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‘The man is dead,’ Brunetti said flatly.
Nothing registered in the doctor’s eyes. ‘May I ask the cause of death?’ he asked, then hastened to explain: ‘I’d like to know in case there was some sort of infection I overlooked.’
‘He was poisoned.’
‘Poisoned,’ the doctor repeated, then he added, ‘I see, I see.’ He considered that and then asked, strangely diffident, acknowledging that the advantage had passed to Brunetti, ‘And what poison, may I ask?’
‘Cyanide.’
‘Oh.’ He sound disappointed.
‘Is it important, Doctor?’
‘If it had been arsenic, there would have been some hearing loss, of the sort he appeared to have. That is, if it was given over a long period of time. But cyanide. No, I don’t think so.’ He considered this for a moment, opened the file, made a brief note, then drew a heavy horizontal line under what he had just added. ‘Was an autopsy performed? I believe they are obligatory in cases like this.’
‘Yes.’
‘And was any note made of his hearing?’
‘I don’t believe any special search was made.’
‘That’s unfortunate,’ the doctor said, then corrected himself: ‘But it probably wouldn’t have shown anything.’ He closed his eyes, and Brunetti could see him leafing through textbooks in his mind, pausing here and there to read a passage with particular attention. Finally, he opened his eyes and looked across at Brunetti. ‘No, it wouldn’t have been evident.’
Brunetti stood. ‘If you could have your nurse make me a copy of your file, Doctor, I won’t take any more of your time.’
‘Yes, certainly,’ said the doctor, getting to his feet and following Brunetti to the door. In the outer office, he handed the file to his nurse and asked her to make a copy for the commissario, then he turned to one of the patients who had appeared while he was speaking to Brunetti and said, ‘Signora Mosca, you may come in now.’ He nodded to Brunetti and followed the woman into his office, closing the door behind them.
The nurse returned and handed him a copy of the file, still warm from the copying machine. He thanked her and left. In the elevator, which he remembered to take, he opened it and read the final note: ‘Patient dead of cyanide poisoning. Results of suggested treatment unknown.’
* * * *
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
He was home before eight, only to discover that Paola had taken the children to see a film. She had left a note saying that a woman had called twice during the afternoon but had not left her name. He rooted around in the refrigerator, finding only salami and cheese and a plastic bag of black olives. He pulled them all out and set them on the table, then went back to the counter and got himself a bottle of red wine and a glass. He popped an olive into his mouth, poured a glass of wine, then spat the pit into his cupped hand. He looked around for a place to put it while he ate another. And another. Finally, he tossed them into the garbage bag under the sink.
He cut two slices of bread, put some salami between them, and poured a glass of wine. On the table was that week’s issue of Epoca, which Paola must have been reading at the table. He sat down, flipped open the magazine, and took a bite of his sandwich. And the phone rang.
Chewing, he walked slowly into the living room, hoping that the ringing would stop before he got there. On the seventh ring, he picked it up and said his name.
‘Hello. This is Brett,’ she said quickly. ‘I’m sorry to call you at home, but I’d like to talk to you. If that’s possible.’
‘Is it something important?’ he asked, knowing it had to be for her to call but hoping, nevertheless, that it was not.
‘Yes. It’s Flavia.’ He knew that too. ‘She’s had a letter from his lawyer.’ There was no need to ask her whose lawyer. ‘And we talked about the argument she had with him.’ This would have to be Wellauer. Brunetti knew he should volunteer to meet her, but he lacked the will to do it.
‘Guido, are you there?’ He heard the tension in her voice, even as he heard her struggle to keep it calm.
‘Yes. Where are you?’
‘I’m at home. But I can’t see you here.’ Her voice caught at that, and he suddenly wanted to talk to her.
‘Brett, listen to me. Do you know the Giro bar, the one just near Santa Marina?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ll meet you there in fifteen minutes.’
‘Thank you, Guido.’
‘Fifteen minutes,’ he repeated, and hung up. He scribbled a note for Paola, saying he had to go out, and ate the rest of his sandwich as he went down the steps.
Giro’s was a smoky, dismal place, one of the few bars in the city that stayed open after ten at night. The management had changed hands a few months before, and the new owners had done their best to tart the place up, adding white curtains and slick music. But it had failed to become a hip pub, while ceasing to be a local bar where friends met for a coffee or a drink. It had neither class nor charm, only overpriced wine and too much smoke.
He saw her when he walked in, sitting at a table in the rear, looking at the door and being looked at in her turn by the three or four young men who stood at the bar, drinking small glasses of red wine and talking in voices that were meant to float back and impress her. He felt their eyes on him as he made his way to her table. The warmth of her smile made him glad he had come.
‘Thank you,’ she said simply.
‘Tell me about the letter.’
She looked at the table, where her hands lay, palms down, and she kept them there while she spoke to him. ‘It’s from a lawyer in Milan, the same one who fought the divorce. He says that he has received information that Flavia is leading “an immoral and unnatural life”—those were the words. She showed me the letter. “An immoral and unnatural life.”‘ She looked up at him and tried to smile. ‘I guess that’s me, eh?’ She brought one hand up, embracing emptiness. ‘I don’t believe it,’ she said, shaking her head from side to side. ‘He said that they were going to file a suit against her and ask . . . they would demand that the children be returned to the custody of their father. This was an official notice of their intention.’ She stopped and covered her eyes with one hand. ‘They’re officially giving us notice.’ She moved her hand to her mouth and covered it, as though keeping the words inside. ‘No, not us, just Flavia. Only her—that they’re going to reinstitute proceedings.’
Brunetti sensed the arrival of a waiter and waved him back with an angry hand. When the man had retreated out of hearing, he asked, ‘What else?’ She tried; he could see that she tried to push the words out, but she couldn’t do it. She looked up and gave him a nervous grin, just the sort Chiara produced when she had done something wrong and had to tell him about it.
She muttered something, lowered her head.
‘What, Brett? I didn’t hear.’
She looked at the top of the table. ‘Had to tell someone. No one else.’
‘No one else?’ She had spent much of her life in this city, and there was no one she could tell this to, only the policeman whose job it was to find out if she loved a murderess?
‘No one?’
‘I’ve told no one about Flavia,’ she said, meeting his glance this time. ‘She said she wanted no gossip, that it could damage her career. I’ve never told anyone about her. About us.’ He remembered, in that instant, Padovani’s telling the tale of Paola’s first blush of love for him, of the way she carried on, telling all her friends, talking of nothing else. The world had permitted her not only joy but public joy. And this woman had been in love, there was no question of that, for three years and had told no one. Except him. The policeman.
‘Was your name mentioned in the letter?’
She shook her head.
‘What about Flavia? What did she say?’
Biting her lips, she lifted one hand and pointed it at her heart.
‘She blames you?’
Just like Chiara, she nodded and then dragged the back of her hand under her nose. It came away
wet and gleaming. He pulled out his handkerchief and handed it to her. She took it, but seeming not to have any idea what she was supposed to do with it, she sat with it in her hand, tears running down her face, nose dripping. Feeling not a little foolish but remembering that, after all, he was someone’s father, he took the handkerchief and patted at her face with it. She started back in her seat and took the handkerchief from him. She wiped her face, blew her nose, and put it in her pocket, the second he had lost in a week.
‘She said it was my fault, that none of this would have happened if it weren’t for me.’ Her voice was tight and raspy. She grimaced. ‘The awful thing is it’s true. I know it’s not really true, but I can’t make it not be true, the way she says it is.’
‘Did the letter say where the information came from?’
‘No. But it had to be Wellauer.’
‘Good.’
She looked at him in surprise. ‘How can that be good? The lawyer said they were going to bring charges. That would make everything public’
‘Brett,’ he said, voice level and calm. ‘Think about it. If his witness was Wellauer, he’d have to testify. And even if he were still alive, he’d never get himself caught in something like this. It’s just a threat.’
‘But still, if they bring charges ...’
‘All he’s trying to do is scare you. And look how he’s succeeded. No court, even an Italian court, would admit anything on hearsay, and that’s all the letter is, without the person who wrote it to give evidence.’ He watched her as she considered this. ‘There isn’t any evidence, is there?’
‘What do you mean by evidence?’
‘Letters. I don’t know. Conversations.’
‘No, nothing like that. I’ve never written anything, not even from China. And Flavia’s always too busy to write.’
‘What about her friends? Do they know?’
‘I don’t know. It’s not something that people like to talk about.’
‘Then I don’t think you have anything to worry about.’
She tried to smile, tried to convince herself that he had somehow managed to bring her back from grief to safety. ‘Really?’
‘Really,’ he said, and smiled. ‘I spend a lot of time with lawyers, and all this one is trying to do is scare you and threaten you.’
‘Well,’ she began, with a laugh that turned into a hiccup, ‘he certainly managed to do that.’ Then, under her breath, ‘The bastard.’
With that, Brunetti thought it was safe to order two brandies, which the waiter was very quick to bring. When the drinks arrived, she said, ‘She was awful.’
He took a sip and waited for her to say more.
‘She said terrible things.’
‘We all do sometimes.’
‘I don’t,’ she retorted immediately, and he suspected that she didn’t, that she would use language as a tool and not a weapon.
‘She’ll forget it, Brett. People who say such things always do.’
She shrugged, dismissing that as irrelevant. She, clearly, wouldn’t forget.
‘What are you going to do?’ he asked, really interested in her answer.
‘Go home. See if she’s there. See what happens.’
He realized that he had never so much as bothered to learn if Petrelli had her own home in the city, had never initiated an investigation of her behavior, either before or after Wellauer’s death. Was it that easy for him to be misled? Was he so different from the rest of men—show him a pretty face, cry a little, appear to be intelligent and honest, and he’d just cancel out the possibility that you could have killed a man or could love someone who did?
He was frightened by how easily this woman had disarmed him. He pulled some loose bills from his pocket and dropped them on the table. ‘Yes, that’s a good idea,’ he finally said, pushing back his chair and getting to his feet.
He caught her sudden insecurity at seeing him so suddenly change from friend to stranger. He couldn’t even do this well. ‘Come on, I’ll go as far as San Giovanni e Paolo with you.’ Outside, because it was night and because it was habit, he linked his arm with hers as they walked. Neither one of them spoke. He was aware of how much she felt like a woman, of the wider arc of her hips, of how pleasant it was to have her move close against him when they passed people on the narrow streets. All this he realized as he walked her home to her lover.
They said goodbye under the statue of Colleoni, no more than that, just a simple goodbye.
* * * *
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Brunetti walked back through the quiet city, troubled by what he had just heard. He thought he knew something of love, having learned about it with Paola. Was he so conventional, then, that this woman’s love— for there was no question that it was love—had to remain alien to him because it didn’t conform to his ideas? He dismissed that all as sentimentality at its worst and concentrated, instead, on the question he had asked himself in the bar: whether his affection for this woman, his attraction toward something in her, had blinded him to what he was supposed to be doing. Flavia Petrelli just didn’t seem to be someone who would kill in cold blood. He had no doubt that, in a moment of heat or passion, she would be capable of killing someone; most people are. For her, it would have been a knife in the ribs or a shove down the steps, not poison, administered coolly, almost dispassionately.
Who, then? The sister in Argentina? Had she come back and exacted vengeance for her older sister’s death? After waiting almost half a century? The idea was ludicrous.
Who, then? Not the director, Santore. Not for a friend’s canceled contract. Santore certainly had enough connections, after a lifetime in the theater, to find his friend a place to sing, even if he had the most modest of talents. Even if he didn’t have any talent at all.
That left the widow, but Brunetti’s instincts told him that her grief was real and that her lack of interest in finding the person responsible had nothing to do with protecting herself. If anything, she seemed to want to protect the dead man, and that led Brunetti back where he had begun, needing and wanting to know more about the man’s past, about his character, about the crack in his careful pose of moral rectitude that would have led someone to put poison in his coffee.
Brunetti was uncomfortable with the fact that he didn’t like Wellauer, had none of the compassion and outrage he usually felt for those whose lives had been stolen from them. He couldn’t shake himself of the belief that— he couldn’t express it any more clearly— Wellauer had somehow been involved in his own death. He snorted; everyone is involved in his own death. But no matter how he tried, the idea would neither disappear nor clarify, and so he kept searching for the detail that might have provoked the death, and he kept failing to find it.
The next morning was as dismal as his mood. A thick fog had appeared during the night, seeping up from the waters on which the city was built, not drifting in from the sea. When he stepped out of his front door, cold, misty tendrils wrapped themselves around his face, slipped beneath his collar. He could see clearly for only a few meters, and then vision grew cloudy; buildings slipped into and out of sight, as though they, and not the fog, shifted and moved. Phantoms, clothed in a nimbus of shimmering gray, passed him on the street, floating by as though disembodied. If he turned to follow them with his eyes, he saw them disappear, swallowed up by the dense film that filled the narrow streets and lay upon the waters like a curse. Instinct and long experience told him there would be no boat service on the Grand Canal; the fog was far too thick for that. He walked blindly, telling his feet to lead, allowing decades of familiarity with bridges, streets, and turns to take him over to the Zattere and the landing where both the number 8 and the number 5 stopped on their way to the Giudecca.
Service was limited, and the boats, divorced from any idea of a schedule, appeared randomly out of clouds of fog, radar screens spinning. He waited fifteen minutes before a number 5 loomed up, then slammed heavily into the dock, rocking it and causing a few of the people waiting there
to lose their balance and fall into one another. Only the radar saw the crossing; the humans huddled down in the cabin, blind as moles in sand.
When he got off the boat, Brunetti had no choice but to walk forward until he could almost touch the front of the buildings along the waterfront. Keeping them an arm’s length away, he walked toward where he remembered the archway to be. When he got to an opening in the line of facades, he turned into it, not really certain that this was Corte Mosca. He could not read the name, though it was painted on the wall only a foot above his head.
The humidity had worsened the smell of cat; the cold sharpened it. The dead plants in the courtyard now lay under a blanket of fog. He knocked at the door, knocked again more loudly, and heard her call out from the other side. ‘Who is it?’
