by Donna Leon
‘You people in the North,’ the Lieutenant said with a condescending nod in Brunetti’s direction, ‘don’t understand what it is to make wine, so why should you know about making anything else?’ He drank the rest of his grappa, made a small moue of distaste – the gesture so carefully manufactured as to allow Brunetti to distinguish easily between distaste and disgust – and set his glass on the table. He gave Brunetti an open-faced glance, as if inviting him to make a contribution to oenological frankness, but Brunetti refused to play and contented himself with finishing his own grappa. However much this dinner with Patta and Scarpa might have driven Brunetti to long for a second grappa – or the second coming – the realization that acceptance would prolong the meal led him to resist the waiter’s offer, just as good sense led him to resist the bait offered to him by Scarpa.
Brunetti’s refusal to engage spurred the Lieutenant, or perhaps it was the grappa – his second – for he began, ‘I don’t understand why Friuli wines are …’ but Brunetti’s attention was called away from whatever deficiency the Lieutenant was about to reveal by the sound of his telefonino. Whenever he was forced into social occasions he could not avoid – as with Patta’s invitation to dinner to discuss candidates for promotion – Brunetti was careful to carry his telefonino and was often saved by a generous Paola, calling with an invented urgent reason for him to leave immediately.
‘Sì,’ he answered, disappointed at having seen it was the central number of the Questura.
‘Good evening, Commissario,’ said a voice he thought must be Ruffolo’s. ‘We just had a call from a woman in Santa Croce. She’s found a dead woman in her apartment. There was blood, so she called us.’
‘Whose apartment?’ Brunetti asked, not that it mattered that he know this now, but because he disliked lack of clarity.
‘She said she was in her own apartment. The dead woman, that is. It’s downstairs from hers.’
‘Where in Santa Croce?’
‘Giacomo dell’Orio, sir. She lives just opposite the church. One seven two six.’
‘Who’s gone?’ Brunetti asked.
‘No one, sir. I called you first.’
Brunetti looked at his watch. It was almost eleven, long after he had thought and hoped this dinner would end. ‘See if you can find Rizzardi and have him go. And call Vianello – he should be at home. Send a boat to pick him up and take him there. And get a crime scene team together.’
‘What about you, sir?’
Brunetti had already consulted the map of the city imprinted in his genes. ‘It’s faster for me to walk. I’ll meet them there.’ Then, as an afterthought, ‘If there’s a patrol anywhere near, call them and tell them to go over. And call the woman and tell her not to touch anything in the apartment.’
‘She went back to her own, sir, to make the call. I told her to stay there.’
‘Good. What’s her name?’
‘Giusti, sir.’
‘If you speak to the patrol, tell them I’ll be there in ten minutes.’
‘Yes, sir,’ the officer said and hung up.
Vice-Questore Patta looked across at Brunetti with open curiosity. ‘Trouble, Commissario?’ he asked in a tone that made Brunetti aware of how different curiosity was from interest.
‘Yes, sir. A woman’s been found dead in Santa Croce.’
‘And they called you?’ interrupted Scarpa, placing just the least hint of polite suspicion on the last word.
‘Griffoni’s not back from vacation yet, and I live closest,’ Brunetti answered with practised blandness.
‘Of course,’ Scarpa said, turning aside to say something to the waiter.
To Patta, Brunetti said, ‘I’ll go and have a look, Vice-Questore.’ He put on his face the look of a beleaguered bureaucrat, reluctantly pulled away from what he wanted to do by what he had to do; he pushed back his chair and got to his feet. He gave Patta the chance to make a comment, but the moment passed in silence.
Outside the restaurant, Brunetti left the business of getting there to memory and pulled out his telefonino. He dialled his home number.
‘Are you calling for moral support?’ Paola asked when she picked up the phone.
‘Scarpa has just told me we northerners don’t know anything about making wine,’ he said.
There was a pause before she said, ‘That’s what your words say, but it sounds as if something else is wrong.’
‘I’ve been called in. There’s a dead woman in Santa Croce, over by San Giacomo.’
‘Why did they call you?’
‘They probably didn’t want to call Patta or Scarpa.’
‘So they called you when you were with them? Wonderful.’
‘They didn’t know where I was. Besides, it was a way for me to get away from them. I’ll go over to see what happened. I live the closest, anyway.’
‘Do you want me to wait up?’
‘No. I have no idea how long it will take.’
‘I’ll wake up when you come in,’ she said. ‘If I don’t, just give me a shove.’
Brunetti smiled at the thought but confined himself to a noise of agreement.
‘I have been known not to sleep through the night,’ she said with false indignation, her aural radar having caught the precise nuance of his noise.
The last time, Brunetti recalled, was the night the Fenice burned down, when the sound of the helicopter repeatedly passing overhead had finally summoned her from the deep abyss to which she repaired each evening.
In a more conciliatory tone, she said, ‘I hope it’s not awful.’
He thanked her, then said goodbye and put the phone in his pocket. He called his attention back to where he was walking. The streets were brightly lit: more largesse from the profligate bureaucrats in Brussels. If he had chosen to do so, Brunetti could have read a newspaper in the light from the street lamps. Light still poured from many shop windows: he thought of the satellite photos he had seen of the glowing night-time planet as measured from above. Only Darkest Africa remained so.
At the end of Scaleter Ca’ Bernardo, he turned left and passed the tower of San Boldo, then walked down from the bridge and into Calle del Tintor and went past the pizzeria. Next to it a shop selling cheap purses was still open; behind the counter sat a young Chinese girl, reading a Chinese newspaper. He had no idea what the current laws were about how late a shop could stay open, but some atavistic voice whispered to him about the unseemliness of engaging in commercial activity at this hour.
A few weeks ago he had had dinner with a commander of the Frontier Police, who had told him, among other things, that their own best estimate of the number of Chinese currently living in Italy was between 500,000 and five million. After saying this, he sat back, the better to enjoy Brunetti’s astonishment. In the face of it, he had added, ‘If the Chinese in Europe were all wearing uniforms, we’d be forced to see it as the invasion it is.’ He had then returned his attention to his grilled calamari.
Two doors down he found another shop, with still another young Chinese girl behind the cash register. More light spilled into the street from a bar; in front of it four or five young people stood, smoking and drinking. He noticed that three of them drank Coca-Cola: so much for the nightlife of Venice.
He came out into the campo; it too was flooded with light. Years ago, just when he had been transferred back from Naples, this campo had been infamous as a place to buy drugs. He remembered the stories he’d heard about the abandoned needles that had to be swept up every morning, had a vague memory of some young person who had been found dead, overdosed, on one of the benches. But gentrification had swept it clean; that or the shift to designer drugs that had rendered needles obsolete.
He glanced at the buildings on his right, just opposite the apse. The shadowy form of a woman stood outlined in the light from a window on the fourth floor of one of them. Resisting the impulse to raise his hand to her, Brunetti went over to the building. The number was nowhere evident on the façade, but her name was on the top bell
.
He rang it and the door snapped open almost immediately, suggesting that she had gone to the door at the sight of a man walking into the campo. Brunetti had been the solitary walker at this hour, tourists apparently evaporated, everyone else at home and in bed, so the odd man out had to be the policeman.
He walked up the steps, past the shoes and the papers: to a Venetian, this amoeba-like tendency to expand one’s territory beyond the confines of the walls of an apartment seemed so entirely natural as barely to merit notice.
As he turned into the last ramp of stairs, he heard a woman’s voice ask from above him, ‘Are you the police?’
‘Sì, Signora,’ he said, reaching for his warrant card and stifling the impulse to tell her she should be more prudent about whom she let into the building. When he reached the landing, she took a half-step forward and put out her hand.
‘Anna Maria Giusti,’ she said.
‘Brunetti,’ he answered, taking her hand. He showed her the card, but she gave it the barest glance. He estimated she was in her early thirties, tall and lanky, with an aristocratic nose and dark brown eyes. Her face was stiff with tension or tiredness; he guessed that, in repose, it would soften into something approaching beauty. She drew him towards her and into the apartment, then dropped his hand and took a step back from him. ‘Thank you for coming,’ she said. She looked around and behind him to verify that no one else had come.
‘My assistant and the others are on their way, Signora,’ Brunetti said, making no attempt to advance farther into the apartment. ‘While we wait for them, could you tell me what happened?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said, bringing her hands together just at her waist in a visual cliché of confusion, the sort of gesture women made in the movies of the fifties to show their distress. ‘I got home from vacation about an hour ago, and when I went down to Signora Altavilla’s apartment, I found her there. She was dead.’
‘You’re sure?’ Brunetti asking, thinking it might upset her less if he asked it that way rather than asking her to describe what she had seen.
‘I touched the back of her hand. It was cold,’ she said. She pressed her lips together. Looking at the floor, she went on. ‘I put my fingers under her wrist. To feel her pulse. But there was nothing.’
‘Signora, when you called, you said there was blood.’
‘On the floor near her head. When I saw it, I came up here to call you.’
‘Anything else, Signora?’
She raised a hand and waved it towards the staircase behind him, as if pointing to things in the one below. ‘The front door was open.’ Seeing his surprise, she quickly clarified this by saying, ‘Unlocked, that is. Closed, but unlocked.’
‘I see,’ Brunetti said. He was silent for some time and then asked, ‘Could you tell me how long you’ve been away, Signora?’
‘Five days. I went to Palermo on Wednesday, last week, and just got home tonight.’
‘Thank you,’ Brunetti said, then asked solicitously, ‘Were you with friends, Signora?’
The look she shot him showed just how bright she was and how much the question offended her.
‘I want to exclude things, Signora,’ he said in his normal voice.
Her own voice was a bit louder, her pronunciation clearer, when she said, ‘I stayed in a hotel, the Villa Igiea. You can check their records.’ She looked away from him in what Brunetti thought might be embarrassment. ‘Someone else paid the bill, but I was registered there.’
Brunetti knew this could be easily checked and so asked only, ‘You went into Signora Altavilla’s apartment to …?’
‘To get my post.’ She turned and walked into the room behind her, a large open space with a peaked ceiling that indicated the room had – how many centuries before? – originally been an attic. Brunetti, following her in, glanced up at the twin skylights, hoping to see the stars beyond them, but all he saw was the light reflected from below.
At a table she picked up a piece of paper. Brunetti took it from her outstretched hand: he recognized the beige receipt for a registered letter. ‘I had no idea what it could be and thought it might be something important,’ she said. ‘I didn’t want to wait until tomorrow to find out, so I went down to see if the letter was there.’
In response to Brunetti’s inquisitive glance, she continued. ‘If I’m away, she gets my post, and then leaves it out when I come home, or I go down and get it from her.’
‘And if she’s not there when you get home?’ Brunetti asked.
‘She gave me the keys, and I go in to get it.’ She turned to face the windows, beyond which Brunetti saw the illuminated apse of the church. ‘So I went down and let myself in. And the letters were where she always put them: on a table in the entrance.’ She ran out of things to say, but Brunetti waited.
‘And then I went and looked in the front room. No reason, really – but there was a light on – she always turns them out when she leaves a room – and I thought maybe she hadn’t heard me. Though that doesn’t make any sense, does it? And I saw her. And touched her hand. And saw the blood. And then I came back up here and called you.’
‘Would you like to sit down, Signora?’ Brunetti asked, indicating a wooden chair that stood against the nearest wall.
She shook her head, but at the same time took a step towards it. She sat down heavily, then gave in to weakness and leaned against the back. ‘It’s terrible. How could anyone …’
Before she could finish her question, the doorbell rang. He went to the speaker phone and heard Vianello announce himself, saying he was with Dottor Rizzardi. Brunetti pushed the button to release the downstairs door and replaced the phone. To the seated woman he said, ‘The others are here, Signora.’ Then, because he had to ask, he said, ‘Is the door locked?’
She looked up at him, confusion spread across her face. ‘What?’
‘The door downstairs. To the apartment. Is it locked?’
She shook her head two, three times and seemed so unconscious of the gesture that he was relieved when she stopped it. ‘I don’t know. I had the keys.’ She searched the pockets of her jacket but found no keys. She looked at him, confused. ‘I must have left them downstairs, on top of the post.’ She closed her eyes, then, after a moment, said, ‘But you can go in. The door doesn’t lock on its own.’ Then she raised a hand to catch his attention. ‘She was a good neighbour,’ she said.
Brunetti thanked her and went downstairs to find the others.
3
Brunetti found Vianello and Rizzardi waiting in front of the door to the apartment. Vianello and he exchanged nods, having seen one another only that afternoon, and Brunetti shook hands with the pathologist. As always, the doctor was turned out like an English gentleman emerging from his club. He wore a dark blue pinstripe suit with the conspicuously invisible signs of hand tailoring. His shirt looked as though he had put it on while starting up the stairs to the apartment, and his tie was what Brunetti vaguely classified as ‘regimental’, though he had no certain idea of what that meant.
Though he knew the doctor had recently returned from a vacation in Sardinia, Brunetti thought Rizzardi looked tired, which he found unsettling. But how to ask a doctor about his health?
‘Good to see you, Ettore,’ he said. ‘How …’ Brunetti started to ask, quickly changing his question to the less intrusive, ‘… was your vacation?’
‘Busy. Giovanna and I had planned to spend our time on the beach, under an umbrella, reading and looking at the sea. But at the last minute Riccardo asked if we’d like to take the grandkids with us, and we couldn’t say no, so we had an eight-year-old and a six-year-old.’ Brunetti saw pass across his face the look common to people who had suffered violent assault. ‘I’d forgotten what it’s like to have children around.’
‘And there went sitting under the umbrella and reading and looking at the sea, I assume,’ Brunetti said.
Rizzardi smiled and shrugged it away. ‘We both loved it, but I feel better if I pretend we didn’t.’
Then, idle chat over, the doctor adjusted his tone and asked, ‘What is it?’
‘The woman upstairs came home from vacation, didn’t find her post left out for her, so she came down and let herself in to look for it and found the woman in the apartment dead.’
‘And she called the police and not the hospital?’ Vianello interrupted.
‘She said she saw blood: that’s what made her call,’ Brunetti explained.
The door, Brunetti noticed, was an old-fashioned wooden one with a horizontal metal handle, the type of door seldom seen any more in this theft-beleaguered city. Though Signora Giusti’s entry would certainly have damaged or destroyed any fingerprints on the handle, Brunetti was still careful to open it by pressing his open palm against the end of the handle to push it down.
Entering, he saw a table against the wall to his left, with a set of keys lying on top of some envelopes. Light came in from an open door on his right and from another at the end of the corridor, at the front of the apartment. He walked to the first of them and leaned into the room, but all he saw was a simple bedroom with a single bed and a chest of drawers.
Habit made him open the door on the opposite side of the corridor, careful again to touch only the end of the handle. Enough light filtered past him for Brunetti to see a smaller room with another single bed, a bedside table next to it, and a low chest of drawers. The door to a bathroom stood ajar.
He turned and continued towards the room at the end of the corridor, vaguely conscious that the other men were glancing into the rooms as he had. Inside, the woman lay on her right side, back to him, blocking the door with the side of her foot, one arm outstretched, the other trapped beneath her. She looked no bigger than a child; surely she couldn’t weigh fifty kilos. There was a patch of blood a bit smaller than a compact disc, dry and dark now, on the floor beside her and partially covered by her head. Brunetti stood and took in the short white hair, the dark blue cardigan made of thick cashmere, the collar of a yellow shirt, and the thin sliver of gold on her ring finger.
