Falling in Love (9 page)

‘I looked,’ the nurse said forcefully, as if to deny some accusation from Brunetti.

‘Excuse me,’ he said, looking up from the file.

‘Santello. In the phone book. But there’s a dozen of them.’

Brunetti thought to ask if she had checked the addresses but limited himself to a smile.

‘How long has she been here?’

The nurse looked at her watch. ‘They brought her up after they put in the stitches.’

‘I’d like to stay here for a while to see if she wakes up,’ Brunetti said.

Perhaps because his explanations had transformed the young woman from a suspect to a victim, the nurse raised no objection, and Brunetti went back to the side of the trolley. When he looked down at her, he saw that she was staring at him.

‘Who are you?’ she asked.

‘Commissario Guido Brunetti,’ he answered. ‘I came because one of the nurses said you think you were pushed down the steps.’

‘I don’t think it,’ she said. ‘I know it.’ Her voice used too much breath, as if she had to pump out the words to get them free. She closed her eyes, and he saw her lips press together in frustration or pain.

He waited.

She looked at him with clear, almost translucent blue eyes. ‘I know it.’ Her voice was little more than a whisper, but the pronunciation was diamond-sharp.

‘Would you tell me what happened?’ Brunetti asked.

She moved her head minimally, but even that caused her a sudden gasp of pain. She lay still and then said, speaking very softly, as if to keep the pain from noticing, ‘I was going home. After dinner with friends. When I was going up the bridge behind the Scuola, I heard footsteps behind me.’ She studied his face to see if he was following.

Brunetti nodded but said nothing.

She lay still for some time, gathering more breath to enable herself to continue. ‘When I started down, I felt someone behind me. Too close.

‘Then he touched my back and said, “
È mia
”, and he shoved me and I tripped. I think I tried to grab the railing.’ Brunetti leaned forward, the better to hear her. ‘Why would he say “You’re mine”?’ she asked.

She raised her right hand to touch the bandage on her head. ‘Maybe I hit it. I remember falling, but that’s all. Then there were police, and they put me on a boat. That’s all I remember.’ She shifted her eyes around the corridor and out the windows. ‘I’m in the hospital, aren’t I?’

‘Yes.’

‘Can you tell me what’s wrong with me?’ she asked.

‘Good heavens,’ Brunetti answered with mock seriousness. ‘I’m not sure that’s any of my business.’

It took her a moment to understand, then she smiled and added, joining in the joke, ‘Physically, that is.’

‘Your left arm is broken, but your chart says it’s not a bad break,’ he said. ‘And there are stitches in your scalp. There’s no evident damage to your brain or skull: no haemorrhage and no fracture.’ He had given the bare facts and felt obliged to add, ‘You have a concussion, so I suppose they’ll keep you here for a day or two to see that they didn’t overlook anything.’

She closed her eyes again. This time they stayed closed for at least five minutes, but Brunetti remained standing beside the bed.

When she opened them again, he asked, ‘Are you sure that’s what you heard, “
È mia
”?’

‘Yes,’ she said without hesitation or uncertainty.

‘Can you tell me anything about the voice?’ Brunetti asked. ‘The tone or the pronunciation?’ It would hardly be much to go on, but if the attacker had come from behind her, that’s all there would be.

She raised her right hand and waved one finger back and forth in a strong negative. ‘No. Nothing.’ Then, more thoughtfully, ‘Not even the sex.’

‘Not high or low?’ he asked.

‘No. Whoever spoke was forcing their voice, the way you do when you sing falsetto.’

Brunetti thought of jigsaw puzzles, the old wooden ones his father had played with in the last years of his life, and he remembered those magic moments when a single piece, perhaps containing half an eye and a dab of flesh, opened up a new colour and made sudden sense of those beige pieces lined up at the edge of the table that had been, until then, meaningless.

‘Are you a singer?’

Her eyes widened and she said, ‘I want to be. But not yet. I have years of work before that.’ With that infusion of passion, her natural voice returned, leaving behind the whisper and the stress, freeing its beauty.

‘Where are you studying?’ Brunetti asked, tiptoeing towards a place he could only suspect might be nearby.

‘Paris. At the Conservatory.’

‘Not here?’ he asked.

‘No, my school’s closed for the spring holiday, so I’ve come here to study with my father for a few weeks.’

‘Does he teach here?’

‘At the Conservatory, but only part time. He’s also one of the freelance
ripetitori
at the theatre. I’ve been working with him there.’

‘La Fenice?’ Brunetti asked, as if the city were full of theatres.

‘Yes.’

‘Ah, I see,’ Brunetti said. ‘Does he approve of what the French are teaching you?’

She smiled and, as happened when young people smiled, grew prettier. ‘My father’s always enthusiastic,’ she said with becoming modesty.

‘Only your father?’

She started to speak, and Brunetti saw her stop herself.

‘Who was it?’ he asked.

‘Signora Petrelli,’ she whispered, as though she had been asked who she thought could heal her broken arm and had replied, ‘La Madonna della Salute.’

‘How is it she heard you singing?’

‘She was going to her rehearsal room, and she passed the door where I was with my father, and she . . .’ The girl closed her eyes. And then a soft snoring sound came from her nose, and Brunetti knew he would get no more information from her that morning.

10

Brunetti went back to the nurses’ station, but the woman he had spoken to was not there. He pulled out his phone and, feeling ridiculous for his continued reluctance to go and talk to Rizzardi, called the pathologist’s number.

Rizzardi answered by asking, ‘You talk to her yet, Guido?’

‘Yes.’

‘What can you do about it?’

Brunetti had been thinking exactly this since he had spoken to the girl. ‘Try to find out if we have a camera over there.’

‘Camera?’ Rizzardi asked.

‘There are some in different places in the city,’ Brunetti explained. ‘Although it’s not likely there’d be one there.’

After a pause that could have been polite or impolite, Rizzardi inquired, ‘Too few tourists?’

‘Something like that.’

All irony fled Rizzardi’s voice and he asked, ‘Why would anyone do something like that?’

‘I have no idea.’ The son of a friend of Brunetti’s had been attacked on the street by a drug addict five years before, but this sort of random attack – a kind of vandalism against persons – was virtually unknown in the city. Rizzardi had no need to know that the girl’s assailant had spoken to her, so all Brunetti did was thank his friend for calling him.

‘I hope you find out who did it,’ Rizzardi said, then added, ‘I’ve got to go,’ and hung up.

Left to his own thoughts, Brunetti mentally listed the agencies that had installed
telecameras
in the city. The ACTV, he knew, had them on the
imbarcaderi
, both to see that the ticket sellers did not cheat their clients and to identify vandals. He knew that many buildings were protected or at least kept under surveillance by them, but who would bother to put one on a bridge that was likely to be used only by Venetians?

He recalled seeing a report about the surveillance cameras his own branch of the police had installed but failed to remember where they were; the Carabinieri certainly had some; and he had seen one in the alley that led to the offices of the Guardia di Finanza near Rialto.

He walked back to take another look at the young woman, but even before he reached her bed, he could hear her quiet snoring. He left the ward and made his way out into Campo SS Giovanni e Paolo.

The scaffolding still climbed both sides of the Basilica. Although it had been in place for years, Brunetti could not remember the last time he’d seen any workmen on it. On an impulse, he went into the Basilica, only to be stopped by a word from a man sitting in a wooden booth to the right of the door. Neither the booth nor the man had been there the last time Brunetti went into the church.

‘Are you a resident?’ the man asked.

A flash of outrage struck Brunetti, doubled by the fact that the man spoke Italian with a foreign accent. What else would he be, a man in a suit, at nine in the morning, going into a church? He lowered his head and stared through the glass at the man who had questioned him.

‘
Scusi, Signore
,’ the man said deferentially, ‘but I have to ask.’

This calmed Brunetti. The man was doing his job, and he was being polite about it. ‘Yes, I am,’ Brunetti said, then, though it was hardly necessary, ‘I’ve come to light a candle for my mother.’

The man smiled broadly and just as quickly covered his mouth to hide his missing teeth. ‘Ah, good for you,’ he said.

‘Would you like me to light one for yours?’

His hand fell from his mouth, and it opened in an ‘O’ of astonishment. ‘Oh, yes, please,’ he said.

Brunetti started to walk towards the main altar, his spirit uplifted by the lightness of everything before him. The sun streamed in from the east, tracing coloured patterns on the waving floor. Signs of the city’s majesty – doges and their wives sleeping away the centuries – lined both sides of the nave. He refused to look at the Bellini triptych on the right, still scandalized by the violence of the last restoration it had been subjected to, poor thing.

Halfway down the right aisle, he paused to study one segment of the stained-glass windows: with advancing years, Brunetti had lost the ability to soak in too much beauty at one time and thus tried to limit the dose when he could by studying only one thing, or two. He gazed up at the quartet of muscular, spear-bearing saints.

His mother had always harboured a special devotion to the mounted dragon-killer on the left, though she alternated between believing him to be San Giorgio or San Teodoro. Brunetti had never thought to ask her why she liked them so much, but now that she was gone, he had come to believe it was because she so hated bullies, and what greater bully than a dragon? He took a euro coin from his pocket and let it clank into the metal box. He took the two candles to which this entitled him and lit the wicks of first one, and then the other, from a burning candle. He placed them in the middle row and stepped back, watching until he was sure the flames would hold.

‘One’s for the mother of the guy at the door,’ he whispered, just to make sure they didn’t confuse things and credit both candles to his mother’s account. He took a final look at the saint, an old friend after all these years, nodded and turned away. As he went along the aisle, Brunetti kept his eyes down to avoid overloading himself, but he could hardly avoid the glory of the pavement.

At the door, he bent down, caught the man’s eye, and said, ‘Done.’

On the way to the Questura, he thought of the things he would need to know: first the location of the
telecamere
and then the name of the organs of state in charge of them. He also had to consider how willingly the different branches of the forces of order would disclose their activities, even to each other, and whether they would be willing to do this cooperatively and not insist upon a request from a magistrate.

He went immediately to the squad room and found Vianello at his desk. Open in front of him was an enormous file of documents with the name ‘Nardo’ on the cover. At Brunetti’s approach, the Sergeant looked up at him and, pasting a tortured expression on his face and reaching out a hand he was careful to make tremble, whispered, ‘Save me, save me.’

Having often been constrained to look at the same file, Brunetti raised his hands as if to ward off a malign apparition, and said, ‘Not the Marchesa again?’

‘The very same,’ Vianello said. ‘This time she’s accusing her neighbour of keeping wild cats in the courtyard.’

‘Lions?’ Brunetti asked.

Vianello tapped the back of his fingers on the page he had been reading and said, ‘No, the cats in the neighbourhood. This time, she claims he lets them in every night and feeds them.’

‘Even though he lives in London?’

‘She says she’s seen his butler feeding them,’ Vianello explained.

‘Who also lives in London,’ Brunetti offered.

‘She’s mad,’ Vianello said. ‘This is the seventeenth complaint we’ve had.’

‘And have to investigate?’ Brunetti asked.

Vianello closed the file and looked longingly at the wastepaper basket on the other side of the room. Resisting the impulse, he shoved the papers to the side of his desk and said, ‘If she weren’t the godmother of a cabinet minister, do you think we’d be wasting our time on this?’