Beastly Things

Long experience of Brunetti in his sibylline mode caused Paola to smile. ‘I presume you’re speaking about the wine.’

He held up the two glasses while she poured the wine, then sat beside her on the sofa. Pinot Grigio: he’d married a mind reader. He picked up a few almonds and ate them one by one, loving the contrast set up between the salt, the almonds’ bitterness, and the wine.

With no warning, his memory ripped him back to the gravelled space in front of the slaughterhouse, and he caught a whiff of the odour coming from it. He closed his eyes and took another sip of wine; he forced his mind to concentrate on the taste of the wine, the taste of the almonds, and the soft presence of the woman beside him. ‘Tell me what you taught today,’ he said, kicking off his shoes and leaning back.

She took a long drink, nibbled at a grissino, and ate one of the slivers of cheese. ‘I’m not sure I taught anything,’ she began, ‘but I’d asked them to read The Spoils of Poynton.’

‘That the one about the lady with all the stuff?’ he asked, turning from sibylline to philistine with one well- chosen question.

‘Yes, dear,’ she said, and poured them both some more wine.

‘How did they respond?’ he asked, suddenly curious. He had read the book, albeit in translation – he preferred James in translation – and liked it.

‘They seemed incapable of understanding that she loved the things she owned because they were beautiful, not because they were valuable. Or valuable for non-financial reasons.’ She sipped her wine. ‘My students find it difficult to grasp any motivation for human action that is not based on financial profit.’

‘There’s a lot of that around,’ Brunetti said, reaching for an olive. He ate it, spat the pit into his left hand, which he observed was steady as a rock. He set the pit in a small saucer and took another one.

‘And they liked the wrong… they liked characters different from the ones I like,’ she amended.

‘There’s a very unpleasant woman in it, isn’t there?’ he asked.

‘There are two,’ she answered and said that dinner would be ready in ten minutes.

23

A THIN RAIN was falling when Brunetti left his house the next morning. When he boarded the vaporetto at Rialto, he saw that the level of the water was high, even though he had received no message on his telefonino alerting him to acqua alta. Higher tides at unusual times had become more frequent in the last two years, and though most people – and all fishermen – believed this was the result of the MOSE project’s violent intervention at the entrance to the laguna, official sources denied this adamantly.

Foa, the Questura’s pilot, grew apoplectic on the subject. He had learned the tides along with the alphabet and knew the names of the winds that crossed the Adriatic as well as priests knew those of the saints. For years, sceptical from the beginning, he had watched the metal monster grow, had seen all protest swept away by the flood of lovely European money sent to save the Pearl of the Adriatic. His fishermen friends told him of the new and violent vortices that had appeared in both the sea and the laguna and of the consequences of the pharaonic dredging that had taken place in recent years. No one, Foa claimed, had bothered to consult the fishermen. Instead, experts – Brunetti remembered once seeing Foa spit after pronouncing this word – had made the decisions, and other experts no doubt would get the contracts for the construction.

For a decade, Brunetti had been reading yes, and he had been reading no, and most recently he had read of more delays in funding that would delay the project yet another three years. As an Italian, he suspected it would run true to form and turn out to have been yet another building project that served as a feeding trough for the friends of friends; as a Venetian, he despaired that his fellow citizens might have sunk so low as to be capable even of this.

Still musing, he left the boat and began to walk towards the back reaches of Castello. He hesitated now and again, not having been down here for years, so after a time he stopped thinking and let his feet lead the way. The sight of Vianello, wearing a raincoat and leaning against the metal railing of the riva, cheered him. Seeing him approach, Vianello said, with a nod towards the door in front of him, ‘The sign says the office opens at nine, but no one’s gone inside yet.’

A printed card protected by a plastic shield gave the doctor’s name and the office hours.

They stood side by side for a few minutes until Brunetti said, ‘Let’s see if he’s already there.’

Vianello pushed himself away from the railing and followed him to the door. Brunetti rang the bell and after a moment tried the door, which opened easily. They stepped inside, up two steps, and into a small entrance which led in its turn to an open courtyard. A sign on their left carried the doctor’s name and an arrow pointing to the other side of the courtyard.

The rain, which outside had been bothersome, here fell on to the newly green grass of the courtyard with gentle kindness. Even the light seemed different; brighter, somehow. Brunetti unbuttoned his raincoat; Vianello did the same.

The courtyard, if it had been part of a monastery, had been part of the smallest monastery in the city. Though covered walkways surrounded the garden, they were no more than five metres long, hardly space enough, Brunetti reflected, to allow a man to make much progress with his rosary. He’d barely have finished the first decade before he’d be back at his starting point, but he’d be surrounded by beauty and tranquillity, at least if he were wise enough to contemplate them.

The acanthus leaves had worn away on the capitals, and the centuries had smoothed the fluting on the shafts of the columns around the garden. Surely this had not happened while the columns were in this protected courtyard; who knows where they had come from or when they had arrived in Venice? Suddenly a goat smiled down at Brunetti: how had that column got here?

Ahead of him, Vianello stopped at a green wooden door with the doctor’s name on a brass plaque, waited for Brunetti to join him, and opened it. Inside was a room like all those Brunetti had sat in while waiting to see doctors. Opposite them they saw another wooden door, closed now. Rows of orange plastic chairs lined two walls; at the end of one row was a low table with two piles of magazines. Brunetti went over to see if it held the usual copies of Gente and Chi. Not unless starlets and minor nobles had all been replaced by cats, dogs and, in one instance, a particularly winsome pig wearing a Father Christmas hat.

They sat opposite one another. Brunetti checked his watch. After four minutes, an old woman came in, leading an antique dog so deprived of hair in various places as to resemble the sort of stuffed toy one found in a grandparent’s attic. The woman ignored them and lowered herself into the chair farthest from Vianello; the dog collapsed at her feet with an explosive sigh, and both of them immediately lapsed into a trance. Strangely enough, it was only the woman’s breathing they could hear.

More time passed, measured by the woman’s snores, until Brunetti got to his feet and went to the other door. He knocked on it, waited for Vianello to join him, knocked again, and then opened it.

Across the room, behind a desk, Brunetti saw the top half of what might have been the fattest man he had ever seen. He was slumped back in his leather chair and sound asleep, his head tilted to the left as far as his neck and the chins above it would allow. He was perhaps in his forties, his age disguised by the absence of wrinkles in his face.

Brunetti cleared his throat, but that had no effect on the sleeping man. He stepped closer, and smelled the rancid odour of cigarette smoke mixed with late night, or early morning, drinking. The man’s hands were latched across his vast chest, the right thumb and the second and third fingers stained with nicotine up to the first knuckle. The room, strangely enough, did not smell of smoke, only of its after-effect: the same odour came from the man’s clothing and, Brunetti suspected, from his hair and skin.

‘Dottore,’ Brunetti said in a soft voice, not wanting to startle him awake. The man continued snoring softly.

‘Dottore,’ Brunetti repeated in a louder voice.

He watched the man’s eyes for motion: they were set deep in his face, as though they had retreated from the encroaching fat that surrounded them. The nose was strangely thin, but it had been overwhelmed by the encircling cheeks, which pushed up against it and, helped by the engorged lips, came close to blocking his nostrils. The mouth