‘About?’
‘About his blindness and its cause and about why he and Casati no longer spoke to one another.’
Vianello put his palms together and turned them over to look at the back of his right hand, as though he sought there what he wanted to say. ‘Guido,’ he began but did not finish the sentence.
Brunetti was suddenly alert to the tone of Vianello’s voice and suspected he knew what was coming.
‘Yes?’ he asked with studied mildness.
‘Are you sure you know what you’re doing?’ Vianello’s glance shot to Brunetti’s face and as quickly away.
An idea had been growing in Brunetti’s imagination since the time Casati had spoken about how ‘we’ had killed ‘her’ and killed the bees and would go on to kill his grandchildren and Brunetti’s children. At the time, it had seemed nothing more than wild, raving talk, and to a certain degree it still did. But not entirely.
It took him some time to think of a way to answer Vianello. ‘No, I’m not sure, not at all,’ Brunetti said. ‘But I’m doing what I want to do and what I think is right to do.’ That was all the explanation he could give. ‘Is that enough?’ he asked his friend.
‘Yes,’ Vianello answered.
At the sound of Federica’s returning footsteps, both men sat up straighter and turned to face the door. She entered, a small slip of paper in her right hand, walked over and placed it on the table in front of Brunetti. ‘It’s the number of his telefonino, and that’s the name of the place where he is,’ she said. ‘It’s all I have.’
Brunetti thanked her and put the paper in his pocket. ‘Do you remember the name of the company where they worked?’ he asked.
She glanced out the window and rubbed absently at her right cheekbone. Eventually, she said, ‘It was named after the wife of the owner. M something: Maura, Mar … No, not that.’ She pulled her lips together and said, ‘M, M, M,’ but it appeared to bring memory no closer. Her face changed in an instant, and she smiled. ‘No, it’s R. “Romina Rimozione”. Her name was Romina, and the company removed things.’ She turned to smile at Brunetti and tapped her finger on her forehead. ‘It’s all in there. Still.’
‘Did Signor Bianchi live in Marghera, too?’
‘Oh, I thought I’d told you. At San Pietro in Castello, in one of the apartments above the cloister.’ Seeing Brunetti’s confusion, she said, ‘To the right of the church, there’s that big doorway that goes into the cloister.
‘He lived on the top floor,’ she went on. Before they could ask, she explained. ‘I never saw him there, but once when I went with my father into the city – this was after we moved out here – we took a walk down to San Pietro, and he told me that’s where his friend Zeno used to live.’
‘You said he never married,’ Brunetti reminded her.
‘No. And he was a handsome man. But then,’ she began and paused briefly to think this through, ‘I suppose all tall men who are friends of your father are handsome when you’re a little girl.’
Smiling, Brunetti said, ‘I certainly hope that’s true of my daughter’s friends,’ and got to his feet.
Federica put herself between Brunetti and the door, trying to make the motion seem natural, and failing. ‘When will …’ she began.
She ran out of words, and Brunetti supplied them. ‘I think the pathologist will give a release in a day or two.’
‘Not before that?’ she asked, stricken by the delay.
‘I’m afraid not, Federica. I’ll ask them, but these are things we – the police – don’t control. I’m sorry.’
She nodded.
Brunetti bent and kissed her on both cheeks, and Vianello extended his hand and shook hers. Brunetti and Vianello started back towards the villa.
23
‘Does it make any sense for us to stay here?’ Vianello asked as they left Federica’s house.
‘No. There’s nothing we can do here for the moment,’ Brunetti answered. While he had been speaking to Federica, he’d seen a trail open up before him, a trail made seductive by the unexplained. Two men working for the same company had been hospitalized at the same time, and a long friendship had been ruptured soon before one of those men died. Brunetti knew himself enough to know he would not ignore this trail, just as he knew that to return to Venice would be to put the first foot on that trail.
‘How do we get back?’ Vianello asked.
‘Same way we came: on the boat.’
Brunetti left a note for Federica on the kitchen table, explaining that he was returning to the city for a few days but would call her when he knew when he’d be back and would do his best to find out when her father’s body would be released for burial.
There was nothing he had to take with him, aside from his keys; he went upstairs to get them and to close the windows and shutters, leaving it to Vianello to close the ones on the ground floor. They walked to the embarcadero, each wrapped so deeply in his own thoughts that neither reacted to the heat and humidity. During the ride, he called Signorina Elettra and told her that he and Vianello were on the way to the Questura, and while they were, he’d like her to try to find some record of … here he had to pause and look out the window to find a way to express what it was that might have happened. ‘An accident in Marghera, at least twenty years ago, involving a company called Romina Rimozione. There are two men who might have been injured: Davide Casati and Zeno Bianchi.’
‘Ah,’ she exhaled, making the sound last a long time. She did not sniff, she did not wag her tail, nor did she pull at the lead, but Brunetti could sense her desire to be off in pursuit of what might be only a rustle in the grass but might just as easily be prey.
‘The second one,’ Brunetti continued as though he had not heard her sigh, ‘spent months in a hospital in Padova. His problem was his eyes: whatever happened left him blind. The other was burned badly, though I don’t know where he was treated.’
‘Anything else, Dottore?’
‘Have you had a response from the university?’
‘No, nothing yet.’
‘Is there any way you could …’ he began and left the question unfinished, not wanting to be recorded suggesting to his superior’s secretary that she break into the computer system of a university in a foreign country.
‘I’m reluctant to do anything like that in Switzerland, Signore. They’re very good at placing tripwires, and since the request was made through official channels, there will eventually be an answer. All that’s needed is time.’
Brunetti knew that, but it did nothing to still his impatience.