Donna Leon - The Golden Egg

He returned to his desk and to the reports, forcing himself, like a swimmer in icy water, to stick at it and move ahead, though his destination seemed to move farther off, the more he struggled to reach it. It was a call from Paola that hauled him to the shore.

‘I called Donata Masi,’ she said, naming a colleague from the university who lived in Campo dei Frari and thus, Brunetti realized, close to the dry cleaner’s.

‘What did she tell you?’ he asked, knowing what the subject matter had to be.

‘That he wasn’t the son of either of the women there. She said she asked about him, years ago, and they told her they let him pretend to work there because they felt sorry for him.’

‘Pretend how?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Oh, you know. Folding clothes up and sometimes taking parcels home for people. Ironing flat things.’ He wanted to ask how this could have gone on for years, with never an official inspection of the place to see who was working there, but his wife was hardly the person to know, and so he let it pass.

‘Anything else?’ he asked.

‘No,’ Paola said, sounding disappointed. ‘I asked her if she knew his family, but she clammed up and said she didn’t want to get involved. So I changed the subject and asked her about a committee meeting we have tomorrow.’

Brunetti wasted no time by asking what it was Donata didn’t want to get involved in. The possibility that officialdom in any of its manifestations might interest itself in a matter – any matter – was enough to cause a cordon sanitaire to form around the subject. People stopped talking, people knew nothing, people forgot. Let officialdom be represented in the form of the police, and forgetting quickly turned into total amnesia. The newspapers had recently been filled with accounts of women who had been raped by the Carabinieri who had arrested them or, in some cases, who had been raped by the officers to whom they had gone to report a crime. Trust the police?

‘And so?’ he asked.

‘So I don’t know what to do,’ Paola admitted.

He allowed his sadness to seep into his voice and said, ‘There’s nothing you can do, Paola.’

It took her a moment to answer. ‘The least I can do is let his family know he’s remembered by some of us. Not just by the women in the dry cleaner’s, but by some of us who saw him all these years.’

‘And what will that do?’ he asked. He knew he should not, but at times he lost all patience with her eternal desire to do the noble thing.

‘It won’t do anything, Guido,’ she said fiercely. ‘It’s not supposed to do anything. He’s dead, so there’s nothing anyone can do . But at least there can be some acknowledgement that people knew him and that he wasn’t just some poor dumb creature passing through life without anyone paying attention to him.’

The little Brunetti had observed of the dead man suggested that this last description was in fact closer to the truth, but he lacked the will to say it. He evaded confrontation by saying, ‘I’ll ask downstairs and call the ambulance service and see what information they have about his family. If he has any. His name was Davide Cavanella.’ Before she could ask, he said, ‘Rizzardi gave it to me.’

‘Was he allowed to live alone?’ she burst out.

‘Paola,’ Brunetti said with great steadiness, ‘I’ll make a few phone calls and see what I can find out about him. All right?’ It wasn’t a test of wills, not really, but it was a test of whether she could still be reeled back from

the edge of the verbal excess she invariably regretted.

Her silence told Brunetti that she was as aware as he of how each of them was expecting the other to behave. ‘All right,’ she said at last. ‘Call me . . .’ she started to say, and then changed it to, ‘No, tell me about it when you get home.’

He used an affectionate name and replaced the receiver.

He phoned downstairs first to find out if the call about the man’s death had come to the Questura. Nothing of the kind, he was told. The Ospedale Civile gave a similar answer and referred him to the Carabinieri at Riva degli Schiavoni. After some time, they told him that they had received a call at 6.13 that morning and, informed that the person was dead, had sent the city hearse which was under the authority of the Ulss system, though it hadn’t been sent from the hospital.

Brunetti took a few deep breaths to restore himself to the calm necessary to deal with bureaucracy and dialled

the number the Carabinieri had given him. And it was from them that he finally learned the address of the dead man: San Polo 2364. As was often the case, the number meant nothing to Brunetti until he had looked in Calli, Campielli e Canali , where he saw that it was in one of the small calli beyond Campo San Stin.

He opened his bottom drawer and started to pull out the phone book, irritated with himself that he had not thought of this simple solution first. His hand stopped when he remembered that the man was deaf: perhaps it was no solution at all. But perhaps he lived with a family member: someone must be able to answer a phone. Brunetti looked at the far wall and summoned up the memory of the man: expressionless face, forever concentrated on something no one else could see, or hear; mouth always a bit open, perhaps to aid breathing; a restless lack of coordination that affected his walk and the way he repeatedly patted the cloth when he tried to fold the garments in the back room of the dry cleaner’s.

He opened the book and looked through the Cs until he found Cavanella, Ana, at that address. Before even deciding to do it or knowing why he should want to, Brunetti dialled the number. It rang six times before a deep voice that was probably a woman’s answered with ‘ Sì .’ There was no interrogation in the word, no curiosity.

‘Signora Cavanella,’ Brunetti began.

‘ Sì ,’ she repeated.

‘This is Commissario Guido Brunetti. I’m calling

to . . . .’ Before he could finish the sentence, Brunetti was speaking to silence: the woman had replaced the phone.

He looked at his watch. It was just after five, so if he assigned himself the task of going to speak to her in person, he would be so close to home when he finished the interview that there would be no sense in his returning to the Questura.

He took the Number Two to San Tomà, walked past the Frari, down the bridge and along the canal towards Campo San Stin. He crossed it and turned right at the second calle . The name he wanted was on the third door on the left. He rang it and waited.

After what seemed a long time, he heard a shutter open above him. Brunetti stepped back and looked up. A woman with a cloud of too-red hair stood at the first floor window, looking down at him.

‘Who are you?’ she asked with no preliminaries and less grace.

‘I’m Commissario Brunetti, Signora,’ he answered politely, suddenly not at all sure just how it was he had ended up here, staring up at her uninviting expression. ‘There are some questions we have to ask you,’ he improvised. As he spoke, he studied her face – she was barely five metres from him – looking for signs of resemblance to a man he had to confess he barely remembered and, aside from his odd, robotic movements, probably would not have recognized.

‘About what?’ she asked. Brunetti wondered what she thought the police might have come to ask about, but then his mind caught up with the absolute lack of emotion in her question and it occurred to him that she might have been pushed – either by grief or the drugs used to combat it – into a place beyond all emotion or the ability to register it.

He backed into the calle , so that he could speak to her without having to look almost directly above himself.