or by the waves of humidity that crept in from the
From the left, the bells of San Polo rang out for the six-thirty mass. Below him, in the house on the opposite side of the
The morning chill began to bite at Brunetti, driving him back into the kitchen, glad of its warmth and the presence of Paola, who now sat at the table and looked far more pleasant than anyone had a right to look before nine in the morning.
She gave him a cheery good morning; he returned a grunt. He set his empty coffee cup in the sink and picked up a second, this one topped with hot milk, which Paola had placed on the counter for him. The first had begun to prod him toward humanity; this one might finish the job.
‘Was that Michele who called last night?’
‘Um.’ He rubbed at his face; he drank more coffee. She pulled a magazine from the end of the table and paged through it, sipping at her own mug. Not yet seven, and she’s looking at Giorgio Armani jackets. She turned a page. He scratched his shoulder. Time passed.
‘Was that Michele who called last night?’
‘Yes.’ She was pleased to have gotten a real word from him and asked nothing more. ‘He told me about Wellauer and Santina.’
‘How long ago was all that?’
‘About forty years, after the war. No, just before it, so it was more like fifty years.’
‘What happened?’
‘He got the sister pregnant, and she died after an abortion.’
‘Did the old woman tell you any of this?’
‘Not a word.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘I’ll have to talk to her again.’
‘This morning?’
‘No; I’ve got to go to the Questura. This afternoon. Tomorrow.’ He realized how reluctant he was to return to that cold and misery.
‘If you do go, wear your brown shoes.’ They would help to protect him against the cold; nothing would protect him, or anyone, against the misery.
‘Yes, thanks,’ he said. ‘Do you want to take a shower first?’ he asked, remembering that she had an early class that morning.
‘No, go ahead. I’ll finish this and make some more coffee.’
As he walked by her, he bent to kiss her head, wondering how she managed to remain civil, even friendly, with the grumbling thing he was in the morning. He smelled the flowery scent of her shampoo and noticed that the hair just above her temple was faintly flecked with gray. He had never noticed it before, and he bent to kiss her there again, trembling at the fragility of this woman.
When he got to his office, he collected all the papers and reports that had accumulated concerning the conductor’s death and began to read through them all again, some for the third or fourth time. The translations of the German reports were maddening. In their exhaustive attention to detail—as in the list of items taken from Wellauer’s home during each of the two robberies—they were monuments to Germanic efficiency. In their almost total lack of information about the conductor’s activities, personal or professional, during the war years, they gave evidence to an equally Germanic ability to remove a truth by simply ignoring it. Given the current president of Austria, Brunetti had to admit it was a tactic that met with remarkable success.
Wellauer had discovered his second wife’s body. She had called a friend shortly before going down into the cellar to hang herself and had invited the woman to join her for a cup of coffee, a blending of the macabre and the mundane that upset Brunetti each time he read the report. Delayed, the woman had arrived only after Wellauer had found his wife’s body and phoned the police. That meant he could just as easily have found anything she might have left—a note, a letter—and destroyed it.
Paola had given him Padovani’s number that morning and told him that the journalist was planning to go back to Rome the following day. Knowing that the lunch could go on his expense account as ‘interviewing a witness,’ Brunetti called Padovani and invited him to lunch at Galleggiante, a restaurant Brunetti liked but could seldom afford. The other man agreed to meet him there at one.
He called down to the office where the translators worked and asked that the one who worked with German be sent up to him. When she arrived, a young woman he had often nodded to on the stairs or in the corridors of the building, he explained that he needed to put a call through to Berlin and might need her help if the person he spoke to didn’t speak either English or Italian.
He dialed the number Signora Wellauer had given him. The phone was picked up on the fourth ring, and a woman’s voice said crisply— Germans always sounded crisp to him— ‘Steinbrunner.’ He passed the phone to the translator and could understand enough of what she said to glean that the doctor was in his office, not in his home, which was the number he had been given. He signaled the translator to make the next call, listened while she explained who she was and what the call was about. She held up her hand in a waiting gesture and nodded. Then she handed the phone to him, and he thought that some miracle had occurred and Dr. Steinbrunner had answered his phone in Italian. Instead of a human voice, however, he heard mild-mannered, innocuous music coming across the Alps at the cost of the city of Venice. He handed the phone back to her and watched while she beat time in the air with her hand while they waited.
Suddenly she pulled the phone closer and said something in German. She spoke a few more sentences and then told Brunetti, ‘His receptionist is transferring the call. She said he speaks English. Do you want to handle it,
