by Donna Leon
The technical squad remained another half-hour, until Bocchese came back and told Brunetti they were finished and he could now move around freely and touch whatever he wanted in the apartment. The two of them shook hands, and Bocchese led his squad down the stairs and out to the waiting boat.
Brunetti, still wearing his plastic gloves, went back into the bedroom, careful where he stepped, and opened the doors of the wardrobe. He saw two jackets, neither of them particularly clean, and a dark grey woollen coat with worn cuffs. Two pairs of shoes rested on the bottom of the closet. The drawers on the bottom held three pullovers and a few polyester shirts. The underwear was grey and unpleasant looking.
Brunetti went through the rest of the apartment. The only printed words he saw were the receipts from Cavanis’ monthly pension payment – 662.87 euros, and how was a person meant to live on that? – and a circular from the local parish, inviting all residents to meet the new parroco. The refrigerator, at least thirty years old, held another two-litre bottle of wine, this one white, and a packet of petrified cheese.
The shelf above the sink in the bathroom held a grimy glass, a packet of aspirin, and a bar of kitchen soap. The bathtub was disgusting.
Nothing else. For all that his presence was evident in his possessions, Cavanis could have moved in that same day or the day before, yet he had been there long enough for the man in the bar to find his behaviour with the keys normal.
Brunetti left, locking the door behind him, and went downstairs. He went back to the bridge and to the other side, then along the canal and into the bar.
When the barman saw him, he said, sounding offended, ‘You didn’t tell me you were a policeman.’
‘It wasn’t necessary. He hadn’t done anything wrong.’ He asked for a coffee.
The man shrugged, as though to say he wasn’t angry, really: he was just saying it.
He made the coffee and placed it in front of Brunetti, then pushed the bowl of sugar envelopes along the counter towards him.
‘Was he really murdered?’ the barman couldn’t stop himself from asking.
‘It would seem so,’ Brunetti answered.
‘Ah, the poor devil,’ he said with real feeling, then surprised Brunetti by saying, ‘I hope at least he was drunk when it happened.’
‘Why is that?’
The barman had to think a while before he found the words for his answer. ‘Because he wouldn’t be so afraid. Maybe.’ He shook his head again and repeated, ‘Poor devil.’
Brunetti sensed another person at his side and turned to see a sandy-haired man a few years older than himself.
‘It’s really true? Someone killed Pietro?’ he asked.
Brunetti nodded, and finished his coffee. ‘Did you know him?’ he asked the man to his left.
‘Well, there’s knowing and there’s knowing,’ the man said and waved towards the place on the bar in front of him. The barman reached for a bottle of white wine and poured him a small glass.
He picked it up and drank it down as though it were water.
‘Was he a friend?’ Brunetti asked with feigned innocence.
‘Sort of,’ he said and pushed the glass across the counter.
Brunetti gestured to the barman, and a second glass appeared in front of him. When both were filled, Brunetti tipped it in the direction of the man beside him, then quickly downed half of it. He found it less good than the coffee.
‘You’re a cop, aren’t you?’ the man asked.
‘Yes. I was supposed to talk to Signor Cavanis this morning. But when I went over there – the way he told me to do – I found him.’ Brunetti shook his head and made what he hoped was a resigned gesture with his left hand.
‘Did you know him?’ the man reversed roles by asking Brunetti.
‘No, not really,’ Brunetti answered, trying to sound easy and relaxed. ‘But we’d spoken a few times.’
The man finished his wine and held the glass up to the barman. ‘He was a good guy. But he drank too much, if you ask me.’
‘Ah,’ Brunetti sighed. ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ Then, quite as if the phenomenon of drinking were a new world to him, he asked, ‘Did it change him? The way he behaved, I mean.’
The man nodded his thanks to the barman and left the glass on the counter. ‘Yeah, it gave him this feeling that he was important.’
Brunetti took the smallest sip of his wine and set the glass down, then turned to his companion, intent on what he might say next.
‘More he drank, more important he thought he was,’ his neighbour said and picked up his glass.
‘Like knowing about sports and stuff like that?’ Brunetti asked, pitching his level of reference to what he thought most men would understand.
‘That for one, yes. Hear him talk, he was the only person who ever watched soccer or knew anything about it,’ the other man said, but the criticism was coloured by affection. ‘But it was more that he kept thinking he’d make a fortune. Ever since I’ve known him . . .’ the man began but then made the grammatical correction and said, ‘. . . since I knew him, he’d have these great plans for getting rich.’ He took another small sip and was surprised to see that the glass was almost empty. ‘I guess he thought that would make him important.’
Brunetti finished his glass and waved to the barman, pointing to both their glasses.
‘He got the bug again just the other night,’ the man continued, nodding his thanks for the wine. ‘Big plans. He said he saw something that was going to change his luck, at last, after all these years.’ He shook his head at the very idea of it then, seeing the scepticism on Brunetti’s face, he turned to the barman and said, ‘You heard him, Ruggiero. Saturday night.’
‘He was drunk, Nino,’ the barman said with a mixture of patience and exasperation. ‘You know what he was like: big talk at night, no memory in the morning.’
‘But you heard him,’ the man called Nino insisted.
‘Yes, I heard him, but I also saw him, and he was drunk. He came in here to get another bottle of wine, didn’t he?’
‘Was this Saturday?’ Brunetti asked.
‘The night of acqua alta, yes,’ the barman answered. Nino nodded to show he agreed but said nothing.
‘I’ve been listening to him for years,’ the barman continued. ‘So I never paid too much attention to him, not once he started on his big plans. I’ve heard too many of them over the years; not only from him.’ He picked up a clean glass and poured himself some of the white wine and drank it down. ‘He said that the time he’d spent watching television was finally going to be worth something. When I asked him what he was talking about, he said he’d remembered something and it was going to make his fortune.’
The other man laughed out loud. ‘I can’t count how many times something he knew, or remembered, or was told, or read in the paper, or saw on television was going to make his fortune.’ He laughed a few more times but then, perhaps recalling that the man was dead, he clapped his hand over his mouth and said, ‘Sorry.’
Brunetti and the barman exchanged glances, but neither knew what to say. Both of them took a sip of wine, set their glasses down and looked around the bar, as though waiting for something to distract them and let the moment pass.
Finally the sandy-haired man said, ‘Well, even if he never amounted to much, there was no malice in him, and he couldn’t help it if he was a drunk. His father was and his grandfather was, too.’ He ran his eyes across the bottles lined up on the mirrored wall of the bar, as if trying to calculate all of the drinking three generations of Cavanis men had done. ‘Pity he won’t get to change his luck.’
‘It didn’t get better, did it?’ the barman asked of no one in particular.
To break their maudlin descent, Brunetti asked the barman, ‘Do you think it really was something he saw on television that made him remember?’
The barman emptied his glass, dipped it into the water in the sink, and began to dry it with a towel. He held it with one hand and rubbed at it, turning and turning long after it was dry.
The other man surprised Brunetti by asking the barman, ‘Should we tell him?’
‘About his memory?’
‘Yes.’
All Brunetti knew was that whatever Cavanis had once seen had vanished in the midst of a bout of drunkenness and not returned. ‘Tell me what?’
The two men engaged in a delicate head-ballet, one nodding to the other, that one shaking his head and nodding back at the first. Finally the barman said, ‘You tell him, Nino.’ To encourage him, he filled his friend’s glass, and then, when Brunetti covered the top of his own glass with his hand, his own, forgetting that he’d just cleaned it.
‘Pietro’s father could do it, too,’ the man called Nino began, a remark that confused Brunetti utterly. ‘I never met the grandfather, so I don’t know if he could do it, but Pietro and his father had memories.’
Brunetti was about to say that most people do, when the man went on, ‘I mean very good memories. If you told Pietro something he’d always remember it, or if he met a person or read something. It was like a camera.’ To give an example, he said, ‘He could remember every move in every game of soccer he ever saw, either live or on television.’
He picked up his glass and held it up towards Brunetti, without drinking. ‘Only trouble was this.’ He raised the glass and swirled the wine around. ‘If he drank too much, it didn’t work and he wouldn’t remember anything when he was sober again.’
‘That’s not true,’ the bartender broke in to say. ‘You know it’s not.’
‘Let me finish, Ruggiero, would you?’ he said impatiently. Then, to Brunetti, ‘As I was saying, he wouldn’t remember some things if they happened when he was drinking. But then other things came back, and he’d remember them again, but only when he was so drunk he didn’t remember new things. Old stuff came back but new stuff didn’t go in. Very strange.’ He finished his wine, set the glass down, and said, ‘Strange guy.’ He was beginning to slur words with an ‘s’ in them, Brunetti noticed.
Nino looked at his watch and said, ‘Gesù, if I’m not back at work in ten minutes my boss will kill me.’ He held up his glass and asked, ‘How much do I owe you, Ruggiero?’
Brunetti placed a restraining hand on Nino’s arm and said, ‘This is mine, signori.’
He took a twenty-euro note from his wallet and set it on the bar, then waved away the barman’s attempt to give him change. He looked at his watch, saw that it was after five, and said, ‘If I’m not back at work in ten minutes, my boss will kill me, too.’
19
Brunetti knew it was an exaggeration to say that Patta would kill him, but it was not an exaggeration to say that he would view Brunetti’s dismissal – reason left undefined – with some relief, for it would remove the major goad in his existence. After which, Brunetti had the fairness to admit, Patta would probably regret his absence. Like any couple that had chugged along for years, he and Patta had developed a way to deal with one another and had learned the precise limits of the acceptable. More importantly, each had learned how to use the skills or contacts of the other for his own purposes. It might not be a recipe for a happy marriage, but Brunetti suspected that many married people would recognize the template.
He got back to the Questura before six and decided that he would wait for Rizzardi’s call. He left the door to his office open so that he would be seen, busy at his desk, should Lieutenant Scarpa pass by, as he often did, especially late in the afternoon. Brunetti read through and initialled some files, went and looked out of his window, then returned to the files, storing their content in abbreviated form in some far reach of his memory that he could sometimes access, sometimes not.
Brunetti’s thoughts passed to what the men had said about the effect of drinking on Cavanis’ memory. Things came and went, carried on and then carried off on waves of alcohol.
Something ‘that was going to change his luck’. Well, his luck certainly had changed, but not in the way Cavanis had hoped or could have imagined. The night of acqua alta, which was Saturday. Brunetti remembered only finishing dinner – with no memory of what it had been – and going into the living room to lie comatose on the sofa. He thought they had watched television, but then Paola had changed to something he didn’t want to watch, and he had abandoned her and gone to bed.
He turned on his computer, only to ignore it and dial Signorina Elettra’s number. When there was no answer, he returned to the computer and sent her an email, asking her to contact the local television station and ask for a list of the programmes shown on Saturday evening: if possible, to send copies of the programmes themselves, something he thought could be done by means of the computer.
Then he called Griffoni on her telefonino. She had already heard about Cavanis, and Brunetti spent some time telling her about the circumstances of his death and the conversation with the men in the bar. He explained that he’d requested the information from the television station and asked if she’d be willing to spend a few hours the next day watching the programmes with him: she might notice something he did not.
‘Local television?’ she asked. ‘An entire evening of it?’ She breathed heavily a few times and then said, ‘All right, I’ll do it, but I expect your first grandchild to be named Claudia.’ Then, voice suddenly serious, she asked, ‘Anything else?’
‘Yes, one thing. I’d like you to go and see Manuela’s mother tomorrow and ask if she knew about the sexual violence.’
‘If she didn’t open the report, then she didn’t know,’ Griffoni said, surprising Brunetti by how certain she sounded.
‘The doctors might have told her.’
‘In that case, she would have told you.’
‘Perhaps. Or maybe she hoped that if it didn’t get talked about, then it hadn’t happened.’ Brunetti had seen stranger behaviour when parents discovered things they did not want to know about their children.
He gave her as much time as she needed to think about this. He looked out of the window and then at his watch: in a week, it would be even darker at this time, and nothing would improve until springtime.
‘All right,’ Griffoni conceded, choosing not to argue the point with him, ‘I’ll talk to her.’ Before he could inquire, she added, ‘Before movie-time.’
He thanked her and hung up and then, because he had been on the phone, dialled Rizzardi’s number. The pathologist answered with his name.
‘It’s me, Ettore,’ Brunetti said. He stopped there, not sure how to ask the doctor if he had done his job.
‘As I said, the body is a miracle. Signor Cavanis was proof. He was fifty-four years old, according to his carta d’identità. But according to his body, the state it was in, he was at least fifteen years older. He had advanced cirrhosis: I don’t know how much longer he would have lived or could have lived. But I don’t know, either, how he lived as long as he did. Because of the cirrhosis, blood vessels had grown around his oesophagus, so there was much more bleeding.’
He paused after this, and Brunetti heard a page turning.
‘The knife was an ordinary kitchen knife,’ the pathologist went on. ‘Bocchese has it now to check for fingerprints. He asked me to tell you they’ll have them within two days and will run them through the system to see if anyone turns up, but he has to send it out for DNA tests.’ Rizzardi paused, but Brunetti knew better than to question Bocchese’s work rhythms.
‘The person who used it was right-handed,’ Rizzardi continued, ‘at least the same height as his victim, definitely standing behind him, and was strong enough to drive the blade through the oesophagus. He was stabbed only once and, because of the cirrhosis, more blood vessels were present and enlarged, so the damage was greater. My best guess is that he died some time on Sunday evening.’
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Then, changing tack, he added, ‘He would have survived no more than a few minutes. He had so much alcohol in his urine – he’d been dead too long for me to get an accurate reading from his blood – that he might not even have been fully conscious of what was happening.’
‘Thanks, Ettore,’ was all Brunetti could think of to say before he replaced the phone. Suddenly overcome by the awareness of how much of his day he had spent in the company of death, he left the Questura and went home.
Paola had told him that the kids would be out that evening, so Brunetti stayed in the kitchen and told her about the events of the day as she baked slices of melanzane in the oven, then fried them with onions and tomatoes to make sauce. He’d told her he wasn’t very hungry when he came in, but as he sat and drank a glass of Gewürztraminer and watched her cook, he felt his appetite sharpen, and he suggested she add a second aubergine.
Seeing that it would be some time before dinner was ready, Brunetti said he’d like to go and lie down on the sofa and read for a while, sure in the knowledge that Paola, whose religion was books, would find this a fine and proper thing to do.
He went into the bedroom and retrieved Apollonius of Rhodes, abandoned on his bedside table. What better companions for the darkening evening hours than Jason and the Argonauts? They’d always seemed like pals from liceo to Brunetti: no one too serious, no one too adult, all of them out in search of adventure. Before he got to their adventures, however, Brunetti had to read through the expansive genealogies of the characters, major and minor, as well as of the gods and goddesses – the usual cast, the usual weaknesses.
When the genealogies were finished, the women began to wish the soldiers on their way but paused long enough to lament with Jason’s mother. And then he read it, ‘Would that the dark wave, where the maiden Helle perished . . .’ He stopped reading and stared straight ahead. Another drowning girl. His reflections were interrupted by Paola, who came to the door to say that dinner was ready.
