Donna Leon - Doctored Evidence

'What happens to the salt, Mamma?' Chiara asked as she poured some olive oil on her own helping of fish.

'I put it in the garbage.'

Ts it true that the Indians used to put fish bones around corn to make it grow better?' she asked, pushing them to one side of her plate.

'Dot Indians or Feather Indians?' Raffi asked.

'Feather Indians, of course,' Chiara answered, oblivious to the racist overtones of Raffi's question. 'You know corn didn't grow in India.'

'Raffi,' Paola said, 'will you take the garbage down tonight and put it in the entrance hall? I don't want this fish stinking up the house.'

'Sure. I told Giorgio and Luca I'd meet them at nme-thirty. I'll take it down when I go.'

'Did you put your things in the washing machine?' she asked.

He rolled his eyes. 'You think I'd try to get out of this place without doing it?' He turned to his father and, in a voice that proclaimed male solidarity, said, 'She's got radar.' Then he spelled the last word out, slowly, letter by letter, just to make clear the nature of the regime under which he lived.

'Thanks,' Paola said, certain of her powers and impervious to all reproach.

When Chiara offered to help with the dishes, Paola told her she'd do them herself because of the fish. Chiara took this as a reprieve rather than as an affront to her domestic skills and went to take advantage of Raffi's absence to use the computer.

Brunetti got up as she was finishing the dishes and pulled the Moka out of the cabinet.

'Coffee?' Paola asked. She knew his habits well enough to know he usually had coffee after dinner only in restaurants.

'Yes. I'm beat’ he confessed.

'Maybe it would be better just to go to bed early’ she suggested.

‘I don't know if I can sleep in this heat’ he said.

'Let me finish these’ she offered, 'and then we can go out and sit on the terrace for a while. Until you get sleepy.'

'All right’ he agreed, put the pot back and opened the next cabinet. 'What's good to drink in this heat?' he asked, surveying the bottles that filled two shelves.

'Sparkling mineral water.'

'Very funny’ Brunetti said. He reached deep into the cabinet for a bottle of Galliano way at the back. He rephrased his question. 'What's good to drink while sitting on the terrace, watching the sun fade in the west, while sitting beside the person you adore most in the universe and realizing that life has no greater joy to offer than the company of that person?'

Draping the dishtowel over the handle of the drawer where the knives and forks were kept, she gave him a long glance that ended in a quizzical grin. 'Non-sparkling mineral water might be better for a man in your condition’ she said and went out on the terrace to wait for him to join her.

He found himself afflicted, the next morning, with the lethargy that often came upon him when a case seemed to be going nowhere. Added to this was the penetrating heat that had already taken a grip on the day by the time he woke. Even the cup of coffee Paola brought him did nothing to lift the oppression of his spirits, nor did the long shower he permitted himself, taking advantage of the fact that both children had already left for the Alberoni, and thus there was no chance of their angry banging on the bathroom door should he use more water than their ecological sensibilities permitted. Two decades of habitual morning grumpiness had established Paola's rights to that mood, so he knew there was little joy to be had in her conversation.

He left the apartment directly after his shower, faintly annoyed with the universe. As he walked towards Rialto, he decided to have another coffee at the bar on the next corner. He bought a paper and was reading the headlines as he walked in. He went to the counter and, eyes still on the paper, asked for a coffee and a brioche. He paid no real attention to the familiar sound of the coffee machine, the thud and the hiss, nor to the sound of the cup being set in front of him. But when he looked up, he saw that the woman who had been serving him coffee for decades was gone; that, or she had been transformed into a Chinese woman half her age. He looked at the cash register, and there was another Chinese, this one a man, standing behind it.

He had seen this happening for months, this gradual taking over of the bars of the city by Chinese owners and workers, but this was the first time it had occurred in one of the places he frequented. He resisted the impulse to ask where Signora Rosalba had gone, and her husband, and instead added two sugars to his coffee. He walked over to the plastic case but saw that the brioche were different from the fresh ones with mirtillo he had eaten for years; the tag on the case explained that they were manufactured and frozen in Milano. He finished his coffee, paid, and left.

It was still early enough for the boats not yet to be crowded with tourists, so he took the Number One from San Silvestro, standing on deck and reading the Gazzettino. This did little to alleviate his mood. Nor did the sight of Scarpa standing at the bottom of the stairs when he walked into the Questura.

Brunetti passed by him silently and started up the steps. From behind, he heard Scarpa call, 'Commissario, if I might have a word…'

Brunetti turned and looked down on the uniformed man. 'Yes, Lieutenant?'

'I'm calling Signora Gismondi in for questioning again today. Since you seem so interested in her, I thought you might want to know.'

'"Interested," Lieutenant?' Brunetti confined himself to asking.

Ignoring the question, Scarpa added, 'No one remembers seeing her at the train station that morning.'

‘I dare say that could also be said of most of the other seventy thousand people in the city’ Brunetti said wearily. 'Good morning, Lieutenant’

Inside his office, he found himself reflecting on Scarpa's behaviour. His deliberate obstructionism might be nothing more than a sign of his hatred of Brunetti and the people who worked with him, Signora Gismondi being nothing more than a tool. Not for the first time, Brunetti speculated on a further meaning, that Scarpa might be attempting to remove the focus of attention from some other person. The possibility still left him feeling faintly sick.

To distract himself from this idea, he read his way through the papers that had accumulated in his in-tray over the last few days, chief of which was a notice from the Ministero dell'Interno, spelling out the changes to law enforcement policies resultant upon, as the document would have it, the passage of recent laws by Parliament. He read it with interest, reread it with anger. When he finished it the second time, he set it down on the middle of his desk, gazed out the window, and said aloud in disgust, 'Why not just let them run the whole country?' His pronoun did not refer to the elected members of Parliament.

He busied himself with other papers that awaited his attention and successfully resisted the temptation to go downstairs to attempt to interfere with whatever was being done to Signora Gismondi. He knew that there was no way a case could be made against her and that she was nothing more than a pawn in a game even he did not fully understand, but he knew that any attempt to help her would work only to her disservice.

He passed a stupid hour, then another, before Vianello, knocked at his door. When the inspector entered, Brunetti's first glance told him something was wrong.

Vianello stood in front of Brunetti's desk, a sheaf of papers in his hand. 'It's my fault, sir,' Vianello said.

'What?' Brunetti asked.

'It was right there in front of me, and I never bothered to ask.'

'What are you talking about, Vianello?' Brunetti asked sharply. 'And sit down. Don't just stand there.'

Vianello appeared not to hear this and held up the papers. 'He worked in the contracts office,' he said, waving the papers for emphasis. 'It was his job to study the building plans submitted for any work that had to be done on the schools and see if they met the specific needs of the pupils and teachers in that particular school.' He pulled out one sheet of paper and set the others on Brunetti's desk. 'Look,' he said, holding it up. 'He had no power to approve the contracts, but he did have the power to recommend.' He added the sheet to the papers on Brunetti's desk and stepped back, as though he feared they might burst into flames. 'I was in there, talking about him, and I never bothered to ask what office it was.'