Her chair stood far back from her desk, as though she had pushed it away hurriedly. A page of text filled the screen of her computer, and a headset lay in front of it. YouTube? In the fashion of all good detectives, he decided to be sure, as if her choice in music would tell him something important about her.
He walked to her desk and, consciously ignoring the computer screen – which he considered taboo unless she showed it to him – picked up the headset, placed one of the earpieces to his left ear, and listened. ‘No, Dottore,’ he heard her say, ‘I think it should go in a registered letter. An email is too informal.’
‘Oddio,’ Brunetti whispered, replaced the headphones quietly on her desk, and left her office.
24
As Brunetti walked back to his office, he asked himself why a place as modest as the one Federica talked about would have a website. The sort of place where patients were kept hungry would hardly cater to the computer literate. But then he recalled that even the shelter where the city sent lost or abandoned dogs had a website. Brunetti paused and reflected on the way one thought had suggested the other; the spontaneity of the comparison embarrassed him. He should take the hungry old man a box of chocolates.
He nevertheless clicked on ‘Villa Flora, Mira’, sure that the photos would attempt to make spare rooms look inviting or grim-faced patients happy. He prepared himself to view a cement bunker pretending to be home.
Where had that tremendous villa come from? Where that rose garden gambolling happily up towards it? He read the captions and learned that this was Villa Flora, Mira. There could certainly be only one home for old people named Villa Flora in Mira.
‘An ambience where our guests will feel entirely at home.’ ‘Villa Flora offers only a change of address, not a change of life.’ ‘Why should retirement mean you’re no longer special?’ ‘Well, well, well,’ Brunetti muttered under his breath. ‘America comes to Mira.’
Brunetti looked through the photos again, more slowly this time, and read the historical information about the building. Designed by a friend of Palladio, the villa – the information insisted – was very much in the master’s style. Brunetti clicked back to the photo that served as the backdrop for the web page. Any influence by Palladio was from the architect’s early years, Brunetti decided, for the building resembled nothing so much as the fierce, fortress-like Villa Godi, where Brunetti had taken his family years ago, mistaken in his certainty that the kids would love the archaeology museum in the basement.
He clicked to the photos of the separate suites on offer: there were nineteen of them. Each had a sitting room, a bedroom, and a bath: meals were served in the dining room, though they could be taken privately. Much of the furniture in the residents’ rooms could easily have been taken from his parents-in-law’s palazzo: spindly-legged tables, velvet-covered sofas, ornate gold-framed mirrors; while the bathrooms looked like those in a five-star hotel: twin sinks, shower heads the size of pizzas, gold fixtures.
The dining room was what he imagined cruise ships boasted: fields of white linen, glistening cutlery, three glasses at every place. Drapes were pulled back from the French windows; beyond lay formal gardens filled, at the time of the photo, with an excess of roses of every colour, each large section of the garden neatly enclosed by low boxwood hedges. And the staff? As Brunetti had guessed, they were described as ‘top professionals in their fields’, ‘highly motivated to treat every resident as a guest’, and were always aware that ‘a guest is a member of our family’. Scrolling down, he saw many pictures of the staff, always smiling, always extending a hand to help.
He went back to ‘Home’ and looked for a key word that might be related to costs or prices, but nothing was to be found. He tried ‘Services’ with similar lack of success. Instead of spending more time searching, he dialled Signorina Elettra’s number.
‘Sì, Commissario?’
‘I’ve got the website of Villa Flora in front of me,’ he said, ‘but I can’t find any place that lists prices.’
‘They’re called “fees” now, Commissario,’ she informed him in a voice that suggested reproach.
‘Of course,’ Brunetti answered, sounding suitably chastened. ‘And these fees?’
‘Two thousand Euros,’ she said.
‘But that’s nothing for a place like this,’ he exclaimed, having clicked back to the photo of the fa?ade of the villa and remembering that this was the same sum he had paid for the nursing home where his mother had lived out her life.
‘A week, Signore,’ she added.
‘Maria Vergine’ escaped him. Where would a factory worker find more than a hundred thousand Euros a year to pay for a retirement home? From what Federica had told him, it sounded as though Bianchi had been reduced to tears by hunger.
‘That’s beyond belief,’ he protested, without knowing why.
‘Indeed,’ she answered and said she had another call.
When she was gone, Brunetti considered tactics. Two policemen arriving to question a blind old man, two men with their deep voices: did he want that? Someone had once told him that blind people could smell the difference between men and women; not because of perfume or aftershave but because of their different hormones. Women smelled sweeter, he had said, something that influenced even the sighted.
He dialled Griffoni’s number; when she said she was not busy, he asked if she’d come up to his office. While he waited, Brunetti went and looked out the window and allowed anomalous information to move around in his mind: a few dead bees in a plastic vial, the Aral Sea, two thousand Euros a week, dark mud in another vial. If they were pieces on a board, would he be able to move them round so that they formed a picture?
Griffoni’s knock pulled him back from these reflections. As soon as she came in, tall, blonde, and with the casual assurance of a woman who had always been aware that she was beautiful, he knew she was a better choice than Vianello, even if Bianchi would not see her.
‘Claudia,’ he said, ‘I’d like you to help me.’
An hour later, Foa pulled up to the dock at Piazzale Roma, where an unmarked car was waiting. The driver, who was not wearing a uniform, got out to open the rear door when they approached, even snapped out a salute, which Brunetti attributed to the shortness of Griffoni’s skirt.
During the twenty-five minutes it took them to get to Mira, Brunetti finished telling her the last of the story: the price of the retirement home.
‘The accident happened twenty years ago?’ she asked, ignoring the rows of stores that lined both sides of the highway and concentrating on what Brunetti had just told her.
‘More or less. Signorina Elettra is still trying to find out what happened. Why do you ask?’