‘In this heat?’ she asked.
‘It’s different out in the laguna,’ Brunetti said, recalling his younger self: harder-muscled, harder-headed, and, he had to admit – though only to himself – probably harder-hearted. ‘You don’t feel the heat because there’s always a breeze.’
‘And currents and mosquitoes, and crazy young men in speedboats.’
‘With happy dogs on their prows,’ he countered. ‘And the light on the water, the feel of the boat under your feet, and no sound when you get to the smaller canals,’ he said, but then, seeing that she still failed to swoon at the magic and mystery of the laguna, added, ‘and young girls in bikinis.’
‘And you in your T-shirt, showing all your muscles.’
Brunetti leaned towards her, bent his elbow in an arm-wrestler’s L and made a fist. ‘Go ahead, feel it,’ he said. And when she raised a hand towards him, added, ‘Be careful you don’t hurt your hand.’
Instead of feeling his muscle, she poked him in the ribs, saying, ‘Oh, stop it, Guido. Be serious: where do you want to go?’ But she said it, Brunetti thought, like someone who had an answer in mind.
‘I don’t know. I haven’t got that far. But I could go out and stay on Burano, I guess, or even out to Torcello. There are fewer people there.’
‘In a hotel?’ she asked in her prosecuting magistrate mode, thus enforcing his belief that she already had an answer. ‘And the boat about which you are so rhapsodic? Where do you have that hidden?’
Brunetti shoved himself to his feet and went into the kitchen. He pulled some ice cubes from the freezer and dropped them into two glasses, thought of the heat and poured in a lot of mineral water, added a shot of Campari to both, and opened one of the bottles of prosecco in the door of the refrigerator. He filled the glasses almost to the rims and took them back into the living room.
Handing one to Paola, he sat back down beside her and took a long swallow. ‘I’m ready now,’ he said.
‘For what?’ Paola asked and took a ladylike sip.
‘For whatever it is you have in mind. Where I can go. And probably where I can have a boat to use, as well.’
She set her drink, barely touched, on the table and leaned back next to him. ‘Zia Costanza’s house,’ she said, as though it were the most obvious thing in the world. ‘Well, I suppose it’s really a villa.’
Brunetti paused to try to remember Aunt Costanza, and finally he did: a much-married, much-widowed cousin of his father-in-law’s who had one son and a great deal of property both on the mainland and in Venice as well as on the islands around it.
He had heard talk, over the years, of apartments, the odd palazzo, a few shops, but he failed to recall any mention of a villa. ‘Where?’
‘Out at the tip end of Sant’Erasmo. She has a villa and some land.’
Long familiarity with the Falier family had alerted Brunetti to the need to seek clarity about expressions such as ‘some land’ or, as had happened in the past, ‘a few apartments’.
‘Is it empty?’
‘Sort of,’ Paola answered. ‘The custodian and his family live in another house on the property and keep the main house ready for anyone she might send out to stay there.’
‘You make it sound like the perfect place for a rest cure,’ Brunetti said, smiling as he spoke.
He took a few small sips of his spritz, placed the half-empty glass beside hers and nodded. ‘How big is this place?’ he asked.
Paola pressed her head against the back of the sofa and closed her eyes. ‘I was sent out there for a few weeks most summers when I was in school. It seemed very big to me then. The land around it was covered with artichokes.’
‘Why were you sent out?’ Brunetti asked.
‘My father thought it would be a good thing for me to see what life on a farm was really like.’
‘Marie Antoinette?’ he asked.
Paola had the grace to laugh. She opened her eyes and looked at him. ‘I suppose so. He wanted me to see how ordinary people lived and worked.’
‘And did you see that?’
‘Well,’ Paola hesitated, ‘the artichokes pretty much took care of themselves and grew on their own.’
‘So what did you do?’
‘Oh, I went swimming and lay on the sofa and read.’
‘And then?’
‘And then it was time to go back to school.’ She put her hand to her forehead as if she had just remembered something. ‘That was more than thirty years ago.’ She shook her head as though to clear it. ‘Good grief, it sounds so long ago.’
‘Have you been there since then?’
‘Once. I went out for a week the summer after my third year at university.’
‘To do what?’ he asked.
She turned her head and looked at him. ‘Something like what you want to do: look at the water and not have any noise around me.’
‘Did it help?’
She looked at him for a long time before she answered. ‘Not as much as meeting you in the library at the university a few months later did.’
‘Ah,’ was all Brunetti allowed himself to say.
After they both, no doubt for different reasons, allowed Brunetti’s ‘Ah’ to fade to nothingness, they returned to the question of Zia Costanza’s place. The villa, Paola explained, was one of the oldest on the island, built in the eighteenth century by Zia Costanza’s branch of the Falier family as a refuge from the dreadful heat and pestilent air of summertime Venice. The flood of 1966, however, showed there was no refuge from the water, which rose to the second floor, destroying everything but the walls and roof. Zia Costanza, proving that she could master the art of losing, jettisoned what was ruined, cleaned what had survived, and waited until springtime to begin to dry the place out. The restoration took two years, left the exterior intact, and turned the interior into the comfortable house where the young Paola was meant to learn about life in the country. Since then, it had been offered to members of the extended family for use during the summer.
‘Is anyone staying there now?’ Brunetti asked.
‘No, only the custodian. He’s been there for years, although he wasn’t there when I went out as a kid, but I met him only once. He seemed formidable, but I’ve been told he’s absolutely reliable. He lives in the gardener’s house at the back of the property with his daughter and her family.’
‘Your Zia Costanza must be in her nineties by now,’ Brunetti recalled.
Paola laughed. ‘That branch of the family is indestructible. She’s ninety-six and lives in Treviso with her son, Emilio, who’s in his seventies. He tells me she goes out for a walk every day, alone. She carries a cane, but she says it’s only to hit away any dogs that come too close to her.’
‘They take care of the villa, even though no one lives there?’