A Question of Belief

‘Good,’ Brunetti said. ‘Call the station in Bolzano and tell them to hold it. We should be there in twelve minutes, so I’ll just get from this one to that one and be back in four hours or so.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’ll call you back.’

Brunetti broke the connection, leaned against the window to the compartment where his family sat, and studied the mountains that soared up above the unbroken fields of apple trees.

After they had passed many fields, his phone rang and Griffoni said, ‘That train’s ten minutes late, so if yours is on time, you’ll make it easily. It’ll be on track four.’

‘I have to take my family to their train, so call them and tell them to have it wait until I get there.’

‘All right,’ she said. ‘Someone will meet you at this end.’

Brunetti pocketed his phone and turned to open the door to the compartment.

15

Later, as he sat on the train carrying him back to Venice, Brunetti reflected upon the way human nature could still surprise him: the young people had insisted on helping them carry their luggage to the connecting train, a conductor having met them and told Brunetti that the train to Venice would be delayed another ten minutes. When his family was aboard, the two young people disappeared, asking nothing about his mysterious reason for returning immediately to Venice. Brunetti kissed Paola and the children, promised he would come north again as soon as possible, and stood back from their train as it carried them off to Merano, to the mountains, and to the delights of sleeping under eiderdowns in the middle of August.

His own train back to Venice gave the same sensation, but intermittently, for the air conditioning was working only when it pleased, alternating blasts of tropical air with those more accurately described as arctic. The windows in the new trains did not open, so he and the other three people in the first-class compartment to which the conductor had taken him sat as if on some means of transport that alternated stops between Calcutta and Ulan Bator. Brunetti had sent his suitcase, and thus his sweaters, along with the family, so when the train was anywhere near Ulan Bator, he was forced to flee into the corridor, which was at least consistent in temperature, however elevated that temperature might be.

For the moment therefore, he could neither read in peace nor think calmly of the situation in Venice and what it might be necessary to do when he got there. He finally went down to the dining car, where the air conditioning was working perfectly, and sat and read the newspaper while drinking two coffees and a bottle of mineral water.

When the train pulled into Mestre, he called Griffoni’s number and was glad to hear that she would meet him at the railway station with a launch.

‘Vianello?’ he asked, knowing his friend was on vacation but hoping that Griffoni would have thought of phoning him.

‘I called him after I spoke to you. He knows someone in the Guardia Costiera, and they’ve got permission to enter Croatian waters to pick him up and bring him back.’

‘Who does he know?’ Brunetti asked.

‘All he said was that it was someone he went to school with,’ she explained.

‘Good. Thanks.’

The train started to move out of the station, and Brunetti broke the connection. As they crossed the bridge, his attention was distracted by enormous patches of seaweed clogging the surface of the water on both sides. The higher tide of the early morning had obscured them, but there was no hiding them now. They spent minutes travelling past them, and still they did not end. A few plastic bottles bobbed in the flat green mass which spread out relentlessly on both sides and which appeared to extend beneath the bridge, as well. Boats steered clear of it. No floating water birds went anywhere near it. Like a neglected patch of eczema, it grew.

He saw the police launch moored directly in front of the station and hastened down the steps towards it. So comfortable had he become in the dining car that it took him a moment to recognize the sensation of invasive heat. His shirt was stuck to his back before he reached the boat, and he was annoyed to realize he had packed his new sunglasses and left them in the suitcase that had, by now, arrived at an altitude of 1,450 metres on the Alp above Glorenza.

He nodded to the pilot, Foa, stepped on board, and took Griffoni’s hand. Her tan made her hair seem even blonder, and her short skirt showed an expanse of bronzed leg. She looked like anything but a commissario di polizia on duty. Foa unmoored the boat and went back into the cabin. He started the engine.

‘Vianello?’ Brunetti asked.

‘He’s back already. Waiting for us at the victim’s home. It took him less than three hours.’

Brunetti smiled. Even if it ruined Vianello’s vacation plans to have to return to Venice, to do so on a Coastguard patrol boat at full throttle across the Adriatic was some compensation. ‘I bet he loved it.’

‘Who wouldn’t?’ she asked and he heard the envy in her voice.

The boat turned left into the Canale di Cannaregio, passed at moderate speed under both bridges and out into the laguna. Griffoni explained that she had spoken with Dottor Rizzardi, who said he would try to get back from his house in the Dolomites by that evening. If he could not, then it would be the following morning.

Griffoni had not seen the body, which had been taken to the morgue before Scarpa called her to tell her about the crime. Brunetti asked carefully about Scarpa’s behaviour and his response to the news that both he and Vianello were returning from vacation to take over the case.

‘I didn’t tell him,’ Griffoni said.

‘So he thinks the case is his?’ Brunetti asked.

‘His and mine, but since I’m only a woman, I obviously don’t count.’ They had chosen to stay out on the deck in the hope of catching the breeze created by their motion, so the wind carried some of their words away. Brunetti took another look at her. Though she was decidedly a woman, Brunetti would never preface that noun with the adjective ‘only’. ‘So my arrival will surprise him,’ Brunetti said, not without satisfaction.

‘I hope it upsets him, too,’ she said with the sort of malice that acquaintance, however brief, with Lieutenant Scarpa so often provoked.

The water in this part of the laguna was surprisingly choppy, and both of them were forced to grab the railing to keep from being tossed about. Foa nevertheless put the boat to full throttle in the open water, drowning out other sound and the possibility of conversation. Brunetti glanced to the left, his eye hopping from Murano to Burano and to the bell tower of Torcello, barely visible in the muggy air.

They turned right, passed a canal and turned into the next. Brunetti saw the man leading the camel and asked, ‘What are we doing in the Misericordia?’

‘His home is up ahead, on the left.’

‘Oddio,’ Brunetti exclaimed. ‘It’s not Fontana, is it?’

‘I told you his name when I called,’ insisted Griffoni.

Brunetti remembered the clicks and noises on the phone line and said, ‘Yes, of course.’

‘You know him?’ she asked, interested.

‘No. But I know about him.’

‘Worked at the Tribunale, didn’t he?’ she asked.

Feeling the boat begin to slow, Brunetti said only ‘Yes’, before moving forward to take the mooring rope. Foa stopped on the right side of the canal, and Brunetti stepped up to the pavement and tied the rope to a metal ring. He extended a hand to Griffoni and helped her from the boat; Foa said he would find a bar to get out of the sun and told them to call him when they were finished.

She led the way: down to the first bridge, across it and up the calle to the first right. Then the third house on the right: a large brown portone with a panel of names and bells beside it.

Griffoni had a key and let them in to what turned out to be a large courtyard filled with potted palms and bushes, the far side already shady in the late afternoon. Motion there caught his eye. A young officer, one of the