watchman. The Carabinieri said that they were following leads and hoped soon to be able to identify the dead man.
Brunetti was amazed at how cursory the story was, almost as if the fictitious watchman were in the daily habit of stumbling across bodies. There was no description of the dead man, no indication of the precise location where he had been found, and no mention of the fact that he was a member of the Carabinieri. Brunetti was curious about the source, and the motive, of this reporting of near and non-facts.
Brunetti folded the paper closed when he got to the bottom of the Rialto and stuck it under his arm. On the other side of the bridge, he was torn between continuing to walk or taking the vaporetto. He opted for the latter, drawn by the thought of being able to pass in front of a snow-covered Piazza San Marco.
He took the number 2 because it would be faster, standing on deck as they moved up the Grand Canal, enchanted by the transformation that had taken place during the night. The docks running out into the canal were white, the tarpaulins that covered the sleeping gondolas were white; so were the smaller, still unwalked
Then they were abreast of the Piazzetta, and the reflection from the expanse of snow between the library and the palace was so strong that Brunetti was forced to put his hand above his eyes to reduce the glare. Good old San Teodoro was still up there on his pillar, driving his spear into the head of his mini-dragon. What struggle to escape! All to no purpose, though, even if San Teodoro was slowed down by the snow.
Patches of the domes poked through the snow, which Brunetti could see was beginning to melt in the morning sun. Saints popped up from everywhere, a lion flew by, boats hooted at one another, and Brunetti closed his eyes from the joy of it.
When he opened them, they were opposite the bridge, jammed even at this hour under its weight of milling tourists, all trying to have a photo taken at the place where so many people had paused for the last time before being taken off to imprisonment, torture, or death.
Farther along here, the snow was almost gone, and by the time he got off at San Zaccaria, there was so little left as to make his boots an encumbrance as well as an affectation.
The guard at the front door greeted him with a lazy salute. He asked for Vianello, but the Ispettore was not yet in. Nor had the Vice-Questore arrived — no surprise to Brunetti, who imagined Patta at home, still in his pyjamas, hoping someone would write him a note explaining that he was late for work because of the snow.
He went to Signorina Elettra’s office.
When he came in, she said with no introduction, ‘You didn’t tell me you saw a photo of him.’ She wore a black dress and an orange silk jacket the colour a Buddhist monk would wear: it stood in sharp contrast to the soberness of her voice.
‘Yes,’ he answered soberly. ‘I did.’
‘Was it very bad? For him?’ she asked, a question which filled Brunetti with relief because of its admission that she had only learned of the photo and not seen it.
Brunetti resisted the impulse to make things sound better than they were. Instead, he said, ‘It was instant. He must have been taken completely by surprise.’
‘How can you say that?’ she asked.
He remembered Guarino, lying on the ground: his jaw. ‘You don’t have to know. Believe me and leave it at that.’
‘What was he?’ she asked.
The question troubled Brunetti because of the answers that came tumbling into his head. He was a Carabiniere. He was a man Avisani trusted implicitly. He was investigating the illegal transport of garbage, though Brunetti knew little more about the investigation than that. He was interested in a man of short temper who gambled and did not like to lose and whose name might be Antonio Terrasini. He was separated from his wife.
As he listed these things in his mind, Brunetti was forced to realize that he did not doubt anything Guarino had told him. He had evaded and avoided answering certain questions, but Brunetti found himself believing that what he had said was true.
‘I think he was an honest man,’ Brunetti said.
She made no reply to that but then said, ‘It doesn’t change anything — having the photo — does it?’ Brunetti made a noise of negation. She went on, ‘But it does, somehow. Makes it more real.’
Signorina Elettra was seldom at a loss for words: Brunetti failed to find the right thing to say to her. Perhaps there was none.
‘That’s not what I wanted to tell you, though,’ she began, but before she could explain, they heard footsteps approaching and turned to see Patta, but a Patta dressed as might have been Captain Scott had he had time and opportunity to outfit himself in the shops of the Mercerie. Patta’s beige parka had a fur-lined hood and was carelessly left open to show the lining. Under it he wore a Harris tweed jacket and a burgundy turtleneck that looked like cashmere. His boots were rubber gumboots like the ones Raffi had called Brunetti’s attention to in the window of Duca d’Aosta just the week before.
The snow, which had enhanced the mood of almost everyone Brunetti had met on the way to work, appeared to have had the opposite effect on Patta. The Vice-Questore nodded to Signorina Elettra — he never nodded curtly to her, but this was not a friendly nod — and said to Brunetti, ‘Come into my office.’
Brunetti followed him and waited while his superior disburdened himself of his parka. Patta laid it, lining out — the better to display the distinctive Burberry plaid — on one of the chairs in front of his desk and pointed to the other one for Brunetti.
‘Is this going to be trouble?’ Patta said with no preamble.
‘You mean the murder, sir?’
‘Of course I mean the murder. A Carabiniere — a
Brunetti waited to see if these were rhetorical questions, but Patta’s confusion and indignation seemed sufficiently real for him to venture, ‘No, I don’t know what’s going on, sir. But I doubt they want us to get involved. The captain I spoke to there yesterday — I think he was the one who called you — he made it clear that they’re claiming jurisdiction.’
Patta’s relief was visible. ‘Good. Let them have it. I don’t understand how this could happen to a Carabinieri officer. He seemed like a sensible person. How could he let himself get killed like that?’
Like the Furies circling the head of a guilt-crazed Orestes, sarcastic responses crowded on to Brunetti’s tongue, but he drove them off and said, instead, ‘There’s no telling how it happened, sir. There could have been more than one of them.’
‘But still. .’ Patta said and let his voice drift away from this unspoken reproach for carelessness.
‘If you think it’s best for us, sir. .’ Brunetti began, his voice a symphony of uncertainty, ‘. . but perhaps. . no, better let them have it.’
Patta was on him like a ferret. ‘What is it, Brunetti?’
‘When I spoke to him, sir,’ Brunetti began with affected reticence, ‘Guarino told me he had a suspect for that murder in Tessera.’ Then, before Patta could ask, he added, ‘The man with the trucking company. Before Christmas.’
‘I’m not an idiot, Brunetti. I read the reports, you know.’
‘Of course, sir.’
‘Well, what did he say? This Carabiniere?’
‘He told me he didn’t give the name of his suspect to his colleagues, sir,’ Brunetti said.
‘That’s impossible,’ Patta said. ‘Of course he’d give it to them.’
‘I’m not sure he trusted them entirely.’ This could well be true, though Guarino had never said it.
