Drawing Conclusions (2 page)

She switched on the light, looked automatically across the room at the sofa, where the military precision of the cushions assured her that her cleaning lady had been there in her absence. She brought her suitcase inside, closed the door, and let the silence drift across and into her. Home.

Anna Maria walked across the room and opened the window and the shutters. Across the
campo
stood the church of San Giacomo dell’Orio: if its rounded apse had been the prow of a sailing ship, it would have been aimed at her windows, and would soon have been upon her.

She moved through the apartment, opening all the windows and pushing back and latching the shutters. She carried her suitcase into the guest room and hoisted it on to the bed, then moved back through the apartment, closing the windows against the chill of the October night.

On the dining room table, Anna Maria found a piece of paper with one of Luba’s curiously worded notes and, beside
it, the distinctive buff notice that indicated the attempted delivery of a registered letter. ‘For you came,’ the note read. She studied the receipt: it had been left four days before. She had no idea who could have sent her a registered letter: the address given for ‘
mittente
’ was illegible. Her first thought was a vague fear that some government agency had discovered an irregularity and was informing her that she was under investigation for having done, or failed to do, something or other.

The second notice, she knew, would have come two days after this one. Its absence meant that Signora Altavilla, who over the years had become the custodian of her post and deliveries, had signed for the letter and had it downstairs. Curiosity overcame her. She set the receipt on the table and went to her study. From memory, she dialled Signora Altavilla’s number. Better to disturb her this way than to fret until morning about the letter that would turn out, she told herself, to be something innocuous.

The phone rang four times without being picked up. She stepped aside and opened the window, leaned out and heard the ringing below. Where could she be at this hour? A film? Occasionally she went with friends, and sometimes she went to babysit her grandchildren, though sometimes the oldest spent the night with her.

Anna Maria hung up the phone and returned to the living room. Over the years and even though separated in age by almost two generations, she and the woman downstairs had become good neighbours. Perhaps not good friends: they had never had a meal together, but now and then they met on the street and had a coffee, and there had been many conversations on the stairs. Anna Maria was sometimes called to work as a simultaneous translator at conferences and thus would be away for days, sometimes weeks, at a time. And because Signora Altavilla went to the mountains with her son and his family each July, Anna Maria had her keys, in order
to water the plants and, as Signora Altavilla had said when she gave her them, ‘just in case’. There was a clear understanding that Anna Maria could – indeed, should – go in to get her post whenever she returned from a trip and Signora Altavilla was not at home.

She took the keys from the second drawer in the kitchen and, propping her own door open with her handbag, switched on the light and went down the stairs.

Though she was certain no one was home, Anna Maria rang the bell. Taboo? Respect for privacy? When there was no answer, she put the key in the lock, but, as often happened with this door, it would not easily turn. She tried again, pulling the door towards her as she turned the key. The pressure of her hand moved the handle down, and when she gave the sudden pull and push the recalcitrant door proved to be unlocked and opened without resistance, pulling her a step forward into the room.

Her first thought was to try to recall Costanza’s age: why was she forgetting to lock her door? Why had she never changed it and got
una porta blindata
that locked automatically when it closed? ‘Costanza?’ she called. ‘
Ci sei?
’ She stood and listened, but there was no answering call. Without thinking, Anna Maria approached the table opposite the doorway, drawn by the small pile of letters, no more than four or five, and that week’s
Espresso
. Reading the title of the magazine, it struck her that the light in the hallway was on and that more light was coming down the corridor from the half-open door to the living room, as well as, closer to her, from the open door of the larger bedroom.

Signora Altavilla had grown up in post-war Italy, and though marriage had made her both happy and prosperous, she had never unlearned the habits of frugality. Anna Maria, who had grown up in a wealthy family in booming, prosperous Italy, had never learned them. Thus the younger woman had always found quaint the older’s habit of turning
off lights whenever she left a room, of wearing two sweaters in the winter, and of expressing real satisfaction when she found a bargain at Billa.

‘Costanza?’ she called again, more to stop her own thoughts than because she believed there would be an answer. In an unconscious attempt to free her hands, she set the keys on top of the letters and stood silent, eyes drawn to the light coming from the open door at the end of the corridor.

She took a breath, and then she took a step, and then another and another. She stopped then, and found she could go no farther. Telling herself not to be foolish, she forced herself to lean forward and take a look around the half-open door. ‘Costan …’ she began but slapped her mouth closed with one of her hands when she saw another hand on the floor. And then the arm, and the shoulder, and then the head, or at least the back of the head. And the short white hair. Anna Maria had for years wanted to ask the older woman whether her refusal to have her hair dyed the obligatory red of women her age was another manifestation of her learned frugality or simply acceptance of how her white hair softened the lines of her face, adding to their dignity.

She looked down at the motionless woman, at the hand, the arm, the head. And she realized she would never get to ask her now.

Guido Brunetti, Commissario di Polizia of the city of Venice, sat at dinner across from his immediate superior, Vice-Questore Giuseppe Patta, and prayed for the end of the world. He would have settled for being abducted by aliens or perhaps for the violent irruption of bearded terrorists, shooting their way into the restaurant, bloodlust in their eyes. The resulting chaos would have permitted Brunetti, who was, as usual, not wearing his own gun, to wrest one from a passing terrorist and use it to shoot and kill both the Vice-Questore and his assistant, Lieutenant Scarpa, who, seated to the left of the Vice-Questore, was at this very moment passing his measured – negative – judgement on the grappa that had been offered at the end of the meal.

‘You people in the North,’ the Lieutenant said with a condescending nod in Brunetti’s direction, ‘don’t understand what it is to make wine, so why should you know about making anything else?’ He drank the rest of his grappa, made a small moue of distaste – the gesture so carefully manufactured as to allow Brunetti to distinguish easily
between distaste and disgust – and set his glass on the table. He gave Brunetti an open-faced glance, as if inviting him to make a contribution to oenological frankness, but Brunetti refused to play and contented himself with finishing his own grappa. However much this dinner with Patta and Scarpa might have driven Brunetti to long for a second grappa – or the second coming – the realization that acceptance would prolong the meal led him to resist the waiter’s offer, just as good sense led him to resist the bait offered to him by Scarpa.

Brunetti’s refusal to engage spurred the Lieutenant, or perhaps it was the grappa – his second – for he began, ‘I don’t understand why Friuli wines are …’ but Brunetti’s attention was called away from whatever deficiency the Lieutenant was about to reveal by the sound of his
telefonino
. Whenever he was forced into social occasions he could not avoid – as with Patta’s invitation to dinner to discuss candidates for promotion – Brunetti was careful to carry his
telefonino
and was often saved by a generous Paola, calling with an invented urgent reason for him to leave immediately.

‘
Sì
,’ he answered, disappointed at having seen it was the central number of the Questura.

‘Good evening, Commissario,’ said a voice he thought must be Ruffolo’s. ‘We just had a call from a woman in Santa Croce. She’s found a dead woman in her apartment. There was blood, so she called us.’

‘Whose apartment?’ Brunetti asked, not that it mattered that he know this now, but because he disliked lack of clarity.

‘She said she was in her own apartment. The dead woman, that is. It’s downstairs from hers.’

‘Where in Santa Croce?’

‘Giacomo dell’Orio, sir. She lives just opposite the church. One seven two six.’

‘Who’s gone?’ Brunetti asked.

‘No one, sir. I called you first.’

Brunetti looked at his watch. It was almost eleven, long
after he had thought and hoped this dinner would end. ‘See if you can find Rizzardi and have him go. And call Vianello – he should be at home. Send a boat to pick him up and take him there. And get a crime scene team together.’

‘What about you, sir?’

Brunetti had already consulted the map of the city imprinted in his genes. ‘It’s faster for me to walk. I’ll meet them there.’ Then, as an afterthought, ‘If there’s a patrol anywhere near, call them and tell them to go over. And call the woman and tell her not to touch anything in the apartment.’

‘She went back to her own, sir, to make the call. I told her to stay there.’

‘Good. What’s her name?’

‘Giusti, sir.’

‘If you speak to the patrol, tell them I’ll be there in ten minutes.’

‘Yes, sir,’ the officer said and hung up.

Vice-Questore Patta looked across at Brunetti with open curiosity. ‘Trouble, Commissario?’ he asked in a tone that made Brunetti aware of how different curiosity was from interest.

‘Yes, sir. A woman’s been found dead in Santa Croce.’

‘And they called you?’ interrupted Scarpa, placing just the least hint of polite suspicion on the last word.

‘Griffoni’s not back from vacation yet, and I live closest,’ Brunetti answered with practised blandness.

‘Of course,’ Scarpa said, turning aside to say something to the waiter.

To Patta, Brunetti said, ‘I’ll go and have a look, Vice-Questore.’ He put on his face the look of a beleaguered bureaucrat, reluctantly pulled away from what he wanted to do by what he had to do; he pushed back his chair and got to his feet. He gave Patta the chance to make a comment, but the moment passed in silence.

Outside the restaurant, Brunetti left the business of getting there to memory and pulled out his
telefonino
. He dialled his home number.

‘Are you calling for moral support?’ Paola asked when she picked up the phone.

‘Scarpa has just told me we northerners don’t know anything about making wine,’ he said.

There was a pause before she said, ‘That’s what your words say, but it sounds as if something else is wrong.’

‘I’ve been called in. There’s a dead woman in Santa Croce, over by San Giacomo.’

‘Why did they call you?’

‘They probably didn’t want to call Patta or Scarpa.’

‘So they called you when you were with them? Wonderful.’

‘They didn’t know where I was. Besides, it was a way for me to get away from them. I’ll go over to see what happened. I live the closest, anyway.’

‘Do you want me to wait up?’

‘No. I have no idea how long it will take.’

‘I’ll wake up when you come in,’ she said. ‘If I don’t, just give me a shove.’

Brunetti smiled at the thought but confined himself to a noise of agreement.

‘I have been known not to sleep through the night,’ she said with false indignation, her aural radar having caught the precise nuance of his noise.

The last time, Brunetti recalled, was the night the Fenice burned down, when the sound of the helicopter repeatedly passing overhead had finally summoned her from the deep abyss to which she repaired each evening.

In a more conciliatory tone, she said, ‘I hope it’s not awful.’

He thanked her, then said goodbye and put the phone in his pocket. He called his attention back to where he was walking. The streets were brightly lit: more largesse from the
profligate bureaucrats in Brussels. If he had chosen to do so, Brunetti could have read a newspaper in the light from the street lamps. Light still poured from many shop windows: he thought of the satellite photos he had seen of the glowing night-time planet as measured from above. Only Darkest Africa remained so.

At the end of Scaleter Ca’ Bernardo, he turned left and passed the tower of San Boldo, then walked down from the bridge and into Calle del Tintor and went past the pizzeria. Next to it a shop selling cheap purses was still open; behind the counter sat a young Chinese girl, reading a Chinese newspaper. He had no idea what the current laws were about how late a shop could stay open, but some atavistic voice whispered to him about the unseemliness of engaging in commercial activity at this hour.

A few weeks ago he had had dinner with a commander of the Frontier Police, who had told him, among other things, that their own best estimate of the number of Chinese currently living in Italy was between 500,000 and five million. After saying this, he sat back, the better to enjoy Brunetti’s astonishment. In the face of it, he had added, ‘If the Chinese in Europe were all wearing uniforms, we’d be forced to see it as the invasion it is.’ He had then returned his attention to his grilled calamari.

Two doors down he found another shop, with still another young Chinese girl behind the cash register. More light spilled into the street from a bar; in front of it four or five young people stood, smoking and drinking. He noticed that three of them drank Coca-Cola: so much for the nightlife of Venice.

He came out into the
campo;
it too was flooded with light. Years ago, just when he had been transferred back from Naples, this
campo
had been infamous as a place to buy drugs. He remembered the stories he’d heard about the abandoned needles that had to be swept up every morning, had a vague
memory of some young person who had been found dead, overdosed, on one of the benches. But gentrification had swept it clean; that or the shift to designer drugs that had rendered needles obsolete.