About Face

so she would have seen the people on the landing below from a different angle.

‘How much of what happened did you see?’ he asked.

‘I saw him pull out the gun, then he handed it to her, then he raised his hand to hit her.’

‘Could you hear anything?’ he asked.

‘No, I was too far away, and those other two were coming up the stairs towards us. I didn’t notice him say anything, and her back was to me. Did you hear anything?’

He hadn’t, so he answered, ‘No,’ then added, ‘but there’s got to be a reason he did what he did.’

‘And why she did what she did, I’d say,’ Griffoni added.

‘Yes, of course.’ He thanked her for the number and hung up.

Franca Marinello answered her phone on the second ring and seemed surprised that Brunetti had called. ‘Does this mean I have to go back to the Questura?’ she asked.

‘No, Signora, it doesn’t. But I’d like to come and speak to you.’

‘I see.’

There was a long pause, after which she said, offering no explanation, ‘I think it would be more convenient if we talked somewhere else.’

Brunetti thought of her husband. ‘As you like.’

‘I could meet you in about twenty minutes,’ she suggested. ‘Would Campo Santa Margherita be convenient for you?’

‘Of course,’ he said, surprised at such a modest neighbourhood. ‘Where?’

‘There’s that gelateria on the side opposite the pharmacy.’

‘Causin,’ Brunetti supplied.

‘In twenty minutes?’

‘Fine.’

She was there when he arrived, sitting at a table at the back. She stood when she saw him enter, and he was struck anew by the conflict of her appearance. From the neck down, she looked like any casually dressed woman in her mid-thirties. Tight black jeans, expensive boots, a pale yellow cashmere sweater and a patterned silk scarf. Once his eyes rose above the scarf, however, everything changed, and he was looking at the sort of face usually reserved for the ageing wives of American politicians: too-tight skin, too-wide mouth, eyes pulled here and there by the attentions of surgeons.

He shook her hand, again noticing the firmness of her grasp.

They sat, a waitress appeared, and he could think of nothing he wanted to drink.

‘I’m going to have camomile tea,’ she said, and it suddenly seemed the only possible choice. He nodded, and the waitress went back to the counter.

Not knowing how to begin, he asked, ‘Do you come here often?’ feeling awkward at having begun with such a stupid question.

‘In the summer I do. We live quite close. I love ice-cream,’ she said. She glanced out of the large plate glass window. ‘And I love this campo. It’s so — I don’t know the right word — so full of life; there are always so many people here.’ She glanced at him and said, ‘I suppose this is the way it was years ago, a place where ordinary people lived.’

‘Do you mean the campo or the city?’ Brunetti asked.

Thoughtfully, she answered, ‘I suppose I must mean both. Maurizio talks about the way the city used to be, but I’ve never seen that. I’ve known it only as a foreigner, I suppose you could say, and not for very long.’

‘Well,’ Brunetti conceded, ‘not very long by Venetian time, perhaps.’

Brunetti judged they had spent enough time saying polite things and so said, ‘I finally read the Ovid.’

‘Ah,’ was her response. Then, ‘I suppose it wouldn’t have made any difference, not really, if you had read it any sooner.’

He wondered what difference it was meant to make, but he did not ask her that. Instead, he asked, ‘Would you tell me more about it?’

They were distracted by the waitress’s return. She carried a large tray with a teapot and a small jar of honey, along with cups and saucers. She set everything on the table, saying, ‘I remembered you like it with honey, Signora.’

‘How very kind of you,’ Marinello said, her smile in her voice. The waitress left; she lifted the top of the teapot and bounced the teabags up and down a few times, then replaced it. ‘I always think of Peter Rabbit when I drink this,’ she told Brunetti as she picked up the teapot. ‘His mother gave it to him when he was sick.’ She swirled the pot a few times.

Brunetti had read the book to the kids when they were small and remembered that this was true, but he said nothing.

She poured out the tea, spooned some honey into hers and pushed the bottle in his direction. Brunetti added some to his, trying to remember if old Signora Rabbit had added honey or not.

He knew the tea was too hot to drink, so he ignored it and asked, choosing not to return to a discussion of Ovid, ‘How did you meet him?’

‘Who? Antonio?’

‘Yes.’

She stirred the spoon around in her cup and set it in her saucer. Then she looked across at Brunetti. ‘If I tell you that, then I’ll have to tell you everything, won’t I?’

‘I’d like you to do that,’ Brunetti answered.

‘Well, then.’ She returned to stirring the tea. She glanced up, then back at her cup, and finally said, ‘My husband has many business contacts.’

Brunetti was silent. ‘Some of them are. . well, they are persons who. . persons he would prefer I knew nothing about.’

She looked to see that he was following and continued, ‘A few years ago, he began a collaboration. .’ She stopped herself short. ‘No, that’s too easy a word, I think; or too evasive. He hired a company run by people he knew to be criminals, though what he was doing was not illegal.’

She sipped at her tea, added more honey, and stirred it around. ‘I learned later,’ she began, and Brunetti made note of the fact that she did not say how she came to learn whatever it was she was about to tell him, ‘that it happened at dinner. He was out with the most important of them: they were celebrating their contract or their agreement or whatever they called it. I had refused to go with him, and Maurizio told them I was sick. It was the only thing he could think of that wouldn’t offend them. But they understood, and they were offended.’

She looked at him and said, ‘You have more experience with these people than I do, I suppose, so you know how important it is to them that they be respected.’ At Brunetti’s nod, she added, ‘I think part of it must have begun there, when Maurizio didn’t bring me to meet them.’ She shrugged and said, ‘It doesn’t matter, I suppose. But one does like to understand things.’

Suddenly, she said, ‘Drink your tea, Commissario. You don’t want it to get cold.’ Commissario, then, Brunetti thought. He did as he was told and drank some: it brought back his youth and being in bed with a cold or the flu.

‘When he told them that I was sick,’ she went on, ‘the man who had invited him asked what was wrong — I had had more dental work that day.’ She looked at him as if to see whether he understood the significance of this, and he nodded. ‘It was all part of the other thing.’

She drank more tea. ‘And Maurizio must have sensed their resentment because he told them more than he should have; at least, enough for them to understand what had happened. It must have been Antonio who asked about it.’ She looked at him again and said in a voice as cold as death, ‘Antonio could be very charming and sympathetic.’

Brunetti said nothing.

‘So Maurizio told them at least part of what had happened. And then he said something. .’ She paused and asked him: ‘Did you ever read the play about Becket and Henry the Somethingth?’

‘Second,’ Brunetti said.

‘So you know the part about the king’s asking his knights if no one would rid him of that pesky cleric, or something like that?’

‘Yes, I know it.’ The historian in him wanted to add that the story was probably apocryphal, but this did not