The Waters of Eternal Youth (16 page)

‘
Buon appetito
,' her mother said, and they picked up their forks.

Ah, Brunetti thought as he piled cream on his second bite of cake, who says that good actions are not rewarded?

Automatically, the level of conversation became appropriate for Manuela: how good the cake was, how good Alina's apple cake was, too, and Manuela always helped by peeling the apples; why is cream so good with chocolate cake, and where does cream come from; and would it be possible to ride a cow?

When Manuela asked this question, her mother quickly ate her last bite of cake and asked her daughter if she could have another, although Brunetti suspected she was enjoying the cake as little as Griffoni.

‘Would you like another piece of cake, Signora?' Manuela asked Griffoni, who put both hands over her stomach and said, ‘If I ate any more, I'd go “pop” and they'd hear it all over the city.'

This set Manuela off into giggles, and the idea of riding a cow – of riding – was abandoned.

When cake and more coffee had been refused, and then refused again, Brunetti and Griffoni got to their feet and said they had to go back to work. Manuela found this thrilling and asked, ‘Do you get to chase bad guys?'

‘No, Signorina Manuela,' Brunetti said, ‘usually we sit at our desks and read papers all day long. It's really very boring. Much more fun to come here and have cake.'

She laughed at this as though it were the funniest thing she'd ever heard, and again the bright sound of her laughter cut Brunetti to the heart.

She went with them towards the door, leaning close to Griffoni as they walked. Just as they got there, Brunetti heard Signora ­Magello-­Ronchi call after him. ‘Commissario,' she said, coming towards them. ‘You forgot this.' She held up the manila envelope she had brought back from some other room.

He took it and thanked her. Manuela's name was on the cover. He turned the envelope over and looked at the flap. ‘Didn't you open it?'

‘I told you. There was no need to,' she answered, voice moving away from pleasantness.

Griffoni, perhaps in response to the tension that had suddenly entered the room, asked Manuela a question and moved off from the others to hear the answer.

Manuela's mother closed her eyes for a moment and concentrated on taking a breath. When she opened her eyes, she said, ‘You can read it if you want. It doesn't interest me.' She looked towards the door, where Griffoni and Manuela stood close together, talking happily. ‘Only she does,' she said in a tired voice. ‘Only my baby.'

Brunetti reached out and took her hand and held it. ‘Thank you for talking to us, Signora,' he said.

‘I hope you liked the cake,' she chirped back in best hostess fashion, then smiled easily, looking remarkably like Manuela when she did.

Griffoni and Brunetti took their leave, but not before having promised to come back and see Manuela another time.

The fastest way to get to the Questura was to take the Number One from San Silvestro. As they waited on the
imbarcadero
for the vaporetto, Brunetti said, ‘She's a sweet girl, isn't she?' realizing only too late that he had referred to Manuela as a girl.

Griffoni nodded but said nothing.

‘You got on with her very well, it seemed.'

‘All I had to do was think of my nieces.'

‘How old are they?'

‘One's six and one's eight. I said to her what I say to them.' She walked back outside and leaned against the railing with folded arms, looking towards Rialto for a sign of the boat.

Brunetti, without glancing at his watch, said, ‘Four minutes.'

‘Are you joking?' Griffoni asked in surprise. ‘Do you all have computer chips in your ears with the boat times?'

‘It's my stop,' he said. ‘So I don't need a chip.'

She turned and glanced across the canal and said, ‘It's strange: there are times when I begin to find all of this normal. It's where I live and I move around on boats, and addresses mean nothing, and it's faster to walk to work, and I'm even beginning to get used to the sound of Veneziano.' She let her voice trail off and stop.

‘And other times?'

‘Other times I see how strange it all is. Everyone in my building is very friendly if we meet on the stairs, but no one's invited me into their home, not even for a coffee, and I've been there for several years. The young people call me
tu
, but the old ones never will. I find the food insipid. I've almost died from every one of the pizzas I've tried to eat here. And I know the sun is going to disappear in about two months and we won't see it again until March, except for a ­one-­week break in January, usually about the end of the first week.'

Brunetti laughed out loud, as he suspected she wanted him to. ‘And at home, you'd be walking around in a sweater and eating pizza at every meal?'

‘No, not really. I'd probably be trying to figure out a way to get around the magistrates who are working for the Mafia; the same with my colleagues. And I'd be in the habit of carrying my pistol. Here,' she began and pulled open her jacket to show that she was not wearing one, ‘I forget to carry it most of the time.'

Brunetti, who did the same, said nothing.

‘What's in the envelope?' she asked, pointing to the one he was carrying.

‘It's what the hospital gave her mother when she took Manuela home.' He turned it over and showed her the sealed flap.

‘And she couldn't open it,' she said, sounding as if she understood such reluctance. ‘How awful it must be for her.' She turned away from Brunetti and looked at the buildings on the other side of the canal, but they offered little solace.

‘Why?' Brunetti asked, curious about Griffoni's concern for the mother when she had spent most of her time with the daughter.

‘Because she understands. And the daughter doesn't.'

He turned and walked into the
imbarcadero
, and she followed him. ‘You heard it coming, didn't you?' she asked as she noticed the boat approaching. When it tied up, they moved on board and towards the back of the cabin, where some seats were empty.

‘I suppose I did. I've been listening to them all my life, so maybe my body feels their vibrations before I hear them. Never thought about it before.'

He stood back and let her pass in front of him to take the seat by the window. When he turned to speak to her, he saw only the back of her head: she was glued to the window as if she were a tourist seeing these
palazzi
for the first time.

He stuck his finger under the flap and prised it up. It opened easily, noiselessly. He reached in and pulled out a dark blue manila folder. Having heard the sound, Griffoni turned and watched him read.

She gave him plenty of time. When he turned to the second page, she said, ‘Well?'

‘It gives a general description of her condition when she was brought to the Emergency Room: she was unconscious, but breathing; an ­X-­ray showed there was still water in her lungs; there was a wound on the side of her head.' Brunetti had gradually been moving the papers farther away from him as he read but finally reached into the inner pocket of his jacket for his reading glasses.

He read quickly down the second page then told Griffoni: ‘Aside from the wound on her head – there is no speculation here about what the cause might have been – there were bruises on her arms and neck.' He flipped back to the first page. ‘These were written when she was admitted. It seems their chief concern was the water in her lungs.'

He turned back to where he had been and again read quickly, skimming the text, searching for the point when the doctors began to understand the extent of her injuries.

He took his eyes from the paper and stared ahead, blind to the people sitting in front of them, blind to the glory on both sides of the boat.

‘What is it?' Griffoni asked.

He pointed to the third paragraph and passed the papers to her, saying, ‘The second day. Look.'

Griffoni read it and, just as Brunetti had, looked away from the page blankly in front of her.

‘Bloodstains seen on patient's sheets necessitated a pelvic exam, performed in place on the ­still-­unconscious patient. Evidence of recent sexual activity of a violent nature, very likely rape.'

Griffoni continued reading the report to the end. ‘She was unconscious for a week,' she said. ‘And then she woke up naturally but could remember nothing – nothing – of the events before her fall – fall – into the water.' She handed him the papers, saying, ‘Read the rest.'

He did and had barely finished when the boat pulled up to the San Zaccaria stop. He followed Griffoni from the boat. They walked along the
riva
, both on autopilot, towards the Questura. At one point, uncertain of his memory of what they had both read, Brunetti stopped and took another look at the report. ‘When she finally did wake up, it took them only a day to see that something was wrong,' he said, then read aloud: ‘ “Patient has no memory of incident and great difficulty in explaining the events preceding it. Her language is childlike, and she seems not to understand her condition.” ' He continued reading the doctors' ­day-­by-­day evidence that far more was wrong with this girl than they had at first assumed, until that evidence became incontrovertible: an adolescent had fallen into the water, and a child had been pulled out.

‘They didn't bother with a full examination when they brought her in,' he said and closed his eyes. ‘A wound on her head, bruising on her body, pulled from the water, and they didn't give her a full examination!'

‘And then, I suppose,' Griffoni said in a voice she struggled to contain, ‘they thought they'd wait until she woke up before they told the mother or told the police.'

Brunetti thought Griffoni's anger might blossom into something else, but it did not. He started towards the Questura again. He wondered if the mother even knew; surely, they would have to have told her; the girl was a minor. Or maybe they thought that by giving her the medical files they were fulfilling their obligations.

Griffoni followed him up to his office and sat opposite him; the sun streaming in from the windows turned her hair into a golden crown. ‘What now?' she asked.

‘I still have to talk to the man who pulled her out of the water,' Brunetti said. ‘I'm supposed to see him tomorrow at noon. I had to invite him to lunch to get him to talk to me.'

‘Do you think he knows anything?'

Brunetti waved a hand in the air to show his uncertainty. ‘He's a drunk. Everyone who's spoken of him says he is. When I called to ask to speak to him, I could hear a glass clicking against the phone.'

‘They're unreliable, drunks,' Griffoni said.

‘And if his brain's been soaking in alcohol for the last fifteen years, it's even less likely he'll remember anything.'

‘Then why bother?'

‘There's nothing else,' Brunetti admitted.

They sat in silence until Brunetti said, ‘The medical report changes everything, doesn't it?'

‘Yes,' she agreed.

Griffoni stared out the window while together they ­listened to a boat passing from left to right under the windows. ‘Maybe. So are you suggesting that her fall was more likely . . . involuntary?'

‘Maybe,' Brunetti answered. ‘Her grandmother told me that Manuela had become very withdrawn in the months before it happened.

‘How did she know that?'

‘Manuela's mother told her.'

She nodded. ‘She'd know, I suppose.' Griffoni crossed her legs and slumped down in her chair. She folded her arms and looked out of the window. ‘You know,' she said, ‘if I think about this, I want to cry.' She pressed both hands to the sides of her mouth and smoothed the skin back.

‘She could be my younger sister.' She shook her head and went on, ‘That hardly matters. She's a young woman who's lost her future. She could be like this for another half a century. My God, think of it.' Her voice had grown unsteady and trailed away on the final words.

‘I think it's time we went home,' was all Brunetti could think of saying.

That is what they did.

The next morning he woke with an ache, but this time it was in his mind, not in his joints. He'd spent the better part of the last week getting nowhere, involving not only himself but another commissario, a magistrate, his superior, ­Vice-­Questore Patta, and Patta's secretary, Signorina Elettra. Five people's attention had resulted in no discoveries save unprovable information about a rape committed fifteen years before, of which there existed no possibility that the victim would remember.

He lay in bed and stared at the ceiling, then turned his head and looked out at the roofs of the city, which glistened with autumnal rain.

He looked at the clock and saw that it was almost nine: Paola had let him sleep. He turned on his side, telling himself that he would plan his day, and went back to sleep.

Half an hour later, Paola woke him by saying his name and setting a cup and saucer down next to him. The sound, and then the smell, bored down into wherever he was and pulled him free. He flopped on to his back, pushed himself up against the back of the bed, and rubbed at his eyes.

‘Here,' Paola said, handing him the cup and saucer. ‘There's already sugar in it.'

She sat on his side of the bed and watched as he took his first sip of coffee, closed his eyes, and rested his head back against the pillow. ‘The patient will live,' he said and finished his coffee. He set the cup and saucer on the bedside table. ‘Aren't you supposed to be teaching?' he asked her.

‘Not until ten.'

‘I'm not doing anything until twelve today,' he boasted.

‘Why is that?'

‘Because I don't feel like it.'

‘That's certainly a compelling reason,' she agreed.

‘When's the last time I missed even a ­half-­day of work?' he demanded. ‘How many days have I taken sick leave in all these years?'

‘You were in the hospital for almost a week.'

‘That was years ago.'

‘Yes,' she admitted.

‘I can't bear it today,' he said: he had told her about the medical report the night before. ‘I don't know why that is, but it's true. Just for one morning, I don't want to think about it, go there, do it.'

‘Is this a ­life-­altering change?'

He had to consider this. ‘Probably not.'

She bent over him and pressed his shoulder, then got to her feet.

‘Why'd you stay?' Brunetti asked.

‘To bring you coffee.'

‘Don't let your feminist friends find out you did that,' Brunetti said.

‘Love trumps principle,' she said and left.

Brunetti spent another hour reading Apollonius. How often it was true in these stories: love trumped principle. Paola tossed out these things so easily. Did she sit on the vaporetto and make them up or did they come to her in flashes?

He set the book aside, took a shower and got ready to leave the house. While he had been lolling in swinish sleep and reading, the sun had come out and got immediately to work: the streets were dry, and it was warm enough to wear only a sweater and jacket.

In the street, he decided to walk: it was faster than taking a vaporetto and making the long S towards Riva di Biasio. Besides, the air was an inducement to walk. Brunetti set out in what would be, in a normal city, a straight line, heading ­north-­west. Venice, however, took him left and right, over bridges, around corners he wasn't aware of turning or planning to turn. Within fifteen minutes, he was walking along the embankment of Rio Marin, heading towards the gas office. A few doors before it, he saw the windows and door of a bar, stopped and glanced inside, searching for a man he wouldn't recognize.

There were two women at a table, each with a coffee cup in front of them. Three young tourists, two girls and a boy, sat at another table, a map spread out in front of them, each holding a glass of beer as they bent over it.

Brunetti entered and went to the bar. The barman looked at him and nodded. Brunetti had eaten nothing that morning and so did not want wine or a spritz. Nor did he want a coffee so close to lunch. He asked for a glass of mineral water and said, ‘I'm supposed to meet Pietro Cavanis, but he doesn't seem to be here.'

‘No,' the man said as he set a glass in front of Brunetti. ‘He hasn't been in for a couple of days. At least, I haven't seen him. He might have been here in the morning, when my son works, but he's not much of a one for the morning, Pietro.'

‘I know,' Brunetti said with a friendly smile. ‘He told me.' He took a few sips of his water and set the glass down. ‘He told me to ask you for the keys if he wasn't here.'

The barman smiled and stepped over to the cash register and pulled a ­much-­handled envelope from where it was stuffed between the machine and the wall. He took out a set of keys and handed them to Brunetti. ‘It's the green door on the other side of the canal. Top floor.'

‘I know that, too,' Brunetti said, thanked the man, and took the keys. Without asking what he owed, Brunetti left two euros on the counter and started for the door. Holding up the keys, he turned at the door and said, ‘I'll bring them back.'

The barman, who had already removed Brunetti's glass and was wiping at the place where it had been, waved the cloth in his direction.

The bridge on the left was closer, so he crossed that and went along the
riva
to the green door. He stepped back and looked at the façade of the building: the shutters on the first floor were all closed and ­sun-­bleached, as were the four on the left side of the second floor. Two of the shutters on the right side were open, the inside bleached to a dull ­grey-­green, suggesting that they were never pulled closed. The building looked sick, as if withering away to death. There were two empty rectangles on the left side of the bells; only Cavanis' name was there: top row, right side.

He put the larger key into the green door. It opened easily, and Brunetti crossed the small entrance space and started up the stairs. He paused on the second landing, something he had begun doing on the steps to his own home.

Outside the door on the right, he saw Cavanis' name, printed in a fine copperplate hand, on a piece of cardboard pinned to the left of the door. Politeness or territoriality made him ring the bell, wait, and then ring it again, longer. Familiar with the sleep of alcoholics, he then used the key to open the door, which was not ­double-­locked.

‘Signor Cavanis,' he called from the doorway. ‘Signor Cavanis.' He waited, and his nose told him what he was going to find. He could have retreated into the corridor and called the crime squad, but instead he left the keys in the door, stuffed both hands into his pockets, and stepped into the room.

It smelled of cigarettes, of decades, eternities of the presence of a heavy smoker. It was a small room. Sofa, low table, facing them a television, all part of a shrine to the ­flat-­faced god. This one was as enormous as it was old. As deep as it was wide, it was turned low but was still audible and was currently giving a blonde young woman in a pink angora sweater the chance to look adoringly at an elderly man in an expensive suit who sat opposite her as he lectured her ­never-­dimming smile.

Brunetti looked for the remote control, but there was none to be found. It was not on the sofa or the table, and there were no other flat surfaces in the room. Nor were there knobs on the television: what you saw was what you got: local channel, fixed volume. How much local news and entertainment could a person stand before going mad?

There were no pictures and no reading material of any sort in the room, no rugs or decorations, and no other furniture. On the table were some plates and glasses, cups and saucers, apparently stacked and pushed aside as days passed. The plate that sat in the line of vision between the screen and the viewer's chair held a ­dried-­out piece of cheese, some prosciutto that had curved in on itself; beside it, pieces had been sliced from a loaf of white bread. The glass beside the plate was half full of red wine; the level had gone down as it evaporated in the overheated room, leaving a reddish stripe above the remaining wine.

Brunetti went into the small kitchen on the right. On the table sat an almost empty ­two-­litre bottle of red wine. He did not bother to open the cabinets or the refrigerator but backed out and went to the door where he had seen the foot.

It was a large foot, wearing a man's shoe, and it was lying on the floor, a grey sock that might once have been white exposed above it. Brunetti leaned forward and into the room. The ­grey-­haired man lay on his left side, his head cushioned on his bent elbow. He could have been taking a nap, one leg stretched out, the other trapped and bent slightly under it. He could have been asleep were it not for the handle of a kitchen knife protruding from the right side of his neck and the pool of dried blood in which he lay. And the smell. Not even the years of smoke, which had discoloured the white door of the refrigerator and darkened the tiles in the kitchen, could cover or disguise that distinctive ­iron-­rich smell, nor could they overpower the smell of rot that Brunetti sensed slowly sinking into his own clothing.

He backed away from the body and left the apartment and stood on the landing. He dialled Bocchese's
telefonino
number and told the leader of the forensics squad what to prepare for, gave him the address, and told him to get a team there as quickly as he could and to bring a pathologist, if one was free.

‘I shouldn't ask this,' Bocchese said, ‘but did you touch anything?'

‘No,' Brunetti said and broke the connection. He remained on the landing outside the apartment, trying to draw the line that would connect what he had just seen to something else. The dead man had saved Manuela from death, and this had come to the attention of the police. Cavanis had been there when it happened and had always denied – after having described it – that he had seen anyone try to harm Manuela. Nothing necessitated a link; nothing proved ­cause–­effect; no straight line led from Rio San Boldo to Rio Marin.

Cavanis could have interrupted a burglar; one look back at the poverty of the room put an end to that idea. An enemy could have done it, although a man with enemies does not leave his keys with a barman and tell him to give them to whoever asks for them. Random violence? In Venice? The possibility didn't remain in Brunetti's mind long enough for him to find the energy to dismiss it.

Brunetti went downstairs and out into the sunlight to wait for the boat.

It took the crew another quarter of an hour to arrive, but when they did, they came in force. Aside from the pilot and Bocchese, there were two photographers and two technicians. The boat glided up to the side of the canal; Brunetti caught the rope and wrapped it around the bollard, then hauled the first man up to the pavement.

Bocchese came on deck and told the pilot to move the boat ahead fifty metres to a stone staircase leading down to the water: he got out there and walked back to Brunetti, leaving it to the crew to unload and move the equipment.

‘Murder?' Bocchese asked. When Brunetti nodded, the technician added, ‘Rizzardi is on his way.'

‘Where was he?'

‘At home,' Bocchese said. ‘When I told him you'd called it in, he said he'd come even though that idiot's on duty.'

Brunetti thought it politic to ignore Rizzardi's comment about his colleague, who was considered an idiot by everyone at the Questura.

Bocchese went back to the two technicians who were carrying their equipment from the boat. Though he was a head shorter than both of them and at least twenty years older, the younger men looked to him for instruction; their very bearing displayed deference.

When they were all on the landing, Brunetti accompanied them to the green door and into the apartment. He realized then that his morning's reluctance to go to the Questura had followed him here. He disliked being at the scene of this crime, disliked watching as the camera was set up and photos were taken of the dead man and everything around him, from every angle. Even more did he find the necessity to avoid the dry puddle of blood grotesque. He didn't want to see the knife, didn't want to see the way the blood had flowed down the dead man's body and seeped into his clothing, nor to start calculating how long he could have lived while the blood was still flowing.

Brunetti retreated to the landing, leaving the others to do their jobs, and tried to push his mind away from the thought of what it must be to know that you were dying, that you were wounded beyond recovery, beyond help or hope, and were going to die. He could wish only that alcohol and shock and sudden loss of blood had dulled Cavanis' mind – for this must be Pietro Cavanis – and lessened his terror.

‘Guido?' A voice from the door to the street called him away from these thoughts.

He turned and saw Ettore Rizzardi, the pathologist, come to bear witness to the obvious, as was so often his duty. Tall and thin, Rizzardi managed to convey a sense of energy held in restraint.

Brunetti shook his hand and then led him into the apartment; he could think of nothing to say. Brunetti watched the pathologist gaze around the room, and registered the moment when he saw the foot. Rizzardi closed his eyes for a moment, and had Brunetti not known him better, he would have suspected him of saying a prayer.

One of the technicians offered each of them a pair of plastic gloves, but Rizzardi had brought his own. He opened the package and put them on. Brunetti did the same.

Brunetti followed the pathologist into Cavanis' bedroom and saw the doctor already bent to take the man's pulse. Rizzardi looked at his watch and took out a notebook. He glanced at Bocchese. ‘Your people finished in here?'

‘Yes.'

‘All right, I'll take a look.' He stepped back from the corpse and took a surgical mask from his pocket, ripped off the protective paper, and put it on. He handed one to Brunetti, who was glad to do the same. Rizzardi took a ­heat-­sensitive wand from his pocket and placed the tip on the dead man's temple, then wrote in his notebook. ‘Will you help me, Guido?' he asked.