Donna Leon - Beastly Things

Vianello said, in the voice Brunetti recognized as the one he used when he wanted to suggest far more than he said, ‘You know, we haven’t even come close to finding a reason why anyone would want to kill him.’ How long, Brunetti wondered, would it be before the Inspector started to talk about the killing as a robbery that got out of hand?

‘He came to Venice,’ Brunetti said, returning to one of the few certain things they knew. Rizzardi’s final report, which they had both read, said only that the dead man, aside from the Madelung’s, was in good health for a man of his age. He had eaten dinner some hours before his death and had consumed a small amount of alcohol. Digestion was under way at the time of his death, the pathologist had written, and added that the time the body had spent in the water had obliterated any sign of sexual activity. Given the temperature of that water, the pathologist could do no more than estimate the possible time of death as between midnight and four in the morning.

Though Nava’s name and photo had been in the papers that day, along with a request that anyone with information about him should call the police, no one had called.

Vianello took a deep breath. ‘The one before him was called Meucci, wasn’t he?’ he asked.

It took Brunetti a moment to catch up with Vianello’s thoughts and realize he was speaking about Nava’s predecessor at the slaughterhouse. ‘Yes. Gabriele, I think.’ He turned to his computer, aware how much his motion imitated Signorina Elettra’s swirl when she turned to hers. He stopped himself, just in time, from saying he thought it should be easy to find Meucci, hoping there would be lists of veterinarians, some society which they all joined.

He ended up finding the doctor in the Yellow Pages, under ‘Veterinarians’. The ambulatorio of Dr Gabriele Meucci was listed at an address in Castello. The number was meaningless until Vianello located it in Calli, Campi, e Castelli at the most remote end of Castello, on the Riva di San Giuseppe.

‘I suppose people down there must have animals, too,’ Vianello said by way of comment on the location. It was as far from the centre of the city as one could get without crossing over to S. Elena, which to both of them might as well have been Patagonia. ‘Rather far from Preganziol, I’d say,’ Vianello added.

As he switched off the computer, Brunetti noticed that his left hand was trembling. He had no idea of the cause, though by tightening his fingers into a fist a number of times he managed to make it stop. He placed his palm flat on his desk and pushed down on it, then lifted it a few centimetres: it still trembled.

‘I think we should go home, Lorenzo,’ he said, eyes on his hand and not on Vianello.

‘Yes,’ Vianello agreed, slapped his hands on his knees and pushed himself to his feet. ‘I think it was too much, out there, today.’

Brunetti wanted to say something in return, make some comment – even joking or ironic – about where they had gone, but the words refused to come to him. Events as shocking as those they had seen, he had always heard, left a lasting trace or changed a person in some profound way. Not a bit of it. He had been horrified and disgusted, but he knew he had not been changed, not really. Brunetti had no idea if this was a good thing or not.

‘Why don’t we meet tomorrow morning, in front of his office?’ he suggested to Vianello.

‘Nine?’

‘Yes. Assuming that he’s working.’

‘And if he’s not?’

‘Then we go and have a coffee and a brioche, sit and watch the boats for a while, and then we come to work late.’

‘Only if you insist, Commissario,’ Vianello said.

As he emerged from the Questura, the accumulated weight of the day descended on Brunetti, and he wished for a moment that he lived in a city where it was possible for a person to call a taxi and not have to pay sixty Euros to do so, no matter how short the ride. Home was, for the first time he could remember, too far to walk, so he went slowly down to the San Zaccaria stop to wait for the Number One.

He held his left hand in a tight fist in his pocket, carefully ignoring its presence there and resisting the urge to take it out and look at it. He had a monthly boat pass, so he did not have to pull out his wallet and extract his travel card.

The boat came and he walked on to it, went inside the cabin and sat. As soon as the vaporetto pulled away from the embarcadero , Brunetti’s curiosity overcame him, and he took his hand from his pocket. He spread his fingers flat on his thigh, but instead of looking at them, he turned his eyes towards the angel flying above the dome of San Giorgio, still visible in the swiftly fading light.

He felt no tremor against his thigh, but before he looked, he raised his fingers a centimetre above his leg and left them there for a few seconds as he continued to consult with the angel, placed there centuries ago. Finally he looked at his fingers, which were motionless. He relaxed them and let them return to lying on his thigh.

‘So many things,’ he said under his breath, not quite sure what he meant by that. The young woman beside him, startled, turned and looked at him, then went back to her crossword puzzle. She didn’t look Italian, he thought, though he had had only a quick glance. French, perhaps. Not American. And not Italian. She sat on a boat going up the Grand Canal, her eyes on a crossword puzzle, the letters of which were too small to permit him to decipher the language. Brunetti looked back at the angel to see if he had any comment on this, but he did not, and so Brunetti turned to study the façades of the buildings to the right.

When he was a boy, they swam in this canal and in many of the other large ones. He remembered diving into the water at Fondamenta Nuove, and he remembered that a classmate of his had once swum to the Zattere from the Giudecca because he didn’t want to wait for a late-night boat. When Brunetti’s father had been a boy, he used to catch seppie at the riva down at Sacca Fisola, but that was before Marghera, just across the laguna , had been completely transformed by petrochemicals. And before the seppie were transformed by them, too.

He got off at San Silvestro and walked through the underpass and to the left, bent on getting home, wanting only a glass of wine and something to eat with it. Almonds, perhaps: something salty. And a still white wine: Pinot Grigio. Yes.

No sooner had he let himself into the apartment than he heard Paola call from the kitchen. ‘If you’d like a drink, there’s something to nibble on in the living room. The wine’s open. I’ll bring it.’

Brunetti hung up his jacket and followed her suggestion as though it had been a command. When he walked into the living room, he was surprised to see that the lights were on and even more surprised, when he looked out the windows, to see that it was almost completely dark. On the boat, concerned with his fingers, he had not registered the settling in of darkness.

The table in front of the sofa held two wine glasses, a bowl of black olives, one of almonds, some grissini, and a dish with small pieces of what looked like parmigiano. ‘Reggiano,’ he said aloud. His mother, even in the family’s times of blackest financial misery, had refused to use anything but Parmigiano Reggiano. ‘Better nothing than something that isn’t as good,’ she had said, and so he still believed.

Paola came into the room carrying a bottle of wine. He looked up at her and said, ‘Better nothing than something that isn’t as good.’

Long experience of Brunetti in his sibylline mode caused Paola to smile. ‘I presume you’re speaking about the wine.’

He held up the two glasses while she poured the wine, then sat beside her on the sofa. Pinot Grigio: he’d married a mind reader. He picked up a few almonds and ate them one by one, loving the contrast set up between the salt, the almonds’ bitterness, and the wine.