by Donna Leon
She sat back in her chair, looked at Brunetti, looked at the flowers, and said, ‘Poor things. I shouldn’t take it out on them.’
‘I don’t think you have anything to take out on anything,’ he said.
‘You wouldn’t say that if you had seen her reaction,’ she insisted.
‘What are you going to do?’ he asked.
‘I’d like to take a look at whatever it is that aroused your curiosity about the judge.’
14
Signorina Elettra came back to his office with him, where he gave her the sheets of paper that had come to him from the Tribunale. He explained what he had made of the delays in certain cases heard by Judge Coltellini and pointed to Fontana’s signature at the bottom of the papers.
‘Child’s play,’ she said in reference to the system used by the Ministry of Justice to preserve the integrity of the judicial system. Looking at Fontana’s signature, she said, ‘You know, I’ve begun to think there’s something strange about the way Fontana behaved with the judge.’
‘Unrequited love is always strange to the people who don’t feel it,’ Brunetti observed, conscious of sounding more sententious than Polonius.
‘That’s just it,’ Signorina Elettra said, looking at him. ‘I’m not sure it is unrequited love.’
‘Then what is it?’
‘I don’t know,’ she answered. She crossed her arms and tapped the corner of the papers idly against her lower lip. ‘I’ve seen unrequited love,’ she said, failing to explain from which side. ‘At first I thought that’s what it was, but the more I think about it, the more it seems like something different. He’s too abject, too servile when he speaks to her: even a man as dull as he is would realize that no one likes to be talked to that way.’
‘Some people do,’ Brunetti said.
‘I know, I know. But she doesn’t. That much is clear. One thing I didn’t tell you — it’s really embarrassing to talk about it — was the way he kept offering to get her things: a coffee, a glass of water, a pastry. It was as if he felt indebted to her, but in an odd way.’
‘If they’re in this together, then she’s probably already getting the bigger share of whatever’s being paid,’ Brunetti said, admitting to both of them the interpretation he had made of the lists he had been sent. ‘So she’s the one who should be paying for the coffees.’
‘No, no,’ Signorina Elettra said, shaking away both his interpretation and his attempt at humour. ‘It’s not as if he thinks he can actually pay her back. It’s as if there’s some great gaping hole between them and all he can think of doing is to try to fill it up, though it’s so big he knows he never can.’ She thought for a moment, then added, ‘No, that’s not it, either. He’s grateful to her, but grateful the way people are when the Madonna answers a prayer. It’s embarrassing to see it.’
‘Did your friend Umberto notice this?’
‘If he did, he didn’t comment. And I was so eager to get away that I didn’t ask him. Besides, I dreaded the thought of standing on the riva, in the sun, and talking to him for a minute longer. All I wanted to do was get in the gondola and get to the other side.’
Brunetti couldn’t resist asking, ‘Is that how Umberto treats you — like the Madonna?’
‘Oh no,’ she said, without a pause. ‘For him, it’s unrequited love.’
Neither that day nor the next did Signorina Elettra manage to discover anything about the cause of the postponements in the law cases listed on the paper. The computer system at the Courthouse was down, and because the two people who were in charge of it were on vacation, the database would not be available for at least a week. Unfortunately, this exclusion applied equally, she discovered, to both authorized and unauthorized attempts to consult the information it contained.
Hoping for some news of success before he went on vacation, Brunetti called down to her and asked if she had had time to follow up on Fontana’s landlord, Marco Puntera. She came close to apologizing for not having been able to do so, explaining that her friend no longer worked at the bank and she had been so busy drawing up Vice-Questore Patta’s instructions for the holiday period that she had been too busy to see what she could find about Signor Puntera. She promised to get to it when the Vice-Questore was safely off to the island of Ponza, where he and his family were to be guests of the head of the city council of Venice, who had a summer home there.
‘Yet another way to ensure the complete objectivity of the forces of order in any investigation of local politicians,’ Brunetti said when he heard the name of Patta’s host.
‘I’m sure the Vice-Questore is resistant to blandishments of any kind,’ Signorina Elettra said in response to Brunetti’s suggestion. ‘You know how often he speaks of the need to avoid even the possibility of favouritism of any sort.’
‘I know well how he speaks of it,’ Brunetti said, and then they turned their attention to his absence during vacation and what needed to be done while Brunetti was gone. She wished him a buona vacanza and said she’d see him in two weeks.
Taking her good wishes as permission to leave, Brunetti went home and began to pack things other than books.
The next morning, the Brunettis got the 9:50 Eurostar, changed in Verona, and headed north with mounting enthusiasm. In Bolzano, they would change to a local train to Merano, and then the Vinchgau trenino to Malles, where the car would be waiting for them. Soon after they left Verona, they were travelling through a universe of grapevines. There was some poem that Brunetti had been forced to read in his third-year English class, something about cannon on the left and cannon on the right; only in this case it was grapevines, kilometre after kilometre of them, all pruned to an identical size; and for all he knew, the grapes as well identical in variety and size.
The time passed as time does in a train: Brunetti, happy to be in open country, looked out the window; Chiara talked to the two young people sharing the compartment with them; while Raffi, seated opposite his mother in one of the centre seats, hid under his headphones, occasionally nodding his head to the rhythm. At one point, as his head took on a particularly metronomic beat, Paola glanced up from her book and managed to confuse the five other people in the compartment by saying, in English, ‘Unheard melodies are indeed sweeter’, whereupon she returned her attentions to the observations of Mr James.
Brunetti tuned in and out of the conversation taking place between his daughter and the people sitting in the window seats. He gathered that they were going to spend two weeks with friends in Bolzano, where they would listen to music and rest. Since both of them had remarked on how easy school was and how boring life in general was, Brunetti was tempted to ask them what they were going to rest from, but he instead devoted his attention to the grapes. Miniature tractors were patrolling the aisles between the rows of vines, spraying them. As the train began to slow for its approach into Trento, he noticed that the driver of one of the tractors was wearing the same sort of white protective suit that the crime squad wore, save that his entire head was covered with a hood and a mask.
Brunetti tapped Paola’s knee to get her attention and pointed out the window. ‘Looks like a Martian, doesn’t he?’ Brunetti asked.
Paola stared out the window for some time, then looked across at Brunetti. ‘See why we eat bio fruit?’ she asked.
As if the name of an edible item had penetrated his headphones and prompted an instinct never in abeyance, Raffi said in a surprisingly loud voice, ‘I’m hungry.’ Paola, like the cliché mother of an Italian film of the fifties, believed that food bought on a train was harmful and so had packed an enormous carrying case with sandwiches, fruit, mineral water, a half-bottle of red wine, and more sandwiches.
At a sign from his mother, Raffi got the bag down from the rack above their heads. He opened it and started handing sandwiches to everyone in the compartment, including the two young people who, after the obligatory initial refusal, accepted them gladly. There were prosciutto and tomato, prosciutto and olive, mozzarella and tomato, egg salad, tuna
fish and olives, and other variations on these ingredients. Raffi filled six paper cups with water and passed them around.
Brunetti found himself suddenly overwhelmed with joy. At peace, heading north, he was surrounded by all he loved and treasured in the world. They were all healthy; they were all safe. For two weeks he could walk in the mountains, eat Speck and strudel, sleep under an eiderdown while the rest of the world broiled, and read to his heart’s content. He looked out the window and saw that the grapevines had been replaced by apple trees.
Conversation among the young people grew general. The young couple were profuse in their thanks to Paola, spoke to her, and to Brunetti, with respect, addressing them as ‘Lei,’ though they had automatically used ‘Tu’ with Chiara and Raffi. A great deal of their conversation had a hermetic quality to Brunetti, who understood almost none of their references and found that some of their adjectives made no sense to him. From context, he inferred that ‘refatto’ was meant as positive praise, while nothing could be worse than to be considered ‘scrauso’.
They pulled out of Trento, still on time, and Raffi started to hand out bananas and plums.
Ten minutes later, the train now flanked by marching apple trees, Brunetti’s phone rang. He toyed for an instant with letting it ring, but then pulled it out of the side pocket of Paola’s bag, where he had stuffed it when they were leaving the house.
‘Pronto,’ he answered.
‘Is that you, Guido?’ he heard a female voice ask.
‘Yes. Who’s this?’
‘Claudia,’ she answered, and it took Brunetti a moment to place voice together with first name and realize it was Commissario Claudia Griffoni, who, as the last commissario in order of seniority, had been assigned to remain on duty during the Ferragosto vacation.
‘What is it?’ he asked, his imagination spared having to fear the worst by the presence of his family there with him.
‘We’ve got a murder, Guido. It looks as if it might have been a mugging that went wrong.’
‘What happened?’ He saw Paola’s hand on his knee and only then realized that he was looking at the floor to curtain himself off from the other people in the carriage.
There was a sudden gap on the line, and then Griffoni’s voice floated back. ‘He was just inside the courtyard of his house, so he might have been pushed inside after he opened the door, or someone could have been waiting for him there.’
Brunetti made an interrogative noise, and Griffoni continued. ‘It looks as if someone knocked him down and then hit his head against a statue.’
‘Who found him?’
‘One of the men in the building, when he went downstairs to take his dog out. About seven-thirty this morning.’
‘Why wasn’t I called?’ Brunetti demanded.
‘When the call came in, the man on duty checked the roster and saw that you were on vacation. Scarpa was the only one here at the time, so he went over. He’s only just called to report it.’
Brunetti glanced up then and saw that the three people sitting opposite — his wife, his son, and the young girl near the window — were staring at him, eyes owl-open with curiosity. He got to his feet, slid the door open, and went out into the corridor, sliding the door closed behind him.
‘Where is he now?’
There was another snap in the line. ‘Excuse me?’ Griffoni said.
‘Where’s the dead man now?’
‘At the morgue in the hospital.’
‘What’s happening at the place where he was killed?’
‘The crime team went over,’ she began, and then her voice faded away for a few seconds. When it returned, she was saying, ‘. . situation is complicated. Three families live in the building, and there’s only the one door to the calle. Scarpa managed to keep them from coming into the courtyard until the team had gone over it, but by ten this morning he had to let them out of the building.’
Brunetti chose to make no comment on how this would contaminate the scene or at least present a legal pretext for any future defence attorney to call the evidence into question. Only on television crime shows was forensic evidence accepted without question.
‘Scarpa’s still there,’ she said. ‘He went over with a few others. He took Alvise.’
‘Might as well set up a boat stop at the place where it happened,’ said a disgusted Brunetti. ‘Who’s doing the autopsy?’
Again, the line broke up. ‘. . asked for Rizzardi,’ she said, showing again that her short time at the Questura had not been wasted.
‘Can he do it?’
‘I hope so. His name wasn’t on the roster, but at least that other idiot has been away on vacation for a week and didn’t leave a contact number.’
‘No way to speak of the assistant medico legale of the city, Commissario,’ Brunetti said.
‘That arrogant idiot, then, Commissario,’ she corrected.
Brunetti let it pass in silent agreement. ‘I’ll come back.’
‘I hoped you would,’ she said with audible relief. ‘Most people are away, and I didn’t want to end up working this with Scarpa.’ Then, to details. ‘How? Do you want me to call Bolzano and have them send you back in one of their squad cars?’
Brunetti looked at his watch and asked,’ Where are you?’
‘In my office. Why?’
‘Take a look at the train schedule and see when the next train going south from Bolzano leaves.’
‘Don’t you want a car?’ she asked.
‘I’d love a car, believe me. But once in a while you can see the autostrada from the train, and nothing’s moving in either direction on certain parts of it. The train would be faster.’
She muttered something, and then he heard the phone being set down. He listened to the gaps, which seemed to be related to the closeness of the train to high power lines. But then he heard Griffoni say, ‘The EuroCity from Munich to Venice is scheduled to leave one minute after your train gets in.’
‘Good,’ Brunetti said. ‘Call the station in Bolzano and tell them to hold it. We should be there in twelve minutes, so I’ll just get from this one to that one and be back in four hours or so.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’ll call you back.’
Brunetti broke the connection, leaned against the window to the compartment where his family sat, and studied the mountains that soared up above the unbroken fields of apple trees.
After they had passed many fields, his phone rang and Griffoni said, ‘That train’s ten minutes late, so if yours is on time, you’ll make it easily. It’ll be on track four.’
‘I have to take my family to their train, so call them and tell them to have it wait until I get there.’
‘All right,’ she said. ‘Someone will meet you at this end.’
Brunetti pocketed his phone and turned to open the door to the compartment.
15
Later, as he sat on the train carrying him back to Venice, Brunetti reflected upon the way human nature could still surprise him: the young people had insisted on helping them carry their luggage to the connecting train, a conductor having met them and told Brunetti that the train to Venice would be delayed another ten minutes. When his family was aboard, the two young people disappeared, asking nothing about his mysterious reason for returning immediately to Venice. Brunetti kissed Paola and the children, promised he would come north again as soon as possible, and stood back from their train as it carried them off to Merano, to the mountains, and to the delights of sleeping under eiderdowns in the middle of August.
His own train back to Venice gave the same sensation, but intermittently, for the air conditioning was working only when it pleased, alternating blasts of tropical air with those more accurately described as arctic. The windows in the new trains did not open, so he and the other three people in the first-class compartment to which the conductor had taken him sat as if on some means of transport that alternated stops between Calcutta and Ulan Bator. Brunetti had sent his suitcase, and thus his sweaters, along with the family
, so when the train was anywhere near Ulan Bator, he was forced to flee into the corridor, which was at least consistent in temperature, however elevated that temperature might be.
For the moment therefore, he could neither read in peace nor think calmly of the situation in Venice and what it might be necessary to do when he got there. He finally went down to the dining car, where the air conditioning was working perfectly, and sat and read the newspaper while drinking two coffees and a bottle of mineral water.
When the train pulled into Mestre, he called Griffoni’s number and was glad to hear that she would meet him at the railway station with a launch.
‘Vianello?’ he asked, knowing his friend was on vacation but hoping that Griffoni would have thought of phoning him.
‘I called him after I spoke to you. He knows someone in the Guardia Costiera, and they’ve got permission to enter Croatian waters to pick him up and bring him back.’
‘Who does he know?’ Brunetti asked.
‘All he said was that it was someone he went to school with,’ she explained.
‘Good. Thanks.’
The train started to move out of the station, and Brunetti broke the connection. As they crossed the bridge, his attention was distracted by enormous patches of seaweed clogging the surface of the water on both sides. The higher tide of the early morning had obscured them, but there was no hiding them now. They spent minutes travelling past them, and still they did not end. A few plastic bottles bobbed in the flat green mass which spread out relentlessly on both sides and which appeared to extend beneath the bridge, as well. Boats steered clear of it. No floating water birds went anywhere near it. Like a neglected patch of eczema, it grew.
He saw the police launch moored directly in front of the station and hastened down the steps towards it. So comfortable had he become in the dining car that it took him a moment to recognize the sensation of invasive heat. His shirt was stuck to his back before he reached the boat, and he was annoyed to realize he had packed his new sunglasses and left them in the suitcase that had, by now, arrived at an altitude of 1,450 metres on the Alp above Glorenza.