‘Are you out of your mind?’ a voice behind him asked, no less indignant for being muffled by a pillow. A younger Brunetti would perhaps have brought a handful of snow back to the bed, but this one contented himself with pressing his hand into the snow and leaving the print there. It was the dry kind of snow, he noticed.
He closed the door and came back to sit on the bed. ‘It snowed,’ he said.
He raised the hand that had left the print in the show and moved it closer to her shoulder. Though her head was turned away from him and mostly covered by a pillow, he had no trouble hearing her say, ‘If you put that hand anywhere near me, I will divorce you and take the children.’
‘They’re old enough to decide themselves,’ he answered with what he thought was Olympian calm.
‘I cook,’ she said.
‘Indeed,’ he said in acknowledgement of defeat.
She lapsed again into coma and Brunetti went to take a shower.
When he left the apartment more than half an hour later, he had had his first coffee and remembered to wear his scarf. He had also put on a pair of rubber-soled boots. It was indeed the fluffy kind of snow, stretching ahead of him undisturbed all the way to the first cross-street. Brunetti stuffed his hands in the pockets of his overcoat and slid one foot forward, telling himself that it was to test how slippery the pavement was. Not at all, he was glad to discover: it was like walking through feathers. He kicked out, first one foot and then the other, and great plumes of snow rose in front of him.
When he got to the crossing, he turned and looked proudly back at his work. Many people had passed towards the campo, and the snow had been kicked and brushed aside, leaving balding spots of pavement where the snow was already beginning to melt around the edges. The people walking by moved with stiff caution, like sailors just put to sea and not yet sure of their sea legs. But it was delight, not caution, that he read on most of their faces, as if school had just closed and they had all been let out to play. People smiled at one another, and strangers all had something to say about the snow.
He stopped at his usual news-stand and bought Il Gazzettino. ‘Recidivist,’ he said to himself as he took the paper. There was a small article on the front page about the murder in Marghera: only two sentences and an instruction to turn to the first page of the second section. He did so and read that the body of an unidentified man had been found in the Marghera industrial complex. The man had been shot and left in the open, where his body had been found by a night 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 calli that led back from the canal to the various hearts of the city. He noticed, as they passed the Comune, how grimy the snow made so many of the buildings look; only the ochre and red ones could remain respectable under the contrast. They passed the Mocenigo palazzi, and he remembered going to one of them with his uncle once; he could no longer remember why. Then ahead on the right, Palazzo Foscari, snow filigree dusting all of the windowsills. On the left he saw Palazzo Grassi, that now-charmless storehouse of second-rate art; then they slipped under the Accademia Bridge, where he saw people clinging to the railing as they went down the steps. He glanced back after they passed under the bridge and saw the same on the other side: a wooden surface would be far more treacherous than stone, especially one that gave the sense of tilting the walker forward.
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.’