The Girl of his Dreams

  'Jesus, help me’ the Inspector muttered. He moved to the lower step, bent down, placed his fingers around the ankle and gave a gentle tug. He glanced at Brunetti, rain running down his face. 'I’ll do it’ Vianello said.

  Brunetti let go of the silk but remained beside his friend, ready to grab him if he slipped on the seaweed. Vianello leaned forward and put both arms under the body and lifted it out of the water. A long piece of cloth dangled down from the legs and wrapped itself around Vianello's trousers. With the body, he took a step backwards to the higher step, then another up to the pavement. Water flowed from them.

  When he was away from the water, Vianello knelt, first on one knee, then on the other, then bent forward and lowered the body to the ground in front of him. The skirt peeled itself free from his legs and slithered down on to the body of the girl. One foot was covered by a cheap pink plastic sandal; the other was bare, but Brunetti saw the lighter skin where the straps had protected it from the sun. Her cardigan was still buttoned, right up to the neck, but there was no longer any need for its warmth.

  She was small, with fair hair that fanned out from her head. Brunetti looked at her face, then back to her feet, and then her hands, and finally he accepted that she was a child.

  Vianello struggled to his feet like an old man. Suddenly there was a surge of noise, and then silence and only the sound of the rain hitting the water. They looked up, and there was Foa, the boat floating silently a hair's breadth from the embankment.

  'Call Bocchese’ Brunetti called out to the pilot, surprised that he could speak in a normal voice. 'Get a team here. And a doctor.'

  Foa waved to acknowledge that he had heard and reached for the radio. 'Maybe he should go back and get them,' suggested Vianello. 'There's nothing he can do here.'

  Even as Brunetti was telling the pilot to go back and pick up the scene of crime team, there was no thought that one of them would go back with him. When the boat was gone, they moved away from the small body and took shelter from the rain in a doorway, keeping a watch up the calle to stop anyone who approached. Occasionally people walked by up at the corner, going to or coining out of Campo San Beneto, perhaps in search of the eternally closed Fortuny museum. But the rain kept tourists from venturing down to the end of the calk to have a look at the waters of the famous Grand Canal.

  After twenty minutes, Vianello started to shiver uncontrollably but refused Brunetti's suggestion that he go up to Calle della Mandola to have a coffee. Irritated by his pigheadedness, Brunetti said, I'm going to get one,' and left without further comment. The rain no longer made any difference; the squelching of his shoes kept him company as he walked up to the larger street and into the first bar he came to.

  The barman stared at first and made some comment about the rain, but Brunetti ignored him and asked for un caffe corretto and one to take away in a plastic cup. The barman brought them together, and Brunetti put three sugars into each. He drank his down quickly and paid. As he was leaving, the barman told him to take the brown umbrella near the door and bring it back whenever he wanted.

  Glad of the umbrella, Brunetti went back towards the water. He said nothing as he handed Vianello the coffee. The Inspector peeled off the napkin on top and drank the coffee down as if it were a dose of medicine, which in some ways it was. He started to speak, but was interrupted by the sound of a motor to their left.

  A moment later they saw the police launch, Foa at the wheel, the outlines of other men visible in the cabin. Foa took the boat down to Calle Traghetto: Brunetti and Vianello waited for them, and did not step out from the doorway until the first of the technicians rounded the corner, hauling a metal case. Soon after followed the chief technician, Bocchese, and Dottor Rizzardi, the medical examiner. Behind them came two more technicians in their disposable white suits, all carrying the heavy tools of their grim trade. All of the men wore tall rubber boots.

  Before Brunetti could ask how it was that he had got there so fast, the doctor explained, 'Bocchese called me at home and offered to pick me up at the Salute’ He moved past Brunetti and toward the body on the pavement. Rizzardi's steps slowed when he saw it and he said, 'I hate children’ None of them had to bother translating this: all of them hated when it was children.

  It was only then that Brunetti noticed that none of the other men carried umbrellas, and he realized it had stopped raining. It had probably grown warmer, as well, but he could not sense that change through the clinging chill of his clothing. He glanced at Vianello, who had stopped trembling.

  As they approached the body, Brunetti said, 'Vianello pulled her out, but she might not have gone in here.' If she had, their scrambling around on the steps would effectively have obliterated any traces of whatever might have happened before.

  Bocchese, Rizzardi, and the first technician knelt around the body, and something perverse in Brunetti led his mind to the Magi and the countless paintings he had seen of three men kneeling around another child. He shook himself free of the memory and approached them.

  'Ten?' Rizzardi, looking at the girl's face, asked of no one in particular. Brunetti tried to remember what Chiara had looked like when she was ten, how small she had been, but the memory refused to come.

  The girl's eyes were closed, but she looked anything but asleep. Where had that myth come from, Brunetti wondered, that the dead looked as if they were sleeping? The dead looked dead: there was a stillness about them that the living could not imitate. Bad painters, sentimental fiction, understandable illusion: but the dead looked like what they were.

  Rizzardi picked up one of the girl's hands and felt for a pulse, an absurd formality that Brunetti found strangely touching. The doctor set the girl's hand back on the pavement and looked at his watch. He rolled back one of her eyelids, and Brunetti saw a flash of green or blue, but the doctor quickly smoothed it closed. With both hands, he opened her mouth and looked inside, then pressed on her chest with one hand, but no water came out, if indeed that was what he was expecting to happen.

  Rizzardi lifted part of her sodden skirt and pulled it above one knee. The rest was trapped under her body, and he did not disturb it. He pushed the cuffs of the sweater back, but there were no marks of any sort on her wrists. He took her hand again and this time turned it over and looked at the palm. The skin was rough, torn, as though she had been dragged along some rough surface: the other palm showed the same signs. Rizzardi bent closer to examine the fingernails, then placed her hands back on the pavement.

  Silently, Bocchese handed the doctor two transparent plastic bags, which he slipped over the child's hands and tied closed. 'Anyone report a child missing?' Rizzardi asked.

  'Not as of yesterday, so far as I know,' Brunetti answered. He glanced at Vianello, who shook his head.

  'Could be a tourist's child’ Rizzardi said. 'From the North. Hair's light enough; so are her eyes.'

  The same was true enough of Paola, Brunetti thought, but he said nothing.

  The doctor pushed himself to his feet, and just at that instant the sun broke through the remaining clouds and fell across them: the men standing around the body of a child on the ground. Bocchese glanced down, and when he saw that his shadow lay across the girl's face, he stepped back quickly.

  'I won't know anything for sure until I do the autopsy,' Rizzardi said, and Brunetti was struck by the way the doctor avoided using one of his usual expressions, such as 'open her up', or 'have a look'.

  'Any idea?' Brunetti could not stop himself from asking.

  The doctor shook his head. 'There's no sign of violence, except on her hands.'

  Vianello made an interrogative noise.

  'The scratches,' the doctor explained. 'It might help us to understand where she was before this happened.' He turned to the technician and said, ‘I hope we find something for you to work on, Bocchese.'

  Bocchese, not much given to talk at any time, had said nothing at all since he arrived. Hearing his name, he appeared to come out of a trance. He looked at the men around him, the
n asked Brunetti, 'You finished?'

  'Yes.'

  To his assistants, Bocchese said, 'Let's get the pictures taken.'

  13

  ‘People don't lose children’ Paola said that night, before dinner, when he had described the events of the day. 'They misplace their keys or their telefonini, or they lose their wallets, or have them stolen, but they don't lose their children, especially not when they're only ten’ She paused, an onion on the cutting board in front of her, and added, ‘I can't make any sense of it, really. Unless it's like that scene in Luke, where Jesus goes to Jerusalem with His parents, and then they lose Him on the way back.'

  Good Lord, the woman was capable of reading anything.

  'When they finally did locate Him’ she said, flicking the skin aside with the blade of the knife and starting to chop, 'He was back in the Temple, preaching to the Elders.'

  'And you think that's what might have happened with this little girl?' Brunetti asked.

  'No’ she said and set the knife down. She turned to face him. 1 suppose I don't want to think about the alternatives.'

  'That she was killed?'

  Paola bent down and took a large frying pan from the cabinet. 'If you don't mind, Guido, I can't talk about this. At least not now’

  'Want me to do anything?' he asked, hoping she would say no.

  'Give me a glass of wine and then go and read’ she said, which is exactly what he did.

  Some months ago, Brunetti, goaded by his wife's violent denunciation of contemporary theatre and film as unmitigated garbage, had decided to reread the Greek dramatists. They, after all, had been the fathers of theatre, which perhaps made them the grandfathers of film, though this was an accusation Brunetti was reluctant to bring against them.

  He had begun with Lysistrata - Paola had heartily approved - then the Oresteia, which had left him troubled that, even two thousand years ago, no one had seemed able to figure out the meaning of justice. Then The Clouds and its delicious sending up of Socrates, and now The Trojan Women, in which he knew there would be no sending up of anyone or anything.

  They knew a thing or two, these Greeks. They knew about mercy, but more about vengeance. And they knew that Fortune was an idiot's dance, springing away, and then back, and then again away. And they knew that no one is ever always fortunate.

  The book fell to his chest and he stared out the window at the growing darkness. He could not bring himself, not that night, to read of the death of Astyanax. He closed his eyes, and the greater darkness brought him the memory of the dead child, the feel of the silk threads of her hair around his wrist.

  The front door opened with more noise than a door should make when opening, and Chiara banged her way into the apartment. Brunetti could never understand how a girl so delicate in appearance could be the creator of such perpetual noise. She bumped into things, dropped books, flipped pages with more noise than a motor scooter, and managed, always, to hit the surface of her plate with her knife and fork.

  He heard her stop at the door and called, 'Ciao, angelo mio.'

  Her hand slapped on the wall a few times, and then the light in the corner went on. 'Ciao, Papa', she said, 'You hiding from Mamma?' He saw her at the door, a small version of her mother, but suddenly not by much. When had she grown those last few centimetres and why had he not noticed it before?

  'No, just in here reading’ he answered.

  'In the dark?' she asked. 'Neat trick.'

  'Well,' Brunetti explained, ‘I was reading, but then I thought I'd sit here and think about what I had read.'

  'Like they tell us to do in school?' she asked innocently, drawing closer. She flopped down on the sofa beside him.

  'I assume that's a fake question’ he said, leaning aside to kiss her cheek.

  She guffawed. 'Of course it's fake. Why else would you read, if you weren't supposed to think about it?' She settled against the back of the sofa and put her feet up on the table next to his, waving them from side to side. 'But that's what the teachers are always telling us: ''think about what you read. These books are meant to serve you as examples for your lives, to enrich and improve them’" Her voice deepened as she said this, and all trace of the Veneto cadence had dropped out as she slipped into Tuscan so pure Dante would have approved. 'Well?' he asked.

  'You tell me how my mathematics book can enrich and improve my life, and I'll promise to take my feet off the table and never put them there again.' She turned her left foot out and tapped at his right one a few times, reminding him of Paola's prohibition of feet on tables.

  ‘I think your teachers might be speaking in a more general sense’ Brunetti began.

  'That's what you always say when you try to defend them’ Chiara answered.

  'Especially when they say something stupid?' he asked.

  'Yes. Usually.'

  'Do they say a lot of stupid things?' he asked.

  It took her some time to answer this. 'No, I don't think so. The worst is Professoressa Manfredi, I suppose.' This was Chiara's history teacher, a woman whose remarks had been much discussed at their dinner table. 'But everyone knows she's Lega, so all she wants us to do is grow up and vote to separate from the rest of Italy and throw all the foreigners out.'

  'Does anyone pay attention to what she says?'

  'No, not even the kids whose parents vote for the Lega.' Chiara reflected on this and then added, 'Piero Raffardi saw her with her husband one day: they were in a store, trying to buy him a suit. And he's just this little ratty-looking man with a moustache, and every time he tried something on, he'd complain about how expensive it was. Piero was in the dressing room next to him, and when he saw who it was, well, who he was with, he decided to stay there and listen to them’ Brunetti could imagine the pleasure it would give a student to be able to eavesdrop on a teacher, especially if it were Manfredi, the black nemesis of most of Chiara's class.

  She turned her head towards him and asked, 'You're not going to tell me it's impolite to eavesdrop?'

  'You know it's impolite’ he said calmly, 'but, in these circumstances, I would assume it was also irresistible.'

  There was a long silence, the only sounds those that came from the kitchen. 'How come you and Mamma’ Chiara suddenly asked, 'never tell us what's right and wrong?'

  From her tone, Brunetti had no idea how serious a question this was. Finally, he answered, ‘I think we do, Chiara.'

  'Well, I don't’ she countered. 'The one time I asked Mamma about it, all she did was quote that stupid Bleak House’ With a voice that had more than a passing resemblance to Paola's, Chiara quoted, '"knows a broom's a broom, and knows it's wicked to tell a lie.'" Switching back from English, she asked, 'What's that supposed to mean?'

  Had a man ever been married to a woman whose moral code was based on the British novel? he asked himself. He decided to spare his daughter this question and, instead, said, ‘I think it means that you're supposed to do your job, whatever it is, and not lie.'

  'Yes, but what about all that stuff about not killing your neighbour or coveting your neighbour's wife?'

  He allowed himself to sink deeper into the sofa as he considered her question. After some time, he answered, 'Well, one way of looking at it is to see all those things, those ten things, as specific examples of the general rule’

  'You mean Dickens' Golden Rule?' Chiara asked with a laugh.

  'You could call it that, yes, I suppose’ Brunetti admitted. 'If you do your job, you're unlikely to want to kill your neighbour, and in your case, I doubt you're going to spend much time in your life coveting your neighbour's wife.'

  'Can't you ever be serious, Papa?' she pleaded.

  'Not when I'm hungry’ Brunetti said and got to his feet.

  14

  The following day, Brunetti spent his first half-hour in the office reading the newspaper accounts of the discovery of the little girl's body. II Gazzettino had not learned of it early enough to put it on the front page, but there had been enough time for it to reach the second
section, the front page of which screamed, in red, that it was 'A Mystery'. The account gave the incorrect time of the discovery of her body, misspelled Brunetti's name, and carried a photo of steps different from the ones where she had been found. Her age was given as five, while the national papers listed it as twelve and nine. The autopsy, it was stated, would take place that day. Further, the police asked that anyone who might have information about the possible identity of a child with dark hair and eyes call them.

  His phone rang and he answered with his name.

  'Ah, Guido,' he heard his mother-in-law say. 'I've been meaning to call you since we got back from the Occupied Territories, but there was simply too much to do here, and then Chiara and Raffi came to lunch and I had so much fun with them that I'm afraid I forgot about calling you, though having them here should have reminded me of you, shouldn't it?'

  ‘I thought you'd been to Palermo,' a literal-minded Brunetti said, relieved to know that the Contessa had not yet seen that day's papers. It confused him that Paola's parents could have managed another trip in the short time since they got back from Sicily.

  Her laugh was musical, always brighter than her voice and very attractive. 'Oh, I'm sorry to confuse you, Guido. I should have told you. Orazio has taken to using that term to refer to Sicily and Calabria. Since both places belong to the Mafia and the government has no effective control over them, he thinks it's linguistically correct to refer to them as the Occupied Territories.' She paused for a moment, and then went on, 'And if you think about it, it's not far off the truth, is it?'

  'Is this term only for domestic consumption, or does he use it in public?' Brunetti enquired, forbearing to pass judgement on the accuracy of the Count's choice of phrase and never willing to comment on his father-in-law's politics.

  'Oh, I'm so seldom with him in public, I have no way of knowing about that. But you know how discreet Orazio is, so perhaps he uses it only with me. But now you know, too,' she said in a lowered tone, adding, 'Perhaps it would be wise to let Orazio decide how widespread the use of the term should be?'