Acqua Alta - [Commissario Brunetti 05]

by Donna Leon

  They stayed until the body was removed, then waited in the corridor while the technicians locked the office and sealed it against unauthorized entry. The four of them went down the stairs together and stopped outside the open door of the guards’ office. The guard who had been there when Brunetti came in looked up from reading Quattro Ruote when he heard them come in. It always surprised Brunetti that anyone who lived in a city where there were no cars would read an automobile magazine. Did some of his sea-locked fellow citizens dream of cars the way men in prison dreamed of women? In the midst of the absolute silence that reigned over Venice at night, did they long for the roar of traffic and the blare of horns? Perhaps, less fantastically, they wanted no more than the convenience of being able to drive home from the supermarket, park the car in front of the house and unload the groceries, rather than carry the heavy bags along crowded streets, up and down bridges, and then up the many flights of stairs that seemed, inevitably, to lurk in wait for all Venetians.

  Recognizing Brunetti, he asked, ‘Are you here for your boots, sir?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He reached under the desk to pull out the white shopping bag and handed it to Brunetti, who thanked him.

  ‘Safe and sound,’ the guard said and smiled again.

  The director of the museum had just been beaten to death in his office and whoever did it had walked past the guards’ station unseen, but at least Brunetti’s boots were safe.

  * * * *

  Chapter Ten

  Because it was after two when Brunetti got home that night, he slept until well past eight the next morning and woke only, and grudgingly, when Paola shook him lightly by the shoulder and told him coffee was beside him. He managed to tight off full consciousness for another few minutes, but then he smelled the coffee, gave up and seized the day. Paola had disappeared after bringing the coffee, a decision the wisdom of which had been taught to her over the years.

  When he finished the coffee, he pushed back the covers and went to look out of the window. Rain. And he remembered that the moon had been almost full the night before, so that meant more acqua alta with the change of tide. He went down the corridor to the bathroom and took a long shower, trying to store up enough heat to last him the day. Back in the bedroom, he began to dress and, while knotting his tie, decided he had better wear a sweater under his jacket because the visits he had already planned to both Brett and Lele would have him walking from one side of the city to the other. He opened the second drawer in the armadio and reached for his grey lambswool. Not finding it, he reached into the next drawer, then the one above it. Detective-like, he thought of the places where it could be, checked the remaining two, and then remembered that Raffi had borrowed the sweater last week. That meant, Brunetti was sure, that he would find it lying in a crumpled ball in the bottom of his son’s closet or in a bunched heap at the back of a drawer. The recent improvement in his son’s academic performance had not, alas, extended to habits of personal cleanliness or general neatness.

  He went across the hall and, because the door was open, into his son’s room. Raffi had already left for school, but Brunetti hoped he wasn’t wearing the sweater. The more he thought about it, the more he wanted to wear that sweater, and the more irritated he became at being frustrated in that desire.

  He opened the cupboard. Jackets, shirts, a ski parka, and on the floor assorted boots, tennis shoes and a pair of summer sandals. But no sweater. It wasn’t draped over the chair, nor over the end of the bed. He opened the first drawer in the dresser and found an upheaval of underwear. The second held socks, none of them matching and, he feared, few of them clean. The third drawer looked more promising: it held a sweatshirt and two T-shirts that bore insignia Brunetti didn’t bother to read. He wanted his sweater, not publicity for the rainforest. He pushed aside the second T-shirt, and his hand froze.

  Lying below the T-shirts, half hidden, but lazily so, were two syringes, neatly wrapped in their sterile plastic wrappers. Brunetti felt his heartbeat quicken as he stared down at them. ‘Madre di Dio’ he said out loud and looked quickly over his shoulder, afraid that Raffi would come in and find his father searching his room. He pushed the T-shirts back over the needles and slipped the drawer closed.

  Suddenly, he found himself remembering the Sunday afternoon, a decade ago, when he had gone to the Lido with Paola and the children. Raffi, running on the beach, had stepped on a piece of broken bottle and sliced open the sole of his foot. And Brunetti, mute in the face of his son’s pain and his own aching love for him, had wrapped a towel around the cut, gathered him up in his arms and carried him, running all the way, the kilometre to the hospital that stood at the end of the beach. He had waited for two hours, dressed in his bathing suit and chilled to the bone by fear and the air conditioning, until a doctor came out and told him the boy was fine. Six stitches and crutches for a week, but he was fine.

  What made Raffi do it? Was he too strict a father? He had never raised his hand to either child, seldom raised his voice; the memory of the violence of his own upbringing was enough to destroy any violent impulse he might have had towards them. Was he too busy with his work, too busy with the problems of society to worry about those of his own children? When was the last time he had helped either one with homework? And where did he get the drugs? And what was it? Please, let it not be heroin, not that.

  Paola? She usually knew before he did what the kids were doing. Did she suspect? Could it be that she knew and hadn’t told him? And if she didn’t know, should he do the same, protect her from this?

  He reached out an unsteady hand and lowered himself to the edge of Raffi’s bed. He locked his hands together and stuck them between his knees, staring down at the floor. Vianello would know who sold drugs in this neighbourhood. Would Vianello tell him if he knew about Raffi? One of Raffi’s shirts lay beside him on the bed. He reached out and pulled it towards him, pressed it to his face and smelled his son’s odour, that same scent he had first smelled the day Paola came home from the hospital with Raffi and he pressed his face into the round belly of his naked son. His throat closed and he tasted salt.

  He sat on the edge of the bed for a long time, remembering the past and shying away from any thought of the future beyond the conviction that he would have to tell Paola. Though he had already embraced his own guilt, he hoped she would deny it, assure him that he had been father enough to his two children. And what about Chiara? Did she know, or suspect? And what beyond that? He stood up at that thought and left the room, leaving the door open, as he had found it.

  Paola sat on the sofa in the living room, feet propped up on the low marble table, reading that morning’s paper. That meant she had already been out in the rain to get it.

  He stood at the door and watched her turn a page. The radar of long marriage caused her to turn to him. ‘Guido, will you make more coffee?’ she asked and turned back to the paper.

  ‘Paola,’ he began. She registered the tone and lowered the paper to her lap. ‘Paola,’ he repeated, not knowing what he had to say or how to say this. ‘I found two syringes in Raffi’s room.’

  She paused, waiting for him to say more, then picked up the paper and continued to read.

  ‘Paola, did you hear what I said?’

  ‘Hm?’ she asked, head tilted back to read the headline at the top of the page.

  ‘I said I found two syringes in Raffi’s room. In the bottom of a drawer.’ He moved towards her, possessed for an instant of the mad urge to rip the paper from her hands and hurl it to the floor.

  ‘That’s where they were, then,’ she said, and turned the page.

  He sat beside her on the sofa and, forcing the gesture to remain cairn, placed his palm flat on the page in front of her and pushed the paper slowly on to her lap. ‘What do you mean, “That’s where they were’’?’ he asked, voice tight.

  ‘Guido,’ she asked, turning her full attention to him, now that the paper was gone, ‘what’s the matter with you? Don’t you feel well?’

/>   Entirely unaware of what he was doing, he contracted his hand into an angry fist, dragging the paper into a loose ball. ‘I said I found two syringes in Raffi’s room, Paola. Syringes. Don’t you understand?’

  She stared at him for a moment, eyes wide in confusion, and then she understood what the syringes meant to him. Their eyes locked, and he watched as Raffi’s mother registered his own belief that their son was addicted to drugs. Her mouth contracted, her eyes opened wide, and then she put back her head and began to laugh. She laughed, exploded into peals of real mirth and fell away from him sideways on the sofa, tears filling her eyes. She wiped at them, but she couldn’t stop laughing. ‘Oh, Guido,’ she said, hand to her mouth in a vain effort to stop herself. ‘Oh, Guido, no, you can’t be thinking that. Not drugs.’ And she was gone in another fit of laughter.

  Brunetti thought for a moment that this was the hysteria of real panic, but he knew Paola too well for that; this was the pure laughter of high comedy. With a violent gesture, he grabbed the newspaper from her lap and hurled it to the floor. His rage sobered her instantly, and she pushed herself upright on the sofa.

  ‘Guido. I tarli,’ she said, as though that explained it all.

  Was she drugged too? What did woodworm have to do with this?

  ‘Guido,’ she repeated, keeping her voice soft, her tone level, as if speaking to the dangerous or the mad. ‘I told you last week. We’ve got woodworm in the table in the kitchen. The legs are full of them. And the only way to get rid of them is to inject poison into the holes they leave. Remember, I asked you if you’d help me move it out on to the terrace the first sunny day we have, so the fumes won’t kill us all?’

  Yes, he remembered this, but vaguely. He hadn’t been paying attention when she told him, but it came back now.

  ‘I asked Raffi to get me the syringes and some rubber gloves so we can inject the poison into the table. I thought he’d forgotten them, but I suppose he just put them in his drawer. And then forgot to tell me he’d got them.’ She reached out and placed her hand over his. ‘It’s all right, Guido. It isn’t what you thought.’

  He had to lean against the back of the sofa as a burning rush of relief swept over him. He rested his head back and closed his eyes. He wanted to laugh at the absurdity of it, wanted to be as free to make fun of his fear as Paola was, but that wasn’t possible, not yet.

  When he could finally speak, he turned to her and asked, ‘Don’t ever tell Raffi, please, Paola.’

  She leaned towards him and placed her palm against his cheek, studying his face, and he thought she was going to promise, but then she collapsed helplessly on his chest, lost again to laughter.

  The contact of her body freed him at last, and he began to laugh, beginning with a faint chuckle and a shake of his head, but then graduating into real laughter, shouts of it, wild hoots of relief and joy and pure delight. She tightened her arms around him and then inched her body up across his chest, seeking his lips with hers. Like a pair of adolescents, then, they made love there on the sofa, heedless of the clothes that ended up heaped on the floor below them, heaped with much the same abandon as were those in Raffi’s cupboard.

  * * * *

  Chapter Eleven

  At the bottom of the Rialto Bridge, he slipped under the covered passageway to the right of the statue of Goldoni, heading back towards SS. Giovanni e Paolo and Brett’s apartment. He knew she was home because the officer who had sat outside her hospital room for a day and a half had reported back to the Questura when she checked herself out and returned to her apartment. No guard had been posted at her home because a uniformed policeman could not stand in one of the narrow calli of Venice without being asked by everyone who passed what he was doing there, nor could a detective who was not a resident of the neighbourhood stand around for more than half an hour without the Questura receiving phone calls reporting his suspicious presence. Non-Venetians thought of it as a city; residents knew it was just a sleepy little country town with an impulse towards gossip, curiosity and small-mindedness no different from that of the smallest paese in Calabria or Aspromonte.

  Though it had been years since he had been in her apartment, he found it with little difficulty, on the right side of Calle dello Squero Vecchio, a street so small that the city had never bothered to paint its name on the wall. He rang the bell and, moments later, a voice came through the intercom asking who he was. He was glad they were taking at least this minimum precaution; too often the people of this peaceful city merely clicked open their doors without bothering to learn who was there.

  Though the building had been restored within the last few years and the stairwells newly plastered and painted, salt and humidity had already begun their work, devouring the paint and scattering large droppings of it on the floor, like scraps under a table. As he turned into the fourth and final flight of steps, he looked up and saw that the heavy metal door to the apartment was open, held back by Flavia Petrelli. However nervous and strained it was, that actually did seem to be a smile.

  They shook hands at the door, and she stepped back to allow him to enter. They spoke at the same time, she saying, ‘I’m glad you came,’ and he, ‘Permesso,’ as he stepped inside.

  She wore a black skirt and a low-necked sweater in a canary yellow that few women would risk. Flavia’s olive complexion and nearly black eyes glowed in response to the colour. But on closer inspection he saw that the eyes, however beautiful, were tired, and small lines of tension radiated from her mouth.

  She asked for his coat and hung it in a large armadio that stood on the left of the hallway. He had read the report of the officers who responded to the attack, so he couldn’t keep himself from looking down at the floor and at the brick wall. There was no sign of blood, but he could smell strong cleansers and, he thought, wax.

  Flavia made no motion to go back into the living room but kept him there and asked, her voice low, ‘Have you found out anything?’

  ‘About Dottor Semenzato?’

  She nodded.

  Before he could answer, Brett called out from the living room, ‘Stop plotting, Flavia, and bring him in here.’

  She had the grace to smile and shrug, then turned and led him back into the living room. It was as he remembered it, filled, even on this dreary day, with light that filtered in from the six immense skylights cut into the roof. Brett sat, dressed in burgundy slacks and a black turtleneck sweater, on a sofa placed between two tall windows. Brunetti could see that parts of her face, though far less swollen than they had been in the hospital, were still angry blue. She shifted herself to the left, leaving him a space next to her, and extended her hand.

  He took her hand and sat beside her, looking at her more closely.

  ‘No more Frankenstein,’ she said, smiling to show not only that her teeth were free of the wires that had bound them together for most of the time that she was in the hospital, but that the cut on her lip had healed sufficiently for her to be able to close her mouth.

  Brunetti, familiar with the assumed omniscience of Italian doctors and their concomitant inflexibility, asked in real surprise, ‘How did you get them to let you out?’

  ‘I made a scene,’ she said quite simply.

  Offered no more than that, Brunetti glanced at Flavia, who covered her eyes with her hand and shook her head at the memory.

  ‘And?’ he asked.

  ‘They said I could go if I’d eat, so now my diet has progressed to bananas and yoghurt.’

  With the talk of food, Brunetti looked more closely at her and saw that, under the bruises and scrapes, her face was indeed thinner, the lines finer and more angular.

  ‘You should eat more than that,’ he said. From behind him, he heard Flavia laugh, but when he turned to her, she recalled him to the business at hand by asking, ‘What about Semenzato? We read about it this morning.’

  ‘It’s pretty much as they wrote. He was killed in his office.’

  ‘Who found him?’ Brett asked.

  ‘The cleaning woma
n.’

  ‘What happened? How was he killed?’

  ‘He was hit on the head.’

  ‘With what?’ asked Flavia.

  ‘A brick.’

  Suddenly curious, Brett asked, ‘What kind of brick?’

  Brunetti remembered where he had first seen it, beside the body. ‘It’s dark blue, about twice the size of my hand, but there are some markings on it, in gold.’

  ‘What was it doing there?’ Brett asked.

  ‘The cleaning woman said he used it as a paperweight. Why do you want to know?’

  She nodded as if in answer to a different question and pushed herself up from the sofa and walked across the room to the bookshelves. Brunetti winced at the gingerly way she walked, at how slowly she raised her arm to pull a thick book down from a high shelf. Tucking it under one arm, she came back towards them and placed the book on the low table that stood in front of the sofa. She flipped it open, riffled through a few pages, then pushed it open and held it there with both palms pressed down on the outer edge of the pages.