A printed card protected by a plastic shield gave the doctor’s name and the office hours.
They stood side by side for a few minutes until Brunetti said, ‘Let’s see if he’s already there.’
Vianello pushed himself away from the railing and followed him to the door. Brunetti rang the bell and after a moment tried the door, which opened easily. They stepped inside, up two steps, and into a small entrance which led in its turn to an open courtyard. A sign on their left carried the doctor’s name and an arrow pointing to the other side of the courtyard.
The rain, which outside had been bothersome, here fell on to the newly green grass of the courtyard with gentle kindness. Even the light seemed different; brighter, somehow. Brunetti unbuttoned his raincoat; Vianello did the same.
The courtyard, if it had been part of a monastery, had been part of the smallest monastery in the city. Though covered walkways surrounded the garden, they were no more than five metres long, hardly space enough, Brunetti reflected, to allow a man to make much progress with his rosary. He’d barely have finished the first decade before he’d be back at his starting point, but he’d be surrounded by beauty and tranquillity, at least if he were wise enough to contemplate them.
The acanthus leaves had worn away on the capitals, and the centuries had smoothed the fluting on the shafts of the columns around the garden. Surely this had not happened while the columns were in this protected courtyard; who knows where they had come from or when they had arrived in Venice? Suddenly a goat smiled down at Brunetti: how had that column got here?
Ahead of him, Vianello stopped at a green wooden door with the doctor’s name on a brass plaque, waited for Brunetti to join him, and opened it. Inside was a room like all those Brunetti had sat in while waiting to see doctors. Opposite them they saw another wooden door, closed now. Rows of orange plastic chairs lined two walls; at the end of one row was a low table with two piles of magazines. Brunetti went over to see if it held the usual copies of Gente and Chi. Not unless starlets and minor nobles had all been replaced by cats, dogs and, in one instance, a particularly winsome pig wearing a Father Christmas hat.
They sat opposite one another. Brunetti checked his watch. After four minutes, an old woman came in, leading an antique dog so deprived of hair in various places as to resemble the sort of stuffed toy one found in a grandparent’s attic. The woman ignored them and lowered herself into the chair farthest from Vianello; the dog collapsed at her feet with an explosive sigh, and both of them immediately lapsed into a trance. Strangely enough, it was only the woman’s breathing they could hear.
More time passed, measured by the woman’s snores, until Brunetti got to his feet and went to the other door. He knocked on it, waited for Vianello to join him, knocked again, and then opened it.
Across the room, behind a desk, Brunetti saw the top half of what might have been the fattest man he had ever seen. He was slumped back in his leather chair and sound asleep, his head tilted to the left as far as his neck and the chins above it would allow. He was perhaps in his forties, his age disguised by the absence of wrinkles in his face.
Brunetti cleared his throat, but that had no effect on the sleeping man. He stepped closer, and smelled the rancid odour of cigarette smoke mixed with late night, or early morning, drinking. The man’s hands were latched across his vast chest, the right thumb and the second and third fingers stained with nicotine up to the first knuckle. The room, strangely enough, did not smell of smoke, only of its after-effect: the same odour came from the man’s clothing and, Brunetti suspected, from his hair and skin.
‘Dottore,’ Brunetti said in a soft voice, not wanting to startle him awake. The man continued snoring softly.
‘Dottore,’ Brunetti repeated in a louder voice.
He watched the man’s eyes for motion: they were set deep in his face, as though they had retreated from the encroaching fat that surrounded them. The nose was strangely thin, but it had been overwhelmed by the encircling cheeks, which pushed up against it and, helped by the engorged lips, came close to blocking his nostrils. The mouth was a perfect cupid’s bow, but a very thick, unwieldy bow.
A thin film of sweat covered his face and had so slicked his thin hair to his skull that Brunetti was put in mind of the greasy pomades his father had used on his hair when Brunetti was a boy. ‘Dottore,’ he said for the third time, this time in a normal voice, his tone perhaps a bit sharp.
The eyes opened; small, dark, curious, and then suddenly wide with fear. Before Brunetti could say anything else, the man shoved himself away from his desk and got to his feet. He did not leap, nor did he jump, though Brunetti had no doubt that he moved as quickly as his bulk would permit. He pressed himself against the wall behind him and looked across the room at the door, then shifted his gaze back and forth between Brunetti and Vianello, who blocked his path.
‘What do you want?’ he asked. His voice was curiously high-pitched, either from fear or just from some odd mismatch between his body and his voice.
‘We’d like to speak to you, Dottore,’ Brunetti said in a neutral voice, choosing to delay an explanation of who they were or the purpose of their visit. He glanced aside at Vianello and saw that the Inspector, in response to the doctor’s fear, had managed somehow to transform himself into a thug. His entire body had become more compact and was angled forward, as though waiting only the command to launch itself at the man. His hands, curved just short of fists, dangled beside his thighs as though longing to be given weapons. The habitual geniality of his face had vanished, replaced by a mouth he seemed unable to close and eyes forever in search of his opponent’s weakest point.
The doctor’s hands, palms outward, rose in front of his chest; he patted at the air, as if to test if it were strong enough to keep these men from him. The doctor smiled: Brunetti recalled a description he had read once of a flower on a corpse, something like that. ‘There’s got to be some mistake, Signori. I’ve done everything you told me to. You must know that.’
Suddenly all bedlam was let out on the other side of the door. It started with a thump, a loud roar, and then a high-pitched woman’s scream. A chair fell over or was pushed over, another woman screamed an obscenity, then everything was drowned out by a chorus of hysterical barks and growls. There followed a series of yelps, and then all animal noise stopped for a moment and was replaced by an exchange of obscenities in two equally shrill voices.
Brunetti pulled the door open. The old woman stood barricaded behind a fallen chair, her ancient dog trembling in her arms, as she hurled epithets at another woman on the other side of the room. This woman, hatchet-faced and thin as a rail, stood behind two now wildly barking dogs with unusually large, squarish heads. They barked as hysterically as the two women screamed, the only differences being their lower pitch and the trickles of saliva that hung suspended from their lips. For the first time in his career, Brunetti wanted to pull his pistol and fire a shot into the air, but he had forgotten to wear his pistol, and he knew the noise of the shot would deafen every creature in the room.
Instead, he crossed to the two dogs, grabbing one of the magazines as he passed the table. He rolled it into a cylinder, then bent and smacked one of the large dogs across the nose. Given the lightness of Brunetti’s blow, the dog’s howl was disproportionately loud, and his quick retreat behind the legs of his owner as surprising as it was ignominious. His fellow dog looked up at Brunetti and started to bare his teeth, but a threatening thrust of the rolled magazine sent him to cower beside the other dog.