The Waters of Eternal Youth

by Donna Leon

  They sat in silence until Brunetti said, ‘The medical report changes everything, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed.

  Griffoni stared out the window while together they ­listened to a boat passing from left to right under the windows. ‘Maybe. So are you suggesting that her fall was more likely . . . involuntary?’

  ‘Maybe,’ Brunetti answered. ‘Her grandmother told me that Manuela had become very withdrawn in the months before it happened.

  ‘How did she know that?’

  ‘Manuela’s mother told her.’

  She nodded. ‘She’d know, I suppose.’ Griffoni crossed her legs and slumped down in her chair. She folded her arms and looked out of the window. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘if I think about this, I want to cry.’ She pressed both hands to the sides of her mouth and smoothed the skin back.

  ‘She could be my younger sister.’ She shook her head and went on, ‘That hardly matters. She’s a young woman who’s lost her future. She could be like this for another half a century. My God, think of it.’ Her voice had grown unsteady and trailed away on the final words.

  ‘I think it’s time we went home,’ was all Brunetti could think of saying.

  That is what they did.

  18

  The next morning he woke with an ache, but this time it was in his mind, not in his joints. He’d spent the better part of the last week getting nowhere, involving not only himself but another commissario, a magistrate, his superior, ­Vice-­Questore Patta, and Patta’s secretary, Signorina Elettra. Five people’s attention had resulted in no discoveries save unprovable information about a rape committed fifteen years before, of which there existed no possibility that the victim would remember.

  He lay in bed and stared at the ceiling, then turned his head and looked out at the roofs of the city, which glistened with autumnal rain.

  He looked at the clock and saw that it was almost nine: Paola had let him sleep. He turned on his side, telling himself that he would plan his day, and went back to sleep.

  Half an hour later, Paola woke him by saying his name and setting a cup and saucer down next to him. The sound, and then the smell, bored down into wherever he was and pulled him free. He flopped on to his back, pushed himself up against the back of the bed, and rubbed at his eyes.

  ‘Here,’ Paola said, handing him the cup and saucer. ‘There’s already sugar in it.’

  She sat on his side of the bed and watched as he took his first sip of coffee, closed his eyes, and rested his head back against the pillow. ‘The patient will live,’ he said and finished his coffee. He set the cup and saucer on the bedside table. ‘Aren’t you supposed to be teaching?’ he asked her.

  ‘Not until ten.’

  ‘I’m not doing anything until twelve today,’ he boasted.

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘Because I don’t feel like it.’

  ‘That’s certainly a compelling reason,’ she agreed.

  ‘When’s the last time I missed even a ­half-­day of work?’ he demanded. ‘How many days have I taken sick leave in all these years?’

  ‘You were in the hospital for almost a week.’

  ‘That was years ago.’

  ‘Yes,’ she admitted.

  ‘I can’t bear it today,’ he said: he had told her about the medical report the night before. ‘I don’t know why that is, but it’s true. Just for one morning, I don’t want to think about it, go there, do it.’

  ‘Is this a ­life-­altering change?’

  He had to consider this. ‘Probably not.’

  She bent over him and pressed his shoulder, then got to her feet.

  ‘Why’d you stay?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘To bring you coffee.’

  ‘Don’t let your feminist friends find out you did that,’ Brunetti said.

  ‘Love trumps principle,’ she said and left.

  Brunetti spent another hour reading Apollonius. How often it was true in these stories: love trumped principle. Paola tossed out these things so easily. Did she sit on the vaporetto and make them up or did they come to her in flashes?

  He set the book aside, took a shower and got ready to leave the house. While he had been lolling in swinish sleep and reading, the sun had come out and got immediately to work: the streets were dry, and it was warm enough to wear only a sweater and jacket.

  In the street, he decided to walk: it was faster than taking a vaporetto and making the long S towards Riva di Biasio. Besides, the air was an inducement to walk. Brunetti set out in what would be, in a normal city, a straight line, heading ­north-­west. Venice, however, took him left and right, over bridges, around corners he wasn’t aware of turning or planning to turn. Within fifteen minutes, he was walking along the embankment of Rio Marin, heading towards the gas office. A few doors before it, he saw the windows and door of a bar, stopped and glanced inside, searching for a man he wouldn’t recognize.

  There were two women at a table, each with a coffee cup in front of them. Three young tourists, two girls and a boy, sat at another table, a map spread out in front of them, each holding a glass of beer as they bent over it.

  Brunetti entered and went to the bar. The barman looked at him and nodded. Brunetti had eaten nothing that morning and so did not want wine or a spritz. Nor did he want a coffee so close to lunch. He asked for a glass of mineral water and said, ‘I’m supposed to meet Pietro Cavanis, but he doesn’t seem to be here.’

  ‘No,’ the man said as he set a glass in front of Brunetti. ‘He hasn’t been in for a couple of days. At least, I haven’t seen him. He might have been here in the morning, when my son works, but he’s not much of a one for the morning, Pietro.’

  ‘I know,’ Brunetti said with a friendly smile. ‘He told me.’ He took a few sips of his water and set the glass down. ‘He told me to ask you for the keys if he wasn’t here.’

  The barman smiled and stepped over to the cash register and pulled a ­much-­handled envelope from where it was stuffed between the machine and the wall. He took out a set of keys and handed them to Brunetti. ‘It’s the green door on the other side of the canal. Top floor.’

  ‘I know that, too,’ Brunetti said, thanked the man, and took the keys. Without asking what he owed, Brunetti left two euros on the counter and started for the door. Holding up the keys, he turned at the door and said, ‘I’ll bring them back.’

  The barman, who had already removed Brunetti’s glass and was wiping at the place where it had been, waved the cloth in his direction.

  The bridge on the left was closer, so he crossed that and went along the riva to the green door. He stepped back and looked at the façade of the building: the shutters on the first floor were all closed and ­sun-­bleached, as were the four on the left side of the second floor. Two of the shutters on the right side were open, the inside bleached to a dull ­grey-­green, suggesting that they were never pulled closed. The building looked sick, as if withering away to death. There were two empty rectangles on the left side of the bells; only Cavanis’ name was there: top row, right side.

  He put the larger key into the green door. It opened easily, and Brunetti crossed the small entrance space and started up the stairs. He paused on the second landing, something he had begun doing on the steps to his own home.

  Outside the door on the right, he saw Cavanis’ name, printed in a fine copperplate hand, on a piece of cardboard pinned to the left of the door. Politeness or territoriality made him ring the bell, wait, and then ring it again, longer. Familiar with the sleep of alcoholics, he then used the key to open the door, which was not ­double-­locked.

  ‘Signor Cavanis,’ he called from the doorway. ‘Signor Cavanis.’ He waited, and his nose told him what he was going to find. He could have retreated into the corridor and called the crime squad, but instead he left the keys in the door, stuffed both hands into his pockets, and
stepped into the room.

  It smelled of cigarettes, of decades, eternities of the presence of a heavy smoker. It was a small room. Sofa, low table, facing them a television, all part of a shrine to the ­flat-­faced god. This one was as enormous as it was old. As deep as it was wide, it was turned low but was still audible and was currently giving a blonde young woman in a pink angora sweater the chance to look adoringly at an elderly man in an expensive suit who sat opposite her as he lectured her ­never-­dimming smile.

  Brunetti looked for the remote control, but there was none to be found. It was not on the sofa or the table, and there were no other flat surfaces in the room. Nor were there knobs on the television: what you saw was what you got: local channel, fixed volume. How much local news and entertainment could a person stand before going mad?

  There were no pictures and no reading material of any sort in the room, no rugs or decorations, and no other furniture. On the table were some plates and glasses, cups and saucers, apparently stacked and pushed aside as days passed. The plate that sat in the line of vision between the screen and the viewer’s chair held a ­dried-­out piece of cheese, some prosciutto that had curved in on itself; beside it, pieces had been sliced from a loaf of white bread. The glass beside the plate was half full of red wine; the level had gone down as it evaporated in the overheated room, leaving a reddish stripe above the remaining wine.

  Brunetti went into the small kitchen on the right. On the table sat an almost empty ­two-­litre bottle of red wine. He did not bother to open the cabinets or the refrigerator but backed out and went to the door where he had seen the foot.

  It was a large foot, wearing a man’s shoe, and it was lying on the floor, a grey sock that might once have been white exposed above it. Brunetti leaned forward and into the room. The ­grey-­haired man lay on his left side, his head cushioned on his bent elbow. He could have been taking a nap, one leg stretched out, the other trapped and bent slightly under it. He could have been asleep were it not for the handle of a kitchen knife protruding from the right side of his neck and the pool of dried blood in which he lay. And the smell. Not even the years of smoke, which had discoloured the white door of the refrigerator and darkened the tiles in the kitchen, could cover or disguise that distinctive ­iron-­rich smell, nor could they overpower the smell of rot that Brunetti sensed slowly sinking into his own clothing.

  He backed away from the body and left the apartment and stood on the landing. He dialled Bocchese’s telefonino number and told the leader of the forensics squad what to prepare for, gave him the address, and told him to get a team there as quickly as he could and to bring a pathologist, if one was free.

  ‘I shouldn’t ask this,’ Bocchese said, ‘but did you touch anything?’

  ‘No,’ Brunetti said and broke the connection. He remained on the landing outside the apartment, trying to draw the line that would connect what he had just seen to something else. The dead man had saved Manuela from death, and this had come to the attention of the police. Cavanis had been there when it happened and had always denied – after having described it – that he had seen anyone try to harm Manuela. Nothing necessitated a link; nothing proved ­cause–­effect; no straight line led from Rio San Boldo to Rio Marin.

  Cavanis could have interrupted a burglar; one look back at the poverty of the room put an end to that idea. An enemy could have done it, although a man with enemies does not leave his keys with a barman and tell him to give them to whoever asks for them. Random violence? In Venice? The possibility didn’t remain in Brunetti’s mind long enough for him to find the energy to dismiss it.

  Brunetti went downstairs and out into the sunlight to wait for the boat.

  It took the crew another quarter of an hour to arrive, but when they did, they came in force. Aside from the pilot and Bocchese, there were two photographers and two technicians. The boat glided up to the side of the canal; Brunetti caught the rope and wrapped it around the bollard, then hauled the first man up to the pavement.

  Bocchese came on deck and told the pilot to move the boat ahead fifty metres to a stone staircase leading down to the water: he got out there and walked back to Brunetti, leaving it to the crew to unload and move the equipment.

  ‘Murder?’ Bocchese asked. When Brunetti nodded, the technician added, ‘Rizzardi is on his way.’

  ‘Where was he?’

  ‘At home,’ Bocchese said. ‘When I told him you’d called it in, he said he’d come even though that idiot’s on duty.’

  Brunetti thought it politic to ignore Rizzardi’s comment about his colleague, who was considered an idiot by everyone at the Questura.

  Bocchese went back to the two technicians who were carrying their equipment from the boat. Though he was a head shorter than both of them and at least twenty years older, the younger men looked to him for instruction; their very bearing displayed deference.

  When they were all on the landing, Brunetti accompanied them to the green door and into the apartment. He realized then that his morning’s reluctance to go to the Questura had followed him here. He disliked being at the scene of this crime, disliked watching as the camera was set up and photos were taken of the dead man and everything around him, from every angle. Even more did he find the necessity to avoid the dry puddle of blood grotesque. He didn’t want to see the knife, didn’t want to see the way the blood had flowed down the dead man’s body and seeped into his clothing, nor to start calculating how long he could have lived while the blood was still flowing.

  Brunetti retreated to the landing, leaving the others to do their jobs, and tried to push his mind away from the thought of what it must be to know that you were dying, that you were wounded beyond recovery, beyond help or hope, and were going to die. He could wish only that alcohol and shock and sudden loss of blood had dulled Cavanis’ mind – for this must be Pietro Cavanis – and lessened his terror.

  ‘Guido?’ A voice from the door to the street called him away from these thoughts.

  He turned and saw Ettore Rizzardi, the pathologist, come to bear witness to the obvious, as was so often his duty. Tall and thin, Rizzardi managed to convey a sense of energy held in restraint.

  Brunetti shook his hand and then led him into the apartment; he could think of nothing to say. Brunetti watched the pathologist gaze around the room, and registered the moment when he saw the foot. Rizzardi closed his eyes for a moment, and had Brunetti not known him better, he would have suspected him of saying a prayer.

  One of the technicians offered each of them a pair of plastic gloves, but Rizzardi had brought his own. He opened the package and put them on. Brunetti did the same.

  Brunetti followed the pathologist into Cavanis’ bedroom and saw the doctor already bent to take the man’s pulse. Rizzardi looked at his watch and took out a notebook. He glanced at Bocchese. ‘Your people finished in here?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘All right, I’ll take a look.’ He stepped back from the corpse and took a surgical mask from his pocket, ripped off the protective paper, and put it on. He handed one to Brunetti, who was glad to do the same. Rizzardi took a ­heat-­sensitive wand from his pocket and placed the tip on the dead man’s temple, then wrote in his notebook. ‘Will you help me, Guido?’ he asked.

  Together, they straightened the man’s body and rolled him on to one side. The knife jutted straight into the air.

  Brunetti studied the angle of the blade. ‘Killed from behind,’ he observed.

  The pathologist nodded. ‘Killer’s ­right-­handed.’

  Both of them had learned over the years how best to distance at least a part of themselves from what they were doing: view it as a practical problem, akin to figuring out why the bedside lamp wouldn’t work. Light bulb? Wall socket? Fuse? Look at the evidence and try to find the cause.

  The man had been limp when they moved him, and the smell had grown stronger as they got closer to him. ‘A day or two, I�
�d say,’ Rizzardi observed. He set his knee down in a clean place on the floor and looked more closely at the knife and at the quantity of coagulated blood on the man’s sweater. ‘It must have opened the jugular.’

  ‘Would it have been fast?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘I’d think so, yes,’ Rizzardi said and got to his feet. ‘I’ll be able to tell you more once I take a closer look.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Later this afternoon, if possible.’ He turned back to the dead man and asked, ‘Did he drink a lot?’

  ‘Yes,’ Brunetti answered. ‘How’d you know?’ He had detected no scent of alcohol; perhaps it had been covered by the other smell coming from the body, left for who knows how long in a heated room.

  Rizzardi led them out to the living room, where the technicians were doing their job: collecting, photographing, putting small bits of things into plastic envelopes. Rizzardi removed his gloves and put them in his pocket. Brunetti wondered how many of them he’d taken home with him over the years.

  ‘If they’ve been drinking long enough,’ Rizzardi said, finally answering Brunetti’s question, ‘they all take on the same look. You come to see it. Both outside and inside.’

  The doctor shook his head as at some private thought and Brunetti asked, ‘What are you thinking about?’

  ‘If you know enough about the human body, you come to see it as a miracle. And when you look at the bodies of some of them – like him – who have drunk for years, perhaps all their lives, and you see what the drinking’s done to them, and in spite of it all they were still alive, then you know it really is a miracle.’

  They shook hands and Rizzardi left, but not before finding Bocchese in the kitchen and saying goodbye to him.

  Brunetti stayed behind, watching the technicians work, until the men from the hospital arrived with their plastic coffin. While they waited, one of the technicians went through the dead man’s pockets and removed a wallet, a telefonino, and a handkerchief much in need of washing. Brunetti watched him place them in separate plastic bags and zip them closed. The technician nodded to the men from the hospital, who put the dead man into the coffin and left the apartment.