CHAPTER EIGHT
On the boat back to the city, he decided to stop in unannounced and see if Flavia Petrelli had perhaps remembered that she had spoken to the Maestro the night before. Buoyed by the sense of having something to do, he got off the boat at Fondamente Nuove and walked toward the hospital, which shared a common wall with the basilica of SS. Giovanni e Paolo. Like all street addresses in Venice, the one the American had given him was virtually meaningless in a city with only six different names for street addresses and a numbering system without plan or reason. The only way to find it was to get to the church and ask someone who lived in the neighborhood. She ought to be easy to find. Foreigners tended to live in more fashionable parts of Venice, not this solidly middle- class area, and very few foreigners managed to sound as if they had grown up here, as Brett Lynch did.
In front of the church, he inquired first for the number, then for the American, but the woman he had approached had no idea of where to find either. She told him to go and ask Maria, saying the name as if she expected him to know exactly which Maria she meant. Maria, it turned out, ran the news-stand in front of the grammar school, and if Maria didn’t know where she lived, then the American didn’t live in the neighborhood.
At the bottom of the bridge in front of the basilica, he found Maria, a white-haired woman of indeterminate age who sat inside her kiosk, dispensing newspapers as though they were fortunes and she the Sibyl. He gave her the number he was looking for, and she replied, ‘Ah, Signorina Lynch,’ saying it with a smile and giving the name the two syllables demanded by Italian. Straight down Calle della Testa, first right, fourth bell, and would he mind taking her newspapers along with him?
Brunetti found the door with no trouble. The name was carved into a brass plate, scratched and tarnished with age, that stood next to the bell. He rang once and, after a moment, a voice through the intercom asked who he was. He resisted the desire to announce that he had come to deliver the papers, and, instead, simply gave his name and title. Whoever it was he had spoken to said nothing, but the door snapped open in front of him, allowing him to enter the building. A single flight of stairs lay off to the right, and he began to climb, noting with pleasure the slight concavity that hundreds of years of use had hollowed out of each step. He liked the way the declivity forced him to walk up the center of the staircase. He went up a double flight, then another. At the fourth turn, the stairway suddenly broadened out, and the original, worn marble steps were replaced by slabs of clean-cut Istrian marble. This part of the building had been extensively restored, and very recently.
The stairs ended at a black metal door. As he approached it, he sensed that he was being examined through the minuscule spyhole that was cut above the top lock. Before he could raise his hand to knock, the door was pulled open by Brett Lynch, who stepped aside and asked him to come in.
He muttered the ritual
He was surprised to find himself in a vast open space, easily ten meters by fifteen. The wooden floor was made of the thick oak beams used to support the oldest roofs in the city. The walls had been stripped of paint and plaster and taken down to the original brick. The most remarkable thing in the room was the tremendous brightness that glared from the uncovered skylights, six of them, set in triple pairs on either side of the peaked ceiling. Whoever had received permission to alter the external structure of a building this old, Brunetti reflected, either had powerful friends or had blackmailed both the mayor and the city planner. And it had all been done recently; the smell of fresh wood told him that.
He turned his attention from the house to its owner. The previous night, he had failed to notice how tall she was, tall in that angular way Americans seemed to find attractive. But her body, he noticed, had none of the frailty that often came with tallness. She looked healthy, fit, a quality that was heightened by her clear skin and eyes. He found that he was staring at her, struck by the intelligence in her eyes, struck as well by the fact that he was seeking to find cunning in them. He was curious about his own refusal to accept her for what she seemed to be, an attractive, intelligent woman.
Flavia Petrelli sat, rather artistically, he thought, just to the left of one of the long windows that filled the left side of the room and through which, at a distance, he could see the bell tower of San Marco. She made no acknowledgment of his presence other than a faint nod, which he returned before saying to the other, ‘I brought you your papers.’
He was careful to hand them to her with the front page exposed, turned so that she would see the pictures and read the shouting headlines. She glanced down at them, quickly folded them shut, and said, ‘Thank you,’ before turning to toss them on a low table.
‘I compliment you on your home, Miss Lynch.’
‘Thank you,’ was her minimal reply.
‘It’s unusual to see so much light, so many skylights in a building of this age,’ he said, prying.
‘Yes, it is, isn’t it?’ she said blandly.
‘Come, Commissario,’ interrupted Flavia Petrelli, ‘certainly you didn’t come here to discuss interior design.’
As if to offset the brusqueness of her friend’s remark, Brett Lynch said, ‘Please have a seat, Dottor Brunetti,’ and motioned him to a low divan that stood in front of a long glass table at the center of the room. ‘Would you like some coffee?’ she asked, the bright hostess, this a purely social call.
Though he had little desire for coffee, he said he’d like some, so as to see how the singer would respond to his declaration that he was there for a while and had no sense of haste. She turned her attention back to a musical score that lay on her lap and ignored him while her friend disappeared to make the coffee.
While she was busy with the coffee and while Petrelli was busy ignoring him, he took a careful look around the apartment. The wall he faced was filled with books from floor to ceiling. He easily recognized the Italian ones by the way their titles ran from bottom to top, the English by their titles running top to bottom. More than half of the books were printed in characters he assumed to be Chinese. All of them looked as if they had been read more than once. Interspersed among the books were pieces of ceramic—bowls and small human figures—that appeared no more than faintly Oriental to him. One shelf was taken up with boxed sets of compact discs, suggesting that they were complete operas. To their left stood very complicated-looking stereo equipment, and in the far corners two large speakers stood on wooden pedestals. The only pictures on the walls were bright modern splashes that didn’t appeal to him.
After a short time, Lynch returned from the kitchen, carrying a silver tray on which stood two small espresso cups, spoons, and a silver sugar bowl. Today, he noticed, she was wearing jeans that had never heard of America and another pair of those boots, this pair a dark reddish brown. A color for each day of the week? What was it in this woman that irritated him so? The fact that she was a foreigner who spoke his language as well as he did and lived in a house he could never hope to afford?
She set the cup down in front of him and he thanked her, waiting for her to take a seat opposite him. He offered to spoon sugar into the second cup, but she shook her head in refusal. He spooned two sugars into his own cup and sat back on the sofa. ‘I’ve just come from San Michele,’ he said by way of introduction. ‘The cause of death was cyanide.’ She raised her cup to her lips, sipped. ‘It was in the coffee.’
She replaced her cup in the saucer and placed both on the table.
Flavia Petrelli glanced up from the score, but it was the other who spoke. ‘Then at least it was quick. How thoughtful of whoever did it.’ She turned to her friend. ‘Did you want coffee, Flavia?’
Brunetti thought it all a bit too theatrical, but he ignored this and asked the question she had clearly meant to prepare by her remark. ‘Am I to take it that you didn’t like the Maestro, Miss Lynch?’
‘No,’ she answered, looking at him directly. ‘I didn’t like him, and he didn’t like me.’
‘Was there any particular reason?’
She moved a hand dismissively. ‘We disagreed about many things.’ That, he supposed, was meant to be sufficient reason.
