Brunetti bought the apartment ten years ago, and ever since, he had lived in recurrent fear of being confronted with a summons to legalize the obvious. He trembled at the prospect of the Herculean task of getting the permits that would authenticate both that the apartment existed and that he had a right to live there. The mere fact that the walls were there and he lived within them would hardly be thought relevant. The bribes would be ruinous.
He opened the door, glad of the warmth and smell he associated with the apartment: lavender, wax, the scent of something cooking in the kitchen at the back; it was a mixture that represented to him, in a way he couldn’t explain, the existence of sanity in the daily madness that was his work.
‘Is that you, Guido?’ Paola called from the living room. He wondered who else she might be expecting at two in the morning, but he didn’t ask.
‘Yes,’ he called back, kicking off his shoes and removing his coat, just now beginning to accept how tired he was.
‘Would you like some tea?’ She came into the hall and kissed him lightly on the cheek.
He nodded, making no attempt to hide his exhaustion from her. Trailing her down the hall toward the kitchen, he took a chair while she filled the kettle and put it on the stove to boil. She pulled down a bag of dried leaves from a cupboard above her head, opened it, sniffed, and asked, ‘Verbena?’
‘Fine, fine,’ he answered, too tired to care.
She tossed a handful of dried leaves into the terra-cotta teapot that had been his grandmother’s and came over to stand behind him. She kissed the back of his head, right on the spot where his hair was beginning to thin. ‘What is it?’
‘At La Fenice. Someone poisoned the conductor.’
‘Wellauer?’
‘Yes.’
She placed her hands on his shoulders and gave them a gentle squeeze that he found encouraging. No comment was necessary; it was obvious to both of them that the press would make a sensation of the death and become screamingly insistent that the culprit be found as quickly as possible. Either he or Paola could have written the editorials that would appear in the morning, were probably being written even now.
The kettle shot out a burst of steam, and Paola went to pour the water into the chipped pot. As always, he found her mere physical presence comforting, found solace in observing the easy efficiency with which she moved and did things. Like many Venetian women, Paola was fair-skinned and had the red-gold hair so often seen in portraits of the women of the seventeenth century. Not beautiful by any ordinary canon, she had a nose that was a bit too long and a chin that was more than a bit too determined. He liked both.
‘Any ideas?’ she asked, bringing the pot and two mugs to the table. She sat opposite him, poured out the aromatic tea, then went back to the cupboard and returned with an immense jar of honey.
‘Its too early,’ he said, spooning honey into his mug. He swirled it around, clicking his spoon against the side of the mug, then spoke in rhythm with the clicking of the spoon. ‘There’s a young wife, a soprano who lied about not seeing him before he died, and a gay director who had an argument with him before he was killed.’
‘Maybe you ought to try to sell the story. It sounds like something we’d see on TV
‘And a dead genius,’ he added.
‘Yes, that would help.’ Paola sipped at her tea, then blew on it to cool it. ‘How much younger is the wife?’
‘Easily young enough to be his daughter. Thirty years, I’d say.’
‘OK,’ she said, using one of the Americanisms toward which her vocabulary was prone. ‘I say it was the wife.’
Though he had repeatedly asked her not to do this, she insisted on choosing a suspect at the beginning of any investigation he worked on, and she was generally wrong, for she always opted for the most obvious choice. Once, exasperated beyond bearing, he’d asked her why she insisted on doing it, and she’d explained that since she had written her dissertation on Henry James, she considered herself entitled to the release of finding the obvious in real life, since she’d never found it in his novels. Nothing Brunetti had ever done could stop her from making her choice, and nothing could ever induce her to inject any subtlety into her selection.
‘Which means,’ he said, still swirling his spoon, ‘that it will turn out to be someone in the chorus.’
‘Or the butler.’
‘Hmm,’ he agreed, and drank his tea. They sat in companionable silence until the tea was gone. He took both mugs and placed them in the sink, and set the teapot on the counter beside it, safe from harm.
* * * *
CHAPTER SIX
The morning after the conductor’s body was found, Brunetti arrived at his office a bit before nine, to discover that an event almost as marvelous as that of the night before had transpired: his immediate superior, Vice- Questore Giuseppe Patta, was already in his office and had been calling for Brunetti for almost half an hour. This fact was revealed to him first by the porter who stood just inside the entrance to the building, then by an officer he met on the stairs, then by the secretary who worked for him and the two other commissarios of the city. Making no attempt to hurry, Brunetti checked his mail, phoned the switchboard to see if there had been any calls, and at last went down the flight of stairs that led to his superior’s office.
Cavaliere Giuseppe Patta had been sent to Venice three years before in an attempt to introduce new blood into the criminal justice system. In this case, the blood had been Sicilian and had proved to be incompatible with that of Venice. Patta used an onyx cigarette holder and had been known, upon occasion, to carry a silver-headed walking stick. Though the first had made Brunetti stare and the second laugh, he tried to reserve judgment until he had worked long enough with the man to decide if he had a right to these affectations. It had taken Brunetti less than a month to decide that though the affectations did suit the man, he had little right to them. The vice- questore’s work schedule included a long coffee each summer morning on the terrace of the Gritti, and, in the winter, at Florian’s. Lunch was usually taken at the Cipriani pool or Harry’s Bar, and he usually decided at about four to ‘call it a day.’ Few others would so name it. Brunetti had quickly learned, as well, that Patta was to be addressed, at all times, as ‘Vice-Questore’ or the even grander ‘Cavaliere,’ the provenance of which title remained obscure. Not only did he insist that his title be used, but he had to be addressed formally as
Patta preferred not to be disturbed by any of the more distressing details of crime or other such messiness. One of the few things that could drive him to run his fingers through the graceful curls at his temples was a suggestion in the press that the police were in any way lax in their duties. It did not matter what the press chose to comment on: that a child had managed to slip through a police cordon to give a flower to a visiting dignitary or that notice had been taken of the open sale of drugs by African street vendors. Any suggestion that so little as hinted at anything less than a police stranglehold on the inhabitants of the city sent Patta into paroxysms of accusation, most of which fell upon his three commissarios. His ire was usually expressed in long memos to them, in which the crimes of omission by the police were made to sound infinitely more heinous than those of commission by the criminal population.
Patta had been known, as the result of a suggestion in the press, to declare various ‘crime alerts,’ in which he singled out a particular crime, much in the way he would select an especially rich dessert from the cloth-draped sweet table in a restaurant, and announced in the press that, this week, the crime in question would be wiped out or, at least, minimized. Brunetti could not, when he read of the most recent ‘crime alert’—for this was information that was generally revealed to him only by the press—help but think of the scene in
Brunetti often mused that the crime rate in Venice was low—one of the lowest in Europe and certainly the lowest in Italy—because the criminals, and they were almost always thieves, simply didn’t know how to get away. Only a resident could navigate the spiderweb of narrow
