Donna Leon - The Golden Egg

‘What do you want?’ she asked.

‘To speak to you, Signora,’ he said, though he had still given no conscious thought to what he wanted to say to her.

She considered his statement, said ‘ Va bene ’, then closed the window and turned away.

Brunetti returned to the door and waited; and continued to wait. After a few minutes, the door was pulled open. The woman stepped forward and stood in the doorway, repeating, ‘What do you want?’ Her voice was neutral, devoid of interest. He could have been trying to sell her a set of cooking pots or to convert her to the love of Jesus.

‘First, to express my condolences, Signora, and then to ask if there is any help you might need from any agency of the city.’ Brunetti knew he had only the authority of humanity to offer the first and no authority whatsoever to offer the second. But he had told Paola he would try to help, and he would do that in whatever form he could.

She looked at him directly and Brunetti had the strange sensation that she was waiting for his words to be played back so that she could understand what they meant. In a situation such as this, Brunetti’s first impulse was usually to speak again, but he remained silent, curious to see how long it would take her to answer him. A long time passed: she looked blankly at him, while Brunetti studied her.

She might have been in her fifties, but he wasn’t sure at which end of them he found her. The red hair stopped two centimetres from her scalp and slipped into white for the rest of the way home. Her eyes were a clear blue, the skin around them virtually unlined. Her nose and well-defined cheekbones were further evidence that she might once have been a great beauty. And it was in the angled line of those bones that he caught a fleeting glimpse of the dead man.

She was taller than average, though the thickening around her waist suggested that she might once have been taller still. Her hands, he noticed, had inordinately short fingers and the shiny skin that comes to hands that have spent a lot of time in hot water.

Brunetti realized that she had no intention of speaking: he could stand there for the rest of the afternoon and still she would not say anything to him. ‘Would you like to come to see Davide, Signora?’ he finally asked.

At the mention of the name, she took a half-step backwards, as though trying to escape the name or the grief it brought her. She held up one of those thick, work-branded hands to ward off his words, stepped back into the house, and closed the door.

6

Though the woman’s retreat meant Brunetti could go home early, his failure to get her to speak to him left him dissatisfied and, strangely enough, uncomfortable about going home when he should still be at work. He told himself not to behave like a schoolboy whose teacher might call and find him still at home when he was meant to be at school and, screwing up his courage, went to a bar in Campo San Polo and took a seat outside. He ordered a spritz, sure it would be the last of the season: a month from now, the thought of ice and chilled Aperol – chilled anything, for that matter – would set his teeth on edge. But the late afternoon sun was gentle on his face, and he was happy to sit in it and watch the world go by, busying itself with things he no longer had to concern himself with today.

He studied the campo , glad it was one of the big ones, where kids could play soccer or ride their bicycles, the second in violation of some city ordinance that no one liked or bothered to obey. His drink came, and he let it sit in front of him for a while so as better to savour the first taste of it. He fished up the slice of orange and bit into it, then followed with the first bitter-sweet-cold-bitter sip. Three swallows landed near his feet. He leaned across to the next table and took a potato crisp from the bowl left behind by the last clients, crumbled it between his fingers, and tossed the pieces to the busy birds, which fell upon them. He took another sip and studied the birds.

A shadow fell across his table and his drink. Looking up, he was momentarily blinded by the sun, but when his vision cleared he saw Lieutenant Scarpa, Vice-Questore Patta’s assistant, standing above him. ‘Good afternoon, Commissario,’ the Lieutenant said. ‘Busy with the birds?’ The Lieutenant was in full uniform, with his dark woollen jacket, but seemed remarkably cool. As if suddenly recalling that he was speaking to a superior officer, he removed his hat and held it, elbow bent, stiffly at his side.

‘Yes, Lieutenant,’ Brunetti said with an easy smile,

‘the owner says they’ve been stealing potato crisps from the bowls on the tables, so I came over to investigate the case.’ He pointed to the bird on the far left and added, ‘I suspect that one’s the ringleader, so I’m going to stay here and finish my drink while I keep my eye on him, just to be sure.’

‘I’ll look forward to reading your report,’ the Lieutenant said, gave a lazy salute, replaced his hat, and walked away, heading in the direction from which Brunetti had arrived.

Paola had picked up many English expressions from the nannies who had lived with her family while she was growing up, and one of them sprang to Brunetti’s mind: ‘A ghost walked over my grave.’ Or was it a goose? And how was it that a speaking person could have a grave? Regardless of the sense of it or who did the stepping, it perfectly described the effect of Scarpa’s presence. The fact that the Lieutenant was walking towards San Stin made Brunetti uncomfortable.

He finished his drink, paid the waiter, and walked home. Paola was in the kitchen, washing salad; she looked up in surprise when he walked in. He kissed the right side of her forehead and said, ‘I found his address and went there, but the mother . . .’ his voice trailed off for a moment. ‘She refused to talk to me, closed the door in my face.’

Paola poured the water out of the bottom part of the spinner and, replacing the salad, began to spin it dry. ‘What did she say?’ She asked above the whirling noise.

‘Nothing,’ Brunetti answered. ‘It was all very strange.’

‘Why didn’t she speak? If she came to the door, then she heard the bell, and that means she’s not deaf.’

‘No, no,’ Brunetti answered. ‘She can hear and she can speak. But all she did was ask me why I was there.’

‘Did you tell her you were a policeman?’

‘Yes. I told her on the phone, and again when I went there.’

‘Then why wouldn’t she talk to you?’

‘Fear of the police, shock, grief, you name it,’ he answered. ‘You know people don’t like to talk to us.’

‘But she came to the door?’ Paola asked, and when he seemed confused by the question, she added, ‘Or else how could she have shut it in your face?’

‘I told you: it was all very strange,’ Brunetti repeated.

‘How did he die?’ she asked.

‘He took sleeping pills,’ Brunetti said, seeing no reason to tell her more.

The information stunned her. ‘You mean he killed himself?’

Brunetti shrugged. ‘He could have taken them accidentally. But they killed him.’

Paola said nothing for a very long time, then finally asked, ‘Are you going to have to talk to her?’

‘I just tried to, but she wouldn’t speak to me.’

‘No, I mean talk to her officially,’ Paola clarified. ‘As the police. Are you obliged to because he died like that?’ He had seen no report from the men from the ambulance, which meant it was probably bogged down on someone’s desk; he’d locate it in the morning.

‘Yes. In a case like this, we’d usually want to exclude the possibility of suicide.’ She gave him a strange look but said nothing. She took the leaves out of the spinner and put them in a large salad bowl. In an ordinary voice, she said, ‘Would you get me a glass of wine?’