The Waters of Eternal Youth (Commissario Brunetti, #25)

‘You’re a cop, aren’t you?’ the man asked.

‘Yes. I was supposed to talk to Signor Cavanis this morning. But when I went over there – the way he told me to do – I found him.’ Brunetti shook his head and made what he hoped was a resigned gesture with his left hand.

‘Did you know him?’ the man reversed roles by asking Brunetti.

‘No, not really,’ Brunetti answered, trying to sound easy and relaxed. ‘But we’d spoken a few times.’

The man finished his wine and held the glass up to the barman. ‘He was a good guy. But he drank too much, if you ask me.’

‘Ah,’ Brunetti sighed. ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ Then, quite as if the phenomenon of drinking were a new world to him, he asked, ‘Did it change him? The way he behaved, I mean.’

The man nodded his thanks to the barman and left the glass on the counter. ‘Yeah, it gave him this feeling that he was important.’

Brunetti took the smallest sip of his wine and set the glass down, then turned to his companion, intent on what he might say next.

‘More he drank, more important he thought he was,’ his neighbour said and picked up his glass.

‘Like knowing about sports and stuff like that?’ Brunetti asked, pitching his level of reference to what he thought most men would understand.

‘That for one, yes. Hear him talk, he was the only person who ever watched soccer or knew anything about it,’ the other man said, but the criticism was coloured by affection. ‘But it was more that he kept thinking he’d make a fortune. Ever since I’ve known him . . .’ the man began but then made the grammatical correction and said, ‘. . . since I knew him, he’d have these great plans for getting rich.’ He took another small sip and was surprised to see that the glass was almost empty. ‘I guess he thought that would make him important.’

Brunetti finished his glass and waved to the barman, pointing to both their glasses.

‘He got the bug again just the other night,’ the man continued, nodding his thanks for the wine. ‘Big plans. He said he saw something that was going to change his luck, at last, after all these years.’ He shook his head at the very idea of it then, seeing the scepticism on Brunetti’s face, he turned to the barman and said, ‘You heard him, Ruggiero. Saturday night.’

‘He was drunk, Nino,’ the barman said with a mixture of patience and exasperation. ‘You know what he was like: big talk at night, no memory in the morning.’

‘But you heard him,’ the man called Nino insisted.

‘Yes, I heard him, but I also saw him, and he was drunk. He came in here to get another bottle of wine, didn’t he?’

‘Was this Saturday?’ Brunetti asked.

‘The night of acqua alta, yes,’ the barman answered. Nino nodded to show he agreed but said nothing.

‘I’ve been listening to him for years,’ the barman continued. ‘So I never paid too much attention to him, not once he started on his big plans. I’ve heard too many of them over the years; not only from him.’ He picked up a clean glass and poured himself some of the white wine and drank it down. ‘He said that the time he’d spent watching television was finally going to be worth something. When I asked him what he was talking about, he said he’d remembered something and it was going to make his fortune.’

The other man laughed out loud. ‘I can’t count how many times something he knew, or remembered, or was told, or read in the paper, or saw on television was going to make his fortune.’ He laughed a few more times but then, perhaps recalling that the man was dead, he clapped his hand over his mouth and said, ‘Sorry.’

Brunetti and the barman exchanged glances, but neither knew what to say. Both of them took a sip of wine, set their glasses down and looked around the bar, as though waiting for something to distract them and let the moment pass.

Finally the sandy-haired man said, ‘Well, even if he never amounted to much, there was no malice in him, and he couldn’t help it if he was a drunk. His father was and his grandfather was, too.’ He ran his eyes across the bottles lined up on the mirrored wall of the bar, as if trying to calculate all of the drinking three generations of Cavanis men had done. ‘Pity he won’t get to change his luck.’

‘It didn’t get better, did it?’ the barman asked of no one in particular.

To break their maudlin descent, Brunetti asked the barman, ‘Do you think it really was something he saw on television that made him remember?’

The barman emptied his glass, dipped it into the water in the sink, and began to dry it with a towel. He held it with one hand and rubbed at it, turning and turning long after it was dry.

The other man surprised Brunetti by asking the barman, ‘Should we tell him?’

‘About his memory?’

‘Yes.’