He held his left hand in a tight fist in his pocket, carefully ignoring its presence there and resisting the urge to take it out and look at it. He had a monthly boat pass, so he did not have to pull out his wallet and extract his travel card.
The boat came and he walked on to it, went inside the cabin and sat. As soon as the vaporetto pulled away from the embarcadero, Brunetti’s curiosity overcame him, and he took his hand from his pocket. He spread his fingers flat on his thigh, but instead of looking at them, he turned his eyes towards the angel flying above the dome of San Giorgio, still visible in the swiftly fading light.
He felt no tremor against his thigh, but before he looked, he raised his fingers a centimetre above his leg and left them there for a few seconds as he continued to consult with the angel, placed there centuries ago. Finally he looked at his fingers, which were motionless. He relaxed them and let them return to lying on his thigh.
‘So many things,’ he said under his breath, not quite sure what he meant by that. The young woman beside him, startled, turned and looked at him, then went back to her crossword puzzle. She didn’t look Italian, he thought, though he had had only a quick glance. French, perhaps. Not American. And not Italian. She sat on a boat going up the Grand Canal, her eyes on a crossword puzzle, the letters of which were too small to permit him to decipher the language. Brunetti looked back at the angel to see if he had any comment on this, but he did not, and so Brunetti turned to study the façades of the buildings to the right.
When he was a boy, they swam in this canal and in many of the other large ones. He remembered diving into the water at Fondamenta Nuove, and he remembered that a classmate of his had once swum to the Zattere from the Giudecca because he didn’t want to wait for a late-night boat. When Brunetti’s father had been a boy, he used to catch seppie at the riva down at Sacca Fisola, but that was before Marghera, just across the laguna, had been completely transformed by petrochemicals. And before the seppie were transformed by them, too.
He got off at San Silvestro and walked through the underpass and to the left, bent on getting home, wanting only a glass of wine and something to eat with it. Almonds, perhaps: something salty. And a still white wine: Pinot Grigio. Yes.
No sooner had he let himself into the apartment than he heard Paola call from the kitchen. ‘If you’d like a drink, there’s something to nibble on in the living room. The wine’s open. I’ll bring it.’
Brunetti hung up his jacket and followed her suggestion as though it had been a command. When he walked into the living room, he was surprised to see that the lights were on and even more surprised, when he looked out the windows, to see that it was almost completely dark. On the boat, concerned with his fingers, he had not registered the settling in of darkness.
The table in front of the sofa held two wine glasses, a bowl of black olives, one of almonds, some grissini, and a dish with small pieces of what looked like parmigiano. ‘Reggiano,’ he said aloud. His mother, even in the family’s times of blackest financial misery, had refused to use anything but Parmigiano Reggiano. ‘Better nothing than something that isn’t as good,’ she had said, and so he still believed.
Paola came into the room carrying a bottle of wine. He looked up at her and said, ‘Better nothing than something that isn’t as good.’
Long experience of Brunetti in his sibylline mode caused Paola to smile. ‘I presume you’re speaking about the wine.’
He held up the two glasses while she poured the wine, then sat beside her on the sofa. Pinot Grigio: he’d married a mind reader. He picked up a few almonds and ate them one by one, loving the contrast set up between the salt, the almonds’ bitterness, and the wine.
With no warning, his memory ripped him back to the gravelled space in front of the slaughterhouse, and he caught a whiff of the odour coming from it. He closed his eyes and took another sip of wine; he forced his mind to concentrate on the taste of the wine, the taste of the almonds, and the soft presence of the woman beside him. ‘Tell me what you taught today,’ he said, kicking off his shoes and leaning back.
She took a long drink, nibbled at a grissino, and ate one of the slivers of cheese. ‘I’m not sure I taught anything,’ she began, ‘but I’d asked them to read The Spoils of Poynton.’
‘That the one about the lady with all the stuff?’ he asked, turning from sibylline to philistine with one well-chosen question.
‘Yes, dear,’ she said, and poured them both some more wine.
‘How did they respond?’ he asked, suddenly curious. He had read the book, albeit in translation – he preferred James in translation – and liked it.
‘They seemed incapable of understanding that she loved the things she owned because they were beautiful, not because they were valuable. Or valuable for non-financial reasons.’ She sipped her wine. ‘My students find it difficult to grasp any motivation for human action that is not based on financial profit.’
‘There’s a lot of that around,’ Brunetti said, reaching for an olive. He ate it, spat the pit into his left hand, which he observed was steady as a rock. He set the pit in a small saucer and took another one.
‘And they liked the wrong… they liked characters different from the ones I like,’ she amended.
‘There’s a very unpleasant woman in it, isn’t there?’ he asked.
‘There are two,’ she answered and said that dinner would be ready in ten minutes.
23
A THIN RAIN was falling when Brunetti left his house the next morning. When he boarded the vaporetto at Rialto, he saw that the level of the water was high, even though he had received no message on his telefonino alerting him to acqua alta. Higher tides at unusual times had become more frequent in the last two years, and though most people – and all fishermen – believed this was the result of the MOSE project’s violent intervention at the entrance to the laguna, official sources denied this adamantly.
Foa, the Questura’s pilot, grew apoplectic on the subject. He had learned the tides along with the alphabet and knew the names of the winds that crossed the Adriatic as well as priests knew those of the saints. For years, sceptical from the beginning, he had watched the metal monster grow, had seen all protest swept away by the flood of lovely European money sent to save the Pearl of the Adriatic. His fishermen friends told him of the new and violent vortices that had appeared in both the sea and the laguna and of the consequences of the pharaonic dredging that had taken place in recent years. No one, Foa claimed, had bothered to consult the fishermen. Instead, experts – Brunetti remembered once seeing Foa spit after pronouncing this word – had made the decisions, and other experts no doubt would get the contracts for the construction.
For a decade, Brunetti had been reading yes, and he had been reading no, and most recently he had read of more delays in funding that would delay the project yet another three years. As an Italian, he suspected it would run true to form and turn out to have been yet another building project that served as a feeding trough for the friends of friends; as a Venetian, he despaired that his fellow citizens might have sunk so low as to be capable even of this.
Still musing, he left the boat and began to walk towards the back reaches of Castello. He hesitated now and again, not having been down here for years, so after a time he stopped thinking and let his feet lead the way. The sight of Vianello, wearing a raincoat and leaning against the metal railing of the riva, cheered him. Seeing him approach, Vianello said, with a nod towards the door in front of him, ‘The sign says the office opens at nine, but no one’s gone inside yet.’