The Temptation of Forgiveness

by Donna Leon

  She moved to sit on a chair at the foot of the bed so as not to block passage down the corridor. Brunetti went back to the nurses’ desk and spoke to the duty nurse. ‘I think I know who he is.’

  The nurse smiled and said, ‘You police people work fast.’

  Too tired to joke, Brunetti nodded, as if to acknowledge what she had said as a compliment. ‘I’ve got his wife’s number. I’ll tell her he’s here.’ Seeing her confusion, he said, ‘I know her, but I’ve never been introduced to him, so I don’t know his name.’

  He took out his telefonino, checked his notebook, and entered Professoressa Crosera’s number. Nothing happened. Turning to the nurse, he said, ‘There’s no reception here,’ and walked back to Griffoni to explain about the phone. ‘Let’s see if there’s anyone at Rosa Salva. I’ll call from the campo.’

  As they emerged into Campo SS. Giovanni e Paolo, where the day was still not in evidence, Brunetti said, ‘I wonder if this was because of his son.’ His steps slowed as he crossed the campo, working out the possibilities and thinking of what he should have asked Professoressa Crosera. He stared up at the face of the statue of Colleoni and envied the man the determination and certainty carved into his features: he certainly would have had the truth out of her.

  He pressed ‘redial’, but still there was no reception. With his left hand, he slapped on the glass door of Rosa Salva a few times before anyone came. Recognizing Brunetti, the barman opened the door to allow them to enter, closed and locked it after them.

  Inside it was warm, the room rich with the sweetness of fresh-baked pastries. A young woman in a white baker’s jacket and hat emerged from the room on the right with a tray of brioche, crossed behind the bar, and slipped the tray into place into the glass vitrine above the counter. Brunetti asked for two coffees.

  Smelling the pastries, he gave thanks for coffee and brioche, for sugar and butter and apricot marmalade and a host of other things that were said to be bad for him. Years ago, Paola had scandalized him by saying she’d happily trade her right to vote for a washing machine; he realized he’d be tempted, at least this early in the day, to trade his for coffee and brioche. There was someone in the Old Testament who had traded his inheritance for a dish of something called ‘pottage’. The passage had always troubled Brunetti, who surely would have read it with greater understanding if the trade had been for coffee and brioche.

  Turning to Griffoni, he asked, pointing to the tray of pastries, ‘If the Devil asked you to trade your soul for a coffee and one of those, would you do it?’

  The coffees came, along with two brioche on a plate. Taking a napkin, she picked one up, sipped at her coffee, and took a bite. ‘First I’d try to get him to settle for three Euros instead,’ she said and took another bite, another sip. ‘But if he refused, I’d probably agree.’

  ‘Me, too,’ Brunetti said and began to eat, happy that fate had sent him such a compatible colleague. When he finished his coffee, he told Griffoni he’d try again to make the call. She pulled out her wallet, placed a note on the counter, and asked for another coffee. Brunetti waved his thanks and went outside.

  Feeling the first buzz from the sugar and the caffeine, Brunetti took his phone from his pocket and entered Professoressa Crosera’s number. The phone rang once before it was answered by a woman who asked, voice tight with fear or anger, ‘Tullio, is that you?’

  ‘Professoressa Crosera?’ Brunetti asked.

  Wary now, she asked, ‘Who is this?’

  ‘Commissario Guido Brunetti, Signora,’ he began. ‘I’m calling from the hospital. Your husband is here.’

  ‘My husband?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, keeping his voice even. ‘He’s here, in Radiologia.’

  ‘What happened?’ she asked. When she said no more, Brunetti listened and heard her taking deep breaths.

  ‘It appears he fell on a bridge and hit his head. That’s why he’s in Radiologia. They’ve taken some X-rays and are deciding what to do next.’ Brunetti did not know if this was true or not, but it might calm her to believe that the hospital had things under control.

  ‘How is he?’

  ‘As I said, Signora, the doctors don’t have a clear idea yet,’ Brunetti explained, thinking it better not to mention what the admitting doctor had said.

  ‘Have you spoken to him?’ she surprised him by asking.

  ‘No, Signora. He hasn’t regained consciousness yet.’

  Before he could continue, she said, ‘I’m coming,’ and she was gone. He immediately dialled Vianello’s number.

  When the Inspector answered, sounding fully awake, Brunetti explained, ‘I’m at the hospital. The husband of that woman who came to me about her son last week – Crosera – fell down a bridge last night, perhaps with some help from another person. He’s in Radiologia; I’ll be here until the neurologist has a look at him.’

  ‘What can I do?’ Vianello said without asking for more information.

  ‘Speak to Il Gazzettino and La Nuova. Tell them a man – no name – was found at the bottom of the steps – Ponte del Forner, over by Ca’ Pesaro – and tell them to request that anyone who was in the area around midnight call us if they heard or saw anything.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘When she gets in, ask Signorina Elettra to take a look at Crosera and her husband, if she can find his name.’

  ‘Usual stuff?’ Vianello asked.

  ‘Yes. Any strange friends; any strange anything. Check the son – Alessandro – see if he’s ever had any trouble with us.’

  ‘How old is he?’

  ‘Fifteen.’

  ‘Then the information would be sealed because he’s a minor.’

  ‘Lorenzo,’ Brunetti said in the tone of voice with which one would reproach a child, ‘ask Signorina Elettra to do it.’

  ‘Of course.’

  Through the silent connection, he could all but hear Vianello putting all of this together. Finally the Inspector said, ‘His wife tells you the son is taking drugs, then the father slips and falls on a bridge, and you want us to find out what we can about him and his wife?’

  ‘You’re forgetting the son, Lorenzo,’ Brunetti said pleasantly.

  ‘Of course. The son.’

  ‘If he didn’t slip and fall, then it’s related to something he did. So for now, let’s have a look.’

  ‘I realize that, Guido,’ Vianello said with a brusqueness that suggested he might not yet have had coffee. ‘You’ve excluded a mugging?’ he asked, but his heart wasn’t in the question.

  ‘What would a mugger do outside at midnight in November, Lorenzo?’

  ‘All right, Guido. I’ll take care of this and see you when you get to the Questura.’

  ‘Thanks, Lorenzo.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘Go back to Radiology and wait for his wife.’

  ‘Right,’ Vianello said and was gone.

  The day was growing lighter, and it looked as though the fog had disappeared. Would they see the sun today, that bright, friendly disc that had been so long absent?

  Griffoni had been waiting in the campo while he was speaking to Vianello. Standing still, she was facing the east. The increasing light coming from behind the Basilica illuminated her face. Brunetti, always a sucker for feminine beauty, liked what he saw, but he also saw the dark signs of tiredness beneath her eyes. ‘What time did you go to bed?’ he asked, as though it were the most normal question for him to ask.

  ‘Midnight, I think,’ she said and turned away from the growing light, thus wiping away the smudges he had seen.

  ‘The call came at one?’ he asked, relentless.

  ‘About then. But I’m fine.’

  ‘Why don’t you go home for a couple of hours?’ Giving her no chance to object he said, ‘They’ll need some time to check things.’ When she still seemed unconvinced, he added, ‘Besides, you probably won’t be of much use to anyone.’

  ‘In my current state, you mean?’

  �
��If that’s what led you to put on brown shoes with black trousers, yes.’

  She looked at her feet, as though he’d told her that her shoes were on fire, and said, ‘Oddio, how did that happen?’

  ‘Go home, Claudia,’ he said seriously. ‘I’ll see you later.’

  8

  When he got to the hospital, Brunetti was told that no ward had yet been found with an empty bed for the injured man, who thus remained in the corridor. He asked a passing nurse if a doctor had been to see the patient yet, but none had. He sat on a chair at the end of the bed and folded his overcoat over his knees. Windows lined one wall of the corridor, allowing Brunetti to look across to the other wing of the ex-monastery. The top fronds of an enormous palm tree were visible on the far side of the courtyard and behind them the windows of a matching corridor. Did similar trouble, equal pain, fill that other place? Brunetti wondered. Did the people there look across and ask the same questions, trick themselves into believing their trouble would be less if it were worse on the other side? And how to measure trouble, how to measure pain?

  He turned in the chair to take a quick look up and down the hall. He and the motionless man were the only people there. Brunetti got to his feet and walked to the side of the bed. The man lay still, his hands outside the covers, clear fluid slowly dripping into a needle stuck in the back of his right hand. Brunetti bent his knees and leaned closer to the man, bracing himself on the bed with one hand. Just below the left cuff of the hospital gown, Brunetti saw three small, moonlike indentations on the inside of his wrist. Because the bed was pressed against the wall, Brunetti was prevented from moving around it to see if there was a similar set of marks on his other wrist.

  Brunetti went back to the chair and sat. He propped his feet on the low railing at the foot of the bed. He crossed his legs and studied the crucifix on the wall. Did people still think He could help them? Maybe being in the hospital refreshed their belief and made it possible again for them to think that He would. One gentleman to another, Brunetti asked the Man on the cross if He would be kind enough to help the man in the bed. He was lying there, perhaps troubled in spirit, helpless, wounded and hurt, apparently through no fault of his own. It occurred to Brunetti that much the same could be said of the Man he was asking to help; this would perhaps make Him more amenable to the request. As he considered that possibility, Brunetti became aware of a shape at the side of the bed. The woman’s sudden presence forced him free of his reverie, and he stood and draped his coat over the railing at the bottom of the bed.

  Professoressa Crosera didn’t acknowledge him. She walked to the side of the bed, looked at the man, and stood as if paralysed. She raised a hand and touched her husband’s upper arm, then removed it and bowed to kiss him on the forehead. The man lay still, unresponsive.

  Hesitantly, she touched his cheek, his lips, then pulled her hand back and tightened it into a fist. The man’s chest rose and fell, rose and fell, but the ambient noise covered any sound his breathing might have made.

  Brunetti crossed his arms but said nothing. She glanced towards the motion and looked at him for no longer than it would take her eyes to photograph him, her face completely free of expression. She turned back to her husband and said, ‘Tell me what happened.’

  ‘Your husband was found earlier this morning at the foot of a bridge. He may have fallen, though the doctor who admitted him found marks on his body that suggest he may have been pushed down the bridge.’

  ‘May have been?’ she repeated.

  ‘Yes, Signora.’

  ‘You’re not sure?’

  ‘There were no witnesses that we know of,’ Brunetti explained.

  When she did not react, he carried the chair over to the side of the bed. ‘Please, Signora,’ he said. ‘Take this.’

  At first it seemed she didn’t know what to do, but then she sank into the chair and kept sinking lower in it so quickly that Brunetti feared she would fall off on to the floor.

  He acted instinctively, putting his hand on the front of her shoulder and pushing her back in the chair. Her eyes closed for a moment, and when she opened them her astonishment was raw, as though she’d fallen asleep on a bus and been awoken by the unsolicited attentions of a stranger.

  ‘Are you all right, Signora?’ Brunetti asked, stepping away from her. ‘Should I call the nurse?’

  She relaxed at the sincerity of his concern, closed her eyes again and shook her head minimally. ‘No, no. I just need a moment.’

  Hearing footsteps approaching, Brunetti turned, and a nurse he had not seen before walked past quickly, ignoring them both. She disappeared into a room at the end of the hall. Then, from behind him, he heard the clank of the arriving breakfast cart.

  Brunetti stood motionless, waiting for the Professoressa to regain her composure. She was thinner than he remembered her being: he had felt only bone when he’d tried to prop her up. She looked at him, and he saw that, like Griffoni’s, her face was drawn and tired, but hers looked as if it had grown that way over a longer period of time. She wore no lipstick and her lips looked so dry he wanted to offer her a glass of water.

  She started to speak, gave a small cough, and tried again. ‘What have the doctors done?’ she asked, then turned her head in the direction of the cart as it slammed into the wall and set dishes and glasses rattling. The noise jolted her to her feet and she shot a quick glance to her husband, who had not moved.

  ‘They took X-rays when he was brought in. But there was no neurologist on call last night. I don’t know what they plan for today.’

  ‘You said he fell,’ she said.

  ‘Yes. Ponte del Forner, over by …’

  ‘I know where it is,’ she said, then, voice growing harsh, she demanded. ‘What’s wrong with him?’

  Brunetti stopped himself from looking at the supine man, silent as these two people discussed what had happened to him as if he were not there.

  ‘I’m sorry, Professoressa, but I know only what the doctor told my colleague this morning, when he was admitted.’

  After a long time, she said, ‘Our apartment is near the bridge.’

  ‘Is it?’ Brunetti asked, seeing no reason to reveal that he had already begun to look into their lives. Instead, he asked, ‘Did you know that your husband had gone out?’

  She hesitated for some time before she answered this. ‘No.’

  ‘Did he seem troubled in any way?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘Troubled?’ she asked, as if responding to a word in a foreign language, but finally said ‘No’, and quickly added, ‘Other than about our son.’

  Brunetti nodded quite as if he believed her.

  ‘You didn’t hear the phone ring or anyone come to the house?’ he asked, trying to sound as though he were reciting a list from memory and really had little interest in her answers.

  ‘No. People don’t come to your house at midnight, do they?’ she asked, suggesting she found it a silly question.

  Ignoring her reference to the time when the incident probably took place, Brunetti changed tactics and tone. ‘Did you tell him you came to talk to me last week?’

  She took even longer to answer this and finally said, ‘Yes.’ She looked at him, and he saw that her eyes were in fact darker than her hair, the pupil seeming of one colour with the iris.

  ‘What did he say to that?’

  ‘When I told him how little you could do, he told me I’d been wasting my time,’ she said, though she seemed embarrassed to say it.

  At that moment, the metal breakfast cart, pushed by two white-uniformed attendants, clacked towards them. Brunetti moved to the end of the bed and backed up against the wall. Professoressa Crosera – he realized he hadn’t asked her for her husband’s name – moved to stand against the wall at the head, both of them doing their best to avoid collision with the cart.

  Brunetti waited to see whether the attendants would bang the cart into the wall to spite them for being there for so long while they were trying to work. Instead, they slowed thei
r progress and stopped short of the bed; each slid a metal tray from the cart as quietly as they could and took them into the room on their right. They emerged and, excusing themselves to Professoressa Crosera, delivered breakfast to the next room, and so all the way down to the end of the hallway. When all the trays had been distributed, they pushed the empty cart against the wall and walked back past Brunetti and Professoressa Crosera and out into the waiting area, nodding to both of them as they passed.

  Did they speculate, Brunetti asked himself, about the personal configurations clustered around the beds of the patients? Did they hear things said that should not be said, tones that should not be used when speaking to a sick person?

  ‘When will a doctor come?’ Professoressa Crosera asked Brunetti just as if she thought he’d know. She touched the corner of her husband’s mouth. ‘Can he have water?’ she asked.

  ‘I think that’s taken care of,’ Brunetti suggested, pointing to the drip of clear liquid that stood beside the bed, the needle taped to the back of her husband’s hand.

  Brunetti turned to the sound of footsteps approaching. The older of the two uniformed attendants approached them with a tray holding two plastic cups and two plastic-wrapped brioche. Since they were both still standing, the attendant set it on the chair at the foot of the bed, saying gently, ‘You should have something to eat. It will help.’

  That broke her: Professoressa Crosera gave a great heaving sob. She covered her mouth with her hand and walked to the far end of the corridor. Brunetti and the attendant could hear her sobs; both turned away to face the door to the waiting area. ‘Thank you, Signora,’ Brunetti said. ‘You’re very kind.’

  She was a robust woman, stuffed into a uniform she seemed to be outgrowing. One loose strand of greying hair had slipped from under the transparent plastic-shower-cap thing; her hands were red and rough. She smiled. St Augustine was wrong, Brunetti realized: it was not necessary for grace to be arrived at by prayer; it was as natural and abundant as the sunlight.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, smiling back at her.