She tried to smile and said in a lighter voice, 'If you had, Poppi would know it and wouldn't be asleep like a baby down there.' A sweep of the tail possibly belied the statement that Poppi was asleep, and Brunetti found himself distracted by the question of whether Chiara, if he told her about this scene, would ask if this were a sleeping-dog-lie.
He held the door open for the lawyer, waited while the secretary wrote down the address of Signora Battestini's niece, thanked them both, shook hands with the lawyer, and left.
11
To walk back to the Questura along the Riva degli Schiavoni at this hour would have melted him, so he cut back into Castello in the direction of the Arsenale. As he passed in front of it, he wondered, as he usually did whenever he looked at the statues, whether the men who had carved them had ever seen a real lion. One of them bore a greater resemblance to Poppi than it did to any lion he had ever seen.
The water in the canal in front of the church of San Martino was exceptionally low, and Brunetti paused to glance down into it. The slopes of viscous mud on either side gleamed in the sunlight, and the stench of corruption rose towards him. Who knew the last time the canal had been dredged and cleaned?
When he got to his office, the first thing he did was to open the window to let some air into the room, but what came in seemed only to bring humidity and made no difference to the temperature. He left the window open in the hope that some passing zephyr would find it and slip through it. He hung up his jacket and took a look at the papers on his desk, though he knew Signorina Elettra would never leave anything on his desk save the most innocuous material that could be read by anyone. The rest would be kept in her desk or, more securely still, in her computer.
On the boat going down to Castello that morning, the Gazzettino had informed him that the judge in the airport case had ruled that the tapes from the hidden cameras in the baggage hall did indeed constitute an invasion of the privacy of the baggage handlers under accusation and thus the videos could not be produced as evidence against them. Reading the story, Brunetti had been swept by the absurd desire to go into the Questura, collect all of the witness statements that had been carefully accumulated during recent months and carry them off to the paper garbage drop at the Scuola Barbarigo. Or even more dramatically, he pictured a funeral pyre on the dock of the Questura, with blackened scraps of carbonized paper carried up into the air by those same reluctant zephyrs he had been wishing for.
He knew what would happen: the judge's ruling would be appealed, and then the whole thing would start again and drag on and on, rulings and counter-rulings until the statute of limitations expired and the whole thing was sent to the archives. His career had been spent watching this same slow gavotte: so long as the music could be played slowly enough, with frequent pauses to change the members of the orchestra, then sooner or later people would get so tired of listening to the same old tune that, when time was called and it stopped, no one would notice.
It was reflections such as these, he realized, that made it sometimes difficult for him to listen to Paola's criticism of the police. He knew that the justification for the judicial system under which he worked was that the endless appeal process guaranteed the safety of the accused from false conviction, but as years passed and those guarantees became broader and stronger and more encompassing, Brunetti began to wonder just whose safety the law was guaranteeing.
He shook himself free of these thoughts and went downstairs in search of Vianello. The inspector was at his desk, talking on the phone. When he saw Brunetti come in, he held up an outspread palm to indicate he would be at least five minutes and then raised his index finger in the general direction of Brunetti's office to show he would come up when he was finished.
Upstairs Brunetti found his office somewhat cooler than when he had first arrived. To pass the time until Vianello came up, he pulled some papers from his in-tray and began to read through them.
It was fifteen, not five, minutes before Vianello came up. He sat and, without preamble, said, 'She was a vicious old cow, and I couldn't find anyone who cared in the slightest that she's dead.' He paused, as if hearing what he had just said, and added, 'I wonder what's on her headstone – "Beloved wife"? "Beloved mother"?'
‘I think the inscriptions are usually longer,' Brunetti observed. "The carvers get paid by the letter’ Then, more to the point, he asked, 'Whom did you speak to and what else did you learn?'
'We stopped in two of the bars and had a drink. Nadia said she used to live over there. She didn't, but a cousin of hers did, and she used to visit her when they were kids, so she knew some names and could talk about a few of the stores that have gone out of business, so people believed her.
'In fact, she didn't even have to ask about the murder: people were eager to tell her. Biggest thing that's happened over there since the floods in '66.' Reading Brunetti's expression, he became less discursive. 'There was general agreement that she was greedy, troublesome and stupid, but invariably someone would remind everyone that she was a widow whose only son had died, and people would pull themselves up short and say that she really wasn't that bad. Though I suspect she was. We talked about her in the bars and then with the waitress at the restaurant, who lives around the corner from her, and there wasn't one person who had a good word to say about her. In fact, enough time has passed for there even to be a little bit of sympathy for the Romanian woman: one woman said she was surprised it took so long for one of the women to kill her.' Vianello considered this, then added, 'It's almost as if the residual sympathy she earned for the death of her son, well, a small part of it, has passed to Signora Ghiorghiu.'
'And the son? What did they say about him?' Brunetti asked.
'No one had much of anything to say. He was quiet, lived with her, went to work, minded his own business, never caused anyone any trouble. It's almost as if he didn't have a real existence and was only a means to enable people to feel sorry for her. His dying, that is.'
'And the husband?'
'The usual stuff; "una brava persona"‘ But then Vianello warned, 'That might just be amnesia talking.'
'Did anyone say anything about the other women who worked for her in the past?'
'No, not much. They came and cleaned or bought her food and cooked, but the Romanian was the first one who lived there with her.' Vianello paused, then added, 'My guess is that the others didn't have papers and didn't want to become known in the neighbourhood for fear that someone would report them.'
'Did she have much contact with her neighbours? The old woman, that is’ Brunetti asked.
'Not for the last few years, especially since her son died. She could still get up and down the steps until about three years ago, when she had a fall and did something to her knee. After that, it looks like she didn't go out again. And by then any friends she'd had in the neighbourhood were gone, either died or moved away, and she'd caused so much trouble that no one wanted anything to do with her.'
'What sort of trouble?'
'Leaving bars without paying, complaining that the fruit wasn't good enough or fresh enough, buying something and using it and then trying to take it back to the store: all the things that make people refuse to serve you. I'm told there was a period when she threw her garbage out the window, but then someone called the police, and they went in and talked to her, and she stopped. But the main complaint was the television.'
'Did anyone say they'd ever met her lawyer?'
Vianello thought about this for a moment, then shook his head and said, 'No, no one ever met her, but a few people said that they'd written to her, especially about the television.'
'And?'
'No one ever received an answer.'