glaring red and appeared newly applied.
‘Signora Sartori,’ the novice said. ‘I’ve brought you a visitor.’ The woman remained intent in her contemplation of the wall.
‘Signora Sartori,’ she tried again, ‘This gentleman’s come to speak to you.’ Still no response.
There was a noise behind them, and when they turned they saw the other dark-skinned novice – the one Brunetti now thought of as the Toltec statue – who, careful to keep both hands hidden under her scapular, said, ‘Sister Giuditta needs your help in the kitchen.’ She gave Brunetti a nervous smile, uncertain whether she should say something to him, as well.
At the news, the first novice pressed her hands together, glanced at Brunetti, then at her companion, then back to Signora Sartori. Brunetti puffed himself up with the air of casual command and said, ‘Fine, then. You go and speak to Suora Giuditta, and I’ll wait for you here.’ To show how patient he was, as well as to assert his intention to remain in the room, he looked around and chose to sit on a chair to the left of the door, a safe, declared distance from the woman at the window.
In the face of this manifestation of male authority, both girls – for they were hardly more than that – nodded and left the room together, leaving him to Signora Sartori. Or her to him.
He sat quietly, trying to sense how aware, or unaware, she was of his presence, and as time passed he began to suspect that she was as sensitive to his presence as he to hers. He let more time pass. Occasionally people walked past the door, but because Brunetti was sitting to the side of it, no one noticed that he was there. No one stopped to look in, nor did anyone come in to speak to Signora Sartori. After ten minutes or so Brunetti began to suspect that the novices had forgotten about him or perhaps assumed that he had left.
He thought back to the tables in the dining room and his choice of seat. He had sat to Signora Cannata’s left, the seat closest to Signora Sartori. How easily she could have heard everything they said, especially in the silence left by the departure of the other two people. So intent had she been on her food that it had not occurred to him at the time that she might have been intent on anything else, though he had said little to Signora Cannata, certainly nothing to raise interest or arouse curiosity.
The silence and the passing of time began to weigh on him, but he forced himself to remain both silent and still.
Her voice, when it came, was rough, the voice of someone no longer accustomed to speech. ‘She was a good woman.’ How many times was Brunetti to hear this? he wondered. He had never questioned it, and nothing he had heard about her made him suspect that it was not true. Events, however, had placed Signora Altavilla beyond criticism, and so it now mattered little whether she had been a good person or not, or who maintained that she was.
‘She understood things. Why people do things.’ She spoke a dialect so dense a non-Venetian would have struggled to understand what she said. She nodded in self-affirmation, then again and then again, but without looking in Brunetti’s direction. In an entirely different voice, she said, ‘We had to,’ letting the last word die out in a terminal fall into silence.
‘It’s hard, sometimes, to know,’ Brunetti ventured.
‘We knew,’ she said, quickly, defensively.
‘Of course,’ Brunetti agreed.
She turned to look at him then. ‘Are you a friend of his?’ she asked.
Brunetti settled for a noncommittal noise.
‘Did he send you?’ Like a bad actress, she squinched up her eyes as she asked this question, as if to show that she was both a suspicious and a clever person and would know if he lied. Seeing her whole face for the first time, he was surprised by its plumpness and the fullness of her mouth. Two deep vertical lines ran beside it; a third line, this one horizontal and in the middle of her chin, turned her face into a wooden puppet’s, a resemblance that was augmented by the impassivity of her glance and her strangely round blue eyes.
‘No, Signora, he didn’t,’ Brunetti said, with no idea who they were talking about. ‘I came to see you, just as I came to see Signora Cannata: to tell you how important your friendship was to Signora Altavilla and how very fond of you she was.’
She must have preferred whatever she saw on the other side of the
He let some more time pass. ‘You told her what you did,’ he said in an entirely conversational voice, phrasing it as something halfway between a question and a reminder.
His words seemed to strike a blow, for she hunched her shoulders and brought her fists together at the centre of her chest, but she did not turn to face him.
Casually, as though presenting some old adage about the behaviour of children, Brunetti said, ‘I think it helps, to be able to tell people what we did and why we did it. Talking about it helps it to go away.’ Speaking to her seemed to Brunetti like trying to order from a menu in a language he did not speak: he might see a familiar word or two, but he had no idea what was going to arrive after he spoke those words.
‘Trouble comes,’ she said to the window on the other side of the
As if summoned by her words, a man walked through the door. He was older than she, well into his eighties, one of those common types seen in bars: short, stocky, nose thickened by decades of hard drinking, a bit askew from years of hard living. His sparse hair, dyed a dark mahogany, was longer on one side of his head; it had been carefully combed over his bald scalp and sealed in place by some sort of shiny gel that made his head look as though it had recently been painted or oiled, then streaked with dark paint.
He came in just as she spoke, his arrival an antiphon to her words. He stopped short, apparently at the sight of Brunetti on the chair near the door. ‘Who are you?’ he demanded angrily, as if Brunetti had been provoking him and he wasn’t going to put up with it any longer. When Brunetti did not answer immediately, the man took a few steps towards him, stopped and planted his feet solidly, giving himself a firm base from which to launch an attack. ‘I asked you who you are,’ he said.
The broken veins in his cheeks and nose grew red, as if his anger had switched them on. ‘What are you doing in here?’ he demanded, looking at the woman, whose attention had remained on the window. His face softened when he looked at her, but she ignored him and he made no move to approach her. He turned back to Brunetti. ‘Are you bothering her?’
Brunetti got slowly to his feet and adopted a look of mild relief. He bent down and carefully pulled at the knees of his trousers to show his concern that they should not wrinkle. ‘Ah,’ he said with relief he made audible, ‘if you’re the Signora’s husband, perhaps you could give me the information.’
This confused the old man and he asked, ‘Who do you think you are to ask me questions? And what are you doing here?’ In the face of Brunetti’s refusal to answer, he repeated, voice rising another notch, ‘Have you been bothering her?’ He stepped closer to the woman, placing the thickness of his body between her and Brunetti.
Brunetti reached into his pocket for his notebook. ‘All I did was try to ask a question,’ he said, allowing annoyance to slip into his own voice. ‘But I realized I’d have to speak to someone else, Signore.’ He pursed his lips and, making no attempt to disguise his irritation, said, ‘I couldn’t get any sense out of her.’ A look between anger and pain crossed the old man’s face. Brunetti licked a finger and turned a few pages, then pointed down at a page on which he had written, in preparation for a parent-teacher meeting that was to be held at Chiara’s school the following week, a list of her teachers and the subjects they taught.
‘I need the information about the years 1988 and 1989. There’s nothing we can do until we have it.’
‘Go to hell with your 1988, and take 1989 with you,’ the old man said, pleased that he now had something specific to be angry about and pleased with his cleverness in expressing it.
Brunetti allowed surprise, then indignation, to play across his face. Then he took a long look at this noisy old man, as if seeing or hearing him for the first time. He stood up straighter and took a step towards him; there was no menace in the movement; though the old man leaned back from him, he did not move from his position in front of the woman.
Brunetti waved the notebook in the air between them. ‘See this, Signore? See this notebook? It’s got her entire work record, all those years. But not 1988 and 1989, so they haven’t been credited to her account.’ An exasperated Brunetti allowed himself to glance at the woman. ‘So she’s not being paid for them.’ He allowed himself to sound as if, given the way this man had treated him, he was almost pleased with the fact.
‘I asked her about those years,’ Brunetti said, looking in her direction with an annoyance he tried, and failed, to disguise. He’d come all this way to try to solve a problem, and first the woman was mute, and now the man told
