by Donna Leon
‘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.
He nodded to the pilot, Foa, stepped on board, and took Griffoni’s hand. Her tan made her hair seem even blonder, and her short skirt showed an expanse of bronzed leg. She looked like anything but a commissario di polizia on duty. Foa unmoored the boat and went back into the cabin. He started the engine.
‘Vianello?’ Brunetti asked.
‘He’s back already. Waiting for us at the victim’s home. It took him less than three hours.’
Brunetti smiled. Even if it ruined Vianello’s vacation plans to have to return to Venice, to do so on a Coastguard patrol boat at full throttle across the Adriatic was some compensation. ‘I bet he loved it.’
‘Who wouldn’t?’ she asked and he heard the envy in her voice.
The boat turned left into the Canale di Cannaregio, passed at moderate speed under both bridges and out into the laguna. Griffoni explained that she had spoken with Dottor Rizzardi, who said he would try to get back from his house in the Dolomites by that evening. If he could not, then it would be the following morning.
Griffoni had not seen the body, which had been taken to the morgue before Scarpa called her to tell her about the crime. Brunetti asked carefully about Scarpa’s behaviour and his response to the news that both he and Vianello were returning from vacation to take over the case.
‘I didn’t tell him,’ Griffoni said.
‘So he thinks the case is his?’ Brunetti asked.
‘His and mine, but since I’m only a woman, I obviously don’t count.’ They had chosen to stay out on the deck in the hope of catching the breeze created by their motion, so the wind carried some of their words away. Brunetti took another look at her. Though she was decidedly a woman, Brunetti would never preface that noun with the adjective ‘only’. ‘So my arrival will surprise him,’ Brunetti said, not without satisfaction.
‘I hope it upsets him, too,’ she said with the sort of malice that acquaintance, however brief, with Lieutenant Scarpa so often provoked.
The water in this part of the laguna was surprisingly choppy, and both of them were forced to grab the railing to keep from being tossed about. Foa nevertheless put the boat to full throttle in the open water, drowning out other sound and the possibility of conversation. Brunetti glanced to the left, his eye hopping from Murano to Burano and to the bell tower of Torcello, barely visible in the muggy air.
They turned right, passed a canal and turned into the next. Brunetti saw the man leading the camel and asked, ‘What are we doing in the Misericordia?’
‘His home is up ahead, on the left.’
‘Oddio,’ Brunetti exclaimed. ‘It’s not Fontana, is it?’
‘I told you his name when I called,’ insisted Griffoni.
Brunetti remembered the clicks and noises on the phone line and said, ‘Yes, of course.’
‘You know him?’ she asked, interested.
‘No. But I know about him.’
‘Worked at the Tribunale, didn’t he?’ she asked.
Feeling the boat begin to slow, Brunetti said only ‘Yes’, before moving forward to take the mooring rope. Foa stopped on the right side of the canal, and Brunetti stepped up to the pavement and tied the rope to a metal ring. He extended a hand to Griffoni and helped her from the boat; Foa said he would find a bar to get out of the sun and told them to call him when they were finished.
She led the way: down to the first bridge, across it and up the calle to the first right. Then the third house on the right: a large brown portone with a panel of names and bells beside it.
Griffoni had a key and let them in to what turned out to be a large courtyard filled with potted palms and bushes, the far side already shady in the late afternoon. Motion there caught his eye. A young officer, one of the new recruits, jumped to his feet and saluted the two commissari. Brunetti noticed then that scene of crime tape divided the courtyard into two parts, in the farther of which stood the young man. He and Griffoni slipped under the tape and approached. ‘Where was he?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Over there, Commissario,’ the young officer said, pointing back towards the stairway that led up to the door to the building.
Brunetti and Griffoni walked over to the steps; Brunetti’s eyes were drawn to a bloodstain on the pavement that looked as if it had been formed around three sides of a rectangle. The chalk-drawn figure of a man emerged from the stain, its feet pointing towards them. From the angle at which Brunetti saw it, the figure looked surprisingly smal
l.
‘Where’s the statue?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Bocchese had it taken to the lab,’ Griffoni said. ‘It was only a nineteenth-century marble copy of a Byzantine lion.’ The remark confused Brunetti, but he chose not to ask about it.
He looked back at the portone that opened into the calle and saw that the bloodstain was about fifteen metres from it, so someone could have been waiting in the courtyard. Or Fontana could have been pushed inside. Or he had gone inside with someone he knew.
‘What time did it happen?’ Brunetti asked Griffoni.
‘No one’s sure. We haven’t questioned the people in the building yet, but one man told Scarpa he and his wife came home just after midnight, and didn’t see anything.’ Waving her arm back at the portone and sweeping it in a line that ended at the bloodstain, she said, ‘There was no way they could not have seen him. So: some time after midnight.’
‘Until seven-thirty,’ Brunetti said. ‘Long time.’
Griffoni nodded in agreement. ‘That’s one of the reasons I wanted Rizzardi to do the autopsy.’
‘What did Scarpa tell you?’ asked Brunetti.
‘He said the wife of this couple told him Fontana lived with his mother. She’s very religious, goes to Mass every day and out to the cemetery once a week to tend her husband’s grave. That her son was devoted to her and it’s such a pity that he should be cut off in the prime of life. Usual story: once a person is dead, people start falling over themselves saying what a fine person he was and what a loss to the world, and how wonderful his entire family is.’
‘Which means, according to you?’
Griffoni smiled and answered, ‘What it would mean to anyone who pays attention to what people are really saying when they’re talking about how wonderful other people are: that she’s a dragon and probably made her son’s life a living misery.’ They were some distance from the young recruit and spoke in low voices; Brunetti regretted this, for it would delay the young man’s exposure to one of the basic truths his profession would eventually reveal to him: never trust anything that is said about a dead person.
Brunetti took another look at the scene of the crime, the tape, the chalked figure. He called over to the young officer, ‘Did you come with Lieutenant Scarpa?’
‘No, sir. I was on patrol over by San Leonardo and got a call telling me to come here.’
‘Who was here when you arrived?’
‘There was the Lieutenant, sir. Scarpa. And Officers Alvise and Portoghese. And three technicians from the crime squad. And the photographer.’ His voice trailed off, but it was obvious that he had not finished.
‘Who else?’ Brunetti said in an encouraging tone.
‘There were four people who lived in the building, or who acted like they did. One of them had a dog. And then some people standing over by the portone.’
‘Did you get their names?’
‘I thought about it, sir. But I figured, since there was a ranking officer and two other officers who are senior to me, well, I figured they’d already done that. And it didn’t seem my place to ask if they had.’
Brunetti took a closer look at the young man. He glanced at his nametag: ‘Zucchero,’ he read. ‘Are you Pierluigi’s son?’
‘Yes, sir,’ he answered.
‘I never met your father,’ Brunetti said, ‘but everyone here speaks of him with respect.’
‘Thank you, sir. He was a good man.’
‘Ispettore Vianello?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Upstairs talking to the mother, Commissario. He got here about half an hour ago.’
Brunetti stepped back from the young man and turned in a circle to study the inside of the courtyard. One wall ran along the street; opposite it, on the other side of the scene of crime tape, stood three doors made of metal grillework, all of them closed.
‘What are those?’ Brunetti asked, pointing to the doors.
‘The storerooms for the apartments, sir.’ Then Zucchero pointed to a fourth grillework door on one of the side walls, also closed, half hidden behind a line of potted palms. ‘There’s another one over there, sir.’
‘Let’s have a look,’ Brunetti said.
The three of them walked over to the single door, which stood in the shade cast by two of the palms. Brunetti noticed that a metal chain had been run through the bars of the door and through a metal hasp that had been nailed into the wooded door frame. ‘Lieutenant Scarpa had all the padlocks replaced, sir. But I’ve got the keys.’ Moving past Brunetti, Zucchero stuck his hands through the bars and switched on a light which allowed them to see inside.
The room was empty, the floor swept clean, but not recently, for tiny patches of powdered stucco had fallen since the last cleaning and stood out like dusty islands in a cement sea. The walls were entirely bare, save for the occasional patch where the whitewash was flaking off.
Brunetti reached in to switch off the light, and they crossed the courtyard to the first of the other doors. The sun reached halfway up the wall and, falling through the grating at an angle, brightened the first metre of the pavement. Made from large terracotta tiles, the pavement was raised two steps above the surface of the courtyard, reducing the humidity and perhaps protecting against the risk of acqua alta. Zucchero opened the lock and pulled open the door. Brunetti lowered his head and stepped inside, found the light and switched it on.
In contrast to the stark emptiness of the other, this storeroom exploded with things: boxes, suitcases, knapsacks, old paint tins, plastic buckets with rags erupting from them, empty jam and pickle jars. At the end, he read the history of childhood: a collapsible wooden baby cot, its plastic bottom sheet draped across it so that only the round metal castors and the bottom of the legs were visible. A hanging mobile of animals and bells had crash-landed on a bookcase. Two cardboard boxes contained a zoo of soft animals, all the worse for wear. Two unopened boxes of Pampers stood beside the mobile, perhaps awaiting the arrival of another child.
Brunetti stepped back and bumped into Griffoni. He apologized, standing back so she could leave, then he switched off the light, and Zucchero saw to closing the door.
Griffoni chose not to go into the third storeroom when Zucchero removed the chain and opened the door. It was identical in size to the other, about three metres in width and extending at least five towards the back wall. Inside, shelves holding boxes ran from floor to ceiling on both sides. The boxes were all the same size and made of plain brown cardboard: these were boxes meant to store things, not boxes brought home from the supermarket and pressed into service. Each bore a neat hand-printed label in the centre of the side that faced out from the shelf. ‘Zia Maria’s Tea Set’, ‘Handkerchiefs’, ‘Winter shoes’, ‘Woollen scarves’, ‘Araldo’s books’. And so it went, the detritus of life ordered and sealed in boxes and nothing to be discarded if it might some time be used or needed again.
Brunetti turned away from the room and the life it held, switched off the light, and followed Zucchero to the fourth storeroom, Griffoni again close behind them, all of them silent.
When Zucchero let them into the last, Brunetti switched on the light and saw that it was the same size as the previous storeroom and had similar shelving. It too gave evidence of many lives or, at least, that many lives had passed through the hands of the owners. Most of the shelves on the left side held empty bird cages, at least twenty of them. They were wooden and metal, all sizes, all colours. Some of them still held their water bottles, dry now, with dark stains showing the level of water when they had been placed in the storeroom. All of the doors were closed, and none of the little wooden swings moved. They had been wiped clean, but the dusty, acid smell of bird filled the space. There was one stack of boxes, these too the sort one bought to store things in. Labelled in a different hand, they contained ‘Lucio’s sweaters’, ‘Lucio’s boots’, and ‘Eugenia’s sweaters’.
The other side held wine racks; not shelves, racks that began about thirty centimetres from the ground and ran almost to the ceiling. Bru
netti walked over and read the labels; he recognized and approved of some of them, saw that others had detached themselves from the bottles and hung loose. Griffoni asked, ‘In this humidity, with that other smell?’
Brunetti put out a finger and rubbed one of the corks, which had herniated the metal foil. A rough white film covered the top of the cork. He pulled out the bottle. ‘Nineteen eighty,’ he said, and slid the bottle back, both of them wincing at the sound of glass scraping on metal.
At the far end of the room they saw a sofa and at one end a standard lamp that must have fallen victim to redecoration. Over the back of the sofa was draped a hand-knitted afghan in violent reds and greens, and at the other end stood a square table with a greying crocheted doily in the centre.
Without bothering to comment on any of the things, Brunetti said to Griffoni, ‘Let’s go up and see how much Vianello has got out of her so far.’ This would have sounded – to anyone unfamiliar with the Ispettore’s uncanny ability to lure even the most recalcitrant witness – slightly menacing; but it was merely what anyone who knew Vianello would expect him to have achieved.
Brunetti nodded to Zucchero, who saluted and moved back into the shadow.
‘It’s on the second floor,’ Griffoni said, leading him up the stairs to the main entrance, which was open. Inside, they paused at the bottom of the oval staircase that led to the upper floors. The steps were marble, broad and low, at the top a skylight: nothing else would explain the light that flooded down, illuminating and heating the area around them.
‘Were you up there before?’ Brunetti asked, staring at the skylight.
‘No, Scarpa went up to talk to her when he found out that Fontana lived with his mother. He didn’t call me until after he’d spoken to her.’
Brunetti nodded, and the young officer left them, staring back across the courtyard. Turning to Griffoni, Brunetti asked, ‘Why do you think he waited so long?’
