All Brunetti knew was that whatever Cavanis had once seen had vanished in the midst of a bout of drunkenness and not returned. ‘Tell me what?’
The two men engaged in a delicate head-ballet, one nodding to the other, that one shaking his head and nodding back at the first. Finally the barman said, ‘You tell him, Nino.’ To encourage him, he filled his friend’s glass, and then, when Brunetti covered the top of his own glass with his hand, his own, forgetting that he’d just cleaned it.
‘Pietro’s father could do it, too,’ the man called Nino began, a remark that confused Brunetti utterly. ‘I never met the grandfather, so I don’t know if he could do it, but Pietro and his father had memories.’
Brunetti was about to say that most people do, when the man went on, ‘I mean very good memories. If you told Pietro something he’d always remember it, or if he met a person or read something. It was like a camera.’ To give an example, he said, ‘He could remember every move in every game of soccer he ever saw, either live or on television.’
He picked up his glass and held it up towards Brunetti, without drinking. ‘Only trouble was this.’ He raised the glass and swirled the wine around. ‘If he drank too much, it didn’t work and he wouldn’t remember anything when he was sober again.’
‘That’s not true,’ the bartender broke in to say. ‘You know it’s not.’
‘Let me finish, Ruggiero, would you?’ he said impatiently. Then, to Brunetti, ‘As I was saying, he wouldn’t remember some things if they happened when he was drinking. But then other things came back, and he’d remember them again, but only when he was so drunk he didn’t remember new things. Old stuff came back but new stuff didn’t go in. Very strange.’ He finished his wine, set the glass down, and said, ‘Strange guy.’ He was beginning to slur words with an ‘s’ in them, Brunetti noticed.
Nino looked at his watch and said, ‘Gesù, if I’m not back at work in ten minutes my boss will kill me.’ He held up his glass and asked, ‘How much do I owe you, Ruggiero?’
Brunetti placed a restraining hand on Nino’s arm and said, ‘This is mine, signori.’
He took a twenty-euro note from his wallet and set it on the bar, then waved away the barman’s attempt to give him change. He looked at his watch, saw that it was after five, and said, ‘If I’m not back at work in ten minutes, my boss will kill me, too.’
19
Brunetti knew it was an exaggeration to say that Patta would kill him, but it was not an exaggeration to say that he would view Brunetti’s dismissal – reason left undefined – with some relief, for it would remove the major goad in his existence. After which, Brunetti had the fairness to admit, Patta would probably regret his absence. Like any couple that had chugged along for years, he and Patta had developed a way to deal with one another and had learned the precise limits of the acceptable. More importantly, each had learned how to use the skills or contacts of the other for his own purposes. It might not be a recipe for a happy marriage, but Brunetti suspected that many married people would recognize the template.
He got back to the Questura before six and decided that he would wait for Rizzardi’s call. He left the door to his office open so that he would be seen, busy at his desk, should Lieutenant Scarpa pass by, as he often did, especially late in the afternoon. Brunetti read through and initialled some files, went and looked out of his window, then returned to the files, storing their content in abbreviated form in some far reach of his memory that he could sometimes access, sometimes not.
Brunetti’s thoughts passed to what the men had said about the effect of drinking on Cavanis’ memory. Things came and went, carried on and then carried off on waves of alcohol.
Something ‘that was going to change his luck’. Well, his luck certainly had changed, but not in the way Cavanis had hoped or could have imagined. The night of acqua alta, which was Saturday. Brunetti remembered only finishing dinner – with no memory of what it had been – and going into the living room to lie comatose on the sofa. He thought they had watched television, but then Paola had changed to something he didn’t want to watch, and he had abandoned her and gone to bed.
He turned on his computer, only to ignore it and dial Signorina Elettra’s number. When there was no answer, he returned to the computer and sent her an email, asking her to contact the local television station and ask for a list of the programmes shown on Saturday evening: if possible, to send copies of the programmes themselves, something he thought could be done by means of the computer.