Donna Leon - About Face

‘What about the dentist?’ he asked, and then added, ‘And how did he die?’

‘It turned out he wasn’t a dentist after all,’ she said, voice moving closer to anger. ‘Just one of those odontotechnici you read about all the time: they start making false teeth, then they set themselves up as dentists and do that until they get caught, but nothing happens to them.’ He saw her hands grip tight on the arms of the chair.

‘You mean he wasn’t arrested?’

‘Finally,’ she said tiredly. ‘The same thing happened to another patient. This one died. So the inspectors from ULSS went in, and they discovered his whole surgery — the tools and the furniture — filled with that hospital infection. It’s a miracle he killed only one person and that any of the others survived. So this time someone did go to prison. The sentence was six years, but the trial had taken two — and he was at home for that, of course — so he was supposed to be there for four years, but he was released with the indulto .’

‘Then what happened?’

‘He went back to work, it seems,’ she said with a bitterness he had seldom heard her express.

‘Work?’

‘As an odontotechnico , not a dentist.’

He closed his eyes at the folly of it. Where else could something like this happen?

‘But he didn’t get a chance to hurt many people,’ she said neutrally.

‘Why?’

‘Someone killed him. In Montebelluna — he’d moved there to open a new surgery. There was a break-in and someone killed him and raped his wife.’

Brunetti remembered the case. Two summers ago, a break-in, a murder that was never solved.

‘He was shot, wasn’t he?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Did you ever talk to her about this?’ he asked.

Her eyes widened. ‘What for? To ask if she felt better because he was dead?’ She saw how stunned he was by her question and softened her tone to say, ‘I read about it and ecognized his name, but I couldn’t ask her.’

‘Did you ever discuss it — him — with her?’

‘Once, just after he was sentenced, I think. At any rate, years ago.’

‘What did you say?’

‘I asked if she had read about his conviction and that he would go to prison, and she said she had.’

‘And?’

‘And I asked her what she thought about it.’ Without waiting for Brunetti, she went on, ‘She said it didn’t make any difference. Not to her and not to any of the people he’d injured. And certainly not to the person he’d killed.’

Brunetti considered this for some time and then asked, ‘Do you think she meant that she had forgiven him?’

She looked at Brunetti, a long, thoughtful glance. ‘She could have meant that,’ she said and then added, coldly, ‘But I hope she didn’t.’

Brunetti left soon after that and, standing in the calle beside the palazzo , called Griffoni at her office, who told him that Signora Marinello had left the Questura that morning in the company of her lawyer. The file, she told him, was downstairs, but she would call him back in a few minutes with Marinello’s number. While he waited for her to do that, Brunetti continued towards the Cà Rezzonico stop, from where he could take a vaporetto in either direction.

Griffoni called back with the telefonino number even before he reached the imbarcadero . Brunetti explained that he wanted to talk to Marinello about the night before, and Griffoni asked, ‘Why’d she shoot him?’

‘You saw it,’ Brunetti said. ‘You saw him get ready to hit her.’

‘Yes, of course I did,’ the other commissario replied. ‘But I don’t mean that: I mean the third time. He was on the floor, with two bullets in him, for God’s sake, and she shot him again. That’s what I don’t understand.’

Brunetti thought he understood, but he did not say this. ‘That’s why I want to talk to her.’ He cast his memory back to the scene of the killing: Griffoni had been standing against the railing when Brunetti looked at her, so she would have seen the people on the landing below from a different angle.

‘How much of what happened did you see?’ he asked.

‘I saw him pull out the gun, then he handed it to her, then he raised his hand to hit her.’

‘Could you hear anything?’ he asked.

‘No, I was too far away, and those other two were coming up the stairs towards us. I didn’t notice him say anything, and her back was to me. Did you hear anything?’

He hadn’t, so he answered, ‘No,’ then added, ‘but there’s got to be a reason he did what he did.’

‘And why she did what she did, I’d say,’ Griffoni added.

‘Yes, of course.’ He thanked her for the number and hung up.

Franca Marinello answered her phone on the second ring and seemed surprised that Brunetti had called. ‘Does this mean I have to go back to the Questura?’ she asked.

‘No, Signora, it doesn’t. But I’d like to come and speak to you.’

‘I see.’

There was a long pause, after which she said, offering no explanation, ‘I think it would be more convenient if we talked somewhere else.’

Brunetti thought of her husband. ‘As you like.’

‘I could meet you in about twenty minutes,’ she suggested. ‘Would Campo Santa Margherita be convenient for you?’

‘Of course,’ he said, surprised at such a modest neighbourhood. ‘Where?’

‘There’s that gelateria on the side opposite the pharmacy.’

‘Causin,’ Brunetti supplied.

‘In twenty minutes?’

‘Fine.’

She was there when he arrived, sitting at a table at the back. She stood when she saw him enter, and he was struck anew by the conflict of her appearance. From the neck down, she looked like any casually dressed woman in her mid-thirties. Tight black jeans, expensive boots, a pale yellow cashmere sweater and a patterned silk scarf. Once his eyes rose above the scarf, however, everything changed, and he was looking at the sort of face usually reserved for the ageing wives of American politicians: too-tight skin, too-wide mouth, eyes pulled here and there by the attentions of surgeons.

He shook her hand, again noticing the firmness of her grasp.

They sat, a waitress appeared, and he could think of nothing he wanted to drink.

‘I’m going to have camomile tea,’ she said, and it suddenly seemed the only possible choice. He nodded, and the waitress went back to the counter.

Not knowing how to begin, he asked, ‘Do you come here often?’ feeling awkward at having begun with such a stupid question.

‘In the summer I do. We live quite close. I love ice-cream,’ she said. She glanced out of the large plate glass window. ‘And I love this campo . It’s so — I don’t know the right word — so full of life; there are always so many people here.’ She glanced at him and said, ‘I suppose this is the way it was years ago, a place where ordinary people lived.’

‘Do you mean the campo or the city?’ Brunetti asked.

Thoughtfully, she answered, ‘I suppose I must mean both. Maurizio talks about the way the city used to be, but I’ve never seen that. I’ve known it only as a foreigner, I suppose you could say, and not for very long.’

‘Well,’ Brunetti conceded, ‘not very long by Venetian time, perhaps.’

Brunetti judged they had spent enough time saying polite things and so said, ‘I finally read the Ovid.’

‘Ah,’ was her response. Then, ‘I suppose it wouldn’t have made any difference, not really, if you had read it any sooner.’

He wondered what difference it was meant to make, but he did not ask her that. Instead, he asked, ‘Would you tell me more about it?’