Fatal Remedies

by Donna Leon

  Immediately curious, Brunetti wondered what Zambino knew and how he could get it from him. But before he could begin to formulate a question, the other proceeded, ‘If it will save you time, I will tell you, and this is quite unofficially, that I have no idea at all of what he might have been concerned about. He told me nothing of his other involvements, only about this case. So I’ve no ideas at all, though I repeat that if I had, I wouldn’t tell you about them.’

  Brunetti smiled his most open smile while he considered how much of what he had just heard was the truth. Saying, ‘You’ve been very generous with your time, Avvocato, and I’ll take no more of it from you,’ he got to his feet and made for the door.

  Zambino came along behind him. ‘I hope you can resolve this, Commissario,’ he said on their way out of the office. He extended his hand and Brunetti took it with every sign of warmth, while he contemplated whether the lawyer was an honest man or a very skilled liar.

  ‘As do I, Avvocato,’ he said, took his leave and headed back towards his home and his wife.

  * * * *

  18

  Bubbling in the back of his mind all day had been the knowledge that he and Paola had to go out to dinner that evening. Ever since what Brunetti refused to call her arrest, he and Paola had avoided accepting or issuing any invitations, but this was a date that had been made months ago, the celebration of the twenty-fifth wedding anniversary of Paola’s best friend and closest ally at the university, Giovanni Morosini, and there was no way they could gracefully avoid it. It was Giovanni who had, upon two occasions, saved Paola’s professional life: once by destroying a letter Paola had written to the Magnifico Rettore in which she called him a power-hungry incompetent, the second time by persuading her not to submit a letter of resignation to the same Rector.

  Giovanni taught Italian literature at the university, his wife Art History at the Accademia di Belle Arti, and the four of them had, over the course of years, become close friends. Because the other three lived the major part of their professional lives inside books, Brunetti sometimes found their company unsettling, convinced as he was that they found art more real than everyday life. But there was no question about the Morosinis’ affection for Paola, so Brunetti had agreed to accept the invitation, especially when Clara called to make it clear they would not go to a restaurant, but would eat at home. The public eye was not a place where Brunetti wanted to spend any time, at least not until Paola’s legal situation was resolved.

  Paola saw no reason not to continue teaching her classes at the university, so got home at five. That gave her time to begin to prepare dinner for the children, take a bath, and get ready before Brunetti arrived.

  ‘You’re already dressed?’ he asked, when he came into the apartment and saw her there, wearing a short dress that looked as though it was made out of gold to airy thinness beat. ‘I’ve never seen that before,’ he added, hanging up his coat.

  ‘And?’ she asked.

  ‘And I like it,’ he finished, ‘especially the apron.’

  Surprised, she looked down, but before she could register displeasure at having been fooled, he turned and walked down the corridor to their room. She went back into the kitchen, where she did put on the apron and he, in their bedroom, put on his dark-blue suit.

  Pulling the collar of his shirt straight under the jacket, he walked into the kitchen. ‘What time are we supposed to be there?’

  ‘Eight.’

  Brunetti pushed back his sleeve and looked at his watch. ‘Leave in ten minutes?’ Paola answered with a grunt, head bent over a pot. Brunetti regretted that there was barely time for a glass of wine. ‘Any idea who else is going to be there?’ he asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Hm,’ Brunetti said. He opened the refrigerator and pulled out a bottle of Pinot Grigio, poured himself half a glass, and took a sip.

  Paola put the lid back on to the pot and turned off the flame. ‘That’s good enough,’ she said. ‘They won’t starve.’ Then, to him, ‘Worrying, isn’t it?’

  ‘When we don’t know who else is invited?’

  Instead of answering, she asked, ‘Remember the Americans?’

  Brunetti sighed and put the glass into the sink. Their eyes met and both laughed. The Americans had been a pair of visiting professors from Harvard the Morosinis had invited to dinner two years before, Assyriologists who had spoken to no one except each other during the entire evening and who had, during the course of the meal, proceeded to get falling-down drunk and thus had to be sent home in a taxi, a bill for which had been put through the Morosinis’ mailbox the next morning.

  ‘Did you ask?’ Brunetti wanted to know.

  ‘Who’d be there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I couldn’t,’ Paola answered and, when she saw that he wasn’t convinced, added, ‘You can’t, Guido. Or I can’t. And what am I supposed to do if it’s someone dreadful, say I’m sick?’

  He shrugged, thinking of the evenings he’d spent, prisoner to the Morosinis’ catholic tastes and variegated friendships.

  Paola got her coat and put it on before he could help her. Together, they left the apartment and headed down towards San Polo. They crossed the campo, went over a bridge, and turned into a narrow calle on the right. Just beyond it, they walked right and rang the Morosinis’ bell. The door snapped open almost instantly and they ascended to the piano nobile, where Giovanni Morosini stood at the open door to their apartment, the sound of voices flowing out and down the steps from behind him.

  A large man, Morosini still wore the beard he’d first grown as a student caught up in the violent protests of sixty-eight. It had turned grey and grizzled with the passing of the years, and he often joked that the same thing had happened to his ideals and principles. A bit taller and considerably wider than Brunetti, he seemed to fill up the entire space of the doorway. He greeted Paola with a double kiss and gave Brunetti a warm handshake.

  ‘Welcome, welcome. Come in and have something to drink,’ he said as he took their coats and hung them in the cupboard beside the door. ‘Clara’s in the kitchen, but I have some people I’d like you to meet.’ As always, Brunetti was struck by the disparity in the man’s size and the softness of his voice, barely more than a whisper, as if he were perpetually afraid of being overheard.

  He stepped back to let them enter and preceded them down the central hallway that led to the large salotto, off which all the other rooms in the house opened. Four people stood in one corner of the room, and Brunetti was instantly struck by how much two of them appeared to be a couple and how little the other two did.

  Hearing them, the people in the room turned and Brunetti saw the eyes of the non-coupled woman light up when she saw Paola. It was not a pleasant sight.

  Morosini led them round a low sofa and over to the others. ‘Paola and Guido Brunetti,’ he began, ‘I’d like to present Dottor Klaus Rotgeiger, a friend of ours who lives on the other side of the campo, and his wife Bettina.’ The two who formed a couple put down their glasses on the table behind them and turned to extend their hands in grips as warm and tight as had been Morosini’s. The usual compliments fell from their lips in lightly accented Italian. Brunetti was struck by a shared ranginess of build and clarity of eye.

  ‘And’, Morosini continued, ‘Dottoressa Filomena Santa Lucia and her husband, Luigi Bernardi.’ The second couple placed their glasses next to the others and extended their hands. The same compliments flowed back and forth. This time, Brunetti registered a sort of tactile reluctance on both their parts to allow their hands to be held overlong by strangers. He also noticed that, though they spoke to both him and Paola, they spent far more time observing her. The woman was dark-eyed and had the air of one who believed herself to be far prettier than she was. The man spoke with the elided R of Milano.

  Clara’s voice called out from behind them, ‘A tavola, a tavola, ragazzi’ and Giovanni led them into the next room, where a long oval table stood parallel to a bank of tall windows that looked across at th
e buildings on the other side of the campo.

  Clara appeared from the kitchen then, head enveloped in a cloud of vapour rising from a tureen that she carried in front of her like a votive offering. Brunetti could smell broccoli and anchovies, and remembered just how hungry he was.

  Conversation during the pasta course was general, the sort of delicate jockeying that always goes on when eight people who really aren’t sure of where sympathies lie try to settle what the topics of interest are. Brunetti was struck, as he had been frequently and strongly in recent years, by the absence of talk about politics. He wasn’t sure if no one cared any more or if the subject had simply become too inflammable to permit strangers to attempt it. Regardless of the cause, it had joined religion in some sort of conversational gulag where no one any longer dared, or cared, to go.

  Dottor Rotgeiger was explaining, in Italian Brunetti thought was quite good, the problems he was having at the Ufficio Stranieri in getting permission to prolong his stay in Venice for another year. Each time he went, he was assailed by self-proclaimed ‘agents’ who lingered by the long lines and said they could help speed up the paperwork.

  Brunetti accepted a second helping of pasta and said nothing.

  By the time the fish course began - an enormous boiled branzino that must have been half a metre long - conversation had passed to Dottoressa Santa Lucia, a cultural anthropologist who had just returned from a long research trip to Indonesia, where she had spent a year studying familial power structures.

  Though she directed her remarks at the entire table, Brunetti could see that her eyes were most often directed at Paola. ‘You have to understand’, she said, not quite smiling but with the satisfied look of one who was able to grasp the subtlety of an alien culture, ‘that the family structure is based upon the preservation of same. That is, everything must be done to keep the family intact, even if it means the sacrifice of its least important members.’

  ‘As defined by whom?’ Paola asked, taking a tiny piece of fish bone from her mouth and placing it with excessive care at the side of her plate.

  ‘That’s a very interesting question,’ Dottoressa Santa Lucia said in exactly the tone she must have used when explaining the same thing hundreds of times to her students. ‘But I think this is one of the few cases where the social judgements of their very complex and sophisticated culture agree with our own more simplistic view.’ She paused, waiting for someone to ask for clarification.

  Bettina Rotgeiger complied: ‘In what way the same?’

  ‘In that we agree on who they are, the least important members of the society.’ Having said this, the dottoressa paused and, seeing that she had the full attention of everyone at the table, took a small sip of wine while they awaited her answer.

  ‘Let me guess,’ Paola interrupted, smiling, her chin propped in her open palm, her fish forgotten below her. ‘Young girls?’

  After a brief pause, Dottoressa Santa Lucia said, ‘Exactly,’ giving no sign that she was disconcerted at having had her thunder stolen. ‘Do you find that strange?’

  ‘Not in the least,’ Paola answered, smiled again, and returned her attention to her branzino.

  ‘Yes,’ the anthropologist continued, ‘in a certain sense, societal norms being what they are, they’re expendable, given that more of them are born than most families can support and the fact that male children are far more desirable.’ She looked around to see how this went down and added with a haste she made obvious was caused by fear that she had somehow offended their rigidly Western sensibilities, ‘In their terms, of course, thinking as they do. After all, who else will provide for aged parents?’

  Brunetti picked up the bottle of Chardonnay and leaned across the table to fill Paola’s glass, then filled his own. Their eyes met; she gave him a small smile and a smaller nod.

  ‘I think it’s necessary that we see this issue through their eyes, that we try to consider it as they do, at least so far as our own cultural prejudices will allow us to do so,’ Dottoressa Santa Lucia proclaimed and was gone for some minutes, explaining the need to expand our vision so as to encompass cultural differences and give to them the respect that was earned by having been developed over the course of many millennia to respond to the specific needs of diverse societies.

  After a while that Brunetti measured as the time it took him to finish a refill of wine and eat his helping of boiled potatoes, she finished, picked up her glass and smiled, as if waiting for the appreciative members of her class to approach the podium to tell her how illuminating the lecture had been. A lengthening pause stretched out and was at last broken by Paola, who said, ‘Clara, let me help you carry these plates into the kitchen.’ Brunetti was not the only person who breathed a sigh of relief.

  * * * *

  Later, on the way home, Brunetti asked, ‘Why did you let her go?’

  Beside him Paola shrugged.

  ‘No, why? Tell me.’

  ‘Too easy,’ Paola said dismissively. ‘It was obvious from the beginning that she wanted to get me to talk about it, about why I did it. Why else would she bring up all that nonsense about girls being expendable?’

  Brunetti walked beside her, her elbow tucked into the angle of his arm. He nodded. ‘Maybe she believed it.’ They walked a few more paces, considering this, then he said, ‘I always hate to see women like that.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Who don’t like women.’ They walked a few more steps. ‘Can you imagine what a class of hers must be like?’ Before Paola could answer he continued, ‘She’s so sure of everything she says, so absolutely certain she’s found the single truth.’ He paused for a moment. ‘And imagine what it would be like to have her on your exam committee. Differ from her on anything and there goes your chance for a degree.’

  ‘Not that anyone would want one in cultural anthropology, anyway.’ Paola remarked.

  He laughed out loud and in complete agreement. As they turned into their calle he slowed his steps, then stopped and turned her so that she was facing him. ‘Thank you, Paola,’ he said.

  ‘For what?’ she asked in feigned innocence.

  ‘For avoiding combat.’

  ‘It would have ended up with her asking me why I let myself get arrested and I don’t think she’s anyone I want to talk about that with.’

  ‘Stupid cow,’ Brunetti muttered.

  ‘That’s a sexist remark,’ Paola observed.

  ‘Yes, isn’t it?’

  * * * *

  19

  Their foray into society left them both wanting no more of it, so they resumed their policy of refusing invitations of any sort. Though both Paola and Brunetti chafed under the restriction of staying home night after night and Raffi seemed to find their continued presence worthy of ironic comment, Chiara loved having them there every evening and insisted on engaging them in card games, watching endless television programmes about animals and initiated a Monopoly tournament that threatened to stretch into the new year.

  Each day, Paola went off to the university and Brunetti to his office at the Questura. For the first time in their careers, they were glad of the endless mountains of paperwork created by the Byzantine state which employed them both.

  Because of Paola’s involvement with the case, Brunetti made up his mind not to attend Mitri’s funeral, something he ordinarily would have done. Two days after it, he decided to read again through the lab and scene-of-crime reports of Mitri’s murder, as well as Rizzardi’s four-page report on the autopsy. It took him a good part of the morning to get through them all, and the process left him wondering why it was that both his professional and his personal life seemed to be so much taken up with going over the same things again and again. During his temporary exile from the Questura he had finished rereading Gibbon and was currently tackling Herodotus, and for when that was finished, he had the Iliad ready at hand. All the deaths, all the lives cut short by violence.

  He took the autopsy report and went down to Signorina Elettra’s office, where he f
ound her looking like the antidote to everything he’d just been thinking about. She wore a jacket redder than any he had ever seen and a white silk-crepe blouse open to the second button. Strangely enough, she was doing nothing when he came in, simply sitting at her desk, chin lodged in one palm, staring out of the window towards San Lorenzo, a sliver of which was visible in the distance.

  ‘Are you all right, Signorina?’ he asked when he saw her.

  She sat up and smiled. ‘Of course, Commissario. I was just wondering about a painting.’

  ‘A painting?’

  ‘Uh huh,’ she said, putting her chin back on her hand and staring off again.

  Brunetti turned to follow her gaze, as if he thought the painting in question might be there, but all he saw was the window and, beyond it, the church. ‘Which one?’ he asked.