Drawing Conclusions (8 page)

Niccolini’s glance was level and direct. Then he too looked at his watch: his eyes stayed on it for some time, as if he were trying to figure out what the numbers meant.

‘I have an hour,’ he finally said. Then, very decisively, he added, ‘Yes.’ He looked around the
campo
for a familiar point and said, ‘I don’t know what to do until then, and the time will pass more quickly.’ He looked back at the bar where they had had a coffee. ‘It’s all different,’ he said.

‘The bar? Or the
campo
?’ Brunetti asked. Or perhaps Niccolini was talking about life. Now. After.

‘All of it, I think,’ Niccolini said. ‘I don’t come to Venice much any more. Just to visit my mother, and that’s so close to the station that I don’t see other parts of the city.’ He looked around him, his eyes as stunned by what they saw as those of a tourist, exposed to this for the first time. He turned and pointed back towards the church of the Miracoli. ‘I went to elementary school at Giacinto Gallina, so I know this neighbourhood. Or I knew it.’ He waved his hand towards one of the bars. ‘Sergio’s gone, and the bar’s Chinese now. And the two old people who used to run Rosa Salva: they’re gone, too.’

As if encouraged by the name of the bar, Niccolini began to walk towards it. Brunetti fell into step beside him, assuming that his invitation had been accepted. By silent assent, they chose a table outside, one without an umbrella so they could better enjoy the remnants of the autumnal sun left to them. There was a menu on the table, but neither of them bothered with it. When the waiter came, Brunetti asked for a glass of white wine and two
tramezzini
: he didn’t care which. Niccolini said he’d take the same.

In the first months after Brunetti’s mother had fallen complete victim to the Alzheimer’s that was to lead to her death, she had stayed in the old people’s home a bit further along Barberia delle Tole, but Brunetti, no matter how much he wanted Niccolini to talk about his mother, was not willing to try to win his fellow feeling and goodwill by offering up his own mother’s suffering as a way to encourage him to speak.

They waited in silence, strangely relaxed in each other’s company. ‘Did you come to see her very often?’ Brunetti finally asked.

‘Until a year ago, I did,’ Niccolini said. ‘But then my wife had twins, and so my mother started to come out to see us.’

‘In Vicenza?’

‘Lerino, really; it’s where they were from originally, my parents. She’d come out on the train and I’d pick her up.’ The waiter came with the glasses of wine. Brunetti picked his up and took a sip, then another. Niccolini ignored his and continued speaking. ‘We have another child, a daughter. She’s six.’

Brunetti thought of the joy his mother had taken in her grandchildren and said, ‘She must have been happy with that.’

Niccolini smiled for the first time since they met, and grew younger. ‘Yes. She was.’ The waiter came and put the sandwiches in front of them.

‘It’s strange,’ Niccolini said, picking up his glass but ignoring the sandwiches. ‘She spent her whole life with children, first as a teacher and then with me and my sister, and then with other children when she went back to teaching when we both were in school.’ He sipped at his wine, then picked up a sandwich and studied it. He set it back on the plate.

Brunetti took a bite of his first sandwich, then asked, ‘What was strange, Dottore?’

‘That when she retired, she stopped working with children.’

‘What did she do, instead?’ Brunetti asked.

Niccolini studied Brunetti’s face before he asked, speaking very slowly, as if searching through his vocabulary for the right words, ‘Why do you want to know all of this?’

Brunetti took another sip of wine. ‘I’m interested in women of my mother’s generation.’ Then, with a glance in Niccolini’s direction, before he could object, Brunetti added, ‘Well, close in age to her generation.’ He set his glass on the table and continued. ‘My mother didn’t work: she stayed home and took care of us, but once, years ago, she told me she would have loved to have been a teacher. But there was no money in her family, so she went to work when she was fourteen. As a servant.’ Brunetti said it boldly, in defiance of all those years when he had denied this simple truth, wishing that his parents had been other than they were, richer than they were, more cultured than they were. ‘So I’m always interested in those women who got to do what my mother wanted to do. What they made of the chance.’

As if now convinced of the legitimacy of Brunetti’s interest, Niccolini went on. ‘She began to work with old people. Well, older people. In fact,’ he said, pointing with his chin, ‘she started down there.’ Anyone in Venice would know he meant the old people’s home, the
casa di cura
, only a hundred metres away.

‘Started how?’ Brunetti asked. ‘Doing what?’

‘Visiting. Listening to them. Bringing them out here into the
campo
when the weather was good.’ This, too, was a phenomenon with which everyone in the city was familiar: tiny old people curved into their wheelchairs and covered up with blankets, regardless of the season, wheeled into the sunlight by friends or relatives or, increasingly, women of Eastern European appearance, who brought them into the
campo
to spend a part of what remained of their lives in company with what remained of life beyond their tiny, cramped rooms.

Brunetti wondered if this man’s mother could have been one of the people who helped his own, but no sooner did the thought come than Brunetti dismissed it as irrelevant.

‘When the weather was bad, she read to them or listened to them.’ Niccolini leaned forward and again picked up the sandwich. He took a bite and set it back on the edge of the plate. ‘She always said how much they liked to be able to tell younger people about what life had been like when they were younger and what they had done and what the city was like: sixty years ago, seventy.’

‘People don’t have to be in the
casa di cura
to start doing that, I’m afraid,’ Brunetti said and smiled, thinking of the hours he had already spent lamenting the changes that had taken place in the city since the time when he was a young man. ‘I think it’s part of being Venetian.’ Then, after a moment, ‘Or part of being human.’

Niccolini pushed himself back in his chair. ‘I think it’s worse for older people. The changes are so much more obvious for them.’ Then, as so many people did when this subject arose, he sighed deeply and waved a hand in a meaningless circle.

‘You said she started here,’ Brunetti said. ‘Where else did she visit them?’

‘That place down in Bragora. That’s where she was
working. Still.’ Hearing himself say that word, Niccolini looked down at his hands.

Brunetti remembered hearing about it, years ago: one entire floor of a
palazzo
in Campo Bandiera e Moro, run by some order of nuns who, though they were rumoured to charge the highest prices in the city, were also said to provide the best care. There had been no beds free when he was looking for a place for his mother; he had not thought about the place since then.

A sudden intake of breath forced him to look across at Niccolini. ‘Oh, my God,’ the doctor said. ‘I’ll have to tell them.’ Niccolini’s face flushed red, and his eyes began to glisten. He leaned forward and, elbows propped on the arms of his chair, covered his mouth and nose with his hands.

Brunetti looked at his watch. It was almost two.

‘I can’t call them. I can’t do this on the telephone,’ Niccolini said, shaking his head to dismiss the possibility.

Tentatively, Brunetti asked, ‘Would you like me to speak to them, Dottore?’ Niccolini’s eyes flashed at him. ‘I know two of the sisters there,’ Brunetti quickly added. Well, he had spoken to them years ago, so in a certain sense he did know them. ‘It’s not far from the Questura.’ Brunetti didn’t know how hard to press here and didn’t want to seem too interested. ‘Of course, if you’d rather do it yourself, I understand.’

The waiter walked past their table and Brunetti asked for the bill. In the minutes that elapsed while the waiter went inside to get it, Niccolini kept his eyes on his half-filled glass of wine and the uneaten sandwiches.

Brunetti paid the bill, left a few euros on the table, and pushed back his chair. Niccolini got to his feet. ‘I’d like you to do it, Commissario. I don’t know if I’m going to be able … ‘he began but let his voice drift off, powerless to give a name to what it was he was unable to do.

‘Of course,’ Brunetti said, careful to keep his words to a minimum. He reached over and took the doctor’s hand.

Before he could speak, the doctor took his hand and pressed it to the point of pain and said, ‘Don’t say anything. Please.’ He released Brunetti’s hand and walked across the
campo
towards the hospital.

Brunetti reached down and picked up one of the sandwiches on the plate. Embarrassed to be seen eating while standing, he sat down again and finished it, then went into the bar and had a glass of mineral water. He realized that he had failed to call Paola to tell her he would not be home for lunch. He paid and stepped outside to make the call. He dialled their home number and hoped she would understand that he had been, in a sense, hijacked by events.

‘Paola,’ he said when she answered with her name, ‘things got away from me.’

‘So did a
rombo
cooked in white wine with fennel.’

Well, at least she was not angry. ‘And baby potatoes and carrots,’ she went on relentlessly, ‘and one of those bottles of Tokai your informer gave you.’

‘I wasn’t supposed to have told you that.’

‘Then pretend you didn’t hear me say I know who you got them from.’

Perhaps he was not going to get off so lightly. ‘I had to meet the son of that woman who died last night.’

‘It wasn’t in the paper this morning, but it’s already in the online version.’

Brunetti was not comfortable with the cyber age, still preferring to read his newspapers in paper form; the fact that a newspaper such as the
Gazzettino
now existed in cyberspace was to him a cause of great uneasiness. ‘What will become of people who are exposed to the
Gazzettino
twenty-four hours a day?’ he asked.

Paola, who often took a longer and more measured view than did Brunetti, said, ‘It might help to think of it as toxic waste we don’t ship to Africa.’

‘Assuredly. I hadn’t considered that. I’m at peace with my conscience now,’ Brunetti said. Then, curious to learn how the story was being played, he asked, ‘What are they saying?’

‘That she was found in her apartment by a neighbour. Death was apparently caused by a heart attack.’

‘Good.’

‘Does that mean it wasn’t?’

‘Rizzardi’s being dodgier and more noncommittal than usual. I think he might have seen something, but he didn’t say anything to the woman’s son.’

‘What’s he like, the son?’

‘He seems a decent man,’ Brunetti said, which had certainly been his first impression. ‘But he couldn’t disguise his relief that the police aren’t showing any interest in his mother’s death.’

‘Is it you who isn’t doing the showing?’ she asked.

‘Yes. He seemed bothered that I wanted to speak to him, so I had to pass it off as a procedural formality because we were the ones who received the call.’

‘Why would he be nervous? He can’t have had anything to do with it.’ Hearing her speak so categorically, Brunetti realized that he too had dismissed this possibility
a priori
. The world offered a cornucopia of variations on the theme of homicide; wives and husbands killed one another with
staggering frequency, lovers and ex-lovers existed in a state of undeclared warfare; he had lost count of the women who had killed their children in recent years. But still his mind stopped short of this: men don’t kill their mothers.

He let himself wander off in pursuit of these thoughts. Paola remained silent, waiting. Finally he admitted, ‘It could just as easily be nothing. After all, he’s had a terrible shock, and after I talked to him, he had to go back to the hospital to identify her.’

‘
Oddio
,’ she exclaimed. ‘Couldn’t they have found someone else?’

‘A relative has to do it,’ Brunetti said.

For a few moments neither of them spoke, then he pulled them both away from these things and said, ‘I should be on time tonight.’

‘Good.’ And she was gone.

The best way to get to the rest home was to walk past the Questura: the map in his brain offered other possibilities, but they were all longer. He could go by and pick up Vianello to come along with him, so that he could tell him about Niccolini and how the presence of the other man had stopped Rizzardi from telling him whatever it was he had wanted to say about the autopsy.

He pulled out his phone and dialled Vianello’s number, told him where he was and that he would pass by to get him in five minutes or so. The sun had passed its zenith, and the first
calle
he turned into was beginning to lose the warmth of the day.

As he walked alongside Rio della Tetta, Brunetti was cheered, as always happened when he walked here, by the sight of the most beautiful paving stones in Venice. Of some colour between pink and ivory, many of the stones were almost two metres long and a metre wide and gave an idea of what it must have been to walk in the city in its glory days. The
palazzo
on the other side of the canal, however, provided
proof that those days were gone for ever. There was a way to recognize abandonment: the flaking dandruff of sun-blasted paint peeling from shutters; rusted stanchions holding flowerpots out of which trailed the desiccated memory sticks of flowers; and water-level gates hanging askew from their rust-rotten hinges, moss-covered steps leading up and into cavernous spaces where only a rat would venture. Brunetti looked at the building and saw the slow decline of the city, while an investor would see only opportunity: a studio for foreign architects, yet another hotel, perhaps a bed and breakfast or, for all he knew, a Chinese bordello.

He crossed the small bridge, down to the end, left, right, and there ahead of him he saw Vianello, leaning against the railing. When he saw Brunetti, Vianello pushed himself upright and fell into step with him. ‘I spoke to the people who live on the first floor,’ the Inspector said. ‘Nothing. They didn’t hear anything, didn’t see anyone. They didn’t hear the woman upstairs come home, didn’t hear anything until we started to show up. Same with the old people on the second floor.’