The second notice, she knew, would have come two days after this one. Its absence meant that Signora Altavilla, who over the years had become the custodian of her post and deliveries, had signed for the letter and had it downstairs. Curiosity overcame her. She set the receipt on the table and went to her study. From memory, she dialled Signora Altavilla’s number. Better to disturb her this way than to fret until morning about the letter that would turn out, she told herself, to be something innocuous.
The phone rang four times without being picked up. She stepped aside and opened the window, leaned out and heard the ringing below. Where could she be at this hour? A film? Occasionally she went with friends, and sometimes she went to babysit her grandchildren, though sometimes the oldest spent the night with her.
Anna Maria hung up the phone and returned to the living room. Over the years and even though separated in age by almost two generations, she and the woman downstairs had become good neighbours. Perhaps not good friends: they had never had a meal together, but now and then they met on the street and had a coffee, and there had been many conversations on the stairs. Anna Maria was sometimes called to work as a simultaneous translator at conferences and thus would be away for days, sometimes weeks, at a time. And because Signora Altavilla went to the mountains with her son and his family each July, Anna Maria had her keys, in order to water the plants and, as Signora Altavilla had said when she gave her them, ‘just in case’. There was a clear understanding that Anna Maria could – indeed, should – go in to get her post whenever she returned from a trip and Signora Altavilla was not at home.
She took the keys from the second drawer in the kitchen and, propping her own door open with her handbag, switched on the light and went down the stairs.
Though she was certain no one was home, Anna Maria rang the bell. Taboo? Respect for privacy? When there was no answer, she put the key in the lock, but, as often happened with this door, it would not easily turn. She tried again, pulling the door towards her as she turned the key. The pressure of her hand moved the handle down, and when she gave the sudden pull and push the recalcitrant door proved to be unlocked and opened without resistance, pulling her a step forward into the room.
Her first thought was to try to recall Costanza’s age: why was she forgetting to lock her door? Why had she never changed it and got una porta blindata that locked automatically when it closed? ‘Costanza?’ she called. ‘Ci sei?’ She stood and listened, but there was no answering call. Without thinking, Anna Maria approached the table opposite the doorway, drawn by the small pile of letters, no more than four or five, and that week’s Espresso. Reading the title of the magazine, it struck her that the light in the hallway was on and that more light was coming down the corridor from the half-open door to the living room, as well as, closer to her, from the open door of the larger bedroom.
Signora Altavilla had grown up in post-war Italy, and though marriage had made her both happy and prosperous, she had never unlearned the habits of frugality. Anna Maria, who had grown up in a wealthy family in booming, prosperous Italy, had never learned them. Thus the younger woman had always found quaint the older’s habit of turning off lights whenever she left a room, of wearing two sweaters in the winter, and of expressing real satisfaction when she found a bargain at Billa.
‘Costanza?’ she called again, more to stop her own thoughts than because she believed there would be an answer. In an unconscious attempt to free her hands, she set the keys on top of the letters and stood silent, eyes drawn to the light coming from the open door at the end of the corridor.
She took a breath, and then she took a step, and then another and another. She stopped then, and found she could go no farther. Telling herself not to be foolish, she forced herself to lean forward and take a look around the half-open door. ‘Costan…’ she began but slapped her mouth closed with one of her hands when she saw another hand on the floor. And then the arm, and the shoulder, and then the head, or at least the back of the head. And the short white hair. Anna Maria had for years wanted to ask the older woman whether her refusal to have her hair dyed the obligatory red of women her age was another manifestation of her learned frugality or simply acceptance of how her white hair softened the lines of her face, adding to their dignity.
She looked down at the motionless woman, at the hand, the arm, the head. And she realized she would never get to ask her now.
2
Guido Brunetti, Commissario di Polizia of the city of Venice, sat at dinner across from his immediate superior, Vice-Questore Giuseppe Patta, and prayed for the end of the world. He would have settled for being abducted by aliens or perhaps for the violent irruption of bearded terrorists, shooting their way into the restaurant, bloodlust in their eyes. The resulting chaos would have permitted Brunetti, who was, as usual, not wearing his own gun, to wrest one from a passing terrorist and use it to shoot and kill both the Vice-Questore and his assistant, Lieutenant Scarpa, who, seated to the left of the Vice-Questore, was at this very moment passing his measured – negative – judgement on the grappa that had been offered at the end of the meal.
‘You people in the North,’ the Lieutenant said with a condescending nod in Brunetti’s direction, ‘don’t understand what it is to make wine, so why should you know about making anything else?’ He drank the rest of his grappa, made a small moue of distaste – the gesture so carefully manufactured as to allow Brunetti to distinguish easily between distaste and disgust – and set his glass on the table. He gave Brunetti an open-faced glance, as if inviting him to make a contribution to oenological frankness, but Brunetti refused to play and contented himself with finishing his own grappa. However much this dinner with Patta and Scarpa might have driven Brunetti to long for a second grappa – or the second coming – the realization that acceptance would prolong the meal led him to resist the waiter’s offer, just as good sense led him to resist the bait offered to him by Scarpa.
Brunetti’s refusal to engage spurred the Lieutenant, or perhaps it was the grappa – his second – for he began, ‘I don’t understand why Friuli wines are…’ but Brunetti’s attention was called away from whatever deficiency the Lieutenant was about to reveal by the sound of his telefonino. Whenever he was forced into social occasions he could not avoid – as with Patta’s invitation to dinner to discuss candidates for promotion – Brunetti was careful to carry his telefonino and was often saved by a generous Paola, calling with an invented urgent reason for him to leave immediately.
‘Sì,’ he answered, disappointed at having seen it was the central number of the Questura.
‘Good evening, Commissario,’ said a voice he thought must be Ruffolo’s. ‘We just had a call from a woman in Santa Croce. She’s found a dead woman in her apartment. There was blood, so she called us.’
‘Whose apartment?’ Brunetti asked, not that it mattered that he know this now, but because he disliked lack of clarity.
‘She said she was in her own apartment. The dead woman, that is. It’s downstairs from hers.’
‘Where in Santa Croce?’
‘Giacomo dell’Orio, sir. She lives just opposite the church. One seven two six.’
‘Who’s gone?’ Brunetti asked.
‘No one, sir. I called you first.’
Brunetti looked at his watch. It was almost eleven, long after he had thought and hoped this dinner would end. ‘See if you can find Rizzardi and have him go. And call Vianello – he should be at home. Send a boat to pick him up and take him there. And get a crime scene team together.’