Death at La Fenice

patient, living now in the past with her.

‘We dressed her all in white. And then we buried her, in that tiny grave. That tiny hole. I went back to my home after the funeral, and they arrested me. But since I was already arrested, it didn’t make any difference. I asked them about the policeman, and they said he was all right. I apologized to him when I saw him later. After the war, when the Allies were in the city, he hid in my cellar for a month, until his mother came and took him away. I had no reason to dislike him or want to hurt him.’

‘How did it happen?’

She glanced up at him in confusion, honestly not understanding.

‘Your sister and Wellauer?’

She licked her lips and studied her gnarled hands, just visible among the shawls. ‘I introduced them. He had heard about the way my singing career started, so when they came to Germany to see me sing, he asked me to introduce him to them, to Clara and to little Camilla.’

‘Were you involved with him then?’

‘Do you mean, was he my lover?’

‘Yes.’

‘Yes, he was. It started almost immediately, when I went up there to sing.’

‘And his affair with your sister?’ he asked.

Her head snapped back as though he had hit her. She leaned forward, and Brunetti thought she was going to strike out at him. Instead she spat. A thin, watery gobbet landed on his thigh and slowly sank into the fabric of his trousers. He was too stunned to wipe it away.

‘Damn you. You’re all the same. Still all the same,’ she shouted in a wild, cracked voice. ‘You look at something, and you see the filth you want to see.’ Her voice grew louder, and she repeated what he had said, mockingly. ‘His affair with my sister. His affair.’ She leaned closer to him, eyes narrowed with hatred, and whispered, ‘My sister was twelve years old. Twelve years old. We buried her in her First Communion dress; she was still that small. She was a little girl.

‘He raped her, Mr. Policeman. He didn’t have an affair with my little sister. He raped her. The first time, and then the other times, when he threatened her, threatened to tell me about her, about what a bad girl she was. And then, when she was pregnant, he sent us both back to Rome. And I didn’t know anything about it. For he was still my lover. Making love to me and then raping my little baby sister. Do you see, Mr. Policeman, why I’m glad he’s dead and why I say he deserved to die?’ Her face was transformed by the rage she had carried for half a century.

‘Do you want to know it all, Mr. Policeman?’

Brunetti nodded, seeing it, understanding.

‘He came back to Rome, to conduct that Norma there with me. And she told him she was pregnant. She was too frightened to tell us, too afraid that we would tell her what a bad girl she was. So he arranged the abortion, and he took her there, and then he took her to that hotel. And he left her there, and she bled to death. And when she died, she was still only twelve years old.’

He saw her hand move out of its wrapping of shawls and scarves, saw it swing up toward him. He did little more than move his head back, and the blow missed him. This maddened her, and she slammed her gnarled hand against the wooden arm of the chair and shrieked with the pain of it.

She lunged out of her chair, sending shawls and blankets slithering to the floor. ‘Get out of my house, you pig. You pig.’

Brunetti leapt away from her, tripping over the leg of his chair, and stumbled down the corridor before her. Her hand remained raised in front of her, and he fled from screaming rage. She stopped, panting, while he fumbled with the bolts, pulling them back. In the courtyard, he could still hear her voice as she screamed at him, at Wellauer, at the world. She slammed and bolted the door, but still she raged on. He stood shivering in the fog, shaken by the anger he had raised in her. He forced himself to take deep breaths, to forget that first instant when he had felt real fear of the woman, fear of the tremendous impulse of memory that had pulled her up from her chair and toward him.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

He had to wait almost half an hour at the boat stop, and by the time the number 5 came, he was thoroughly chilled. There had been no change in the atmosphere, so during the trip back across the laguna to San Zaccaria, he huddled in the barely heated inner cabin and looked out on damp whiteness that clawed at the misty windows. Arrived at the Questura, he walked up to his office, ignoring the few people who greeted him. Inside, he closed the door but kept his coat on, waiting for the chill to pass from his body. Images crowded into his mind. He saw the old woman, a fury, screaming her way down the damp corridor; he saw the three sisters in the artful V of their pose; and he saw the little girl lying dead in her First Communion dress. And he saw it all, saw the pattern, saw the plan.

He finally took off his coat and tossed it on the back of a chair. He went to his desk and started to search through the papers littered across its top. He set files and folders aside, hunting until he found the green-covered autopsy report.

On the second page, he found what he remembered would be there: Rizzardi had made note of the small bruises on arm and buttock, listing them only as ‘traces of subcutaneous bleeding, cause unknown.’

Neither of the two doctors he had spoken to had mentioned giving Wellauer any sort of injection. But a man who was married to a doctor would hardly have had to make an appointment to receive an injection. Nor did Brunetti believe he had to have an appointment to speak to that doctor.

He returned to the pile of papers and found the report from the German police and read through it until he found something that had tugged at his memory. Elizabeth Wellauer’s first husband, Alexandra’s father, not only taught at the University of Heidelberg but was chairman of the Department of Pharmacology. She had stopped to see him on her way to Venice.

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