Donna Leon - Friends in High Places

The words came bubbling out of Zecchino, pumped out by fear. ‘I heard voices downstairs. It was an argument. They were inside. Then they stopped for a while, then they started again, but I didn’t see them. I was up there,’ he said, waving a hand toward the stairs that led to the attic.

‘What happened?’

‘I don’t know. I heard them come up here and I heard them shouting. But then my girlfriend offered me some more stuff, and I don’t know what happened after that.’ He looked up at Brunetti, curious to see how much of his story Brunetti believed.

‘I want more, Zecchino,’ Brunetti said, putting his face directly in front of Zecchino’s and breathing in the foul breath that spoke of dead teeth and years of bad food. ‘I want to know who they were.’

Zecchino started to speak and then stopped himself and looked down at the floor. When he finally looked up at Brunetti, the fear had gone and his eyes had a different expression. Some secret calculation had filled them with feral cunning.

‘He was outside when I left, on the ground,’ he said at last.

‘Was he moving?’

‘Yes, he was pushing himself with his feet. But he didn’t have a…’ Zecchino began but the new cunning made him stop.

He had said enough. ‘Didn’t have what?’ Brunetti demanded. When Zecchino didn’t answer, he shook him again, and Zecchino gave a quick, broken sob. His nose began to run on to the sleeve of Brunetti’s jacket. He whipped his hands free, and Zecchino fell back against the wall.

‘Who was with you?’ he demanded.

‘My girlfriend.’

‘Why were you here?’

‘To fuck,’ Zecchino said. ‘This is where we always come.’ The thought filled Brunetti with revulsion.

‘Who were they?’ Brunetti asked, moving a half-step towards him.

The instinct of survival had overcome Zecchino’s panic, and Brunetti’s advantage was gone, evaporated as quickly as a drug-induced phantom. He was left standing in front of this human wreck, only a few years older than his son, and he knew that any chance of getting the truth from Zecchino was gone. Brunetti found the idea of breathing the same air or being in the same space as Zecchino insupportable, but he forced himself to go back to the window. He looked down, and saw below him the pavement where Rossi had been thrown and across which he had tried to propel himself. The area for at least two metres in circumference around the window had been swept clean. There were no bags of cement, nor were there any in the room. Like the supposed workmen seen at this window, they had disappeared, leaving no trace.

Leaving Zecchino in front of the house, Brunetti started towards home, but he found no consolation in the soft spring evening, nor in the long walk along the water he permitted himself. His route would take him far out of his way, but he wanted the long views, the smell of the water, and the comfort of a glass of wine at a small place he knew near the Accademia to cleanse him of the memory of Zecchino, especially of the way he had grown furtive and feral at the end of their meeting. He thought of what Paola had said, that she was glad never to have found drugs attractive for fear of what might have happened; he lacked her openness of mind and had never tried them, not even as a student when everyone around him was smoking something or other and assuring him that it was the perfect way to liberate his mind from his choking middle-class prejudices. Little did they imagine how he, then, aspired to middle-class prejudice; middle-class anything, for that matter.

The memory of Zecchino kept breaking into his reflections, blotting out thought. At the foot of the Accademia Bridge he hesitated for a moment but decided to make a wide circle and pass through Campo San Luca. He started over the bridge, eyes on his feet, and noticed how many of the strips of white facing were broken or torn off the front edge of the steps. When had it been rebuilt, the bridge? Three years ago? Two? And already many of the steps were in need of repair. His mind veered away from contemplation of how that contract must have been awarded and returned to what Zecchino had told him before he began to lie. An argument. Rossi injured and trying to escape. And a girl willing to go up into the lair Zecchino had in that attic, there to engage in whatever it was the combination of drugs and Gino Zecchino would lead her to.

At the sight of the broad horror of the Cassa di Risparmio, he veered to the left, past the bookstore, and then into Campo San Luca. He went into Bar Torino and ordered a spritz, then took it and stood at the window, studying the figures who still congregated in the campo.

There was no sign of either Signora Volpato or her husband. He finished his drink, put the glass on the counter, and offered some bills to the barman.

‘I don’t see Signora Volpato,’ he said casually, tilting his head toward the campo.

Handing him his receipt and change, the barman said, ‘No, they’re usually here in the morning. After ten.’

‘I have to see her about something,’ Brunetti said, sounding nervous but smiling awkwardly at the barman, as if in search of his understanding of human need.

‘I’m sorry,’ the barman said and turned to another customer.

Outside, Brunetti turned left, and left again, and went into the pharmacy, just closing now.

‘Ciao, Guido,’ his friend Danilo the pharmacist said, locking the door behind them. ‘Let me finish and we’ll go have a drink.’ Quickly, with the ease of long practice, the bearded man emptied the cash register, counted the money, and took it into the back of the pharmacy, where Brunetti could hear him moving around. A few minutes later he came out, wearing his leather jacket.

Brunetti felt the scrutiny of those soft brown eyes, saw the beginning of a smile. ‘You look like you’re in search of information,’ Danilo said.

‘Is it that obvious?’

Danilo shrugged. ‘Sometimes you stop for medicine, and you look worried; sometimes you stop for a drink, and you look relaxed; but when you come looking for information, you look like this,’ he said, beetling his brows together and staring at Brunetti with what appeared to be the first signs of incipient madness.

‘Va là,’ Brunetti said, smiling in spite of himself.

‘What is it?’ Danilo asked. ‘Or who is it?’

Brunetti made no move towards the door, thinking it might be better to have this conversation inside the closed pharmacy than in one of the three bars in the campo. ‘Angelina and Massimo Volpato,’ he said.

‘Madre di Dio,’ Danilo exclaimed. ‘You’d be better taking the money from me. Come on,’ he said, grabbing Brunetti’s arm and pulling him towards the back room of the pharmacy, ‘I’ll open the safe and then say the thief wore a ski mask, I promise.’ Brunetti thought it was a joke until Danilo continued, ‘You aren’t thinking of going to them, are you, Guido? Really, I’ve got money in the bank you can have, and I’m sure Mauro could let you have more,’ he said, including his boss in his offer.

‘No, no,’ Brunetti said, laying a quieting hand on Danilo’s arm. ‘I just need to know about them.’

‘Don’t tell me they’ve finally made a mistake, and someone’s filed a complaint against them?’ Danilo said with the beginnings of a smile. ‘Ah, what joy.’

‘You know them that well?’ Brunetti asked.

‘I’ve known them for years,’ he said, almost spitting out his disgust. ‘Especially her. She’s in here once a week, with her little pictures of her saints, and her rosary in her hands.’ He hunched over and brought his hands together under his chin. He tilted his head to one side and looked up at Brunetti, his mouth pulled together in a purse-lipped smile. Turning his usual Trentino dialect into purest Veneziano and pitching his voice into a high squeal, he said, ‘Oh, Dottor Danilo, you don’t know how much good I’ve done to the people in this city. You don’t know how many people are grateful to me for what I’ve done for them and how they should pray for me. No, you have no idea.’ Though Brunetti had never heard Signora Volpato speak, he heard in Danilo’s savage parody the echo of every hypocrite he’d ever known.