by Donna Leon
‘Modesty prevents my saying he was appalled,’ she responded with some pride. ‘This forced me to explain that what I was doing was really much kinder than what was done to Alvise: he was tossed out from one minute to the next.’ She smiled the sharkish smile Brunetti had come to appreciate and added, ‘What I am also doing is weaning the Vice-Questore from what has become, over the years, an embarrassing dependence on my abilities.’
‘Did you tell him that, too?’ Brunetti asked, unable to disguise his astonishment.
‘Of course not, Dottore. I think it’s best for us all if he doesn’t realize this.’
11
Brunetti agreed fully with Signorina Elettra’s judgement. ‘You’re on strike only against them?’ he asked, wanting to clear this up before he asked for her help.
‘Of course. If you have something you’d like me to do, I’d be only too happy to abandon this,’ she said, flipping closed the magazine. ‘I don’t know why I bother to read it.’
‘That’s exactly what my wife says about Muscoli e Fitness,’ Brunetti said, deadpan.
But Signorina Elettra was not to be trapped. ‘I’m sure she’s interested because those things were so vital to Henry James,’ she said.
‘Have you read him?’ Brunetti asked, not sure if he was astonished or worried.
‘Only in translation. I’m afraid my mind has been so dulled by reading police reports that it’s hard for me to concentrate on such complex prose and psychological penetration.’
‘Indeed,’ Brunetti said in a soft voice. And then, sensing Vianello’s impatience with their quips, said, ‘What I’d like you to do is find out if anyone has telecamere in place by Ponte de le Scuole.’
‘Is that the one behind San Rocco?’ she asked.
‘Yes.’
It took her only a moment to visualize the place, and when she did, she said, ‘I wouldn’t think so. It’s so far from anything.’ Turning to Vianello, she asked, ‘What do you think, Lorenzo?’
‘We should try the Carabinieri,’ he said, looking very pleased with himself. ‘I remembered one of them, years ago, telling me they were putting up a lot of cameras, and he said they . . .’ he paused here, catching their attention, ‘. . . wanted to put them in places where people didn’t go much.’
‘Is that a Carabinieri joke?’ Signorina Elettra asked.
‘Sounds it, doesn’t it?’ Vianello confirmed. ‘But, no, it’s actually what he said.’ Neither one of them was willing to comment. Then, after a few seconds, he added, ‘And did.’
Vianello was about to continue when, all of a sudden, their heads, like sunflowers towards the sun, turned in unison towards the sound of the opening door of the office of the Vice-Questore, and with the same involuntary phototropism, their faces reddened at the sight of his.
‘You,’ Patta said at the sight of Brunetti, ignoring Vianello, who was in uniform that day and, as such, unworthy of his attention. ‘I want to talk to you.’ At first Patta seemed not to notice Signorina Elettra, but then he gave her a brusque nod and turned back into his office.
Brunetti, his face as stern as the Vice-Questore’s had been, glanced at his colleagues and followed his superior inside.
Patta stood in the middle of the room, a sure sign to Brunetti that their dealings were likely to be, regardless of subject, brief.
‘What do you know about this strike business?’ Patta demanded, waving an angry hand towards the door.
‘Signorina Elettra was just telling me about it, Vice-Questore.’
‘You didn’t know anything?’
‘No, Dottore.’
‘Where have you been?’ Patta asked with his usual gossamer delicacy of manner, then, without bothering to wait for Brunetti’s answer, walked to the window and studied the buildings on the other side of the canal. When he had them memorized, he asked, not turning around, ‘What are you working on?’ It sounded to Brunetti like the kind of pro forma question Patta would ask while he was thinking about something else – the strike, probably.
‘A woman was pushed down the stairs of a bridge last night. She’s in the hospital.’
Patta turned. ‘I thought that sort of thing didn’t happen here.’ Then, in case Brunetti had not been sensitive to his tone or to his heavy emphasis on the last word, he added, ‘In peaceful Venice.’
Although Brunetti had to swallow his immediate reaction, his answer could not have been more bland. ‘That certainly used to be true, Dottore, but we’ve had so many people coming in these last years, it’s no longer the case.’ Having edited his remark to remove ‘from the South’ after ‘people’ and replace it with a long pause, Brunetti considered his response both true and moderate.
As if he had read Brunetti’s mind, Patta’s voice became soft and almost menacing. ‘Does it bother you that so many of us are here, Commissario?’
Brunetti gave a small, but visible, start to demonstrate surprise and said, ‘I meant the tourists, Vice-Questore, hardly the people who come here to work . . .’ he toyed with saying it, thought he would, thought he wouldn’t, and then decided to hell with it and finished his sentence, ‘. . . for the good of the city, such as you.’ He smiled and applauded his own restraint in not having included Lieutenant Scarpa among those who worked for the good of the city.
He wondered which way Patta would jump and whether he had finally gone too far in provoking his superior. Patta could not fire him directly, but both of them had worked in the system long enough to understand that the Vice-Questore had friends who were sufficiently powerful to make life unpleasant for Brunetti, just as his own connections could cause significant trouble for Patta. Brunetti could be transferred somewhere awful, and there were enough awful places to make his head spin. Or Patta could take the easier path and see that Brunetti’s friends and supporters at the Questura were transferred: there were surely enough awful places to go round.
Musing upon these things, Brunetti stood with his hands held behind his back, his eyes glued to the large photo of the President of the Republic hanging behind Patta’s desk. He began to make an alphabetical list of the terrible places he might be sent and had got to Catania when Patta said, ‘Tell me about this thing on the bridge. What happened?’
‘Late last night, a young woman was pushed down the steps by someone who spoke to her before he did it.’
‘Spoke to her how?’ Patta asked. He walked to his desk and took his place behind it, waving Brunetti to the chair in front.
Brunetti sat down. ‘She told me he said, “You’re mine” just before he pushed her.’
‘Do you believe that?’ Patta asked, unable to prevent the instinctive suspiciousness from slipping into his voice.
Ignoring the scepticism and concerned only with the question, Brunetti said, ‘Yes, I do.’
‘What else did she tell you?’ Patta asked. Then, not at all to Brunetti’s surprise, he added, ‘Is she important?’
In ordinary circumstances, Brunetti would turn a remark like this on its head and hand it back to his superior as a philosophical inquiry about how importance could best be determined, but today he wanted no trouble, and so he said, ‘She’s a guest at La Fenice, and it seems that Signora Petrelli thinks highly of her.’ Both statements were true, he knew, and joined together like this they were utterly misleading.
‘Petrelli?’ Patta asked, then added, ‘That’s right; she’s back. What’s she got to do with this girl?’ Brunetti didn’t like the question, nor its insinuation.
‘From what I was told, she heard this young woman singing at the theatre and stopped to compliment her,’ he answered, as if he had not heard or understood the undertone in Patta’s question.
‘So she is singing there, this other woman?’
‘Of course,’ Brunetti said, as if the entire city were lined up and asking for her autograph. ‘We were there for a performance a few nights ago, and Signora Petrelli’s enthusiasm seems justified.’ Brunetti left it at that: at least one of these was unquestionably true.
‘In that case
. . .’ Patta began, and Brunetti waited as his superior pulled out some mental calculator that only he knew how to operate and worked out the relationship between the importance of the victim and the amount of police time that he should order to be spent on her. As Brunetti watched, Patta returned the calculator to a pocket in his mind, then said, ‘Can you look into it?’
Brunetti took his notebook from his pocket and paged through it. ‘I have a meeting at two’ – this was a lie – ‘but after that I’m free.’
‘All right, then. See what you can find out,’ Patta said. ‘We can’t have this sort of thing happening.’ The head of the Tourist Office could not have phrased it more clearly.
Brunetti got briskly to his feet, nodded at the Vice-Questore, and left the office. He found Signorina Elettra alone in front of her computer, doing for him what he refused to learn to do.
‘Lorenzo?’ he asked.
‘He had to meet someone.’
‘Anything?’ he asked.
‘Before he left, he told me he called the Carabinieri and they do have a camera on the other side of the bridge where the girl was found: it shows the right side leading to San Rocco.’ She pushed her chair back and pointed at the screen, saying, ‘They just sent me this.’
Making no attempt to disguise his astonishment, Brunetti said, ‘The Carabinieri actually sent this?’
‘He’s done them some favours in the past.’
Brunetti had no idea what they might have been, nor did he want to know. ‘I’ll never tell another Carabinieri joke,’ he lied.
Giving him a sceptical glance, Signorina Elettra rolled her chair to one side to create space for him.
He moved behind her and leaned down, the better to view the screen. The image at first reminded him of an X-ray: grey, grainy, and utterly without definition. He made out – but only because he knew he was looking at a bridge – the parapet, at the top of the screen, and the back wall of the Scuola di San Rocco, though it could have been the wall of any building. Motion appeared: a small, round, wavy dark grey shape at the bottom right of the screen. Very quickly, it grew shoulders, a torso, legs, feet, moved away, and then disappeared in reverse order as the person walked down the other side of the bridge. ‘That’s all?’ he asked, unable to disguise his disappointment.
Signorina Elettra shrugged and slid her chair forward. She clicked a few keys; other grey shapes hurried across the bridge as if they were skating over the steps. He watched two of them, three, crossing the bridge in both directions, then he lost count. There was a long blankness on the screen: only the parapet and the wall at the back. Signorina Elettra touched a key, but nothing changed.
Suddenly a shape crashed into the screen, startling a gasp from both of them. Brunetti watched as something thin projected down from the shape and poked at the stairs, then gave way, after which the whole shape collapsed on top of it, bringing with it another of those small round shapes, though this one bounced against a step, and then it all stopped moving.
Time passed. Signorina Elettra said, ‘I’ll speed it up again.’ Nothing changed on the screen: nothing moved for a time.
Suddenly two round shapes appeared at bottom right; by now Brunetti recognized them as heads and watched as the bodies caught up with the heads, and then the men hurried up the steps to the unconscious woman. One knelt beside her while the other moved his arm and held something to his ear. The kneeling one took off his jacket and spread it over the shape on the ground, then both of them got to their feet and stood motionless.
Signorina Elettra fast-forwarded the video, and the two men moved to the side of the bridge with the jerky animation of speeded-up film. Twice one of them hurried to kneel beside the shape, which did not move. Then both heads whipped to the left at the same time, after which two more men, dressed in black, hurried on to the scene.
She leaned forward and touched a key, and things returned to normal speed. The men in black knelt beside the shape, which appeared to move. One of the carabinieri put his hand on the woman’s shoulder and bent over her, speaking into her ear. The shape stopped moving.
Again Signorina Elettra fast-forwarded the tape: one of the uniformed officers leaped to his feet in defiance of the law of gravity; then the other did the same. All at once the screen filled with figures as two men in white uniforms arrived with a stretcher. They appeared to speak to the carabiniere who was not speaking with the other two men, then they ran to the top of the bridge and set down the stretcher. Signorina Elettra slowed things down and the white-uniformed men carried the woman to the top of the bridge, one of the carabiniere following close behind. The men lowered her to the stretcher then lifted it and disappeared with her at the bottom left of the screen.
She touched another key, and the figures on the screen froze as in a children’s game.
‘May I see the scene where she falls again, please?’ Brunetti asked.
Signorina Elettra did as he requested, and again they watched the young woman fail to block her fall. They saw her arm give way and her head crash against the edge of the step.
‘Again, please,’ Brunetti requested, and they started from the beginning. This time he ignored – or tried to ignore – the falling woman and looked behind her for any sign of motion. There was something.
‘Can you slow it down?’ he asked.
She started it again, and this time the young woman looked as though she were falling under water, floating down to make elegant contact with the surface that would break her arm and cut open her head.
Brunetti ignored this and studied the top of the bridge behind her. And he saw it again: a dark vertical bar that came into sight from behind, then swirled away, to be followed immediately by something thin and striped and horizontal. It flashed out from the top of the place where the vertical bar had been, and was then sucked back to the left.
Signorina Elettra sent the scene back to the beginning, and they watched the same apparitions: first the dark vertical and then the striped horizontal, both appearing from the same place and returning there.
She hit the keys and it started again, and then again.
When the slow-motion scene stopped the fourth time, leaving only a few centimetres of the disappearing horizontal image, she froze the last image and turned to Brunetti to ask, ‘What do you think it is?’
‘A coat and a scarf,’ he said with no hesitation. ‘He walked across the top of the bridge, took a look at what he’d done, then turned around and walked back down the other side.’ He leaned forward and touched the screen with his finger. ‘That’s his scarf swirling out to the side.’
‘Bastard,’ Signorina Elettra whispered, the first time in all these years that he had heard her use strong language. ‘He could have killed her.’
‘Maybe he thought he had,’ Brunetti said in a grim tone.
12
Signorina Elettra remained silent, staring at the last wave of horizontal lines. She rested her chin on her palm and continued to study it. ‘There’s not much else it could be, is there?’ she finally agreed. She leaned closer, hit a key, and the picture on the screen suddenly grew larger. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘you can even see the fringe.’
Brunetti bent closer and saw that she was right. He stepped back, put his hands into his pockets, and stared at the image on the screen, working out what might have happened. ‘She fell from the top of the stairs,’ he said. ‘So either he was following her, or he was waiting near the bridge, which means he knew which way she would be going. Then, after he pushed her, he couldn’t resist the temptation to see what had happened.’ He thought it through again and said, ‘She didn’t move until those men found her.’
‘So he did think he’d killed her,’ Signorina Elettra finished for him. Then, voice tight with rage and disgust, she said, ‘God, it’s awful.’ Brunetti saw that she had closed her eyes and decided not to speak to her until she was calmer.
He went over to the window and studied the vines in the garden of the palazzo where, for the last decade, he h
ad seen no sign of life other than the yearly renewal of this ever-expanding plant. In a month, the wisteria would be in full bloom, but for now the vine would lurk menacingly on the wall, apparently unwilling to divulge its secret until that day when – zap! – the panicles were there, where they had not been the day before, and the perfume filled every room of the Questura.
From behind him, he heard Signorina Elettra say in her normal voice, ‘It’s usually the husband or boyfriend or an ex or someone she’s trying to make become an ex.’
Brunetti had reached the same conclusion and had decided he had no choice but to go back to the hospital to speak to the girl again.
‘Her name’s Francesca Santello,’ he said.
‘How old is she?’ Signorina Elettra asked.
‘Young,’ was all Brunetti could say, failing to remember what had been written on the hospital chart. ‘Looks about eighteen. Not much more than that.’ Then, ‘She’s studying in Paris.’
‘Would you like me to see if I can find out anything about her?’ she asked.
Brunetti nodded. ‘She seemed a nice girl,’ he said.
‘Nice girls don’t always have nice boyfriends,’ Signorina Elettra answered.
Brunetti gave a combination of nod and shrug to indicate agreement and resignation to the way of the world.
‘The way he stood on the bridge and looked at her is strange,’ she said in a sober voice. ‘A crank wouldn’t do that: he’d just push her for the fun of it and run away. But this guy wanted to see what he’d done.’ She looked thoughtful. ‘I’ll have a look,’ she said.
Brunetti checked his watch and decided to go home for lunch and then to the hospital during the time when the wards were, at least theoretically, closed to visitors.
‘Where is she?’ Signorina Elettra asked.
‘Cardiologia.’
Signorina Elettra failed to hide her surprise. ‘What?’
‘They had nowhere else to put her.’
When she finally responded, it was to ask, ‘You think she’s safe there?’
