Donna Leon: The Golden Egg

‘Are you joking, Ettore?’ Brunetti asked.

After a brief pause, Rizzardi said, ‘I might have been, when I said it, but I think it’s true. I don’t know about you, but it helps me to be able to complain or to be angry and have people tell me I’m right to think the way I do.’

‘Me, too,’ Brunetti agreed. Then he asked, ‘How’d he die?’

‘It started out the most peaceful way, and then it got ugly,’ the pathologist said.

‘What does that mean?’

‘He took sleeping pills, quite a lot of them, with what I think was hot chocolate and something sweet: biscuits or cake. And a lot of these pills are brightly coloured.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘You said he might have been retarded,’ the pathologist explained. ‘The pills might have looked like sweets to him.’

Brunetti considered this possibility and then asked, ‘And then?’

‘He fell asleep on his back, and then he started to vomit,’ Rizzardi began, paused and then asked, ‘You know what happens, don’t you?’

‘Yes.’

It was some time before Rizzardi spoke again. ‘It must be awful. You think you’re going to go to sleep peacefully, and then you end up choking to death. Poor devil. Terrible. Terrible.’

It had happened to Brunetti only once, choking, when he was a young man and a piece of bread got caught in his throat. Luckily, he’d been eating in a trattoria, and even more luckily, the waiter serving the next table had dropped the plates he was carrying and grabbed Brunetti from behind, yanking him to his feet and enclosing him in an iron grip. A terrified Brunetti had coughed up the piece of bread, followed quickly by everything he had eaten that day. Draped across the table, his sleeve in a plate of pasta, Brunetti had slowly gasped himself back to life and, returned to it, had been astonished to find himself in an almost empty room.

Decades later, he could still remember the terror that had gripped him and the certainty that he was going to die. One thing that had astonished him at the time was his perception that everything was happening with courtly slowness. His hands had moved at a snail’s pace to grasp his own throat; the plates the waiter let fall when he started towards Brunetti had floated to the floor as slowly as snowflakes. And the sharp jolt of pressure to his chest that had saved his life had taken for ever to come.

He still remembered that strange prolongation of time, and the sense, when he looked up from the table, breathing almost normally, that time had slipped back to its normal pace.

‘ . . . no sign of organic damage,’ he heard Rizzardi say.

‘What?’ Brunetti asked.

‘I didn’t find any sign of organic damage.’

‘But he died,’ said a confused Brunetti, trying to recall what little he knew of physiology. ‘Choking would stop the oxygen, wouldn’t it?’ Beyond that, he had no idea what the actual cause of death would be. Lack of oxygen to the brain? Or to the lungs and then to the brain? But what did that do ?

‘Oh, there was that,’ Rizzardi said. ‘I was talking about his ears. I didn’t see any sign of injury or scarring from illness that would have caused the deafness.’ The pathologist continued, reflectively, ‘But if it was genetic, then there’d be nothing to see, anyway. There was no sign of damage to his vocal cords, either.’

Brunetti, still puzzled as to what the actual physical cause of death might have been, didn’t react to this and only asked, ‘Would the pills have killed him, anyway? Even without the choking?’

‘I think so.’

‘Only think?’

With a voice into which he put an almost parental calm, Rizzardi said, ‘I’m waiting for the results of the lab tests.’

‘Let me know when you get them, will you?’ Brunetti asked.

‘I’ll send the report to you,’ Rizzardi said, then added, as if he had the power to read Brunetti’s mind, ‘The choking cuts off oxygen to the brain, and that shuts down the whole system. It can happen in a few minutes. That’s enough.’ That said, the pathologist put down the phone.

The very words, ‘a few minutes’, renewed Brunetti’s memory of and terror at his own experience. What would it be like to choke for minutes? And had this poor dead man experienced the bizarre elasticization of time?

5

Brunetti had time to tell Paola only the bare facts of the man’s death before the kids arrived for lunch, which put an end to the subject. Over a salad of carpaccio of red beet, ruccola and parmigiano, Chiara asked permission to go on a school trip to Padova that coming Saturday, and over involtini of chicken breast, which she ignored and replaced with cheese, her parents gave their permission for her to go. As soon as everyone was finished, Chiara went to her room to study, and Raffi went off to play soccer with friends on what the family agreed was probably going to be one of the few remaining mild afternoons of the autumn. Brunetti returned to the Questura.

Signorina Elettra had left before lunch, having selected herself as the person to attend an afternoon presentation by the Guardia di Finanza on the newest techniques for detecting and combating identity theft and computer hacking. When Brunetti had learned of this, he had expected protest from those police officers who might more rightfully have been chosen to attend. Not a whimper.

Had it been any other employee, Brunetti realized, he would have looked askance at her self-selection, but the ways of Signorina Elettra, though they were not beyond reproach, were assuredly beyond question: like his sense

of time when he had choked on the piece of bread, her prerogatives had expanded.

Dutifully, Brunetti spent the afternoon going through the files that had accumulated on his desk during the last weeks, reading through them methodically, or at least allowing his eyes to pass methodically over the words. Because he had lived for more than two decades with a woman who responded to infelicities of language with the ardour of a shark greeted by a bleeding wound, Brunetti’s interest was kept alive, if not by the subject matter of the documents, then by the language in which these subjects were presented. A man who had beaten his wife senseless, causing her to lose the sight of one eye, spoke during his questioning of his ‘difficulty in sustaining a life-affirming relationship’; the wife of a prominent lawyer, caught at the doors of the Armani shop wearing a short leather jacket with the price tags carefully sliced from it, maintained that she had ‘serious problems in recognizing the arbitrary distinctions in ownership between shop and client’, and maintained that she was, anyway, merely stepping into the calle to see how the colour looked in the light of day. The fact that the bag she wore across her shoulder held five T-shirts and two pairs of slacks did nothing to clarify her rhetoric, though it did clarify the situation. It had taken her husband less than two hours to arrive at the Questura with a certificate from a psychiatrist, attesting the woman’s pre-existing ‘difficulties in ownership assignment’, and thus she had been released.

Brunetti suspected he should be troubled, or at least embarrassed, by the amusement these phrases provoked in him, especially in the first case, but he was not. Politicians made no discernible sense when they spoke, few doctors used the word ‘cancer’ with patients who had it, and the word ‘immigrant’ could no longer be prefaced by ‘illegal’. Detach language from meaning, and the world was yours.

Shaking his head when he found himself entertaining thoughts like this, he got to his feet and walked over to the window. The cat condominium still stood in front of

the church of San Lorenzo. At this distance, Brunetti could not see any of the residents in front of it, but the sight of the tiny structure cheered him, as it always did. Unruly creatures, cats, and profoundly, incorrigibly disobedient. Were Paola not allergic, they would have one, perhaps two. Out loud, he found himself saying, in English, as did she, ‘“For he is an instrument for the children to learn benevolence upon.”’ And so they are, Brunetti supposed.