‘He’s in Mira.’
‘Do you mean he lives there?’ he asked. It was close enough, no more than twenty minutes away from Piazzale Roma.
‘Yes. Sort of,’ she said.
‘I’m sorry, Federica,’ Brunetti said. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘He’s living in a kind of nursing home.’ Then, in a slower voice, ‘He’s been there for a long time.’
‘Why is that?’ Vianello asked.
‘Because he’s old, and he’s blind and has nowhere else to go.’
22
‘My mother told me he got sick at about the same time my father had his accident,’ Federica began. ‘Some terrible eye disease they couldn’t do anything about.’ She called back her memory of those events, then continued. ‘He used to come to dinner at the house in Marghera.’ Finding something she was glad to remember, she added, ‘Zio Zeno never married. He always told me he’d wait for me to grow up and then he’d marry me.’ She smiled, as people always do at the thought of happy families and happy times.
‘He was in a hospital – I think it was in Padova – for a long time, but it didn’t help. And then some place for rehabilitation. My mother said he wasn’t the same after it happened because he hated to be helpless, always needing other people.’
‘But what could he do, poor devil?’ Vianello said, his voice rich with concern. ‘He couldn’t work. You said he had no family.’
Federica interrupted in her turn and went on. ‘And the state certainly wouldn’t take care of him: they’d give him a miserable pension and put him in a nursing home somewhere and forget about him.’ Shaking herself free of this reality, she continued. ‘It was a long time ago, and things were bad then.’ She looked from one to the other and added, ‘Maybe they’re better now,’ although her scepticism was clear.
‘Why did he go to Mira?’ Brunetti asked, as though it were the end of the world.
‘I don’t know. No one ever said why.’
‘Has he been in the nursing home all this time?’ Brunetti asked. A nursing home in Mira, of all places.
Federica took a long time to answer, and Brunetti was afraid she was going to object to his continuing questioning, but she was merely trying to remember. ‘I really don’t know too much,’ she said. ‘My father called him once a month or so, always on Sunday afternoon. And he was always sad after they talked.’
‘Did your father ever go to see him?’ Brunetti asked.
She shook her head a few times, absolute negation reflected in the speed with which she did it. ‘No. Zio wouldn’t let him come because the place was so terrible. My mother told me he once said that sometimes there wasn’t even enough to eat. He couldn’t stand to have my father see him there.’ She looked to make sure they understood a man’s dignity, and then added, ‘My mother told me he said he could hear Zio crying when he said that.’ They sat in silence, thinking of the state-run nursing homes in which they had seen their relatives, perhaps their friends, put.
She started to speak, coughed, started again.
Brunetti heard the whish of cloth on cloth as she uncrossed her legs under the table. ‘I never understood why he kept calling him. They hadn’t seen one another for years, and still they talked once a month. What could they tell one another?’
Neither man tried to answer this question.
‘Would you know how to get in touch with him?’ Brunetti asked. ‘Your Uncle Zeno?’
‘I’m sure I have his phone number somewhere, and his address. ‘I’ll look for it. I know I have it.’
‘Thank you,’ Brunetti said and studied her face, which seemed less troubled than it had when they started talking. ‘I have to go into the city again, but I’d like to come back and stay a bit longer. Would that be all right with you?’ he asked.
‘Of course,’ Federica was surprised into answering. ‘I’m glad you’re here. With my father gone, it gives me someone to talk to.’ While the thought ran through his mind that this was a strange thing for a married woman to say, Federica added, ‘During the day, that is. Massimo’s gone by four and doesn’t get back for twelve hours. That’s a lot of time to spend by myself.’
‘Have you stopped working?’ he asked.
‘Yes. With two children, you know … Besides, there’s much less work at the factory, so they don’t need me any more. Most of the glass comes from China now: no one can compete – not when they put “Made in Murano” on it.’
‘Can’t you stop them?’ Vianello asked.
She gave a resigned smile in which there was anything but humour. ‘It’s like trying to stop acqua alta,’ she said.
They sat in silence for a moment, three Venetians, relatives at the wake of a city that had been an empire and was now selling off the coffee spoons to try to pay the heating bill.
Brunetti saw Federica prepare to say something, but then stop. He waited. She opened her mouth and this time she found the words, or the courage, to ask, ‘Why do you want to know about Zio Zeno? He’s blind and in a nursing home out on the mainland.’
‘You said he was a close friend of your father’s and spoke to him regularly for years.’ Brunetti remembered what she had said about the friendships of men, then continued, ‘So I’d …’
She started to interrupt him, and again stopped.
Putting on his softest voice, Brunetti said, ‘What were you going to say, Federica?’
‘I don’t know if they were still talking to one another.’
‘Why is that?’
‘Recently, I asked my father how Zio Zeno was, and he said he didn’t know. I asked him to say hello to Zio when they spoke, and he said he wouldn’t be speaking to him again.’ She glanced at them, and when neither of them commented, she said, ‘They’ve spoken to one another once a month for ages, and suddenly they weren’t speaking.’
‘Did you ask him why?’ Brunetti wanted to know.
She shook the idea away. ‘When my father spoke in a certain way, I knew there was no use insisting or asking him questions. He’d made up his mind, and that was that.’
‘No idea?’ Vianello asked.
‘None. You can ask Zio Zeno when you speak to him,’ she said. ‘I’ll go upstairs and get you the number.’
After Federica’s footsteps had receded into silence, Brunetti looked across at Vianello and asked, ‘Well? What do you think? If they both spent months in the hospital, it would be in their employment and medical records, wouldn’t it?’
‘Even if it was so long ago?’ Vianello asked.
‘The ways of the computer are many and mysterious,’ Brunetti answered in a falsely solemn voice.
‘I have faith in the computer,’ Vianello said, ‘but not in the people who enter information into them.’
Brunetti swept his friend’s doubts aside by saying, ‘We need a date, and we need the name of their employer. Then we can begin looking. There’s always something.’
‘And this blind man, Zeno Bianchi?’ Vianello asked.
‘We go to talk to him as soon as we can.’