by Donna Leon
Niccolini considered this and then said, his voice struggling for neutrality, ‘There are many kinds of trauma.’
Brunetti decided to intervene before Rizzardi began to simplify the meaning of the term and further antagonize Niccolini. ‘I think you should know that Dottor Niccolini is a veterinarian, Ettore.’
Rizzardi took a moment to respond, and when he did it was evident that the news pleased him. ‘Ah, then he’ll understand,’ he said.
Both Rizzardi and Brunetti heard Niccolini gasp. He wheeled towards the pathologist, one hand involuntarily closing into a fist, face blank with shock.
Rizzardi stepped away from the railing and held up his hands, palms outward in an instinctive gesture of self-protection. ‘Dottore, Dottore, I meant no offence.’ He patted repeatedly at the air between him and Niccolini until the other man, looking stunned at his own behaviour, lowered his hand. Rizzardi said, ‘I meant only that you’d understand the physiology of what I said. Nothing more.’ Then, more calmly, ‘Please, please. Don’t even think it.’
Was Niccolini so upset that he had heard Rizzardi’s remark as a comparison between animal and human anatomy? But how could he be expected to be cool and rational in the presence of the man who had performed the autopsy?
Niccolini nodded a few times, eyes closed, his face flushed, then looked at Rizzardi and said, ‘Of course, Dottore. I misunderstood. It’s all so …’
‘I know. It’s all so terrible. I’ve spoken to many people. It’s never easy.’
The men returned to silence. A beagle came out of one of the shops near the end of the campo and relieved itself against a tree, then went back into the shop.
Rizzardi’s voice summoned Brunetti’s attention away from the dog. ‘I can only repeat that your mother died of a heart attack: there’s no question of that.’ Brunetti had listened to the doctor enough times in the past to understand that Rizzardi was telling the truth, but Brunetti could see his face now, so he knew there was also something the doctor was not saying.
Rizzardi continued. ‘And to answer your question: yes, there was blood at the scene. Commissario Brunetti saw it, as well.’ Niccolini turned to Brunetti for confirmation, and Brunetti nodded, then waited to see how Rizzardi would explain it. ‘There was a radiator not far from where your mother was found, and it is not inconsistent with the evidence that she hit her head as she fell. As you know, head wounds often bleed a great deal, but because death would have come so quickly after her heart attack, she would not have bled for long, and that too is consistent with what we observed at the scene.’ With every sentence he spoke, Rizzardi’s language moved closer and closer to the officialese of printed reports and committee minutes.
Like a man coming up for air, Niccolini asked, ‘But it was the heart attack that killed her?’ How many times, Brunetti wondered, did he need to hear this?
‘Beyond question,’ Rizzardi said in his most official voice, and at the sound of it, the mild squeak of discomfort with which Brunetti had listened to his previous evasions was suddenly transformed into a klaxon of doubt. Brunetti had no idea what the doctor was lying about, but he was now convinced that he was.
Niccolini imitated the pathologist’s former position, and leaned back against the railing.
A sound resembling a war whoop caught their attention, and all of them turned and looked towards the far end of the campo, where Marco swirled in ever-narrowing circles around one of the trees. Brunetti, watching the narrowing gyre of the boy’s play, wondered at Niccolini’s behaviour. He would understand misery or grief or an explosion of tears. During his career he had seen the opposite, as well: cold-hearted satisfaction at the death of a parent. Niccolini seemed nervous and paralysed at the same time. Why else force Rizzardi to repeat his judgement that the death had been natural?
Rizzardi pushed back the sleeve of his jacket and looked at his watch. ‘I’m sorry, Signori, but I have an appointment.’ He reached to shake hands with Niccolini and said a polite goodbye. He told Brunetti that he would send him the written report as soon as he could and told him to call if he had any questions.
Niccolini and Brunetti watched silently as the pathologist walked across the campo and disappeared into the hospital.
7
When Rizzardi was gone, Brunetti asked, nodding in the direction of the hospital, ‘Is there anything else you have to do in there?’
‘No, I don’t think so,’ Niccolini answered, shaking his head as if to remove the idea or the place. ‘I signed some papers when I went in, but no one told me I had to do anything else.’ He looked at the hospital, then back at Brunetti, and added, ‘They said I can’t see her until this afternoon. Two o’clock.’ Then, speaking more to himself than Brunetti, he said, ‘This shouldn’t have happened.’ He looked up then and said, as if he feared Brunetti had reason to doubt it, ‘She was a good mother.’ Then, after a pause, ‘She was a good woman.’
Despite the years – decades – he had spent as a policeman, Brunetti still wanted to believe this to be true of most people. Experience suggested that they were good, at least until they were put into unusual or difficult situations, and then some – many, even – changed. Brunetti surprised himself by thinking of prayer: ‘lead us not into temptation’. How intelligent of whoever had said that – was it Christ himself? – to realize how easily we were tempted and how easily we fell, and how wise we are to pray to be spared temptation.
‘… you think they’ll …’ he heard Niccolini say and returned his attention to the other man. Instead of finishing the phrase, the veterinarian raised his hand in the air, palm towards the sky, then let it fall to his side, as if resigned to the fact that the heavens had little interest in what had happened to his mother.
Brunetti’s lack of attention had been temporary. He very much wanted to listen to whatever the doctor had to say and so, glancing at his watch, he suggested, ‘Dottore, if you’d like, we could have something to eat together.’ He paused, then said, ‘But if you’d like to be by yourself,’ Brunetti went on, involuntarily raising both palms and shifting his body backwards, ‘I understand.’
Niccolini’s glance was level and direct. Then he too looked at his watch: his eyes stayed on it for some time, as if he were trying to figure out what the numbers meant.
‘I have an hour,’ he finally said. Then, very decisively, he added, ‘Yes.’ He looked around the campo for a familiar point and said, ‘I don’t know what to do until then, and the time will pass more quickly.’ He looked back at the bar where they had had a coffee. ‘It’s all different,’ he said.
‘The bar? Or the campo?’ Brunetti asked. Or perhaps Niccolini was talking about life. Now. After.
‘All of it, I think,’ Niccolini said. ‘I don’t come to Venice much any more. Just to visit my mother, and that’s so close to the station that I don’t see other parts of the city.’ He looked around him, his eyes as stunned by what they saw as those of a tourist, exposed to this for the first time. He turned and pointed back towards the church of the Miracoli. ‘I went to elementary school at Giacinto Gallina, so I know this neighbourhood. Or I knew it.’ He waved his hand towards one of the bars. ‘Sergio’s gone, and the bar’s Chinese now. And the two old people who used to run Rosa Salva: they’re gone, too.’
As if encouraged by the name of the bar, Niccolini began to walk towards it. Brunetti fell into step beside him, assuming that his invitation had been accepted. By silent assent, they chose a table outside, one without an umbrella so they could better enjoy the remnants of the autumnal sun left to them. There was a menu on the table, but neither of them bothered with it. When the waiter came, Brunetti asked for a glass of white wine and two tramezzini: he didn’t care which. Niccolini said he’d take the same.
In the first months after Brunetti’s mother had fallen complete victim to the Alzheimer’s that was to lead to her death, she had stayed in the old people’s home a bit further along Barberia delle Tole, but Brunetti, no matter how much he wanted Niccolini to talk about
his mother, was not willing to try to win his fellow feeling and goodwill by offering up his own mother’s suffering as a way to encourage him to speak.
They waited in silence, strangely relaxed in each other’s company. ‘Did you come to see her very often?’ Brunetti finally asked.
‘Until a year ago, I did,’ Niccolini said. ‘But then my wife had twins, and so my mother started to come out to see us.’
‘In Vicenza?’
‘Lerino, really; it’s where they were from originally, my parents. She’d come out on the train and I’d pick her up.’ The waiter came with the glasses of wine. Brunetti picked his up and took a sip, then another. Niccolini ignored his and continued speaking. ‘We have another child, a daughter. She’s six.’
Brunetti thought of the joy his mother had taken in her grandchildren and said, ‘She must have been happy with that.’
Niccolini smiled for the first time since they met, and grew younger. ‘Yes. She was.’ The waiter came and put the sandwiches in front of them.
‘It’s strange,’ Niccolini said, picking up his glass but ignoring the sandwiches. ‘She spent her whole life with children, first as a teacher and then with me and my sister, and then with other children when she went back to teaching when we both were in school.’ He sipped at his wine, then picked up a sandwich and studied it. He set it back on the plate.
Brunetti took a bite of his first sandwich, then asked, ‘What was strange, Dottore?’
‘That when she retired, she stopped working with children.’
‘What did she do, instead?’ Brunetti asked.
Niccolini studied Brunetti’s face before he asked, speaking very slowly, as if searching through his vocabulary for the right words, ‘Why do you want to know all of this?’
Brunetti took another sip of wine. ‘I’m interested in women of my mother’s generation.’ Then, with a glance in Niccolini’s direction, before he could object, Brunetti added, ‘Well, close in age to her generation.’ He set his glass on the table and continued. ‘My mother didn’t work: she stayed home and took care of us, but once, years ago, she told me she would have loved to have been a teacher. But there was no money in her family, so she went to work when she was fourteen. As a servant.’ Brunetti said it boldly, in defiance of all those years when he had denied this simple truth, wishing that his parents had been other than they were, richer than they were, more cultured than they were. ‘So I’m always interested in those women who got to do what my mother wanted to do. What they made of the chance.’
As if now convinced of the legitimacy of Brunetti’s interest, Niccolini went on. ‘She began to work with old people. Well, older people. In fact,’ he said, pointing with his chin, ‘she started down there.’ Anyone in Venice would know he meant the old people’s home, the casa di cura, only a hundred metres away.
‘Started how?’ Brunetti asked. ‘Doing what?’
‘Visiting. Listening to them. Bringing them out here into the campo when the weather was good.’ This, too, was a phenomenon with which everyone in the city was familiar: tiny old people curved into their wheelchairs and covered up with blankets, regardless of the season, wheeled into the sunlight by friends or relatives or, increasingly, women of Eastern European appearance, who brought them into the campo to spend a part of what remained of their lives in company with what remained of life beyond their tiny, cramped rooms.
Brunetti wondered if this man’s mother could have been one of the people who helped his own, but no sooner did the thought come than Brunetti dismissed it as irrelevant.
‘When the weather was bad, she read to them or listened to them.’ Niccolini leaned forward and again picked up the sandwich. He took a bite and set it back on the edge of the plate. ‘She always said how much they liked to be able to tell younger people about what life had been like when they were younger and what they had done and what the city was like: sixty years ago, seventy.’
‘People don’t have to be in the casa di cura to start doing that, I’m afraid,’ Brunetti said and smiled, thinking of the hours he had already spent lamenting the changes that had taken place in the city since the time when he was a young man. ‘I think it’s part of being Venetian.’ Then, after a moment, ‘Or part of being human.’
Niccolini pushed himself back in his chair. ‘I think it’s worse for older people. The changes are so much more obvious for them.’ Then, as so many people did when this subject arose, he sighed deeply and waved a hand in a meaningless circle.
‘You said she started here,’ Brunetti said. ‘Where else did she visit them?’
‘That place down in Bragora. That’s where she was working. Still.’ Hearing himself say that word, Niccolini looked down at his hands.
Brunetti remembered hearing about it, years ago: one entire floor of a palazzo in Campo Bandiera e Moro, run by some order of nuns who, though they were rumoured to charge the highest prices in the city, were also said to provide the best care. There had been no beds free when he was looking for a place for his mother; he had not thought about the place since then.
A sudden intake of breath forced him to look across at Niccolini. ‘Oh, my God,’ the doctor said. ‘I’ll have to tell them.’ Niccolini’s face flushed red, and his eyes began to glisten. He leaned forward and, elbows propped on the arms of his chair, covered his mouth and nose with his hands.
Brunetti looked at his watch. It was almost two.
‘I can’t call them. I can’t do this on the telephone,’ Niccolini said, shaking his head to dismiss the possibility.
Tentatively, Brunetti asked, ‘Would you like me to speak to them, Dottore?’ Niccolini’s eyes flashed at him. ‘I know two of the sisters there,’ Brunetti quickly added. Well, he had spoken to them years ago, so in a certain sense he did know them. ‘It’s not far from the Questura.’ Brunetti didn’t know how hard to press here and didn’t want to seem too interested. ‘Of course, if you’d rather do it yourself, I understand.’
The waiter walked past their table and Brunetti asked for the bill. In the minutes that elapsed while the waiter went inside to get it, Niccolini kept his eyes on his half-filled glass of wine and the uneaten sandwiches.
Brunetti paid the bill, left a few euros on the table, and pushed back his chair. Niccolini got to his feet. ‘I’d like you to do it, Commissario. I don’t know if I’m going to be able … ‘he began but let his voice drift off, powerless to give a name to what it was he was unable to do.
‘Of course,’ Brunetti said, careful to keep his words to a minimum. He reached over and took the doctor’s hand.
Before he could speak, the doctor took his hand and pressed it to the point of pain and said, ‘Don’t say anything. Please.’ He released Brunetti’s hand and walked across the campo towards the hospital.
8
Brunetti reached down and picked up one of the sandwiches on the plate. Embarrassed to be seen eating while standing, he sat down again and finished it, then went into the bar and had a glass of mineral water. He realized that he had failed to call Paola to tell her he would not be home for lunch. He paid and stepped outside to make the call. He dialled their home number and hoped she would understand that he had been, in a sense, hijacked by events.
‘Paola,’ he said when she answered with her name, ‘things got away from me.’
‘So did a rombo cooked in white wine with fennel.’
Well, at least she was not angry. ‘And baby potatoes and carrots,’ she went on relentlessly, ‘and one of those bottles of Tokai your informer gave you.’
‘I wasn’t supposed to have told you that.’
‘Then pretend you didn’t hear me say I know who you got them from.’
Perhaps he was not going to get off so lightly. ‘I had to meet the son of that woman who died last night.’
‘It wasn’t in the paper this morning, but it’s already in the online version.’
Brunetti was not comfortable with the cyber age, still preferring to read his newspapers in paper form; the fact
that a newspaper such as the Gazzettino now existed in cyberspace was to him a cause of great uneasiness. ‘What will become of people who are exposed to the Gazzettino twenty-four hours a day?’ he asked.
Paola, who often took a longer and more measured view than did Brunetti, said, ‘It might help to think of it as toxic waste we don’t ship to Africa.’
‘Assuredly. I hadn’t considered that. I’m at peace with my conscience now,’ Brunetti said. Then, curious to learn how the story was being played, he asked, ‘What are they saying?’
‘That she was found in her apartment by a neighbour. Death was apparently caused by a heart attack.’
‘Good.’
‘Does that mean it wasn’t?’
‘Rizzardi’s being dodgier and more noncommittal than usual. I think he might have seen something, but he didn’t say anything to the woman’s son.’
‘What’s he like, the son?’
‘He seems a decent man,’ Brunetti said, which had certainly been his first impression. ‘But he couldn’t disguise his relief that the police aren’t showing any interest in his mother’s death.’
‘Is it you who isn’t doing the showing?’ she asked.
‘Yes. He seemed bothered that I wanted to speak to him, so I had to pass it off as a procedural formality because we were the ones who received the call.’
‘Why would he be nervous? He can’t have had anything to do with it.’ Hearing her speak so categorically, Brunetti realized that he too had dismissed this possibility a priori. The world offered a cornucopia of variations on the theme of homicide; wives and husbands killed one another with staggering frequency, lovers and ex-lovers existed in a state of undeclared warfare; he had lost count of the women who had killed their children in recent years. But still his mind stopped short of this: men don’t kill their mothers.