‘All right,’ Rizzardi said, his face relaxing, but not by much. ‘It’s been about a year since her colleagues started to notice that something was wrong, or at least that long that they’ve spoken to me about it. She’s moody, unhappy, or sometimes overly happy, but the mood never lasts more than a few days. In the past, her work was always perfect: she was the model the other people in the lab set their standards by.’
‘And now?’
Rizzardi turned away from the draped form and, keeping it between himself and Brunetti, started to walk towards the door. Just short of it, he stopped, and turned back to meet Brunetti’s glance. ‘But now she comes in late, or doesn’t come in at all. And she makes mistakes, mixes up samples, drops things. Nothing she’s done has ever been serious enough to cause a patient harm, but people are beginning to suspect that’s next. One of the men who works with her told me it’s as if she doesn’t have the courage to quit and wants to get herself fired.’ Rizzardi stopped.
‘What’s she like?’ Brunetti asked.
‘She’s a good woman. Introverted, lonely, not very attractive. But good. At least that’s what I’d say. But who knows anything?’
‘Indeed,’ Brunetti confirmed. ‘Thanks for telling me.’ Then, feeling obliged to honour a promise he did not understand, he added, ‘I’ll do what I can.’
‘Good,’ Rizzardi said and opened the door. He went out, leaving the door open, and Brunetti was quick to follow him into the greater warmth of the corridor.
Brunetti walked slowly towards the exit, past the bar filled with people wearing pyjamas or street clothing. When he reached the grassy courtyard that had once been the monks’ cloister, he went and sat on the low wall on the far side. Like a diver coming up to the surface, Brunetti needed to acclimatize himself to the greater temperature before daring to go out under the sun again. As he sat, his thoughts turned to the dead Fontana, recalibrating everything. He would never know the man’s feelings for his mother: for any man, they were never simple. But his attentions to Judge Coltellini now had to be viewed in a different light or from a different angle. This was no case of star-crossed love, nor spurned affections. What was it Signorina Elettra had said? That he seemed grateful to her, the way a supplicant was grateful to the Madonna when his prayer was answered? But if his answered prayer had nothing to do with the magic of romance, then what did it have to do with? Brusca’s words floated back to him: if you eliminate sex, sex, sex, you are left with money, money, money.
A grey cat came across the grass and jumped up beside him. He put out a hand, and the cat pressed its head against it. He rubbed it behind the ears, and the cat flopped against him. For a few minutes, he rubbed the cat’s ears until it surprised him by falling asleep. Brunetti moved it gently aside, said, ‘I told you not to wear your fur’, and started back towards the Questura.
Signorina Elettra seemed pleased to see him, but did not smile. ‘I’m sorry your vacation was cut short, Commissario,’ she said as he came in.
‘So am I. My family is draped in sweaters and lighting a fire at night.’
‘You went to Alto Adige, didn’t you?’
‘Yes, but I didn’t make it past Bolzano.’
She shook her head at the shame of this, then asked, ‘What may I do for you?’
‘Did you find the names of the people involved in the cases in those papers?’ he asked.
‘Not until this morning, I’m afraid,’ she said, pointing to some papers on her desk. Brunetti recognized the court documents he had been sent. ‘I was going to bring them up later.’
Brunetti glanced at his watch and saw that it was not yet eleven. ‘Then good thing I came here.’
She slid the papers towards him. ‘Two of the cases involve Signor Puntera,’ she said, pointing to the ones he had circled in pencil and red pen.
‘Signor Puntera,’ Brunetti said. ‘How very interesting.’ He nodded for her to proceed.
‘The first is a claim on the part of the family of a young man who was injured in an accident in one of Signor Puntera’s warehouses.’
‘Here?’
‘Yes. He’s still got two warehouses, over near the Ghetto. They’re used to store supplies for one of his companies that does building restoration.’
‘What happened?’
‘This young man — it was only his third day on the job, poor devil — was carrying bags of dry cement out to a boat in the canal behind the warehouse. Another worker was in the boat, stacking them. When the first one didn’t come back for some time, the man in the boat went to look for him and found him on the floor, well, found his feet. He’d been buried under a landslide of bags of cement.’
‘What happened?’
‘Who knows?’ she asked rhetorically. ‘No one saw. The defence claims he must have yanked one out from the bottom of the pile or that he hadn’t stacked them correctly in the first place. There was one of those little tractors in the warehouse, loading pallets of bags of sand, and the plaintiff’s lawyer says the driver must have dislodged something from the other side of the pile. The driver denies it and says he was on the other side of the warehouse all morning.’
‘What happened to him?’
‘He fell on his face and was buried under the bags. Some of them opened, and sand poured around him. He broke a leg and an arm, but the lack of oxygen was much worse.’
‘How bad is he?’
‘His lawyer says he’s like a child.’
‘
‘His lawyer,’ Brunetti repeated. ‘Who brought the case?’
‘His parents. He’s going to need lifetime care, and they don’t want him to be in a state hospital.’ Brunetti nodded: no parent would want this for a child. Or for themselves. Or for the man next door.
‘What else?’
‘His lawyer told me that, at the beginning, Puntera made the family a private offer if they’d withdraw the case. They refused, and so it went to court, but things have gone wrong with the case from the beginning. Things like delays and postponements.’
‘I see,’ Brunetti said. He looked at the paper and saw that the accident had taken place more than four years before. ‘And until it’s settled in court, where is he?’
‘He’s in the hospital in Mestre, but his family takes him home on weekends.’
‘What will happen?’ Brunetti asked, though there was no reason she should know.
She shrugged. ‘Sooner or later, they’ll accept his offer. There’s no way of knowing when this will be settled — civil cases are backed up for eight years as it is — so eventually they’ll give in. People like this can’t go on paying for lawyers for years.’
‘And the boy?’
‘The lawyer says it will be a mercy for them all if he dies, a mercy for him, too.’
Brunetti let some time pass, then asked, ‘And the other case?’
‘The warehouses again. He doesn’t own them: he rents them. And the landlord wants him out and the space back so that he can turn them into apartments.’
‘Quickly,’ Brunetti begged the surrounding air, ‘please, someone tell me a story I’ve never heard in Venice before.’
Ignoring him, she went on, ‘So the longer the case is delayed, the longer he can continue to use the warehouses.’
‘How long has
‘Three years. At one time, he had his workers go down and protest about the eviction in front of Ca Farsetti, right in front of the entrance the mayor generally uses.’
‘And His Honour? What tactic did he employ with them?’
‘Do you mean how did he appease the workers while making it clear that his sympathies were entirely with their employers?’
Brunetti held up his hands in awe, as if the Cumaen Sibyl herself had spoken. ‘Never have I heard the man’s
