by Donna Leon
He let himself wander off in pursuit of these thoughts. Paola remained silent, waiting. Finally he admitted, ‘It could just as easily be nothing. After all, he’s had a terrible shock, and after I talked to him, he had to go back to the hospital to identify her.’
‘Oddio,’ she exclaimed. ‘Couldn’t they have found someone else?’
‘A relative has to do it,’ Brunetti said.
For a few moments neither of them spoke, then he pulled them both away from these things and said, ‘I should be on time tonight.’
‘Good.’ And she was gone.
The best way to get to the rest home was to walk past the Questura: the map in his brain offered other possibilities, but they were all longer. He could go by and pick up Vianello to come along with him, so that he could tell him about Niccolini and how the presence of the other man had stopped Rizzardi from telling him whatever it was he had wanted to say about the autopsy.
He pulled out his phone and dialled Vianello’s number, told him where he was and that he would pass by to get him in five minutes or so. The sun had passed its zenith, and the first calle he turned into was beginning to lose the warmth of the day.
As he walked alongside Rio della Tetta, Brunetti was cheered, as always happened when he walked here, by the sight of the most beautiful paving stones in Venice. Of some colour between pink and ivory, many of the stones were almost two metres long and a metre wide and gave an idea of what it must have been to walk in the city in its glory days. The palazzo on the other side of the canal, however, provided proof that those days were gone for ever. There was a way to recognize abandonment: the flaking dandruff of sun-blasted paint peeling from shutters; rusted stanchions holding flowerpots out of which trailed the desiccated memory sticks of flowers; and water-level gates hanging askew from their rust-rotten hinges, moss-covered steps leading up and into cavernous spaces where only a rat would venture. Brunetti looked at the building and saw the slow decline of the city, while an investor would see only opportunity: a studio for foreign architects, yet another hotel, perhaps a bed and breakfast or, for all he knew, a Chinese bordello.
He crossed the small bridge, down to the end, left, right, and there ahead of him he saw Vianello, leaning against the railing. When he saw Brunetti, Vianello pushed himself upright and fell into step with him. ‘I spoke to the people who live on the first floor,’ the Inspector said. ‘Nothing. They didn’t hear anything, didn’t see anyone. They didn’t hear the woman upstairs come home, didn’t hear anything until we started to show up. Same with the old people on the second floor.’
‘You believe them?’
With no hesitation, Vianello said, ‘Yes. They’ve got two little kids, so I doubt they’d hear much of anything. And the old people are pretty much deaf, anyway.’ Then he added, ‘They said she had people to stay with her. Always women. At least the ones they’ve seen.’
Brunetti gave him an inquisitive glance, and Vianello said, ‘That’s all they said.’
As they continued walking, Brunetti said, ‘Her son told me Signora Altavilla volunteered in that casa di cura down in Bragora, so I thought we should talk to the sisters about her. He said she went there to talk to – but really to listen to – the old people.’
‘That’s far more useful, don’t you think?’ Vianello asked.
‘Hmm?’
‘Seems to me, the older people get, the less interest they have in the world around them, and in the present, and so the more they want to think about the past and talk about the past. And maybe live in the past.’ He paused, but when his superior remained silent, Vianello continued. ‘It’s certainly that way with most of the old people I know, or knew: my grandmother, my mother, even Nadia’s parents. Besides, if you think about it, why should they be interested in the present? For most of them, it’s filled with health problems, or money problems, and they’re getting weaker and weaker. So the past is a better place to spend their time, and even better if they’ve got someone to listen to them.’
Brunetti was forced to agree with him. It had surely been the case with his parents, though he wasn’t sure if they – his father returned from the war a broken, unhappy man and his mother eventually lost to Alzheimer’s – were reliable examples. He thought of Paola’s parents, Conte and Contessa Falier – anchored in the present and curious about the future – and Vianello’s theory fell apart.
‘Are we doing this,’ Vianello asked, keeping perfectly in step with Brunetti, ‘because of that mark?’
Brunetti fought the impulse to shrug and said, ‘Rizzardi’s at his uncommunicative best. He told the son she died of a heart attack – so I suppose that’s true – but he didn’t say anything about the mark. And we couldn’t talk.’
‘You got any ideas?’ Vianello asked.
This time Brunetti permitted himself the shrug, then said, ‘I’d like to learn something about her, then see what Rizzardi decides to tell us.’
As they reached the top of Ponte San Antonin, Brunetti pointed with his chin at the church and said, ‘My mother always used to tell me, whenever we passed here, about some time in the nineteenth century – I think it was – that a rhinoceros – or maybe it was an elephant – she told me both versions – somehow ended up trapped inside the church.’
Vianello stopped and stared at the façade. ‘I never heard anything about that, but what could a rhinoceros have been doing, walking around the city? Or an elephant, for that matter.’ He shook his head, as if at yet another tale of the strange behaviour of tourists, and started down the steps on the other side. ‘I was at a funeral there once, years ago.’ Vianello stopped walking and looked at the façade with open surprise. ‘Isn’t that strange? I don’t even remember whose funeral it was.’
They continued, following the curve to the right, and Vianello said, returning to what Brunetti had told him, ‘It makes you understand why nothing’s ever clear, a story like that.’
‘You mean the rhinoceros? That was or wasn’t there? And that was or wasn’t a rhinoceros?’
‘Yes. Once it gets said, someone will believe it and repeat it, and then hundreds of years later, people are still repeating it.’
‘And it’s become the truth?’
‘Sort of,’ Vianello answered, sounding reluctant. They walked in silence for some time, and then he observed, ‘It’s pretty much the same today, isn’t it?’
‘That stories aren’t reliable?’ Brunetti asked.
‘That people invent stories, and then after a time there’s no telling what’s true and what isn’t.’
They turned into the campo, and the sun came back to work in front of them, lifting their mood. The trees still had their leaves, a number of people sat on the benches beneath them, and the open vista soothed their eyes.
They crossed the campo without speaking. Brunetti couldn’t remember which door it was, though he knew it was in the line of buildings to the right of the church. He stopped at the first row of bells and read the list, but only family names were given. On a panel next to the second door he found ‘Sacra Famiglia’ and rang the bell.
It was almost a full minute before a female voice, old and wavering, asked who it was. ‘Brunetti,’ he said, adding, ‘I’m a friend of Signora Altavilla’s …’ He prevented himself from continuing the lie, or at least the full lie, by concluding, ‘… son.’
‘She’s not here,’ the voice said, sounding querulous, though that might have been nothing more than the speaker-phone. ‘She didn’t come in today.’
‘I know that, Suora,’ Brunetti said. ‘I’d like to speak to the Mother Superior.’
The voice said something neither he nor Vianello could hear, and then the door snapped open. They stepped into a large entrance hall, its pavement laid out in the orange and white chequerboard pattern so common to buildings of this epoch. Nothing more than dimness entered through the grillwork of a row of windows at the back of the building. They ignored the elevator and took the staircase to the right of it. A small old woman stood at
the only door on the first floor: her clothing spoke of her vows before her size and stance spoke of her age.
She nodded as the two men approached, then put out her hand. Both of them had to angle down their arms, almost as though they were shaking hands with a child: she came to their chests and actually had to put her head back to look into their eyes. ‘I’m Madre Rosa,’ she said, ‘Mother Superior here. Suora Grazia said you wanted to speak to me.’ She stepped back inside the door to get a better look at them. ‘I have to say I don’t like the look of you.’
Her face remained unmoved as she spoke, and her accent revealed even more strongly its origins far south of Venice.
One of the tenets of the mental identikit Brunetti possessed held that southerners, even the children, always recognized policemen, and so he asked, smiling as he did so, ‘Is that because we’re men or because we’re big, or because we’re policemen?’
She stepped back further and nodded to them to enter. She closed the door after them and said, ‘I know already that Costanza’s dead, so any policeman who comes saying he’s a friend of hers is lying in order to get information. That’s why I don’t like the look of you. I don’t care how big you are.’
Brunetti was struck with a sudden sympathy for the people he had outwitted in questioning and admired this woman, who had made child’s play of his attempt; further, he admired her directness in telling him her feelings. ‘I’m not a friend of her son’s, either, Madre,’ he confessed. ‘But I did just speak to him, and he asked me to come and tell you what happened.’
The nun did not respond to his frankness but turned and led them into what must once have been the over-furnished sitting room of a private apartment. From the back, she appeared even smaller; Brunetti noticed she favoured her right leg when she walked. The sofas and chairs were covered with thick brown velvet and had feet carved to look like the paws of lions. A closer look revealed that many of the toes were missing, and some of the chairs had grease spots on the backrests and bald spots on the arms, with some of the patches surrounded by horizontal tears in the fabric. The baldness was repeated on the enormous Kashan that covered the floor from wall to wall.
The nun pointed to two of the easy chairs and gingerly took her place facing them on a hard wooden chair, careful not to bend her right leg. Their chairs had sagged with age and use to such a degree that their heads, when they sat down, were on a level with hers.
Brunetti leaned to his side to reach for his wallet in order to show her his warrant card, but she forestalled him by saying, ‘I don’t need to see it, Signore. I know policemen when I see them.’
Brunetti abandoned the attempt and tried to sit upright, but his position was so constricting that he got to his feet and sat on the arm of the chair. ‘I was called last night when Signora Altavilla’s body was found, and I went to her apartment. I spoke to her neighbour,’ he said, and the nun nodded, suggesting that she knew the woman and her closeness to Signora Altavilla or that she knew about the phone call.
‘The autopsy that was performed this morning …’ he began and saw the nun’s eyes contract. ‘… suggests that she died of a heart attack.’ He paused and looked in her direction.
‘Suggests?’ Madre Rosa asked.
‘There was a cut on her forehead, which the pathologist thinks must have happened when she fell. I was there last night and saw that she had fallen close to a radiator: that might explain it.’ She nodded, understanding, but not necessarily believing.
Brunetti noticed then something he had not seen since he was a boy in elementary school: she reached under her long white scapular and pulled up the string of rosary beads she wore at her side. She held them as she looked at him, then let one of them slip through her fingers, and then another. He had no idea if she was praying or merely touching them to give herself strength and comfort. Finally she said only, ‘Might explain?’
Brunetti, as he always did when people caught him in prevarication, gave an easy, relaxed smile. ‘We won’t know what happened until the physical evidence from her apartment is examined.’
‘And you won’t know it then, either, will you?’ she asked. ‘Not for sure, that is.’
Brunetti watched Vianello cross and uncross his legs, then he got to his feet, as well. He put his hands on his hips and bent backwards, and when he came forward again, he said, ‘Madre, if we could use one of these chairs for people we’re questioning, I think we’d save a great deal of our time. And have a great deal more success.’
She tried to stop herself from smiling, but she failed. Then she surprised them both by saying, in purest Veneziano, ‘Ti xe na bronsa coverta.’ Hearing her so effortlessly go from her accented Italian to perfectly pronounced dialect surprised both of the men into answering smiles. Her assessment was accurate: Vianello was much like the embers in a covered brazier. One never knew what brightness lurked there or what light might break forth from his invisible silence.
Almost as if she disapproved of the way the mood had lightened and wanted to put an end to that, she erased her smile. She glanced between them, and Brunetti saw the wariness return to her face. ‘What is it you’d like to know about Costanza?’ she asked. The raising of her guard had aged her: she stiffened her back against the muscles that had allowed her to lean forward, and her face sagged tiredly.
Vianello imitated Brunetti by sitting on the thick arm of his chair. He took his notebook from his side pocket, opened his pen, and prepared to take notes. ‘We don’t know anything at all about her, Madre Rosa,’ Brunetti said. ‘Her neighbour and her son both praised her.’
‘I don’t doubt that,’ she said.
When it seemed she had no more to say, Brunetti went on, ‘I’d like to know something about her, Madre.’ Again he waited for the nun to say something, but she did not.
‘Was she popular with the people here?’ he asked, waving his hand to encompass the entire home.
The nun answered almost at once. ‘She was generous with her time. She was retired, I think in her mid-sixties, so she had a life of her own, but still she listened to them. She took some of them out for walks, down to the riva, even on to the boats if they wanted that.’ Brunetti gave no hint of the surprise with which her sudden loquacity filled him.
Neither man responded, so she added, ‘Sometimes she’d spend the morning watching the boats go by while they talked, or sit with them in their rooms here and listen to them. She’d let them talk to her for hours, and she always paid attention to what they said. Asked questions, remembered what they’d told her on previous visits.’ She waved a hand towards the door of the room in imitation of Brunetti’s gesture. ‘It makes them feel important, to think that what they say is interesting and that someone will remember it.’ Brunetti wondered if she included herself among those who would listen to and remember their stories, or if it would make her feel important to have someone remember what she said.
‘Did she treat them all the same way?’ Brunetti asked.
He saw that she wasn’t prepared for this question and didn’t like it when she heard it. Perhaps she disapproved of friendships with the old people; perhaps she simply disapproved of friendships. ‘Yes. Of course,’ she said; Brunetti noticed that she clenched the rosary in her fist: no more easy flow of beads.
‘No special friends?’ Brunetti enquired.
‘No,’ she said instantly. ‘Patients aren’t friends. She knew the danger of that.’
Confused, Vianello asked, ‘What danger?’
‘Many of them are lonely,’ she said. ‘And many of them have families that are waiting for them to die so they can have their money or their homes.’ She waited for a moment, as if to see if they would be shocked that a nun could speak with this bleak clarity. In the face of their silence, she continued, ‘So the danger is that they will become too attached to people who treat them well. Costanza …’ she began but did not finish whatever it was she intended to say. Instead, she changed back to her original subject and said, ‘They can be very difficult, old
people.’
‘I know,’ Brunetti agreed, omitting any reference to how he had learned this truth. Then, after a short pause, he said, ‘But I’m afraid – and I say this with all respect – that you haven’t told us very much about her.’
Madre Rosa gave a wry grimace. ‘I shouldn’t say this, Signore, and I hope the Lord will pardon me for having thought it, but if you knew how difficult many of the people here can be, perhaps you’d understand. It’s very easy to be kind to people who are kind themselves or who are appreciative of kindness, but that is not always the case.’ From the tired resignation with which the nun said this, Brunetti realized hers was the voice of long experience. He also realised that this was all she was going to say.
Brunetti and Vianello exchanged a look and, as if by mutual agreement, got to their feet. In a way, Brunetti’s thoughts also shook themselves out and stood up straight. They had come all the way down here, and all this woman had done was speak of Signora Altavilla’s patience and had been anything but forthcoming in doing so. For their purposes, they had learned next to nothing about Signora Altavilla, though peace be on her soul. ‘Thank you, Madre,’ Brunetti said, not sure whether he should offer his hand to her or not. She made the decision for him, confining herself to a nod, first to him and then to Vianello, her hands safely tucked under her scapular, then turned and led them towards the front entrance.
She paused at the door as she said, ‘I hope you’ll convey my condolences to her son. I never met him, but Costanza spoke about him from time to time and always had good things to say.’ Then, as if answering some unspoken question on their part, she added, ‘It sounds as though he’s inherited her terrible honesty.’
‘What do you mean by that, Madre?’ Brunetti asked.
It took her a long time to answer, so long that she had to shift her weight to her left side as she stood there. When she finally spoke, she answered with a question. ‘You hear I’m from the South, don’t you?’
Both men nodded.
‘We have different ideas about honesty than you do up here,’ she said obliquely.