whether to tell him. So long a time passed that he began to think she had gone back to sleep. But finally she said, ‘Told me not to go to meeting.’
‘What meeting?’
‘With Semenzato.’ So it hadn’t been a robbery. He said nothing. This was not the time to push her, not now.
Voice growing thicker and slower, she explained. ‘This morning, at the museum. Ceramics in the China exhibition.’ There was a long pause and she fought to keep her eye open. ‘They knew about me and Flavia.’ After that, her breathing slowed and he realized she was asleep again.
He sat, watching her, and tried to make some sense out of what she had said. Semenzato was the director of the museum at the Doge’s Palace. Until the reopening of the restored Palazzo Grassi, it had been the most famous museum in Venice, Semenzato the most important museum director. Perhaps he still was. After all, the Doge’s Palace had mounted the Titian show; all Palazzo Grassi had presented in recent years was Andy Warhol and the Celts, both shows the product of the ‘new’ Venice and hence more the outcome of media hype than of serious artistic study.
It was Semenzato, Brunetti recalled, who had helped arrange, about five years ago, the exhibition of Chinese art, and it was Brett Lynch who had served as intermediary between the city administration and the Chinese government. He had seen the show long before he met her, and he could still remember some of the exhibits: the life-size terracotta statues of soldiers, a bronze chariot, and a full suit of decorative mail, constructed from thousands of interlocking pieces of jade. There had been paintings as well, but he had found them boring: weeping willows, men with beards, and the same old flimsy bridges. The statue of the soldier, however, had stunned him, and he remembered standing motionless in front of it, studying the face and reading in it fidelity, courage and honour, signs of a common humanity that had spanned two millennia and half the world.
Brunetti had met Semenzato on various occasions and had found him an intelligent, charming man, with the patina of graceful manners that men in public positions acquire with the passing of years. Venetian, of an old family, Semenzato was one of several brothers, all of whom had to do with antiquities, art, or the trade in those things.
Because Brett had arranged the show, it made sense that she would see Semenzato when she was back in Venice. What made no sense at all was that someone would try to prevent that meeting and would go to such brutal lengths to do so.
A nurse with a pile of sheets in her arms came into the room without knocking and asked him to leave while she bathed the patient and changed the linen. Obviously, Signora Petrelli had been at work on the hospital staff, seeing that the little envelopes,
He left the room and stood at a window in the corridor, gazing down into the central courtyard that was part of the original fifteenth-century monastery. Opposite him he saw the new pavilion that had been built and opened with such public shouts of glory — nuclear medicine, most advanced technologies to be had in all of Italy, most famous doctors, a new age in health care for the exorbitantly taxed citizens of Venice. No expense had been spared; the building emerged an architectural wonder, its high marble arches giving a modern-day reflection of the graceful arches that stood out in Campo SS. Giovanni e Paolo and led the way into the main hospital.
The opening ceremony had been held, there had been speeches and the press had come, but the building had never been used. No drains. No sewers. And no responsibility. Was it the architect who had forgotten to put them in the original blueprints, or the builders who had failed to put them where they were meant to go? The only thing that was certain was that responsibility fell on no one and that the drains would have to be added to the already finished building, at enormous expense.
Brunetti’s reading of the event was that it had been planned like this from the very moment of inception, planned so that the builder would get not only the original contract to construct the new pavilion but the work, later, to destroy much of what had been built in order to install the forgotten drains.
Did one laugh or cry? The building had been left unprotected after the opening that was not an opening, and vandals had already broken in and damaged some of the equipment, so now the hospital paid for guards to patrol the empty corridors, and patients who needed the treatments and procedures it was supposed to provide were sent to other hospitals, or told to wait, or told to go to private clinics. He could no longer remember how many billion lire had been spent. And nurses had to be bribed to change the sheets.
Suddenly, Flavia Petrelli appeared at the far end of the courtyard, and he watched her progress, all but imperial, across its open space. No one recognized her, but every man she passed noticed her. She had changed into a long purple dress which swirled from side to side as she walked. Over her shoulder she had draped a fur, nothing so prosaic as mink. As he watched her cross the courtyard, he was reminded of a passage he had read, years ago, that described a woman’s entrance into a hotel. So secure was she in her wealth and position that she had shrugged her mink from her shoulders without looking, certain that there would be a servant there to catch it. Flavia Petrelli had no need to read about such things in a book: she had that same absolute certainty about her place in the world.
He watched as she passed into one of the arched stairwells that led to the upper floors. She took the steps, he noticed, two at a time, a haste which was entirely at odds with both the dress and the fur.
Seconds later, she appeared at the top of the steps, and her face grew tense when she saw him outside the room. ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked, walking quickly towards him.
‘Nothing. A nurse came in.’
She entered the room without bothering to knock. Minutes later, the nurse emerged, carrying an armful of bedding and an enamel pan. He waited a few minutes more, then knocked on the door and was told to enter.
When he came into the room, he saw that the head of the bed had been raised minimally, and Brett was lying up, head cushioned by pillows. Flavia stood beside her and held the cup to her lips, while she drank through a straw. The effect of her face was less shocking now, either because he had had time to grow accustomed to it or because he could see that parts of it were unbruised.
He stooped down and picked up his briefcase from where he had left it and approached the bed. Brett took one hand out from under the covers and slid it across the bed towards him. He covered it briefly with his own. ‘Thank you,’ she said.
‘I’ll come back tomorrow, if I may.’
‘Please. I can’t explain now, but I will.’
