About Face

19
They woke to snow. A certain slant of light told Brunetti what had happened even before his eyes were fully opened or he was really awake. He looked towards the windows and saw a thin ridge of snow balanced on the railing of the terrace and, beyond it, white-roofed houses and a sky so blue it hurt his eyes. Not even the merest whisper of a cloud could be seen, as if all of them had been ironed in the night and thrown out flat over the city. He lay and looked and tried to remember the last time it had snowed like this, snowed and stayed and not been washed away immediately by the rain.
He had to know how deep it was. In his enthusiasm, he turned to tell Paola, but the sight of that thin ridge of white lying motionless beside him gave him pause, and he contented himself with getting out of bed and going over to the window. The bell tower of San Polo was covered, and, beyond it, that of the Frari. He went down the hall to Paola’s study, and from there he could see the bell tower of San Marco, its golden angel glistening in the reflected light. From some distant place, he heard the tolling of a bell, but the reverberation was transformed by the snow covering everything, and he had no idea which church it was or from what direction it was coming.
He went back into the bedroom and over to the window again. Already there were tiny trails of a triple-toed bird’s prints in the snow on the terrace. One of them went right to the edge and disappeared, as if the bird had been unable to resist the temptation to hurl himself into the midst of all of that whiteness. Without thinking, he opened the tall door and bent down to touch it, to feel whether it was the solid wet kind that was good for making snowballs or the dryer kind that fluffed up if you kicked your feet ahead of you when you walked.
‘Are you out of your mind?’ a voice behind him asked, no less indignant for being muffled by a pillow. A younger Brunetti would perhaps have brought a handful of snow back to the bed, but this one contented himself with pressing his hand into the snow and leaving the print there. It was the dry kind of snow, he noticed.
He closed the door and came back to sit on the bed. ‘It snowed,’ he said.
He raised the hand that had left the print in the show and moved it closer to her shoulder. Though her head was turned away from him and mostly covered by a pillow, he had no trouble hearing her say, ‘If you put that hand anywhere near me, I will divorce you and take the children.’
‘They’re old enough to decide themselves,’ he answered with what he thought was Olympian calm.
‘I cook,’ she said.
‘Indeed,’ he said in acknowledgement of defeat.
She lapsed again into coma and Brunetti went to take a shower.
When he left the apartment more than half an hour later, he had had his first coffee and remembered to wear his scarf. He had also put on a pair of rubber-soled boots. It was indeed the fluffy kind of snow, stretching ahead of him undisturbed all the way to the first cross-street. Brunetti stuffed his hands in the pockets of his overcoat and slid one foot forward, telling himself that it was to test how slippery the pavement was. Not at all, he was glad to discover: it was like walking through feathers. He kicked out, first one foot and then the other, and great plumes of snow rose in front of him.
When he got to the crossing, he turned and looked proudly back at his work. Many people had passed towards the campo, and the snow had been kicked and brushed aside, leaving balding spots of pavement where the snow was already beginning to melt around the edges. The people walking by moved with stiff caution, like sailors just put to sea and not yet sure of their sea legs. But it was delight, not caution, that he read on most of their faces, as if school had just closed and they had all been let out to play. People smiled at one another, and strangers all had something to say about the snow.
He stopped at his usual news-stand and bought Il Gazzettino. ‘Recidivist,’ he said to himself as he took the paper. There was a small article on the front page about the murder in Marghera: only two sentences and an instruction to turn to the first page of the second section. He did so and read that the body of an unidentified man had been found in the Marghera industrial complex. The man had been shot and left in the open, where his body had been found by a night watchman. The Carabinieri said that they were following leads and hoped soon to be able to identify the dead man.
Brunetti was amazed at how cursory the story was, almost as if the fictitious watchman were in the daily habit of stumbling across bodies. There was no description of the dead man, no indication of the precise location where he had been found, and no mention of the fact that he was a member of the Carabinieri. Brunetti was curious about the source, and the motive, of this reporting of near and non-facts.
Brunetti folded the paper closed when he got to the bottom of the Rialto and stuck it under his arm. On the other side of the bridge, he was torn between continuing to walk or taking the vaporetto. He opted for the latter, drawn by the thought of being able to pass in front of a snow-covered Piazza San Marco.
He took the number 2 because it would be faster, standing on deck as they moved up the Grand Canal, enchanted by the transformation that had taken place during the night. The docks running out into the canal were white, the tarpaulins that covered the sleeping gondolas were white; so were the smaller, still unwalked calli that led back from the canal to the various hearts of the city. He noticed, as they passed the Comune, how grimy the snow made so many of the buildings look; only the ochre and red ones could remain respectable under the contrast. They passed the Mocenigo palazzi, and he remembered going to one of them with his uncle once; he could no longer remember why. Then ahead on the right, Palazzo Foscari, snow filigree dusting all of the windowsills. On the left he saw Palazzo Grassi, that now-charmless storehouse of second-rate art; then they slipped under the Accademia Bridge, where he saw people clinging to the railing as they went down the steps. He glanced back after they passed under the bridge and saw the same on the other side: a wooden surface would be far more treacherous than stone, especially one that gave the sense of tilting the walker forward.
Then they were abreast of the Piazzetta, and the reflection from the expanse of snow between the library and the palace was so strong that Brunetti was forced to put his hand above his eyes to reduce the glare. Good old San Teodoro was still up there on his pillar, driving his spear into the head of his mini-dragon. What struggle to escape! All to no purpose, though, even if San Teodoro was slowed down by the snow.
Patches of the domes poked through the snow, which Brunetti could see was beginning to melt in the morning sun. Saints popped up from everywhere, a lion flew by, boats hooted at one another, and Brunetti closed his eyes from the joy of it.
When he opened them, they were opposite the bridge, jammed even at this hour under its weight of milling tourists, all trying to have a photo taken at the place where so many people had paused for the last time before being taken off to imprisonment, torture, or death.
Farther along here, the snow was almost gone, and by the time he got off at San Zaccaria, there was so little left as to make his boots an encumbrance as well as an affectation.
The guard at the front door greeted him with a lazy salute. He asked for Vianello, but the Ispettore was not yet in. Nor had the Vice-Questore arrived – no surprise to Brunetti, who imagined Patta at home, still in his pyjamas, hoping someone would write him a note explaining that he was late for work because of the snow.
He went to Signorina Elettra’s office.
When he came in, she said with no introduction, ‘You didn’t tell me you saw a photo of him.’ She wore a black dress and an orange silk jacket the colour a Buddhist monk would wear: it stood in sharp contrast to the soberness of her voice.
‘Yes,’ he answered soberly. ‘I did.’
‘Was it very bad? For him?’ she asked, a question which filled Brunetti with relief because of its admission that she had only learned of the photo and not seen it.
Brunetti resisted the impulse to make things sound better than they were. Instead, he said, ‘It was instant. He must have been taken completely by surprise.’
‘How can you say that?’ she asked.
He remembered Guarino, lying on the ground: his jaw. ‘You don’t have to know. Believe me and leave it at that.’
‘What was he?’ she asked.
The question troubled Brunetti because of the answers that came tumbling into his head. He was a Carabiniere. He was a man Avisani trusted implicitly. He was investigating the illegal transport of garbage, though Brunetti knew little more about the investigation than that. He was interested in a man of short temper who gambled and did not like to lose and whose name might be Antonio Terrasini. He was separated from his wife.
As he listed these things in his mind, Brunetti was forced to realize that he did not doubt anything Guarino had told him. He had evaded and avoided answering certain questions, but Brunetti found himself believing that what he had said was true.
‘I think he was an honest man,’ Brunetti said.
She made no reply to that but then said, ‘It doesn’t change anything – having the photo – does it?’ Brunetti made a noise of negation. She went on, ‘But it does, somehow. Makes it more real.’
Signorina Elettra was seldom at a loss for words: Brunetti failed to find the right thing to say to her. Perhaps there was none.
‘That’s not what I wanted to tell you, though,’ she began, but before she could explain, they heard footsteps approaching and turned to see Patta, but a Patta dressed as might have been Captain Scott had he had time and opportunity to outfit himself in the shops of the Mercerie. Patta’s beige parka had a fur-lined hood and was carelessly left open to show the lining. Under it he wore a Harris tweed jacket and a burgundy turtleneck that looked like cashmere. His boots were rubber gumboots like the ones Raffi had called Brunetti’s attention to in the window of Duca d’Aosta just the week before.
The snow, which had enhanced the mood of almost everyone Brunetti had met on the way to work, appeared to have had the opposite effect on Patta. The Vice-Questore nodded to Signorina Elettra – he never nodded curtly to her, but this was not a friendly nod – and said to Brunetti, ‘Come into my office.’
Brunetti followed him and waited while his superior disburdened himself of his parka. Patta laid it, lining out – the better to display the distinctive Burberry plaid – on one of the chairs in front of his desk and pointed to the other one for Brunetti.
‘Is this going to be trouble?’ Patta said with no preamble.
‘You mean the murder, sir?’
‘Of course I mean the murder. A Carabiniere – a maggiore, for God’s sake – gets himself murdered in our territory. What’s going on here? Are they going to try to pass it on to us?’
Brunetti waited to see if these were rhetorical questions, but Patta’s confusion and indignation seemed sufficiently real for him to venture, ‘No, I don’t know what’s going on, sir. But I doubt they want us to get involved. The captain I spoke to there yesterday – I think he was the one who called you – he made it clear that they’re claiming jurisdiction.’
Patta’s relief was visible. ‘Good. Let them have it. I don’t understand how this could happen to a Carabinieri officer. He seemed like a sensible person. How could he let himself get killed like that?’
Like the Furies circling the head of a guilt-crazed Orestes, sarcastic responses crowded on to Brunetti’s tongue, but he drove them off and said, instead, ‘There’s no telling how it happened, sir. There could have been more than one of them.’
‘But still . . .’ Patta said and let his voice drift away from this unspoken reproach for carelessness.
‘If you think it’s best for us, sir . . .’ Brunetti began, his voice a symphony of uncertainty, ‘. . . but perhaps . . . no, better let them have it.’
Patta was on him like a ferret. ‘What is it, Brunetti?’
‘When I spoke to him, sir,’ Brunetti began with affected reticence, ‘Guarino told me he had a suspect for that murder in Tessera.’ Then, before Patta could ask, he added, ‘The man with the trucking company. Before Christmas.’
‘I’m not an idiot, Brunetti. I read the reports, you know.’
‘Of course, sir.’
‘Well, what did he say? This Carabiniere?’
‘He told me he didn’t give the name of his suspect to his colleagues, sir,’ Brunetti said.
‘That’s impossible,’ Patta said. ‘Of course he’d give it to them.’
‘I’m not sure he trusted them entirely.’ This could well be true, though Guarino had never said it.
Brunetti watched as Patta decided to pretend to be surprised at such a thing. Before he could express his disbelief, Brunetti went on. ‘He as much as told me that.’ This was a lie.
‘He didn’t give you the name, did he?’ Patta asked sharply.
‘Yes,’ Brunetti offered, with no explanation.
‘Why?’ It was almost a shout.
Patta, Brunetti knew, would not understand it if Brunetti were to suggest Guarino had trusted him because he recognized in him another honest man. Instead, he answered, ‘He suspected his investigation was being interfered with: he said it had happened in the past. Perhaps he thought we’d be more likely to run a careful investigation. And perhaps find the killer.’ Brunetti was tempted to suggest more, but caution prevailed and he left it to Patta to consider the advantages. When Patta did not respond, Brunetti went for broke, saying, ‘I have no choice but to give them the name, then, do I, sir?’
Patta studied the surface of his desk, a priest reading the runes. ‘Did you believe him about the suspect?’ he finally asked.
‘I did, yes.’ There was no need to tell Patta about the photo, about the trip to the Casinò: Patta was not a detail man.
‘Do you think we can continue this without their knowing what we’re doing?’ Patta’s use of the plural was enough to tell Brunetti that his superior had already decided to pursue the investigation: now what Brunetti had to do was ensure that it be left to him to do so.
‘Guarino thought we’d have the advantage because of our local knowledge, sir.’ Brunetti spoke as though neither Patta nor Scarpa was Sicilian.
In a contemplative voice, Patta said, ‘I’d like to be able to do that.’
‘What, sir?’
‘Take this right out of the mouths of the Carabinieri. First, Mestre took that murder investigation away from us, and now the Carabinieri want to take this, too.’ The speculative man had been replaced by the man of action, one who had buried the memory of his original delight when he believed the investigation was not to be theirs. ‘They’ll see they can’t do that, not while I’m Vice-Questore in this city.’
Brunetti was glad Patta managed to restrain the impulse to slam his fist down on his desk: it would have been a gesture too far. What a pity Patta had not worked in the historical archive of some Stalinist state: how he would have loved altering the photos, airbrushing out the old and replacing them with the new. Or writing, and then rewriting, the history books: the man had a call.
‘. . . and Vianello, I suppose,’ Brunetti heard Patta conclude and dragged himself away from the delights of speculation.
‘Of course, sir. If that’s what you think is best,’ Brunetti said and got to his feet, a motion prompted by Patta’s tone, not whatever it was he had been saying that Brunetti had not heard.
He stood, waiting for Patta’s final remark, but he failed to make it and Brunetti went out to Signorina Elettra’s office. In a voice that might well have carried into Patta’s office, Brunetti said, ‘If you have a moment, Signorina, I have a few things I’d like to ask you to take care of.’
‘Of course, Commissario,’ she said formally, turning her head in the direction of Patta’s office. ‘I have some things to finish for the Vice-Questore. I’ll come up when I’m free.’