Death in a Strange Country (26 page)

‘Dottore, you’re a guest
in my house, so I shouldn’t ask you this.’

‘What, Signora?’

‘Is this the truth or is
this a trick?’

‘Signora, you tell me
something to swear on, and I’ll swear this is the truth.’

With no hesitation, she
demanded, ‘Will you swear on your mother’s heart?’

‘Signora, I swear on my
mother’s heart that this is the truth. Peppino should come and talk to us. And
he should be very careful with these people.’

She set her glass down,
untasted. ‘I’ll try to talk to him, Dottore. But maybe it will be different
this time?’ She couldn’t keep the hope from her voice. Brunetti realized that
Peppino must have told his mother a great deal about his important friends,
about this new chance, when everything would be different, and they would
finally be rich.

‘I’m sorry, Signora,’ he
said, meaning it. He got to his feet. ‘Thank you for the coffee, and for the
pastries. No one in Venice knows how to make them like you do.’

She pushed herself to her
feet and grabbed a handful of the sweets. She slipped them into the pocket of
his jacket. ‘For your children. They’re growing. Sugar’s good for them.’

‘You’re very kind,
Signora,’ he said, painfully aware of how true this was.

She walked with him to
the door, again leading him by the arm, as if he were a blind man or liable to
lose his way. At the door to the street, they shook hands formally, and she
stood at the door, watching him as he walked away.

* *
* *

15

The next morning, Sunday, was the day of the week Paola
dreaded, for it was the day when she woke up with a stranger. During the years
of their marriage, she had grown accustomed to waking up with her husband, a
grim, foul creature incapable of civility for at least an hour after waking, a
surly presence from whom she expected grunts and dark looks. Not the brightest
bed partner, perhaps, but at least he left her alone and let her sleep. On
Sunday, however, his place was taken by someone who, she hated the very word,
chirped. Liberated from work and responsibility, a different man emerged:
friendly, playful, often amorous. She loathed him.

This Sunday, he was awake
at seven, thinking of what he could do with the money he had won at the Casinò.
He could beat his father-in-law to the purchase of a computer for Chiara. He
could get himself a new winter coat. They could all go to the mountains for a
week in January. He lay in bed for half an hour, spending and respending the
money, then was finally driven out of bed by his desire for coffee.

He hummed his way to the
kitchen and pulled down the largest pot, filled it, set it on the stove, and
put a saucepan of milk next to it, then went into the bathroom while they heated.
When he emerged, teeth brushed and face glowing from the shock of cold water,
the coffee was bubbling up, filling the house with its aroma. He poured it into
two large cups, added the sugar and the milk, and went back towards the
bedroom. He set the cups on the table beside their bed, got back down under the
covers, and fought with his pillow until he had beaten it into a position that
would allow him to sit up enough to drink his coffee. He took a loud sip,
wiggled himself into a more comfortable position, and said softly, ‘Paola.’

From the long lump beside
him, his fair consort made no response.

‘Paola,’ he repeated,
voice a little louder. Silence. ‘Humm, such good coffee. Think I’ll have
another sip,’ which he proceeded to do, loudly. A hand emerged from the lump,
turned itself into a fist, and poked at his shoulder. ‘Wonderful, wonderful
coffee. Think I’ll have another sip.’ A distinctly threatening noise emerged.
He ignored it and sipped at his coffee. Knowing what was about to come, he
placed the cup on the table beside the bed so that it would not be spilled. ‘Umm,’
was all he said before the lump erupted and Paola flipped herself onto her
back, in the manner of a large fish, extending her left arm across his chest.
Turning, he took the second cup from the table and placed it into her hand,
then took it back and held it for her while she pushed herself up onto her
pillow.

This scene had first
taken place the second Sunday of their marriage, they still on their honeymoon,
when he had bent over his still-sleeping wife to nuzzle at her ear. The voice
that had said, steel-like, ‘If you don’t stop that, I’ll rip out your liver and
eat it,’ had informed him that the honeymoon was over.

Try as he might, which
wasn’t very hard, he could never understand her lack of sympathy with what he
insisted upon seeing as his real self. Sunday was the only day he had during
the week, the only day when he didn’t have to concern himself directly with
death and disaster, so the person who woke up, he maintained, was the real man,
the true Brunetti, and he could dismiss that other, Hyde-like creature as being
in no way representative of his spirit. Paola was having none of this.

While she sipped at her
coffee and worked at getting her eyes open, he switched on the radio and
listened to the morning news, though he knew it was likely to turn his mood
until it resembled hers. Three more murders in Calabria, all members of the
Mafia, one a wanted killer (one for us, he thought); talk of the imminent
collapse of the government (when was it not imminent?); a boatload of toxic
waste docked at Genoa, turned back from Africa (and why not?); and a priest,
murdered in his garden, shot eight times in the head (had he given too severe a
penance in confession?). He switched it off while there was still time to save
his day and turned to Paola. ‘You awake?’

She nodded, still
incapable of speech.

‘What will we do with the
money?’

She shook her head, nose
buried in the fumes of the coffee.

‘Anything you’d like?’

She finished the coffee,
handed the cup to him without comment, and fell back on her pillow. Looking at
her, he didn’t know whether to give her more coffee or artificial respiration. ‘Kids
need anything?’

Eyes still closed, she
shook her head.

‘Sure there’s nothing you’d
like?’

It cost her inhuman
effort, but she got the words out. ‘Go away for an hour, then bring me a
brioche and more coffee.’ That said, she flipped herself over onto her stomach
and was asleep before he was out of the room.

He took a long shower,
shaving under the flood of hot water, glad that he didn’t have to fear the
responses of the varied ecological sensibilities of the other members of the
household, always ready to decry what they saw as waste or misuse of the
environment. Brunetti believed himself to be a man whose family always chose
enthusiasms and causes that contributed directly to his inconvenience. Other
men, he was sure, managed to have children who contented themselves with
worrying about things that were far away - the rainforest, nuclear testing, the
plight of the Kurds. Yet here he was, a city official, a man the newspapers had
even once praised, and he was forbidden, by members of his own family, from
buying mineral water that came in plastic bottles. Instead, he had to buy water
in glass bottles, then haul those bottles up and down ninety-four steps. And if
he stayed under the shower for more time than it took the average human being
to wash his hands, he had to listen to endless denunciations of the
thoughtlessness of the West, its devouring of the resources of the world. When
he was a child, waste was condemned because they were poor; now it was
condemned because they were rich. At this point, he discovered how difficult it
was to shave while grinning, so he abandoned the catalogue of his woes and
finished his shower.

When he emerged from the
house twenty minutes later, he found himself swept by a boundless feeling of
unspecified delight. Though the morning was cool, the day would be warm, one of
those glorious sun-swept days that graced the city in the autumn. The air was
so dry that it was impossible to believe the city was built on water, though a
glance to the right as he walked past any of the side streets on his way
towards Rialto was ample proof of that fact.

Arriving at the major cross-street,
he turned left and headed down towards the fish market, closed now on Sunday
but still giving off the faintest odour of the fish that had been sold there
for hundreds of years. He crossed a bridge, turned to the left, and went into a
pasticceria.
He ordered a dozen pastries. Even if they didn’t eat them
all for breakfast, Chiara was sure to knock them off during the course of the
day. Probably the morning. Balancing the rectangular package on his
outstretched palm, he went back towards Rialto, then turned right and back up
towards San Polo. At Sant’ Aponal, he stopped at the newsstand and bought two
papers,
Corriere
and
Il Manifesto,
which he thought were the ones
Paola wanted to read that day. Back home, the steps seemed almost not to be
there as he climbed up to the apartment.

He found Paola in the
kitchen, coffee just brimming up in the pot. From down the hall, he heard
Raffaele shouting to Chiara through the bathroom door, ‘Come on, hurry up. You’ve
been in there all morning.’ Ah, the water police, back on duty.

He set the package down
on the table and tore back the white paper. The mound of pastries glistened
with melted sugar, and some fine powdered sugar floated out to settle on the
dark wood of the table. He grabbed a piece of apple strudel and took a bite.

‘Where’d they come from?’
Paola asked, pouring coffee.

‘That place down by
Carampane.’

‘You went all the way
there?’

‘It’s a beautiful day,
Paola. After we eat, let’s go for a walk. We could go out to Burano for lunch.
Come on, let’s do it. It’s a perfect day for the ride out.’ Even the thought of
it, the long boat ride out to the island, the sun glimmering on the crazy
patchwork of riotously coloured houses as they grew nearer, lifted his heart
even higher.

‘Good idea,’ she agreed. ‘What
about the kids?’

‘Ask them. Chiara will
want to come.’

‘All right. Maybe Raffi
will, too.’

Maybe.

Paola shoved the
Manifesto
towards him and picked up
Corriere.
Nothing would be done, no move
to embrace this glorious day, until she had at least two more cups of coffee
and read the papers. He took the newspaper in one hand, his cup in the other,
and went back through the living room to the terrace. He set those things down
on the balcony and went back into the living room for a straight-backed chair,
which he propped up just the right distance from the railing. He sat, pushed
the chair back, and rested his feet on the railing. Grabbing the paper, he
opened it and began to read.

Church bells sounded, the
sun rained down abundantly upon his face, and Brunetti knew a moment of
absolute peace.

Paola spoke from the
doorway to the terrace. ‘Guido, what was that doctor’s name?’

‘The pretty one?’ he
asked, not looking up from his paper, not really paying attention to her voice.

‘Guido, what was her name?’

He lowered his paper and
turned to look at her. When he saw her face, he took his feet from the railing
and set the chair down. ‘Peters.’ She closed her eyes for a moment, then handed
him the
Corriere,
turned back to a page in the middle.

‘American Doctor Dead of
Overdose’, he read. The article was a small one, easily overlooked, no more
than six or seven lines. The body of Captain Terry Peters, a paediatrician in
the US Army, had been found late Saturday afternoon, in her apartment in Due
Ville, in the province of Vicenza. Doctor Peters, who worked at the Army
hospital at Caserme Ederle, had been found by a friend, who had gone to see why
the doctor had not shown up for work that morning. A used syringe was found by
the doctor’s body, and there were signs of other drug use, as well as evidence
that the doctor had been drinking. The Carabinieri and the American military
police were handling the investigation.

He read the article
again, then again. He looked through the newspaper he had, but
Il Manifesto
had
made no mention of it