‘Nothing, nothing. I tend to get carried away.’
Brunetti noticed her suddenly casual tone, as though all of this were happening far away and did not concern her. Like most honest people, she was a bad liar.
‘“The earth itself” is what, Signora?’ the inspector asked.
‘Excuse me?’ she asked, trying to sound confused but not managing to.
‘It’s what you began to say: “The earth itself”, and then you stopped. I’m curious about what you were going to say.’
‘Oh, I don’t remember,’ she said distractedly. ‘It was nothing.’
‘I thought, since you work with the soil, that you meant it literally, Signora, about the soil.’
Her face lost all expression, and he watched her repeat in her mind what he had just said. Then she smiled, as if she’d seen an open window through which she could fly. ‘No, I meant the Earth, the planet. I suppose I was going to say it’s gone mad.’ She gave a self-effacing laugh and added, ‘I often say that.’
‘I think we all do, Signora,’ Vianello said and gave her a broad smile. ‘I try not to say it in front of my children, though. They’re too young for that sort of thing.’ Brunetti listened to his friend sounding forthright and honest, pulling her away from the scent that had alarmed her.
‘How old are they, officer?’ she asked, while Brunetti watched her hands.
‘Seven and nine,’ Vianello lied. What’s more trustworthy than a man with two young children?
‘Still so little?’ she asked before she thought.
‘Yes, I married late,’ he lied again. ‘I wanted to be sure.’
‘And are you?’ she inquired.
‘Yes, absolutely,’ the Inspector said and pasted a broad smile on his face.
Obviously at a loss for what to say, Signora Minati looked down at her hands and saw them, claw-like, grasping one another in a death grip. She stretched out her fingers and pressed her open hands against her thighs.
She looked at Brunetti. ‘Will there be anything else?’ she asked.
Brunetti got to his feet, quickly followed by Vianello. ‘No, Signora, I think that’s all. You’ve been very generous with your time.’
She preceded them to the door and opened it. Brunetti took his notebook from his jacket pocket and wrote in it. He passed her the slip of paper and said, ‘This is my telefonino number.’
She took it and studied it as though she’d found it in her hand at the end of a magician’s trick and had no idea what to do with it. She folded it in half and then again and put it into the pocket of her skirt, saying nothing.
Brunetti offered his hand. She shook it, and then Vianello’s, then the two men descended the steps and left the building.
20
Outside, both of them aware that they would be visible from the window, they walked away from the building at a normal pace. As they did so, Vianello said, ‘I wonder what she’s frightened of. She’s been away from Uzbekistan for ten years, so we can forget that.’ He sounded certain, and Brunetti thought he was right.
‘That leaves the reports that were sent to her,’ Brunetti said. He continued walking, looking down at his feet. He stopped and turned to the Inspector. ‘Or it could simply be that she’s afraid of having two policemen come to talk to her.’ Many people would be, he knew but didn’t want to say.
They reached the campo that led to the boat stop, and as they stepped from the shadow the narrow streets provided, the sun pounded down on them, reminding them that it was July, the worst month. Both of them removed their jackets, Brunetti regretting his concession to respectability by having abandoned last week’s cotton Bermudas and tennis shoes.
His thoughts veered towards Paola, and he found himself remembering that she’d once told him how gullible he tended to be about women, abandoning his normal suspiciousness and always willing to believe their moral superiority to men. He defended his normal suspiciousness, if only to himself, with the fact that he had asked Signorina Elettra to see what she could find out about Signora Minati.
As if serving as the voice of Brunetti’s conscience, the Inspector observed, ‘You weren’t very hard on her, were you?’
‘No,’ Brunetti admitted. ‘She seemed an honest person.’
Vianello wiped his brow with his handkerchief but said nothing.
Brunetti missed his baseball cap, regardless of how much it would have made him look like a tourist lost on the island. ‘Is this what it’s been like in the city?’ he asked Vianello, hoping that last night’s heat was not to be a constant.
‘Yes,’ Vianello answered. ‘Worse. Here, at least there’s a breeze off the laguna. There, nothing.’
They reached the embarcadero and went inside the covered platform to escape the sun. The air was close and humid and it seemed hotter than outside, but at least the roof had put an end to the sun’s flagellations. They sat on one of the benches, leaving a space between them to encourage the reluctant air to circulate.
How had he managed to stay outside and row with Casati all day in this heat? Had effort and concentration transformed light into a caress and driven heat from his mind? Here, inside this airless trap, he found it impossible to imagine that other world of endless space and limitless horizons.
‘She never said anything about the results from the soil samples, only about the bees,’ Brunetti said aloud. ‘She talked about the diseases the bees have, and then she wandered away and talked about Uzbekistan. When she started to say something about the soil again, she stopped herself.’
Vianello nodded. ‘When I asked her, she went all mystic on us and said she was talking about the whole Earth. Which I don’t believe for a minute.’
‘I’m not so sure,’ Brunetti said, though he made himself sound reluctant.
‘Why?’
‘Some people think that way, that it’s all a unit, a whole, all connected together.’
Vianello turned to him and asked, ‘So?’
Brunetti suspected that little was to be gained from a discussion of the nature of the universe and answered, ‘So we ask Signorina Elettra to call the University of Lausanne.’ He took his telefonino from his pocket. That was quickly done. First, Brunetti told her when Casati was likely to have sent the parcel, then he explained Casati’s strange remarks in the days before his death and his unending grief for his wife, although he stopped himself from saying anything about where this might have led.