
‘Did you recognize any of them?’
‘No. It’s been years since I’ve sung here, and there are a lot of new faces.’ She picked up the comb and pushed the necklace back into the paper, removing it from their sight. ‘I wasn’t really paying attention,’ she concluded.
Then she asked him, with a casual wave towards the necklace, as though it were a few pages of a score someone had left in her room, ‘What do you want to do with that?’
‘The usual,’ Brunetti answered. ‘Take it to the Questura. Fingerprints.’
‘You really do that?’ she asked.
‘Yes.’ Then he asked, ‘Whom do I say it belongs to?’
‘Why bother?’
‘Because when they’re finished with the tests, it goes back to the owner.’
‘Really?’ she asked, incapable of disguising her wonder. ‘It’s worth a fortune.’
‘I can see that,’ Brunetti said. ‘Or I think I can.’ He glanced at the necklace, but all he could see now was the blue wrapping paper.
‘Why would he give me something like that?’ she asked, bewildered.
‘To impress you,’ Brunetti explained. ‘To give you proof beyond question of his regard and attraction.’
‘But that’s crazy,’ she said, this time sounding angry rather than confused. ‘“Attraction”?’ It was as if she had only now heard the word. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Just what I say, Flavia, that this person is attracted to you in some way. And the gift is an attempt to make you interested in the giver who treats you with this sort of . . . largesse.’ Then, before she could react, he said, ‘I know it’s crazy. But we’re hardly dealing with a normal person here.’
She tried a light voice and asked, ‘Is that the sort of thing policemen are supposed to say?’
Brunetti laughed and said, with robot-like precision, ‘Never. We remain open-minded and respectful of all persons at every minute of our working day.’ He let his voice relax and finished by saying, ‘It’s only with our family and friends that we can say what we think.’
She looked at him and, smiling, placed a hand on his arm. ‘Thank you for that, Guido.’
Brunetti thought this might be the best time to say it. ‘There’s one thing we haven’t considered in all of this,’ he said.
‘I think it’s enough that you’ve considered that he’s crazy and that he knows where I live,’ she said angrily. ‘I don’t think I can take any more surprises.’
‘It shouldn’t really be a surprise,’ Brunetti said, knowing this was not true.
‘What are you talking about?’ she demanded and removed her hand from his arm.
‘We’ve been assuming that this person is a man. Everyone uses “he” and “him” when talking about what’s happened, but there’s no way we can be sure of that.’
‘Of course it’s a man,’ she said in a tight voice. ‘Women don’t go around pushing other women down bridges.’
‘Flavia,’ he began, concerned that he might be about to lose her and trying to find the way to say it without offending her. But why waste time with suggestion and more questions; why not just say it and have done with it?
‘The last time you were here . . . in fact, the last two times you were here, you were living with a woman.’
She reeled back as though he had tried to hit her, but she said nothing.
‘A very nice one, I might add,’ Brunetti said and smiled, but she gave no answering smile. ‘People in your business don’t pay much attention to things like that, but other people do. Obsessives more so.’
‘And so this is the revenge of the lesbians for my having given that up?’ she asked, her anger not at all disguised. ‘Or a woman who wants me to transfer my love to her?’
‘I have no idea,’ Brunetti said calmly. ‘But your past life is no secret, so – like it or not – we have to consider the possibility that the person who is stalking you’ – he’d finally said the word – ‘is a woman.’ She said nothing, so he went on. ‘The fact that women are less violent than men might make it a good thing, but this person has already acted violently, and if it’s because you spoke to that girl, it was for very little reason.’
Her response surprised him. ‘Is there someone in the hospital with the girl?’
‘There’s someone, a police officer, who will look in on her now and again.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘It’s as much as I can do,’ he said, choosing not to explain. ‘She’ll go home soon, and then she’ll have the protection of her family,’ he continued, without being at all sure of this.
Flavia was silent, shifting repeatedly in her seat, then asked, ‘So if it’s a woman, are you saying she’ll attack any woman I talk to?’
‘I’m not saying anything, Flavia. I’m merely asking you to consider a possibility.’
Again she was silent, but Brunetti waited her out. ‘A friend of mine,’ she began, ‘a mezzo-soprano, told me she once had a woman fan who threatened her with a knife.’ Brunetti waited.
‘The woman had sent her a couple of notes, always very complimentary and intelligent, after performances. But not often, once a year, maybe twice. Over the course of eight or nine years. And then the woman wrote to suggest they have a drink after a performance in London. My friend said she sounded so articulate and clever that she agreed.’
Flavia’s voice drifted away, and Brunetti wondered if he were going to hear the end of the story. But Flavia jump-started herself and continued. ‘So they met in a bar after a performance, and as soon as she sat down, my friend said, she knew the woman was crazy.’ She caught Brunetti’s puzzled glance and said, ‘You know, the way you just know someone’s mad.’
‘What happened?’ Brunetti asked.
‘The woman went on about how my friend was the only woman in the world for her, that they were meant to be together, and when my friend started to get up to leave, the woman pulled out a knife and said she’d kill her if she didn’t come with her.’
‘What did she do?’
‘She told me she smiled and found the presence of mind to say that they should get a taxi and go back to her hotel.’
‘And then?’
‘When they got outside, my friend hailed a taxi, and when it pulled up, she gave the other woman a shove, got in and slammed the door and told the driver to drive. Anywhere.’
‘Did she go to the police?’
‘No.’
‘What happened?’
‘Nothing. She never heard from her again. But it took her months to get over it.’ Then, after a long time, ‘I’m not sure you ever get over something like that, not really.’
‘Yes,’ Brunetti agreed, then he asked, ‘Have your fans ever behaved like this before?’
Flavia shook her head, almost violently. ‘Mine? No. Absolutely not.’ She looked away from him and stared into the mirror, but Brunetti, who could see her reflection, realized she was looking at something invisible to either of them.
He noticed the moment she became aware of his gaze. Quickly she turned to face him and said, ‘Most of them are women.’
‘Who?’
‘The fans who make me nervous, who make us all nervous.’
‘By doing what?’
She shook her head, as if finding the correct words was too difficult. She reached out to the things on the table and moved a few of them around, picked up the hairbrush and stroked the bristles with the tips of her fingers. It was so quiet in the room that Brunetti thought he could hear them snapping back into place.
‘These women are needy,’ Flavia finally said, sounding uncertain about that word. ‘They try to hide it, but they can’t.’
‘What do they need?’
‘I don’t know. Something. From us,’ she said and then was silent. ‘Maybe they want love.’ Another pause, even longer. ‘But I don’t want to think that.’ She set the brush back on the table then nodded a few times, as if to convince herself of what she had said.
Just as Brunetti was about to speak, Flavia said fiercely, ‘Fans are fans; they aren’t friends.’
‘Never?’
‘Never,’ she said with enraged certainty. ‘And now this.’
‘Yes.’
‘What can I do?’ she asked.
‘You’re not here much longer, are you?’ he asked.
‘Less than a week, and then I have some time free to be with the children.’
Talking seemed to have calmed her a bit, so Brunetti asked, hoping that more information might help, ‘You said it started in London.’
‘Yes. And in St Petersburg, there were masses of flowers, but that’s normal there: lots of people bring them.’
‘Were they yellow roses?’ he asked, remembering what he had seen after her performance and what she had described at dinner.
‘In St Petersburg, only some. In London, yes.’
‘Anything else?’
‘Things have disappeared from my dressing rooms. Never money, only things.’
‘What things?’
‘A coat, a pair of gloves, and in Paris my address book.’
Brunetti considered this and asked, ‘Have any of your friends mentioned receiving strange phone calls?’
‘Strange how?’
‘Someone asking where you were? Maybe saying they were a friend of yours and you hadn’t answered your phone for a long time?’
She started to speak, and he saw something flash into her memory. ‘Yes. A friend in Paris said she’d had a call from someone who said they couldn’t get in touch and asking if she knew where I was.’
‘What happened?’
‘There was something about the voice she didn’t like, so she said she hadn’t heard from me for a month either.’
‘Was it a man or a woman who called?’ Brunetti asked.
Flavia pulled her lips together and said, as if about to tell him something that would prove him right, ‘A woman.’
Brunetti resisted the impulse to say, ‘I told you so.’
17
Flavia leaned forward, rested her elbows on the dressing table, and lowered her head into her hands. Brunetti heard her mutter something but couldn’t make out the words. He waited. From beside her, he saw her shake her head a few times, and then she sat up and looked at him. ‘I can’t believe this is happening.’ She closed her eyes and bit her lower lip, then looked at him and said, voice not as steady as it had been, ‘That’s just cheap melodrama, isn’t it? Of course I believe this is happening: that’s what’s so horrible.’
Brunetti, much as he would have liked to offer her comfort, refused to lie to her. The brief conversation between Flavia and Francesca, containing nothing more than a compliment about the girl’s talent, was perhaps the link to the attack on the bridge. ‘È mia.’ Did a polite compliment lead to this assertion of absolute possession, and was any person in whom Flavia showed interest to be put in danger?
Brunetti had been fortunate in his career in that, regardless of how many bad and very bad people he had been forced to encounter in his years of police work, he had rarely had to deal with the mad. The behaviour of the bad made sense: they wanted money or power or revenge or someone else’s wife, and they wanted them for reasons that another person could understand. Further, there was usually a connection between them and their victims: rivals, partners, enemies, relatives, husband and wife. Find a person who stood to gain – and not only in the financial sense – from the death or injury of the victim and put some pressure on that connection or start to wind in the connecting line, and very often the returning tug would lead to the person responsible. There had always been a line: the secret was to find it.
Here, however, the reason might have been nothing more than a casual conversation, a bit of praise, a bit of encouragement, the sort of thing any generous-spirited person would give to a young woman at the beginning of her career. This appeared to have provoked rage against the girl sufficient to cause violence.
‘What do I do?’ Flavia asked at last, and Brunetti withdrew from his speculations to return to her. ‘I can’t live like this,’ she said, ‘trapped between this little room and my apartment. I don’t want to be afraid of everyone I see coming close to me on the street.’
‘And if I said you’re not likely to be in danger?’ Brunetti asked.
‘My friends are, anyone I speak to is. Isn’t that the same thing?’
Only to the purest of Christian spirits, Brunetti thought, but did not say. Over the years, he had seen diverse reactions to physical danger. So long as it is speculative, we respond as heroes, lions; in the face of real physical danger, we become mice.
‘Flavia,’ he began, ‘I don’t think this person wants to harm you; he or she wants to love you. And be respected, or loved, by you.’
‘That’s disgusting,’ she spat. ‘It’s better to be harmed. Cleaner.’
‘Stop it, Flavia, would you?’ he said so sharply he surprised even himself.
Her mouth and eyes flew open and stayed that way for seconds. ‘What?’ she began, and he feared she’d tell him to leave.
‘It’s not better to be harmed. Think of that girl, with a broken arm and stitches in her head, and God knows what fear. Most things are better than that. So stop it, would you? Please.’
He’d gone too far. He knew it but he didn’t care. Either she could stop the melodrama, leave it on the stage and behave like an adult, or . . . That was the part he couldn’t be sure about: what would happen if she stuck to big statements and grand gestures? He remembered her as being far more sensible than this, far closer to the earth in terms of practical realities.
She picked up the comb and used the sharp tip to move aside the blue wrapping paper, again exposing the necklace. She stared at it, then shifted to the side of her chair to allow Brunetti a clear view of the jewels.
‘Only a person who’s crazy would give that to someone they don’t know and have never met,’ she said. ‘Do you think he,’ she began, paused and added, ‘– or she – really believes something like that would make me interested in them or make it not have happened, what he did to that poor girl?’
‘We’re not sharing the same reality with this person, Flavia,
’ Brunetti said. ‘The rules you use to talk to me or to your dresser or your colleagues don’t apply here.’
‘Which ones do?’
Brunetti raised his hands in the universal gesture of ignorance. ‘I have no idea. They’re the ones this person makes.’
She leaned forward to look at the watch on the dressing table and said, ‘It’s almost midnight. God, I hope we’re not locked in here.’
‘Don’t they have a watchman?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Yes, after the fire, they do, and he really has to walk around the building, or at least that’s what they’ve told me.’
‘Shall we go, then?’ Brunetti asked. ‘I’ll walk you home.’
She looked at him, confused. ‘I thought it was more convenient for you to walk to Rialto.’
Casually, as though he believed it, Brunetti said, ‘It’s only a few minutes’ difference if I take the Accademia.’ Then, before she could question him, he said, ‘Come on. Let’s go. You’ve spent enough time in this place today.’
She held up her watch again. ‘It’s already tomorrow.’
He smiled and repeated, ‘Come on. Get dressed and we’ll go.’
She went into the bathroom, and he heard the familiar feminine noises: water splashing in the sink, a dropped shoe, a few clicks and clacks, and then the door opened and she was there: brown skirt and sweater, low-heeled shoes, and light makeup. Brunetti gave thanks that he lived in a country where a woman who had just spoken of being in fear of her life would put on eyeliner and lipstick for a ten-minute walk across a deserted city after midnight.
It took them some time to figure out what to do with the necklace, but she finally succeeded in wrapping the package in a white towel and shoving it into a plastic bag. That in its turn went into a dark green canvas shoulder bag he recognized as being from Daunt’s bookshop in London. Flavia passed it to him and he strung it over his shoulder.
She led the way back down the corridor to the elevator. As they were waiting for it to come, her phone buzzed in the pocket of her jacket: neither of them managed to disguise their shock. She grabbed the phone and looked at it. The name she saw there softened her expression. She glanced at Brunetti and said, ‘Freddy’, then answered by saying, ‘Ciao, Freddy’ in an entirely natural voice: happy, calm, curious.