Acqua Alta cgb-5

by Donna Leon

  Murino had apparently been expecting this question, for his answer was immediate. ‘Two weeks ago. We met for a drink, and I told him I was planning a buying trip up into Lombardy at the end of the month. I told him I wanted to close the shop for a week and asked him if he had any objection if I did so.’

  ‘And did he?’

  ‘No, none at all.’

  ‘What about your daughter?’

  ‘She’s busy studying for her exams. She’s studying law. And whole days pass when no one comes into the shop. So I thought this was a good time to close for a while. We also needed to get some work done.’

  ‘What sort of work?’

  ‘We’ve got a door that opens to the canal, and it’s come off its hinges. So if we want to use it, a whole new frame has to be built,’ he said, gesturing towards the velvet curtains. ‘Would you like to see?’ Murino asked.

  ‘No, thank you,’ Brunetti answered. ‘Signor Murino, did it ever occur to you that there might be a certain conflict of interest for your partner?’

  Murino smiled inquisitively, ‘I’m afraid I don’t understand.’

  ‘Then let me try to make it clearer. His other position might have served to, let us say, work to the advantage of your joint investment here.’

  ‘I must apologize, but I still don’t understand what you mean.’ Murino’s smile would not have seemed out of place on the face of an angel.

  Brunetti gave examples. ‘Using you, perhaps, as a consultant or learning that certain pieces or collections were going to come up for sale. Perhaps recommending the shop to people who expressed an interest in a particular sort of item.’

  ‘No, that never occurred to me.’

  ‘Did it occur to your partner?’

  Murino took his handkerchief and leaned over to wipe at another smudge. When he was satisfied that the surface was clean, he said, ‘I was his business partner, Commissario, not his confessor. I’m afraid that’s a question only he could answer.’

  ‘But that, alas, is not to be.’

  Murino shook his head sadly. ‘No, that is not to be.’

  ‘What will happen to his share of the shop now?’

  Murino’s face was all astonished innocence. ‘Oh, I’ll continue dividing the profits with his widow.’

  ‘And you and your daughter will continue to do the buying and selling?’

  Murino’s answer was slow in coming, but when it came, it was no more than an acknowledgement of the self-evident. ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘Of course,’ Brunetti echoed, though the words neither sounded the same nor conveyed the same idea when he said them.

  Murino’s face suffused with sudden anger, but before he could speak, Brunetti said, ‘Thank you for your time, Signor Murino I hope you have a successful trip to Lombardy.’

  Murino pushed himself away from the chest and went over to the door to retrieve Brunetti’s umbrella. He held it by the still-wet cloth and offered it, handle first, to Brunetti. He opened the door and held it politely for Brunetti, then closed it softly behind him. Brunetti stood in the rain and raised his umbrella. As he did, a sudden gust of wind tried to pull it from his hands, but he tightened his grip and turned towards home. During the entire conversation, neither of them had once used Semenzato’s name.

  * * * *

  Chapter Sixteen

  As he made his way across the rain-swept campo, Brunetti found himself wondering if Semenzato would have trusted a man like Murino to keep the records of all purchaser and sales. Brunetti had certainly known odder business arrangements, and he kept in mind the fact that he knew Semenzato, as it were, only in retrospect, a vision that seldom encouraged clarity. But still, who would be so dull as to believe the word of an antiquarian, as slippery a bunch as he could imagine? Here a voice stronger than his attempt to suppress it asked, ‘And a Neapolitan, to boot?’ No one would accept what they said as face value, without question. But if the major business of their partnership was in stolen or false pieces, then the earnings from the legitimate business of the shop wouldn’t matter. In that case, Semenzato would never have had to question Murino’s receipts or his word that an armadio or a table had been purchased for a certain price, sold for so much more. When he thought of the idea of profit, loss, price, he realized he had no base figures here, no idea whatsoever of the market value of the pieces Brett said were missing. For that matter, he didn’t even know what those pieces were. Tomorrow.

  Because of the ever-increasing rain and the threat of acqua alta, the streets were strangely deserted, even though this was the time when most people would be hurrying home from work or out to do some last-minute shopping before the stores closed. Instead, Brunetti found that he could pass easily through the narrow streets without the repeated bother of turning his umbrella sideways to allow shorter people to pass under it with theirs. Even the broad top of the Rialto Bridge was strangely deserted, something he could not remember ever having seen before. Many of the stalls were empty, boxes of fruit and vegetables whisked away before closing time, owners escaped from the grinding cold and the rain that continued to pound down.

  He slammed the door of his building behind him: in wet weather, the lock tended to stick, and only violence would get the massive door to close or open. He shook his umbrella a few times, then furled it and stuck it under his arm. With his right hand, he grabbed the handrail and began the long climb to their apartment. On the first floor, Signora Bussola, the deaf widow of a lawyer, was watching the telegiornale, which meant that everyone on the floor got to listen to the news. Predictably, she watched the news on RAI Uno; not for her those radical leftists and communist scum on RAI Due. On the second floor, the Rossis were quiet: that meant their argument was over and they were in the back of the house, in the bedroom. The third floor was silent. A young couple had moved in there two years ago and bought the entire floor, but Brunetti could count on one hand the times he had met either one of them on the stairs. He was said to work for the city, though no one was sure what he did. The wife left every morning and came home at five thirty every afternoon, but no one knew where she went or what she did, a fact which Brunetti thought miraculous. On the fourth floor, there were only scents. The Amabiles seldom emerged, but the stairwell was always awash with the glorious, tempting smells of food. Tonight it appeared to be capriolo and, if he wasn’t wrong, artichokes, though it might be fried aubergine.

  And then there was his own door and the promise of peace. Which lasted only as long as it took him to open the door and step inside. From the back of the apartment, he could hear Chiara sobbing. This was his little Spartan, the child who almost never cried, the girl who could be punished by being deprived of the things she most desired and who would never shed a tear, this the child who had once broken her wrist but had sat tearless, however pale, while it was being set. And she was not merely crying; she was sobbing.

  He walked quickly down the hall and into her room. Paola sat on the side of the bed, cradling Chiara in her arms. ‘But, baby, I don’t think there’s anything we can do. I’ve got the ice on it, but you’re just going to have to wait until it stops hurting.’

  ‘But, Mamma, it hurts. It hurts so much. Can’t you make it stop?’

  ‘I can give you more aspirin, Chiara. Maybe that will help.’

  Chiara gulped back her tears and repeated, her voice gone strangely high, ‘Mamma, please do something.’

  ‘Paola, what is it?’ he asked, keeping his voice very calm, very level.

  ‘Oh, Guido,’ Paola said, turning to him but keeping firm hold of Chiara. ‘Chiara dropped the table on her toe.’

  ‘What table?’ he asked, rather than what toe.

  ‘The one in the kitchen.’ That was the one with the woodworm. What had they done, tried to move it themselves? But why do that when it was raining? They couldn’t take it out on to the terrace; it was too heavy for them.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘She didn’t believe me that there were so many holes, so she turned it on i
ts side to look, and it slipped out of her hands and landed on her toe.’

  ‘Let me see,’ he said and, as soon as he spoke, saw that her right foot lay on top of the coverlet, wrapped in a bath towel that held a plastic bag of ice against the injured toe to work against the swelling.

  It proved to be just as he imagined, and the toe proved to be worse. It was the big toe of her right foot, swollen, the entire nail red with the promise of the blue that would emerge with time.

  ‘Is it broken?’ he asked.

  ‘No, Papà, I can bend it and that doesn’t hurt. But it throbs and throbs,’ Chiara said. She had stopped sobbing, but he could see from her face that the pain was still strong. ‘Papà, please do something.’

  ‘There’s nothing Papà can do, Chiara,’ Paola said, pushing the foot a bit to the side and placing the bag of ice back on top of it.

  ‘When did it happen?’ he asked.

  ‘This afternoon, right after you left,’ Paola answered.

  ‘And she’s been like that all day?’

  ‘No, Papà,’ Chiara said, defending herself from the unspoken accusation that she had spent the entire afternoon in tears. ‘It hurt at the beginning, and then it was all right for a while, but now it hurts a lot.’ She had already asked once if he could do something; Chiara was not the sort of person who repeated a request.

  He remembered something he had learned years ago, when he was doing his military service and one of the men in his unit had dropped a manhole cover on his toe. Somehow, he had managed not to break it because it had caught his toe just at the end, but it had, like Chiara’s, gone red and swollen.

  ‘There is one thing,’ he began. Paola and Chiara swung their heads to look at him.

  ‘What?’ they asked in unison.

  ‘It’s disgusting,’ he said, ‘but it will help.’

  ‘What is it, Papà?’ Chiara asked through lips that were beginning to tremble again with pain.

  ‘I have to stick a needle through the nail and let the blood out.’

  ‘No,’ Paola shouted, tightening her grip around Chiara’s shoulder.

  ‘Does it work, Papà?’

  ‘It worked the one time I saw it done, but that was years ago. I’ve never done it, but I watched the doctor do it.’

  ‘Do you think you could do it, Papà?

  He removed his coat and laid it across the foot of her bed. ‘I think so, angel. Do you want me to try?’

  ‘Will it make it stop hurting?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘All right, Papà.’

  He glanced across at Paola, asking her opinion. She bent and kissed the top of Chiara’s head, wrapped her in an even tighter embrace, then nodded to Brunetti and tried to smile.

  He went down the hall and took a candle from the third drawer to the right of the kitchen sink. He jammed it down into a ceramic candle-holder, grabbed a box of matches and went back into the bedroom. He set the candle down on Chiara’s desk, lit it and went down the hall into Paola’s study. From her top drawer he took a paper clip and bent it open into a straight rod as he went back towards Chiara’s room. He’d said ‘needle’, but then he’d remembered that the doctor had used a paper clip, saying a needle was too thin to burn through the nail quickly.

  Back in Chiara’s room, he took the candle and set it at the foot of the bed, behind Paola’s back. ‘I think it might be better if you didn’t watch, angel,’ he told Chiara. To assure that, he sat on the edge of the bed, next to Paola, his back turned to hers, and uncovered Chiara’s foot.

  When he touched it, she pulled it away instinctively, said ‘Sorry’ into her mother’s shoulder, and pushed her foot back near him. He took it with his left hand and moved the ice bag away from it. He had to change his position on the bed, careful not to let the candle spill over, until he was sitting facing the two of them. He took her heel and wedged it between his knees, pressing them together to hold it steady.

  ‘It’s all right, baby. It’s just going to take a second,’ he said, reaching for the candle with one hand and holding the end of the paper clip in the other. When the heat seared his fingers, he dropped the paper clip and spilled wax over the coverlet. Both his wife and his daughter winced away from his sudden motion.

  ‘One moment, one moment,’ he said and went back into the kitchen, muttering darkly under his breath. He took a pair of pliers from the bottom drawer and went back into the bedroom. When the candle was relit and everything was as it had been before, he grasped one end of the paper clip in the pliers and stuck the other into the flame. He waited until it glowed red and then, so quickly that he would not have time to think about what he was doing, he pressed the glowing end of the paper clip into the centre of the nail on Chiara’s toe. He held it there while the toenail began to smoke, grabbed her ankle with his left hand to prevent her from pulling her foot back.

  Suddenly, the resistance disappeared from under the paper clip, and dark blood flooded up out of her toe and across his fingers. He pulled the paper clip out and, acting more from instinct than from anything he might have remembered, he pressed at the bottom of her toe, forcing the dark blood to flow out of the hole in the nail.

  Through all of this, Chiara had wrapped herself around Paola, and she, in her turn, had kept her eyes turned away from what Brunetti was doing. When he glanced up, however, he saw that Chiara was looking at him over her mothers shoulder and then down at her foot. ‘Is that all?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes,’ he answered. ‘How does it feel?’

  ‘It’s better already, Papà. All the pressure’s gone, and it doesn’t throb anymore.’ She studied the tools of his trade: candle, pliers, paper clips. ‘That’s all you need to do it?’ she asked with real curiosity, tears forgotten.

  ‘That’s all,’ he said, giving her ankle a squeeze.

  ‘Do you think I could do it?’ she asked.

  ‘Do you mean on yourself or on someone else?’ he asked.

  ‘Either.’

  ‘I don’t see why not.’

  Paola, whose daughter seemed to have forgotten about her in the fascination of this new scientific discovery, removed her arms from that no-longer-suffering daughter and picked up the ice bag and towel from the bed. She stood, looked down at the two of them for a moment, as if studying some alien life form, and went down die hall towards the kitchen.

  * * * *

  Chapter Seventeen

  The following morning, Chiara’s foot felt good enough for her to go to school, though she opted to wear three pairs of woollen socks and her high rubber boots, not only because of the still-pounding rain and threatened acqua alta, but because the boots were wide and large enough to allow her healing toe plenty of room. She was gone by the time he was dressed and ready to leave for work, but at his place on the kitchen table he found a large sheet of paper with an immense red heart drawn on it and, under it, in her precise block print, ‘Grazie, Papà.’ He folded the drawing into a neat rectangle and sipped it into his wallet.

  He hadn’t bothered to phone to tell Flavia and Brett — he assumed both of them were there — he was coming, but it was almost ten when he rang the bell, and he believed that was a sufficiently respectable hour to arrive to speak of murder.

  He told the voice on the intercom who he was and pushed the heavy door open when the switch from upstairs released the lock. He propped his umbrella in a corner of the entrance, shook himself much in the manner of a dog, and began to climb the steps.

  Today it was Brett who stood by the open door, she who let him into the apartment. She smiled when she saw him, and he saw again only the white flash of her teeth.

  ‘Where’s Signora Petrelli?’ he asked as she led him into the living room.

  ‘Flavia is seldom presentable before eleven. Never human before ten.’ As she led the way across the living room, he noticed that she walked more easily and seemed to be less concerned about causing pain to her body by some entirely natural movement or gesture.

  She motioned him to a seat and t
ook her place on the sofa; what little light came into the room entered behind her and partially shadowed her face. When they were seated, he pulled from his pocket the paper on which he had made notes the day before, though he was fairly clear about what he needed to know.

  ‘I’d like you to tell me about the pieces you found in China, the ones you think are false,’ he began with no introduction.

  ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘Everything.’

  ‘That’s rather a lot.’

  ‘I need to know about the pieces you think have been stolen. And then I need to know something about how it could have been done.’