Death in a Strange Country cgb-2

by Donna Leon

  She looked over at him when he said that, and he saw a phantom of what he had seen in her eyes that night on the island of San Michele. She started to speak, stopped, and looked back down at the stethoscope. After a long time, she shook her head and said, ‘I think you’re exaggerating my reaction, Mr Brunetti. I don’t know what you’re talking about when you say I’m afraid of something.’ And then, to convince them both, ‘I don’t know anything about why Mike would have been killed or who might have wanted to kill him.’

  He glanced at her hand and saw that she had bent the black rubber tube that led down to the flat disc at the end of the instrument until the rubber was grey with tension. She caught the direction of his eyes, looked down at her own hand, and slowly released it, until the tube was again straight, the rubber black. ‘And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have another patient to see.’

  ‘Certainly, Doctor,’ he said, knowing that he had lost. ‘If you think of anything you want to tell me or if you want to talk to me, you can reach me at the Questura in Venice.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, stood and went to the door. ‘Do you want to finish the article?’

  ‘No,’ he said, scrambling to his feet and going to the door. He put out his hand. ‘If you think of anything, Doctor.’

  She took his hand, smiled, but said nothing. He watched as she went down the corridor to the left and into the next room, from which he could hear the voice of a woman talking in a low, crooning voice, probably to a sick child.

  Outside, the driver was waiting, busy with a magazine. He looked up when Brunetti opened the back door of the car. ‘Where to, sir?’

  ‘Is that dining-hall open today?’ He was very hungry, realized only now that it was after one.

  ‘Yes, sir. Strike’s been settled.’

  ‘Who was on strike?’

  ‘CGL,’ he explained, naming the biggest of the Communist labour unions.

  ‘CGL?’ Brunetti repeated in amazement. ‘On an American military base?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ the driver said and laughed. ‘After the war, they hired people who spoke some English, and they let the unions form without paying any attention to them. But once they realized that CGL was Communist, they refused to hire anyone else who was a member. But they can’t get rid of the people who still are. Lots of them work in the dining-hall. Food’s good.’

  ‘All right, take me there. How far?’

  ‘Oh, about two minutes,’ he said, pulling away from the kerb and cutting the car into another tight U-turn that took them back up what Brunetti was sure was a one-way street.

  On their left, they passed two larger-man-life Statues that he hadn’t noticed before. ‘Who are those two?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know who the angel with the sword is, but the other one is Saint Barbara.’

  ‘Saint Barbara? What’s she doing here?’

  ‘She’s the patron saint of the artillery, sir. Remember, her father was struck by lightning when he tried to cut her head off?’

  Although he had been raised a Catholic, Brunetti had never felt much interest in religion and found it difficult to keep the different saints straight, rather, he believed, in the manner the pagans must have found it hard to remember which god was in charge of what. Besides, it had always seemed to him that the saints spent entirely too much time misplacing various body parts: eyes, breasts, arms, and now, with Saint Barbara, her head. ‘I don’t know the legend. What happened?’

  The driver swerved through a STOP sign and around a corner, looked back at Brunetti, and explained. ‘Her father was a pagan, and she was a Christian. Her father wanted her to marry a pagan, but she wanted to stay a virgin.’ He added, under his breath, ‘Silly girl.’ He looked back at the road, just in time to brake sharply to avoid running into a truck. ‘So the father decided to punish her by cutting off her head. He raised his sword over her, giving her one last chance to obey him, and zacketay! lightning struck the sword and killed him.’

  ‘What happened to her?’

  ‘Oh, they never tell you that part of the story. In any case, because of the explosion of the lightning, she’s the patron saint of the artillery.’ He pulled up in front of another low building. ‘Here we are, sir.’ Then he added, puzzled. ‘I’m surprised you didn’t know that, sir. About Saint Barbara.’

  ‘I wasn’t assigned the case,’ Brunetti said.

  After lunch, he had the driver take him back to Foster’s apartment. The same two soldiers were sitting in their Jeep in front of the apartment. They both got out when Brunetti approached them and waited for him to draw up to them. ‘Good afternoon,’ he said, smiling pleasantry. ‘I’d like to have another look inside the apartment if that’s possible.’

  ‘Have you spoken to Major Butterworth about this, sir?’ the one with more stripes asked.

  ‘No, not today. But he gave me permission yesterday.’

  ‘Could you tell me why you want to go back, sir?’

  ‘My notebook. I was jotting down the names of his books yesterday, and I must have set it down on the bookcase inside. I didn’t have it when I got on the train, and this was the last place I’d been.’ He saw that the soldier was about to refuse, so he added, ‘You’re welcome to come inside with me if you’d like. All I want to do is pickup the notebook if it’s there. I don’t think the apartment is going to be any help to me, but I have notes on other things in there, and they’re important to me.’ He was talking too much, he realized.

  The two soldiers exchanged glances, and apparently one of them decided that it would be all right. The one he had spoken to handed his rifle to his companion and said, ‘If you’ll come along with me, sir, I’ll let you into the apartment.’

  Smiling his gratitude, Brunetti followed him towards the front entrance and into the elevator. Neither of them spoke during the short ride to the third floor nor while the soldier opened the door. He stepped back and allowed Brunetti to walk past him into the apartment, then closed the door behind them.

  Brunetti went into the living room and up to the bookcase. He made a show of looking for the notebook, which was in his jacket pocket, even stooped down and looked behind a chair that stood beside the bookcase. ‘That’s strange. I’m sure I had it here.’ He pulled a few books forward and looked behind them. Nothing. He paused, reflecting on where else he might have set it down. ‘I got myself a drink of water in the kitchen,’ he said to the soldier. ‘I might have set it down in there.’ Then, as if he had just thought of it, ‘Is there any chance that someone might have come in and found it?’

  ‘No, sir. No one’s been in here since you left.’

  ‘Good,’ Brunetti answered with his friendliest smile, ‘then it’s got to be here.’ He preceded the soldier into the kitchen and went to the worktop beside the sink. He looked around him, bent down to look under the kitchen table, then stood. As he did, he placed himself directly in front of the water heater. The screws on the front panel which he had replaced yesterday, careful to leave them at exact verticals and horizontals, had all been moved and were all slightly out of true. So someone had checked and found that the bags were missing.

  ‘It doesn’t seem to be here, sir.’

  ‘No, it doesn’t,’ Brunetti agreed in a voice into which he put real confusion. ‘Very strange. I’m sure I had it while I was here.’

  ‘Could you have dropped it in your car, sir?’ the soldier suggested.

  ‘The driver would have told me,’ Brunetti said, then, as if the idea had just come to him, ‘if he found it.’

  ‘Better check your vehicle, sir.’

  They left the apartment together, the soldier careful to lock the door behind him. As they descended in the elevator, Brunetti decided that it would be far too coincidental for him to find the notebook hidden behind the back seat of the car. Consequently, when they emerged from the building, he thanked the soldier for his help and went back to his own car.

  Not sure if the American was within hearing distance and not certain about whether he unders
tood Italian, he played it straight and asked his driver if he had found a notebook in the car. Obviously, he had not. Brunetti opened the back door, stuck his hand behind the back seat, and felt around in the empty space. He found, not at all to his surprise, nothing. He pulled himself from the car and turned back towards the Jeep. He opened his hands in an empty, significant gesture, and then got into the back seat and asked the driver to take him to the station.

  * * * *

  12

  The only train leaving Vicenza at that hour was a local that stopped at all of the stations between Vicenza and Venice, but, since the Intercity from Milan was not due for another forty minutes, Brunetti opted for the local, though he hated the stop-and-go trip, with the continual change of passengers and the great tide of students who invariably surged on and off at Padova.

  In the dining-hall, he had picked up a copy of an English-language newspaper that lay abandoned on the table where he sat He took it now from his inner pocket and began to read. The Stars and Stripes, it announced itself in red letters, apparently a paper published by the American military in Europe. The front page carried a story about a hurricane that had swept its way through a place called Biloxi, a city he believed to be in Bangladesh. No, in America, but how could that name be explained? There was a large picture of houses and cars overturned, trees shoved over onto one another. He turned a page and read that a pit bull had bitten off the hand of a sleeping child in Detroit, a city he was certain was in America. There was no picture. The Secretary of Defense had assured Congress that all those contractors who had defrauded the government would be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Remarkable, the similarity between the rhetoric of American politics and Italian. He had no doubt that the illusory nature of that promise would be the same in both countries.

  There were three pages of cartoons, none of which made the least bit of sense to him, and six of sports news, which made even less. In one of the cartoons, a caveman swung a club, and on one of the sports pages, a man in a striped uniform did the same. Beyond that, all was arcana to Brunetti. The last page carried a continuation of the report on the hurricane, but then the train pulled into Venice station and he abandoned the story. He left the paper on the seat beside him; perhaps someone else could profit from it better than he.

  It was after seven when they arrived, but the sky was still light. That would end this weekend; he thought, when the clocks were set back an hour, and it got dark earlier. Or was it the other way, and it stayed bright longer? He hoped that it took most people as long to figure this out each year as it did him. He crossed the Bridge of the Scalzi and entered the rabbit warren of streets that wove their way back towards his apartment. Few people, even at this hour, passed him, since most went to the station or to the bus depot at Piazzale Roma by boat. Usually as he walked, he glanced at the fronts of buildings, up at their windows, down narrow streets, always alert to something he might not have noticed before. Like many of his townsmen, Brunetti never tired of studying the city, every so often delighting himself by discovering something he had never noticed before. Over the course of the years, he had worked out a system that allowed him to reward himself for each discovery: a new window earned him a coffee; a new statue of a saint, however small, got him a glass of wine; and once, years ago, he had noticed on a wall he must have passed five times a week since he was a child a lapidary stone that commemorated the site of the Aldine Publishing House, the oldest in Italy, founded in the fourteenth century. He had gone right around the corner and into a bar in Campo San Luca and ordered himself a Brandy Alexander, though it was ten in the morning and the barman had given Brunetti a strange look when he placed the glass in front of him.

  Tonight, however, the streets failed to capture his interest; he was still back in Vicenza, still seeing the grooves in the four screws that held the front panel of the water heater in Foster’s apartment, each of them slightly moved from the careful straight lines in which Brunetti had left them the day before, each giving the lie to the soldier’s assertion that no one had been in the apartment after Brunetti. So now they - whoever ‘they’ were - knew that Brunetti had taken the drugs from the apartment and had said nothing about it.

  He let himself into the building and had unlocked their mailbox before he remembered that Paola would have been home hours ago and would have checked the post. He began the ascent to his home, grateful for the first flight, low and gentle, a remnant of the original fifteenth-century palazzo. At the top, the stairs jogged off to the left and rose up, in two steep flights, to the next floor. A door awaited him there, which he unlocked and closed behind him. Another flight, these dangerous and steep. They doubled back above themselves and carried him up the last twenty-five steps to the door of his apartment. He unlocked the door and let himself in, finally home.

  There was the smell of cooking to welcome him, one scent mingling with another. Tonight he could make out the faint odour of squash, which meant that Paola was making risotto con zucca, available only in this season, when the dark green, squat barucca squash were brought from Chioggia, across the laguna. And after that? Shank of veal? Roasted with olives and white wine?

  He hung his jacket in the cupboard and went down the hall to the kitchen. The room was hotter than usual, which meant the oven was on. The large frying pan on the stove revealed, when he lifted the lid, bright orange chunks of zucca, frying slowly with minced onions. He took a glass from the rack beside the sink and pulled a bottle of Ribolla from the refrigerator. He poured a little more than a mouthful, tasted, drank it down, then filled the glass and replaced the bottle. The warmth of the kitchen swept up about him. He loosened his tie and went back down the corridor. ‘Paola?’

  ‘I’m here, in the back,’ he heard her answering call.

  He didn’t answer but went into the long living room and then out onto the balcony. This was the best time of day for Brunetti, for he could see, from their terrace, the sunset off in the West. On the clearest of days, he could see the Dolomites from the small window in the kitchen, but it was so late in the day now that they would be hazed over and invisible. He stayed where he was, forearms propped on the railing, studying the rooftops and towers that never ceased to please him. He heard Paola move down the hall, back into the kitchen, heard the clang of shifted pots, but he stayed where he was, listening to the eight o’clock bells ring out from San Polo, then to the answering resonance of San Marco, a few seconds late, as always, come booming across the city. When all the bells were silent, he went back into the house, closing the door against the growing evening chill.

  In the kitchen, Paola stood at the stove, stirring the risotto, pausing now and again to add more boiling broth. ‘Glass of wine?’ he asked. She shook her head, still stirring. He passed behind her, paused long enough to kiss her on the back of the neck, and poured himself another glass of wine.

  ‘How was Vicenza?’ she asked.

  ‘Better to ask me how was America.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ she said. ‘It’s incredible, isn’t it?’

  ‘Were you ever there?’

  ‘Years ago. With the Alvises.’ Seeing his puzzled look, she explained. ‘The Colonel, when he was stationed in Padova. There was some sort of party at the officers’ club, for Italian and American officers. About ten years ago.’

  ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘No, you didn’t go. It was when you were in Naples. I think. Is it still the same?’

  ‘Depends on what it was like then,’ he said, smiling.

  ‘Don’t be smart with me, Guido. What was it like?’

  ‘It was very clean, and everyone smiled a great deal.’

  ‘Good,’ she said, stirring again. ‘Then it hasn’t changed.’

  ‘I wonder why it is, that they always smile so much.’ He had noticed the same thing, each time he was in America.

  She turned away from the risotto and stared at him. ‘Why shouldn’t they smile, Guido? Think about it. They’re the richest people in the world. Everyone
has to defer to them in politics, and they have convinced themselves, somehow, that everything they have ever done in their very brief history has been done for no purpose other than to further the general good of mankind. Why shouldn’t they smile?’ She turned back to the pan and muttered darkly as she felt the rice sticking to the bottom. She poured more broth into it and stirred quickly for a moment.

  ‘Is this going to turn into a cell meeting?’ he asked blandly. Though they generally agreed about politics, Brunetti had always voted Socialist, while Paola voted, fiercely, Communist. But now, with the demise of the system and the death of the party, he had begun to take tentative shots at her.

  She didn’t bother to grace him with an answer.

  He started to pull down plates in order to set the table. ‘Where are the kids?’

  ‘Both with friends.’ Then, before he could ask, she added, ‘Yes, they both called and asked permission.’ She turned off the flame under the risotto, added a substantial chunk of butter that stood on the worktop, and poured in a small dish of finely grated Parmigiano Reggiano. She stirred it around until both were dissolved into the rice, poured the risotto into a serving bowl, and set it on the table. She pulled out her chair, sat down, and turned the spoon towards him, saying, ‘Mangia, ti fa bene,’ a command that had filled Brunetti with joy for as long as he could remember.