Donna Leon - A Question of Belief

Brunetti tapped Paola’s knee to get her attention and pointed out the window. ‘Looks like a Martian, doesn’t he?’ Brunetti asked.

Paola stared out the window for some time, then looked across at Brunetti. ‘See why we eat bio fruit?’ she asked.

As if the name of an edible item had penetrated his headphones and prompted an instinct never in abeyance, Raffi said in a surprisingly loud voice, ‘I’m hungry.’ Paola, like the cliché mother of an Italian film of the fifties, believed that food bought on a train was harmful and so had packed an enormous carrying case with sandwiches, fruit, mineral water, a half-bottle of red wine, and more sandwiches.

At a sign from his mother, Raffi got the bag down from the rack above their heads. He opened it and started handing sandwiches to everyone in the compartment, including the two young people who, after the obligatory initial refusal, accepted them gladly. There were prosciutto and tomato, prosciutto and olive, mozzarella and tomato, egg salad, tuna fish and olives, and other variations on these ingredients. Raffi filled six paper cups with water and passed them around.

Brunetti found himself suddenly overwhelmed with joy. At peace, heading north, he was surrounded by all he loved and treasured in the world. They were all healthy; they were all safe. For two weeks he could walk in the mountains, eat Speck and strudel, sleep under an eiderdown while the rest of the world broiled, and read to his heart’s content. He looked out the window and saw that the grapevines had been replaced by apple trees.

Conversation among the young people grew general. The young couple were profuse in their thanks to Paola, spoke to her, and to Brunetti, with respect, addressing them as ‘ Lei ,’ though they had automatically used ‘ Tu ’ with Chiara and Raffi. A great deal of their conversation had a hermetic quality to Brunetti, who understood almost none of their references and found that some of their adjectives made no sense to him. From context, he inferred that ‘ refatto’ was meant as positive praise, while nothing could be worse than to be considered ‘ scrauso ’.

They pulled out of Trento, still on time, and Raffi started to hand out bananas and plums.

Ten minutes later, the train now flanked by marching apple trees, Brunetti’s phone rang. He toyed for an instant with letting it ring, but then pulled it out of the side pocket of Paola’s bag, where he had stuffed it when they were leaving the house.

‘ Pronto ,’ he answered.

‘Is that you, Guido?’ he heard a female voice ask.

‘Yes. Who’s this?’

‘Claudia,’ she answered, and it took Brunetti a moment to place voice together with first name and realize it was Commissario Claudia Griffoni, who, as the last commissario in order of seniority, had been assigned to remain on duty during the Ferragosto vacation.

‘What is it?’ he asked, his imagination spared having to fear the worst by the presence of his family there with him.

‘We’ve got a murder, Guido. It looks as if it might have been a mugging that went wrong.’

‘What happened?’ He saw Paola’s hand on his knee and only then realized that he was looking at the floor to curtain himself off from the other people in the carriage.

There was a sudden gap on the line, and then Griffoni’s voice floated back. ‘He was just inside the courtyard of his house, so he might have been pushed inside after he opened the door, or someone could have been waiting for him there.’

Brunetti made an interrogative noise, and Griffoni continued. ‘It looks as if someone knocked him down and then hit his head against a statue.’

‘Who found him?’

‘One of the men in the building, when he went downstairs to take his dog out. About seven-thirty this morning.’

‘Why wasn’t I called?’ Brunetti demanded.

‘When the call came in, the man on duty checked the roster and saw that you were on vacation. Scarpa was the only one here at the time, so he went over. He’s only just called to report it.’

Brunetti glanced up then and saw that the three people sitting opposite — his wife, his son, and the young girl near the window — were staring at him, eyes owl-open with curiosity. He got to his feet, slid the door open, and went out into the corridor, sliding the door closed behind him.

‘Where is he now?’

There was another snap in the line. ‘Excuse me?’ Griffoni said.

‘Where’s the dead man now?’

‘At the morgue in the hospital.’

‘What’s happening at the place where he was killed?’

‘The crime team went over,’ she began, and then her voice faded away for a few seconds. When it returned, she was saying, ‘. . situation is complicated. Three families live in the building, and there’s only the one door to the calle . Scarpa managed to keep them from coming into the courtyard until the team had gone over it, but by ten this morning he had to let them out of the building.’

Brunetti chose to make no comment on how this would contaminate the scene or at least present a legal pretext for any future defence attorney to call the evidence into question. Only on television crime shows was forensic evidence accepted without question.

‘Scarpa’s still there,’ she said. ‘He went over with a few others. He took Alvise.’

‘Might as well set up a boat stop at the place where it happened,’ said a disgusted Brunetti. ‘Who’s doing the autopsy?’

Again, the line broke up. ‘. . asked for Rizzardi,’ she said, showing again that her short time at the Questura had not been wasted.

‘Can he do it?’

‘I hope so. His name wasn’t on the roster, but at least that other idiot has been away on vacation for a week and didn’t leave a contact number.’

‘No way to speak of the assistant medico legale of the city, Commissario,’ Brunetti said.

‘That arrogant idiot, then, Commissario,’ she corrected.

Brunetti let it pass in silent agreement. ‘I’ll come back.’

‘I hoped you would,’ she said with audible relief. ‘Most people are away, and I didn’t want to end up working this with Scarpa.’ Then, to details. ‘How? Do you want me to call Bolzano and have them send you back in one of their squad cars?’

Brunetti looked at his watch and asked,’ Where are you?’

‘In my office. Why?’

‘Take a look at the train schedule and see when the next train going south from Bolzano leaves.’

‘Don’t you want a car?’ she asked.

‘I’d love a car, believe me. But once in a while you can see the autostrada from the train, and nothing’s moving in either direction on certain parts of it. The train would be faster.’

She muttered something, and then he heard the phone being set down. He listened to the gaps, which seemed to be related to the closeness of the train to high power lines. But then he heard Griffoni say, ‘The EuroCity from Munich to Venice is scheduled to leave one minute after your train gets in.’

‘Good,’ Brunetti said. ‘Call the station in Bolzano and tell them to hold it. We should be there in twelve minutes, so I’ll just get from this one to that one and be back in four hours or so.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’ll call you back.’

Brunetti broke the connection, leaned against the window to the compartment where his family sat, and studied the mountains that soared up above the unbroken fields of apple trees.

After they had passed many fields, his phone rang and Griffoni said, ‘That train’s ten minutes late, so if yours is on time, you’ll make it easily. It’ll be on track four.’

‘I have to take my family to their train, so call them and tell them to have it wait until I get there.’