join him in the Casino below. When they agreed, he responded with a delight new-minted each year and pulled from the inner pocket of his jacket three small suede bags, which he placed in front of them.
As she did each year, Paola protested, ‘Oh, Dottore, you shouldn’t,’ which, as usual, she said while busily opening the bag to reveal the Casino chips which the bags always contained. Brunetti noticed the same combination he did each year and knew that the total would be two hundred thousand lire for each woman, enough to divert them while Doctor Pastore spent an hour or two playing blackjack and usually winning back far more than he had provided for the ladies’ amusement.
The three men rose from the table, held the chairs of the women, and the six of them started for the Casino gaming rooms on the floor below.
Because they couldn’t all fit into the elevator, the women were put inside while the men decided to use the main staircase to go down to the main gambling hall. Brunetti found Count Orazio on his right and tried to think of something to say to his father-in-law.
‘Did you know that Richard Wagner died here?’ he asked, forgetting now how it was that he knew this, since Wagner was hardly a composer he liked.
‘Yes,’ the Count answered. ‘Hardly soon enough.’
And then, luckily, they were in the main gaming room, and Count Orazio joined his wife to watch as she played roulette, taking leave of Brunetti with a friendly smile and something that flirted with being a bow.
Brunetti had first been to a Casino not in his native Venice, where no one but compulsive or professional gamblers paid any attention to the tables, but in Las Vegas, where he had stopped while driving across America many years ago. Because his first experience of gambling had been there, he always associated the practice with bright lights, loud music, and the high whoops of those who won or lost. He remembered a stage show, helium- filled balloons bouncing against the ceilings, people dressed in T-shirts, jeans, shorts. Consequently, though he came here to the Casino each year, he was always surprised to find the atmosphere somewhere between that of an art museum and, worse, a church. Few people smiled, voices were never raised above a whisper, and no one ever appeared to be having any fun. In the midst of this solemnity, he missed the honest shouts of victory or defeat, the wild shrieks of joy that came with changes of fortune.
None of that here, no indeed. Men and women, all well-dressed, hushed to reverent silence, ringed the roulette table, putting down chips across the felt board. Silence, pause, then the croupier gave the wheel a sharp turn, dropped the ball in, and all eyes riveted themselves upon the whirl of metal and colour, stuck there as it slowed, slowed, slowed to a halt. Snake-like, the croupier’s rake crept up and down the board, sweeping in the losers’ chips and nudging a few to the winner. And then again the same motions, the flurry, the spin, and those eyes, fixed, nailed to the spinning wheel. Why, he wondered, did so many of these men wear rings on their little fingers?
He drifted into the next room, vaguely aware that he had become separated from his party, curious to observe. In an inner room, he came upon the blackjack tables and saw Doctor Pastore already seated there, a middling pile of chips stacked with surgical neatness in front of him. As Brunetti watched, he called for a card, drew a six, stopped, waited while the other players drew, then flipped his cards over to display a seven and an eight to accompany the six. His pile of chips grew; Brunetti turned away.
Everyone seemed to be smoking. One player at the baccarat table had two cigarettes burning in an ashtray in front of him, a third hanging from his lower lip. Smoke was everywhere: in his eyes, his hair, his clothing; it floated in a cloud that could be cut and stirred by a hand. He moved to the bar and bought himself a grappa, not really wanting it, but bored with watching the play.
He sat on a plush velvet sofa and watched the players in the room, occasionally sipping at the glass in his hand. He closed his eyes and allowed himself to drift for a few minutes. He felt the sofa move beside him and, without opening his eyes or moving his head from where it rested against the back of the sofa, he knew it was Paola. She took his glass, sipped at it, then gave it back to him.
‘Tired?’ she asked.
He nodded, suddenly too tired to speak.
‘All right. Come with me and we’ll have one more round at roulette, and then we can go home.’
He turned his head, opened his eyes, and smiled at her. ‘I love you, Paola,’ he said, then bowed his head and sipped at his grappa. How many years had it been since he had said that? He glanced up at her, almost shyly. She grinned and leaned over and kissed him on the mouth. ‘Come on,’ she said, getting to her feet and reaching down to pull him up. ‘Let’s lose this money, and then we’ll go home.’ She had five chips in her hand, each worth fifty thousand lire, which meant she had been winning. She handed him two, keeping the others for herself.
Back in the main gaming room, they had to wait a few minutes before they could worm themselves up beside the roulette table and, when they were there, he waited two turns until, for no reason he could name, it seemed the right time to play. Stacking the two chips one on top of the other in his hand, he placed them blindly on the board, then looked down and saw that they rested on number 28, a number that had no significance whatsoever for him. Paola placed hers on the black.
Spin, watch, wait, and, as he knew it would, the ball slipped into its rightful place in number 28, and he won more than three million lire. Almost a month’s salary, a vacation for them this summer, a computer for Chiara. He watched as the croupier’s rake came sliding towards him, chugging those chips across the felt until they stopped in front of him. He scooped them up, smiled at Paola, and, in the loudest voice heard in the Casino in years, shouted, in English, ‘Hot damn.’
* * * *
10
He saw no sense in bothering to go to the Questura the next morning and, instead, stayed at home until it was time to get the train to Vicenza. He did, however, call Maggiore Ambrogiani and ask that the driver be sent to get him at the station.
As the train crossed over the causeway and away from the city, he looked off into the distance and saw, visible only rarely these days, the mountains, not yet snow-covered but, he hoped, soon to be. This was the third dry year, with little rain in the spring, none in the summer, and bad harvests in the autumn. The farmers had their hopes pinned on winter snows this year, and he recalled the saying of the peasants of the Friuli, a grim, hard- working people:
He hadn’t bothered with a briefcase today; it was unlikely he would find bags of cocaine two days in a row,
