Death in a Strange Country (9 page)

She pushed her way
outside and stood on deck. A sudden gust of wind pulled at her cap, and she
crushed it to her head with one hand, then removed it and held it at her side.
With its stiffness removed, she was revealed as more than pretty.

He came up the steps and
stood beside her. They made the right turn into the Grand Canal. ‘It’s very
beautiful,’ she said. Then, changing her tone, she asked, ‘Why do you speak
English so well?’

‘I studied it in school,
and at the university, and I spent some time in the States.’

‘You speak it very well.’

‘Thank you. Do you speak
Italian?’

‘Un poco,’
she replied, then smiled
and added,
‘molto poco.’

Ahead of them he saw the
moorings of Piazzale Roma. He stepped in front of her and grabbed the mooring
rope to hold it ready while Monetti pulled up next to the piling. He flipped it
over the top of the pole and tied it in an expert knot. Monetti cut the engine
and Brunetti jumped to the dock. She took his hand with easy familiarity and
followed him from the boat. Together, they went towards the car that was still
parked in front of the Carabinieri station.

The driver, when he saw
her approaching, scrambled out of the front seat, saluted, and opened the back
door of the car. She pulled the skirt of her uniform under her and slipped into
the back seat. Brunetti put out a restraining hand and stopped the driver from
closing the door after her. ‘Thank you for coming, Doctor,’ he said, bowing
down, one hand on the roof of the car, to speak to her.

‘You’re welcome,’ she
said and didn’t bother with thanking him for having taken her to San Michele.

‘I’ll look forward to
seeing you in Vicenza,’ he said and watched for her reaction.

It was sudden and strong,
and he saw a flash of that same fear he had seen when she first looked at the
wound that had killed Foster. ‘Why?’

His smile was bland. ‘Perhaps
I can find out more about why he was killed.’

She reached in front of
him and pulled at the door. He had no choice but to step back from its closing
weight. It slammed shut, she leaned across the seat and said something to the driver,
and the car moved away. He stood and watched as it inserted itself into the
traffic flowing out of Piazzale Roma, up the graded road towards the causeway.
At the top, it disappeared from his sight, an anonymous pale green vehicle
going back to the mainland after a trip to Venice.

* *
* *

5

Without bothering to glance into the Carabinieri
station to see if his return with the Captain had been noticed, Brunetti went
back to the boat, where he found Monetti returned to his newspaper. Years ago,
a foreigner - he couldn’t now remember who it was - had remarked on how slowly
Italians read. Ever since then, whenever he observed someone nursing a single
newspaper all the way from Venice to Milan, Brunetti thought of this; Monetti
had certainly had a good deal of time, but he appeared still to be in the first
pages. Perhaps boredom had forced him to begin reading through it a second
time.

‘Thanks, Monetti,’ he
said, stepping onto the deck.

The young man looked up
and smiled. ‘I tried to slow her down as much as possible, sir. But it’s crazy,
with all these maniacs who get right on your tail and follow too closely.’
Brunetti had been in his thirties when he learned to drive, forced to do it
when he was posted to Naples for a three-year assignment. He did it with
trepidation, and he drove badly, slowed by caution, and too often enraged by
those same maniacs, the variety who drove cars, not boats.

‘Would you mind taking me
up to San Silvestro?’ he asked.

‘I’ll take you right to
the end of the
calle
if you’d like, sir.’

‘Thanks, Monetti. I
would.’

Brunetti flipped the rope
up over the top of the piling and wrapped it carefully around the metal
stanchion on the side of the boat. He moved ahead and stood beside Monetti as
they started up the Grand Canal. Little that was to be seen down at this end of
the city interested Brunetti, surely as close to a slum as the island had. They
passed the railway station, a building that surprised by its drabness.

It would have been easy
for Brunetti to grow indifferent to the beauty of the city, to walk in the
midst of it, looking and not really seeing. But then it always happened: a
window he had never noticed before would swim into his ken, or the sun would
gleam in an archway, and he would actually feel his heart tighten in response
to something infinitely more complex than beauty. He supposed, when he bothered
to think about it, that it had something to do with language, with the fact
that there were fewer than eighty thousand people who lived in the city, and
perhaps with the fact that he had gone to kindergarten in a fifteenth-century
palazzo.
He missed this city when he was away from it, much in the same way he
missed Paola, and he felt complete and whole only while he was here. One glance
around him, as they sped up the canal, was proof of the wisdom of all of this.
He had never spoken of this to anyone. No foreigner would understand; any
Venetian would find it redundant.

Soon after they passed
under the Rialto, Monetti pulled the boat over to the right. At the end of the
long
calle
that led up to Brunetti’s building, he slipped the engine
into neutral, hovered for the briefest of instants beside the embankment, and
let Brunetti jump to shore. Even before Brunetti could turn to wave his thanks,
Monetti was gone, swinging around, back down the way he had come, blue light
flashing as he took himself home to dinner.

Brunetti walked up the
calle,
legs tired with all the jumping on and off boats that he seemed to have
been doing all day, since the first boat had picked him up here more than
twelve hours ago. He opened the enormous door into the building and closed it
quietly behind him. The narrow stairway that hairpinned its way up to the top
of the building served as a perfect trumpet of sound, and they could, even four
floors above, hear it whenever it slammed. Four floors. The thought burdened
him.

By the time he reached
the final turn in the staircase, he could smell the onions, and that did a
great deal to make the last flight easier. He glanced at his watch before he put
his key into the door. Nine-thirty. Chiara would still be awake, so he could at
least kiss her good night and ask her It’she had done her homework. If Raffaele
were there, he could hardly risk the first, and the second would be futile.

‘Ciao,
Pap
à
,’ Chiara called from the living
room. He put his jacket in the cupboard and went down the corridor to the
living room. Chiara lolled in an easy chair, looking up from a book that lay
open in her lap.

As he walked into the
room, he automatically switched on the track lighting above her. ‘You want to
go blind?’ he asked, probably for the seven hundredth-time.

‘Oh, Papà, I can see
enough to read.’

He bent over her and
kissed her on the cheek she held up to him. ‘What are you reading, Angel?’

‘It’s a book Mamma gave
me. It’s fabulous. It’s about this governess who goes to work for a man, and
they fall in love, but he’s got this crazy wife locked up in the attic, so he
can’t marry her, even though they’re really in love. I just got to the part
where there’s a fire. I hope she burns up.’

‘Who, Chiara?’ he asked. ‘The
governess or the wife?’

‘The wife, silly.’

‘Why?’

‘So Jane Eyre,’ she said,
making a hash of the name, ‘can marry Mister Rochester,’ to whose name she did
equal violence.

He was about to ask
another question, but she had gone back to the fire, so he went into the
kitchen, where Paola was bent over the open door of the washing-machine.

‘Ciao,
Guido,’ she said,
standing. ‘Dinner in ten minutes.’ She kissed him, turned back to the stove,
where onions were browning in a pool of oil.

‘I just had a literary
discussion with our daughter,’ he said. ‘She was explaining the plot of a great
classic of English literature to me. I think it might be better for her if we
forced her to watch the Brazilian soap operas on television. She’s in there,
rooting for the fire to kill Mrs Rochester.’

‘Oh, come on, Guido,
everyone roots for the fire when they read
Jane Eyre.’
She stirred the
onions around in the pan and added, ‘Well, at least the first time they read
it. It isn’t until later that they realize what a cunning, self-righteous
little bitch Jane Eyre really is.’

‘Is that the kind of
thing you tell your students?’ he asked, opening a cabinet and pulling out a
bottle of Pinot Noir.

The liver lay sliced and
waiting on a plate beside the frying pan. Paola slipped a slotted ladle under
it and flipped half into the pan, then stepped back to avoid the spitting oil.
She shrugged. Classes at the university had just resumed, and she obviously
didn’t want to think about students on her own time.

Stirring, she asked, ‘What
was the captain-doctor like?’

He pulled down two
glasses and poured wine into both. He leaned back against the worktop, handed
her one, sipped, answered, ‘Very young and very nervous.’ Seeing that Paola continued
to stir, he added, ‘And very pretty.’

Hearing that, she sipped
at the glass she held in one hand and looked at him.

‘Nervous about what?’ She
took another sip of the wine, held the glass up to the light, and said, ‘This
isn’t as good as what we got from Mario, is it?’

‘No,’ he agreed. ‘But
your cousin Mario is so busy making a name for himself in the international
wine trade that he doesn’t have time to bother with orders as small as ours.’

‘He would if we paid him
on time,’ she snapped.

‘Paola, come on. That was
six months ago.’

‘And it was more than six
months that we kept him waiting to be paid.’

‘Paola, I’m sorry. I
thought I’d paid him, and then I forgot about it. I apologized to him.’

She set the glass down
and gave the liver a quick jab.

‘Paola, it was only two
hundred thousand lire. That’s not going to send your cousin Mario to the
poorhouse.’

‘Why do you always call
him, “my cousin Mario?”‘

Brunetti came within a
hair’s breadth of saying, ‘Because he’s your cousin and his name is Mario,’
but, instead, set his glass down-on the worktop and put his arms around her.
For a long time, she remained stiff, leaning away from him. He increased the
pressure of his arms around her, and she relaxed, leaned against him, and put
her head back against his chest.

They stayed like that
until she poked him in the ribs with the end of the spoon and said, ‘liver’s
burning.’

He released her and
picked up his glass again.

‘I don’t know what she’s
nervous about, but it upset her to see the corpse.’

‘Wouldn’t anyone be upset
to see a dead man, especially someone they knew?’

‘No, it was more than
that. I’m sure there was something between them.’

‘What sort of something?’

‘The usual sort.’

‘Well, you said she was
pretty.’

He smiled. ‘Very pretty,’
She smiled. ‘And very,’ he began, searching for the right word. The right one
didn’t make any sense. ‘And very frightened.’

‘Why do you say that?’
Paola asked, carrying the pan to the table and setting it down on a ceramic
tile. ‘Frightened about what? That she’d be suspected of killing him?’