by Donna Leon
‘And she?’
‘Oh, she was at the beginning of throwing her life away.’
‘I never met her,’ Brunetti said. ‘You know her well?’
‘No. There’s about six years’ difference in age between us, so we didn’t have friends in common and weren’t ever at school together. So I know her only by reputation, though I did see her occasionally, back then.’
‘What’s she like?’ Brunetti asked. Before Paola could begin to answer, he stood and went into the kitchen and was quickly back with two glasses and a nearly empty bottle of the home-made plum schnapps a friend gave him every Christmas. He poured two small glasses and returned to his seat.
She thanked him and took a small sip, as if barely willing to try it, which was the way she always drank this schnapps, a sort of transferred manifestation of the suspicions she entertained about the man who had given it to her husband.
‘She was very pretty: tall, with long, straight blonde hair and pale blue eyes. She could have been a Scandinavian exchange student, so little did she look like one of us.’ Coming from a light-eyed blonde, this seemed strange to Brunetti.
Paola seemed to drift off. She gave her attention to the night sky, the still-lit campanile of San Marco just visible from this corner of the living room. ‘We couldn’t live anywhere else, could we?’
‘Probably not.’
‘It makes me understand why Demetriana wants to save it. Or at least try to.’
‘Good luck to her, then,’ Brunetti said and went back to work. ‘How did Barbara throw her life away?’
‘The usual way for rich young girls who aren’t very bright: men, some drugs, some more men, lots of parties and lots of trips, and then some more drugs, and then she was twenty-five, and she was lucky enough to meet Teo, who’s really a very nice man, and she married him and had a baby and sort of settled down.’
‘Sort of?’
‘Sort of,’ Paola repeated. ‘Teo finally ran out of patience. Unfortunately for Barbara, he met someone else at the same time, so things were over for her.’
‘You make it sound easy.’
‘I think, for men, it is, especially when there’s enough money and another woman waiting.’
‘And his child?’ Brunetti asked, trying to sound neutral.
‘What judge would give a child to the father, Guido? In Mamma-worshipping Italy?’
‘So he left them?’
‘He left them, but Barbara had someone waiting, too.’ He watched her consider whether to say something and then decide she would. ‘But he didn’t stay around very long.’
‘And Manuela?’
‘According to Demetriana, she was in love with her horse, and that seems to have made life with her mother easier for her.’ Brunetti detected none of the irony or sarcasm he had expected in Paola’s voice. ‘Manuela lived with her, spent a lot of time with her horse, and then she fell into the water, and that was that.’
‘Has your mother ever spoken about Manuela?’ Brunetti asked.
Paola spent a long time looking at the campanile before she answered. ‘Only after she sees her at Demetriana’s. She’s a very sweet girl. Woman.’ She paused, busying herself with her glass, then said, ‘None of us talks about her much.’
‘Don’t you find that strange?’ he asked.
‘Guido,’ she said in a very soft voice, ‘sometimes I don’t understand you.’
Brunetti thought this was because she forgot that he was a policeman but chose not to say anything.
‘We talk about her, of course, because we see her. But we’ve never talked about what happened to her.’ Then, setting her glass down, she said, ‘There’s no other decent way, is there?’
‘No, there isn’t,’ Brunetti said and got to his feet to take the bottle back to the kitchen.
13
As he walked towards the Questura the next morning, Brunetti considered the ways this case differed from the others he’d dealt with during his career: there was an injured person but no evidence that she had been the victim of a crime, and there was no need to hurry the investigation, for, in the absence of both victim and suspect, what need of haste to seek a guilty person?
The whole thing had taken on the feeling of an academic exercise, carried out to allow the wife of the Vice-Questore to rise a few steps up the ladder of Venetian society, and to help an old woman die in peace. Yet Brunetti was incapable of ridding himself of his concern for the girl’s fate.
Ahead of him as he entered the Questura, his colleague Claudia Griffoni was just starting up the steps. She turned at the sound of her name and paused on the third step to wait for him.
‘Are you working on anything important?’ Brunetti asked as he approached.
‘A tourist was mugged and robbed last night,’ she answered. ‘In Calle degli Avvocati.’
Brunetti was surprised: the street was home to a small hotel and a number of people of ample means. He closed his eyes and called up the memory: a narrow cul-de-sac leading off from Campo Sant’Angelo, it ended against the door of a building and was a place where the unwary could be trapped.
‘What happened?’
She pulled a notebook from the pocket of her jacket and opened it. ‘The victim’s Irish; twenty-three years old. I was at the hospital this morning at eight to see him. He was in a bar last night, chatting up a girl. Bought her a few drinks, had a few himself, and then she suggested they go to her home together. When they got to the end of the calle, two men jumped him from behind. He doesn’t remember any more than that.’
‘What time was this?’
She looked at the notebook. ‘About one-thirty. The call came at 1.37.’
‘Who called?’
‘A man who lives in the calle : the noise woke his dog up, and the dog’s barking woke him up. When he saw a man lying in the calle, he called the Carabinieri. But by the time they got there, he was gone; the Carabinieri found him in the campo, propped up against a building. They called an ambulance that took him to the hospital.’
Common as this might be in any other city, the attack astonished Brunetti. This sort of crime did not happen here. Had seldom happened here: he corrected himself.
‘You talked to him?’ At her nod, Brunetti added, ‘What did he say?’
‘That he was too drunk to defend himself, especially against two of them.’
‘Was he badly hurt?’
‘His head needed a couple of stitches, and he’s bruised, but nothing’s broken.’ After a moment, she added, ‘It could have been much worse, I suppose.’
‘The girl?’
‘No sign of her. He didn’t remember anything about her except that she spoke a little English and seemed to know the way they were going. He doesn’t know what happened to her.’
‘So she could have led him there,’ Brunetti suggested.
‘Or she could have reacted with good sense and run like hell when the punching started,’ Griffoni shot back.
‘Of course,’ Brunetti temporized. ‘Did you get a description?’ he asked.
‘He was still fuddled when I talked to him,’ Griffoni said. ‘I don’t know if it was the drink or the shock or maybe what they gave him when they put the stitches in his head. He wouldn’t know them if he saw them, although he’d remember the girl.’
‘You think it’s worth pursuing?’ he asked her.
She waved the notebook in a vague circle and said, ‘I doubt it. There’s no video camera near there. He doesn’t remember what bar he was in or how they got to where it happened: everything looked the same to him. He thought they went over three or four bridges.’
‘So it could have been anywhere,’ Brunetti observed.
‘Exactly.’ They began to climb the steps. At the second landing, she stopped and asked, ‘May I say something that will sound strange?�
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‘Of course.’
‘Where I last worked, this sort of thing happened ten times a night, twenty. Every night; more on the weekends. We kept up a steady stream in and out of the hospitals.’
‘Naples,’ he stated. He knew it was her home as well as her last posting.
‘Casa mia,’ she said with a laugh.
‘And so?’ Brunetti asked.
‘One mugging – and it’s only the third since I’ve been here – and I’m shocked by it. When I realize that, I begin to suspect I’ve been reassigned to a different planet.’ She shook her head in wonder.
Brunetti turned to the last flight of steps that would take him up to his office but stopped and turned back to her. ‘We’re spoiled, aren’t we?’ he asked.
She pulled her lips together, the way a student would when confronted with a difficult question from a teacher, perhaps a trick question. Brunetti watched her formulate her answer. ‘Perhaps it would be better to say that you’re lucky,’ she finally said.
‘What are you going to do about it?’ he asked, gesturing towards the notebook that was still in her hand.
She tilted her head and raised one shoulder in a resigned gesture. ‘Unless the girl suddenly shows up and gives us a description of the two men, there’s nothing we can do.’
‘Other than sit and wait for them to come in and confess?’ Brunetti suggested.
‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ she agreed drily.
‘Then if there’s nothing for you to do, come up to my office and let me tell you about another case where it seems there is little to be done.’
It took Brunetti some time to tell her about Contessa Lando-Continui and her granddaughter, as Griffoni frequently interrupted to ask for explanations and write the answers in her notebook.
When he was finished, though the events made no more sense to him than they had before he tried to explain them, Brunetti was aware of how strong were the opinions he had formed of people he had never met. He felt nothing but pity for Manuela, whom he continued to think of as a girl, although she was at least thirty. He disliked her mother, whom he defined in Paola’s terms as someone who had ‘thrown her life away’. Unfortunately, she might somehow have created the circumstances in which her daughter’s could be thrown away, as well. The father was little more than a shadow with a double name. An emotional Schettino, he had stayed on board his own Costa Concordia until the marital seas got rough and then jumped ship and found a new crew with whom to sail away from the wreck. Brunetti realized he also pitied Contessa Lando-Continui for her aching need to know what had happened to her granddaughter before she ceased knowing anything at all.
‘You really convinced Patta to ask a magistrate to open a case?’ Griffoni asked with open admiration.
‘I told you what he’s getting in return,’ Brunetti answered.
‘You make it sound so easy,’ she said.
Brunetti laughed. ‘I’ve known him so long, I’ve begun to feel something close to affection for him,’ he confessed. Seeing her surprise, he added, ‘Though only at times.’
Griffoni closed her notebook and sat back in her chair. ‘If you will allow me to say this, I can never trust a Sicilian.’
Brunetti’s first response was amusement, thinking she was joking. But when he realized she was not, he managed to disguise his startled reaction by raising his hand to his mouth and then moving his fingers to rub against his jaw in a manner he sought to make seem contemplative. Is this, he wondered, what it sounds like when I say how little I can trust Neapolitans? Why are other people’s prejudices so strange, while our own are so thought-out and reasonable?
To get away from this subject as quickly as possible, Brunetti asked, ‘Do you have time to help with this?’
‘Yes, of course,’ she said. ‘Otherwise, I might be tempted to take another look at the baggage handlers.’
‘Claudia, my dear,’ he said in his most patient and philosophical voice, ‘you and I will become grandparents many times over and the baggage handlers will still be opening suitcases and helping themselves to whatever it is they please, and the videos of their doing so will by then fill a warehouse. But it’s our grandchildren who will be handling the investigation, not us, and the investigation will continue into the fourth generation.’
Griffoni steered away from the topic, saying as quickly as she could, ‘What is it you’d like me to do?’
By way of an answer, Brunetti asked, ‘Do you know anything about horses?’
‘Who told you?’ she asked, raising her eyebrows.
‘Told me what?’
‘About the horses,’ she answered.
Raising his hands in feigned surrender, Brunetti said, ‘No one told me anything about horses, or about you and horses. It was a simple question.’ She remained silent, and so he asked, ‘Why did it surprise you?’
‘I haven’t mentioned it to anyone here.’
He shook his head, more confused with every remark.
‘I ride,’ Griffoni said. ‘Dressage.’
‘Is that the one where the horses sort of dance?’ Brunetti asked, as ignorant of horse riding as he was of pigeon racing. ‘I see it on television sometimes. The riders wear tall hats, don’t they?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you ride here?’
‘No,’ she said, her disappointment audible.
‘Why not?’
‘Guido,’ she said, voice tight, ‘could you tell me what you want to know and let this other stuff go?’
‘Of course,’ he said apologetically, seeing how troubled this conversation – he realized it was really more like an inquisition – had made her.
‘Her granddaughter had a horse and kept it near Treviso. I want to talk to them, and I’d like to take someone with me who knows about riding.’ Then, as if he thought she might not follow his explanation, he added, ‘That’s why I asked you.’
‘You just told me all this happened fifteen years ago,’ Griffoni said. ‘And you think the same people will still be there?’
‘Perhaps. Perhaps not. Whoever’s there, I want to understand whatever answers I get.’
‘You make it sound like they’re going to make you take a test ride on a horse and not answer your questions unless you do.’
‘It’s not the questions I’m concerned with,’ Brunetti said. ‘It’s the answers. If they talk about her and riding or her and horses, I need to understand what it is they’re telling me.’
She appeared utterly confused. ‘It sounds as if you think they’re foreigners.’
Brunetti smiled at this and said, ‘No, I’m the foreigner. I don’t know enough about what goes on between the rider and the horse, especially if it’s a young girl.’ When she said nothing, Brunetti was forced to add, sounding defensive, ‘Please don’t tell me I’m crazy. Or that it’s all pop psychology.’
Before he could continue, she interrupted. ‘If anything was troubling her, the horse would have known about it, that’s for sure.’ Then, grinning, she added, ‘Unfortunately, they’re hard to interview.’
The idea made Brunetti smile. ‘What I’m hoping,’ he said, ‘is that someone there will remember her. At the time, it was reported as an accident, so I’m sure no one bothered to question these people.’
‘Have you seen the report?’
‘Signorina Elettra should have found it by now.’
‘Shall we go and find out?’ Griffoni asked and got to her feet.
Signorina Elettra appeared to have given herself a promotion, for today she wore a double-breasted blue jacket with epaulettes and gold braid at the cuffs. Griffoni’s glance was a mixture of envy and appreciation, which she did nothing to disguise.
Brunetti stepped forward since he had made the request. ‘Did you find the report of her accident?’ he asked.
‘Are you sure of the d
ate, Commissario?’ Signorina Elettra asked, but she said it as a statement and not a question.
Signorina Elettra had found the newspaper accounts of the incident, as had he, so there was no doubt as to the date. She knew this and he knew this, so her remark was a coded announcement that . . . Brunetti’s mind flashed to but immediately excluded: ‘she had failed to find it but was still searching’, ‘it did not appear in the files’, and settled on ‘she suspected it had been lost’.
‘Those files were all computerized, weren’t they?’ Brunetti asked.
‘At the time, yes.’ Signorina Elettra answered. ‘Everything from the paper reports was transcribed and entered into the system.’
‘And the paper copy?’ Griffoni, who had moved over to prop herself against Brunetti’s place at the windowsill, asked.
‘Destroyed, of course,’ Signorina Elettra said and, as though she had been waiting for them to catch up with her, relaxed back in her chair.
Both heads swivelled towards her at the same moment, both faces registering comprehension. Brunetti left it to the other commissario to state the obvious. ‘So if the computer doesn’t have the report, then it’s gone.’ Never had the simple word sounded so final to Brunetti.
Signorina Elettra nodded but went on to say, ‘Before you start suspecting conspiracy, you should know that about a third of the reports that were put into the system are missing, at least for that year. There was a bug in the program, and before they found it, they continued to enter material and destroy the originals.’
‘How long did it take to discover what was happening?’ Griffoni asked.
‘They’d entered almost everything before they noticed.’
Brunetti and Griffoni exchanged a glance. In her shrug, he read her irritation with incompetence and error. She asked, ‘What about the hospital? If they took her there, then a medical report must exist.’
Ah, Brunetti thought, is this how southerners imagine us to be? Creatures of order, routine, method? The last time he had been to the hospital, it was to visit his sister-in-law the night before she was to be operated on for varicose veins. He’d walked in on his brother taping a plastic folder to her leg; inside the clear plastic was a sheet of paper on which could be read, ‘Operate on THIS leg.’ He had chosen not to comment.
