Donna Leon - About Face

She bent her head close to Terrasini and said something. Startled, Terrasini looked up at the four people, and Brunetti thought he saw Marinello’s lips move as she spoke again. Terrasini’s right hand moved so slowly that Brunetti could not believe what he was doing until he saw his hand fumble under the front of his jacket and emerge holding the pistol.

Terrasini shouted, Vasco and his assistant looked back, then flattened themselves on the stairs. Griffoni moved to the railing, as far from Brunetti as possible, pistol already in her hand. Brunetti took his and pointed it at the slow-moving Terrasini, saying, in a voice he worked to keep calm and authoritative, ‘Antonio, there are two of us.’ He did not allow himself to consider what would happen if the three of them opened fire in this enclosed space, how the bullets would ricochet against surfaces, hard or soft, until their energy was entirely spent.

As if coming out of a daze, Terrasini looked from Griffoni to Brunetti, then at Marinello and at the two men huddled on the stairs, and then back to Brunetti.

‘Put the gun on the floor, Antonio. There are too many people here and it’s dangerous.’ Brunetti saw that Terrasini was listening to him, but he wondered what it was that made his eyes so dull: drugs, or drink, or rage, or all three. Tone was probably more important than what he said — that and keeping the young man’s attention.

Signora Marinello took a small step towards Terrasini and said something Brunetti could not hear. Very slowly, she raised her hand, placed it on his left cheek, and turned his face in her direction. Again, she spoke to him, and put out her hand. Her lips pulled back and she gave a small, encouraging nod.

Terrasini narrowed his eyes, suddenly confused. He looked at his hand, seemed almost surprised to see the gun there, and let his hand drop halfway to his knee. In ordinary circumstances, Brunetti would have approached them, but her presence near the young man kept him at a cautious distance, gun still raised.

Again she spoke. The young man handed the gun to her, shaking his head in what appeared to Brunetti to be confusion. She took the gun with her left hand and transferred it to her right.

Brunetti lowered his own pistol and began to slip it into his holster. When he returned his attention to the people on the landing, he saw Terrasini look at her in astonishment and then pull his right hand back and make a fist. His left hand shot out and grabbed her just at the point where the shoulder becomes the throat, and Brunetti realized what he was going to do.

She shot him. She shot him in the stomach once and then again, and when he was lying on the floor at her feet, she took a step towards him and shot him in the face. Her dress was pale grey and long: the first two shots stained the silk at her stomach, and the third one sprinkled red droplets just above the hem.

In the stairwell, the noise was deafening. Brunetti looked at Griffoni, whose mouth moved, but the only sound he heard was a loud buzz that did not stop, even after Griffoni’s mouth closed.

Vasco and his assistant scrambled to their feet, looked down at the landing, where Franca Marinello stood, the pistol still in her hand. They turned and, as one, vaulted up the stairs and through the doors into the gaming room, from which no sound emerged. Brunetti saw the double doors close and vibrate with the force, but still all he could hear was the buzz.

Brunetti looked back at the landing. Franca Marinello tossed the gun negligently on to Terrasini’s chest, looked up at him, and said words he could not hear, trapped as he was inside this bell jar of unrelenting noise.

He heard something beside him, something dull and leaden that managed to penetrate the buzz, and turned to see Griffoni approach: it must have been her footsteps on the steps. ‘You all right?’ Brunetti asked. Griffoni understood and she nodded.

Brunetti saw that Franca Marinello was crouched against the wall, as far as she could be from Terrasini’s body, face pressed into her knees. No one had certified that the young man was dead, but Brunetti knew it was a body that lay there, blood seeping on to the marble behind his head.

He was surprised at the stiffness in his knees and at how reluctant they were to take him down the steps. He could feel, but still not hear, his footsteps. Avoiding Terrasini, he knelt on one knee beside the woman. He waited until he was sure she was aware of him near her and then said, glad to be able to hear his own voice, however faintly, ‘Are you all right, Signora?’

She raised her head and presented him with her face, never before seen so close to. The tilted eyes looked all the stranger for being so near, and he suddenly noticed a thin scar starting just below her left ear and disappearing behind it.

‘Did you have time to read the Fasti ?’ she asked, and Brunetti wondered if this were a sign of shock.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ve had so little time.’

‘Pity,’ she said. ‘It’s all there. Everything.’ She lowered her head to her knees.

Brunetti found himself with nothing to say. He got to his feet and turned towards a sound from above, again swept with relief that he could hear it. He saw Vasco at the top of the stairs, looking enormous from this angle, like a character in an action film, like a cartoon figure of Conan the Barbarian, like. .

‘I called your people,’ he said. ‘They should be here soon.’

Brunetti’s eyes fell to the top of the head of the silent woman and, on the other side of the landing, the eternally quiet body. Terrasini lay on his back. Looking at him, Brunetti thought of that other corpse, Guarino, and to the terrible resemblance between these two men so quickly, so terribly, stripped of life.

After a few minutes’ sensation, Vasco managed to calm the people in the gaming rooms at the head of the stairs by telling them there had been an accident. Willing to believe it, they went back to what they were losing, and life went on.

Claudia Griffoni went back to the Questura with Signora Marinello, she also enveloped in a long fur, the same one she had been wearing the night Brunetti first saw her. He waited while the technical crew set up their cameras on the stairs. Two police officers having witnessed the shooting, the technicians did little more than photograph the scene and put the pistol in a plastic evidence bag, then wait for the medico legale to arrive.

He called Paola a little before three and told her sleep-fogged voice that he would not be back for some time. After Terrasini was declared dead, Brunetti asked the technical squad if they would take him back with them but chose to stay on deck with the pilot. Neither man spoke; the motor seemed unaccountably low until Brunetti remembered the three shots and the odd dislocation of sound that followed them. He looked at the façades of the buildings they passed, not really seeing them, for he was back on the stairs, watching, and not understanding, what happened.

Franca Marinello spoke to Terrasini and he took out the gun, then she spoke again, and he gave it to her. And then, while Brunetti was looking away, something happened — did she say something? — that maddened him. And then she used the gun. Everything, Brunetti knew, was subject to rational explanation. Cause was followed by effect. The autopsy would determine what substances were in the young man’s brain, but at least when Brunetti was watching him, he had been responding to words, not to chemicals.

The launch swung into the Rio di San Lorenzo and pulled up at the dock of the Questura. Brunetti looked into the cabin of the boat and saw the two attendants getting to their feet. Did they talk to one another, he wondered, on their way back from these trips?