Death in a Strange Country

hand and stopped the driver from closing the door after her. ‘Thank you for coming, Doctor,’ he said, bowing down, one hand on the roof of the car, to speak to her.

‘You’re welcome,’ she said and didn’t bother with thanking him for having taken her to San Michele.

‘I’ll look forward to seeing you in Vicenza,’ he said and watched for her reaction.

It was sudden and strong, and he saw a flash of that same fear he had seen when she first looked at the wound that had killed Foster. ‘Why?’

His smile was bland. ‘Perhaps I can find out more about why he was killed.’

She reached in front of him and pulled at the door. He had no choice but to step back from its closing weight. It slammed shut, she leaned across the seat and said something to the driver, and the car moved away. He stood and watched as it inserted itself into the traffic flowing out of Piazzale Roma, up the graded road towards the causeway. At the top, it disappeared from his sight, an anonymous pale green vehicle going back to the mainland after a trip to Venice.

* * * *

5

Without bothering to glance into the Carabinieri station to see if his return with the Captain had been noticed, Brunetti went back to the boat, where he found Monetti returned to his newspaper. Years ago, a foreigner - he couldn’t now remember who it was - had remarked on how slowly Italians read. Ever since then, whenever he observed someone nursing a single newspaper all the way from Venice to Milan, Brunetti thought of this; Monetti had certainly had a good deal of time, but he appeared still to be in the first pages. Perhaps boredom had forced him to begin reading through it a second time.

‘Thanks, Monetti,’ he said, stepping onto the deck.

The young man looked up and smiled. ‘I tried to slow her down as much as possible, sir. But it’s crazy, with all these maniacs who get right on your tail and follow too closely.’ Brunetti had been in his thirties when he learned to drive, forced to do it when he was posted to Naples for a three-year assignment. He did it with trepidation, and he drove badly, slowed by caution, and too often enraged by those same maniacs, the variety who drove cars, not boats.

‘Would you mind taking me up to San Silvestro?’ he asked.

‘I’ll take you right to the end of the calle if you’d like, sir.’

‘Thanks, Monetti. I would.’

Brunetti flipped the rope up over the top of the piling and wrapped it carefully around the metal stanchion on the side of the boat. He moved ahead and stood beside Monetti as they started up the Grand Canal. Little that was to be seen down at this end of the city interested Brunetti, surely as close to a slum as the island had. They passed the railway station, a building that surprised by its drabness.

It would have been easy for Brunetti to grow indifferent to the beauty of the city, to walk in the midst of it, looking and not really seeing. But then it always happened: a window he had never noticed before would swim into his ken, or the sun would gleam in an archway, and he would actually feel his heart tighten in response to something infinitely more complex than beauty. He supposed, when he bothered to think about it, that it had something to do with language, with the fact that there were fewer than eighty thousand people who lived in the city, and perhaps with the fact that he had gone to kindergarten in a fifteenth-century palazzo. He missed this city when he was away from it, much in the same way he missed Paola, and he felt complete and whole only while he was here. One glance around him, as they sped up the canal, was proof of the wisdom of all of this. He had never spoken of this to anyone. No foreigner would understand; any Venetian would find it redundant.

Soon after they passed under the Rialto, Monetti pulled the boat over to the right. At the end of the long calle that led up to Brunetti’s building, he slipped the engine into neutral, hovered for the briefest of instants beside the embankment, and let Brunetti jump to shore. Even before Brunetti could turn to wave his thanks, Monetti was gone, swinging around, back down the way he had come, blue light flashing as he took himself home to dinner.

Brunetti walked up the calle, legs tired with all the jumping on and off boats that he seemed to have been doing all day, since the first boat had picked him up here more than twelve hours ago. He opened the enormous door into the building and closed it quietly behind him. The narrow stairway that hairpinned its way up to the top of the building served as a perfect trumpet of sound, and they could, even four floors above, hear it whenever it slammed. Four floors. The thought burdened him.

By the time he reached the final turn in the staircase, he could smell the onions, and that did a great deal to make the last flight easier. He glanced at his watch before he put his key into the door. Nine-thirty. Chiara would still be awake, so he could at least kiss her good night and ask her It’she had done her homework. If Raffaele were there, he could hardly risk the first, and the second would be futile.

‘Ciao, Papa,’ Chiara called from the living room. He put his jacket in the cupboard and went down the corridor to the living room. Chiara lolled in an easy chair, looking up from a book that lay open in her lap.

As he walked into the room, he automatically switched on the track lighting above her. ‘You want to go blind?’ he asked, probably for the seven hundredth-time.

‘Oh, Papa, I can see enough to read.’

He bent over her and kissed her on the cheek she held up to him. ‘What are you reading, Angel?’

‘It’s a book Mamma gave me. It’s fabulous. It’s about this governess who goes to work for a man, and they fall in love, but he’s got this crazy wife locked up in the attic, so he can’t marry her, even though they’re really in love. I just got to the part where there’s a fire. I hope she burns up.’

‘Who, Chiara?’ he asked. ‘The governess or the wife?’

‘The wife, silly.’

‘Why?’

‘So Jane Eyre,’ she said, making a hash of the name, ‘can marry Mister Rochester,’ to whose name she did equal violence.

He was about to ask another question, but she had gone back to the fire, so he went into the kitchen, where Paola was bent over the open door of the washing-machine.

‘Ciao, Guido,’ she said, standing. ‘Dinner in ten minutes.’ She kissed him, turned back to the stove, where onions were browning in a pool of oil.

‘I just had a literary discussion with our daughter,’ he said. ‘She was explaining the plot of a great classic of English literature to me. I think it might be better for her if we forced her to watch the Brazilian soap operas on television. She’s in there, rooting for the fire to kill Mrs Rochester.’

‘Oh, come on, Guido, everyone roots for the fire when they read Jane Eyre.’ She stirred the onions around in the pan and added, ‘Well, at least the first time they read it. It isn’t until later that they realize what a cunning, self-righteous little bitch Jane Eyre really is.’

‘Is that the kind of thing you tell your students?’ he asked, opening a cabinet and pulling out a bottle of Pinot Noir.

The liver lay sliced and waiting on a plate beside the frying pan. Paola slipped a slotted ladle under it and flipped half into the pan, then stepped back to avoid the spitting oil. She shrugged. Classes at the university had just resumed, and she obviously didn’t want to think about students on her own time.

Stirring, she asked, ‘What was the captain-doctor like?’

He pulled down two glasses and poured wine into both. He leaned back against the worktop, handed her one, sipped, answered, ‘Very young and very nervous.’ Seeing that Paola continued to stir, he added, ‘And very pretty.’

Hearing that, she sipped at the glass she held in one hand and looked at him.

‘Nervous about what?’ She took another sip of the wine, held the glass up to the light, and said, ‘This isn’t as good as what we got from Mario, is it?’

‘No,’ he agreed. ‘But your cousin Mario is so busy making a name for himself in the international wine trade that he doesn’t have time to bother with orders as small as ours.’

‘He would if we paid him on time,’ she snapped.

‘Paola, come on. That was six months ago.’

‘And it was more than six months that we kept him waiting to be paid.’