Falling in Love (14 page)

Without commenting on how broad that request was, she nodded and left him at the top of the stairs to go to her own office. Brunetti went into Signorina Elettra’s and found her sitting upright at her desk, the magazine replaced by a book. ‘Using the strike to catch up on your reading?’ he asked.

She didn’t bother to look at him, either because he was now included in her strike or because she was enthralled by the book.

Brunetti came closer and, reading upside down, made out the name on the binding.

‘Sciascia?’ he asked. ‘Don’t you learn enough about crime and the police by working here?’

His question proved sufficient to distract her. ‘I’m trying to limit my direct contact.’

‘With crime?’

She glanced in the direction of the door to the Vice-Questore’s office. ‘With the police,’ she said, then, responding to Brunetti’s false agitation of hands, she clarified, adding, ‘But only those of certain ranks.’

‘I hope I’m not included.’

She took the red ribbon hanging from the binding and slipped it between the pages before closing the book. ‘Hardly. In what way can I be useful to you, Commissario?’

He saw no reason to tell her he knew about Alvise’s salary or his new employment category: so long as he didn’t know, he would not have to do anything.

‘The girl we saw,’ he began, waving at the computer, ‘told me she received compliments about her singing from no one less than Flavia Petrelli.’ He gave her the chance to ask about this, but all she did was set her book to the side of the computer and continue to look at him attentively.

‘She – Signora Petrelli – has a fan whose behaviour is, well, is excessive,’ he continued. Still she said nothing.

‘So far, all he’s done is send flowers, hundreds of them, both to her dressing room and to her home.’

After a long pause, Signorina Elettra asked, ‘“So far”?’

Brunetti shrugged to express his own unease. ‘I have no concrete reason to believe this has anything to do with what happened on the bridge. It’s all supposition.’

She considered that, face impassive. ‘Do you have any idea who this fan is?’

‘None,’ he said but then realized he really hadn’t given his identity much thought. ‘It’s got to be someone with enough money to travel to where she’s singing and buy that many flowers. And who is clever and rich enough to get the flowers delivered pretty much wherever he wants.’ He tried to imagine what else this man would have to know and be able to do. ‘He’d have to know the city well enough to be able to follow the girl without being seen or losing track of her.’

‘And without her seeing him. You think that means he’s Venetian?’

‘Possibly.’

‘Shall I try to find out about the flowers?’ she asked with the enthusiasm of a hunter set loose in the fields.

‘Yellow roses. There were so many of them, it must have been a special order. The florist would probably have to have them sent in from the mainland.’

She leaned forward to switch on her computer. ‘Have you missed it?’ Brunetti risked asking, nodding towards the screen.

‘No more than my friends miss their children when they go off to university,’ she said, waiting for the screen to light up.

Brunetti was struck by how little, after all these years, he knew about her. She had friends who had children of university age, yet she was surely not old enough to have a child ready to begin studying. He didn’t even know how old she was. If he had chosen, he could easily have had a look at her file, learned her date of birth and her educational history. But he had never done it, just as he would never read a friend’s letters – at least would not have done so in the era when people still wrote letters. Paola, whose mother was a passionate reader, had inherited the sense of ethics and honour of the gentlemen heroes of nineteenth-century novels. While he, strangely enough, had been given pretty much the same ethical grounding by a woman who had never gone beyond the fourth year of middle school and a perpetually unemployed dreamer whose health had been ruined and mind affected by years as a prisoner of war.

‘Excuse me,’ he said, having not attended to her last remarks.

‘I said that I’m allowing myself to use it selectively.’ She indicated the computer screen. ‘I use it as I always have, only there are now two people for whom I don’t use it.’ He was impressed at how very reasonable she made it sound.

‘Since I’m among those for whom you still work,’ Brunetti said, speaking with false earnestness to demonstrate how sincere was his hope that he was, ‘I’d like you to find out whatever you can about the girl on the bridge. Francesca Santello: parents divorced; mother lives in France; she lives with her father when she’s here; somewhere in Santa Croce. She’s studying singing at the Conservatory in Paris.’ He spoke slowly when he saw that she was taking notes.

‘I’ve asked Claudia to see if she can find out about anything strange that might have happened at the theatre. Even though she’s not Venetian.’

Signorina Elettra nodded, as she would if he had mentioned the limitations created by a physical handicap.

‘Do you know anyone who works there?’ he asked, adding, ‘The only person I know retired about five years ago and moved to Mantova.’

It took her only a second to answer. ‘Someone I was at school with works in the bar on the corner, just opposite the theatre. I can ask him if he’s heard them talking about anything strange. Most of the stage crew and staff go in there for coffee, so he might have heard something.’ She made a note of that and looked at Brunetti. ‘Anything else?’

‘I’d like you to see what you can find out about fans,’ he said.

She held up her pencil to get his attention. ‘It might be more accurate to refer to stalkers.’

‘Of?’

‘Signora Petrelli.’

‘And the girl?’ he asked, though he thought he knew.

‘She was someone who got in the way.’

‘“In the way”,’ Brunetti repeated, pleased to hear her confirm his own opinion.

‘Shall I take a look at Signor Petrelli’s ex-husband?’ she asked.

‘Yes. And see if you can find out – do gossip magazines have an online edition?’

‘I have no idea,’ she answered blandly. ‘I always read them at the hairdresser’s.’

‘If they do, could you go back through the last few years and see who Signora Petrelli’s been involved with?’

‘Are you thinking the same thing I am?’

‘Probably,’ Brunetti said. ‘Just check the magazines,’ he added, thinking that it would save a great deal of Signorina Elettra’s time if he simply asked Flavia directly. If nothing else, it would allow Signorina Elettra more time to get on with her strike-breaking.

15

In his office, he turned on his own computer and, telling himself he was a man and not a mouse and could certainly do basic research, looked at the crime statistics about stalkers: yet another term, like ‘serial killer’, that English had brought into the language. Well, he told himself, they’ve also given us ‘privacy’, so take the bad with the good.

He began to read the Questura’s internal documents and statistics, then turned to the wider world of the records kept by the Ministry of the Interior. He read with growing interest and increasing distress, and after an hour he said aloud, ‘So much for the Latin lover.’

Two women a week, or close to it, were judged by the police to have been murdered, and usually the killer was an ex of some sort. There were countless other cases of accidental deaths and various vicious attacks, and when had it become fashionable to throw acid in women’s faces?

He remembered, years ago, attending a seminar in Rimini, where a pathologist in a suit and tie who could easily have been mistaken for a small-town pharmacist had spoken of the many murders that passed undetected each year: falls were very common, as were overdoses of pills taken by women who had also been drinking. Women sometimes hit their heads and drowned in the bathtub, the doctor had told them: he had once performed an autopsy on one whose husband had come home from work to find her floating there, having, he told the police, left her asleep in bed that morning. A very wealthy man, he was also a very careless one, for he had forgotten the surveillance cameras in the house that had filmed his wife going into the bathroom, only to be followed by him eight minutes later, naked and carrying a large sheet of bubble wrap, traces of which the pathologist had found under her fingernails. ‘Young, healthy people don’t fall in the bathtub. Please remember that, ladies and gentlemen,’ he had said before moving on to his next case.

And young girls don’t trip and fall down bridges, Brunetti added, though he was the only one listening.

He called up the statistics for the last few years, and saw that aggression against women kept inverse pace with the crumbling economy: one went up as the other went down. Quite a large number of men, when faced with fiscal ruin, had opted for suicide, but more of them turned their rage or despair – or whatever the emotion that drove them was – against the women nearest to them, killing or maiming them with a frequency that frightened Brunetti.

These, he reflected, were women they knew and said they loved or had once loved, in many cases women with whom they had raised children. They were not some distant, unattainable diva on the stage, singing for thousands and not for you.

He closed the program and stared at the verdant hillside of the screen saver that had been in the computer when it had come to share his office, and his life. Green hills, one rolling to the left and, behind it, one to the right, almost as if the photographer had told them how to pose. He leaned forward and opened Google and tapped her name into the window provided, hit the Return key, and, within seconds, had Flavia Petrelli smiling upon him, as if to thank him for his attempt to help her. There she was, costumed, beautiful, radiant. He looked at the clothing and tried to figure out the roles that would require it. He got the Contessa in
Nozze
right and, having just seen the same production, Tosca. The cowboy hat and pistol identified her as Minnie, even though Brunetti had never seen
La Fanciulla
. In the next photo, she wore a bosom-exposing gown with a crinoline and with her hair – or her wig – piled high on her head. He didn’t bother to read the caption.

He moved on to Wikipedia and was reminded that she had been born in Alto Adige more than forty years ago and had begun her musical training there. He jumped over the summary of her career and started reading the short paragraph entitled ‘Personal Life’. There was the husband, listed correctly as Spanish, and two children whose names were not given. Her marriage, he read, had ended in divorce. There was the usual reference to ‘early talent’, ‘astonishing debut’, and ‘technical mastery’, as well as a list of the roles she had sung, but there was nothing beyond this.

Returning to Google, he opened another article, which consisted chiefly of photos, but he soon tired of the wigs and ball gowns. He had the number of her
telefonino
in his and he called it.

‘Sì
,
’
she answered on the fourth ring.

‘Flavia,’ he began, ‘it’s Guido. I’d like to talk to you; this evening, if possible.’

There was a very long pause, and finally she said, ‘How long will it take and what do you want to talk about?’

‘It’s about a girl you spoke to, and I have no idea how long it will take,’ he answered.

‘A girl?’she asked. ‘What girl?’

‘Francesca Santello,’ he said, but the name was met with silence. ‘You spoke to her at the theatre a few days ago.’

‘The contralto?’ Flavia asked.

‘I think so. Yes.’

‘What about her?’

‘Could I come and see you?’

‘Guido, I’m in the theatre. I have to sing tonight. If whatever you have to tell me is going to upset me, I don’t want to hear it, not this soon before a performance. Besides, there’s nothing I can tell you about her. We met at the theatre, I complimented her, and that was that.’ He heard a noise from her end of the phone: it sounded like a door closing. Then he heard a woman’s voice – not Flavia’s. Then silence.

‘Could I come to see you after the performance?’ he asked.

‘Has something happened to the girl?’ she asked.

‘Yes. But she’s all right.’

‘Then why are you calling me?’

‘Because I want you to tell me as much as you remember of your meeting with her.’

‘I could do that right now,’ she said, her voice less friendly than it had been.

‘No, I’d rather do it in person.’

‘So I can betray my guilt with my facial expression?’ she asked, perhaps as a joke, perhaps not.

‘No, not at all. I just don’t want us to be rushed: I want you to have time to remember what happened and what you said.’

There was another long pause, during which he could hear the other woman’s voice again and then some noises that might have been objects being moved around or set down.

‘All right,’ she said brusquely, the sort of voice one used with importuning salesmen. ‘You know what time we finish. I’ll wait for you.’

‘Thank you,’ Brunetti answered, but she had broken the connection before he spoke the second word.