by Donna Leon
‘Yes. In Campo Santa Maria Mater Domini. Where they still live.’
‘Was that where she was living . . . when this happened?’
‘Yes. It’s better for her to be with her mother,’ she said, sounding not entirely convinced.
Brunetti was at a loss for what to ask her. He found it hard to believe that the girl had so successfully managed to live with her fear. What would it be like, seeing the cause of your terror every day, having it around you whenever you left your house? ‘The fear must affect her life all the time,’ he said.
‘She loves the city,’ the Contessa said, as if playing a trump card. ‘She’s grown up here, all of her friends are here, and . . . I live here.’
‘She went to school here?’
‘Yes,’ the Contessa said and named a school in Santa Croce.
‘Do she and her mother get along?’
Her answer was slow in coming. ‘I’ve always assumed so.’ As answers went, that wasn’t very much, but he left it alone for the moment.
‘I’m not sure what it is you’d like me to do, Contessa,’ he said.
‘I’d like you to see if there was anything that might have happened . . .’ she said with a wave of her hand and covered her eyes.
Brunetti allowed a long time to pass before he asked, ‘Did you know of any trouble she might have been having? Any person she might have wanted to avoid?’
‘No,’ she said immediately and fiercely.
Brunetti decided to leave that for the moment. ‘Contessa,’ he said, using much the same voice he employed when the children were being evasive with him, ‘fifteen years have passed. I can’t go back and try to look at this unless I have a reason or a place to start looking.’ He would also need some sort of legal justification for looking, but he decided to tell her nothing about that.
He picked up his glass, too long ignored, and rolled it between his palms. ‘I’m afraid that whatever suspicions you might have aren’t enough,’ he said – forcing himself to refer to ‘suspicions’ instead of ‘vague suspicions’ – ‘to justify an investigation.’
‘She didn’t fall into that water,’ the Contessa insisted with the truculence of age and the sense of certainty peculiar to wealth.
He took a sip and then another and kept his glass in his hand, suspecting he might need it. ‘Contessa, there are possibilities you haven’t considered,’ he began, voice tentative, as he prepared to suggest to this woman that neither her love nor her wealth had been sufficient to stop her granddaughter from going into the water drunk or drugged. But how say it? What words to use?
‘Manuela didn’t try to kill herself, and she didn’t drink or use drugs.’ Had she read his thoughts?
‘You sound very certain.’ He was a man with two children who had recently been of that same volatile age. They were happy kids to whom the idea of suicide was from some other planet and drugs, he hoped, were unlikely, but these were beliefs common to most parents. How well did Manuela’s grandmother understand a girl two generations younger than she? Youth and age, and their respective problems, lived in different worlds.
‘Nothing could have made Manuela jump into the water. No matter what happened to her, if Manuela had got within two metres of the riva, she would have been lying on the ground, vomiting with fear. I saw that happen twice. Once we were on a vaporetto and people crowded suddenly to one side, and it tipped a bit. She started to scream and grabbed the woman next to her and vomited all down her back.’
Brunetti tried to speak, but she talked over him, half rising from her chair. ‘Another time, when she was about eleven, one of the boys in her class waited for her after school. He knew she was afraid of water – miserable little sadist – and when she was walking across Campo Santa Marina, he and a friend grabbed her and pulled her down towards the canal and told her they were going to throw her in.’
Brunetti waited.
‘She had something like an epileptic seizure. Luckily, it’s near the hospital, and two men carried her there. She was there for two days.’
Brunetti found himself incapable of speech at the horror of it and at her rage, twenty years on.
‘And you know the worst part of it, Signor Brunetti?’
He shook his head and set his glass back on the table, suddenly not interested in its contents.
‘How to get her home.’ She saw his expression and went on. ‘A taxi?’ She laughed the idea to scorn. ‘Think of the vaporetti and where they go: how do you get to Campo Santa Maria Mater Domini from the hospital? Take the boat around the back of the island to the train station and then walk along the open riva to change from one boat to another? Looking at all that water?’ She stopped, and he thought she was asking him to suggest a solution to this trick question.
‘What did you do?’
‘They put her in one of those chairs that Sanitrans uses to carry people up and down stairs, and two of them, well, four of them because they had to take turns, they carried her home from the hospital.’
Brunetti pushed at his glass with one finger and slid it to the side of the tray. He could think of nothing to say.
‘Think of that for an eleven-year-old girl with her eyes shut tight: being carried across the city in an open chair, like a crippled old woman, or some sort of lunatic being taken to Palazzo Boldù, and everyone you pass on the street looking at you and wondering what’s wrong with you.’ She gave him a few moments to consider what she had said. ‘That’s why I know Manuela didn’t jump into the water, Commissario.’
Brunetti decided not to say that the possibility still remained that she had been drunk or drugged when she fell into the water.
She looked across the table at him. Her face was stripped of expression, allowing Brunetti to see it as a structure of eyes, nose, mouth, jaw, chin. The expanse of years between the time she would have been a beauty and the present surprised him: he would still have been a child, she a woman with children his age or older.
‘It’s not only her fear – phobia, if you will – that makes it impossible that she fell in,’ she said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘The man who pulled her out . . .’ The faint bell of memory sounded in Brunetti’s mind. A man diving into the water to rescue a girl. Yes . . . something . . . something, but what?
‘The man who saved her said he saw someone push or throw her into the water.’
‘Who did he say that to?’
‘To you,’ she said with barely disguised accusation.
‘I think you must be mistaken, Contessa,’ Brunetti said. ‘With all due respect.’
‘No, not to you, not personally. But to the police who came. He got her out of the water, but he was too drunk to do anything except shout for help. A different young man gave her artificial respiration, but by then the damage had been done.’ So carried away was she by the telling of this story that she made fists of her hands and banged them into one another. ‘It was the other man, the young one, who called the police.
‘When they came, the first man was lying on the pavement, asleep. The police knew him. He was the local drunk, and when they woke him up he was so drunk he couldn’t remember his own name, and he couldn’t find his wallet. He told the police that he’d seen a man with the girl, and it looked as if he’d pushed or thrown her in.’
‘What did the police do?’
She uncurled her fingers and put her hands in her lap. ‘They took them both – him and Manuela – to the hospital. When he woke up in the morning, he remembered his name.’ Brunetti thought the Contessa had stopped, then she added, with great sadness, ‘But she didn’t remember hers.’
She gave a deep sigh, so profound that Brunetti could see her chest rise and fall. ‘But that’s all he remembered. When they asked him about the other man, he said there was someone else, but all he knew was that there was another man. The police assumed he mean
t the young man who had helped Manuela.’
‘What else did he say?’
‘That he saw something in the water that looked like a person, so he dived in to grab it.’
‘That was very brave of him,’ Brunetti said but then recalled the spurious bravery of drunks.
‘Yes,’ the Contessa agreed but hesitantly and sounding even less certain than he was.
‘Both he and Manuela were there when I got to the hospital. I went to thank him and told him I was her grandmother.’ He watched her recall the scene. ‘He asked me for money,’ she said.
‘Did you give it to him?’
‘Of course.’
‘How much?’
‘I had a few hundred euros in my bag, and I gave it to him.’ Before Brunetti could speak, she went on. ‘When I asked the police about him – this must have been a few weeks later – it was after the doctors told us that the damage to Manuela was very bad . . .’ Her voice trailed off. She wiped at her forehead with the fingers of her right hand, looked at him and asked, ‘Excuse me. What was I saying?’
‘You were telling me what he did with the money you gave him.’
‘The police told me he was drunk for a month. They said he was a drunk and not to believe anything he’d told me because he was just trying to get my money.’ She surprised him by shrugging, a gesture that related to nothing she had said. ‘But it wasn’t until later that I learned about what he’d said about the man.’
‘The police told you?’
Her answer was a long time in coming. ‘In a way.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The Questore had been a good friend of my husband; he told me what was in the original police report and that the man didn’t remember anything about it when he woke up. The Questore told me the police were convinced it was drunken invention and wasn’t true.’
‘Did you believe him?’
‘I had no reason not to.’
‘And now?’
She stroked the velvet covering of the arms of her chair. ‘And now I’d like to be sure.’
There had been so many recent revelations of police brutality and cover-ups that he preferred to spare them both the embarrassment of asking her to explain her change of mind.
‘Did the Questore tell you anything else about him?’
‘Only that he saved her life, and was a drunk. That’s what the police had already told me.’
Brunetti leaned towards her and held up a hand. ‘Let me ask you, Contessa, precisely what it is you’d like me to do.’
Her hands had moved to her lap. She laced her fingers together and stared at them.
Brunetti took up his drink. He studied the surface of the liquid, telling himself he would remain like this until she spoke. No matter how long the silence lasted, he would force her to tell him what she wanted.
Footsteps passed the closed door of the room; for a moment, Brunetti thought he could hear his watch ticking, but he dismissed that as fantasy.
He heard her move restlessly in her chair, but he refused to look at her.
‘I want my granddaughter back,’ she said in a voice that had passed beyond grief into agony.
4
When he looked at her, Brunetti was astonished to find that she appeared to have shrunk: she sat lower in her chair, and her feet could not touch the floor; broad parts of the back of the armchair were visible on both sides of her shoulders. ‘I’m afraid there’s no way I can arrange that, Contessa. Knowing what happened won’t make any difference.’
‘Nothing’s helped for fifteen years,’ the Contessa said, her voice raw. Like an obstinate child, she refused to look at him, as if by ignoring his gaze she could ignore the impossibility of what she was demanding.
‘I’m sorry,’ Brunetti said, unable to think of anything better to say.
When she finally did look at him, she had aged even more: her eyes were less bright, her mouth smaller, and she slumped forward, as though her back no longer had sufficient strength to keep her upright. She had spoken with the blind insistence of the very old. There were certain things they wanted before they went, and they believed that having them would help them let go of this world more easily. Perhaps it would, Brunetti was willing to admit; but, he added, perhaps it would not.
It did not sound to him as though the Contessa were after vengeance. Perhaps she believed that simply knowing what had happened to her granddaughter would lessen her pain. Brunetti knew how illusory that belief was: as soon as a person knew what had happened, they wanted to know why, and then they wanted to know who.
Almost without being aware of it, Brunetti had passed from curiosity about this young girl and her strange destiny to a desire to learn about its circumstances and, if possible, its cause. There was a disproportion between the importance of the decision he made and the speed with which he made it, but he chose to ignore this. He gave it little serious consideration, nor did he reflect on what it might require of him. An old woman was in need, and he reacted with as little thought as he would give to putting out a hand to prevent her falling down the stairs. His love for his mother had been unthinking, fierce, and protective, as was his love for his wife and his children: he really had no other choice, had he?
He saw her reach for the bottle and felt his resolution pause or skip a beat. He had not agreed to anything, and there was still time to change his mind and say he could not help, but then she picked up the cap and screwed it back on to the bottle and set the bottle at the back of the tray.
She seemed to have regained some strength and now resembled the confident host of last night’s dinner party, as though the confession of her futile wish had purged her of weak illusion. ‘I’m eighty-six years old,’ she said. ‘I don’t know how many years I have left.’ She dismissed this with a shrug and went on. ‘Before I die, I want to know what happened. I know it won’t help Manuela and won’t give her a second chance to become the person she might have become. But I want to die in peace.’
Brunetti didn’t move, didn’t speak, tried to give no evidence of anything save attention. He both wanted and needed to understand her.
‘I told you suicide was impossible.’ She took two deep breaths. ‘But I’m not sure about that. I never really have been. Manuela had become a troubled girl; joy had fled her life. I don’t want to die thinking I have some responsibility for what she is now.’ Then she said, not at all melodramatically but with calm certainty, ‘I need to know.’
When it became evident to Brunetti that she was finished, he asked, ‘Do you know what was troubling her?’
She looked at her hands, and he thought of the way his own children used to hang their heads when he had to reprove them. ‘Something had gone wrong in her life, but I don’t know what it was.’ She took a white handkerchief from the pocket of her dress and wiped at her nose but did not look up at him. ‘Her mother had noticed that she was moody and sad, but she thought it was normal for a girl her age.’ She glanced away, then back at him. ‘I suppose I wanted to believe that.’
‘Is that all her mother told you?’ Brunetti asked.
‘She asked me for money to pay for Manuela to see a psychologist.’ The Contessa cleared her throat and then said in a voice made sharp by remembered anger, ‘I told her that she could use the money she was paying for Manuela’s riding lessons to pay for the psychologist. Or sell the horse.’
As though frightened by what she had said, the Contessa drew a deep breath and closed her eyes, waiting for her emotions to subside.
Brunetti sat and waited for her and with her.
‘I gave them the apartment in Campo Santa Maria Mater Domini, years ago, when they were still married. She kept it after the divorce.’ She spoke in a low, tight voice. ‘I made her a monthly payment. I paid her bills, and Manuela’s. I paid for the horse, the lessons, the stable, even the horse’s food. When her mot
her asked for more, something in me snapped and I refused.’ She looked at Brunetti, waiting for his response.
‘I see,’ Brunetti said.
‘After it happened, her mother told me that Manuela had got worse because she didn’t go to see someone.’ She paused, then volunteered, ‘Later I learned that my son had given her the money, but she never sent Manuela to see a psychologist.’
Brunetti realized that she was not going to say any more, and so he asked, ‘Did you see her soon before the incident?’
‘No. Every time I phoned, her mother told me Manuela wasn’t there.’
‘How long did this go on?’
‘Until about a week before it happened, when she finally let me talk to Manuela on the phone.’ The Contessa folded her arms across her chest as though the room had suddenly grown very cold. ‘I asked her how she was, and she said she was fine; then she asked me how I was, and I gave her the same answer. But she didn’t sound fine to me. She didn’t sound all right at all.’
‘And then?’
‘A week later, my son called me in the middle of the night to tell me what had happened.’ She looked up at the ceiling and began to nod her head repeatedly, giving assent to something Brunetti didn’t understand.
‘So you didn’t see her again before it happened?’
‘No.’
Brunetti pulled out his notebook and opened it. ‘I’d like you to give me the telephone number for your daughter-in-law, and your own,’ he said. She gave him both numbers from memory, and he wrote them down.
‘Do you know the names of any of Manuela’s friends, people she knew here or went to school with? Boyfriends, if she had any.’
While he was thinking of what else she might be able to tell him, the Contessa said, ‘Those are things you’ll have to ask her mother. I think Manuela’s lost contact with her friends.’ Hearing that, she edited it: ‘Or they’ve lost touch with her.’
He had once believed that people, parents in particular, would notice unusual behaviour in their children, but he had found that this was often not the case. Most people were observant only in retrospect.