Death at La Fenice
Death in a Strange Country
The Anonymous Venetian
A Venetian Reckoning
Acqua Alta
The Death of Faith
A Noble Radiance
Fatal Remedies
Friends in High Places
A Sea of Troubles
Wilful Behaviour
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
Beastly Things
The Jewels of Paradise
The Golden Egg
By Its Cover
Falling in Love
The Waters of Eternal Youth
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Epub ISBN: 9781473539839
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Published by William Heinemann 2017
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Copyright © Donna Leon and Diogenes Verlag 2017
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Donna Leon has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
First published by William Heinemann in 2017
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ISBN 9781785151354
For Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg
E scenderem col fiume, e in seno accolti
il mar ci avrà pria che risorga il giorno.
We’ll go down with the stream, and the sea
Will have us before the day dawns.
Handel, Ottone, Act 2, Scene 9
After an exchange of courtesies, the session had gone on for another half-hour, and Brunetti was beginning to feel the strain of it. The man across from him, a 42-year-old lawyer whose father was one of the most successful – and thus most powerful – notaries in the city, had been asked to come in to the Questura that morning after having been named by two people as the man who had offered some pills to a girl at a party in a private home two nights before.
The girl had washed them down with a glass of orange juice reported also to have been given to her by the man now sitting opposite Brunetti. She had collapsed some time later and had been taken to the emergency room of the Ospedale Civile, where her condition had been listed as ‘Riservata’.
Antonio Ruggieri had arrived punctually at ten and, as apparent evidence of his faith in the competence and probity of the police, had not bothered to bring another lawyer with him. Nor had he complained about the heat in the one-windowed room, though his eyes had paused for a moment on the fan standing in the corner, doing its best – and failing – to counteract the muggy oppression of the hottest July on record.
Brunetti had apologized for the heat in the room, explaining that the ongoing heatwave had forced the Questura to choose between using its reduced supply of energy for the computers or for air conditioning and had chosen the former. Ruggieri had been gracious and had said only that he’d remove his jacket if he might.
Brunetti, who kept his jacket on, had begun by making it amply clear that this was only an informal conversation to provide the police with more background information about just what had happened at the party.
Registering this bumbling commissario’s badly disguised admiration for the stature of Ruggieri’s family, the famous people in the city who were their clients and friends, and the circle of wealth and ease in which Ruggieri travelled by right, it had taken the lawyer little time to lapse into easy condescension towards the older man.
Because the officer sitting next to Commissario Brunetti was wearing a uniform, Ruggieri ignored him, though he kept his sensors active to ensure that the younger man responded in a manner proper to the speech of his elders and betters. When the young man failed to react adequately to his self-effacing superiority, the lawyer ceased to use the plural when addressing the two men.
‘As I was saying, Commissario,’ Ruggieri went on, ‘it was a friend’s birthday party: we’ve known one another since we were at school.’
‘Did you know many people there?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Practically all of them: most of us have been friends since we were children.’
‘And the girl?’ Brunetti asked with faint confusion.
‘She must have come with one of the invited guests. There’s no other way she could have got in.’ Then, to show Brunetti how he and his friends safeguarded their privacy, he added, ‘One of us always keeps an eye on the door to see who comes, just in case.’
‘Indeed,’ Brunetti said with a nod of agreement, and in response to Ruggieri’s glance, added, ‘That’s always best.’ He reached forward to push the upright microphone a bit closer to Ruggieri.
‘Do you have any idea whom she might have come with, if I might ask?’
It took Ruggieri a moment to answer. ‘No. I didn’t see her talking to anyone I know.’
‘How was it that you started to talk to her?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Oh, you know how it is,’ Ruggieri said. ‘Lots of people dancing or standing around. One minute I was alone, watching the dancers, and the next thing I knew, she was standing beside me and asking me my name.’
‘Did you know her?’ Brunetti asked, in his best old-fashioned, slightly puzzled voice.
‘No,’ Ruggieri said emphatically. Then he added, ‘And she used “tu” when she spoke to me.’
Brunetti shook his head in apparent disapproval, then asked, ‘What did you talk about?’
‘She said she didn’t know many people and didn’t know how to get a drink.’ Ruggieri said. When Brunetti made no comment, he went on, ‘So I had to ask her if I could bring her one. After all, what else is a gentleman to do?’ Brunetti remained silent, and Ruggieri said hurriedly, ‘It didn’t seem polite to ask her how it was she didn’t know people there. But it did cross my mind.’
‘Of course,’ Brunetti agreed, quite as though it were a situation in which he often found himself. He put an attentive look on his face and waited.
‘She wanted a vodka and orange juice, and I asked her if she were old enough to have one.’
Brunetti conjured a smile. ‘And she said?’ he asked.
‘That she was eighteen, and if I didn’t believe her, she’d find someone else who would.’
Imitating a look he had often seen on the face of his mother’s aunt Anna, Brunetti brought his lips together in a tiny moue of disapproval. Beside him, Pucetti shifted in his seat.
‘Not a very polite answer,’ Brunetti said primly.
Ruggieri ran a hand through his dark hair and gave a weary shrug. ‘It’s what we get from them today, I’m afraid. Just because they’re old enough to vote and drink doesn’t mean they know how to behave.’
Brunetti found it interesting that Ruggieri again remarked on her age.
‘Avvocato,’ Brunetti began with every sign of reluctance, ‘the reason I asked you to come in and talk with us is that you’ve been said to have given her some pills.’
‘I beg your pardon?’ Ruggieri said, sounding puzzled. Then he gave an easy smile meant to include Brunetti and added, ‘I’ve been said to have done many things.’
Smiling nervously in return, Brunetti went on, ‘The girl – I’m sure you’ve read – was taken to the hospital. The Carabinieri questioned a number of people and were told you’d been speaking to a girl wearing a green dress.’
‘Who were they?’ Ruggieri’s voice was sharp.
Brunetti held up both hands in a gesture bespeaking weakness. ‘I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to tell you, Avvocato.’
‘So people are free to lie about me and I can’t even defend myself against them?’
‘I’m sure there will be a time for that, Signore,’ Brunetti said, leaving it to the lawyer to work out when that might be.
Ignoring Brunetti’s answer, Ruggieri asked, ‘What else did they say?’
Brunetti shifted in his chair and crossed his legs. ‘I’m not at liberty to say that, either, Signore.’
Ruggieri looked away and studied the wall, as though there might be some other person hiding behind it. ‘I hope they said something about the girl.’
‘What about her?’
‘The way she was all over me,’ Ruggieri said angrily, the first strong emotion he’d shown since they entered the room.
‘Well, someone did say that her behaviour was, er, forward,’ Brunetti answered, letting the word stumble out.
‘That’s putting it mildly,’ Ruggieri said and sat up straighter in his chair. ‘She was leaning against me. That was after I brought her the drink. Then she started to move to the music, against my leg. She put the glass – it was chilled from the ice – between her breasts. They were almost hanging out of her dress.’ Ruggieri sounded indignant at the shamelessness of youth.
‘I see, I see,’ Brunetti said. He was conscious of the tension mounting in Pucetti beside him. The junior officer had recently questioned a young man accused of violence against his girlfriend and had produced a report that was professionally neutral.
‘Did she say anything to you, Signore?’
Ruggieri considered this, started to speak, stopped, then went on. ‘She told me she was hot because of me.’ He paused to let the other men understand fully. ‘Then she asked if there was some place we could go, just the two of us.’
‘Good heavens,’ said an astonished Brunetti. ‘What did you tell her?’
‘I wasn’t interested. That’s what I told her. I don’t like it when it’s that easy to get.’ Seeing Brunetti’s nod of agreement, the lawyer went on, ‘And no matter what these people told you, I don’t know anything about any pills.’
‘Was the girl you talked to wearing a green dress?’ Brunetti asked.
Eventually, the lawyer gave a boyish smile and answered, ‘She might have been. I was looking at her tits, not the dress.’
Brunetti felt Pucetti’s reaction. To cover the young man’s slow intake of breath, he slapped his hand to his mouth and failed to stifle his appreciative chuckle.
Ruggieri smiled broadly and, perhaps encouraged by it, said, ‘I suppose I could have taken her somewhere and done her, but it was hardly worth the effort. Nice tits, but she was a stupid cow.’
Brunetti and Pucetti had learned an hour before the interview that the girl had died in the hospital earlier that morning. The immediate cause of death was an asthma attack; the presence in her blood of Ecstasy provided another. Beside him, Brunetti heard the rough grind of the feet of Pucetti’s chair against the cement floor of the interrogation room. From the corner of his left eye, he saw Pucetti’s legs pull back as the young man got ready to stand.
Fear of what would happen gripped Brunetti’s heart, and his left arm shot up as a low grunt escaped him. This changed to a sharp whining sound that rose up the scale as if forced out by pain. Brunetti lunged crookedly to his feet, gasping for breath while pumping out the tortured whine.
The two other men froze in shock and stared at him. Brunetti pivoted to his left, propelled by a force that shifted his entire body. Arm still raised above his head, he collapsed towards Pucetti, his arm crashing down on Pucetti’s shoulder as the young officer rose from his chair.
Self-protection, perhaps, forced Brunetti’s hand to grab at Pucetti’s collar and yank the younger man towards him. Pucetti automatically braced his left palm flat on the table, arm straight, elbow locked, and took Brunetti’s weight as it fell across him. He turned and wrapped his right arm around the Commissario’s chest, steadied him, and started to lower him to the floor, fighting down his panic.
Pucetti shouted to Ruggieri, ‘Go and get help!’ From his place above Brunetti, feeling for his heartbeat, Pucetti saw the other man’s legs and feet under the table: they did not move.
‘But there’s nothing—’ Ruggieri started to say, but Pucetti cut him off and screamed again, ‘Get help!’ The legs moved; the door opened and closed.
Pucetti leaned down over his superior, who lay on his back, eyes closed, breathing normally. ‘Commissario, Commissario, can you hear me? What’s wrong? What happened?’
Brunetti’s eyes snapped open and he looked into Pucetti’s.
‘Are you all right, Commissario?’ Pucetti asked, struggling for calm.
In an entirely normal voice, as if making a point about proper procedure, Brunetti asked, ‘Do you know what would have happened to your career if you’d attacked him?’
Pucetti pulled himself back from the supine man. ‘What do you mean?’ he asked.
‘You were about to grab him, weren’t you?’ Brunetti demanded, making no attempt to temper his reproach.
Pucetti was silent, his eyes still on the perfectly relaxed Brunetti. He struggled for speech, but it took him some time to achieve it. ‘The girl’s dead, and he’s talking like that,’ he finally sputtered. ‘He can’t do that. It’s not decent. Someone should slap his mouth shut.’
‘Not you, Pucetti,’ Brunetti said sharply, propping himself up on his elbow. ‘It’s not your job to teach him manners. It’s to treat him with respect because he’s a citizen and he hasn’t been formally accused of any crime.’ Brunetti thought for a moment and corrected himself. ‘Or even if he’d been accused of a crime.’ Pucetti’s face was rigid. Brunetti didn’t know if it was from resentment or embarrassment and didn’t care. ‘Do you understand that, Pucetti?’
‘Sì, Signore,’ the younger man said and pushed himself to his feet.
‘Not so fast,’ Brunetti stopped him; he’d heard the sound of approaching voices. Seeing Pucetti’s confusion, he added, ‘You heard what he said when he was leaving, didn’t you, that there was nothing wrong with me.’
‘No, sir,’ Pucetti answered.
‘It’s what he started to say before you shouted at him again.’ The voices grew nearer. ‘Get back down here and put your palms on my chest and give me CPR, for God’s sake.’
Blank-faced and looking lost, Pucetti did what he was ordered and knelt beside Brunetti, who lay back down and closed his eyes. Pucetti put one palm on Brunetti’s chest, his other palm on top of it, and started to press, counting out the seconds in a low voice.
‘He’s in there,’ Ruggieri said from the corridor.
Brunetti opened his eyes to slits and saw two pairs of uniformed legs come through the door, followed closely by the dark grey slacks of Ruggieri’s suit. ‘What’s going on?’ came the voice of Lieutenant Scarpa.
Pucetti suspended his counting, but not the rhythmic pressure, and answered, ‘I think it’s his heart, Lieutenant,’ then went back to counting out the seconds.
‘An ambulance is coming,’ Scarpa said. Brunetti saw the other uniformed legs turn to the side, and Scarpa said, ‘Go down and wait for it. Bring them up here.’ The legs turned and left the room.
‘What happened?’ Scarpa asked.
‘I thought he was going to attack me,’ Ruggieri began, ‘but then he stood up and fell against him.’ Brunetti realized this confusion of pronouns was unlikely to make any sense to the Lieutenant, so he closed his eyes and started to pant softly in rhythm with the pressure of Pucetti’s hands.
Brunetti heard footsteps move to the end of the table and then approach. ‘Has he had heart trouble before?’ the Lieutenant asked.
‘I don’t know, Lieutenant. Vianello might.’
After a long silence, Scarpa said, ‘You want me to take over?’ Brunetti was glad his eyes were closed. He kept on panting.
‘No, sir. I’ve got the rhythm going.’
‘All right.’
The approaching two-beat of the ambulance’s siren slipped into Brunetti’s consciousness. Good Lord, what had he done? He’d hoped to create a momentary distraction to stop Pucetti from attacking the man, but things had got out of control entirely, and now he was on the floor with Pucetti feigning CPR and Lieutenant Scarpa offering to help.
Would they try to find Vianello? Or call Paola? She’d been asleep when he left that morning, so they hadn’t spoken.
He hadn’t considered the consequences of his behaviour, had done the first thing he thought would save Pucetti. He could have blamed it on not having slept last night, or having slept too much, because of what he’d eaten or not eaten. Too much coffee, no coffee. But he’d gone too far by falling against Pucetti. And here they were, and here was the ambulance crew.
Footsteps, noise, Pucetti gone, different hands, mask over his nose and mouth, hands under his ankles and shoulders, stretcher, ambulance, siren, the calming up and down of motion on the water, slow slide into the dock, bumbling about, transfer to a harder surface, the sound of wheels on marble floors as he was rolled through the hospital. He peeked through slitted eyes and saw the automatic doors and huge red cross of Pronto Soccorso.
Inside, he was wheeled quickly past Reception and parked alongside the wall of a corridor. After some time, he heard footsteps approach. Someone slipped a pillow under his head while another person put something around his wrist, a blanket was placed over him and pulled to his waist, and then the footsteps moved away.
Brunetti lay still for minutes, eyes tightly closed until he remembered he had to think of a way to put an end to this. He couldn’t jump up and pretend to be Lazarus, nor could he push the blanket aside and step down from the bed, saying he had to get back to work. He lay still and waited. He lapsed into something approaching sleep and was awakened by movement. He opened his eyes and saw that he was in a small examination room, a white-uniformed nurse lowering the sides of his rolling bed. Before he could ask her anything, she left the room.
Very shortly after this, a woman wearing a white jacket entered the room and approached his bedside without speaking. Their eyes met and she nodded. He noticed that she carried a plastic folder. She reached out her hand and touched his, turned it over, and felt for his pulse. She looked at her watch, made a note in the file, then peeled down his lower eyelid, still saying nothing. He stared ahead.
‘Can you hear me?’ she asked.
Brunetti thought it wiser to nod than to speak.
‘Do you feel any pain?’
He looked up at the woman, saw her nametag, but the angle prevented him from reading it.
‘A little,’ he whispered.
She was about his age, dark-haired. Her skin was dry, her eyes weary and wary.
‘Where?’
‘My arm,’ he said, having a vague memory that one sign of a heart attack was pain in one of the arms; the left, he thought.
The woman made a note. After a moment, she turned away from him and slipped the file into a clear plastic holder attached to the top rail of his bed.
‘Can you tell me what’s happened, Dottoressa?’ he asked, thinking that was the sort of thing a person would ask if he’d been taken to the hospital in an ambulance.
She turned back to him, and he saw her name: Dottoressa Sanmartini. Her expression was so neutral that Brunetti wondered if she knew she was speaking to a human being. ‘Your vital signs,’ she began, pointing to his file suspended from the bed, ‘offer a wide range of interpretation.’ She closed her eyes for a moment and took a deep breath.
Then she looked across at him, this time appearing to notice him. ‘What work do you do?’
‘I’m a commissario of police,’ he answered.
‘Ah,’ escaped her lips. She pulled out the file, opened it, and wrote something on the top sheet.
‘I’m feeling better, I think,’ Brunetti said nervously, thinking it was time to stop all this and get out of there.
‘We still have to do some tests,’ she cut him short by saying. Then, perhaps in response to his expression, she added, ‘Don’t worry, Signor …’ she looked at his chart, ‘… Brunetti. We’ll check a few things, just to be sure what’s going on.’
‘I don’t think anything is,’ he said calmly, hoping that the certainty in his voice would persuade her.
‘Perhaps it would be better if you left this to us to decide, Signore,’ she said quite amiably, convincing Brunetti that he was going to have to pay for his rashness.
Brunetti closed his eyes in resignation. He had set this in motion; now he could do nothing but play it out until the end.
Voice suddenly brisk and professional, she went on, ‘We’ll take blood and do further tests. I’d like to exclude some possibilities.’
It occurred to him to ask what it was she wanted to eliminate, but he realized that wisdom lay in raising no opposition. ‘Good,’ he forced himself to say.
Another set of footsteps approached. A male voice said, ‘Elena told me to come, Dottoressa.’
Brunetti looked towards the voice then and saw a white-bearded mountain of a man carrying a small metal tray. The man set it on a cabinet next to the bed, rolled up Brunetti’s left sleeve, and wrapped a piece of rubber tubing tight around his upper arm. He removed a syringe from the tray and tore off the plastic covering. His immense hand rendered the syringe minute and because of that somehow more threatening. Straight-faced, he said, ‘I hope this won’t hurt, Signore.’
Brunetti closed his eyes. He felt the man’s hand on his wrist, then the faint touch of the cold needle on his inner arm, then nothing at all while he waited for something to happen. He was conscious of pressure, heard some clinking noises, but he kept his eyes closed, waiting.
A sudden brush on his arm caused him to open his eyes, and he saw the man untying the rubber tubing. Three glass vials of blood stood upright in a plastic rack on the tray.
The doctor placed a sheet of paper on it, saying, ‘All of these, Teo. And I’d like them to do the enzymes immediately.’
‘Of course, Dottoressa.’ He took the tray and turned away. Brunetti listened to his footsteps disappear down the corridor. What have I done? What have I done?
‘I’d like to call my wife,’ he said.
‘I’m sorry, but telefonini don’t work in the examining rooms. There’s no reception,’ Dottoressa Sanmartini explained.
Brunetti reached his newly freed hand to the edge of the sheet and began to push it back. ‘Not so fast, Signore,’ the Dottoressa said. ‘We still need an electrocardiogram. You can call her after that. A nurse will take you to where you’ll be able to call.’ As if conjured up by the doctor’s words, a female nurse arrived and placed herself at the foot of the bed.
The doctor stood back while the nurse pushed him from the room. She wheeled Brunetti across the large atrium in front of Pronto Soccorso and then directly into the cardiology emergency room. But once he was inside, things slowed down. Some sort of mix-up in scheduling meant that he had to wait while three people were examined.
Having once thought of her, Brunetti now became agitated at the idea that Paola knew nothing of what was going on. He looked at his watch and saw it was just after noon: there was still an hour before she’d begin to worry.
Finally a different doctor did the electrocardiogram, after which Brunetti was wheeled to another room where the same man slathered cold gel on his chest to prepare him for an ultrasound. The doctor told Brunetti he could watch the monitor with him, but Brunetti declined the chance to do so.
The doctor squeegeed the gel around on Brunetti’s chest for what seemed a long time, then began to rub a blunt wand across his chest. Occasionally he tapped at a computer screen, taking pictures from various angles, never saying a word. At last he ripped a long strip of paper towel from an enormous roll and passed it to Brunetti. When Brunetti had finished wiping his chest clean he dropped the towels into a large plastic bin beside the bed, still no wiser than he had been at the beginning of the exams.
‘Humm,’ was the doctor’s only comment when Brunetti asked if there was anything wrong.
Realizing it was the only answer he was going to get, Brunetti asked, ‘Can I go home now?’
The doctor could not contain his surprise. ‘Go home?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s not a decision I can make, Signore. I’m not in charge of your case.’ Then, glancing at the screen, he added, ‘I think it would be wiser if you were to stay here a bit longer.’
Before Brunetti could say a word, they heard a commotion outside the small room. A female voice was raised loud in protest, and then another one, even louder. Suddenly the door opened and Paola appeared.
Brunetti pushed himself up on one elbow and held out his other arm towards her. ‘Paola, don’t worry. There’s nothing wrong,’ he said, hoping to quell her fears and assure her he was all right.
She came quickly to the side of the bed, and he glanced at the doctor, hoping to enlist his support.
Paola leaned down, and when she was sure she had his attention, said, voice tight with badly contained anger, ‘What have you done now?’
The doctor, evidently shocked by the woman’s words, to say nothing of the tone in which she said them, asked, ‘Who are you, Signora?’
‘I’m this man’s wife, Dottore,’ Paola said in a voice she managed to make sound calm. ‘I’d be very grateful if I could have a few minutes alone with my husband.’
Brunetti watched the other man’s reaction. The doctor moved his head backwards, as though the distance would afford him a better view of these two people, then tilted his chin to one side and then the other, then upwards, much in the manner of a curious bird. He turned off the machine, and the light in the room grew dimmer. He left silently, closing the door very quietly after him.
‘I’ve never seen that happen,’ Brunetti observed.
‘What?’ asked his distracted wife.
‘That someone bounced a doctor from his own examining room.’
Brunetti heard Paola take a few deep breaths. He wondered what form her anger was going to take. He should have insisted on phoning, should have got up and found a phone that worked, borrowed one, used his warrant card to commandeer one at the nurses’ desk. But he had not, had completely given himself over to the passivity that hospitals want to instil in their patients.
She said nothing for so long that Brunetti began to fear her silence was a presage of the consequences of his thoughtlessness.
‘Who told you?’ he finally asked.
Suddenly her right hand was over her eyes, the left tucked under the other elbow. Brunetti said her name, but she turned away from him. ‘Paola. Tell me,’ he said, struggling to keep his voice calm.
He pushed the blanket back, swung his legs over the edge of the bed, and sat up, suddenly light-headed and woozy. He clung to the edge of the mattress with both hands. He took two deep breaths and lowered his feet to the floor; then he stood.
Paola must have heard him, for she uncovered her eyes and looked at him. ‘Pucetti came to the university. He appeared at the back of the classroom where I was teaching. In his uniform. With a terrible look on his face.’
Ah, faithful, dutiful Pucetti, trying to amend things by bringing the real news, the good news, to his commander’s wife. Brunetti could imagine the scene: the pale-faced officer at the door, distress written plain across his face.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
‘I thought you were dead, Guido,’ Paola said in a ravaged voice. ‘I thought that was why he’d come, to tell me that you’d been killed. By someone who was trying to rob a bank or some crazy person who had a hostage. I saw him, and I knew for an instant that you were dead.’ Her voice was hoarse, and the words came out with rough edges, as though she had been screaming for hours.
Paola had not cried, he saw; there were no traces of that around her eyes. She was a woman who lived in her imagination, who immediately turned what she saw into stories, who caught a person’s expression and made up what had happened to them, and she believed in tragedy. She lived a happy life, but her vision of life was tragic.
‘And then what happened?’ he asked, still on his guard.
‘And then he smiled and held up his thumb to show me things were all right. I still didn’t know what had happened, but he was telling me not to worry.’ Paola stopped and breathed deeply a few times.
Brunetti waited.
‘I looked back at the students. Some of them were turned around, watching Pucetti; the others started to talk.’ She raised her right hand in a gesture that could have signified anything. ‘So I told them class was over.’
Brunetti nodded. That made sense, letting them go, not pretending that she’d be able to concentrate any longer.
‘You’d think they’d never seen a policeman before,’ she said in something that approached her normal voice.
Brunetti looked down and saw that his feet were naked. Where had his shoes gone? He urgently wanted to be wearing them, to be able to joke with his wife, to sit in his office and be bored.
‘When they were gone, Pucetti came across to my desk and told me that it was all an act, done to protect him. I had no idea what he was talking about, and I don’t think I really understand it now, either.’
Brunetti walked to the chair standing against the wall and brought it back for her. He touched her then, holding her shoulders and guiding her to the chair as though she were an old woman and needed help.
‘Tell me what you’ve done, please,’ she asked, the same request that had accompanied her dramatic entrance into the room, but, oh, so different now.
‘I was questioning a suspect together with Pucetti. All of a sudden, Pucetti lost control of himself. I thought he was going to grab the guy’s throat. So I jumped up to block him and cause confusion – I really didn’t think about it – and a few minutes later, I was lying on the floor with Pucetti giving me CPR and Scarpa looking down at me.’
‘You think Scarpa understood what had happened?’ she asked.
‘God knows,’ Brunetti answered. ‘I was on the floor with Pucetti pumping away at my heart, so I didn’t have a clear vision of what was going on.’ Brunetti cast his mind back over the Lieutenant’s behaviour and said, ‘He was worried, but I’m not sure about what.’ How difficult, to think the Lieutenant could have felt concern for him. Perhaps Pucetti would know: after all, he had seen Scarpa’s face and had spoken to him.
‘Next thing, Patta will be sending you flowers.’
‘I think I’m going to let him,’ Brunetti said.
‘What?’ she asked.
‘I think I’m going to keep this.’
‘Keep what?’ she asked, clearly not understanding.
‘This thing. Collapse. Sickness. Attack. Whatever it was.’
‘Or wasn’t,’ Paola corrected him.
Brunetti smiled. Life was good again: his wife could joke with him.
‘I can’t stand it any longer, doing what I do,’ Brunetti surprised himself by saying. ‘I had to fake all this and end up here in the hospital, with doctors prodding and poking at me, just because I have to protect the people I work with from reacting to the work they do.’ He had never spoken this aloud, never thought it out in this fashion before.
He leaned against the mattress, glad to have its solidity behind him. Brunetti wanted, even though he was speaking to the one person he trusted without reserve, not to have to explain anything more. He was tired of the whole thing.
‘It sounds like you want to run away,’ she said, trying to make it sound like a joke.
Brunetti nodded.
She looked at him the same way the doctor had, even tilting her head at the same angle to study him. He watched his response mirrored in her face: her eyes widened and she glanced away. Her lips grew tight as they sometimes did when she was reading a difficult text. Experience had taught him that he had no option save to give her time to study the text, wait and see what she would decide.
The door to the room opened, but neither of them bothered to look to see who it was. Silence. The person retreated and the door closed.
She studied his face for a long time before she asked, ‘Are you sure?’ Then, as though she wanted to be sure they were talking about the same thing, she added, ‘Run away from home?’
His soul knew that she was his home. ‘In a way,’ he admitted, shocked at how it must sound to her. ‘Not from you. Not from the kids. But from all of the rest.’ To make the distinction clear, he waved at the room in which they found themselves, as though asking her to see it as evidence of everything he was talking about.
‘I‘ve been thinking about it for a long time,’ Brunetti continued, discovering truth as he spoke it. ‘I need not to have to do this work for a while. Not think about it and not do it, and not end up in a hospital because a suspect said something offensive about a girl.’
‘What girl?’ Paola asked.
‘A girl who was given pills at a party and who died here last night,’ he said, remembering where the girl must be.
Paola let some time pass, the way people do when they hear of an unknown person’s death. Finally she said, ‘If you shot Patta for every offensive thing he’s said, he’d look like Swiss cheese.’ She smiled; Brunetti’s life straightened out and returned to its normal course.
‘Pucetti’s young,’ he explained.
‘It’s a while since he was the bright young recruit, Guido. He’s in his thirties now.’ Brunetti wondered if she would draw her conclusion, and she did. ‘He should be able to control himself, Guido. He carries a gun, for God’s sake.’
Brunetti wanted to explain that Pucetti had not been wearing his gun that morning, but he realized it made no difference. He had lost control of himself, or would have, which merited an official reprimand, but Brunetti’s grandstanding had eliminated that possibility. Wasn’t what he had done to save Pucetti a distortion of the truth? Was it any different from kicking a weapon closer to the fallen body of an attacker who might have been about to use it? Or saying that the suspect had resisted arrest and had to be restrained?
‘You’re right,’ Brunetti said. ‘I didn’t think. All I wanted to do was stop him before he did anything violent.’
‘You’re his boss, Guido, not his father.’
‘Would you do the same thing to stop one of your students from ruining his career?’ he asked, knowing it was not at all the same thing, not really.
‘I probably would,’ she said and got to her feet.
Her answer didn’t change much, he realized. He had done it and would do it again. Where could he find another Pucetti?
‘And so?’ he asked.
She let a moment pass and then said, ‘We were talking about your running away.’
‘You make me sound like a child,’ he said petulantly.
‘Not at all, Guido. I’ve watched you during the last few months, and I agree with you that you need to get away from waiting for the next horrible case you’ll have to work on.’
In all these years, she had never criticized the work he did: she had always been the interested, supportive wife, who listened to him as he described the mayhem he had observed and the consequences of the violence that lay so close to the surface of human behaviour. She had listened to his accounts of murder, rape, arson, violence, and she’d had the grace to ask him questions and had often suggested new ways to view people and events.
And in return, he asked himself, how much interest had he paid to the work that was equally part of her life? He had turned her passion for the prose of Henry James into a running gag and had refused to read more than a few of his books. Murder was for real men, and books were for girls. And now he couldn’t bear it any more, and she was encouraging him to run away from it.
‘I’ve just had a vacation,’ he reminded her.
‘That was two months ago, and you didn’t like it.’
‘It rained all the time,’ he said, remembering how he’d sulked his way through London, Dublin, and Edinburgh, complaining about the rain and the lousy coffee, not caring that his mood dampened his family’s spirits as much as did the weather.
‘We can talk about this when you come home,’ she said. ‘Did they tell you when that will be?’
‘No. Only that they have to do more tests,’ he said, sounding casual.
‘Does that mean they’ve found something?’ Paola asked, sounding anything but casual.
The door opened, and Dottoressa Sanmartini came in. ‘Good afternoon, Signora,’ she said coolly. ‘Might I ask you to leave me alone with my patient?’
Ordinarily, Paola would have reacted to any sarcasm lurking among the words, but there was none, only the request of one polite person to another. She said, ‘Of course, Dottoressa,’ and left the room.
‘Would you like to sit on the bed, Signor Brunetti?’ the doctor asked.
Brunetti sat and waited for her to continue, curious about what a civilian would think of the costs of their work.
When she realized that he was not going to prompt or question her, she went on, ‘You must sometimes have to deal with dreadful people who have done terrible things and are incapable of seeing them as that.’ Had someone played her the tape of the conversation with Ruggieri? he wondered wildly.
‘You’ve certainly seen the results of what people can do to one another,’ she added.
‘You’ve see the same things, Dottoressa, I’d imagine,’ he said.
‘Yes, but my responsibility ends when I cure the victim of her wounds.’ Interesting, Brunetti thought, that she automatically said ‘her’. ‘I don’t have to listen to the person who did it deny what he did or say that he had the right to do it.’
‘And you think this could lead to what’s wrong with me?’ Brunetti asked.
She set the papers down and turned the full attention of her eyes towards him. ‘Signor Brunetti, may I speak frankly?’
‘If you’re my doctor, don’t you have that obligation?’ he asked.
She made a noise, something between a snort and a laugh. ‘Hardly.’
‘Then yes, please speak frankly.’
She indicated the file. ‘I think the results in there have very little to do with what’s wrong with you.’
Brunetti shrugged and waited for her to continue. When she did not, he asked, ‘Then what does?’
‘Your work. The need to do something when you can do nothing.’
She looked down, studying either her answer or her feet. Eyes still lowered, she said, ‘Because of the limits put on your powers, you can only arrest and question people you believe guilty of a crime. You can’t do anything to them, and you have little chance of making them see what it is they’ve done.’
She raised her eyes and looked at him. ‘That’s why I said “need”, Signore. I’m talking about a sense of ethical obligation. Because you consider yourself powerless, you ended up here.’
‘You make it sound like a very simple conclusion, Dottoressa,’ Brunetti said quite amiably.
‘When I look at the results of your tests, it is simple,’ she answered. ‘Would you like to know why?’
‘Yes.’
She picked up the file and opened it, then said, ‘I spent some time looking at these results, and I find no sign that you had a heart attack, nor demonstrable problems with your heart. The electrocardiogram and ultrasound are normal, and there’s no sign of problems with your blood enzymes.’
Brunetti flashed a relieved smile and closed his eyes for a moment. ‘That’s a great relief,’ he said, feeling uncomfortable at continuing with his performance as a worried patient.
‘But your blood pressure is very high: 180 over 110.’
Brunetti made no attempt to disguise his nervousness.
‘In your case, since there’s no sign of damage – of any sort – to the tissue of the heart, what’s left is stress.’
Brunetti interrupted here to ask, ‘Is that better or worse, Dottoressa?’
‘Neither better nor worse, Signore.’ She left him time to digest that, then said, ‘I’ve made copies of our results. You can show them to your own doctor. My diagnosis is that you are at risk because of stress, and you should do something to reduce it.’
‘I’m too old to find a new job, Dottoressa,’ he said.
Finally, she smiled. ‘And too young to retire, I’d venture.’
‘I’m afraid so.’
‘Nonetheless, and regardless of your age, I think what you need, Signor Brunetti, is time away from the circumstances that cause your stress. I’ve indicated that in my report, which says that you are suffering from exhaustion brought on by your work that might have adverse consequences for your heart.’
‘Does that mean what I think it does?’ he asked.
‘I’ve written a letter recommending two weeks – renewable to three – away from your place of work. You should not be contacted for anything to do with your normal duties. Only for emergencies.’ Here she looked at him directly, and he noticed that her nose was bent just minimally to the left, as though from an old injury that had not been attended to properly. ‘Whatever those emergencies might be. And you should not be bothered for normal bureaucratic problems.’
He risked saying, ‘You sound like a person who has worked within a bureaucracy, Dottoressa.’
‘For my sins,’ she said. And then smiled again.
‘And when may I go home?’
‘If your wife will go with you, you can leave now.’
‘That’s very kind of you, Dottoressa,’ he said, trying to mask his relief.
She nodded but said, ‘It’s also very pragmatic of me.’
‘Excuse me.’
‘We need the bed.’
Outside the room, Brunetti found Paola, and in the corridor where he had lain while waiting to be seen by a doctor, he found his shoes. Some time later, they emerged, arm in arm, into the pounding light and worse heat of a late afternoon in mid-July. Stepping from the coolness of the enormous entrance hall of the Ospedale, Brunetti felt as though someone had wrapped him in an electric blanket after first throwing a bucket of hot water over his head. The interrogation room in which he had staged his collapse had been hot, but nothing like this.
Turning to Paola, he said, ‘I should have booked a return ticket with the ambulance.’
‘And gone back to the Questura?’ she asked, opening her bag to search for her sunglasses. Not finding them at once, she retreated into the shade until she did, then emerged with them in place.
‘Let’s go home,’ Brunetti said. ‘This is unbearable.’
They walked slowly, taking the shortest way, deliberately cutting through Campo della Fava to avoid the crowds in Calle della Bissa. When they arrived at the foot of the Rialto bridge, they looked up at it, horrified. Anthill, termites, wasps. Ignoring these thoughts, they locked arms and started up, eyes on their feet and the area immediately in front of them. Up, up, up as feet descended towards them, but they ignored them and didn’t stop. Up, up, up and across the top, shoving their way through the motionless people, deaf to their cries of admiration. Then down, down, down, the momentum of their descent making them more formidable. They saw the feet of the people coming up towards them dance to the side at their approach, hardened their hearts to their protests, and plunged ahead. Then left and into the underpass, where they stopped. Brunetti’s pulse raced and Paola leaned helpless on his arm.
‘I can’t stand it any more,’ Paola said and pressed her forehead against his shoulder. ‘I want Il Gazzettino to have a headline saying there’s cholera in the city. Plague.’
Brunetti kissed the top of her head. ‘Shall I pray for a tsunami?’ he asked.
He felt the motion of her giggle. She pulled away from him and said in her calmest voice, ‘No, I don’t want anything that would hurt the buildings.’
By the time they got to the front door, Brunetti had perspired through his shirt and jacket, and Paola had strings of damp hair falling across her forehead. They climbed the steps, saying nothing, wanting only to get to the top and let themselves into the current of air that flowed from one end of their apartment to the other.
Inside, Brunetti peeled off his jacket, convinced that he heard it suck free from his shirt. He moved into the living room and into the stream of merely warm air that flowed from north to south. He unbuttoned his shirt and flapped its open sides in the breeze. When he turned to Paola, she was running her fingers through her hair to hold it up in the same breeze.
Without thinking, he said,
‘la pastorella alpestra et cruda
posta a bagnar un leggiadretto velo,
ch’a Laura il vago et biondo capel chiuda.’
Paola let her hair fall to her shoulders and smiled at him. ‘If you can watch the shepherdess wash the veil that binds her hair from the wind, then I hope the burning heat of the day will fill you with the chill of love,’ she said, completing the poem.
‘Don’t I ever get to quote something you don’t recognize?’ Brunetti whined.
‘You’ll have to try someone more obscure than Petrarch,’ she answered amiably, and then added, ‘Why don’t you take a shower first? You’re the one who was in the hospital all morning.’
‘My own stupid fault,’ he said and went back to their room to find fresh clothing.
A new man emerged from the shower, one who had stood briefly under a stream of water as hot as he could endure and then switched to cold and stood stoically, though for a far shorter time. It was this man who found his wife sprawled across the sofa, sipping at a glass of pale liquid that, because of the moisture condensing on the outside of the glass, had to be cold. Silently praising his powers of observation, he noted a second glass on the tray in front of the sofa.
‘Mine?’ he asked.
Too tired, or too hot, to make a joking response, Paola contented herself with a nod. He sat beside her and picked up the glass. He set it down after the first sip. ‘Is this lemonade?’ he asked, doing his best not to sound like a policeman.
‘Don’t you like it?’ she asked. ‘I can’t bear the thought of drinking anything else.’
Brunetti took another sip. ‘You’re probably right. I asked only because I’m surprised.’
‘That it’s not wine?’ Paola asked.
The question made him uncomfortable, as if she’d suggested he would not drink anything that did not contain alcohol. ‘It’s fine,’ Brunetti said and took another sip. But it wasn’t a spritz, was it?
When Paola finished her lemonade, she set the glass down and asked, ‘Well?’
Brunetti gave the question some thought. ‘I’ve been authorized two or three weeks of complete rest,’ he finally said.
‘And you’re going to take them?’
‘Yes,’ he answered without hesitation. ‘Yes.’
‘Good,’ she affirmed. ‘It’s what you need.’
‘If only to stop me from doing stupid things?’ he inquired.
‘What you did wasn’t stupid, Guido, not at all,’ Paola said. ‘Rash, perhaps, or impulsive, but by no means stupid.’
Brunetti wondered if the children reacted the same way to her approval, if they, too, felt uncertainty or guilt fall away the instant she said what they’d done was right. ‘I’m glad you think that,’ he said, unable to stop it from coming out awkwardly.
Ignoring his remark, she asked, ‘What will you do with your two or three weeks?’
Brunetti realized he hadn’t given it any thought, other, that is, than knowing that he would take the time for himself. He kicked off his shoes and put his feet on the table in front of them. How nice a spritz would be, he thought again, and shifted himself down in the sofa. ‘I’d like to go somewhere and look at the water,’ he said.
‘Here in Venice, or somewhere else?’ she asked, as if his remark had been the most natural thing he could possibly have said.