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‘Commissario Brunetti.’
Again he listened to the slow, angry rasp of metal on metal as she pulled back the heavy bolts that secured the door. She pulled it toward her. The sharp increase in humidity forced her to give it an upward tug in the middle of its arc to lift it from the uneven floor. Still wearing the overcoat, though it was now buttoned tight, she didn’t bother to ask him what he wanted. She stepped back enough to allow him to enter, then slammed the door behind him. Again she bolted it securely before turning to lead him down the narrow passageway. In the kitchen, he went and sat near the stove, and she stopped to kick the rags back into place beneath the door.
She shuffled to her chair and collapsed into it, to be immediately enveloped in the waiting scarves and shawls.
‘You’re back.’
‘Yes.’
‘What do you want?’
‘What I came for last time.’
‘And what’s that? I’m an old woman, and I don’t remember things.’ The intelligence in her eyes belied that.
‘I’d like some information about your sister.’
Without bothering to ask which one he meant, she said, ‘What do you want to know?’
‘I don’t want to make you remember your grief, Signora, but I need to know more about Wellauer so that I can understand why he died.’
‘And if he deserved to die?’
‘Signora, we all deserve to die, but no one should get to decide for us when that will be.’
‘Oh, my.’ She chuckled dryly. ‘You’re a real Jesuit, aren’t you? And who decided when my sister would die? And who decided how?’ As suddenly as her anger had flared up, it died, and she asked, ‘What do you want to know?’
‘I know of your relation with him. I know that he was said to be the father of your sister’s child. And I know that she died in Rome in 1939.’
‘She didn’t just die. She bled to death,’ she said in a voice as bleak as blood and death. ‘She bled to death in a hotel room, the room he put her in after the abortion and where he didn’t go to visit her.’ The pain of age struggled in her voice with the pain of memory. ‘When they found her, she had been dead for a day. Perhaps two. And it was another day before I learned about it. I was under house arrest, but friends came to tell me about her. I left the house. I had to strike a policeman to do it, knock him to the ground and kick him in the face to do it, to get away. But I left. And none of them, none of the people who saw me kick him, none of them stopped to help him.
‘I went with my friends. To where she was. Everything that was necessary had already been done, and we buried her the same day. No priest came, because of the way she died, so we just buried her. The grave was very small.’ Her voice trailed away, borne off by the power of memory.
He had seen this happen many times in the past, and he therefore had the sense to remain quiet. The words had started now, and she wouldn’t be able to stop until she had said them all and gotten free of them. He waited, patient, living now in the past with her.
‘We dressed her all in white. And then we buried her, in that tiny grave. That tiny hole. I went back to my home after the funeral, and they arrested me. But since I was already arrested, it didn’t make any difference. I asked them about the policeman, and they said he was all right. I apologized to him when I saw him later. After the war, when the Allies were in the city, he hid in my cellar for a month, until his mother came and took him away. I had no reason to dislike him or want to hurt him.’
‘How did it happen?’
She glanced up at him in confusion, honestly not understanding.
‘Your sister and Wellauer?’
She licked her lips and studied her gnarled hands, just visible among the shawls. ‘I introduced them. He had heard about the way my singing career started, so when they came to Germany to see me sing, he asked me to introduce him to them, to Clara and to little Camilla.’
‘Were you involved with him then?’
‘Do you mean, was he my lover?’
‘Yes.’
‘Yes, he was. It started almost immediately, when I went up there to sing.’
‘And his affair with your sister?’ he asked.
Her head snapped back as though he had hit her. She leaned forward, and Brunetti thought she was going to strike out at him. Instead she spat. A thin, watery gobbet landed on his thigh and slowly sank into the fabric of his trousers. He was too stunned to wipe it away.
‘Damn you. You’re all the same. Still all the same,’ she shouted in a wild, cracked voice. ‘You look at something, and you see the filth you want to see.’ Her voice grew louder, and she repeated what he had said, mockingly. ‘His affair with my sister. His affair.’ She leaned closer to him, eyes narrowed with hatred, and whispered, ‘My sister was twelve years old. Twelve years old. We buried her in her First Communion dress; she was still that small. She was a little girl.
‘He raped her, Mr. Policeman. He didn’t have an affair with my little sister. He raped her. The first time, and then the other times, when he threatened her, threatened to tell me about her, about what a bad girl she was. And then, when she was pregnant, he sent us both back to Rome. And I didn’t know anything about it. For he was still my lover. Making love to me and then raping my little baby sister. Do you see, Mr. Policeman, why I’m glad he’s dead and why I say he deserved to die?’ Her face was transformed by the rage she had carried for half a century.
‘Do you want to know it all, Mr. Policeman?’
Brunetti nodded, seeing it, understanding.
‘He came back to Rome, to conduct that Norma there with me. And she told him she was pregnant. She was too frightened to tell us, too afraid that we would tell her what a bad girl she was. So he arranged the abortion, and he took her there, and then he took her to that hotel. And he left her there, and she bled to death. And when she died, she was still only twelve years old.’
He saw her hand move out of its wrapping of shawls and scarves, saw it swing up toward him. He did little more than move his head back, and the blow missed him. This maddened her, and she slammed her gnarled hand against the wooden arm of the chair and shrieked with the pain of it.
She lunged out of her chair, sending shawls and blankets slithering to the floor. ‘Get out of my house, you pig. You pig.’
Brunetti leapt away from her, tripping over the leg of his chair, and stumbled down the corridor before her. Her hand remained raised in front of her, and he fled from screaming rage. She stopped, panting, while he fumbled with the bolts, pulling them back. In the courtyard, he could still hear her voice as she screamed at him, at Wellauer, at the world. She slammed and bolted the door, but still she raged on. He stood shivering in the fog, shaken by the anger he had raised in her. He forced himself to take deep breaths, to forget that first instant when he had felt real fear of the woman, fear of the tremendous impulse of memory that had pulled her up from her chair and toward him.
* * * *
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
He had to wait almost half an hour at the boat stop, and by the time the number 5 came, he was thoroughly chilled. There had been no change in the atmosphere, so during the trip back across the laguna to San Zaccaria, he huddled in the barely heated inner cabin and looked out on damp whiteness that clawed at the misty windows. Arrived at the Questura, he walked up to his office, ignoring the few people who greeted him. Inside, he closed the door but kept his coat on, waiting for the chill to pass from his body. Images crowded into his mind. He saw the old woman, a fury, screaming her way down the damp corridor; he saw the three sisters in the artful V of their pose; and he saw the little girl lying dead in her First Communion dress. And he saw it all, saw the pattern, saw the plan.
He finally took off his coat and tossed it on the back of a chair. He went to his desk and started to search through the papers littered across its top. He set files and folders aside, hunting until he found the green-covered autopsy report.
On the second page, he found what he remembered would
be there: Rizzardi had made note of the small bruises on arm and buttock, listing them only as ‘traces of subcutaneous bleeding, cause unknown.’
Neither of the two doctors he had spoken to had mentioned giving Wellauer any sort of injection. But a man who was married to a doctor would hardly have had to make an appointment to receive an injection. Nor did Brunetti believe he had to have an appointment to speak to that doctor.
He returned to the pile of papers and found the report from the German police and read through it until he found something that had tugged at his memory. Elizabeth Wellauer’s first husband, Alexandra’s father, not only taught at the University of Heidelberg but was chairman of the Department of Pharmacology. She had stopped to see him on her way to Venice.
* * * *
‘Yes?’ Elizabeth Wellauer said as she opened the door for him.
‘Again I apologize for disturbing you, Signora, but there is new information, and I’d like to ask you some more questions.’
‘About what?’ she asked, making no move to open the door any further.
‘The results of the autopsy on your husband,’ he explained, certain that this would be enough to give him entry. With a sharp, graceless motion, she pulled the door back and stood aside. Silently, she led him to the room where they had had their two previous interviews and pointed to what he was beginning to think of as his chair. He waited while she lit a cigarette, a gesture so habitual with her that he now paid almost no attention to it.
‘At the time of the autopsy’—he began with no preliminaries—’the pathologist said that he found signs of bruising on your husband’s body that might have been caused by injections of some sort. The same thing is mentioned in his report.’ He paused, giving her the opportunity to volunteer an explanation. When none came, he continued. ‘Dr. Rizzardi said that they might have come from anything: drugs, vitamins, antibiotics. He said that the pattern of the bruises was inconsistent with your husband’s having given them to himself—he was right-handed, wasn’t he?’
‘Yes.’
‘The bruises on the arm were on the right side as well, so he couldn’t have given himself those injections.’ He allowed himself a minimal pause. ‘If they were injections, that is.’ He paused again. ‘Signora, did you give your husband these injections?’
She ignored him, so he repeated the question. ‘Signora, did you give your husband these injections?’ No response. ‘Signora, do you understand my question? Did you give your husband these injections?’
‘They were vitamins,’ she finally answered.
‘What kind?’
‘B -twelve.’
‘Where did you get them? From your former husband?’
The question clearly surprised her. She shook her head in strong denial. ‘No; he had nothing to do with it. I wrote a prescription for them while we were still in Berlin. Helmut had complained of feeling tired, so I suggested that he try a series of B-twelve injections. He had done so in the past, and they had helped him then.’
‘How long ago did you begin with the injections, Signora?’
‘I don’t remember exactly. About six weeks ago.’
‘Did he seem to improve?’
‘What?’
‘Your husband. Did he improve as a result of these injections. Did they have the effect you intended?’
She glanced up at him sharply when he asked this second question, but answered calmly. ‘No, they didn’t seem to help. So after six or seven, I decided to discontinue them.’
‘Did you decide that, or did your husband, Signora?’
‘What difference does it make? They didn’t work, so he stopped taking them.’
‘I think it makes a great deal of difference, Signora, who decided to stop them. And I think you know that.’
‘Then I suppose he decided.’
‘Where did you get the prescription filled? Here in Italy?’
‘No; I’m not licensed to practice here. It was in Berlin, before we came down here.’
‘I see. Then the pharmacist would surely have a record of it.’
‘Yes, I suppose he would. But I don’t remember where I had it filled.’
‘You mean you just wrote a prescription and chose a pharmacy at random?’
‘Yes.’
‘How long have you lived in Berlin, Signora?’
‘Ten years. I don’t see why that’s important.’
‘Because it seems strange to me that a doctor would live in a city for ten years and not have a permanent pharmacy. Or that the Maestro wouldn’t have a pharmacy where he usually went.’
Her response was just a second too long in coming. ‘He did. We both do. But that day, I wasn’t at home when I wrote the prescription, so I just took it to the first pharmacy I saw and asked them to fill it.’
‘But surely you remember where it was. It wasn’t so long ago.’
She looked out the window, concentrating, trying to remember. She turned to him and said, ‘I’m sorry, but I can’t remember where it was.’
‘That’s no matter, Signora,’ he said dismissively. ‘It for us.’ She glanced up at this, surprised, or something more. ‘And I’m sure they’ll be able to find out what the prescription was, what sort of—he paused for just a second before saying the last word—’vitamin.’
Though her cigarette was still burning in the ashtray, she reached for the package, then changed the motion and simply pushed the pack around with one finger, giving it a precise quarter turn each time. ‘Shall we stop this now?’ she asked, voice neutral. ‘I’ve never liked games, and you aren’t very good at them, either.’
Through the years, he had seen this happen more times than he could count, seen people reach the point they couldn’t go beyond, the point where they would, however reluctantly, tell the truth. Like a city under siege: their outer defenses gave in first, then came the first retreat, the first concession to the approaching enemy. Depending upon the defender, the struggle would be fast or slow, bogged down at this rampart or that; there could be a counterattack, or there could be none. But the first motion was always the same, the almost relieved shrugging off of the lie, which led, in the end, to the final opening of the gates to truth.
‘It wasn’t a vitamin. You know that, don’t you?’ she asked.
He nodded.
‘And do you know what it was?’
‘No, I don’t know what it was, not exactly. But I believe it was an antibiotic. I don’t know which one, but I don’t think that’s important.’
‘No, it’s not important.’ She looked up at him with a small smile, its sadness centered in her eyes. ‘Netilmicina. I believe that’s the name it’s sold under here in Italy. The prescription was filled at the Ritter Pharmacy, about three blocks from the entrance to the zoo. You shouldn’t have any trouble finding it.’
‘What did you tell your husband it was?’
‘Just as I told you, B-twelve.’
‘How many injections did you give him?’
‘Six, at six-day intervals.’
‘How soon was it before he began to notice the effect?’
‘A few weeks. We weren’t speaking much to each other then, but he still saw me as his doctor, so first he asked me about his fatigue. And then he asked me about his hearing.’
‘And what did you tell him?’
‘I reminded him of his age, and then I told him it might be a temporary side effect of the vitamin. That was stupid of me. I have medical books in the house, and he could easily have gone and checked what I told him.’
‘Did he?’
‘No, no, he didn’t. He trusted me. I was his doctor, you see.’
‘Then how did he learn? Or how did he begin to suspect?’
‘He went to see Erich about it. You know that, or you wouldn’t be here now, asking these questions. And after we were here, he began to wear the glasses with the hearing aid, so I knew he must have gone to see another doctor. When I suggested another injection, he refused. He knew by then, of course, but I don
’t know how he found out. From the other doctor?’ she asked.
Again he nodded.
She gave him the same sad smile.
‘And then what happened, Signora?’
‘We had come down here in the middle of the treatment. In fact, I gave him the last injection in this room. Even then he might have known but refused to believe what he knew.’ She closed her eyes and rubbed at them with her hands. ‘It becomes very complicated, this idea of when he knew everything.’
‘When did you finally realize that he knew?’
‘It must have been about two weeks ago. In a way, I’m surprised it took him so long, but that was because we were so much in love.’ She looked across at him when she said this. ‘He knew how much I loved him. So he couldn’t believe that I’d do this to him.’ She smiled bitterly. ‘There were times, after I started, when I couldn’t believe it, either, when I remembered how much I loved him.’