He heard something beside him, something dull and leaden that managed to penetrate the buzz, and turned to see Griffoni approach: it must have been her footsteps on the steps. ‘You all right?’ Brunetti asked. Griffoni understood and she nodded.
Brunetti saw that Franca Marinello was crouched against the wall, as far as she could be from Terrasini’s body, face pressed into her knees. No one had certified that the young man was dead, but Brunetti knew it was a body that lay there, blood seeping on to the marble behind his head.
He was surprised at the stiffness in his knees and at how reluctant they were to take him down the steps. He could feel, but still not hear, his footsteps. Avoiding Terrasini, he knelt on one knee beside the woman. He waited until he was sure she was aware of him near her and then said, glad to be able to hear his own voice, however faintly, ‘Are you all right, Signora?’
She raised her head and presented him with her face, never before seen so close to. The tilted eyes looked all the stranger for being so near, and he suddenly noticed a thin scar starting just below her left ear and disappearing behind it.
‘Did you have time to read the
‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ve had so little time.’
‘Pity,’ she said. ‘It’s all there. Everything.’ She lowered her head to her knees.
Brunetti found himself with nothing to say. He got to his feet and turned towards a sound from above, again swept with relief that he could hear it. He saw Vasco at the top of the stairs, looking enormous from this angle, like a character in an action film, like a cartoon figure of Conan the Barbarian, like. .
‘I called your people,’ he said. ‘They should be here soon.’
Brunetti’s eyes fell to the top of the head of the silent woman and, on the other side of the landing, the eternally quiet body. Terrasini lay on his back. Looking at him, Brunetti thought of that other corpse, Guarino, and to the terrible resemblance between these two men so quickly, so terribly, stripped of life.
26
After a few minutes’ sensation, Vasco managed to calm the people in the gaming rooms at the head of the stairs by telling them there had been an accident. Willing to believe it, they went back to what they were losing, and life went on.
Claudia Griffoni went back to the Questura with Signora Marinello, she also enveloped in a long fur, the same one she had been wearing the night Brunetti first saw her. He waited while the technical crew set up their cameras on the stairs. Two police officers having witnessed the shooting, the technicians did little more than photograph the scene and put the pistol in a plastic evidence bag, then wait for the
He called Paola a little before three and told her sleep-fogged voice that he would not be back for some time. After Terrasini was declared dead, Brunetti asked the technical squad if they would take him back with them but chose to stay on deck with the pilot. Neither man spoke; the motor seemed unaccountably low until Brunetti remembered the three shots and the odd dislocation of sound that followed them. He looked at the facades of the buildings they passed, not really seeing them, for he was back on the stairs, watching, and not understanding, what happened.
Franca Marinello spoke to Terrasini and he took out the gun, then she spoke again, and he gave it to her. And then, while Brunetti was looking away, something happened — did she say something? — that maddened him. And then she used the gun. Everything, Brunetti knew, was subject to rational explanation. Cause was followed by effect. The autopsy would determine what substances were in the young man’s brain, but at least when Brunetti was watching him, he had been responding to words, not to chemicals.
The launch swung into the Rio di San Lorenzo and pulled up at the dock of the Questura. Brunetti looked into the cabin of the boat and saw the two attendants getting to their feet. Did they talk to one another, he wondered, on their way back from these trips?
He thanked the pilot and jumped off the still-moving boat. He knocked on the door of the Questura, and the night man let him in, saying, ‘Commissario Griffoni is in her office, sir.’
He went up the stairs and then followed the beacon of light from her door at the end of the dark hallway. He paused at the door but did not knock. ‘Come in, Guido,’ she said.
A clock on the wall to the left of her desk told him it was three-thirty. ‘If you gave me a coffee, I’d shoot Patta and have you promoted to his job,’ she said, looking up, and then smiled.
‘They didn’t tell us, when we took these jobs, about this part of it, did they?’ he said, crossing the room and sitting opposite her. ‘What did she say?’
Griffoni ran both hands through her hair in a gesture he had seen her make towards the end of Patta’s meetings, a sign that her patience was running short. ‘Nothing.’
‘Nothing?’ Brunetti asked. ‘How much time did you spend with her?’
‘I brought her back here in the boat, but she didn’t say anything except thank you to the pilot, and then to the man who opened the door, and then to me.’ She moved her hands towards her head but stopped herself and said, ‘I told her she could call her lawyer if she wanted to, but all she said was, “No, thank you. I’d prefer to wait until the morning”, like a teenager caught for drunk driving who didn’t want to wake her parents up.’ She shook her head, either at the comparison or at Marinello’s behaviour.
‘I told her she could leave if her lawyer came and she made a statement in my presence, but she said she wanted to talk to you. She was perfectly polite — I even liked her — but she refused to say anything, and there was nothing I could do to make her change her mind. I’d ask her, and she’d say thank you but no. It’s strange, really. And that face.’
‘Where is she?’ Brunetti asked, not wanting to enter into that discussion.
‘Downstairs, in one of the interview rooms.’
Ordinarily, these rooms would have been called ‘interrogation rooms’. Brunetti wondered what made her use the less threatening description, but that was not something he wanted to talk about, either.
‘I’ll go down,’ he said, getting to his feet. He held out his hand. ‘Could you give me the key?’
She opened her hands in a helpless gesture. ‘The door’s not locked. As soon as she went in, she sat down and took a book out of her bag and started to read. I couldn’t do it, couldn’t lock the door.’ Brunetti smiled at her, liking her for her weakness. ‘Besides, Giuffre’s down there, and she’d have to go past him if she tried to leave.’
‘All right, Claudia. Maybe you should go home and get some sleep. Thanks. And thanks for coming tonight.’
She looked up at him and asked, unable to hide her nervousness, ‘Your ears? Are they still ringing?’
‘No. Are yours?’
‘Not really. But there’s a small buzz. It’s much less than it was, but a little bit of it’s still there.’
‘Get some sleep, then go over to the hospital in the morning and tell them what happened. There might be something they can tell you.’
‘Thanks, Guido, I will,’ she said and reached to switch off her desk lamp. She got to her feet and Brunetti helped her into her coat and waited for her at the door to her office. Not speaking, they went down the stairs together. On the ground floor, she said good-night. Brunetti turned down the corridor towards the single light that came from the door of one of the rooms at the end.
He paused and glanced in, and Franca Marinello looked up from her book.
‘Good morning,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry you had to wait for me.’
‘Oh, that’s all right. I don’t sleep a lot any more, and I had a book with me, so it doesn’t matter.’
‘But you’d be more comfortable at home, I’m sure.’
‘Yes, surely that’s true. But I thought you might think it important that we talk tonight.’
‘Yes, I think it is,’ he said, coming into the room.
As if it were her salon, she nodded to the chair across from her, and he sat. She closed her book and laid it on the table, but he could not see the spine and so had no idea what it was.
She had seen his glance. ‘Psellus’s
