Beastly Things

by Donna Leon

  Vianello tossed his hands in the air. ‘All right, all right, so it might sound strange that she’d change jobs like that, but you can’t make it be more than that. We don’t have enough information to decide what happened. We don’t have any information. And we won’t have it until we find out more about her.’

  This small concession was all Brunetti needed. He got to his feet, saying, ‘I’ll go and ask her to look.’

  He had just reached the door, when Vianello, in an entirely natural voice, said, ‘She’ll probably love that,’ and got to his feet to return to his office.

  Twenty minutes later, Vianello’s reading of that day’s Gazzettino was interrupted by Brunetti’s request that he come up to his office. Upon his assistant’s arrival, Brunetti said, ‘She did.’ He stopped himself from telling Vianello that Signorina Elettra had also found Signorina Borelli’s job change suspicious – well, not suspicious, really, but interesting – and told him only that she had said it might take her some time to locate and access her employment records. Her casual use of those verbs reminded Brunetti that some time had passed since either he or Vianello had bothered to question how Signorina Elettra managed to do it: they simply awaited the results of her having done it and were happy to do so. Their reluctance to ask the direct question was perhaps related to the amorphous legality of what she did when conducting her researches. Brunetti turned away from these thoughts with a tiny shake: next thing he knew, he’d be wondering how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.

  Vianello said, in the voice Brunetti recognized as the one he used when he wanted to suggest far more than he said, ‘You know, we haven’t even come close to finding a reason why anyone would want to kill him.’ How long, Brunetti wondered, would it be before the Inspector started to talk about the killing as a robbery that got out of hand?

  ‘He came to Venice,’ Brunetti said, returning to one of the few certain things they knew. Rizzardi’s final report, which they had both read, said only that the dead man, aside from the Madelung’s, was in good health for a man of his age. He had eaten dinner some hours before his death and had consumed a small amount of alcohol. Digestion was under way at the time of his death, the pathologist had written, and added that the time the body had spent in the water had obliterated any sign of sexual activity. Given the temperature of that water, the pathologist could do no more than estimate the possible time of death as between midnight and four in the morning.

  Though Nava’s name and photo had been in the papers that day, along with a request that anyone with information about him should call the police, no one had called.

  Vianello took a deep breath. ‘The one before him was called Meucci, wasn’t he?’ he asked.

  It took Brunetti a moment to catch up with Vianello’s thoughts and realize he was speaking about Nava’s predecessor at the slaughterhouse. ‘Yes. Gabriele, I think.’ He turned to his computer, aware how much his motion imitated Signorina Elettra’s swirl when she turned to hers. He stopped himself, just in time, from saying he thought it should be easy to find Meucci, hoping there would be lists of veterinarians, some society which they all joined.

  He ended up finding the doctor in the Yellow Pages, under ‘Veterinarians’. The ambulatorio of Dr Gabriele Meucci was listed at an address in Castello. The number was meaningless until Vianello located it in Calli, Campi, e Castelli at the most remote end of Castello, on the Riva di San Giuseppe.

  ‘I suppose people down there must have animals, too,’ Vianello said by way of comment on the location. It was as far from the centre of the city as one could get without crossing over to S. Elena, which to both of them might as well have been Patagonia. ‘Rather far from Preganziol, I’d say,’ Vianello added.

  As he switched off the computer, Brunetti noticed that his left hand was trembling. He had no idea of the cause, though by tightening his fingers into a fist a number of times he managed to make it stop. He placed his palm flat on his desk and pushed down on it, then lifted it a few centimetres: it still trembled.

  ‘I think we should go home, Lorenzo,’ he said, eyes on his hand and not on Vianello.

  ‘Yes,’ Vianello agreed, slapped his hands on his knees and pushed himself to his feet. ‘I think it was too much, out there, today.’

  Brunetti wanted to say something in return, make some comment – even joking or ironic – about where they had gone, but the words refused to come to him. Events as shocking as those they had seen, he had always heard, left a lasting trace or changed a person in some profound way. Not a bit of it. He had been horrified and disgusted, but he knew he had not been changed, not really. Brunetti had no idea if this was a good thing or not.

  ‘Why don’t we meet tomorrow morning, in front of his office?’ he suggested to Vianello.

  ‘Nine?’

  ‘Yes. Assuming that he’s working.’

  ‘And if he’s not?’

  ‘Then we go and have a coffee and a brioche, sit and watch the boats for a while, and then we come to work late.’

  ‘Only if you insist, Commissario,’ Vianello said.

  As he emerged from the Questura, the accumulated weight of the day descended on Brunetti, and he wished for a moment that he lived in a city where it was possible for a person to call a taxi and not have to pay sixty Euros to do so, no matter how short the ride. Home was, for the first time he could remember, too far to walk, so he went slowly down to the San Zaccaria stop to wait for the Number One.

  He held his left hand in a tight fist in his pocket, carefully ignoring its presence there and resisting the urge to take it out and look at it. He had a monthly boat pass, so he did not have to pull out his wallet and extract his travel card.

  The boat came and he walked on to it, went inside the cabin and sat. As soon as the vaporetto pulled away from the embarcadero, Brunetti’s curiosity overcame him, and he took his hand from his pocket. He spread his fingers flat on his thigh, but instead of looking at them, he turned his eyes towards the angel flying above the dome of San Giorgio, still visible in the swiftly fading light.

  He felt no tremor against his thigh, but before he looked, he raised his fingers a centimetre above his leg and left them there for a few seconds as he continued to consult with the angel, placed there centuries ago. Finally he looked at his fingers, which were motionless. He relaxed them and let them return to lying on his thigh.

  ‘So many things,’ he said under his breath, not quite sure what he meant by that. The young woman beside him, startled, turned and looked at him, then went back to her crossword puzzle. She didn’t look Italian, he thought, though he had had only a quick glance. French, perhaps. Not American. And not Italian. She sat on a boat going up the Grand Canal, her eyes on a crossword puzzle, the letters of which were too small to permit him to decipher the language. Brunetti looked back at the angel to see if he had any comment on this, but he did not, and so Brunetti turned to study the façades of the buildings to the right.

  When he was a boy, they swam in this canal and in many of the other large ones. He remembered diving into the water at Fondamenta Nuove, and he remembered that a classmate of his had once swum to the Zattere from the Giudecca because he didn’t want to wait for a late-night boat. When Brunetti’s father had been a boy, he used to catch seppie at the riva down at Sacca Fisola, but that was before Marghera, just across the laguna, had been completely transformed by petrochemicals. And before the seppie were transformed by them, too.

  He got off at San Silvestro and walked through the underpass and to the left, bent on getting home, wanting only a glass of wine and something to eat with it. Almonds, perhaps: something salty. And a still white wine: Pinot Grigio. Yes.

  No sooner had he let himself into the apartment than he heard Paola call from the kitchen. ‘If you’d like a drink, there’s something to nibble on in the living room. The wine’s open. I’ll bring it.’

  Brunetti hung up his jacket and followed her suggestion as though it had been a command. When he walked into the living roo
m, he was surprised to see that the lights were on and even more surprised, when he looked out the windows, to see that it was almost completely dark. On the boat, concerned with his fingers, he had not registered the settling in of darkness.

  The table in front of the sofa held two wine glasses, a bowl of black olives, one of almonds, some grissini, and a dish with small pieces of what looked like parmigiano. ‘Reggiano,’ he said aloud. His mother, even in the family’s times of blackest financial misery, had refused to use anything but Parmigiano Reggiano. ‘Better nothing than something that isn’t as good,’ she had said, and so he still believed.

  Paola came into the room carrying a bottle of wine. He looked up at her and said, ‘Better nothing than something that isn’t as good.’

  Long experience of Brunetti in his sibylline mode caused Paola to smile. ‘I presume you’re speaking about the wine.’

  He held up the two glasses while she poured the wine, then sat beside her on the sofa. Pinot Grigio: he’d married a mind reader. He picked up a few almonds and ate them one by one, loving the contrast set up between the salt, the almonds’ bitterness, and the wine.

  With no warning, his memory ripped him back to the gravelled space in front of the slaughterhouse, and he caught a whiff of the odour coming from it. He closed his eyes and took another sip of wine; he forced his mind to concentrate on the taste of the wine, the taste of the almonds, and the soft presence of the woman beside him. ‘Tell me what you taught today,’ he said, kicking off his shoes and leaning back.

  She took a long drink, nibbled at a grissino, and ate one of the slivers of cheese. ‘I’m not sure I taught anything,’ she began, ‘but I’d asked them to read The Spoils of Poynton.’

  ‘That the one about the lady with all the stuff?’ he asked, turning from sibylline to philistine with one well-chosen question.

  ‘Yes, dear,’ she said, and poured them both some more wine.

  ‘How did they respond?’ he asked, suddenly curious. He had read the book, albeit in translation – he preferred James in translation – and liked it.

  ‘They seemed incapable of understanding that she loved the things she owned because they were beautiful, not because they were valuable. Or valuable for non-financial reasons.’ She sipped her wine. ‘My students find it difficult to grasp any motivation for human action that is not based on financial profit.’

  ‘There’s a lot of that around,’ Brunetti said, reaching for an olive. He ate it, spat the pit into his left hand, which he observed was steady as a rock. He set the pit in a small saucer and took another one.

  ‘And they liked the wrong … they liked characters different from the ones I like,’ she amended.

  ‘There’s a very unpleasant woman in it, isn’t there?’ he asked.

  ‘There are two,’ she answered and said that dinner would be ready in ten minutes.

  23

  A THIN RAIN was falling when Brunetti left his house the next morning. When he boarded the vaporetto at Rialto, he saw that the level of the water was high, even though he had received no message on his telefonino alerting him to acqua alta. Higher tides at unusual times had become more frequent in the last two years, and though most people – and all fishermen – believed this was the result of the MOSE project’s violent intervention at the entrance to the laguna, official sources denied this adamantly.

  Foa, the Questura’s pilot, grew apoplectic on the subject. He had learned the tides along with the alphabet and knew the names of the winds that crossed the Adriatic as well as priests knew those of the saints. For years, sceptical from the beginning, he had watched the metal monster grow, had seen all protest swept away by the flood of lovely European money sent to save the Pearl of the Adriatic. His fishermen friends told him of the new and violent vortices that had appeared in both the sea and the laguna and of the consequences of the pharaonic dredging that had taken place in recent years. No one, Foa claimed, had bothered to consult the fishermen. Instead, experts – Brunetti remembered once seeing Foa spit after pronouncing this word – had made the decisions, and other experts no doubt would get the contracts for the construction.

  For a decade, Brunetti had been reading yes, and he had been reading no, and most recently he had read of more delays in funding that would delay the project yet another three years. As an Italian, he suspected it would run true to form and turn out to have been yet another building project that served as a feeding trough for the friends of friends; as a Venetian, he despaired that his fellow citizens might have sunk so low as to be capable even of this.

  Still musing, he left the boat and began to walk towards the back reaches of Castello. He hesitated now and again, not having been down here for years, so after a time he stopped thinking and let his feet lead the way. The sight of Vianello, wearing a raincoat and leaning against the metal railing of the riva, cheered him. Seeing him approach, Vianello said, with a nod towards the door in front of him, ‘The sign says the office opens at nine, but no one’s gone inside yet.’

  A printed card protected by a plastic shield gave the doctor’s name and the office hours.

  They stood side by side for a few minutes until Brunetti said, ‘Let’s see if he’s already there.’

  Vianello pushed himself away from the railing and followed him to the door. Brunetti rang the bell and after a moment tried the door, which opened easily. They stepped inside, up two steps, and into a small entrance which led in its turn to an open courtyard. A sign on their left carried the doctor’s name and an arrow pointing to the other side of the courtyard.

  The rain, which outside had been bothersome, here fell on to the newly green grass of the courtyard with gentle kindness. Even the light seemed different; brighter, somehow. Brunetti unbuttoned his raincoat; Vianello did the same.

  The courtyard, if it had been part of a monastery, had been part of the smallest monastery in the city. Though covered walkways surrounded the garden, they were no more than five metres long, hardly space enough, Brunetti reflected, to allow a man to make much progress with his rosary. He’d barely have finished the first decade before he’d be back at his starting point, but he’d be surrounded by beauty and tranquillity, at least if he were wise enough to contemplate them.

  The acanthus leaves had worn away on the capitals, and the centuries had smoothed the fluting on the shafts of the columns around the garden. Surely this had not happened while the columns were in this protected courtyard; who knows where they had come from or when they had arrived in Venice? Suddenly a goat smiled down at Brunetti: how had that column got here?

  Ahead of him, Vianello stopped at a green wooden door with the doctor’s name on a brass plaque, waited for Brunetti to join him, and opened it. Inside was a room like all those Brunetti had sat in while waiting to see doctors. Opposite them they saw another wooden door, closed now. Rows of orange plastic chairs lined two walls; at the end of one row was a low table with two piles of magazines. Brunetti went over to see if it held the usual copies of Gente and Chi. Not unless starlets and minor nobles had all been replaced by cats, dogs and, in one instance, a particularly winsome pig wearing a Father Christmas hat.

  They sat opposite one another. Brunetti checked his watch. After four minutes, an old woman came in, leading an antique dog so deprived of hair in various places as to resemble the sort of stuffed toy one found in a grandparent’s attic. The woman ignored them and lowered herself into the chair farthest from Vianello; the dog collapsed at her feet with an explosive sigh, and both of them immediately lapsed into a trance. Strangely enough, it was only the woman’s breathing they could hear.

  More time passed, measured by the woman’s snores, until Brunetti got to his feet and went to the other door. He knocked on it, waited for Vianello to join him, knocked again, and then opened it.

  Across the room, behind a desk, Brunetti saw the top half of what might have been the fattest man he had ever seen. He was slumped back in his leather chair and sound asleep, his head tilted to the left as far as his n
eck and the chins above it would allow. He was perhaps in his forties, his age disguised by the absence of wrinkles in his face.

  Brunetti cleared his throat, but that had no effect on the sleeping man. He stepped closer, and smelled the rancid odour of cigarette smoke mixed with late night, or early morning, drinking. The man’s hands were latched across his vast chest, the right thumb and the second and third fingers stained with nicotine up to the first knuckle. The room, strangely enough, did not smell of smoke, only of its after-effect: the same odour came from the man’s clothing and, Brunetti suspected, from his hair and skin.

  ‘Dottore,’ Brunetti said in a soft voice, not wanting to startle him awake. The man continued snoring softly.

  ‘Dottore,’ Brunetti repeated in a louder voice.

  He watched the man’s eyes for motion: they were set deep in his face, as though they had retreated from the encroaching fat that surrounded them. The nose was strangely thin, but it had been overwhelmed by the encircling cheeks, which pushed up against it and, helped by the engorged lips, came close to blocking his nostrils. The mouth was a perfect cupid’s bow, but a very thick, unwieldy bow.

  A thin film of sweat covered his face and had so slicked his thin hair to his skull that Brunetti was put in mind of the greasy pomades his father had used on his hair when Brunetti was a boy. ‘Dottore,’ he said for the third time, this time in a normal voice, his tone perhaps a bit sharp.

  The eyes opened; small, dark, curious, and then suddenly wide with fear. Before Brunetti could say anything else, the man shoved himself away from his desk and got to his feet. He did not leap, nor did he jump, though Brunetti had no doubt that he moved as quickly as his bulk would permit. He pressed himself against the wall behind him and looked across the room at the door, then shifted his gaze back and forth between Brunetti and Vianello, who blocked his path.

  ‘What do you want?’ he asked. His voice was curiously high-pitched, either from fear or just from some odd mismatch between his body and his voice.