‘He’s bound to know everyone in the trade.’
‘I know that. But I want to know whether he’s involved with anything illegal.’ When Lele didn’t answer, Brunetti said, ‘I’m not even sure what that means, and I’m not sure you can find it out.’
‘I can find out anything,’ Lele said dispassionately; it was a statement of fact, not a boast. He said nothing for a moment, hand still rubbing lightly back and forth on his compressed lips. Finally, he took his hand down and said, ‘All right. I know a few people I can ask, but I’ll need a day or two. One of the men I need to talk to is in Burma. I’ll call you by the end of the week. Is that all right?’
‘It’s fine, Lele. I don’t know how to thank you.’
The painter dismissed this with a wave of his hand. ‘Don’t thank me until I find out something.’
‘If there is anything,’ Brunetti added, as if to disarm the antipathy he had sensed in Lele towards the museum director.
‘Oh, there’s always something.’
Chapter Six
WHEN HE LEFT Lele’s gallery, he turned left and ducked into the underpass that led out to the Zattere, the long, open fondamenta that ran alongside the canal of the Giudecca. Across the water he saw the church of the Zittelle and then, further along, that of the Redentore, their domes soaring up above them. A strong wind came in from the east, stirring up whitecaps that knocked and bounced the vaporetti around like toys in a tub. Even at this distance, he could hear the thundering reverberation as one of them crashed against its mooring, saw it buck and tear at the rope that held it to the dock. He pulled up his collar and let the wind push him forward, keeping to the right, close against the buildings, to avoid the spray that spewed up from the embankment. Il Cucciolo, the waterside bar where he and Paola had spent so many hours during the first weeks after their meeting, was open, but the vast wooden deck in front of it, built out over the water, was completely empty, stripped of tables, chairs and umbrellas. To Brunetti, the first real sign of spring was the day when those tables and chairs appeared after their winter’s hibernation. Today, the thought made him shiver. The bar was open, but he avoided it, for the waiters were the rudest in the city, their arrogant slowness tolerable only in exchange for idle hours in the sun.
A hundred metres along, past the church of the Gesuati, he pulled open the glass door and slipped into the welcoming warmth of Nico’s bar. He stamped his feet a few times, unbuttoned his coat, and approached the counter. He ordered a grog and watched the waiter hold a glass under the spigot of the espresso machine and shoot it full of steam that quickly condensed to boiling water. Rum, a slice of lemon, a generous dash of something from a bottle, and then the barman placed it in front of him. Three sugars, and Brunetti had found salvation. He stirred the drink slowly, cheered by the aromatic steam that rose up softly from it. Like most drinks, it didn’t taste as good as it smelled, but Brunetti had grown so accustomed to this truth that he was no longer disappointed by it.
The door opened again, and a rush of icy wind blew two young girls in before it. They wore ski parkas lined with fur that burst out and surrounded their glowing faces, thick boots, leather gloves, and woollen slacks. From the look of them, they were American, or possibly German; if they were rich enough, it was often hard to tell.
‘Oh, Kimberly, are you sure this is the place?’ the first one said in English, sweeping the place with her emerald eyes.
‘It said so in the book, Alison. Nico’s is, like, famous.’ (She pronounced ‘Nico’ to rhyme with ‘sicko’, a word Brunetti had picked up at his last Interpol convention.) ‘It’s famous for gelato.’
It took a moment for the possibility of what might be about to happen to register on Brunetti. The instant it did, he sipped quickly at his grog, which was still so hot it burned his tongue. Patient, he took his spoon and began vigorously to stir the drink, moving it up high on the sides of the glass in hopes that this would somehow force it to cool more rapidly.
‘Oh there it is, I bet, under those round lid things,’ the first one said, coming to stand next to Brunetti and peering over the bar, down at where Nico’s famous gelato, production severely cut back in acknowledgement of the season, did indeed lie under those round lid things. ‘What flavour do you want?’
‘Do you think they’d have Heath Bar?’
‘Nah, not in Italy.’
‘Yeah, I guess not. I guess we’re gonna have to stick to, like, basics.’
The barman approached, smiling in acknowledgement of their beauty and radiant good health, to make no mention of their courage. ‘Sì?’ he asked, smiling.
‘Do you have any gelato?’ one of them asked, pronouncing the last word loudly, if not correctly.
Without a pause, apparently accustomed to this, the barman smiled again and reached behind him to pull two cones from a tall pile on the counter.
‘What flavour?’ he asked in passable English.
‘What flavours have you got?’
‘Vaniglia, cioccolato, fragola, fior di latte, e tiramisù.’
The girls looked at each other in great perplexity. ‘I guess we better stick with vanilla and chocolate, huh?’ one asked. Brunetti could no longer distinguish between them, so similar was the bored nasality of their voices.
‘Yeah, I guess.’
The first one turned to the barman and said, ‘Due vanilla and chocolatto, please.’
In a moment, the deed was done, the cones made and handed across the counter. Brunetti found the only consolation he could in taking a long drink of his grog, holding the half-full glass under his nose for a long time after he had swallowed.
The girls had to remove their gloves to take the cones, then one of them had to hold both cones while the other dug into her pockets for four thousand lire. The barman handed them napkins, possibly in the hope that this would keep them inside while they ate the ice cream, but the girls were not to be stopped. They took the napkins and wrapped them carefully around the base of the cones, pushed open the door, and disappeared into the increasing gloom of the afternoon. The bar filled with the sad boom of another boat as it crashed against the wharf.
The barman glanced at Brunetti. Brunetti met his eyes. Neither said a word. Brunetti finished the grog, paid, and left.
It was fully dark now, and Brunetti found himself eager to be at home, out of this cold, and away from the wind that still sliced across the open space along the waterside. He crossed in front of the French consulate, then cut back alongside the Giustiniani Hospital, a dumping ground for the old, and headed towards home. Because he walked quickly, it took him only ten minutes to get there. The entrance hall smelled damp, but the pavement was still dry. The sirens for acqua alta had sounded at three that morning, waking them all, but the tide had turned before the waters had seeped up through the chinks in the pavement. The full moon was only a few days away, and it had been raining heavily up north in Friuli, so there was a chance that the night would bring the first real flooding of the year.
At the top of the stairs, inside his home, he found what he wanted: warmth, the scent of a fresh-peeled tangerine, and the certainty that Paola and the children were at home. He hung his coat on one of the pegs beside the door and went into the living room. There he found Chiara, propped on her elbows at the table, holding a book open with one hand and stuffing peeled sections of tangerine into her mouth with the other. She looked up as he came in, smiled broadly, and held out a section of tangerine to him. ‘Ciao, Papà.’
He came across the room, glad of the warmth, suddenly aware of how cold his feet were. He stood beside her and bent down far enough to allow her to pop a section of tangerine into his mouth. Then another, and another. While he chewed, she finished the peeled sections that lay on a dish beside her.
‘Papà, you hold the match,’ she said, reaching across the table and handing him a book of matches. Obedient, he peeled one off and lit it, holding the flame towards her. From the pile on the table beside her, she selected a piece of tangerine pee
l and bent it until the two inner sides touched. As she did, a fine mist of oil shot out from the cracking skin and flared up in a blazing rocket of coloured flames. ‘Che bella,’ Chiara said, eyes wide with delight that never seemed to diminish, no matter how many times they did this.
‘Are there any more?’ he asked.
‘No, Papà, that was the last one.’ He shrugged but not before a look of real sorrow flashed across her face. ‘I’m sorry I ate them all, Papà. There are some oranges. Do you want me to peel you one?’
‘No, angel, that’s all right. I’ll wait till dinner.’ He leaned to the right and tried to look into the kitchen. ‘Where’s Mamma?’
‘Oh, she’s in her study,’ Chiara said, turning back to her book. ‘And she’s in a really bad mood, so I don’t know when we’re going to eat.’
‘How do you know she’s in a bad mood?’ he asked.
She looked straight up at him and rolled her eyes. ‘Oh, Papà, don’t be silly. You know what she’s like when she’s in one of her moods. Told Raffi she couldn’t help him with his homework, and she yelled at me because I didn’t take the rubbish downstairs this morning.’ She propped her chin on both fists and looked down at her book. ‘I hate it when she’s like that.’
‘Well, she’s been having a lot of trouble at the university, Chiara.’
She turned a page. ‘Oh, you always stick up for her. But she’s no fun when she’s like that.’
‘I’ll go and talk to her. Maybe that will help.’ Both of them knew the unlikelihood of this but, the optimists of the family, they smiled to each other at the possibility.
She slumped back down over her book, Brunetti bent and kissed the top of her head and switched on the overhead light as he left the room. At the end of the corridor, he stopped in front of the door to Paola’s study. Talking to her seldom helped, but listening to her sometimes did. He knocked.
‘Avanti,’ she called out, and he pushed back the door. The first thing he noticed, even before he saw Paola standing at the glass door that led to the terrace, was the chaos on her desk. Papers, books, magazines spilled across its surface; some open, some closed, some used to mark pages in others. Only the self-deceived or the vision-impaired would ever call Paola either neat or orderly, but this mess was pushed out way beyond even her very tolerant limits. She turned from the door and noticed the way he stared at her desk. ‘I’ve been looking for something,’ she explained.
‘The person who killed Edwin Drood?’ he asked, referring to an article she had spent three months writing the previous year. ‘I thought you found him.’
‘Don’t joke, Guido,’ she said, in that voice she used when humour was as welcome as the old boyfriend of the bride. ‘I’ve spent most of the afternoon trying to hunt down a quotation.’
‘What do you need it for?’
‘A class. I want to begin with the quotation, and I need to tell them where it comes from, so I’ve got to locate the source.’
‘Who is it?’
‘The Master,’ she said, in English, and Brunetti watched her go all misty-eyed, the way she always did when she talked about Henry James. Did it make sense, he wondered, to be jealous? Jealous of a man who, it seemed to him from what Paola had said about him, not only couldn’t decide what his nationality was, but couldn’t seem to decide what sex he was, either?
For twenty years, this had gone on. The Master had gone on their honeymoon with them, was in the hospital when both of their children were born, seemed to tag along on every holiday they had ever taken. Stout, phlegmatic, possessed of a prose style that proved impenetrable to Brunetti, no matter how many times he tried to read him in either English or Italian, Henry James appeared to be the other man in Paola’s life.
‘What’s the quotation?’
‘He said it in response to someone who asked him, late in his life, what he had learned by all his experience.’
Brunetti knew what he was meant to do. He did it. ‘What did he say?’
‘“Be kind and then be kind and then be kind,”’ she said in English.
The temptation proved too strong for Brunetti. ‘With or without commas?’
She shot him a grim look. Obviously not the day for jokes, especially about the Master. In an attempt to worm out from under the weight of that look, he said, ‘Seems a strange quotation to begin a literature class.’
She weighed whether to take his remark about the commas as still standing or to address herself to his next. Luckily, for he did want to eat dinner that night, she picked up the second. ‘We begin with Whitman and Dickinson tomorrow, and I’m hoping that the quotation will serve to pacify a few of the more horrible students in the class.’
‘Il piccolo marchesino?’ he asked, slighting, with the use of the diminutive, Vittorio, heir apparent to Marchese Francesco Bruscoli. Vittorio, it seemed, had been persuaded to terminate his attendance at the universities of Bologna, Padua and Ferrara, and had, six months ago, ended up at Cà Foscari, attempting to take a degree in English, not because he had any interest in or enthusiasm for literature – indeed, for anything that resembled the written word – but simply because the English nannies who had raised him had made him fluent in that language.
‘He’s such a dirty-minded little pig,’ Paola said vehemently. ‘Really vicious.’
‘What’s he done now?’
‘Oh, Guido, it’s not what he does. It’s what he says, and the way he says it. Communists, abortion, gays. Any of those subjects just has to come up and he’s all over them, like slime, talking about how glorious it is that Communism’s been defeated in Europe, that abortion is a sin against God, and gays—’ She waved a hand towards the window, as if asking the roofs to understand. ‘My God, he thinks they should all be rounded up and put in concentration camps, and anyone with AIDS should be sequestered. There are times when I want to hit him,’ she said, with another wave of her hand but ending, she realized, weakly.
‘How do these subjects come up in a literature class, Paola?’
‘They rarely do,’ she admitted. ‘But I hear about him from some of the other professors.’ She turned to Brunetti and asked, ‘You don’t know him, do you?’
‘No, but I know his father.’
‘What’s he like?’
‘Pretty much the same. Charming, rich, handsome. And utterly vicious.’
‘That’s what’s so dangerous about him. He’s handsome and very rich, and many of the students would kill to be seen with a marchese, regardless of what a little shit he is. So they ape him and repeat his opinions.’
‘But why are you so bothered about him now?’
‘Because tomorrow I begin with Whitman and Dickinson, I told you.’
Brunetti knew they were poets; had read the first and not liked him, found Dickinson difficult but, when he understood, wonderful. He shook his head from side to side, asking for an explanation.
‘Whitman was gay, and Dickinson probably was, too.’
‘And that sort of thing is not on il marchesino’s list of acceptable behaviour?’
‘To say the very least,’ replied Paola. ‘That’s why I want to begin with that quotation.’
‘You think something like that will make any difference?’
‘No, probably not,’ she admitted, sitting down in her chair and beginning to straighten out some of the mess on her desk.
Brunetti sat in the armchair against the wall and stretched his feet out in front of him. Paola continued closing books and placing magazines on neat piles. ‘I had a taste of the same today,’ he said.
She stopped what she was doing and looked across at him. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Someone who didn’t like gays.’ He paused and then added, ‘Patta.’
Paola closed her eyes for second, then asked, ‘What was it?’
‘Do you remember Dottoressa Lynch?’
‘The American? The one who’s in China?’
‘Yes to the first, and no to the second. She’s back here. I saw her today, in the h
ospital.’
‘What’s the matter?’ Paola asked with real concern, hands grown suddenly still over her books.
‘Someone beat her. Well, two men, really. They went to her place on Sunday, said they had come on business, and when she let them in, they beat her.’
‘How badly is she hurt?’
‘Not as badly as she could have been, thank God.’
‘What does that mean, Guido?’
‘She’s got a cracked jaw, and a few broken ribs, and some bad scrapes.’
‘If you think that’s not bad, I tremble to think of what would be,’ Paola said, then asked, ‘Who did it? Why?’
‘It might have something to do with the museum, but it might have something to do with what my American colleagues insist on calling her “lifestyle”.’
‘You mean that she’s a lesbian?’
‘Yes.’
‘But that’s insane.’
‘Agreed. But none the less true.’
‘Is it starting here?’ Clearly, rhetorical. ‘I thought that sort of thing happened only in America.’
‘Progress, my dear.’
‘But what makes you say that’s the reason?’
‘She said that the men knew about her and Signora Petrelli.’
Paola could never resist a set-up. ‘Before she went back to China a few years ago, you would have had trouble finding anyone in Venice who didn’t know about her and Signora Petrelli.’
More literal-minded, Brunetti protested, ‘That’s an exaggeration.’
‘Well, perhaps. But there was certainly talk at the time,’ Paola insisted.
Having corrected Paola once, Brunetti was content to leave it. Besides, he was growing hungrier, and he wanted his dinner.
‘Why wasn’t it in the papers?’ she suddenly asked.
‘It happened on Sunday. I didn’t find out about it until this morning and then only because someone noticed her name on the report. It had been given to the uniformed branch and was being treated as routine.’
‘Routine?’ she repeated in astonishment. ‘Guido, things like that don’t happen here.’