The Girl of his Dreams

From the kitchen Sergio appeared with three bottles of prosecco. 'Before the coffee’ he said, ‘I think we should say goodbye.'

The trays ended up on the low table in front of the sofa, and Gloria, Paola, and Chiara went back into the kitchen to return a few minutes later, each with six prosecco glasses sprouting out from the fingers of her upraised hands.

Sergio popped the first cork, and at the sound the mood in the room changed, as if by magic. He poured the wine into the glasses, making the round as the bubbles subsided. He opened another bottle and then the last, filling more glasses than there were people. Everyone crowded round the table and picked up a glass, then stood with it half raised, waiting.

Sergio looked across at his brother; but Brunetti raised his glass and nodded towards his elder brother, signalling that the toast, and the family, were now his.

Sergio raised his glass and the room grew suddenly still. He lifted it higher, looked around at the people in the room, and said, To Amelia Davanzo Brunetti and to those of us who love her still.' He drank down half the glass. Two or three people repeated his toast in soft voices, and then everyone drank. By the time they lowered their glasses, softness had stolen back into the room, and voices were natural again. The topics of life returned to their conversation, and with them the future tense sneaked back in.

Some glasses were abandoned and a number of people drank coffee, ate a few of the biscuits, and then they began to idle slowly towards the door, each of them pausing to speak to, and then kiss, both of the brothers.

In twenty minutes, there was no one left in the room except Sergio and Guido and their wives and children. Sergio looked at his watch and said, ‘I've reserved a table for all of us, so I think we should leave this here and go and have lunch’

Brunetti emptied his glass and set it beside the still full ones that stood abandoned in a circle on the table. He wanted to thank Sergio for having found something right but undramatic to say, but he didn't know how to do it. He started towards the door, then turned back and embraced his brother. Then he pulled away and went through the door. He went down the steps in silence and outside into the sun to wait for the rest of the Brunettis.

3

The funeral took place on a Saturday, so there was no need for any of them to stay home from work or school the following day. By Monday morning, life had been restored to a normal rhythm, and everyone went off at the usual hour, though in Paola's case, Monday being one of the days when she had no need to present herself at the university, her place of work would be her desk. Brunetti left her sleeping. When he let himself out of the building, he found the day warm and sunny but still faintly damp. He started down towards Rialto, where he could buy a newspaper.

He was relieved to find that he dragged only a slight burden of grief. The relief he felt that his mother had managed to escape from a situation she would have found intolerable had she been aware of it brought him something akin to peace.

The stalls selling scarves, ‘I-shirts, and tourist kitsch were all open by the time he passed them, but his thoughts kept him blind to their garish colours. He nodded to one or two people he recognized but kept walking at a pace intended to discourage anyone who might want to stop and speak to him. He glanced at the clock on the wall, as he did every time he passed it, then turned towards the bridge. Piero's shop, on his right, was the only one that still sold food: everyone else had switched to junk of one sort or another. He was suddenly assaulted by the smell of chemicals and dyes, as if he had been transported to Marghera or it had come to him. Sharp and cloying, the smell ate at the membranes of his nose and brought tears to his eyes. The soap shop had been there for some time, but until now only the artificial colours had offended him; today it was the stench. Did they expect people to wash their bodies with this?

On his way towards Campo San Giacomo he noticed packages of pasta, bottles of aceto balsamico, and dried fruit on stalls that had formerly sold fresh fruit. Their lurid colours screeched at him, the visual equivalent of the odours that had forced him to hasten his steps. Gianni and Laura had closed their fruit stand and gone years ago, and so had the guy with the long hair and his wife, though they seemed to have sold it to Indians or Sri Lankans. How long would it be before the fruit market disappeared entirely and Venetians would be forced, like the rest of the world, to buy their fruit in supermarkets?

Before he could dwell on this litany of misery, the memory of Paola's voice overrode his musings, and he heard her telling him that if she wanted to listen to old women complain about how good things had been in the old days and how the whole world was falling apart, she'd go and sit in the doctor's waiting room for an hour some morning: she did not want to have to listen to it from him, in her own home.

Brunetti smiled at the memory, reached the top of the bridge and unwrapped his scarf from his neck before he started down the other side. He cut to the left, past the Ufficio Postale, up and down the bridge, and into Ballarin for a caffe and a brioche. He stood, crowded by people on either side, and realized that the memory of Paola's complaint – a complaint about his complaints – had cheered him. He caught his own image in the mirror behind the bar and grinned back at it.

He paid and continued on his way to work, cheered by the warmer weather. As he crossed Campo Santa Maria Formosa, he unbuttoned his jacket. Approaching the Questura, he saw Foa, the pilot, leaning over the side of his launch and gazing up the canal towards the bell tower of the Greek church.

'What's happening, Foa?' he called and stopped beside the boat.

Foa turned and smiled when he saw who it was. 'It's one of those crazy tuffetti, Commissario. He's been fishing in there since I got here.'

Brunetti glanced up the canal towards the church tower but saw only the undisturbed surface of the water. 'Where is he?' he asked, walking alongside the boat until he came abreast of the prow.

'He went under just about there,' Foa said, pointing up the canal, *by the tree on the other side.'

All Brunetti could see was the water of the canal and, at the end, the bridge and the tilting bell tower. 'How long's he been under?' he asked.

'Seems like for ever, but it can't have been even a minute, sir,' Foa said, glancing at Brunetti.

Both men stood silently, staring up the canal, their eyes studying the surface of the water, waiting for the tuffetto to appear.

And then there he was, popping up from below like a plastic duck in a bathtub. One moment there was no sign of him, and the next he was sliding along silently, smoothly, tiny waves radiating out on the surface of the water as he paddled forward.

'You think it's good for him to eat those fish?' Foa -asked.

Brunetti looked down at the water just beside the boat: grey, motionless, opaque. 'No worse than it is for us, I suppose,' he answered.

When Brunetti looked back, the tiny black bird had disappeared beneath the water again. He left Foa to it, went inside and up to his office.

As he left the house that morning, one of Brunetti's preoccupations had been the iminent return of Vice- Questore Giuseppe Patta. His immediate superior had been absent for two weeks, attending a conference on international police cooperation against the Mafia, held in Berlin. Though the invitation specified that attendees were to hold the rank of commissario or its equivalent, Patta had decided his own attendance was necessary. His absence had been facilitated by his secretary, Signorina Elettra Zorzi, who phoned him in Berlin at least twice a day, often more frequently than that, asking for his instructions about a number of ongoing cases. Since Patta could be counted on never to call the Questura while away, the possibility did not occur to him that Signorina Elettra had been calling him from a hotel in Abano Terme, where she had gone for two weeks of sauna, mud, and massage.

Brunetti went to his office and looked at the papers on his desk. He opened his newspaper and glanced at the front page. When he had read that, he skipped to pages eight and nine, where the existence of countries other than Italy might be acknowledged. Fixed elections in Central Asia, with twelve dead and troops in the streets; Russian businessman and two bodyguards killed in an ambush; mudslides in South America brought on by illegal