Acqua Alta

‘Yes, sir,’ Vianello answered, making note of this. ‘You ask her about their accent?’

Brunetti had already thought of this, but there had been too little time with Brett. Her Italian was perfect, so their accents would have given her an idea of what part of the country they came from. ‘I’ll ask her tomorrow.’

‘In the meantime, I’ll look into gorillas in Mestre,’ Vianello said. With a grunt, he got out of the chair and left the office.

Brunetti pushed back his chair, pulled the bottom drawer of his desk open with his toe, and rested his crossed feet on it. He slouched down in his chair and latched his fingers behind his head, then turned and looked out of the window. From this angle, the fa c ade of San Lorenzo wasn’t visible, but he could see a patch of cloudy, late-winter sky, a monotony that might induce thought.

She had said something about the ceramics in the show, and that could only mean the show she had helped arrange four or five years ago, the first time in recent years that museum-goers in the West had been allowed to see the marvels currently being excavated in China. And he had thought her to be in China still.

He had been surprised to see her name on the crime report that morning, shocked to see her bruised face in the hospital. How long had she been back? How long was she intending to stay? And what had brought her back to Venice? Flavia Petrelli would be able to answer some of those questions; Flavia Petrelli might herself be the answer to one of them. But those questions could wait; for the moment, he was more interested in Dottor Semenzato.

He let his chair drop forward with a bang, reached for the phone, and dialled a number from memory.

‘Pronto,’ said the familiar deep voice.

‘Ciao, Lele,’ Brunetti responded. ‘Why aren’t you out painting?’

‘Ciao, Guido, come stai?’ Then, without waiting for an answer, he explained. ‘Not enough light today. I went out to the Zattere this morning, but I came back without doing anything. The light’s flat, dead. So I came back here to fix lunch for Claudia.’

‘How is she?’

‘Fine, fine. And Paola?’

‘Good, so are the kids. Look, Lele, I’d like to talk to you. Can you spare me some time this afternoon?’

‘Talk talk or police talk?^?

‘Police talk, I’m afraid. Or I think it is.’

‘I’ll be at the gallery after three if you want to come over then. Until about five.’ From the background, Brunetti heard a hissing sound, a muttered, ‘Puttana Eva,’ and then Lele said, ‘Guido, I’ve got to go. The pasta’s boiling over.’ Brunetti barely had time to say goodbye before the phone went dead.

If anyone would know about Semenzato’s reputation, it was Lele. Gabriele Cossato, painter, antiquarian, lover of beauty, was as much a part of Venice, it seemed, as were the four Moors, poised in eternal confabulation to the right of the basilica of San Marco. For as far back as Brunetti could remember, there had been Lele, and Lele had been a painter. When Brunetti remembered his childhood, he recalled Lele, a friend of his father, and he remembered the stories, told then even to him, for he was a boy and so was expected to understand, about Lele’s women, that endless succession of donne, signore, ragazze, with whom Lele would appear at the Brunettis’ table. The women were all gone now, forgotten in his love for his wife of many years, but his passion for the beauty of the city remained, that and his limitless familiarity with the art world and all it encompassed: antiquarians and dealers, museums and galleries.

He decided to go home for lunch and then go to see Lele directly from there. But then he remembered that it was Tuesday, which meant that Paola would be having lunch with the members of her department at the university, and that in its turn meant that the children would eat with their grandparents, leaving him to cook and eat a meal alone. To avoid that, he went to a local trattoria and spent the meal thinking about what could be so important about a discussion between an archaeologist and a museum director that it had to be prevented with such violence.

A little after three, he crossed the Accademia Bridge and cut left towards Campo San Vio and, beyond it, Lele’s gallery. The artist was there when he arrived, perched on a ladder, a torch in one hand, a pair of electrical clippers in the other, reaching into a spaghetti-like mass of electrical wires housed behind a wooden panel above the door to the back room of the gallery. Brunetti was so accustomed to seeing Lele in his three-piece pin-striped suits that, even though the painter was perched at the top of the ladder, his position seemed not at all incongruous. Looking down, Lele greeted him, ‘Ciao, Guido. Just a minute while I join these together.’ So saying, he laid the torch on the top of the ladder, peeled back the plastic covering off one wire, twisted the exposed part around a second wire, then took a thick roll of black tape from his back pocket and bound the two together. With the point of the clippers, he poked the wire back among the others that ran parallel to it. Then, looking down at Brunetti, he said, ‘Guido, go into the storeroom and throw the switch for the current.’

Obedient, he went into the large storeroom on the right and stood for a moment at the door, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the deeper darkness.

‘Just on the left,’ Lele called.

Turning, he saw the large electrical panel attached to the wall. He pulled the main circuit breaker down, and the storeroom was suddenly flooded with light. He waited again, this time for his eyes to adjust to the brightness, then went back into the main room of the gallery.

Lele was already down from the ladder, the panel closed above him. ‘Hold the door,’ he said and walked towards Brunetti, carrying his ladder. He quickly stored it in the back room and emerged, brushing dust from his hands.

‘Pantegana,’ he explained, giving the Venetian name for rat, a word which, though it named them clearly - rat - still managed to make them, in the naming, somehow charming and domestic. ‘They come and eat the covering on the wires.’

‘Can’t you poison them?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Bah,’ Lele snorted. ‘They prefer the poison to the plastic. They thrive on it. I can’t even keep paintings in the storeroom anymore; they come in and eat the canvas. Or the wood.’

Brunetti looked automatically at the paintings hanging on the walls of the gallery, vividly coloured scenes of the city, alive with light and filled with Lele’s energy.