CB18 About Face (2009) (28 page)

As Brunetti watched, Terrasini slid a small pile of chips forward. The man sitting next to him tossed down his cards. The croupier took another card. Terrasini shook his head. The man next to him took another card, then threw the others down. The croupier gave himself another card, then he too tossed his cards down on the table and swept the chips towards Terrasini.

The sides of the young man’s mouth pulled upward, but it was more taunt than smile. The dealer gave each player two cards – one up, one down – and the game continued. Brunetti glanced up and saw that Griffoni had wandered off to the other side of the room, where she appeared to be dividing her attention between the table where the young man was playing and the one where Vasco had his head bent to hear what was being said to him by a woman in a yellow dress who stood beside him.

Brunetti looked back just as the standing man took another step to the right, broadening the sightline. And he saw Franca Marinello, standing behind Terrasini, her eyes on his cards. Terrasini turned to her, and her lips moved. He tipped his chair back while he waited for the other players to decide what to do. He reached his arm out and wrapped it around her hip, drawing her close to him. Inattentively, as though her hip were a lucky coin or the knee of a saint’s statue that brought luck when touched, he rubbed his hand against it: Brunetti could see the cloth of her dress wrinkle under his touch.

Brunetti watched her face. The eyes glanced at Terrasini’s hand, then returned to the table. She said something, perhaps calling his attention to the croupier. He removed his arm and let his chair fall forward. Her expression did not change. Terrasini called for a card, which the croupier placed in front of him. Terrasini looked at the card, shook his head, and the croupier turned his attention to the next player.

Terrasini’s eyes moved around the table, then slid off in the direction of Brunetti, but by then Brunetti was pulling his handkerchief out of his breast pocket to wipe his nose, his attention elsewhere. When he glanced back at the table, the croupier was sliding more chips in Terrasini’s direction.

There was a minor disturbance at the table as the croupier got to his feet, saying something to the players. He gave a small bow and moved behind his chair, and another man in impeccable evening clothes slid into his place.

Terrasini took this opportunity to stand and turn away from the table. He raised his arms and grasped his hands together above his head like a tired sportsman. His motion pulled at the back of his jacket, and Brunetti saw the bottom half of what looked like a brown leather holster just above the left back pocket of his trousers.

The new dealer took fresh cards and began to shuffle them. At the sound, Terrasini lowered his hands and moved closer to Franca Marinello. Casually he ran both palms slowly across her breasts before taking his seat once again. Brunetti saw the flesh around her mouth go dead white, but she made no attempt to move away from the table, and she did not look at Terrasini.

She blinked, and her eyes stayed closed perhaps a second too long. When she opened them, she was looking in Brunetti’s direction. And she recognized him.

He thought she might nod, perhaps smile, but she gave no sign of knowing him. Then it occurred to him that she might say something to Terrasini, but she did not move. She could have been a statue, gazing at another statue. After some time she looked back at the cards in front of Terrasini. The game resumed, but this time it was the croupier who finished with the chips in front of him, and so with the next hand, and the next. Then the man to Terrasini’s right and then the one to his left won, and then it was again the turn of the croupier.

The chips in front of the young man melted away until there was only one pile, which grew smaller, and then it was gone. Terrasini pushed his chair back and all but jumped to his feet: his chair fell backwards to the floor. He slammed the palms of both hands on to the cloth of the table and leaned forward to shout at the croupier. ‘You can’t do that. You can’t do that.’

Suddenly Vasco – Brunetti had no idea where he had come from – and another man were on either side of Terrasini, helping him stand upright and talking to him in low voices. Brunetti noticed how white were the knuckles of Vasco’s right hand and how the cloth of Terrasini’s sleeve wrinkled even more than had Franca Marinello’s dress.

The three men started towards the door, Vasco leaning down and speaking to Terrasini all the while, his expression friendly and relaxed, as if he and his assistant were helping a client to his water taxi. The woman in the yellow dress moved quickly towards the table, righted the chair and set it back in place. She sat, put her purse in front of her, opened it and took out a handful of chips.

Brunetti saw Griffoni heading for the door, caught her eye, and hurried to join her. Franca Marinello was a few steps in front of them, walking quickly in the direction of the three men, who had reached the door. Still walking, Vasco shot a quick glance back into the room. When he saw the police approaching, he abandoned his smile and hurried the young man down the first ramp of steps. Marinello followed them, accompanied by the low sound of voices from the gambling room.

The men stopped at the first landing, and Vasco spoke to Terrasini, who nodded, head still lowered. Vasco and the other man exchanged a look over the young man’s head and, as if they had practised the move many times, let go of his arms at the same moment and stepped away from him.

Marinello pushed past Vasco’s assistant and went to stand next to Terrasini. She put a hand on his arm. It looked to Brunetti as if it took him a moment to recognize her, and when he did, he appeared to relax. Seeing the situation defused, Vasco and his assistant started back up the stairs; they stopped before they reached Brunetti and Griffoni, two steps above them.

She bent her head close to Terrasini and said something. Startled, Terrasini looked up at the four people, and Brunetti thought he saw Marinello’s lips move as she spoke again. Terrasini’s right hand moved so slowly that Brunetti could not believe what he was doing until he saw his hand fumble under the front of his jacket and emerge holding the pistol.

Terrasini shouted, Vasco and his assistant looked back, then flattened themselves on the stairs. Griffoni moved to the railing, as far from Brunetti as possible, pistol already in her hand. Brunetti took his and pointed it at the slow-moving Terrasini, saying, in a voice he worked to keep calm and authoritative, ‘Antonio, there are two of us.’ He did not allow himself to consider what would happen if the three of them opened fire in this enclosed space, how the bullets would ricochet against surfaces, hard or soft, until their energy was entirely spent.

As if coming out of a daze, Terrasini looked from Griffoni to Brunetti, then at Marinello and at the two men huddled on the stairs, and then back to Brunetti.

‘Put the gun on the floor, Antonio. There are too many people here and it’s dangerous.’ Brunetti saw that Terrasini was listening to him, but he wondered what it was that made his eyes so dull: drugs, or drink, or rage, or all three. Tone was probably more important than what he said – that and keeping the young man’s attention.

Signora Marinello took a small step towards Terrasini and said something Brunetti could not hear. Very slowly, she raised her hand, placed it on his left cheek, and turned his face in her direction. Again, she spoke to him, and put out her hand. Her lips pulled back and she gave a small, encouraging nod.

Terrasini narrowed his eyes, suddenly confused. He looked at his hand, seemed almost surprised to see the gun there, and let his hand drop halfway to his knee. In ordinary circumstances, Brunetti would have approached them, but her presence near the young man kept him at a cautious distance, gun still raised.

Again she spoke. The young man handed the gun to her, shaking his head in what appeared to Brunetti to be confusion. She took the gun with her left hand and transferred it to her right.

Brunetti lowered his own pistol and began to slip it into his holster. When he returned his attention to the people on the landing, he saw Terrasini look at her in astonishment and then pull his right hand back and make a fist. His left hand shot out and grabbed her just at the point where the shoulder becomes the throat, and Brunetti realized what he was going to do.

She shot him. She shot him in the stomach once and then again, and when he was lying on the floor at her feet, she took a step towards him and shot him in the face. Her dress was pale grey and long: the first two shots stained the silk at her stomach, and the third one sprinkled red droplets just above the hem.

In the stairwell, the noise was deafening. Brunetti looked at Griffoni, whose mouth moved, but the only sound he heard was a loud buzz that did not stop, even after Griffoni’s mouth closed.

Vasco and his assistant scrambled to their feet, looked down at the landing, where Franca Marinello stood, the pistol still in her hand. They turned and, as one, vaulted up the stairs and through the doors into the gaming room, from which no sound emerged. Brunetti saw the double doors close and vibrate with the force, but still all he could hear was the buzz.

Brunetti looked back at the landing. Franca Marinello tossed the gun negligently on to Terrasini’s chest, looked up at him, and said words he could not hear, trapped as he was inside this bell jar of unrelenting noise.

He heard something beside him, something dull and leaden that managed to penetrate the buzz, and turned to see Griffoni approach: it must have been her footsteps on the steps. ‘You all right?’ Brunetti asked. Griffoni understood and she nodded.

Brunetti saw that Franca Marinello was crouched against the wall, as far as she could be from Terrasini’s body, face pressed into her knees. No one had certified that the young man was dead, but Brunetti knew it was a body that lay there, blood seeping on to the marble behind his head.

He was surprised at the stiffness in his knees and at how reluctant they were to take him down the steps. He could feel, but still not hear, his footsteps. Avoiding Terrasini, he knelt on one knee beside the woman. He waited until he was sure she was aware of him near her and then said, glad to be able to hear his own voice, however faintly, ‘Are you all right, Signora?’

She raised her head and presented him with her face, never before seen so close to. The tilted eyes looked all the stranger for being so near, and he suddenly noticed a thin scar starting just below her left ear and disappearing behind it.

‘Did you have time to read the
Fasti
?’ she asked, and Brunetti wondered if this were a sign of shock.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ve had so little time.’

‘Pity,’ she said. ‘It’s all there. Everything.’ She lowered her head to her knees.

Brunetti found himself with nothing to say. He got to his feet and turned towards a sound from above, again swept with relief that he could hear it. He saw Vasco at the top of the stairs, looking enormous from this angle, like a character in an action film, like a cartoon figure of Conan the Barbarian, like . . .

‘I called your people,’ he said. ‘They should be here soon.’

Brunetti’s eyes fell to the top of the head of the silent woman and, on the other side of the landing, the eternally quiet body. Terrasini lay on his back. Looking at him, Brunetti thought of that other corpse, Guarino, and to the terrible resemblance between these two men so quickly, so terribly, stripped of life.

After a few minutes’ sensation, Vasco managed to calm the people in the gaming rooms at the head of the stairs by telling them there had been an accident. Willing to believe it, they went back to what they were losing, and life went on.

Claudia Griffoni went back to the Questura with Signora Marinello, she also enveloped in a long fur, the same one she had been wearing the night Brunetti first saw her. He waited while the technical crew set up their cameras on the stairs. Two police officers having witnessed the shooting, the technicians did little more than photograph the scene and put the pistol in a plastic evidence bag, then wait for the
medico legale
to arrive.

He called Paola a little before three and told her sleep-fogged voice that he would not be back for some time. After Terrasini was declared dead, Brunetti asked the technical squad if they would take him back with them but chose to stay on deck with the pilot. Neither man spoke; the motor seemed unaccountably low until Brunetti remembered the three shots and the odd dislocation of sound that followed them. He looked at the façades of the buildings they passed, not really seeing them, for he was back on the stairs, watching, and not understanding, what happened.

Franca Marinello spoke to Terrasini and he took out the gun, then she spoke again, and he gave it to her. And then, while Brunetti was looking away, something happened – did she say something? – that maddened him. And then she used the gun. Everything, Brunetti knew, was subject to rational explanation. Cause was followed by effect. The autopsy would determine what substances were in the young man’s brain, but at least when Brunetti was watching him, he had been responding to words, not to chemicals.

The launch swung into the Rio di San Lorenzo and pulled up at the dock of the Questura. Brunetti looked into the cabin of the boat and saw the two attendants getting to their feet. Did they talk to one another, he wondered, on their way back from these trips?

He thanked the pilot and jumped off the still-moving boat. He knocked on the door of the Questura, and the night man let him in, saying, ‘Commissario Griffoni is in her office, sir.’

He went up the stairs and then followed the beacon of light from her door at the end of the dark hallway. He paused at the door but did not knock. ‘Come in, Guido,’ she said.

A clock on the wall to the left of her desk told him it was three-thirty. ‘If you gave me a coffee, I’d shoot Patta and have you promoted to his job,’ she said, looking up, and then smiled.