by Donna Leon
Transient Desires
Also by Donna Leon
Death at La Fenice
Death in a Strange Country
Dressed for Death
Death and Judgment
Acqua Alta
Quietly in Their Sleep
A Noble Radiance
Fatal Remedies
Friends in High Places
A Sea of Troubles
Willful Behavior
Uniform Justice
Doctored Evidence
Blood from a Stone
Through a Glass, Darkly
Suffer the Little Children
The Girl of His Dreams
About Face
A Question of Belief
Drawing Conclusions
Handel’s Bestiary
Beastly Things
Venetian Curiosities
The Jewels of Paradise
The Golden Egg
My Venice and Other Essays
By its Cover
Gondola
Falling in Love
The Waters of Eternal Youth
Earthly Remains
The Temptation of Forgiveness
Unto Us a Son Is Given
Trace Elements
Donna Leon
Transient Desires
Atlantic Monthly Press
New York
Copyright © 2021 by Donna Leon and Diogenes Verlag
Endpaper map by © Martin Lubikowski, ML Design, London
Jacket photograph © Umdash9/Alamy Stock Photo
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Originally published in Great Britain in 2021 by William Heinemann.
Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America
First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition: March 2021
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title.
ISBN 978-0-8021-5817-8
eISBN 978-0-8021-5819-2
Atlantic Monthly Press
an imprint of Grove Atlantic
154 West 14th Street
New York, NY 10011
Distributed by Publishers Group West
groveatlantic.com
For Romilly McAlpine
“The depths have covered them:
they sank to the bottom as a stone.”
Handel Israel in Egypt
Part the Second: 18
1
Brunetti slept late. At about nine, he turned his head towards the right and opened one eye, saw the time, and closed his eye again. He did not move for some time, and when he next opened his eye, he saw that it was half past nine. He reached out his left arm in the hope that he would find Paola beside him, but he found only the indentation of her former presence, long since gone cold.
He levered himself on to his side and then his back, rested for a moment after achieving this, and opened his eyes. He studied the ceiling, glanced at the far corner on the right and saw the mark above the window where water had leaked in some months before, creating a brown patch that looked like an octopus, a rather small one. Like an octopus, this stain changed colour with the light, sometimes changing shape, as well, although there were always only seven legs.
He had promised Paola he would get up on the ladder and paint it over, but he was always in a hurry, or it was night-time and he didn’t want to get on the ladder, or he didn’t have his shoes on and didn’t want to risk climbing the ladder wearing only socks. This morning the stain annoyed him, and he decided he would ask the man who did odd jobs for them to come and paint it over and have done with it.
Or his son could tear himself loose from his computer or from talking to his girlfriend on the phone and get the ladder and paint it and help his parents for a change. Detecting the distinct note of resentment and self-pity in his thoughts, Brunetti pushed them aside and considered some of the events of last night’s dinner, among which were three glasses of grappa that were most likely the cause of his current condition.
As was their custom once a year, last evening he and some companions from liceo had met for dinner in a restaurant at the beginning of Riva del Vin, where the obliging owner always put them in the same corner by the window on to the Canal Grande.
As the years passed, their number had shrunk from more than thirty to just ten, reduced for the usual reasons: geography, employment, and sickness. Some had tired of the inconveniences of the city and had moved away; others had taken better jobs in other parts of Italy or Europe, and two had died.
This year, as well as Brunetti, the other three original organizers of the dinner had attended. The first was Luca Ippodrino, who had turned his father’s trattoria into a world-famous restaurant by following three relatively simple rules: he served the same food his mother had served for thirty years to the men who unloaded the boats at Rialto; it was now served on porcelain plates and in far smaller and delicately decorated portions; the prices had been inflated almost beyond bearing. The waiting list for a table – especially during the Biennale and the Film Festival – started filling up months in advance.
The second, Franca Righi, Brunetti’s first girlfriend, had gone on to study physics in Rome and now taught at the same university where she had studied. It was she who had towed Brunetti through their biology and physics classes and now delighted in telling him each time one of the laws they had studied turned out to be false and had to be replaced.
The last was a newly divorced Matteo Lunghi, a gynaecologist, whose wife had left him for a much younger man, and who had had to be encouraged through the dinner by his friends.
The remaining six were successful – or content – to varying degrees or at least behaved that way when in the company of people who had known them most of their lives. Much of that ease of communication, Brunetti believed, came of their having a common store of cultural and historical references as well as their generation’s unspoken and unconsidered ethical standards.
Before allowing himself to consider what those might be, Brunetti pushed aside the covers and went down to the bathroom to have a shower.
The hot water restored his spirits, as did the length of time – his children not there to protest about the waste of water – he spent under it. He went back to the bedroom, draped the towel over the back of a chair, and started to get dressed. He pulled out the trousers of a suit he hadn’t worn since the winter, dark grey cashmere and wool and bought for almost nothing when the men’s clothing store in Campo San Luca had closed two years before. Strange, he thought, as he pushed the button through the buttonhole: they had seemed to fit him better when he had bought the suit. Perhaps the dry cleaning had tightened them somehow; surely they would loosen up as the day wore on and he moved around wearing them.
He sat on the chair, pulled on a pair of dark socks and black shoes h
e’d bought in Milano years before and that had moulded themselves to his feet as time passed and that never failed to convey a thrill of sensual delight as he slipped them on.
Before he put on his jacket, he considered wearing a vest but, remembering how warm it had been the day before, decided it was unnecessary: the good weather of late autumn could be counted on for another day. In the kitchen, he looked on the table for a note from Paola but found nothing. It was Monday, so she would not be home before late afternoon, spending the time in her office at the university, ostensibly to speak to the doctoral candidates whose dissertations she was overseeing. She delighted in the fact that they seldom came to speak to her, leaving her quite happy to sit undisturbed in her office, preparing classes or reading. Thus the life of the scholar, Brunetti reflected.
He left the house and started for the Questura, but turned immediately into Rizzardini for a coffee and a brioche, and then another coffee and a glass of mineral water. Braced by caffeine and sugar, Brunetti turned towards Rialto and the business of passing through the centre of the city at half past ten in the morning, just as the people who had done their grocery shopping at the market were beginning to be replaced by the tourists in search of their first ombra or prosecco, all bent on having what they had been told was a real Venetian experience.
Twenty minutes later, he turned right on to the riva that led to the Questura and, looking across the canal, saw the cleaned and restored façade of the church of San Lorenzo, no longer a church but a gallery of some sort, dedicated, he had been told, to the salvation of the seas. The decades-old billboard giving the year of the beginning of the ever-unconcluded restoration had been removed, as had the wooden condominium built by local residents for stray cats that had stood there for as long as Brunetti could remember.
As he arrived outside the Questura, he saw his superior, Vice-Questore Giuseppe Patta, at the bottom of the staircase at the far end of the entrance hall. Instinctively, Brunetti pulled his telefonino from the pocket of his jacket and bent his head over it, nodding to the officer who opened the glass door for him but not moving into the building. He stopped and poked angrily at the front of his phone, then turned to the officer and said, making no attempt to disguise his irritation, ‘Do you have any connection down here, Graziano?’
The officer on guard duty, aware that Brunetti was arriving for work two hours late and that the Vice-Questore did not view the Commissario with a benevolent eye, said, ‘It’s been going in and out all morning, Signore. Did you manage to connect by going out there?’ He nodded towards the space in front of the Questura.
Brunetti shook his head, saying, ‘It’s no better out there. Makes me crazy that there’s . . .’ but stopped when he saw his superior walking towards him. ‘Good morning, Vice-Questore,’ he said, then added in a helpful voice, holding up his phone, ‘Don’t even bother going outside to try, Dottore. There’s no hope. Nothing’s working.’
That said, Brunetti slipped the phone back into his pocket and pointed, quite unnecessarily, towards the stairs. ‘I’m going to check the phone on my desk again and see if it’s working yet.’
Patta, entirely confused, asked, ‘What’s wrong, Brunetti?’ His tone, Brunetti thought, was remarkably similar to the one he had himself used, when the kids were younger and told him they had no homework to do that evening.
Like a prosecutor holding up the plastic bag with the bloodstained knife inside to show to the press photographer, he pulled out his phone again and showed it to his superior. ‘There’s no connection.’
From the corner of his eye, he saw Graziano nod in agreement, quite as if he had watched Brunetti’s failure to make a call.
Patta turned from Brunetti and asked the officer, ‘Where’s Foa?’
‘He should be here in three minutes, Vice-Questore,’ Graziano assured him, looking at his watch and somehow managing to seem taller when he spoke to their superior. As if summoned by the Vice-Questore’s desire, the police launch turned into the canal and passed quickly in front of the church, under the bridge, and slowed to a stop at the dock just beyond where the three men stood.
Patta turned away silently from the two men and walked towards the boat, its motor reduced to a purr. Foa tossed a rope around the nearest stanchion and jumped down to the pavement, saluted the Vice-Questore, stepped back and extended his arm, as if to clear a group of pesky reporters from the space between them. Patta viewed any motion made within a metre of his person as an attempt to help him and placed a hand upon Foa’s forearm to steady himself as he stepped up on to the boat.
Foa smiled to his two colleagues, flipped the rope free, leaped over the gunwale and landed in front of the wheel. The engine gave a roar, and Foa spun the launch in a tight U and headed back the way he’d come.
2
Brunetti continued up to his office, his story to the Vice-Questore about telephone problems still on his mind. What might be called the infrastructure of the Questura was, not to put too fine a point on it, a mess, and thus Brunetti’s invention was completely credible. The heating system was quixotic and throughout the winter shifted its faint results from side to side of the building as it willed; there was no air conditioning save in a few select offices. The electricity functioned, more or less, although occasional surges of current had killed a few computers and one printer. By now, the staff was so inured that the occasional exploding light bulb was treated as no more than a presage of the fireworks of Redentore; the plumbing was rarely a problem; the roof leaked only in two places, and most of the windows could be closed, though some didn’t open.
As he climbed the steps, Brunetti thought of the ways he resembled the building, with a bit of stiffness here, something that occasionally malfunctioned there, but he soon ran out of comparisons. The original thought, however, prompted him to drop his hand from the railing and stand a bit straighter as he climbed the stairs.
Inside his office, Brunetti tossed the newspaper he’d bought in Campo Santa Marina on to his desk. He found the room uncomfortably warm and went to open a window. The view from here had been improved, he was forced to admit, by the general sprucing-up of the church and the removal of the condominium. But still he missed the cats.
He took his phone from his pocket and punched in Paola’s number. It rang a few times before she answered. ‘Sì?’ she asked. Only that.
‘Ah,’ Brunetti exclaimed, forcing his voice into a deeper register, ‘The voice of love responds, and my heart opens, brimming with the joy of . . . ?’
‘What is it, Guido?’ Then, before he could respond to the definite chill in her voice, she added, ‘I’m here with one of my students.’
Brunetti, who had been about to ask her what she planned to cook for dinner, instead said, ‘I wanted only to declare the enormity of my love, my dear.’
‘Thank you so much,’ she said and broke the connection without even bothering to wait for him to indulge in some romantic invention.
He glanced at the newspaper and decided it would be preferable to the reports that sat unread on his desk. It might provide information about what was happening in the world that began at the end of the Ponte della Libertà. He often chastised the children for their lack of curiosity, not only about their own country, but about the wider world, as well. How would they be able to take their place as citizens if they knew nothing about their leaders, the laws, the alliances that bound them to Europe and to places beyond?
Even before he opened the Gazzettino, Brunetti had outlined a speech in praise of patriotism that would have done Cicero proud. He’d had no trouble with the Narratio: the children were ignorant of the current state of politics in their own country. The Refutatio was child’s play: he’d easily punched away any claim that Italy was a pawn in a geopolitical game being played by Germany and France. He was halfway through the Peroratio, enjoining them to assume the full responsibility of their citizenship, and approaching the end of his discourse when h
is eye fell on that day’s headline ‘Morta la moglie strangolata: Una settimana di agonia.’ So she had died, the young woman strangled by her heroin-addicted husband, but not before a week of agony, poor thing. She left one child. As was often the case, they were in the midst of getting a separation. Indeed.
He noticed a small article about two young women, identified as American, who had been found on the dock outside the Emergency Room of the Ospedale Civile in the early hours of Sunday morning. The article gave their names and reported that one had a broken arm.
Inexorably, his eye was drawn to the article below: this one dealt with the ongoing search at an abandoned pig farm near Bassano, where the remains of the two wives of the former owner – he now dead of natural causes – had been discovered. And now there were traces of a third woman, whom neighbours said had lived there for some time, and then didn’t.
It was the word ‘traces’ that drove Brunetti to his feet and down the stairs. Outside, on the riva, he turned right, his body in sole command, and went down to the bar, heedless of anything save the urgent need to distract himself from the effect of that word.
When Brunetti entered, he saw that Bamba Diome, the Senegalese barman, had come on shift and replaced his employer behind the bar. Brunetti nodded in greeting but couldn’t bring himself to speak. He looked to his left and saw that the three booths were occupied. Better this way, he told himself, he was here to refuel and only that. He looked into the glass case filled with tramezzini: they’d been made by Sergio, who still cut them into triangles, while Bamba preferred rectangles. Maybe an egg and tomato? Bamba returned and gave a brisk swipe at the counter in front of Brunetti.
‘Water, Dottore?’
Brunetti nodded, ‘And a tomato and egg.’ He saw the Gazzettino on the counter and pushed it away. Seeing him reject the newspaper, Bamba said, ‘Terrible, isn’t it, Dottore?’ and set down the glass of water and the single tramezzino.
