personal interest gave us a peephole at the Questura-what they were doing, what they were saying, looking everywhere but here. When he left, promising to report later, I took a few minutes to look over the water entrance. Maybe a film of blood had stuck to the canal steps like a bathtub ring, maybe some stains had soaked into the marble. But everything was clean, even tidy, the paving stones piled neatly under the tarp, no smears on the damp floor. Nothing on the boat outside, washed by rain. One of the cleaning women would do the entrance hall today, swabbing down the marble floor, wiping away every mark, every trace. I went back upstairs.
“You don’t have to stay,” my mother said, feet up under an afghan now that Cavallini was gone.
“Of course I’ll stay.”
“No, don’t. I know you. You’ll moon around and treat me like bone china. And I’m not, you know. I won’t break.”
“Somebody has to answer the phone.”
“Oh god, it’s going to start, isn’t it? All the friendly little calls. And we can’t not answer,” she said, shooting me a glance. “What if it’s the police?”
So I spent the rest of the day at home, making cups of tea while my mother retreated into herself. She made no pretense of passing the time by reading, playing cards. She was waiting. She would walk over to the window, then back, absorbed in a world of her own, not even hearing the phone. She smoked and drank tea, thanking me in a voice so abstracted it was almost a monotone, like that of someone who’d taken painkillers and become vague. I fielded Mimi and Bertie and everyone else who called, an afternoon of them, all eager for news, sniffing drama. “She thinks he’s left me,” my mother said when Celia called. “Walked out on me.” So far from what Celia or anyone was thinking that for a second I wondered if she had, in fact, taken pills.
I looked at Il Gazzettino again. Mimi with stars in her hair. The man she called Ernesto, evidently someone important. Not the picture of us with the police, but Cavallini would remember it, which was all that mattered. When exactly had my mother called? While we played and someone else rowed out to the lagoon.
Inspector Cavallini stopped in at the end of the day, in time for drinks, but had nothing new. None of Gianni’s patients had heard from him. No accidents had been reported.
“Imagine,” my mother said, her voice flat. “You can just disappear. I didn’t know it could be so easy.”
“I’m sorry, I must ask. Do you have any thoughts yourself, signora? Something he might have said to you?” My mother was shaking her head. “Anyone who might have wished him some harm?”
I glanced up, but his eyes were on my mother, not even taking me in.
“Of course not. Why would anyone?”
“In this life, every man has his enemies.”
“Why do you think it’s someone-why not a stroke?”
“Because we would have found him by now. A man falls in the street, he would be seen. So of course the possibility is that someone put him somewhere.”
“Where?”
Cavallini shrugged. “The usual place in Venice is the sea.”
I went over to the drinks table, an excuse not to look at him. I heard the tarp splash in.
“The sea? But then-”
“Yes, it’s difficult. We cannot dredge the lagoon. A canal, yes, but not the lagoon. It’s too big. We have to wait for the sea to give him up.”
“Give him up,” my mother said quietly. “You mean his body.”
Cavallini said nothing.
After he left, I made two drinks, but my mother waved hers away. Angelina had lighted a fire and my mother sat next to it, staring, listening to the sound of the burning wood. The phone had stopped. The servants, sensing a kind of illness, had gone silent in the other rooms. I sat pinned to my chair, unable to break the quiet, feeling it like a weight around me, pressing. My mother kept staring at the fire, her eyes dull. I knew it wouldn’t always be like this, that it would pass, but while it was here, the terrible quietness between us, I felt it squeezing, worse than Gianni’s hand on my throat.
At dinner we sat at the same end of the long table. The cook had made a risotto dotted with shellfish, but my mother only picked at it, barely sipping her wine, still talking to herself somewhere else. Finally she put down the fork and lit a cigarette instead.
“Adam,” she said, “that business at the party.”
I looked up.
“You know, when Claudia-” She stopped, waiting to see if I was following. I nodded. “It’s because she thought Gianni had worked for the Germans, you said.”
I nodded again, waiting.
“That’s what you did in the army. Investigate people like that.”
“Yes.”
“And you thought so too. Because she said?”
“No, because he did. All Claudia knew is that he reported her father.”
She took this in without moving, wanting to see it through.
“So if it’s true-” She hesitated. “There would be this hate.”
“She didn’t hate him enough to-”
My mother looked at me, puzzled, then waved this away. “Darling, not her, the others. Inspector Cavallini said, who wished him harm? and I thought, well, if it’s true, there might be people-they’d wish him harm. But that was the war. I thought all that was over. I mean, who goes around now-?” She paused, taking another sip of her wine. “He’s the last, you know. His brother was killed in an accident.”
“No. He was killed by partisans. For collaborating with the Germans.”
She flinched. “What a lot you know.”
“I had his file pulled.”
“You investigated his brother?”
“And Gianni. I thought we should know.”
She looked down, flustered, busying herself putting out the cigarette. “You had no right to do that, Adam. No right.”
“Mother-”
She raised her hand to her forehead. “I know, I know. But the point, darling,” she said, taking a breath, controlling herself, “is that if he did those things, or people thought he did, by mistake or something, then they might have a reason-” She drifted off, letting me finish.
“Yes, if they thought he did,” I said, making it easier.
“It just doesn’t seem possible somehow. That he would. You know, I’ve known him, my god, all my life. Almost all my life.”
“People change.”
“Yes. But they don’t, really.” She looked down at her glass. “He was in love with me, you know, even then.”
“And you?” I said, staring across.
“Me? Oh, no. I was in love with your father. I was, you know. And then I came here-I don’t know why, really, I wasn’t looking for him-and there he is and he’s still in love with me. All those years. It’s funny, the curves life throws at you.” She raised her head. “Did he really do that? Work with them?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“Maybe he had to. They forced people, didn’t they?”
I said nothing.
“But that would be a reason. For somebody to-”
“It’s possible.”
She thought about this for a minute, then started brushing the tablecloth, a nervous movement. “Oh, what’s wrong with me? Here we are burying him and we don’t know anything. He could be in a hospital somewhere, anything.”
“Yes,” I said, squeezed again, almost out of breath.
“It’s just, if he’s not-” She stopped her hand, looking at the table. “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
She went to bed early, or at least went to her room. I saw the sliver of light under the door, heard the creak
