After what seemed an interminable time, she stood upright and turned back to Brunetti. ‘Not an accident?’ she asked.
‘It doesn’t appear that way, Signora,’ Brunetti said.
Like a dog coming out of the water, she gave a shake of her entire body and asked in a tight voice, ‘What was it, then?’
‘He was the victim of a crime.’
She bit at her upper lip. ‘Was he the man in Venice?’
‘Yes,’ Brunetti said, wondering why, if she had had any suspicion, she had not contacted them. ‘Why do you ask that, Signora?’
‘Because no one’s heard from him for two days, and even his wife doesn’t know where he is.’
‘Did you call us, Signora?’
‘The police?’ she asked in honest astonishment.
Brunetti was tempted to ask her who else, but he resisted temptation and answered with a simple ‘Yes.’
As if she were only now aware of the three men standing in the room, she said, ‘Perhaps we could go back to my office.’
They followed her down a corridor, where the smell of animal grew even stronger, and into the room on the right. Against one wall, the receptionist sat in a straight-backed chair, a black and white rabbit on his lap. The rabbit had only one ear but, aside from that, seemed well-fed and sleek. A large grey cat was asleep in the sun on the windowsill behind them. It opened one eye when they came in but then closed it.
At their arrival, the boy leaned down and set the rabbit on the ground, then left the room without speaking. The rabbit hopped over to Vianello and sniffed at the bottom of his trousers, then did the same with Vezzani’s, and then Brunetti’s. Unsatisfied, it hopped over to Signora Baroni and raised itself on its hind legs against her leg. Brunetti was surprised to see that its front paws reached well above her knees.
She bent down and picked it up, saying, ‘Come on, Livio.’ The animal settled comfortably into her arms. She went and sat behind her desk. Vianello leaned against the windowsill, leaving the two chairs in front of the desk to the commissari. As soon as Signora Baroni sat and created a lap, the rabbit fell asleep in it.
As if there had been no interruption, the woman said, the fingers of one hand idly scratching the belly of the rabbit, ‘I didn’t call because Andrea’s been gone from here only one full day, and then again today. I was going to call his wife again, but then you came.’ Her attention left the rabbit and she looked at all three of them in turn, as if to assure herself that they were all listening and had understood. ‘Then, when you said he’d been the victim of a crime, my first thought, obviously, was that man in Venice.’
‘Why “obviously”, Signora?’ Brunetti asked in a pleasant voice.
Her fingers returned their attentions to the rabbit, which appeared to have been transformed into a piece of splay-legged drapery. ‘Because the article said the man had not been identified, and Andrea’s missing, and you’re the police, and you’re here. So that’s the conclusion I came to.’ She shifted the rabbit, who refused to emerge from his coma, to her other knee and asked, ‘Am I mistaken?’
Brunetti said, ‘We don’t have a definite identification yet,’ but quickly added, ‘There’s little doubt, but we need a positive identification.’ He told himself he had forgotten to ask Nava’s wife, but that was not the truth.
‘Who has to do it?’ she asked.
‘Someone who knew him well.’
‘Does it have to be a relative?’
‘Not necessarily, no.’
‘His wife’s the obvious person, isn’t she?’
‘Yes.’
Signora Baroni picked up the rabbit, shook him into something resembling consciousness, and lowered him gently on to his feet. He hopped as far as the wall beside her, stretched out on the floor, and was immediately asleep. She sat upright, met Brunetti’s eyes, and said, ‘Could I do it? I worked with him for six years.’
‘Yes, of course,’ he said. ‘Why?’
‘It would be too much for Anna.’
Though he was surprised, Brunetti was relieved that Nava’s wife would be spared at least this.
Signora Baroni seemed to know a great deal about Nava’s life, both personal and professional. Yes, she knew about his separation from his wife, and yes, she thought he was not happy with his job at the slaughterhouse. Here she sighed and added that Nava had made it clear that, no matter how disagreeable he might find the job, he felt obliged to keep it in order, among other reasons, she explained, ‘to pay my salary here’. Saying that, she closed her eyes for a moment and rubbed at her forehead with her fingers.
‘He said it as a joke, of course,’ she said, looking up at Vianello. ‘But it wasn’t.’
Brunetti asked, ‘Did he say anything else about his work there, Signora?’
She reached down and picked up the sleeping rabbit, whose eyes did not open. She began to stroke the rabbit’s single ear. Finally she said, ‘He never told me, but I think it was more than the job that was bothering him.’
‘Do you have any idea what it might have been?’ Brunetti asked.
She shrugged, disturbing the rabbit with the motion. It jumped to the floor again but this time walked over to a radiator and lay down beside it.
‘I suppose it was a woman,’ she said at last. ‘It usually is, isn’t it?’
None of the men answered her.
‘He never spoke about it, if that’s what you want to know. And I didn’t ask him because I didn’t want to know. It was none of my business.’
After that, she explained to them what her business was: make appointments; send samples to the labs and register the results for each animal; send bills and keep the accounts; occasionally help with exams and treatments. Luca and another assistant, who was not there that day, greeted patients, fed the animals, and helped Doctor Nava with procedures; no, he had never been threatened by the owner of a pet, though some had been distressed by the death of their animals. On the contrary, most people saw his concern for their pets and liked him as a result.
Yes, he lived upstairs, had been there for the last three months or so. When Brunetti told her that they had keys and wanted to have a look at his apartment, she said she saw no reason why they couldn’t do so.
She led them to a door at the far end of the corridor, explaining, ‘Because it was originally all one house, the entrance to his apartment is from here.’
Brunetti thanked her and opened the door with a key from the set that had been in Nava’s pocket and that he had taken from the evidence room. At the top of the stairs another door, unlocked, opened into a large, open space running from the back of the building clear to the front, as though the original builders had stopped before dividing it into separate rooms. To say it was sparsely furnished was to understate the case: a two-seat sofa faced a small television placed on the floor, a neat pile of DVDs on the floor in front of it. A wooden table stood in front of the window that gave on to the back of the house and provided a view of the houses opposite. To the left of the window was a two-ring electric cooker on a narrow wooden table; frequent scrubbing had worn away the enamel. Clean pots hung from hooks above a small sink. On top of a small refrigerator was a ceramic bowl filled with apples.
A single bed stood under the eaves at the back of the room, blanket and sheet tucked in with military precision. Opposite it, along the other wall, was another bed covered with a tightly tucked Mickey Mouse blanket and a hillock of toy animals.
A cardboard wardrobe stood against the back wall. Brunetti looked inside and saw a few suits and an overcoat whose weight was turning the closet’s crossbar into a U. Below these were a few pairs of small sneakers and to their right three pairs of larger shoes, one pair of which, Brunetti observed, were well-worn brown tasselled loafers. Plastic-wrapped white shirts lay stacked on a shelf above the clothes bar. The shelf below held the neatly folded underwear and clothing of a small boy.
The bathroom was just as spartan as the rest of the apartment but surprised Brunetti by being very clean. In fact, the apartment held no empty cups, old clothing, food wrappers, dirty plates, or any of the detritus Brunetti associated with the homes of the abandoned or solitary.
A few magazines and books lay on the table next to the man’s bed. Brunetti drifted over and picked them up. There was a book about vegetarianism and, stuck into it, a photocopied chart of the combinations of grains and vegetables that would best create protein and amino acids. There was a printout of an article about lead poisoning and what appeared to be a veterinarian textbook on bovine diseases. Brunetti flicked through this, looked at two
