‘Fine. That’s very kind of you, Signore. Not many people would bother to take the trouble to call and tell us.’
‘It’s the least we can do for our clients,’ Brunetti said.
She thanked him and was gone.
‘Bingo,’ Brunetti said as he replaced the phone. But then his habitual caution asserted itself and he changed that to ‘Bingo?’
22
‘IT COULD BE coincidence,’ Vianello insisted in response to Brunetti’s explanation that Tekknomed – where Signora Borelli had worked – was a client of Papetti’s father’s legal office.
‘She studied marketing and tourism, Lorenzo. And now she’s his assistant in a slaughterhouse, for God’s sake. Can you tell me how that came about?’
‘What are you thinking of accusing her of, Guido? Changing jobs and having an affair?’
‘You said it,’ Brunetti replied, realizing how weak and petulant his argument was. ‘She changed jobs after working for a company her new boss was involved with.’
Vianello gave him a long look before he answered. ‘These are times of self-invention, Guido: you’re the one who’s always telling me that. Young people with degrees, no matter what they’re in, are lucky to have a job, any job. She probably got a good offer and agreed to follow him to the new job.’ When Brunetti didn’t answer, Vianello asked, ‘How many of your friends’ kids have jobs? Most of the ones I know sit at home in front of their computers all day and have to ask their parents for spending money on the weekend.’
Brunetti raised a hand to stop him. ‘I know all that. Everyone knows that. But it’s not what I’m talking about. Here’s a woman with what was presumably a good job…’
‘We don’t know that.’
‘Well, we can find out. And if it was a good job, then she left it to go and do something new.’
‘Better salary. Better hours. Closer to home. Hated her old boss. More vacation. Private office. Company car.’ Vianello stopped and gave Brunetti a chance to answer, and when he did not, the Inspector asked, ‘You want me to give you more reasons why she might have changed jobs?’
‘It feels strange,’ Brunetti said, sounding, even to himself, like a truculent child grasping at straws.
Vianello tossed his hands in the air. ‘All right, all right, so it might sound strange that she’d change jobs like that, but you can’t make it be more than that. We don’t have enough information to decide what happened. We don’t have any information. And we won’t have it until we find out more about her.’
This small concession was all Brunetti needed. He got to his feet, saying, ‘I’ll go and ask her to look.’
He had just reached the door, when Vianello, in an entirely natural voice, said, ‘She’ll probably love that,’ and got to his feet to return to his office.
Twenty minutes later, Vianello’s reading of that day’s Gazzettino was interrupted by Brunetti’s request that he come up to his office. Upon his assistant’s arrival, Brunetti said, ‘She did.’ He stopped himself from telling Vianello that Signorina Elettra had also found Signorina Borelli’s job change suspicious – well, not suspicious, really, but interesting – and told him only that she had said it might take her some time to locate and access her employment records. Her casual use of those verbs reminded Brunetti that some time had passed since either he or Vianello had bothered to question how Signorina Elettra managed to do it: they simply awaited the results of her having done it and were happy to do so. Their reluctance to ask the direct question was perhaps related to the amorphous legality of what she did when conducting her researches. Brunetti turned away from these thoughts with a tiny shake: next thing he knew, he’d be wondering how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.
Vianello said, in the voice Brunetti recognized as the one he used when he wanted to suggest far more than he said, ‘You know, we haven’t even come close to finding a reason why anyone would want to kill him.’ How long, Brunetti wondered, would it be before the Inspector started to talk about the killing as a robbery that got out of hand?
‘He came to Venice,’ Brunetti said, returning to one of the few certain things they knew. Rizzardi’s final report, which they had both read, said only that the dead man, aside from the Madelung’s, was in good health for a man of his age. He had eaten dinner some hours before his death and had consumed a small amount of alcohol. Digestion was under way at the time of his death, the pathologist had written, and added that the time the body had spent in the water had obliterated any sign of sexual activity. Given the temperature of that water, the pathologist could do no more than estimate the possible time of death as between midnight and four in the morning.
Though Nava’s name and photo had been in the papers that day, along with a request that anyone with information about him should call the police, no one had called.
Vianello took a deep breath. ‘The one before him was called Meucci, wasn’t he?’ he asked.
It took Brunetti a moment to catch up with Vianello’s thoughts and realize he was speaking about Nava’s predecessor at the slaughterhouse. ‘Yes. Gabriele, I think.’ He turned to his computer, aware how much his motion imitated Signorina Elettra’s swirl when she turned to hers. He stopped himself, just in time, from saying he thought it should be easy to find Meucci, hoping there would be lists of veterinarians, some society which they all joined.
He ended up finding the doctor in the Yellow Pages, under ‘Veterinarians’. The ambulatorio of Dr Gabriele Meucci was listed at an address in Castello. The number was meaningless until Vianello located it in Calli, Campi, e Castelli at the most remote end of Castello, on the Riva di San Giuseppe.
‘I suppose people down there must have animals, too,’ Vianello said by way of comment on the location. It was as far from the centre of the city as one could get without crossing over to S. Elena, which to both of them might as well have been Patagonia. ‘Rather far from Preganziol, I’d say,’ Vianello added.
As he switched off the computer, Brunetti noticed that his left hand was trembling. He had no idea of the cause, though by tightening his fingers into a fist a number of times he managed to make it stop. He placed his palm flat on his desk and pushed down on it, then lifted it a few centimetres: it still trembled.
‘I think we should go home, Lorenzo,’ he said, eyes on his hand and not on Vianello.
‘Yes,’ Vianello agreed, slapped his hands on his knees and pushed himself to his feet. ‘I think it was too much, out there, today.’
Brunetti wanted to say something in return, make some comment – even joking or ironic – about where they had gone, but the words refused to come to him. Events as shocking as those they had seen, he had always heard, left a lasting trace or changed a person in some profound way. Not a bit of it. He had been horrified and disgusted, but he knew he had not been changed, not really. Brunetti had no idea if this was a good thing or not.
‘Why don’t we meet tomorrow morning, in front of his office?’ he suggested to Vianello.
‘Nine?’
‘Yes. Assuming that he’s working.’
‘And if he’s not?’
‘Then we go and have a coffee and a brioche, sit and watch the boats for a while, and then we come to work late.’
‘Only if you insist, Commissario,’ Vianello said.
As he emerged from the Questura, the accumulated weight of the day descended on Brunetti, and he wished for a moment that he lived in a city where it was possible for a person to call a taxi and not have to pay sixty Euros to do so, no matter how short the ride. Home was, for the first time he could remember, too far to walk, so he went slowly down to the San Zaccaria stop to wait for the Number One.