GB_23: By Its Cover: A Commissario Guido Brunetti Mystery Read online

  ‘And you?’

  ‘Oh, I walked behind them, and I made it obvious that I wasn’t interested in what they said. I walked next to the other guy – I don’t even remember who it was any more – and we occasionally said something to one another. But I listened to a lot of their conversation.’ After a moment, he said, ‘It was hard not to hear it.’

  ‘About?’

  ‘About young girls.’

  ‘Ah,’ Brunetti said. ‘It’s not a terribly long walk from their palazzo to the Questura, so you didn’t have to listen to much of it, at least.’

  ‘As my grandmother often told us, God’s mercy is everywhere.’ Vianello got to his feet and they started down towards Castello.

  7

  They walked because not to do so would be to throw away the joy of this waning day. It had grown warm enough to encourage the wisteria buds to flex their muscles, like athletes who scrape their feet on the ground prior to a sprint or a leap: they’d begun their yearly creep over the brick wall of the garden on the opposite side of the canal they were passing, Brunetti noticed. Within a week, their panicles would be suspended over the water, and after another their lavender eruption would take place overnight, hurling scent across to every passer-by, enough to make anyone who caught a whiff wonder what in heaven’s name he or she was doing going to work on a day like this, staring at a computer screen, when outside, life was starting all over again.

  For Brunetti, springtime was a succession of scent memories: the lilacs in a courtyard over by Madonna dell’Orto; the bouquets of lily of the valley brought in by the old man from Mazzorbo, who each year sold them on the steps of the church of the Gesuiti and who had been coming for so many years that no one dared to question his right to set up shop; and the smell of fresh sweat from clean bodies pressed together on the now-crowded vaporetti, a welcome relief after a winter of the musty smell of jackets and coats worn too many times, sweaters unwashed for too long.

  If life had a smell, it was to be found in springtime. There were times when Brunetti wanted to bite at the air to try to taste it, impossible as he knew that to be. It was too soon to start ordering a spritz, but his desire for rum punch had disappeared with the last cold day.

  As had happened to him since boyhood, Brunetti felt a surge of directionless goodwill towards everything and everyone around him, as at the end of a period of emotional hibernation. His eye approved of all it saw, and the possibility of a walk was an intoxication. Like a sheepdog, he guided Vianello the way he wanted to go, leading him past S. Antonin and out to the riva. San Giorgio stood opposite them, the view of it filtered through the tallmasted boats moored along the side wall that faced them.

  ‘It’s days like this that make me want to quit,’ Vianello surprised him by saying.

  ‘Quit what?’

  ‘Work. Being a policeman.’

  Brunetti exercised his will and remained calm. ‘And do what?’ he asked.

  Both of them knew it would have been shorter to go the back way and over the bridge in front of the Arsenale and then along the Tana, but the chance to look at that open expanse of water had lured them, and they had proved incapable of resisting its force.

  Vianello stood for some time, looking across at the church and the waves that flopped about in the bacino, then turned left and started towards Via Garibaldi. ‘I don’t know. Nothing interests me as much as work. I like what we do. But it’s these first spring days: they make me want to run away and join the Gypsies, or sign up on a freighter and sail to – oh, I don’t know – Tahiti.’

  ‘Can I come along?’ Brunetti asked.

  Vianello laughed and made a huffing noise to voice his disbelief that they’d ever, either one of them, find the courage to do such a thing. ‘It would be nice, though, wouldn’t it?’ he asked, taking Brunetti’s cowardice for granted.

  ‘I ran away once,’ Brunetti said.

  Vianello stopped and turned to him. ‘Ran away? Where to?’

  ‘It was when I was about twelve,’ Brunetti said, letting the memory start to seep back. ‘My father had lost his job, and there wasn’t much money, so I decided to try to find a job so I could bring something home.’ He shook his head at his youth or his desire or his folly.

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I took the vaporetto to Sant’Erasmo and started asking the farmers in the fields – there were a lot more than there are now – if they’d give me some sort of job.’ He waited but Vianello started walking again, and Brunetti hurried to catch up with him. ‘Not a real job; just for the day. It must have been a weekend because I don’t have any memory that I was staying away from school.’

  He put himself on the outside, nearer the water. ‘Finally one of them said all right and handed me the fork he was digging with and told me to finish turning over the earth in that field.’ Brunetti’s steps slowed, and Vianello slowed his own to keep pace with memory.

  ‘I started out too fast and dug too deep, so he stopped me and showed me how to do it: dig it in at an angle, push it in with one foot, flip the earth over and smash the clod open with the back of the tines, and then dig it in again.’ Vianello nodded.

  When Brunetti said no more, Vianello asked, ‘What happened?’

  ‘Oh, he left me working for the rest of the afternoon. By the time I was finished, I had bloody blisters on both hands, but I kept at it because I wanted to be able to take something home to give my mother.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘Yes. After I’d turned over about half the field, he told me it was enough, and he gave me some money.’

  ‘Do you remember how much it was?’

  ‘It might have been two hundred lire. I don’t remember at all. But it seemed like a lot to me then.’

  ‘I can imagine.’

  ‘He took me back to his house so I could wash my face and hands and clean off my shoes. His wife gave me a sandwich and a glass of milk – I think it came straight from their cow. It was sensational; I’ve never had anything so good since then – and I walked up to the imbarcadero and took the vaporetto back.’

  ‘And your mother?’

  Brunetti stopped again. ‘I went in and up to the apartment. She was in the kitchen, and when she saw me, she asked me if I’d had fun playing with my friends. So I guess it must have been the weekend.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘I put the money on the table and told her it was for her. That I’d earned it working. She saw my hands then and turned them over. She put iodine on them and bandaged them.’

  ‘But what did she say?’

  ‘She thanked me and said she was proud of me, but then she said she hoped I’d seen how hard a person had to work if all they had to work with was their body.’ Brunetti smiled, but there was little humour in it. ‘At first I didn’t understand her. But then I did. I’d worked all day, well, it seemed like it had been all day to me, though I suppose it was only a few hours. And all I had for it was enough for her to buy some pasta and some rice and maybe a piece of cheese. So I understood what she meant: if you work with only your body, all you’ll do is work for enough to eat. Even then I knew I didn’t want to spend my life like that.’

  ‘Well, you haven’t, have you?’ Vianello asked with a broad smile. He clapped Brunetti on the upper arm and started again towards Via Garibaldi. As they turned into the broad street, Brunetti saw evidence in support of his belief that this was one of the few areas of the city still filled primarily with Venetians. It was enough to see the beige woollen cardigans and short, carefully permed hair to know the older women were Venetian; those children with their skateboards were not there on vacation; and most foreign men did not stand so close to one another during a conversation. The shops, too, sold things that would be used in the city where they were purchased, not wrapped up and taken home to be shown off as some sort of prized acquisition, like a deer hunted and shot and tied to the top of a car. Here, people bought things they needed in the kitchen: they bought toilet paper, and they bought T-shirts in pl
ain white cotton that were going to be worn as underwear.

  At the bottom, where the street ran into Rio di S. Ana, they stayed left, Brunetti leading the way. He had found the number in Calli, Campielli e Canali. It was in Campo Ruga, and he let his memories take him there: left, right, to the canal and over the bridge, down to the first left and then into the campo.

  The house was on the opposite side of the campo, a narrow building much in need of new plastering and, from the look of it, also in need of new gutters. Water streaks had dined for years on three places in the plaster and were now starting on the bricks for dessert. The sun had turned the paint on the shutters of the windows of the first- and second-floor apartments a tired, dusty green. Any Venetian could read the greyish blisters the way an archaeologist can read earth strata to determine the length of time since the last human habitation. The apartments had been empty for decades.

  The shutters on the apartment on the third floor were open, though they seemed not in much better condition than the ones on the floors beneath. There were three bells beside the door, but only the top bell had a name attached: ‘Franchini’. Brunetti rang it, waited, rang it again, this time attentive for any fugitive sound that might come down from above. Nothing.

  He looked around the campo, which seemed curiously inhospitable. There were two leafless trees, apparently uninterested in the arrival of springtime, and two park benches as faded and stained as the shutters of the house. Though the campo was large, no children played there, perhaps because of the canal running along one side, which had no wall.

  He had not bothered to write down the phone number, but Vianello, who had a smartphone, found the directory online and then the number, which he dialled. This time, the tiny, tinny sound of a ringing phone came down to them. It rang ten times and then stopped. They both backed off from the building and looked up at the windows as if waiting for a man to fling them open and sing his first aria. Nothing.

  ‘The bar?’ Vianello asked, pointing with his chin to the far end of the campo. Inside, the place appeared as run-down as the shutters had, everything, including the barman, old and tired and in need of being wiped with a damp cloth. He looked at them when they came in and gave what he must have thought was a welcoming smile.

  ‘Sì, signori?’

  Brunetti asked for two coffees, which arrived quickly and were surprisingly good. A sharp clang came from the back of the bar and, turning, they saw a man sitting on a high stool in front of a slot machine: the noise came from the coins trickling into the tray in front of him. He slipped a few from the tray and began to feed them into the machine, then tapped at the brightly coloured buttons. Whizz and clink and lights. Nothing.

  ‘Do you know Aldo Franchini?’ Vianello asked the barman, speaking Veneziano and tilting his head backwards in the general direction of the building.

  Before he answered, the barman looked over at the man playing the slot machine. ‘The ex-priest?’ he finally asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Vianello answered. ‘All I know is that he studied theology.’

  The barman considered this for as long as he thought necessary and said, ‘Yes, he did,’ then asked, ‘Strange, isn’t it?’

  ‘That he’d study theology? Or stop being a priest?’ Vianello asked.

  ‘It’s not as if it matters any more, is it?’ the barman asked. His tone was not in the least disapproving. If anything, it held the same sympathy he’d express if he’d been told that someone had devoted part of his life to learning how to repair typewriters and fax machines.

  Vianello asked for a glass of mineral water.

  ‘Do you know anything else about him?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘You police?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is this about that guy who broke his nose? He out of jail?’

  ‘No,’ Brunetti assured him. ‘He’s got some time still.’

  ‘Good. They should keep him there a long time.’

  ‘You know him?’

  ‘We went to school together. He was a violent, nasty kid, and now he’s a violent, nasty man.’

  ‘Any reason for that?’ Brunetti inquired.

  The barman shrugged, saying, ‘Born that way.’ Tilting his head, he indicated the man who was still feeding the machine. ‘Like him. He can’t help himself: it’s like a disease.’ Then, as if the simplicity of his own answer had disappointed him, he asked, ‘Why are you looking for Franchini?’ When neither of them answered, he said, again nodding in the direction of the man at the machine, ‘You think he … ?’ but the last part of the question was drowned out by a rivulet of coins, and Brunetti wasn’t sure what he had said. Nor, apparently, had Vianello heard him.

  ‘We’d like to talk to him. It’s about something he might have seen. All we want to do is ask him a few questions.’

  ‘I’ve heard the police say that before,’ the barman said in a weary voice.

  ‘All we want to do is talk to him,’ Brunetti repeated. ‘He hasn’t done anything wrong, just been at a place where someone else did.’

  The barman started to say something but stopped himself.

  Brunetti smiled and urged, ‘Say it.’

  ‘That usually doesn’t make much difference to you guys,’ the barman risked saying.

  Vianello looked at Brunetti, leaving it for him to respond. ‘This time all we want is information.’ Brunetti could see the man fight down his curiosity.

  ‘I saw him yesterday morning. He was in here about nine for a coffee. Haven’t seen him since.’

  ‘Does he come in often?’

  ‘Often enough.’

  Brunetti turned when there was a sudden burst of noise from the back of the bar. The man at the slot machine was pounding the palm of his hand against the front of the machine.

  ‘Stop it, Luca,’ the bartender shouted, and the noise ceased. He turned to Brunetti and Vianello and said, ‘See? I told you: it’s a disease.’ Brunetti waited to see if he meant this as a joke, but it seemed he did not. ‘They shouldn’t be allowed. It’s too easy for them to gamble everything away.’ His indignation seemed genuine.

  Brunetti waited for Vianello to ask the obvious question, but when the Inspector said nothing, Brunetti took out his wallet and removed one of his cards. He wrote his telefonino number on the back and handed it to the barman. ‘When he comes in again, would you give him this and ask him to call me, please?’

  Brunetti took two Euros from his pocket and set them on the counter. As they turned to leave, they heard a burst of obscenity from the man in front of the slot machine, but the closing door cut it off.

  8

  They agreed to walk to the Questura, but the way back was far less pleasant, the warmth having fled the day while they were in the bar. He might as well have sent a uniformed officer to look for Franchini, but Brunetti had given in to his urge to be outside and moving and thus had wasted two hours. Wasted? He’d had a pleasant conversation with Vianello, had remembered a bit of his youth, and had his conviction that some people were simply born bad confirmed by a neutral source. All in all, his time had been far more productive than if he had spent the afternoon at his desk, reading files.

  This belief was strengthened by his spending the late afternoon doing just that: transcriptions of interrogations, regulations concerning the correct treatment of female suspects by male officers, a new three-page form to be used in the case of an injury experienced while at work. The only relief came from his computer, which brought him an email from the Department of History at the University of Kansas, telling him that there was no one named Joseph Nickerson on the faculty, and the university offered no class in Maritime and Mediterranean Trade History. Nor had the Provost, whose name appeared to be on the letter referred to by Mr Brunetti, ever signed such a document.

  Brunetti had been prepared for this, would have been surprised if Dr Nickerson had proved to be a real person. He dialled Signorina Elettra’s number to see what she had learned, but her phone rang unanswered. Though it was only six-
thirty, he let her absence be an overture to his own and went home.

  As he closed the door, he heard Paola call his name urgently from the back of the apartment. When he entered their bedroom, the last light was disappearing in the west, and silhouetted against it he saw his wife, bent to one side, as if in the grip of pain or frenzy. One arm was wrapped across her throat, the elbow pointing in his direction. Only half of her other arm was visible. He thought of swift-striking disease, a ruptured disc, a stroke. As he moved towards her, heart chilled, she turned her back, and he saw that the fingers of both hands were joined at the zipper of her dress.

  ‘Help me, Guido. It’s stuck.’

  It took him a few seconds to conjure up the appropriate husbandlike behaviour. He reached to take her hands from the zipper and bent his head to see a thin slip of grey cloth caught by one side of it. He pinched the cloth above it and tried to move the zip, first up and then down. After a few tugs, he freed the cloth and pulled the zip to her neck. ‘That’s fine now,’ he said and kissed her hair, saying nothing about the punch his lungs had taken.

  ‘Thanks. What are you going to wear tonight?’

  Years ago, he had once suggested that he wear the same suit he had worn to work that day, only to have Paola stare at him as though he’d suggested he initiate the dinner conversation with an indecent proposition to her mother. Since then, to prevent her thinking him some untutored youth, unlearned in the world’s false subtleties, he always named the suit he believed she would find most suitable. ‘The dark grey one.’

  ‘The one Giulio had made for you?’ she asked, her tone suggesting her guarded opinion of his old friend Giulio. They’d been to school together, when Giulio had been sent to live with an aunt in Venice for the six years his father was a guest of the state. The fact that he was Neapolitan had not affected Brunetti’s instant liking for the boy: ingenious, industrious, thirsty for learning and pleasure and, like Brunetti, the son of a man of whose behaviour many people did not approve.