The Temptation of Forgiveness

by Donna Leon

‘I’ll be getting on with my work, then,’ she said, speaking Veneziano. She left him and went back down the corridor. Brunetti picked up one of the coffees and went to stand in front of the window to drink it. He heard the woman’s footsteps as she came back to the bed, heard the rough sound of the sugar envelope being opened. Down in the courtyard, a gardener stood with a hose in one hand, a cigarette in the other, letting water flow into the ground around the trunk of the palm tree.

  Brunetti went to the chair and set his empty cup on the tray. The brioche was probably more chemical than flour, but still Brunetti ate it, refusing to let himself taste it. Luckily, the woman had also brought two cups of water, one of which he drank as soon as the brioche was gone.

  ‘Would you like me to go and see if anything is happening?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘Yes, please,’ Professoressa Crosera said.

  A different nurse was behind the desk now, a woman in her fifties, with very thick greying hair cut short. He showed her his warrant card to let her see his rank, though he had no idea if it would help. Apparently it did, because she looked at him after seeing it and asked, ‘How can I help you, Commissario?’

  ‘I’m here because of the man who was brought in this morning, with the head injury. Do you have any idea of when he’ll be seen by a neurologist?’

  She glanced at her watch. ‘Dottor Stampini, the chief neurologist, is always in his office by seven, Signore. The injured man’s X-rays are on his desk.’ Then she said, in a professionally neutral voice, ‘The night nurse told me she took them down to Dottor Stampini’s office herself. Will that be all?’ she asked.

  ‘Thank you, Signora,’ Brunetti answered. ‘His wife is here. I’ll go and tell her.’

  Dottor Stampini arrived at the bedside about fifteen minutes later. He was a surprisingly youthful man with a shock of reddish-blond hair that he occasionally tossed back from above his eyes the way a horse tosses its mane. He shook hands with Professoressa Crosera and then with Brunetti, gave his name but made no attempt to discover who they were and asked them to move away from the bed while he examined his patient.

  Brunetti moved a few metres down the corridor; she chose to stand at the nearest window and look out into the courtyard. Brunetti kept his eyes on the doctor.

  Dottor Stampini took a small flashlight from the pocket of his white jacket and bent over the man on the bed. He raised the man’s right eyelid, shone the light into it, and then did the same with the left. He then moved towards the bottom of the bed, folded back the covers and exposed both legs to the knees. He took a small metal hammer from the same pocket and tapped at the right knee, repeated the blow a number of times, then tried the left knee with the same lack of success.

  He replaced the covers and took up the chart that hung from the bottom of the bed. He read the first and second page, then held an X-ray up to the light coming in from the window behind Brunetti. He put it back and wrote on the chart, replaced it, then picked it up again and added something. When he was finished, he came down towards them.

  ‘Are you his wife, Signora?’ the doctor asked as he reached them.

  ‘Yes. What’s wrong with him?’

  ‘One moment,’ the doctor said, turning to Brunetti. ‘And you are?’

  ‘Commissario Guido Brunetti. Polizia di Stato.’

  The doctor made no attempt to hide his surprise. ‘May I ask why you’re here, Commissario?’

  ‘My colleague told me that the doctor who admitted the patient to the hospital said he noticed marks on his wrist.’

  The doctor turned and went back to the bed. Brunetti watched him examine, first the left wrist, then the right, careful not to disturb the needle in the back of the hand. Then he went to the foot of the bed and wrote on the chart for some time.

  ‘What marks?’ Professoressa Crosera asked Brunetti while they watched the doctor. ‘What from?’

  Brunetti thought she sounded frightened.

  ‘I don’t know, Signora. Do you have any idea?’

  Her eyes widened at Brunetti’s question. As the doctor approached, she shook her head but said nothing.

  This time, Dottor Stampini addressed Professoressa Crosera, ignoring Brunetti. ‘I’ve ordered a CAT scan. When I have the results, I’ll have a clearer idea of what’s going on.’

  ‘Isn’t there anything you can tell me, even without the scan?’ she asked, managing to keep her voice calm.

  The doctor shrugged and flipped his hair off his face again. ‘Not really, Signora. I’m sorry, but nothing will be clear until I see the scan.’

  ‘This morning?’ she asked, this time failing to keep the fear from her voice.

  ‘Some time today.’

  ‘Thank you, Dottore,’ Brunetti said, as if the doctor had been speaking to both of them, then asked, ‘You saw them?’

  Suddenly impatient, the doctor said, ‘The skin is broken. It could be anything.’ Brunetti nodded, and the doctor continued, ‘If you have no more questions, I’ll begin my rounds.’

  ‘Thank you, Dottore,’ Brunetti said. Then, as if he’d just thought of it, he said to Professoressa Crosera, ‘I have to call the Questura. I’ll do it from the waiting room. The connection here is bad.’

  The doctor took this opportunity to leave and started down the corridor, Brunetti close behind him, his telefonino in his hand.

  When they were almost at the stairway, Brunetti put the phone in his pocket and called to the man in front of him, ‘Dottor Stampini?’

  Stampini stopped and turned. With little patience, he asked, ‘What is it?’

  Putting on his most amiable voice, Brunetti said, ‘I’d like to have a word with you, if you have time.’

  Neither of them could ignore how close they were to the nurses at the desk, and so Stampini said, ‘All right. We can use my office.’

  It was the second on the left and looked much like the office of every other overworked doctor Brunetti had ever seen: books and folders on the desk, open drawers spilling out sample boxes of medicine, back issues of medical journals stacked on the radiators, a disorderly row of cups on the windowsill.

  Stampini stopped just inside the door and again asked, ‘What is it?’

  With no hesitation, Brunetti said, ‘His pupils don’t dilate, and he’s lost the reflexes in his knees. That suggests something serious, doesn’t it?’

  Stampini’s response was similarly direct. ‘Are you a doctor in your spare time, Commissario?’

  ‘No, Dottore, I’m not and, believe me, I don’t pretend to be. But I’ve seen a lot of injured people in my career – too many of them, I’m afraid – and the ones with these symptoms are often …’ He broke off and waited for the doctor to say something. When he did not, Brunetti concluded, ‘I don’t presume to tell you something you know far better and in far greater detail than I do, Dottore.’

  Stampini considered Brunetti’s conciliatory remark and asked, ‘What is it you want to know?’

  ‘If I proceed on the assumption that the marks on his wrist are signs of violence or some sort of attack, I have to organize a criminal investigation and try to find someone who might have seen him before it happened.’

  ‘I see. I see,’ the doctor said. Then, in a milder voice, he asked, ‘What happened?’

  ‘We aren’t sure. He was found lying at the foot of a bridge. When he fell, he hit his head on the metal railing and on the pavement: there was blood in both places.’

  ‘And the marks on his wrist?’ Dottor Stampini asked.

  ‘Like you, Dottore,’ Brunetti answered with a small smile, ‘I see injuries, and I try to draw conclusions. In this case, it could be simple: someone attacked him and pulled him off balance.’

  ‘Was he robbed?’ the doctor asked.

  ‘He didn’t have his wallet on him. He had the keys to his house in his pocket, and he wasn’t wearing a coat; he lives not far from where he was found.’

  ‘The chart says he was X-rayed at three this morning.’

  Brunetti nodded. ‘He was
attacked some time around midnight.’

  Stampini stuffed his hands into the pockets of his jacket and stared at the floor. He rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet for a while and then pulled his hands out and shoved his hair back from his forehead. Finally he said, ‘He’s not going to be able to tell you what happened. Not soon. And perhaps not ever.’

  ‘The X-rays?’ Brunetti asked.

  Stampini nodded. ‘There appears to be a great deal of haemorrhaging. The CAT scan will tell me more, but what I can see from the X-rays doesn’t look good.’

  ‘Good in what sense, Dottore? For his full mental recovery?’ Brunetti asked. ‘Or for his survival?’

  Dottor Stampini’s expression told Brunetti little. The doctor’s right hand rose to his chin and he pushed at the skin of his cheek, as though trying to check whether he’d remembered to shave that morning.

  The doctor lowered his hand and looked across at Brunetti. ‘Both,’ he said, but then he must have thought back over the tangled grammar of Brunetti’s question, for he quickly changed it to, ‘Neither.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Brunetti admitted.

  ‘Nothing looks good,’ Dottor Stampini said, then, ‘Don’t tell his wife.’

  ‘I don’t have to, Dottore. She’ll find out soon enough.’

  9

  Realizing that there was nothing else to say, Brunetti took a step back and prepared to leave the office. The younger man made a hesitant noise, then said, ‘Of course, I could be wrong. There have been cases where the blood is reabsorbed and the patient recovers fully.’

  Brunetti raised a hand and let it fall back. He could think of nothing at all to say and so left to return to Professoressa Crosera and her husband.

  When Brunetti entered the corridor, he saw two male attendants, one at the head and the other at the foot of the injured man’s bed, his wife standing nearby. Brunetti remained where he was and waited to see what would happen. The men began to roll the bed towards the door, past him, then out to the elevators. Brunetti and Professoressa Crosera followed them silently into the elevator. No one spoke while it descended.

  On the second floor, the men rolled the stretcher into Neurologia. One of them gave some papers to the nurse at the desk, who glanced through them and said something to him, then pushed a button on the wall and the doors to a corridor pulled back, allowing the men to roll the stretcher inside. When Brunetti and Professoressa Crosera attempted to follow, the nurse held up a hand and said, ‘You can’t go in there.’

  ‘I’m his wife.’

  This failed to have any effect on the nurse, who repeated: ‘You can’t go in there.’ Then, relenting a bit, she added, ‘Not until they’ve got him settled in a bed.’

  ‘Is there some place we can sit?’ Brunetti asked, eager to get back to the Questura but unwilling to leave the woman until she had seen her husband settled.

  He glanced at his watch with no idea what it would tell him. It could still be seven, though it might as easily have been noon: he had been there so long that the numbers no longer separated or marked events. It turned out to be only a little after nine.

  ‘There’s a waiting room on the other side of the elevators,’ the nurse said and picked up her phone.

  The usual red plastic chairs, forged together into lines of five, awaited them. Always this terrible reddish orange; Brunetti could not associate that colour with anything other than suffering.

  He stood until Professoressa Crosera took a seat at the end of the row nearest to the door, then, leaving the seat empty where she had placed, not unintentionally, her bag, Brunetti took the next one. ‘Could I ask you some questions, Professoressa?’

  ‘You’ve already asked me some,’ she said, eyes on the door.

  ‘I know that, and I apologize for troubling you. But if the signs that your husband was attacked are confirmed, then a crime was committed, and it’s my job to find the person responsible. The only way I can do that is to have a closer look at your husband’s recent behaviour to learn if anything unusual happened to him or if anything he said or did might lead to the person who did this to him.’

  She listened in silence.

  ‘Were there any unexplained phone calls, subjects he seemed reluctant to discuss, people he didn’t want to talk to, maybe because of the trouble with your son?’

  In the face of her continuing silence, Brunetti went on, ‘You said you were worried about your son; your husband must have been, as well.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you be?’ she asked angrily.

  ‘Any father would be, Signora,’ Brunetti answered mildly and then added, ‘And any mother.’ He realized he had unconsciously stopped using her title and addressed her as he would any woman.

  She turned away from him and pushed back in her chair, looking at the open doorway.

  ‘As I told you, I have two children, both teenagers. I’m never free of worrying about them and what might happen to them.’

  Not bothering to look at him, she asked, in a polite, social voice, ‘Is this something they teach you in police school, Commissario? How to earn the trust of the people you’re questioning?’

  Her question insulted him, but it did not offend him; he couldn’t, however, resist the luxury of laughter, which surprised her. ‘No, Signora,’ he said when he stopped. ‘We were taught to try to bond with the men we questioned by talking about football. When I entered the police, no one thought we’d ever have to question a woman. I suspect our teachers believed they’d all be at home, taking care of the kids.’ He straightened his face and said, ‘I want to find the person who did this to their father, and I’m asking for your help.’

  She turned back to him to ask, ‘Even if what I say might endanger my son?’

  ‘Your son is too young to be in any legal danger. The worst that could happen to him is that he’d be sent to speak to a social worker or psychologist, but only if the judge declared him sufficiently dependent on drugs to need professional help.’

  She turned away again and studied the door. ‘But what if what I told you put my son in greater danger?’ she asked.

  Brunetti examined her words. ‘Greater danger.’ Greater than the danger his father had been put in? Greater danger than he was in now, presumably because the dealer had somehow found out that his mother had gone to the police? Had her husband decided to confront him, and was it the dealer who had met him on the bridge?

  ‘Are you afraid of the person who’s selling him the drugs?’ Brunetti asked.

  She turned to face him. ‘Only if the police fail to do anything about him, Commissario.’ Before Brunetti could protest that she was exaggerating, she went on. ‘No matter what you do, the dealers will be free to do what they want.’

  ‘Did your husband speak to Sandro?’ Brunetti asked, unwilling to discuss what the police could and could not do.

  His question surprised her, and he watched as she tried to think of how to answer it.

  ‘I can’t tell you that,’ she finally answered, and again Brunetti was left with two ways to interpret what she said.

  ‘Nothing we do to the dealer will put your son in jeopardy,’ Brunetti insisted.

  ‘If he attacked my husband, and you arrest him the day after?’

  ‘Not if he’s arrested for selling drugs. I’m sure your son isn’t the only person he sells them to.’

  She laced her fingers together. ‘I need time to think,’ she said, ‘I have to ask my husband.’

  Brunetti kept his face neutral and said only, ‘He might not remember what happened.’ That was certainly true of head injuries, Brunetti knew.

  ‘No,’ she said in a voice grown solid with decision. ‘I want to ask him.’

  Brunetti recognized that it was futile to insist, just as it was futile for her to think of asking her husband anything. He got to his feet and said, not without embarrassment, ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t know your husband’s name.’

  She looked at him, startled, then cast a look of such yearning tenderness towa
rds the ward where her husband had been taken that Brunetti turned his eyes away from her face.

  ‘How strange,’ she said slowly; Brunetti returned his attention to her.

  ‘Excuse me?’ he asked. ‘I’m afraid I don’t understand.’

  She smiled her first real smile: it wiped years from her face. ‘It’s usually the woman who is the nameless appendage to her husband.’ Her face suddenly tightened, and she drew her lips together; Brunetti feared she would begin to cry again.

  Instead, she took a breath and said, ‘Tullio Gasparini.’

  He thanked her and left, wondering, as he often did, if he would ever understand the secrets of the heart.

  10

  On his way to the Questura, Brunetti thought the first thing they had to do was find the man who was selling drugs to the students of the Albertini, Sandro Gasparini among them. For the moment, he was the most likely suspect in the attack. The simplest way to find him was to talk to the boy, but that would require the consent of the mother, who would surely insist that a lawyer be present. If she absolutely refused, they could have the boy followed, but where would he find the manpower for that? Or a magistrate to authorize it?

  Why would a man be out on the street around midnight, coatless, with only his keys? Could he have left his home with no one noticing? Brunetti stopped in his tracks: where had the boy been last night and this morning? He thought back over his conversation with Professoressa Crosera and could not remember asking her that. She had been at home when Brunetti called: if her son had been missing, surely that would have been the first thing she’d ask any policeman. When she went to the hospital before dawn, would she leave her home without explaining to the children where she was going? Had they both been there to tell?

  He pulled out the new phone Signorina Elettra had procured for him, went online not without difficulty and found the number of the Albertini, and keyed it in. The phone rang four times before a woman answered. ‘Good morning. This is the Albertini School. How may I help you?’

  ‘Good morning, Signora. This is Commissario Guido Brunetti. I’m calling about one of your students.’