Death in a Strange Country

‘The driver would have told me,’ Brunetti said, then, as if the idea had just come to him, ‘if he found it.’

‘Better check your vehicle, sir.’

They left the apartment together, the soldier careful to lock the door behind him. As they descended in the elevator, Brunetti decided that it would be far too coincidental for him to find the notebook hidden behind the back seat of the car. Consequently, when they emerged from the building, he thanked the soldier for his help and went back to his own car.

Not sure if the American was within hearing distance and not certain about whether he understood Italian, he played it straight and asked his driver if he had found a notebook in the car. Obviously, he had not. Brunetti opened the back door, stuck his hand behind the back seat, and felt around in the empty space. He found, not at all to his surprise, nothing. He pulled himself from the car and turned back towards the Jeep. He opened his hands in an empty, significant gesture, and then got into the back seat and asked the driver to take him to the station.

* * * *

12

The only train leaving Vicenza at that hour was a local that stopped at all of the stations between Vicenza and Venice, but, since the Intercity from Milan was not due for another forty minutes, Brunetti opted for the local, though he hated the stop-and-go trip, with the continual change of passengers and the great tide of students who invariably surged on and off at Padova.

In the dining-hall, he had picked up a copy of an English-language newspaper that lay abandoned on the table where he sat He took it now from his inner pocket and began to read. The Stars and Stripes, it announced itself in red letters, apparently a paper published by the American military in Europe. The front page carried a story about a hurricane that had swept its way through a place called Biloxi, a city he believed to be in Bangladesh. No, in America, but how could that name be explained? There was a large picture of houses and cars overturned, trees shoved over onto one another. He turned a page and read that a pit bull had bitten off the hand of a sleeping child in Detroit, a city he was certain was in America. There was no picture. The Secretary of Defense had assured Congress that all those contractors who had defrauded the government would be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Remarkable, the similarity between the rhetoric of American politics and Italian. He had no doubt that the illusory nature of that promise would be the same in both countries.

There were three pages of cartoons, none of which made the least bit of sense to him, and six of sports news, which made even less. In one of the cartoons, a caveman swung a club, and on one of the sports pages, a man in a striped uniform did the same. Beyond that, all was arcana to Brunetti. The last page carried a continuation of the report on the hurricane, but then the train pulled into Venice station and he abandoned the story. He left the paper on the seat beside him; perhaps someone else could profit from it better than he.

It was after seven when they arrived, but the sky was still light. That would end this weekend; he thought, when the clocks were set back an hour, and it got dark earlier. Or was it the other way, and it stayed bright longer? He hoped that it took most people as long to figure this out each year as it did him. He crossed the Bridge of the Scalzi and entered the rabbit warren of streets that wove their way back towards his apartment. Few people, even at this hour, passed him, since most went to the station or to the bus depot at Piazzale Roma by boat. Usually as he walked, he glanced at the fronts of buildings, up at their windows, down narrow streets, always alert to something he might not have noticed before. Like many of his townsmen, Brunetti never tired of studying the city, every so often delighting himself by discovering something he had never noticed before. Over the course of the years, he had worked out a system that allowed him to reward himself for each discovery: a new window earned him a coffee; a new statue of a saint, however small, got him a glass of wine; and once, years ago, he had noticed on a wall he must have passed five times a week since he was a child a lapidary stone that commemorated the site of the Aldine Publishing House, the oldest in Italy, founded in the fourteenth century. He had gone right around the corner and into a bar in Campo San Luca and ordered himself a Brandy Alexander, though it was ten in the morning and the barman had given Brunetti a strange look when he placed the glass in front of him.

Tonight, however, the streets failed to capture his interest; he was still back in Vicenza, still seeing the grooves in the four screws that held the front panel of the water heater in Foster’s apartment, each of them slightly moved from the careful straight lines in which Brunetti had left them the day before, each giving the lie to the soldier’s assertion that no one had been in the apartment after Brunetti. So now they - whoever ‘they’ were - knew that Brunetti had taken the drugs from the apartment and had said nothing about it.

He let himself into the building and had unlocked their mailbox before he remembered that Paola would have been home hours ago and would have checked the post. He began the ascent to his home, grateful for the first flight, low and gentle, a remnant of the original fifteenth-century palazzo. At the top, the stairs jogged off to the left and rose up, in two steep flights, to the next floor. A door awaited him there, which he unlocked and closed behind him. Another flight, these dangerous and steep. They doubled back above themselves and carried him up the last twenty-five steps to the door of his apartment. He unlocked the door and let himself in, finally home.

There was the smell of cooking to welcome him, one scent mingling with another. Tonight he could make out the faint odour of squash, which meant that Paola was making risotto con zucca, available only in this season, when the dark green, squat barucca squash were brought from Chioggia, across the laguna. And after that? Shank of veal? Roasted with olives and white wine?

He hung his jacket in the cupboard and went down the hall to the kitchen. The room was hotter than usual, which meant the oven was on. The large frying pan on the stove revealed, when he lifted the lid, bright orange chunks of zucca, frying slowly with minced onions. He took a glass from the rack beside the sink and pulled a bottle of Ribolla from the refrigerator. He poured a little more than a mouthful, tasted, drank it down, then filled the glass and replaced the bottle. The warmth of the kitchen swept up about him. He loosened his tie and went back down the corridor. ‘Paola?’

‘I’m here, in the back,’ he heard her answering call.

He didn’t answer but went into the long living room and then out onto the balcony. This was the best time of day for Brunetti, for he could see, from their terrace, the sunset off in the West. On the clearest of days, he could see the Dolomites from the small window in the kitchen, but it was so late in the day now that they would be hazed over and invisible. He stayed where he was, forearms propped on the railing, studying the rooftops and towers that never ceased to please him. He heard Paola move down the hall, back into the kitchen, heard the clang of shifted pots, but he stayed where he was, listening to the eight o’clock bells ring out from San Polo, then to the answering resonance of San Marco, a few seconds late, as always, come booming across the city. When all the bells were silent, he went back into the house, closing the door against the growing evening chill.

In the kitchen, Paola stood at the stove, stirring the risotto, pausing now and again to add more boiling broth. ‘Glass of wine?’ he asked. She shook her head, still stirring. He passed behind her, paused long enough to kiss her on the back of the neck, and poured himself another glass of wine.