Who, then? The sister in Argentina? Had she come back and exacted vengeance for her older sister’s death? After waiting almost half a century? The idea was ludicrous.
Who, then? Not the director, Santore. Not for a friend’s canceled contract. Santore certainly had enough connections, after a lifetime in the theater, to find his friend a place to sing, even if he had the most modest of talents. Even if he didn’t have any talent at all.
That left the widow, but Brunetti’s instincts told him that her grief was real and that her lack of interest in finding the person responsible had nothing to do with protecting herself. If anything, she seemed to want to protect the dead man, and that led Brunetti back where he had begun, needing and wanting to know more about the man’s past, about his character, about the crack in his careful pose of moral rectitude that would have led someone to put poison in his coffee.
Brunetti was uncomfortable with the fact that he didn’t like Wellauer, had none of the compassion and outrage he usually felt for those whose lives had been stolen from them. He couldn’t shake himself of the belief that— he couldn’t express it any more clearly— Wellauer had somehow been involved in his own death. He snorted; everyone is involved in his own death. But no matter how he tried, the idea would neither disappear nor clarify, and so he kept searching for the detail that might have provoked the death, and he kept failing to find it.
The next morning was as dismal as his mood. A thick fog had appeared during the night, seeping up from the waters on which the city was built, not drifting in from the sea. When he stepped out of his front door, cold, misty tendrils wrapped themselves around his face, slipped beneath his collar. He could see clearly for only a few meters, and then vision grew cloudy; buildings slipped into and out of sight, as though they, and not the fog, shifted and moved. Phantoms, clothed in a nimbus of shimmering gray, passed him on the street, floating by as though disembodied. If he turned to follow them with his eyes, he saw them disappear, swallowed up by the dense film that filled the narrow streets and lay upon the waters like a curse. Instinct and long experience told him there would be no boat service on the Grand Canal; the fog was far too thick for that. He walked blindly, telling his feet to lead, allowing decades of familiarity with bridges, streets, and turns to take him over to the Zattere and the landing where both the number 8 and the number 5 stopped on their way to the Giudecca.
Service was limited, and the boats, divorced from any idea of a schedule, appeared randomly out of clouds of fog, radar screens spinning. He waited fifteen minutes before a number 5 loomed up, then slammed heavily into the dock, rocking it and causing a few of the people waiting there to lose their balance and fall into one another. Only the radar saw the crossing; the humans huddled down in the cabin, blind as moles in sand.
When he got off the boat, Brunetti had no choice but to walk forward until he could almost touch the front of the buildings along the waterfront. Keeping them an arm’s length away, he walked toward where he remembered the archway to be. When he got to an opening in the line of facades, he turned into it, not really certain that this was Corte Mosca. He could not read the name, though it was painted on the wall only a foot above his head.
The humidity had worsened the smell of cat; the cold sharpened it. The dead plants in the courtyard now lay under a blanket of fog. He knocked at the door, knocked again more loudly, and heard her call out from the other side. ‘Who is it?’
‘Commissario Brunetti.’
Again he listened to the slow, angry rasp of metal on metal as she pulled back the heavy bolts that secured the door. She pulled it toward her. The sharp increase in humidity forced her to give it an upward tug in the middle of its arc to lift it from the uneven floor. Still wearing the overcoat, though it was now buttoned tight, she didn’t bother to ask him what he wanted. She stepped back enough to allow him to enter, then slammed the door behind him. Again she bolted it securely before turning to lead him down the narrow passageway. In the kitchen, he went and sat near the stove, and she stopped to kick the rags back into place beneath the door.
She shuffled to her chair and collapsed into it, to be immediately enveloped in the waiting scarves and shawls.
‘You’re back.’
‘Yes.’
‘What do you want?’
‘What I came for last time.’
‘And what’s that? I’m an old woman, and I don’t remember things.’ The intelligence in her eyes belied that.
‘I’d like some information about your sister.’
Without bothering to ask which one he meant, she said, ‘What do you want to know?’
‘I don’t want to make you remember your grief, Signora, but I need to know more about Wellauer so that I can understand why he died.’
‘And if he deserved to die?’
‘Signora, we all deserve to die, but no one should get to decide for us when that will be.’
‘Oh, my.’ She chuckled dryly. ‘You’re a real Jesuit, aren’t you? And who decided when my sister would die? And who decided how?’ As suddenly as her anger had flared up, it died, and she asked, ‘What do you want to know?’
‘I know of your relation with him. I know that he was said to be the father of your sister’s child. And I know that she died in Rome in 1939.’
‘She didn’t just die. She bled to death,’ she said in a voice as bleak as blood and death. ‘She bled to death in a hotel room, the room he put her in after the abortion and where he didn’t go to visit her.’ The pain of age struggled in her voice with the pain of memory. ‘When they found her, she had been dead for a day. Perhaps two. And it was another day before I learned about it. I was under house arrest, but friends came to tell me about her. I left the house. I had to strike a policeman to do it, knock him to the ground and kick him in the face to do it, to get away. But I left. And none of them, none of the people who saw me kick him, none of them stopped to help him.
‘I went with my friends. To where she was. Everything that was necessary had already been done, and we buried her the same day. No priest came, because of the way she died, so we just buried her. The grave was very small.’ Her voice trailed away, borne off by the power of memory.
He had seen this happen many times in the past, and he therefore had the sense to remain quiet. The words had started now, and she wouldn’t be able to stop until she had said them all and gotten free of them. He waited,
