About Face

by Donna Leon

  She blinked, and her eyes stayed closed perhaps a second too long. When she opened them, she was looking in Brunetti’s direction. And she recognized him.

  He thought she might nod, perhaps smile, but she gave no sign of knowing him. Then it occurred to him that she might say something to Terrasini, but she did not move. She could have been a statue, gazing at another statue. After some time she looked back at the cards in front of Terrasini. The game resumed, but this time it was the croupier who finished with the chips in front of him, and so with the next hand, and the next. Then the man to Terrasini’s right and then the one to his left won, and then it was again the turn of the croupier.

  The chips in front of the young man melted away until there was only one pile, which grew smaller, and then it was gone. Terrasini pushed his chair back and all but jumped to his feet: his chair fell backwards to the floor. He slammed the palms of both hands on to the cloth of the table and leaned forward to shout at the croupier. ‘You can’t do that. You can’t do that.’

  Suddenly Vasco – Brunetti had no idea where he had come from – and another man were on either side of Terrasini, helping him stand upright and talking to him in low voices. Brunetti noticed how white were the knuckles of Vasco’s right hand and how the cloth of Terrasini’s sleeve wrinkled even more than had Franca Marinello’s dress.

  The three men started towards the door, Vasco leaning down and speaking to Terrasini all the while, his expression friendly and relaxed, as if he and his assistant were helping a client to his water taxi. The woman in the yellow dress moved quickly towards the table, righted the chair and set it back in place. She sat, put her purse in front of her, opened it and took out a handful of chips.

  Brunetti saw Griffoni heading for the door, caught her eye, and hurried to join her. Franca Marinello was a few steps in front of them, walking quickly in the direction of the three men, who had reached the door. Still walking, Vasco shot a quick glance back into the room. When he saw the police approaching, he abandoned his smile and hurried the young man down the first ramp of steps. Marinello followed them, accompanied by the low sound of voices from the gambling room.

  The men stopped at the first landing, and Vasco spoke to Terrasini, who nodded, head still lowered. Vasco and the other man exchanged a look over the young man’s head and, as if they had practised the move many times, let go of his arms at the same moment and stepped away from him.

  Marinello pushed past Vasco’s assistant and went to stand next to Terrasini. She put a hand on his arm. It looked to Brunetti as if it took him a moment to recognize her, and when he did, he appeared to relax. Seeing the situation defused, Vasco and his assistant started back up the stairs; they stopped before they reached Brunetti and Griffoni, two steps above them.

  She bent her head close to Terrasini and said something. Startled, Terrasini looked up at the four people, and Brunetti thought he saw Marinello’s lips move as she spoke again. Terrasini’s right hand moved so slowly that Brunetti could not believe what he was doing until he saw his hand fumble under the front of his jacket and emerge holding the pistol.

  Terrasini shouted, Vasco and his assistant looked back, then flattened themselves on the stairs. Griffoni moved to the railing, as far from Brunetti as possible, pistol already in her hand. Brunetti took his and pointed it at the slow-moving Terrasini, saying, in a voice he worked to keep calm and authoritative, ‘Antonio, there are two of us.’ He did not allow himself to consider what would happen if the three of them opened fire in this enclosed space, how the bullets would ricochet against surfaces, hard or soft, until their energy was entirely spent.

  As if coming out of a daze, Terrasini looked from Griffoni to Brunetti, then at Marinello and at the two men huddled on the stairs, and then back to Brunetti.

  ‘Put the gun on the floor, Antonio. There are too many people here and it’s dangerous.’ Brunetti saw that Terrasini was listening to him, but he wondered what it was that made his eyes so dull: drugs, or drink, or rage, or all three. Tone was probably more important than what he said – that and keeping the young man’s attention.

  Signora Marinello took a small step towards Terrasini and said something Brunetti could not hear. Very slowly, she raised her hand, placed it on his left cheek, and turned his face in her direction. Again, she spoke to him, and put out her hand. Her lips pulled back and she gave a small, encouraging nod.

  Terrasini narrowed his eyes, suddenly confused. He looked at his hand, seemed almost surprised to see the gun there, and let his hand drop halfway to his knee. In ordinary circumstances, Brunetti would have approached them, but her presence near the young man kept him at a cautious distance, gun still raised.

  Again she spoke. The young man handed the gun to her, shaking his head in what appeared to Brunetti to be confusion. She took the gun with her left hand and transferred it to her right.

  Brunetti lowered his own pistol and began to slip it into his holster. When he returned his attention to the people on the landing, he saw Terrasini look at her in astonishment and then pull his right hand back and make a fist. His left hand shot out and grabbed her just at the point where the shoulder becomes the throat, and Brunetti realized what he was going to do.

  She shot him. She shot him in the stomach once and then again, and when he was lying on the floor at her feet, she took a step towards him and shot him in the face. Her dress was pale grey and long: the first two shots stained the silk at her stomach, and the third one sprinkled red droplets just above the hem.

  In the stairwell, the noise was deafening. Brunetti looked at Griffoni, whose mouth moved, but the only sound he heard was a loud buzz that did not stop, even after Griffoni’s mouth closed.

  Vasco and his assistant scrambled to their feet, looked down at the landing, where Franca Marinello stood, the pistol still in her hand. They turned and, as one, vaulted up the stairs and through the doors into the gaming room, from which no sound emerged. Brunetti saw the double doors close and vibrate with the force, but still all he could hear was the buzz.

  Brunetti looked back at the landing. Franca Marinello tossed the gun negligently on to Terrasini’s chest, looked up at him, and said words he could not hear, trapped as he was inside this bell jar of unrelenting noise.

  He heard something beside him, something dull and leaden that managed to penetrate the buzz, and turned to see Griffoni approach: it must have been her footsteps on the steps. ‘You all right?’ Brunetti asked. Griffoni understood and she nodded.

  Brunetti saw that Franca Marinello was crouched against the wall, as far as she could be from Terrasini’s body, face pressed into her knees. No one had certified that the young man was dead, but Brunetti knew it was a body that lay there, blood seeping on to the marble behind his head.

  He was surprised at the stiffness in his knees and at how reluctant they were to take him down the steps. He could feel, but still not hear, his footsteps. Avoiding Terrasini, he knelt on one knee beside the woman. He waited until he was sure she was aware of him near her and then said, glad to be able to hear his own voice, however faintly, ‘Are you all right, Signora?’

  She raised her head and presented him with her face, never before seen so close to. The tilted eyes looked all the stranger for being so near, and he suddenly noticed a thin scar starting just below her left ear and disappearing behind it.

  ‘Did you have time to read the Fasti?’ she asked, and Brunetti wondered if this were a sign of shock.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ve had so little time.’

  ‘Pity,’ she said. ‘It’s all there. Everything.’ She lowered her head to her knees.

  Brunetti found himself with nothing to say. He got to his feet and turned towards a sound from above, again swept with relief that he could hear it. He saw Vasco at the top of the stairs, looking enormous from this angle, like a character in an action film, like a cartoon figure of Conan the Barbarian, like . . .

  ‘I called your people,’ he said. ‘They should be here soon.’

&
nbsp; Brunetti’s eyes fell to the top of the head of the silent woman and, on the other side of the landing, the eternally quiet body. Terrasini lay on his back. Looking at him, Brunetti thought of that other corpse, Guarino, and to the terrible resemblance between these two men so quickly, so terribly, stripped of life.

  26

  After a few minutes’ sensation, Vasco managed to calm the people in the gaming rooms at the head of the stairs by telling them there had been an accident. Willing to believe it, they went back to what they were losing, and life went on.

  Claudia Griffoni went back to the Questura with Signora Marinello, she also enveloped in a long fur, the same one she had been wearing the night Brunetti first saw her. He waited while the technical crew set up their cameras on the stairs. Two police officers having witnessed the shooting, the technicians did little more than photograph the scene and put the pistol in a plastic evidence bag, then wait for the medico legale to arrive.

  He called Paola a little before three and told her sleep-fogged voice that he would not be back for some time. After Terrasini was declared dead, Brunetti asked the technical squad if they would take him back with them but chose to stay on deck with the pilot. Neither man spoke; the motor seemed unaccountably low until Brunetti remembered the three shots and the odd dislocation of sound that followed them. He looked at the façades of the buildings they passed, not really seeing them, for he was back on the stairs, watching, and not understanding, what happened.

  Franca Marinello spoke to Terrasini and he took out the gun, then she spoke again, and he gave it to her. And then, while Brunetti was looking away, something happened – did she say something? – that maddened him. And then she used the gun. Everything, Brunetti knew, was subject to rational explanation. Cause was followed by effect. The autopsy would determine what substances were in the young man’s brain, but at least when Brunetti was watching him, he had been responding to words, not to chemicals.

  The launch swung into the Rio di San Lorenzo and pulled up at the dock of the Questura. Brunetti looked into the cabin of the boat and saw the two attendants getting to their feet. Did they talk to one another, he wondered, on their way back from these trips?

  He thanked the pilot and jumped off the still-moving boat. He knocked on the door of the Questura, and the night man let him in, saying, ‘Commissario Griffoni is in her office, sir.’

  He went up the stairs and then followed the beacon of light from her door at the end of the dark hallway. He paused at the door but did not knock. ‘Come in, Guido,’ she said.

  A clock on the wall to the left of her desk told him it was three-thirty. ‘If you gave me a coffee, I’d shoot Patta and have you promoted to his job,’ she said, looking up, and then smiled.

  ‘They didn’t tell us, when we took these jobs, about this part of it, did they?’ he said, crossing the room and sitting opposite her. ‘What did she say?’

  Griffoni ran both hands through her hair in a gesture he had seen her make towards the end of Patta’s meetings, a sign that her patience was running short. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Nothing?’ Brunetti asked. ‘How much time did you spend with her?’

  ‘I brought her back here in the boat, but she didn’t say anything except thank you to the pilot, and then to the man who opened the door, and then to me.’ She moved her hands towards her head but stopped herself and said, ‘I told her she could call her lawyer if she wanted to, but all she said was, “No, thank you. I’d prefer to wait until the morning”, like a teenager caught for drunk driving who didn’t want to wake her parents up.’ She shook her head, either at the comparison or at Marinello’s behaviour.

  ‘I told her she could leave if her lawyer came and she made a statement in my presence, but she said she wanted to talk to you. She was perfectly polite – I even liked her – but she refused to say anything, and there was nothing I could do to make her change her mind. I’d ask her, and she’d say thank you but no. It’s strange, really. And that face.’

  ‘Where is she?’ Brunetti asked, not wanting to enter into that discussion.

  ‘Downstairs, in one of the interview rooms.’

  Ordinarily, these rooms would have been called ‘interrogation rooms’. Brunetti wondered what made her use the less threatening description, but that was not something he wanted to talk about, either.

  ‘I’ll go down,’ he said, getting to his feet. He held out his hand. ‘Could you give me the key?’

  She opened her hands in a helpless gesture. ‘The door’s not locked. As soon as she went in, she sat down and took a book out of her bag and started to read. I couldn’t do it, couldn’t lock the door.’ Brunetti smiled at her, liking her for her weakness. ‘Besides, Giuffrè’s down there, and she’d have to go past him if she tried to leave.’

  ‘All right, Claudia. Maybe you should go home and get some sleep. Thanks. And thanks for coming tonight.’

  She looked up at him and asked, unable to hide her nervousness, ‘Your ears? Are they still ringing?’

  ‘No. Are yours?’

  ‘Not really. But there’s a small buzz. It’s much less than it was, but a little bit of it’s still there.’

  ‘Get some sleep, then go over to the hospital in the morning and tell them what happened. There might be something they can tell you.’

  ‘Thanks, Guido, I will,’ she said and reached to switch off her desk lamp. She got to her feet and Brunetti helped her into her coat and waited for her at the door to her office. Not speaking, they went down the stairs together. On the ground floor, she said good-night. Brunetti turned down the corridor towards the single light that came from the door of one of the rooms at the end.

  He paused and glanced in, and Franca Marinello looked up from her book.

  ‘Good morning,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry you had to wait for me.’

  ‘Oh, that’s all right. I don’t sleep a lot any more, and I had a book with me, so it doesn’t matter.’

  ‘But you’d be more comfortable at home, I’m sure.’

  ‘Yes, surely that’s true. But I thought you might think it important that we talk tonight.’

  ‘Yes, I think it is,’ he said, coming into the room.

  As if it were her salon, she nodded to the chair across from her, and he sat. She closed her book and laid it on the table, but he could not see the spine and so had no idea what it was.

  She had seen his glance. ‘Psellus’s Chronographia,’ she said, placing a hand on the book. Brunetti recognized the author and the title, but no more than that. ‘It’s about decline,’ she told him.

  It was late, almost four, and he longed for sleep. This was not the time or the occasion for the discussion of books. ‘I’d like to talk to you about the events of this evening, if I might,’ Brunetti said soberly.

  She turned to the side as if to try to look around him. ‘Isn’t there supposed to be someone with a tape recorder, or at least a stenographer?’ she asked lightly, hoping to make it sound like a joke.

  ‘I suppose there should be, but that can wait until later. I’d like you to speak to your lawyer first.’

  ‘But isn’t this a policeman’s dream, Commissario?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he said, his patience slipping, and he too tired to disguise that fact.

  ‘A suspect willing to talk to him without a tape recorder and without a lawyer?’

  ‘I’m not sure what you’re suspected of, Signora,’ he said, trying to say it lightly, if only to change the mood, probably failing, he realized. ‘And nothing you say has much value, simply because it isn’t being recorded or filmed, and so you will always be able to deny having said it.’

  ‘I’m afraid I long to say it,’ she said. He saw that she had become serious, even sober, but her face gave no sign of that, only her voice.

  ‘I’d appreciate it, then, if you’d tell me.’

  ‘I killed a man tonight, Commissario.’

  ‘I know. I saw you do it, Signora.’

  ‘H
ow did you interpret what happened?’ she asked, as if she were asking him what he thought of a film they had both seen.

  ‘I’m afraid that’s irrelevant. What counts is what happened.’

  ‘But you saw what happened. I shot him.’

  He felt a wave of tiredness wash over him. He had climbed up and into that storage tank, seen Pucetti’s hand, skin hanging off, seen his blood on the bandages. And he’d watched her shoot and kill a man, and he was too tired to endure this talk, talk, talk.

  ‘And I saw you speak to him, and each time he did something different.’

  ‘What did you see him do, then?’

  ‘I saw him look up at us as though you’d warned him we were there, and then you said something else and he gave you the gun, and then after you had it, I saw him pull his hand back as if he were going to hit you.’

  ‘He was going to hit me, Commissario. Please don’t let there be any question of that.’

  ‘Could you tell me why?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Signora, what I think or don’t think doesn’t matter, I’m afraid. What matters is that Commissario Griffoni and I saw that he was going to hit you.’

  She surprised him by saying, ‘It’s a pity you still haven’t read it.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘The Fasti: ‘The Flight of the King’. I know it’s a minor work, but some other writers found him interesting. I’d like the piece to get the just attention it deserves.’

  ‘Signora,’ Brunetti snapped, pushing his chair back and getting angrily to his feet. ‘It’s almost four o’clock in the morning, and I’m tired. I’m tired of being out in the cold for most of the night and, if you don’t mind my saying so, I’m tired of playing literary cat and mouse with you.’ He wanted to be at home, warm, in his bed, asleep, with no buzzing in his ear and no provocation of any sort, from anyone.