The entrance was brightly lit, the floor covered with grey linoleum, and at one side stood a desk, behind which sat a young man in a white lab jacket. ‘Buon dì,’ he said, smiling. ‘May I help you?’
Vezzani stepped aside and allowed Brunetti to approach the desk. The boy could not have been eighteen and filled the air around him with a sense of health and well-being. Brunetti saw matched rows of perfect teeth, brown eyes so large his mind flashed to the description of ‘ox-eyed Hera’, even though he was looking at a boy. If roses had skin, his was the same.
‘We’re looking for the person in charge,’ Brunetti said, smiling back, as who could not?
‘Is it about your pet?’ the young man asked, not managing to sound as if he expected a positive response. He leaned to the side to see around them.
‘No,’ Brunetti said, letting his smile disappear. ‘It’s about Dottor Nava.’
At those words, the boy’s smile went the way of Brunetti’s, and he studied each of them more closely, as if in search of some new odour they might have carried into the room. ‘Have you seen him?’ he finally brought himself to ask.
‘Perhaps I could speak to the person in charge,’ Brunetti said.
The boy got to his feet, suddenly in a hurry. ‘That would be Signora Baroni,’ he said. ‘I’ll get her.’ Abruptly he turned away from them to open a door just behind him. Leaving it open, he walked down a short corridor and entered a room on the right. Animal sounds came from the open door: barking and a thumping sound that could have been anything.
After less than a minute, a woman emerged and came towards them. Leaving the door open behind her, she approached Brunetti, who was closest to her. Though her face suggested she was a generation older than the receptionist, there was no sign of this in the ease and fluidity of her motions.
‘Clara Baroni,’ she said, shaking Brunetti’s hand and nodding to the others. ‘I’m Dottor Nava’s assistant. Luca said you came to talk about him. Do you know where he is?’
Brunetti was struck by the awkwardness of the situation, the four of them standing in the room. It did not seem the best setting for what he had to say, but he saw no alternative. ‘We’ve just come from speaking to Dottor Nava’s wife,’ he began. Then, in case it was still necessary, ‘We’re policemen.’
She nodded, encouraging him.
‘The doctor’s been killed.’ He could find no better way to say it.
‘How?’ she asked, face blank with shock. ‘In an accident?’
‘No, Signora. Not an accident,’ Brunetti said evasively. ‘He had no identification, so it’s taken us this long to trace him.’ As he spoke to her, the focus of her eyes drifted away from him while she studied some interior place. She braced herself with one hand against the receptionist’s desk. None of the men said anything.
After what seemed an interminable time, she stood upright and turned back to Brunetti. ‘Not an accident?’ she asked.
‘It doesn’t appear that way, Signora,’ Brunetti said.
Like a dog coming out of the water, she gave a shake of her entire body and asked in a tight voice, ‘What was it, then?’
‘He was the victim of a crime.’
She bit at her upper lip. ‘Was he the man in Venice?’
‘Yes,’ Brunetti said, wondering why, if she had had any suspicion, she had not contacted them. ‘Why do you ask that, Signora?’
‘Because no one’s heard from him for two days, and even his wife doesn’t know where he is.’
‘Did you call us, Signora?’
‘The police?’ she asked in honest astonishment.
Brunetti was tempted to ask her who else, but he resisted temptation and answered with a simple ‘Yes.’
As if she were only now aware of the three men standing in the room, she said, ‘Perhaps we could go back to my office.’
They followed her down a corridor, where the smell of animal grew even stronger, and into the room on the right. Against one wall, the receptionist sat in a straight-backed chair, a black and white rabbit on his lap. The rabbit had only one ear but, aside from that, seemed well-fed and sleek. A large grey cat was asleep in the sun on the windowsill behind them. It opened one eye when they came in but then closed it.
At their arrival, the boy leaned down and set the rabbit on the ground, then left the room without speaking. The rabbit hopped over to Vianello and sniffed at the bottom of his trousers, then did the same with Vezzani’s, and then Brunetti’s. Unsatisfied, it hopped over to Signora Baroni and raised itself on its hind legs against her leg. Brunetti was surprised to see that its front paws reached well above her knees.
She bent down and picked it up, saying, ‘Come on, Livio.’ The animal settled comfortably into her arms. She went and sat behind her desk. Vianello leaned against the windowsill, leaving the two chairs in front of the desk to the commissari. As soon as Signora Baroni sat and created a lap, the rabbit fell asleep in it.
As if there had been no interruption, the woman said, the fingers of one hand idly scratching the belly of the rabbit, ‘I didn’t call because Andrea’s been gone from here only one full day, and then again today. I was going to call his wife again, but then you came.’ Her attention left the rabbit and she looked at all three of them in turn, as if to assure herself that they were all listening and had understood. ‘Then, when you said he’d been the victim of a crime, my first thought, obviously, was that man in Venice.’
‘Why “obviously”, Signora?’ Brunetti asked in a pleasant voice.
Her fingers returned their attentions to the rabbit, which appeared to have been transformed into a piece of splay-legged drapery. ‘Because the article said the man had not been identified, and Andrea’s missing, and you’re the police, and you’re here. So that’s the conclusion I came to.’ She shifted the rabbit, who refused to emerge from his coma, to her other knee and asked, ‘Am I mistaken?’
Brunetti said, ‘We don’t have a definite identification yet,’ but quickly added, ‘There’s little doubt, but we need a positive identification.’ He told himself he had forgotten to ask Nava’s wife, but that was not the truth.
‘Who has to do it?’ she asked.
‘Someone who knew him well.’
‘Does it have to be a relative?’
‘Not necessarily, no.’
‘His wife’s the obvious person, isn’t she?’
‘Yes.’
Signora Baroni picked up the rabbit, shook him into something resembling consciousness, and lowered him gently on to his feet. He hopped as far as the wall beside her, stretched out on the floor, and was immediately asleep. She sat upright, met Brunetti’s eyes, and said, ‘Could I do it? I worked with him for six years.’
‘Yes, of course,’ he said. ‘Why?’
‘It would be too much for Anna.’
Though he was surprised, Brunetti was relieved that Nava’s wife would be spared at least this.
Signora Baroni seemed to know a great deal about Nava’s life, both personal and professional. Yes, she knew about his separation from his wife, and yes, she thought he was not happy with his job at the slaughterhouse. Here she sighed and added that Nava had made it clear that, no matter how disagreeable he might find the job, he felt obliged to keep it in order, among other reasons, she explained, ‘to pay my salary here’. Saying that, she closed her eyes for a moment and rubbed at her forehead with her fingers.
‘He said it as a joke, of course,’ she said, looking up at Vianello. ‘But it wasn’t.’
Brunetti asked, ‘Did he say anything else about his work there, Signora?’