Death in a Strange Country

‘Paola, I’m sorry. I thought I’d paid him, and then I forgot about it. I apologized to him.’

She set the glass down and gave the liver a quick jab.

‘Paola, it was only two hundred thousand lire. That’s not going to send your cousin Mario to the poorhouse.’

‘Why do you always call him, “my cousin Mario?”‘

Brunetti came within a hair’s breadth of saying, ‘Because he’s your cousin and his name is Mario,’ but, instead, set his glass down-on the worktop and put his arms around her. For a long time, she remained stiff, leaning away from him. He increased the pressure of his arms around her, and she relaxed, leaned against him, and put her head back against his chest.

They stayed like that until she poked him in the ribs with the end of the spoon and said, ‘liver’s burning.’

He released her and picked up his glass again.

‘I don’t know what she’s nervous about, but it upset her to see the corpse.’

‘Wouldn’t anyone be upset to see a dead man, especially someone they knew?’

‘No, it was more than that. I’m sure there was something between them.’

‘What sort of something?’

‘The usual sort.’

‘Well, you said she was pretty.’

He smiled. ‘Very pretty,’ She smiled. ‘And very,’ he began, searching for the right word. The right one didn’t make any sense. ‘And very frightened.’

‘Why do you say that?’ Paola asked, carrying the pan to the table and setting it down on a ceramic tile. ‘Frightened about what? That she’d be suspected of killing him?’

From beside the stove, he took the large wooden cutting board and carried it to the table. He sat and lifted the kitchen towel spread across the board and exposed the half-wheel of golden polenta that lay, suit warm and now grown firm, beneath it She brought a salad and the bottle of wine, pouring them both more before she sat down.

‘No, I don’t think it’s that,’ he said, and spooned liver and onions onto his plate, then added a broad wedge of polenta. He speared a piece of liver with his fork, pushed onions on top of it with his knife, and began to eat. As was his habit, he said nothing until his plate was empty. When the liver was gone and he was mopping the juice up with what remained of his second helping of polenta, he said; ‘I think she might know, or have some idea about, who killed him. Or why he was killed.’

‘Why?’

‘If you’d seen her look when she saw him. No, not when she saw that he was dead and that it was really Foster, but when she saw what killed him she was on the edge of panic. She got sick.’

‘Sick?’

‘Threw up.’

‘Right there?’

‘Yes. Strange, isn’t it?’

Paola thought for a while before she answered. She finished her wine, poured herself another half-glass. ‘Yes. It’s a strange reaction to death. And she’s a doctor?’ He nodded. ‘Makes no sense. What could she be afraid of?’

‘Anything for dessert?’

‘Figs.’

‘I love you.’

‘You mean you love figs,’ she said and smiled.

There were six of them, perfect and moist with sweetness. He took his knife and began to peel one. When he was done, juice running down both hands, he cut it in half and handed the larger piece to her.

He crammed most of the other into his mouth and wiped at the juice that ran down his chin. He finished the fig, ate two more, wiped at his mouth again, cleaned his hands on his napkin, and said, ‘If you give me a small glass of port, I’ll die a happy man.’

Getting up from the table, she asked, ‘What else could she be afraid of?’

‘As you said, that she might be suspected of having something to do with it. Or because she did have something to do with it.’

She pulled down a squat bottle of port, but before she poured it into two tiny glasses, she took the plates from the table and placed them in the sink. When that was done, she poured them both glasses of port and brought them back to the table. Sweet, it caught up with the lingering taste of fig. A happy man. ‘But I don’t think ifs either of those.’

‘Why?’

He shrugged. ‘She doesn’t seem like a murderer to me.’

‘Because she’s pretty?’ Paola asked and sipped at her port.

He was about to answer that it was because she was a doctor, but then he remembered what Rizzardi had said, that the person who killed the young man knew where to put the knife. A doctor would know that. ‘Maybe,’ he said, then changed the subject and asked, ‘Is Raffi here?’ He looked at his watch. After ten. His son knew he was supposed to be home by ten on school nights.

‘Not unless he came in while we were eating,’ she answered.

‘No, he didn’t,’ Brunetti answered, sure of the answer, unsure of how he knew.

It was late, they’d had a bottle of wine, glorious figs, and perfect port. Neither of them wanted to talk about their son. He’d still be there and still be theirs in the morning.

‘Should I put those in the sink for you?’ he asked, meaning the dishes but not meaning the question.

‘No. I’ll do it. You go and tell Chiara to go to bed.’ The dishes would have been less trouble.

‘Fire out?’ he asked when he walked into the living room.

She didn’t hear him. She was hundreds of miles and years away from him. She sat slouched low in the chair, her legs stretched out before her. On the arm of the chair were two apple cores, a packet of biscuits on the floor beside her.

‘Chiara,’ he said, then louder, ‘Chiara.’

She glanced up from the page, not seeing him for a moment, then registering that it was her father. She looked immediately down at the page, forgetting him.

‘Chiara, it’s time to go to bed.’

She turned a page.

‘Chiara, did you hear me? It’s time to go to bed.’

Still reading, she pushed herself up from the chair with one hand. At the bottom of a page, she paused long enough to look up from the book and give him a kiss, then she was gone, finger in the page. He lacked the courage to tell her to leave the book behind. Well, if he got up to the night, he could turn her light off.

Paola came into the living room. She bent and turned off the light beside the chair, picked up the apple cores and the packet of biscuits, and went back into the kitchen. Brunetti switched off the light and went down the corridor towards the bedroom.

* * * *

6

Brunetti got to the Questura at eight the next morning, stopping to get the papers on the way. The murder had made the eleventh page of the Corriere, which gave it only two paragraphs, had not made it into La Repubblica, understandable enough on a day that was the anniversary of one of the bloodier terrorist bombings of the Sixties, but had made it to the front page of the second section of Il Gazzettino, just to the left of a story, this one with a photo, about three young men who had died when their car slammed into a tree on the state highway between Dolo and Mestre.

The article said that the young man, whose name was given as Michele Fooster, was the apparent victim of a robbery. Drugs were suspected, though the article, in the manner of the Gazzettino, didn’t bother to specify what they were suspected of. Brunetti sometimes reflected that it was a good thing for Italy that a responsible Press was not one of the requirements for entry into the Common Market.

Inside the main door of the Questura, the usual human line snaked its way out of the Ufficio Stranieri, crowded with badly dressed and poorly shod immigrants from Northern Africa and newly freed Eastern Europe.