Acqua Alta

‘Will it make it stop hurting?’

‘I think so.’

‘All right, Papa.’

He glanced across at Paola, asking her opinion. She bent and kissed the top of Chiara’s head, wrapped her in an even tighter embrace, then nodded to Brunetti and tried to smile.

He went down the hall and took a candle from the third drawer to the right of the kitchen sink. He jammed it down into a ceramic candle-holder, grabbed a box of matches and went back into the bedroom. He set the candle down on Chiara’s desk, lit it and went down the hall into Paola’s study. From her top drawer he took a paper clip and bent it open into a straight rod as he went back towards Chiara’s room. He’d said ‘needle’, but then he’d remembered that the doctor had used a paper clip, saying a needle was too thin to burn through the nail quickly.

Back in Chiara’s room, he took the candle and set it at the foot of the bed, behind Paola’s back. ‘I think it might be better if you didn’t watch, angel,’ he told Chiara. To assure that, he sat on the edge of the bed, next to Paola, his back turned to hers, and uncovered Chiara’s foot.

When he touched it, she pulled it away instinctively, said ‘Sorry’ into her mother’s shoulder, and pushed her foot back near him. He took it with his left hand and moved the ice bag away from it. He had to change his position on the bed, careful not to let the candle spill over, until he was sitting facing the two of them. He took her heel and wedged it between his knees, pressing them together to hold it steady.

‘It’s all right, baby. It’s just going to take a second,’ he said, reaching for the candle with one hand and holding the end of the paper clip in the other. When the heat seared his fingers, he dropped the paper clip and spilled wax over the coverlet. Both his wife and his daughter winced away from his sudden motion.

‘One moment, one moment,’ he said and went back into the kitchen, muttering darkly under his breath. He took a pair of pliers from the bottom drawer and went back into the bedroom. When the candle was relit and everything was as it had been before, he grasped one end of the paper clip in the pliers and stuck the other into the flame. He waited until it glowed red and then, so quickly that he would not have time to think about what he was doing, he pressed the glowing end of the paper clip into the centre of the nail on Chiara’s toe. He held it there while the toenail began to smoke, grabbed her ankle with his left hand to prevent her from pulling her foot back.

Suddenly, the resistance disappeared from under the paper clip, and dark blood flooded up out of her toe and across his fingers. He pulled the paper clip out and, acting more from instinct than from anything he might have remembered, he pressed at the bottom of her toe, forcing the dark blood to flow out of the hole in the nail.

Through all of this, Chiara had wrapped herself around Paola, and she, in her turn, had kept her eyes turned away from what Brunetti was doing. When he glanced up, however, he saw that Chiara was looking at him over her mothers shoulder and then down at her foot. ‘Is that all?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ he answered. ‘How does it feel?’

‘It’s better already, Papa. All the pressure’s gone, and it doesn’t throb anymore.’ She studied the tools of his trade: candle, pliers, paper clips. ‘That’s all you need to do it?’ she asked with real curiosity, tears forgotten.

‘That’s all,’ he said, giving her ankle a squeeze.

‘Do you think I could do it?’ she asked.

‘Do you mean on yourself or on someone else?’ he asked.

‘Either.’

‘I don’t see why not.’

Paola, whose daughter seemed to have forgotten about her in the fascination of this new scientific discovery, removed her arms from that no-longer-suffering daughter and picked up the ice bag and towel from the bed. She stood, looked down at the two of them for a moment, as if studying some alien life form, and went down die hall towards the kitchen.

* * * *

Chapter Seventeen

The following morning, Chiara’s foot felt good enough for her to go to school, though she opted to wear three pairs of woollen socks and her high rubber boots, not only because of the still-pounding rain and threatened acqua alta, but because the boots were wide and large enough to allow her healing toe plenty of room. She was gone by the time he was dressed and ready to leave for work, but at his place on the kitchen table he found a large sheet of paper with an immense red heart drawn on it and, under it, in her precise block print, ‘Grazie, Papa.’ He folded the drawing into a neat rectangle and sipped it into his wallet.

He hadn’t bothered to phone to tell Flavia and Brett — he assumed both of them were there — he was coming, but it was almost ten when he rang the bell, and he believed that was a sufficiently respectable hour to arrive to speak of murder.

He told the voice on the intercom who he was and pushed the heavy door open when the switch from upstairs released the lock. He propped his umbrella in a corner of the entrance, shook himself much in the manner of a dog, and began to climb the steps.

Today it was Brett who stood by the open door, she who let him into the apartment. She smiled when she saw him, and he saw again only the white flash of her teeth.

‘Where’s Signora Petrelli?’ he asked as she led him into the living room.

‘Flavia is seldom presentable before eleven. Never human before ten.’ As she led the way across the living room, he noticed that she walked more easily and seemed to be less concerned about causing pain to her body by some entirely natural movement or gesture.

She motioned him to a seat and took her place on the sofa; what little light came into the room entered behind her and partially shadowed her face. When they were seated, he pulled from his pocket the paper on which