The only animation – and Brunetti flinched from the word – came from the occasional jerks and tremors of her head, which snapped to the left with no predictable rhythm. Brunetti tried to time the motions, but they came when they wanted, after three seconds, or five, or one.
She sat in the chair as though that were her occupation. There was no cup or glass on the table near her, no fruit, no chocolates, no book or magazine. She looked at them and gave a regal wave to a row of chairs that faced her, as if part of her time were spent in giving audiences. They sat.
Around them stood large, dark, awkward pieces of furniture. The chairs seemed too padded, or too high, or too low; some were merely too ugly. One wardrobe tilted to the right and seemed in imminent danger of collapse. A table had legs that appeared to be suffering from elephantiasis, and a mirror had grown mouldy with age. The pieces looked like family heirlooms from a family with no taste.
‘You’re friends of my nephew?’ she asked in place of greeting.
‘Sì, Signora,’ Brunetti said. Griffoni nodded and gave a small, affirmative smile. The woman barely looked at her. Every so often, her head shot quickly to the left and then back. Brunetti made himself ignore it.
‘Why hasn’t he been to see me?’ Her voice sought anger but found only petulance.
‘He’s very busy, Signora. You know he has to travel for his work,’ Brunetti answered, blocking out the image of the man in the hospital bed.
‘But he comes to see me before he leaves,’ she said uncertainly, as though in search of confirmation from Brunetti. Her voice was weak and tended to drop off in the final words of a sentence.
‘Unfortunately, this trip was very sudden, so he asked us to come and tell you,’ Brunetti risked saying.
‘When will …’ she began, but then seemed to forget what it was she wanted to ask, or perhaps the future tense was difficult for her.
‘He asked us,’ Brunetti began, as though he had not noticed that she had failed to finish the sentence, ‘to bring his greetings and to ask you to help him understand something.’
‘Understand what?’ she asked.
‘He’s been trying to help with the coupons you gave him …’ Brunetti left the sentence open, half-question, halfstatement, suggesting she confirm or deny.
She shifted her feet so quickly that one of the slippers fell to the floor. As with the jerking motion of her head, Brunetti pretended not to notice it; in fact, everyone in the room pretended not to notice it.
‘Coupons?’ she asked in a voice that now had a quaver, as though the question had pushed her over the edge into advanced, befuddled old age.
‘Yes, the ones from the Farmacia della Fontana. It seems the pharmacist is willing now to redeem them in cash.’
The prospect of cash seemed to rejuvenate her. The hesitant manner of an old woman vanished, replaced by a younger woman’s ardent curiosity. Brunetti suddenly found himself thinking of something his mother had told him when he was a boy, one of her attempts to suggest to him what the world was like, without, of course, revealing that this was what she was doing. He had said – he must have been fourteen or fifteen – that he thought Venetians were different from other people, but he wasn’t sure how.
They’d been in the kitchen, and she was wiping her hands on the apron that was as much a part of her as was her wedding ring. ‘We’re greedy, Guido. It’s in our marrow,’ she’d said, and that was the only answer he got.
‘He said that?’ Signora Gasparini asked. ‘In cash?’
Brunetti said ‘Yes’, and Griffoni nodded.
The old woman moved her head, this time voluntarily and up and down, and glanced towards something they couldn’t see; her face went slack in thought. Silence expanded; Brunetti could think of nothing to say or ask.
‘When will Tullio be back?’ the old woman asked.
‘Ah, I don’t know, Signora. He said he’d be gone at least until the end of next week. That’s why he asked us to stop by and see how you are and ask if you need anything.’
She gave him a long look, and Brunetti could all but see her trying to gaze into his soul to discover what sort of man he was. ‘It’s hard for Elisa and the kids,’ he said with easy familiarity, ‘with him away for so long.’ Brunetti turned to Griffoni, as though he’d just remembered she was sitting there with him. ‘Did he tell you when he’d be back, Claudia?’
‘No, he didn’t. But we have a date for dinner with them on the twentieth, haven’t we?’
Brunetti nodded and turned back to Signora Gasparini. ‘He’ll be back then, by the end of next week,’ Brunetti assured her, smiling to show his pleasure at that fact.
‘That’s a long time,’ the old woman pointed out.
‘Oh, it will pass quickly,’ Brunetti said airily and shifted forward as though about to get to his feet.
The old woman held up a hand. ‘You didn’t tell me your names.’
‘I’m Guido Brunetti, and this is Claudia Griffoni.’
‘Is she your wife?’ Signora Gasparini asked.
It was Griffoni who interrupted to say, ‘As good as, Signora,’ and give a breathy laugh.
If Brunetti had expected the old woman to be surprised by this, he was mistaken. She turned her attention to Griffoni, looking at her for the first time. For as long as she kept her eyes on Griffoni – Brunetti counted out nine beats – her head did not move. But when she said, ‘So you do things together?’ the small tremors began again.
Given Griffoni’s last remark, Brunetti wasn’t quite certain what she had in mind.
Griffoni apparently felt no confusion, for she answered, ‘Yes, we do, Signora. We shop together and share household expenses. Guido still pays for dinner, though, if we go out.’
This seemed to satisfy the woman, for she said, ‘So you’ll go together to get the money?’
‘Of course,’ Griffoni assured her. ‘We’re used to working as a team.’ She smiled at the other woman to acknowledge the ambiguity of what she’d just said. Then, as though suddenly recalling a missing detail, Griffoni added, ‘But we need to know what to tell the pharmacist.’
Suddenly alert, Signora Gasparini said, ‘Are you Venetian?’ It was a request for information, entirely neutral.
‘No, I’m not, Signora, but I live here now,’ Griffoni said and gave Brunetti a long look.
‘Ah, that’s good,’ the old woman said and actually rubbed her hands together, a gesture Brunetti had read about in the novels of Balzac.
He turned to Griffoni, as though his role as leader was finished, and now it was time to turn things over to the person who would deal with the details. ‘All right, Claudia. I’ll leave you here with Signora Gasparini and ask the badante if there’s anything else we can do.’
He got to his feet in an energetic, masculine way, went to the door, and let himself out. At the back of the house, he stopped and called, ‘Signorina? Signorina Beata?’ He took a few more steps to the door at the end of the corridor. He raised his voice and called again: ‘Signorina Beata. Are you here?’
The door opened, and the young woman emerged into the hallway, wiping her hands on a kitchen towel. ‘How can I help you, Signore?’ she asked. Her Italian, Brunetti noticed, was excellent, with only a vowel here and there to show that it was an imported product.
‘Signor Tullio told his wife that he’s seen changes in his aunt in the last months,’ Brunetti began, putting as much concern into his voice as he could. He waited for her response, which was a quick nod that could as easily be confirmation of the fact as acknowledgement that she had understood his statement.
Her silence left him with no choice but to be more direct. ‘Have you noticed changes in her, too, Signorina?’
She wiped her hands again, although they must by now have been dry. ‘She doesn’t remember things like she used to,’ she said and looked at him to assure herself that he understood. When Brunetti nodded, she continued. ‘It didn’t happen when the shaking disease began.’ She dismissed this idea with a swift
unfurling of the towel. ‘She remembered to take her pills, and the shaking wasn’t so bad.’ Brunetti nodded again.
‘Then she started having trouble sleeping. Sometimes I found her asleep on the sofa in the morning with the television on, and she didn’t remember how she got there.’ The young woman seemed more troubled by this than by ‘the shaking disease’.
‘Then that stopped and she started sleeping later in the morning. Until one time I couldn’t wake her up and called 118.’ She folded the towel into a rectangle, shook it out, and folded it again.
‘When was that, Signorina?’ Brunetti asked, wanting to confirm what Professoressa Crosera had told him.
‘In the middle of October,’ she said. ‘I remember because she came home on the last day of October and it had been two weeks.’ She closed her eyes for a moment, perhaps remembering that day, and then said, ‘She’s not getting better, so I think I won’t be able to go home for Christmas.’
‘Is that when you noticed the changes in her?’
‘I didn’t notice for a long time because the changes were so small. But when she came home from the hospital, there was a big change. It used to be that we went out every day to do the errands. We’d go to the supermarket in Santa Margherita together and decide what to get for dinner, or have a coffee and a pastry.’ She gave him a long look, as though deciding whether she could tell him more. Apparently she could, for she said, ‘It was like we were friends. One day she’d pay, and the next day she’d let me pay. And for that time, while we had a coffee and ate the pastry, we really were friends.’
Brunetti was busy doing the maths: fifteen times a month, times five or six Euros: seventy-five Euros. He thought of his mother’s admonition about the Venetians and greed, to which he added cunning.
‘And then, at the end of the month, she’d give me all the money back, saying it was so I could buy a pair of shoes or send something to my mother.’ Beata smiled at the memory.
After he digested this, Brunetti asked, ‘What other errands did you do together?’
‘Sometimes we’d go to Rialto, too. Or we’d look in shop windows and talk about the things we saw. Or I’d go with her to her doctor or to the pharmacy, and once to get her eyes checked.’
‘When she began to change, did you worry?’ Brunetti asked.
The young woman busied herself folding the towel again while she thought about this. ‘Not really, because it was so slow. Just sometimes, or with some things.’
‘Could you give me an example, Signorina?’
‘She didn’t want me to come in with her when she went to the doctor any more, or go to the pharmacy with her, even though it’s in Cannaregio. She began to ask me to leave the room when she wanted to make a phone call, and she wouldn’t let me help her keep track of when she should take her medicines.’ She gave Brunetti time to comment, but he did not. ‘I think she was embarrassed because the shaking was getting worse, and sometimes she’d mix things up. I pretended not to notice, but she knew that I did.’ Beata gave him a quick glance and tried to shrug away what she had just said.
‘We still went for coffee together, but it wasn’t the same as before. And she always paid. I kept offering, but she said no, so I didn’t enjoy it as much because we weren’t like friends any more. She was always the padrona, and that’s not nice, not once you’ve been friends.’ She left that in the air a long time, then added, in a voice that failed to disguise her sadness, ‘I think she forgot that we’d become friends.’
Brunetti was afraid she was going to cry and so he asked abruptly, ‘Do you know anything about the coupons?’
‘What coupons?’ she asked.
‘From the pharmacy. For cosmetics.’
Her surprise was palpable, and as he watched, she glanced away from him and down the corridor, as if she could see the past there, though in better focus.
‘So that’s where they came from,’ she said.
‘The coupons?’ Brunetti asked.
‘No. The things she gave me. This summer, just after my birthday, she came home with a bag of lipsticks and face creams and a bottle of bath oil, and gave it all to me.’ The smile had come back to her face.
‘She’d already given me a birthday present; a gold chain with a cross. I’m going to give it to my mother when I go home in the summer to visit.’
‘So the cosmetics were an extra present?’
‘Yes. She said she’d been given them. I want to take them when I go home.’ Her smile dimmed a little. ‘There’s no reason to use them here, anyway.’
‘Could I see them?’ Brunetti asked.
‘What?’
‘Would you show them to me?’
‘But they’re in my room,’ she said, as though Brunetti had made an improper suggestion.
‘Perhaps you could go and get them, then, Beata? I’d like to see them.’ She gave him such a troubled look that Brunetti was forced to say, ‘It might help the Signora.’
Beata nodded and crossed the hall to go into a room on the other side.
She was quickly back with an orange Hermès shopping bag in her hand, and Brunetti thought for a moment that the cosmetics had come from there. Seeing his face, Beata said, ‘No, Signore. The Signora put them in this bag because she knew I liked it.’
She placed the bag on one of the large chests in the hall and removed, one by one, all the items in it. There were four lipsticks, a bottle of bath oil, another one, a small box that held a tub of face cream, and three tubes of something called fondo tinto.
‘She gave them to you this summer, and you haven’t used them yet?’ Brunetti asked.
‘No, Signore. I want to take it all home with me next summer and give it to my mother and sister. They’ve never had things this good.’ She gave the tubes and boxes a glance filled with longing and near-reverence, as though concentrated in them were all the wealth and luxury of the West.
‘Thank you, Signorina Beata,’ Brunetti said. ‘Do you know if the Signora brought home more things like this?’
‘I think she did, but earlier in the summer. And then she didn’t any more.’
‘Was this after she stopped asking you to go out with her every day?’
‘How did you know that?’
‘Oh, it was just a guess,’ Brunetti said easily.
The door to the Signora’s room opened, and Griffoni came into the hallway, turned and blew a kiss into the room, and then came towards them. To Beata, she said, ‘The Signora would like you to bring her a cup of tea.’
Brunetti watched the young woman stop herself from dropping another curtsey. ‘Of course,’ she said and walked towards the kitchen.
‘How do you do it?’ Brunetti asked, not having to mention the kiss she tossed towards the old woman.
‘By listening. And asking questions. And then wanting to know more.’ She glanced at the cosmetics set out on top of the chest, lined up like the row of objects from Gasparini’s drawer. She picked up the box and opened the lid, careful not to bend the cardboard flap. Carefully, she pulled out the pale blue plastic tub and read the label.
‘I looked at this two weeks ago. There are 150 grams in here, and it costs ninety-seven Euros.’ She slipped the tub into the box and reinserted the tab. She opened all of the lipsticks one by one and showed Brunetti that they were unused.
‘I should tell my nephews in Naples not to get mixed up in selling drugs, not when they could sell this stuff,’ she said.
Brunetti let the remark pass. Griffoni had seldom spoken of her family, and he did not want to sound intrusive. But, he had to admit, she had a natural sense of the realities of the marketplace.
‘Well?’ he asked.
‘She told me a bit about her youth.’ That said, Griffoni started to replace the tubes and boxes in the bag, careful to place them neatly beside one another on the bottom, setting the tubes and lipsticks upright. She held up one of the tubes and said, ‘I asked her what her secret was, for looking so young.’ She stopped then and looked at Brunetti, giving hi
m a visual prod.
‘And she told you what?’
‘To “stay away from doctors, and use the best cosmetics”,’ she said, waving the tube back and forth.
‘So she paid for all of this?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Yes. She started to tell me she’d found a way to do it that saved her money, but then she clapped her hand over her mouth and said it was a secret and she couldn’t tell anyone.’
‘What did you do?’ Brunetti asked.
A door opened and Beata emerged, carrying a tray with a single cup of tea and three sweet biscuits on a plate. Brunetti went ahead and opened the door for her, then followed her into the room.
When the old woman looked up at him, he said, ‘Thank you, Signora, for your help. I hope we haven’t tired you with our questions.’
‘Not at all,’ Signora Gasparini said, smiling vaguely towards him. ‘Please say hello to my nephew when you see him. And perhaps you could ask him to call me?’ Then she reached to take the cup of tea Beata handed her. She looked up and said, smiling, ‘That young woman is charming.’
‘Yes, she is, isn’t she?’ Brunetti said and left the room, closing the door behind him.
Griffoni waited for him in the hallway, all of the items back in the bag, which now stood in the centre of the chest. They left the apartment, and Griffoni did not start to speak until they reached the bridge in front of the building. She stopped at the top and leaned back against the railing, arms stiff and palms braced on the top.
Before he could ask, Griffoni said, ‘I told her I admired her for being so clever and for knowing how to keep a secret. Then I said that I envied her for having found a way to save money because I had the same passion for cosmetics and loved to use the best. I put on my unhappy face and said how hard it was, with what I earned, to afford them.’
Brunetti listened, as fascinated as a python by the snake charmer’s flute.
‘Then I smiled and gave her some more compliments, and she looked at me for a long time and then asked me if I took medicine. For a minute I didn’t know what she was talking about, but I said yes, tried to look modest, and said I did take something for a feminine problem.’ Smiling at her own cleverness, she added, ‘Even women are reluctant to ask you anything, once you say that.’