The Temptation of Forgiveness

by Donna Leon

  *

  Life continued peaceful and dull, until the phone woke Brunetti one night from profound, dreamless sleep. When he finally picked it up, it seemed to have been ringing for ever.

  ‘Sì?’ he asked, still dull with sleep but aware of what the call would have to be.

  ‘Guido?’ a woman’s voice asked.

  It took him a second to recognize Claudia Griffoni, his colleague and friend. ‘Yes, Claudia, what is it?’

  ‘I’m at the hospital,’ she said. ‘A man may have been attacked.’

  ‘Where?’ he asked. He got out of bed and went into the corridor; he reached inside to pull the door closed.

  ‘Near San Stae.’

  ‘Badly?’

  ‘It looks that way.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Someone called the hospital about an hour ago, saying he’d found a man lying at the bottom of a bridge. He thought he’d fallen: there was blood on the pavement.’

  ‘But?’ Brunetti asked. Why else would she call him?

  ‘But when they got him here, the doctor at Pronto Soccorso found marks on the inside of his left wrist that might have been made by fingernails. As though someone had grabbed him.’ Before Brunetti could ask, she said, ‘He took samples. There was a lot of blood on the ground, where he’d hit his head. The doctor says he has a concussion: from the look of it; he says he must have hit the metal railing when he fell. He’s trying to find out how bad the damage is.’ She drew a breath. ‘They called the Questura; I’m on call tonight.’

  ‘Is the bridge sealed off?’

  ‘Yes. Two vigili urbani were on patrol at Rialto, so they came: they’ll see that no one gets near the bridge. The crime scene crew are on the way.’

  ‘Witnesses?’ he asked.

  She made a noise.

  ‘You want me there?’

  ‘There or here,’ she said.

  ‘Tell me what bridge it is, and I’ll go there first, then come to the hospital.’

  ‘Wait a minute. I’ve got it written down.’ He heard fumbling from the other end. ‘Ponte del Forner,’ she said. ‘It’s …’

  ‘I know where it is,’ he cut her short.

  ‘Do you want me to send a boat?’

  ‘Thanks, Claudia, but no. I can get there in fifteen minutes. It’s faster.’

  ‘All right. I’ll see you here, then. After.’

  Brunetti switched off the phone and pushed the bedroom door open. He set the phone back in its stand and walked over to the bed. The top half of Paola’s blonde head on her pillow seemed to glow in the light cast by the full moon. He turned on his bedside lamp, saw that it was almost two, and went to the armadio and got dressed in front of it. He tossed his pyjamas on his side of the bed and sat to put on his shoes.

  He turned off his light, gave his eyes a chance to adjust to the moonlight, then walked around the bed and put his hand on Paola’s shoulder. ‘Paola. Paola.’

  Her breathing changed, and she turned her head sideways to face him. She made an inquisitive noise.

  ‘I have to go out.’

  She grunted.

  ‘I’ll call.’

  She grunted again.

  He thought of telling her he loved her, but it was not the sort of declaration he wanted to hear answered with a grunt.

  In the hallway, he put on his coat and let himself out quietly.

  The night was thick with caigo, that peculiar Venetian dampness that fills the lungs, obscures vision, and leaves a viscous, slippery coating on the pavement. He walked towards Rialto, half savouring the sense of being in an abandoned city wrapped in something more than haze but less than fog. He stopped and listened, but there were no footsteps to be heard. He moved off again, towards Campo Sant’ Aponal. He was approaching the aftermath of violence and pain and injury, but he felt no distress, only the calm that came of being in his city as it once had been: a sleepy provincial town where very little happened, and the streets were often empty.

  As Brunetti entered the campo, a man appeared and passed him by, eyes on the ground. In front of the church, he saw another man and a woman walking slowly hand in hand, their heads swivelling from side to side, enchanted. As they grew closer, he heard the thud of their hiking boots, and when they were abreast of him he saw their heavy backpacks. They were blind to him, as well they should be, he thought.

  He traversed the campo, making his way towards San Cassiano. The near darkness obscured many reference points, but Brunetti had given things over to his feet and the memory they had of these narrow bridges and the even narrower calli towards which they led. He passed San Cassiano on his right, over the bridge, down, right, left, another bridge, and fifty metres ahead of him he saw the sudden glare in the fog of a torch pointed in his direction.

  ‘You there, the bridge is closed,’ a male voice said at normal volume. ‘Go back to Calle della Regina.’ He spoke Veneziano as if only a local would be walking in this part of the city at this time of night.

  ‘It’s me, Brunetti,’ he said and kept walking.

  ‘Ah, good morning, Commissario,’ the man said, and the beam of his flashlight lifted for a moment as he raised his hand in salute. For no reason Brunetti could understand, the fog seemed less dense nearer to the bridge. The officer must have realized it, as well, for he turned off the flashlight and reattached it to his belt.

  He was one of the vigili urbani, Brunetti noticed; not one of his own men. It was then that he heard the noise and the male voices from behind the officer. ‘Is that the crime squad?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘Yes, sir.’ As the man spoke, the fog cleared on the other side of the bridge, and Brunetti saw the light blooming there.

  He walked towards the bridge, the man falling into step beside him. He stopped at the first step and called out, ‘This is Brunetti. Can I come up?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ a voice called back, and Brunetti walked to the top of the bridge, noting the thick metal handrail. The vigile stayed behind and went back to the beginning of the calle to stop people from entering.

  From the top, Brunetti saw two of the white-suited technicians following their neat patterns, checking the ground for anything that might have belonged to the victim or his presumed attacker. Ambrosio, one of Bocchese’s men, tall and frighteningly thin, even in his puffy white overalls, came up the steps towards Brunetti. ‘We’re checking to see if anything else fell when he did.’

  ‘The doctor told Griffoni it looked as if someone might have grabbed him and pulled him down the steps,’ Brunetti said.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Ambrosio said in the bland voice the tech people used when responding to their colleagues’ suppositions. ‘She called and told us. We’re looking for signs of some other person or what might have happened.’ Ambrosio waved down at the area where his colleagues were still at work.

  ‘Any witnesses?’ Brunetti asked.

  Ambrosio shrugged. ‘Since we got here, a couple of people have leaned out of their windows to see what we’re doing, but when we ask them if they heard anything, no one has.’

  Questioning possible witnesses was not the kind of work the crime squad was supposed to be doing and so he said, ‘We’ll send some men over tomorrow to go from door to door.’ He knew both Il Gazzettino and La Nuova Venezia would report the incident, and he made a note to have someone call the editorial offices and ask them to insert a request that anyone who had heard or seen a disturbance near San Stae call the Questura. Such requests seldom elicited a response, but that was no reason not to try.

  Brunetti called to the men at the bottom of the bridge. ‘Can I come down?’

  ‘Yes, sir. We’ve checked the area.’

  ‘You find anything?’ he asked as he started down the steps towards them.

  ‘The usual stuff that’s lying around on the street: cigarette butts, a boat ticket, sweet wrapper.’

  ‘Don’t forget the dog shit,’ said the other as he rose and put his hands on his hips and leaned backwards, as though hoping this would straighten o
ut his back. To Brunetti he added, ‘That’s the worst part of this job. There’s not as much as there used to be, but there’s still enough. More than enough.’

  Choosing to ignore this, Brunetti asked Ambrosio, who had come to stand beside him, ‘That where he hit his head?’

  Ambrosio nodded and pointed to a place on the pavement at the bottom of the bridge, where Brunetti saw a wide red stain. ‘We found blood on the railing, sir,’ he said, indicating the place. ‘Looks, to me at least, as if he hit his head there, then scraped it on the wall, and finally landed at the bottom and lay there, bleeding, until the guy saw him and called the hospital.’ He accompanied this with a final gesture towards the landing at the bottom of the steps.

  Brunetti saw a red smear on the railing and another on the inner wall of the bridge, arguing in favour of the technician’s reconstruction.

  ‘You still have much to do?’ he asked the other two men.

  The taller one, who had been searching at the bottom of the bridge, answered. ‘No, sir, not now that we’ve picked up everything. We’ve already taken prints from the railing and samples from those three places, so all we have to do is pack and clean up.’

  ‘Clean up how?’ Brunetti, wishing he could have resisted the temptation to ask.

  ‘We keep a bucket in the boat, sir. With a rope. We can use the water from the canal to wash away the blood.’ He spoke as casually as if he were giving street directions. ‘After that, we’ll go back to the Questura. If you wait five minutes, we can give you a ride.’

  ‘No, thanks,’ Brunetti answered. ‘I’m going to the hospital.’

  ‘We can drop you there on the way. No trouble.’

  It would be faster, Brunetti knew, just as he knew that in the Pronto Soccorso they had a coffee machine in their staffroom. Brunetti had arrived in the wake of so many emergencies that the staff had come to view him as one of themselves and so let him use it, no matter what time he showed up.

  ‘Thanks,’ Brunetti said and moved towards the police launch that was tied to the wall beside the bridge.

  The boat got to the ambulance entrance of the hospital a bit after three, the time of bad news. Brunetti thanked the pilot and stepped on to the landing. He made his way to Pronto Soccorso, where eight people sat in chairs against the wall, waiting their turn. The man at the reception desk recognized Brunetti and waved him through.

  Brunetti asked about the man who had been admitted with a head injury and was told that he was probably still in Radiologia: there was no bed available for him at the moment. Before Brunetti could ask, the man told him to go and make himself a coffee: he’d probably find his colleague there; she’d come in from Radiologia only a few minutes before.

  From force of habit, Brunetti knocked on the door of the staffroom. He heard a chair scrape, feet approach, and then Griffoni opened the door and smiled at him. At three in the morning, drawn and tired; wearing no makeup, washed-out black jeans, brown shoes and falling-down socks, and a man’s grey woollen sweater at least three sizes too big for her, she looked good enough for a photo shoot. ‘I’m having a coffee,’ she said in greeting, then added, ‘and saving my life.’ She walked back to the table and drank what was left in her cup, then took it over and set it in the sink. ‘The machine’s still on. Would you like one?’

  Brunetti saw no reason why he couldn’t make his own coffee and was about to say so when she added, ‘I’m not being a subservient woman, Guido. You look more tired than I feel.’

  ‘Then yes,’ Brunetti said. ‘Please.’ He pulled out a chair and waited, silent, until she’d brought the coffee over to him, saying there was sugar in it already. ‘Thanks, Claudia. I’ve been outside for a long time. Had no idea how cold it was.’

  ‘And damp. Don’t forget the damp,’ she said, giving a very theatrical shiver, then pulling out a chair to sit opposite him. ‘Did they find anything?’ she asked.

  ‘The usual junk on the ground,’ he said and took a sip.

  ‘Horrible, isn’t it?’ she said when she saw his expression. ‘If someone served that in Napoli, he’d be shot.’

  Brunetti finished the coffee and took the cup and saucer over to the sink. ‘Tasted all right to me, but then, if I were an alcoholic, I’d probably drink aftershave lotion.’

  ‘I think you just did,’ she answered.

  He smiled and leaned back against the sink. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘He’s about fifty, and he’s got a very bad concussion. The doctor isn’t a neurologist, so he can’t be more precise than that. He’s got bruises and cuts on his head and face, probably from the fall, and the red marks I told you about on the inside of his wrist.’ She took a few breaths and went on. ‘Since I called you, the doctor’s said that the major damage is to the side of his head.’ She paused, looking for the right word. ‘He said there’s a sort of dent in his skull.’

  Brunetti’s eyes tightened at the word.

  ‘He thinks it could have happened when his head hit the railing as he fell.’

  ‘What’s his name?’ Brunetti asked, coming closer to the table.

  ‘I don’t know. He had a pair of house keys in his pocket, but no identification. And no coat.’

  ‘He probably lives around there,’ Brunetti said. ‘Can I see him?’ he asked.

  She shook her head. ‘The nurses told me not to go back before five. They’re short-staffed as it is, and they don’t want anyone on the ward who isn’t a doctor or a patient.’

  ‘Did you try to …?’

  Even before he finished the question, she answered.

  ‘I tried everything short of threats, but they mean it. The one I spoke to tried to be pleasant. It’s the only time they have to enter patient information into the computer, and they really don’t want anyone around.’ Seeing that he was going to speak, Griffoni said, ‘Trust me, Guido.’ She looked at her watch and said, ‘It’s just a little more than an hour.’ She tried to appear encouraging, but she sounded tired.

  He accepted the delay in front of them, and with that, either his adrenalin or his spirit failed him and he was overcome with shaky exhaustion. He had been leaning forward, both hands propped on the back of one of the chairs at the table, but now he had to step around the chair and sit.

  He propped his elbows on the table, leaned forward, and put his face in his hands, rubbing at his eyes. Suddenly he wanted nothing more than to wash his face and hands with hot water.

  Griffoni got to her feet and said she was going to find a bathroom, but he didn’t look at her; indeed, he didn’t even open his eyes. He heard the door close and put his arms on the table, his head on his arms.

  The next thing he knew, Claudia was saying his name, then he felt her hand on his shoulder. ‘Guido, it’s after five. We can go up now.’

  Silent, tired, the energy of the coffee long since disappeared, he followed Griffoni up to the Radiology department. The nurse at the desk nodded to Griffoni as they came in. ‘He’s still unconscious.’

  ‘Can we see him?’ Griffoni asked.

  The nurse looked at Brunetti, who said, ‘I’m police, too.’

  She nodded, and Griffoni walked past the desk and down the corridor. Towards the end, parked against the left side of the hallway, was a wheeled stretcher on which lay a blanket-covered form. Electrical wires sneaked out from under the blankets and slithered up a metal pole towards a fuse-box-looking thing at the top.

  Griffoni pointed with her chin and walked to the side of the bed. Brunetti came up beside her and looked down at the man on the stretcher.

  Lying there was the thick-haired man he had seen with Professoressa Crosera.

  7

  ‘What is it?’ Griffoni asked.

  ‘I know him,’ Brunetti answered. ‘His wife came to talk to me a week ago.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Her son. She’s afraid the boy’s taking drugs.’

  ‘Is he?’ Griffoni had kept her voice low, and as they began to talk about the son, she backed a few steps away from the man
on the stretcher. Brunetti followed her.

  ‘It could be. All she could tell me was that the boy was behaving strangely; letting his schoolwork go, not paying attention to what was said to him.’

  Griffoni said, quite seriously, ‘Only that?’

  Brunetti shrugged. ‘Pretty much,’ he answered, thinking back to what Professoressa Crosera had said to him, and to his own unwillingness to act on it.

  ‘What did you tell her?’

  ‘I tried to explain that there wasn’t much we could do. She wouldn’t give me any concrete information; I wasn’t even sure the behaviour she described was due to drugs.’ In response to Griffoni’s sceptical expression, he said, ‘He’s a fifteen-year-old boy and he’s become moody and unresponsive.’

  Griffoni nodded in understanding and agreement. ‘It’s strange, but most of the parents I’ve talked to want to be told it’s impossible, that there’s no chance their child could …’ She finished with a flourish of her hand suggestive of all the things parents did not want to know about their children.

  Brunetti glanced at the man; he lay on his back, head slightly tilted away, as though he wanted them to study the bandage that wrapped it in a drunken turban, on this side pulled down across his forehead and ear, on the other at least a hand’s breadth above the ear. There was no telling what lay beneath the bandage, nor indeed under which part of it the wounds could be found: a cut sewn closed? A scrape disinfected and covered to keep it clean? A dent? There were rough places and scrapes on his face and a general puffiness around his eyes. He looked to be quietly asleep.

  ‘Let me go and tell them who he is,’ Brunetti said. He took out his notebook and paged through it until he found the word ‘Albertini’. He glanced at his watch: it was 5.37, a time when a ringing phone presaged only pain. ‘I’ll call his wife,’ he told Griffoni.