Death in a Strange Country

would allow him to evade anyone who might be following him as well as the battalions of ravening tourists who invariably centred their attacks on the area around San Marco. Each year, it grew harder to have patience with them, to put up with their stop-and-go walking, with their insistence on walking three abreast, even in the narrowest calle. There were times when he wanted to scream at them, even push them aside, but he contented himself by taking out all of his aggression through the single expedient of refusing to stop or in any way alter his walking in order to allow them a photo opportunity. Because of this, he was sure his body, back, face, elbow appeared in hundreds of photos and videos; he sometimes contemplated the disappointed Germans, looking at their summer videos during the violence of a North Sea storm, as they watched a purposeful, dark-suited Italian walk in front of Tante Gerda or Onkel Fritz, blurring, if only for an instant, the vision of sunburned, Lederhosen-clad, sturdy thighs as they posed upon the Rialto Bridge, in front of the doors of the Basilica of San Marco, or beside a particularly charming cat. He lived here, damn it, so they could wait for their stupid pictures until he got past them, or they could take home a picture of a real Venetian, probably the closest any of them would come to making contact with the city in any significant way. And, oh yes, wasn’t he a happy man to take home to Paola? Especially during her first week of classes.

To avoid this, he stopped in at Do Mori, his favourite bar, just a few steps from Rialto, and said hello to Roberto, the grey-haired proprietor. They exchanged a few words, and Brunetti asked for a glass of Cabernet, the only thing he felt like drinking. With it, he ate a few of the fried shrimp that were always available at the bar, then decided to have a tramezzino, thick with ham and artichoke. He had another glass of wine and, after it, he began to feel human, for the first time that day. Paola always accused him of becoming foul- tempered when he didn’t eat for a long time, and he was beginning to believe she might be right. He paid and left, cut back to Rugetta and continued towards his home.

In front of Biancat, he stopped to study the flowers in the window. Signor Biancat saw him through the immense glass window, smiled arid nodded, so Brunetti went inside and asked for ten blue irises. As he wrapped them, Biancat talked about Thailand, from which he had just returned after a week-long conference of orchid breeders and growers. It seemed to Brunetti a strange way to spend a week, but then he reflected that he had, in the past, gone to both Dallas and Los Angeles for police seminars. Who was he to say that it was stranger to spend a week talking about orchids than about the incidence of sodomy among serial killers or the various objects used in rapes?

The stairs to his apartment generally served as an accurate gauge of the state of his being. When he felt good, they hardly seemed to be there; when he felt tired, his legs counted out each of the ninety-four. Tonight, someone had clearly slipped in an extra flight or two.

He opened the door, anticipating the smell of home, of food, of the varied odours he had come to attribute to this place where they lived. Instead, upon entering, he smelled only the odour of freshly-made coffee, hardly the thing longed for by a man who had just spent the whole day working in - yes - America.

‘Paola?’ he called and glanced down the corridor towards the kitchen. Her voice answered him from the other direction, from the bathroom, and then he smelled the sweet scent of bath salts that was carried down the hall towards him on a sea of moist, warm air. Almost eight at night, and she was taking a bath?

He walked down the hall and stood outside the partly-open door. ‘You in there?’ he asked. The question was so stupid that she didn’t bother to answer it. Instead, she asked, ‘You going to wearyour grey suit?’

‘Grey suit?’ he repeated, stepping into the steam-filled room. He saw her towel-wrapped head, floating disembodied on a cloud of suds, as though it had been carefully placed there by the person who had decapitated her. ‘Grey suit?’ he repeated, thinking what an odd couple they would appear, he in his grey suit and she in her suds.

Her eyes opened, the head turned towards him, and she gave him The Look, the one that always made him wonder if she was looking through him to where his suitcase lay in the attic, estimating how long it would take her to pack it for him. It was enough to remind him that tonight was the night when they were to go to the Casino, invited there, with her parents, by an old friend of her family. It meant a late dinner, hideously expensive, made worse, or better - he could never decide which - by the fact that the family friend paid for it with his golden, or was it platinum, credit card. And then there always followed an hour or so of gambling or, worse, watching other people gamble.

Having been the investigating officer both times that the staff of the Casino had been discovered at various sorts of peculation and having been, in both cases, the arresting officer, Brunetti hated the unctuous politeness with which he was treated by the Director and the staff. If he gambled and won, he wondered if the game had been fixed in his favour; if he lost, he had to consider the possibility that vengeance had been taken. In neither scenario did Brunetti bother to speculate on the nature of luck.

‘I thought I’d wear the dark blue one,’ he said, holding out the flowers and bending over the tub. ‘I brought you these.’

The Look changed into The Smile, which could still, even after twenty years with her, occasionally reduce his knees to jelly. A hand, then an arm, lifted out of the water. She touched the back of his wrist, leaving it wet and warm, then pulled her arm back under the surface of bubbles. ‘I’ll be out in five minutes.’ Her eyes caught his and held. ‘If you’d been earlier, then you could have had a bath, too.’

He laughed and broke the mood. ‘But then we would have been late for dinner.’ True enough. True enough. But he cursed the time he had lost by stopping for a drink. He left the bathroom and went down the long hall to the kitchen and placed the flowers in the sink, plugged it, and added enough water to cover their stems.

In their bedroom, he saw that she had placed a long red dress across the bed. He didn’t remember the dress, but he seldom did remember them, and he thought it best not to mention it. If it turned out to be a new dress and he remarked on it, he would sound like he thought she was buying too many clothes, and if it was something she had worn before, he would sound like he paid no attention to her and hadn’t bothered to notice it before. He sighed at the eternal inequality of marriage, opened the closet, and decided that the grey suit would be better. He removed his trousers and jacket, took off his tie, and studied his shirt in the mirror, wondering if he could wear it that evening. Deciding against it, he took it off and draped it across the back of a chair, then began dressing himself anew, vaguely bothered with having to do it but too much an Italian to consider the possibility of not doing so.

A few minutes later, Paola came into the bedroom, golden hair free, the towel now wrapped around her body, and walked to the dresser where she kept her underwear and sweaters. Casually, carelessly, she tossed the towel onto the bed and bent to open a drawer. Slipping a new tie under his collar and beginning to knot it, he studied her as she stepped into a pair of black panties, then pulled a bra around herself and hooked it. To distract himself, he thought of physics, which he had studied at the university. He doubted that he would ever understand the dynamics and stress forces of female undergarments: so many things to hold, support, keep in place. He finished knotting his tie and pulled his jacket from the closet. By the time he had it on, she was zipping the side of her dress and stepping into a pair of black shoes. His friends often complained of waiting eternities while their wives dressed or put on make-up; Paola always beat him to the door.

She reached into her side of the closet and drew out a floor-length coat that looked like it was made of fish scales. For a moment, he caught her looking at the mink that hung at the end of a row of clothing, but she ignored it and closed the door. Her father had given her the mink for Christmas a few years ago, but she had not worn it for