Beastly Things (21 page)

‘That the one about the lady with all the stuff?’ he asked, turning from sibylline to philistine with one well-chosen question.

‘Yes, dear,’ she said, and poured them both some more wine.

‘How did they respond?’ he asked, suddenly curious. He had read the book, albeit in translation – he preferred James in translation – and liked it.

‘They seemed incapable of understanding that she loved the things she owned because they were beautiful, not because they were valuable. Or valuable for non-financial reasons.’ She sipped her wine. ‘My students find it difficult to grasp any motivation for human action that is not based on financial profit.’

‘There’s a lot of that around,’ Brunetti said, reaching for an olive. He ate it, spat the pit into his left hand, which he observed was steady as a rock. He set the pit in a small saucer and took another one.

‘And they liked the wrong … they liked characters different from the ones I like,’ she amended.

‘There’s a very unpleasant woman in it, isn’t there?’ he asked.

‘There are two,’ she answered and said that dinner would be ready in ten minutes.

23

A THIN RAIN
was falling when Brunetti left his house the next morning. When he boarded the vaporetto at Rialto, he saw that the level of the water was high, even though he had received no message on his
telefonino
alerting him to
acqua alta
. Higher tides at unusual times had become more frequent in the last two years, and though most people – and all fishermen – believed this was the result of the MOSE project’s violent intervention at the entrance to the
laguna
, official sources denied this adamantly.

Foa, the Questura’s pilot, grew apoplectic on the subject. He had learned the tides along with the alphabet and knew the names of the winds that crossed the Adriatic as well as priests knew those of the saints. For years, sceptical from the beginning, he had watched the metal monster grow, had seen all protest swept away by the flood of lovely European money sent to save the Pearl of the Adriatic. His fishermen friends told him of the new and violent vortices that had appeared in both the sea and the
laguna
and of the consequences of the pharaonic dredging that had taken place in recent years. No one, Foa claimed, had bothered to consult the fishermen. Instead, experts – Brunetti remembered once seeing Foa spit after pronouncing this word – had made the decisions, and other experts no doubt would get the contracts for the construction.

For a decade, Brunetti had been reading yes, and he had been reading no, and most recently he had read of more delays in funding that would delay the project yet another three years. As an Italian, he suspected it would run true to form and turn out to have been yet another building project that served as a feeding trough for the friends of friends; as a Venetian, he despaired that his fellow citizens might have sunk so low as to be capable even of this.

Still musing, he left the boat and began to walk towards the back reaches of Castello. He hesitated now and again, not having been down here for years, so after a time he stopped thinking and let his feet lead the way. The sight of Vianello, wearing a raincoat and leaning against the metal railing of the
riva
, cheered him. Seeing him approach, Vianello said, with a nod towards the door in front of him, ‘The sign says the office opens at nine, but no one’s gone inside yet.’

A printed card protected by a plastic shield gave the doctor’s name and the office hours.

They stood side by side for a few minutes until Brunetti said, ‘Let’s see if he’s already there.’

Vianello pushed himself away from the railing and followed him to the door. Brunetti rang the bell and after a moment tried the door, which opened easily. They stepped inside, up two steps, and into a small entrance which led in its turn to an open courtyard. A sign on their
left
carried the doctor’s name and an arrow pointing to the other side of the courtyard.

The rain, which outside had been bothersome, here fell on to the newly green grass of the courtyard with gentle kindness. Even the light seemed different; brighter, somehow. Brunetti unbuttoned his raincoat; Vianello did the same.

The courtyard, if it had been part of a monastery, had been part of the smallest monastery in the city. Though covered walkways surrounded the garden, they were no more than five metres long, hardly space enough, Brunetti reflected, to allow a man to make much progress with his rosary. He’d barely have finished the first decade before he’d be back at his starting point, but he’d be surrounded by beauty and tranquillity, at least if he were wise enough to contemplate them.

The acanthus leaves had worn away on the capitals, and the centuries had smoothed the fluting on the shafts of the columns around the garden. Surely this had not happened while the columns were in this protected courtyard; who knows where they had come from or when they had arrived in Venice? Suddenly a goat smiled down at Brunetti: how had
that
column got here?

Ahead of him, Vianello stopped at a green wooden door with the doctor’s name on a brass plaque, waited for Brunetti to join him, and opened it. Inside was a room like all those Brunetti had sat in while waiting to see doctors. Opposite them they saw another wooden door, closed now. Rows of orange plastic chairs lined two walls; at the end of one row was a low table with two piles of magazines. Brunetti went over to see if it held the usual copies of
Gente
and
Chi
. Not unless starlets and minor nobles had all been replaced by cats, dogs and, in one instance, a particularly winsome pig wearing a Father Christmas hat.

They sat opposite one another. Brunetti checked his watch. After four minutes, an old woman came in, leading an antique dog so deprived of hair in various places as to resemble the sort of stuffed toy one found in a grandparent’s attic. The woman ignored them and lowered herself into the chair farthest from Vianello; the dog collapsed at her feet with an explosive sigh, and both of them immediately lapsed into a trance. Strangely enough, it was only the woman’s breathing they could hear.

More time passed, measured by the woman’s snores, until Brunetti got to his feet and went to the other door. He knocked on it, waited for Vianello to join him, knocked again, and then opened it.

Across the room, behind a desk, Brunetti saw the top half of what might have been the fattest man he had ever seen. He was slumped back in his leather chair and sound asleep, his head tilted to the left as far as his neck and the chins above it would allow. He was perhaps in his forties, his age disguised by the absence of wrinkles in his face.

Brunetti cleared his throat, but that had no effect on the sleeping man. He stepped closer, and smelled the rancid odour of cigarette smoke mixed with late night, or early morning, drinking. The man’s hands were latched across his vast chest, the right thumb and the second and third fingers stained with nicotine up to the first knuckle. The room, strangely enough, did not smell of smoke, only of its after-effect: the same odour came from the man’s clothing and, Brunetti suspected, from his hair and skin.

‘Dottore,’ Brunetti said in a soft voice, not wanting to startle him awake. The man continued snoring softly.

‘Dottore,’ Brunetti repeated in a louder voice.

He watched the man’s eyes for motion: they were set deep in his face, as though they had retreated from the encroaching fat that surrounded them. The nose was
strangely
thin, but it had been overwhelmed by the encircling cheeks, which pushed up against it and, helped by the engorged lips, came close to blocking his nostrils. The mouth was a perfect cupid’s bow, but a very thick, unwieldy bow.

A thin film of sweat covered his face and had so slicked his thin hair to his skull that Brunetti was put in mind of the greasy pomades his father had used on his hair when Brunetti was a boy. ‘Dottore,’ he said for the third time, this time in a normal voice, his tone perhaps a bit sharp.

The eyes opened; small, dark, curious, and then suddenly wide with fear. Before Brunetti could say anything else, the man shoved himself away from his desk and got to his feet. He did not leap, nor did he jump, though Brunetti had no doubt that he moved as quickly as his bulk would permit. He pressed himself against the wall behind him and looked across the room at the door, then shifted his gaze back and forth between Brunetti and Vianello, who blocked his path.

‘What do you want?’ he asked. His voice was curiously high-pitched, either from fear or just from some odd mismatch between his body and his voice.

‘We’d like to speak to you, Dottore,’ Brunetti said in a neutral voice, choosing to delay an explanation of who they were or the purpose of their visit. He glanced aside at Vianello and saw that the Inspector, in response to the doctor’s fear, had managed somehow to transform himself into a thug. His entire body had become more compact and was angled forward, as though waiting only the command to launch itself at the man. His hands, curved just short of fists, dangled beside his thighs as though longing to be given weapons. The habitual geniality of his face had vanished, replaced by a mouth he seemed unable
to
close and eyes forever in search of his opponent’s weakest point.

The doctor’s hands, palms outward, rose in front of his chest; he patted at the air, as if to test if it were strong enough to keep these men from him. The doctor smiled: Brunetti recalled a description he had read once of a flower on a corpse, something like that. ‘There’s got to be some mistake, Signori. I’ve done everything you told me to. You must know that.’

Suddenly all bedlam was let out on the other side of the door. It started with a thump, a loud roar, and then a high-pitched woman’s scream. A chair fell over or was pushed over, another woman screamed an obscenity, then everything was drowned out by a chorus of hysterical barks and growls. There followed a series of yelps, and then all animal noise stopped for a moment and was replaced by an exchange of obscenities in two equally shrill voices.

Brunetti pulled the door open. The old woman stood barricaded behind a fallen chair, her ancient dog trembling in her arms, as she hurled epithets at another woman on the other side of the room. This woman, hatchet-faced and thin as a rail, stood behind two now wildly barking dogs with unusually large, squarish heads. They barked as hysterically as the two women screamed, the only differences being their lower pitch and the trickles of saliva that hung suspended from their lips. For the first time in his career, Brunetti wanted to pull his pistol and fire a shot into the air, but he had forgotten to wear his pistol, and he knew the noise of the shot would deafen every creature in the room.

Instead, he crossed to the two dogs, grabbing one of the magazines as he passed the table. He rolled it into a cylinder, then bent and smacked one of the large dogs
across
the nose. Given the lightness of Brunetti’s blow, the dog’s howl was disproportionately loud, and his quick retreat behind the legs of his owner as surprising as it was ignominious. His fellow dog looked up at Brunetti and started to bare his teeth, but a threatening thrust of the rolled magazine sent him to cower beside the other dog.

The thin-faced woman changed target and began to hurl her obscenities at Brunetti, ending in a loud boast that she would call the police and have him arrested. After this, she stopped shouting, sure that she now had the upper hand. Even the two dogs relaxed into this new legal certainty and began to growl, though they remained safely behind the woman’s legs.

The still-thuggish Vianello chose this moment to walk into the room, his warrant card shoved in the woman’s direction. ‘
I’m
the police, Signora, and according to the law of 3 March 2009, you have the obligation to carry muzzles with you if you take these dogs into a public place.’ He looked around the room, assessing it and her presence in it with the dogs. ‘This is a public place.’

The old woman with the dog in her arms said, ‘Officer’, but Vianello silenced her with a look.

‘Well?’ he demanded in his roughest voice. ‘Do you know what the fine is?’

Brunetti was sure Vianello didn’t, so he doubted that the woman did.

One of the large dogs suddenly began to whine; she yanked violently at its leash, silencing it instantly. ‘I know. But I thought that in here, inside …’ She waved vaguely at the walls with the hand that did not hold the leashes. Her voice trailed away. She bent down and patted the head of the first dog, then the other. Their long tails thumped against the wall.

Seeing how automatic her gesture was and the dogs’
easy
, affectionate response to it must have disarmed Vianello, for he said, ‘All right for this time, but be careful in the future.’

‘Thank you, officer,’ she said. The dogs came out from behind her, wiggling towards Vianello until she pulled them back.

‘What about what she said to us?’ the old woman demanded.

‘Why don’t you sit down, ladies, while we finish talking to the doctor?’ Brunetti suggested and went back into the doctor’s office.

The advantage had been lost: that was obvious to Brunetti as soon as he saw the fat man. He stood by the open window of his office, taking a deep pull from the cigarette he held in his nicotine-stained hand. He looked at the returning men with eyes in which all trace of fear had been replaced by strong dislike. Brunetti suspected it originated not from embarrassment at the fear he had displayed as from what he had discovered them to be.

He continued to draw on the cigarette, saying nothing, until it was a stub that came close to burning his fingers. He shifted it to the very tips of his fingers, took one last long pull, then tossed it out the window. He closed the window but remained standing in front of it.

‘What do you want?’ he asked in the same high voice.

‘We’re here to talk to you about your successor, Dr Andrea Nava,’ Brunetti said.

‘I can’t help you, then, Signori,’ Meucci said, sounding uninterested.

‘Why is that, Doctor?’ Brunetti inquired.