About Face

didn’t go away, she kept taking them.’

This time, Brunetti sat quietly and waited for her to go on. ‘After five days on the island, she collapsed, and they took her to a doctor — there wasn’t much in the way of medical attention there. He said there was an infection in her mouth, something he wasn’t able to treat, so Maurizio hired a plane and took her to Australia. That was the nearest place where he thought she could get help. Sydney, I think.’ Then, absently, ‘Not that it matters.’

She picked up the water, drank half of it and set the glass down. ‘She had one of those terrible hospital infections. Apparently it had spread from where the teeth had been and gone into the tissue of her jaw and face.’ The Contessa covered her own face in her hands, as if trying to protect it from what she was saying.

‘The doctors there had no choice. They had to go in and try to save what they could. It was one of those infections that doesn’t respond to antibiotics, or she was allergic to them. I really don’t remember now.’ The Contessa uncovered her face and looked at Brunetti. ‘She told me once, years ago. It was terrible to hear her talk about it. She was such a lovely girl. Before it happened. But they had to do so much, destroy so much. To save her.’

‘So that explains it,’ said a bemused Brunetti.

‘Of course,’ the Contessa said fiercely. ‘Do you think she’d want to look like that? For the love of God, do you think any woman would?’

‘I had no idea,’ Brunetti said.

‘Of course you didn’t. And no one else does.’

‘But you do.’

She nodded sadly. ‘Yes, I do. When they came back, she looked like she looks now. She called me and asked to come to see me, and I was overjoyed. It had been months, and all I knew was what Maurizio told me on the phone, that she had been very sick, but he didn’t say what. When she called me, Franca told me she had had a terrible accident, and I wasn’t to be shocked when I saw her.’ Then, after a moment, ‘At least she tried to prepare me. But nothing could, could it?’ she asked, but Brunetti had no answer to give her.

He sensed that the Contessa was bringing it all back by speaking of it. ‘But I was shocked, and I couldn’t hide it. I knew she’d never want to do something like that. And she was so pretty, Guido: you can have no idea how pretty she was.’

The photo in the magazine had given him an idea, and so he did know.

‘I started to cry. I couldn’t help myself: I simply started to cry. And Franca had to comfort me. Guido, think about it — she came back like that, and I was the one who broke down.’ She stopped talking and blinked her eyes a few times, but she managed to fight back tears.

‘It was the best the surgeons in Australia could do. Because the infection had gone on for too long.’

Brunetti cast his attention out the window and studied the buildings on the other side of the canal. When he looked back, tears ran down the Contessa’s cheeks. ‘I’m sorry, Mamma,’ he said, quite unconscious of calling her that for the first time.

She gave herself a shake. ‘I’m sorry too, Guido, so sorry for her.’

‘But what did she do?’

‘What do you mean, what did she do? She tried to live her life, but she always had that face and the assumptions people made about it.’

‘She didn’t tell anyone?’

The Contessa shook her head. ‘I told you: she told me, and she asked me not to tell anyone. And until today, I haven’t. Only Maurizio and I know, and the people in Australia who saved her life.’ She gave a sigh and sat up straighter. ‘For there’s that to say, Guido: they saved her life.’

‘What about the dentist?’ he asked, and then added, ‘And how did he die?’

‘It turned out he wasn’t a dentist after all,’ she said, voice moving closer to anger. ‘Just one of those odontotechnici you read about all the time: they start making false teeth, then they set themselves up as dentists and do that until they get caught, but nothing happens to them.’ He saw her hands grip tight on the arms of the chair.

‘You mean he wasn’t arrested?’

‘Finally,’ she said tiredly. ‘The same thing happened to another patient. This one died. So the inspectors from ULSS went in, and they discovered his whole surgery — the tools and the furniture — filled with that hospital infection. It’s a miracle he killed only one person and that any of the others survived. So this time someone did go to prison. The sentence was six years, but the trial had taken two — and he was at home for that, of course — so he was supposed to be there for four years, but he was released with the indulto.’

‘Then what happened?’

‘He went back to work, it seems,’ she said with a bitterness he had seldom heard her express.

‘Work?’

‘As an odontotechnico, not a dentist.’

He closed his eyes at the folly of it. Where else could something like this happen?

‘But he didn’t get a chance to hurt many people,’ she said neutrally.

‘Why?’

‘Someone killed him. In Montebelluna — he’d moved there to open a new surgery. There was a break-in and someone killed him and raped his wife.’

Brunetti remembered the case. Two summers ago, a break-in, a murder that was never solved.

‘He was shot, wasn’t he?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Did you ever talk to her about this?’ he asked.

Her eyes widened. ‘What for? To ask if she felt better because he was dead?’ She saw how stunned he was by her question and softened her tone to say, ‘I read about it and ecognized his name, but I couldn’t ask her.’

‘Did you ever discuss it — him — with her?’

‘Once, just after he was sentenced, I think. At any rate, years ago.’

‘What did you say?’

‘I asked if she had read about his conviction and that he would go to prison, and she said she had.’

‘And?’

‘And I asked her what she thought about it.’ Without waiting for Brunetti, she went on, ‘She said it didn’t make any difference. Not to her and not to any of the people he’d injured. And certainly not to the person he’d killed.’

Brunetti considered this for some time and then asked, ‘Do you think she meant that she had forgiven him?’

She looked at Brunetti, a long, thoughtful glance. ‘She could have meant that,’ she said and then added, coldly, ‘But I hope she didn’t.’

28

Brunetti left soon after that and, standing in the calle beside the palazzo, called Griffoni at her office, who told him that Signora Marinello had left the Questura that morning in the company of her lawyer. The file, she told him, was downstairs, but she would call him back in a few minutes with Marinello’s number. While he waited for her to do that, Brunetti continued towards the Ca Rezzonico stop, from where he could take a vaporetto in either direction.

Griffoni called back with the telefonino number even before he reached the imbarcadero. Brunetti explained that he wanted to talk to Marinello about the night before, and Griffoni asked, ‘Why’d she shoot him?’

‘You saw it,’ Brunetti said. ‘You saw him get ready to hit her.’

‘Yes, of course I did,’ the other commissario replied. ‘But I don’t mean that: I mean the third time. He was on the floor, with two bullets in him, for God’s sake, and she shot him again. That’s what I don’t understand.’

Brunetti thought he understood, but he did not say this. ‘That’s why I want to talk to her.’ He cast his memory back to the scene of the killing: Griffoni had been standing against the railing when Brunetti looked at her,