Acqua Alta

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Acqua Alta

[Commissario Brunetti 05]

By Donna Leon

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Dalla sua pace la mia dipende,quel che a lei piace vita mi rende,quel che le incresce morte mi d à .S’ella sospira, sospiro anch’io,è mia quell’ira, quel pianto è mioe non ho bene s’ella non l’ha.

My peace depends upon hers:what pleases her gives me life,that which pains her gives me death.If she sighs, I will sigh as well,her anger and her sorrows are mineand I have no joy unless she shares it.

Mozart, Don Giovanni

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Chapter One

Domestic tranquillity prevailed. Flavia Petrelli, the reigning diva of La Scala, stood in the warm kitchen and chopped onions. In separate heaps in front of her lay a pile of plum tomatoes, two cloves of garlic chopped into fine slices, and two plump-bottomed aubergines. She stood at the marble counter, bent over the vegetables, and she sang, filling the room with the golden tones of her soprano voice. Occasionally, she pushed at a lock of dark hair with the back of her wrist, but it was no sooner anchored behind her ear than it sprang loose and fell across her cheek.

At the other end of the vast room that took up much of the top floor of the fourteenth-century Venetian palazzo, its owner and Flavia’s lover, Brett Lynch, sprawled across a beige sofa, bare feet propped against the far arm, head resting on the other, following the score of I Puritani, the music of which blared out, neighbours be damned, from two tall speakers resting on mahogany pedestals. Music swelled up to fill the room, and the singing Elvira prepared to go mad — for the second time. Eerily, two Elviras sang in the room: the first the one Flavia had recorded in London five months before and who now sang from the speakers; the second was the voice of the woman chopping the onions.

Occasionally, as she sang in perfect union with her own recorded voice, Flavia broke off to ask, ‘Ouf, whoever said I had a middle register?’ or ‘Is that a B flat the violins are supposed to be playing?’ After each interruption, her voice returned to the music, her hands to the chopping. To her left, a large frying-pan sat on a low flame, a pool of olive oil waiting for the first vegetables.

From four floors below, the doorbell rang. ‘I’ll get it,’ Brett said, placing the score face down on the floor and standing. ‘Probably the Jehovah’s Witnesses. They come on Sundays.’ Flavia nodded, brushed a strand of dark hair from her face with the back of her hand, and returned her attention to the onions and to Elvira’s delirium, in the midst of which she continued to sing.

Barefoot, glad of the warmth of the apartment on this late January afternoon, Brett walked across the beamed floor and out into the entrance hall, picked up the speakerphone that hung beside the front door, and asked, ‘Chi è ?’

A man’s voice answered, speaking Italian, ‘We’re from the museum. With papers from Dottor Semenzato.’

Strange that the director of the museum at the Doge’s Palace would send papers, especially on a Sunday, but perhaps he had been alarmed by the letter Brett had sent him from China — though he certainly hadn’t sounded that way earlier in the week — and wanted something read before the appointment he had grudgingly given for Tuesday morning.

‘Bring them up, if you don’t mind. Top floor.’ Brett replaced the phone and pressed the button that opened the door four floors down, then walked to the door and called to Flavia across the weeping violins, ‘Someone from the museum. Papers.’

Flavia nodded, picked up the first of the aubergines and sliced it in half, then, without missing a beat, returned to the serious business of losing her mind for love.

Brett went back towards the front door, paused to bend down and turn over the corner of a carpet, then opened the door to the apartment. Footsteps approached from below, and two men came into sight, pausing at the bottom of the final ramp of steps. ‘There are only sixteen more,’ Brett said, smiling down at them in welcome, then, suddenly aware of the frigid air of the stairwell that edged in, covered one bare foot with the other.

They stood on the steps below and looked up towards the open door. The first one carried a large manila envelope. They paused for a moment before beginning the final flight and Brett smiled again, calling down encouragement: ‘Forza.’

The first one, short and fair-haired, smiled back and started up the last flight of steps. His companion, taller and darker, took a deep breath, then came up behind him. When the first man got to the door, he paused and waited for the other to join him.

‘Dottoressa Lynch?’ the blond one asked, pronouncing her last name in the Italian fashion.

‘Yes,’ she answered, stepping back from the door to allow them to enter.

Politely, both of them muttered, ‘Permesso,’ as they stepped into the apartment. The first one, whose light hair was cut very close to his head and who had attractive dark eyes, held out the envelope. ‘These are the papers, Dottoressa.’ As he handed them to her, he said, ‘Dottor Semenzato asked that you look at them immediately.’ Very soft, very polite. The tall one smiled and turned away, his attention distracted by a mirror that hung to the left of the door.

She bent her head and began to open the flap of the envelope, which was held together with red sealing wax. The blond man stepped a bit closer to her, as if to take the envelope from her and help her open it, but suddenly he moved past her and grabbed her from behind by both arms, his grip fierce and tight.

The envelope fell, bounced off her bare feet, and landed between her and the second man. He brushed it aside with his foot, as if careful of its contents, and stepped up close in front of her. As he moved, the other one tightened his grip on her arms. The tall one brought his face down from his considerable height and said, voice low and very deep, ‘You don’t want to keep that appointment with Dottor Semenzato.’

She felt anger before she felt fear, and she spoke out of the first. ‘Let me go. And get out of here.’ She twisted sharply in an attempt to pull herself free of the man’s grip, but he tightened his hands, pinning her arms to her sides.

Behind her, the music soared up and Flavia’s double voice filled the room. So perfectly did she sing the passage that no one could tell there were two voices, not one, that sang of pain and love and loss. Brett turned her face towards the music, but then by a conscious act of will stopped the motion and asked, turning back to the man in front of her, ‘Who are you? What do you want?’

His voice changed as did his face, both growing ugly. ‘Don’t ask questions, bitch.’

Again, she tried to twist herself free, but it was impossible. Bracing her weight on one foot, she kicked backward with the other, but her bare heel had no effect on the man who held her.

From behind her, she heard the one who, held her say, ‘All right. Do it.’

She was turning her head to look at him when the first blow came, catching her in the centre of the stomach. The sudden, explosive pain pulled her forward with such force that she almost broke free from the man who held her, but he pulled her back and jerked her upright. The one in front of her hit her again, this time catching her below the left breast, and her response was the same, an involuntary motion that pulled her body forward to protect itself from this awful pain.

Then quickly, so quickly that she lost count of how many times he did it, he began to punch at her body, catching her repeatedly on the breast and ribs.

Behind her, Flavia’s voices sang now of the blissful future she looked forward to, so soon to be Arturo’s bride, and then he hit her on the side of the head. Her right ear buzzed, and then she could hear the music only with the left.

She was conscious of just one thing: she couldn’t make any noise. She couldn’t scream, cry out, moan. The soprano voices blended behind her, exultant with joy, and her lip split open under the man’s fist.

The one behind her released her right arm. There was no longer any need to restrain her, but he kept one hand on her arm to hold her upright and pulled her around until she was facing him. ‘Don’t keep your meeting with Doctor Semenzato,’ he said, voice still very low and polite.

But she was gone from him, no longer listening to what he said, dimly conscious of the music and the pain, and the dark fear that these men might kill her.

Her head hung and she saw only their feet. She sensed the taller one make a sudden motion towards her, and she felt warmth on her legs and face. She had lost control of her body and smelled the sharp stench of her own urine. Tasting blood, she saw it drip on to the floor and splash on to their shoes. She hung between them, thinking only that she couldn’t make a sound and wishing only that they would let her drop, let her roll herself up into a ball to reduce the pain that came at her from all over her body. And all the while this was happening, the double voice of Flavia Petrelli filled the room with the sounds of joy, soaring up over the voices of the chorus and the tenor, her sweet lover.

With greater effort than she had applied to anything in her life, Brett raised her head and looked into the eyes of the tall one, who now stood directly in front of her. He smiled back at her with a smile so intimate that she might have seen it on a lover’s face. Slowly, he reached out and cupped her left breast in his hand, squeezing it gently, and he whispered, ‘Want some more, cara? It’s better with a man.’

Her reaction was entirely involuntary. Her fist caught his face and glanced off without doing any harm, but the sudden motion pulled her free of the hand of the other one. She fell back against the wall and was conscious, in a disembodied way, of its solidity under her back.

She felt herself sinking down, felt her sweater being pulled up by the heavy grain of the brick wall behind her. Slowly, slowly, as in a freeze-frame film, she sank down against the wall, its rough face scratching at her flesh as gravity pulled at her entire body.

Things grew very confused. She heard Flavia’s voice singing the cabaletta, but then she heard Flavia’s other voice, no longer singing, scream in fury, ‘Who are you? What are you doing?’

‘Don’t stop singing, Flavia,’ she tried to say, but she couldn’t remember how to say it. She sank to the floor, head tilted towards the entry to the living room, where she saw the real Flavia outlined against the light that streamed in from the other room, heard the same outline of glorious music that splashed in with her, and she saw the large chopping knife in Flavia’s hand.

‘No, Flavia,’ she whispered, but no one heard her.

Flavia launched herself across the space that separated her from the two men. As surprised as she, they had no time to react, and the knife slashed across the upraised forearm of the shorter one. He howled in pain and pulled the arm to him, covering the wound with his other hand. Blood surged up through the fabric of his jacket.

Another freeze frame. Then the taller man started towards the still-open door. Flavia pulled the knife back level with her hip and took two steps towards him. The wounded one kicked at her with his left foot, catching her on the side of the knee. She fell but landed kneeling, knife still pulled back beside her.

Whatever communication passed between the two men was entirely silent, but at the same instant they both broke towards the door. The tall one paused long enough to snatch at the envelope, but the kneeling Flavia lashed out at his hand with the knife, and he backed away, leaving it on the floor. Flavia pushed herself to her feet and ran down a few steps after them but stopped and went back into the apartment, kicking the door closed behind her.

She knelt beside the supine form of the other woman. ‘Brett, Brett,’ she called, looking down at her. The bottom half of her face was streaked with blood that streamed from her nose and lip and from a patch of broken skin that ran across the left side of her forehead. She lay with one knee bent under her, her sweater bunched up under her chin, breasts exposed. ‘Brett,’ Flavia said again and for a moment believed that this utterly motionless woman was dead. She pushed that idea away immediately and placed her hand against the side of Brett’s throat.

As slowly as dawn on a heavy winter morning, one eye opened, then the other, though, beginning to swell, it could open only halfway.

‘Stai bene?’ Flavia asked.

The only answer she heard was a low moan. But it was an answer.

‘I’m going to call for help. Don’t worry, cara. They’ll be here soon.’

She ran into the other room and reached for the telephone. For a second, she didn’t recognize what it was that prevented her from picking up the phone, but then she saw the bloody knife, her hand white-knuckled around the handle. She dropped it to the floor and grabbed the receiver. With stiff fingers, she jabbed out 113. After ten rings, a woman’s voice answered and asked her what she wanted.

‘This is an emergency. I need an ambulance. In Cannaregio.’

Bored, the voice asked the exact address.

‘Cannaregio 6134.’

‘I’m sorry, signora. It’s Sunday and we have only one ambulance. I’ll have to put your name on the list.’

Flavia’s voice rose. ‘There’s a woman here who’s hurt. Someone tried to kill her. She has to get to the hospital.’

The voice took on a tone of wearied patience. ‘I’ve explained to you, signora. We have only one ambulance, and there are two calls for it to make first. As soon as it’s free, we’ll send it to you.’ When she had no response from Flavia, the voice asked, ‘Signora, are you still there? If you give me the address again, I’ll put your name on the list. Signora? Signora?’ In response to Flavia’s silence, the woman at the other end broke the connection, leaving Flavia with the receiver in her hand, wishing she still had the knife.

Hand trembling, Flavia replaced the receiver and went back into the hall. Brett remained where she had left her but had somehow managed to turn over onto her side and lay still, holding one arm across her chest, moaning.

Flavia knelt beside her. ‘Brett, I have to get a doctor.’

Flavia heard a muffled noise, and Brett’s hand came slowly towards her own. Her fingers barely made contact with Flavia’s arm, then fell to the floor. ‘Cold,’ was the only thing she said.

Flavia got to her feet and went into the bedroom. She ripped the covers from the bed and dragged them back into the foyer, where she spread them over the motionless form on the floor. She opened the door to the apartment, not bothering to check through the spyhole to see if the two men had returned. Leaving the door open behind her, she ran down two flights of stairs and pounded heavily on the door of the apartment below.

After a few moments, the door was opened by a middle-aged man, tall and balding, who held a cigarette in one hand and a book in the other. ‘Luca,’ Flavia gasped, fighting the impulse to scream as this went on and on and no one came to help her lover, ‘Brett’s hurt. She’s got to have a doctor.’ Suddenly her voice cracked and she was sobbing. ‘Please, Luca, please, get a doctor.’ She grabbed at his arm, no longer capable of speech.

Without a word, he stepped back into his apartment and grabbed his keys from a table beside the door. He dropped the book on the floor, pulled the door closed behind him, and disappeared down the steps before Flavia could say anything else.

Flavia went up the steps two at a time and back into the apartment. She looked down and saw that a small pool of blood now spread out under Brett’s face, a strand of her hair floating on the surface. Years ago, she had read or been told that people in shock should be kept awake, that it was dangerous for them to go to sleep. So she knelt again beside her friend and called her name. By now, one eye was swollen shut, but at the sound of her name, the American opened the other just a slit and looked at Flavia without giving any sign that she recognized her.

‘Luca went. The doctor will be here in a minute.’

Slowly, the eye seemed to go out of focus, then pulled itself back to look at her. Flavia crouched lower. She wiped Brett’s hair back from her face, feeling the blood trail across her fingers. ‘It’s going to be all right. They’ll be back in a minute, and you’ll be all right. Everything’s going to be all right, darling. Don’t worry.’

The eye closed, opened, drifted into long focus, then came back. ‘Hurt,’ she whispered.

‘It’s all right, Brett. It’s going to be all right.’

‘Hurt.’

Flavia knelt by her friend, gazing into the one eye, willing it to stay open and in focus, and she continued to mutter things that, in future, she never remembered having said. Sometime later, she began to weep, but she was not aware of this.

She saw Brett’s hand, half hidden by the covers, and she grabbed at it, held it softly, as though it were made of the same down as the covers around it. ‘It’s going to be all right, Brett.’

Suddenly, from below, she heard the sound of footsteps and raised voices. For an instant, it occurred to her that this might be the two men, come back to finish whatever it was they had come to do. She got to her feet and went to the door, hoping to be able to close it in time, but when she looked, she saw Luca’s face and, behind him, a man in a white jacket with a black bag in his hand.

‘Thank God,’ she said and was surprised to find that she meant it. Behind her, the music stopped. Elvira was at last reunited with her Arturo, and the opera was at an end.

* * * *

Chapter Two

Flavia stepped back from the door to allow the two men to enter. ‘What is it? What happened?’ Luca asked, looking down at the heap of covers on the floor and what they covered. ‘Dio mio,’ he said involuntarily and bent towards Brett, but Flavia stopped him with an out-thrust arm and pulled him aside, allowing room for the doctor to approach the fallen woman.

He bent down over her, reached out his hand, and felt for the pulse at her neck. Feeling it, slow but strong, he pulled back the covers to see how badly she was hurt. Her sweater was bunched in a blood-streaked tangle under her throat, exposing her ribs and torso. Her skin was red and broken in places and beginning to turn livid and dark.

‘Signora, can you hear me?’ the doctor asked.

Brett made a noise; words were too difficult now.

‘Signora, I’m going to move you. Just a little, so I can see what’s happened.’ He gestured to Flavia, who knelt down on the other side of the motionless woman. ‘Hold her shoulders. I have to straighten out her legs.’ He reached down and took her left leg by the calf, stretching it out, then did the same with the right. Slowly he turned her on to her back, and Flavia lowered her shoulder to the floor. All of this flickered through to Brett as a new wave of pain, and she moaned.

Turning back to Flavia, the doctor said, ‘Get me a pair of scissors.’ Obedient, Flavia went back into the kitchen and took a pair of scissors from a large flowered ceramic pot on the counter. As she stood there, she felt the heat radiating up from the pan of olive oil, still on the burner, hissing and sizzling at her. She snapped off the flame and went quickly back to the doctor.

He took the scissors and cut through the bloody sweater, then pulled it back from her body. The man who had beaten her had worn a heavy ring on the fourth finger of his right hand, and it had left signs of itself behind, small circular impressions that stood out in greater darkness from the livid flesh around them.

The doctor bent over her again and said, ‘Signora, please open your eyes.’

Brett struggled to obey, but she could get only one of them to open. The doctor took a small flashlight from his bag and pointed die light into her pupil. It contracted and she involuntarily closed her eye.

‘Good, good,’ the doctor said. ‘Now I’d like you to move your head a bit, just a little.’

Though it cost her a great deal, Brett managed to do it.

‘And now your mouth. Can you open that?’

When she tried that, she gasped with the pain of it, a sound that pushed Flavia up against the other wall.

‘Now I’m going to touch your ribs, signora. Tell me when it hurts.’ Gently, he prodded at her ribs. Twice, she moaned.

He took a packet of surgical gauze from his bag and ripped it open. He dampened it from a bottle of antiseptic and slowly began to clean the blood from her face. As soon as he wiped it away, more seeped from her nostril and from the gaping seam in her lower lip. He signalled to Flavia, who knelt again beside him. ‘Here, keep this on her lip, and don’t let her move.’ He handed the bloody gauze to Flavia, who did as she was told.

‘Where’s the phone?’ the doctor asked.

Nodding her head, Flavia indicated the living room. The doctor disappeared through the door, and Flavia could hear him dialling and then speaking to someone at the hospital, ordering a stretcher. Why hadn’t she thought of that? The house was so close to the hospital they had no need of an ambulance.

Luca hovered over her, finally contenting himself with bending down and pulling the covers back over Brett.

The doctor came back and stooped down beside Flavia. ‘They’ll be here soon.’ He looked down at Brett. ‘I can’t give you anything for pain until we’ve taken X-rays. Is there much pain?’

To Brett, there was nothing else but pain.

The doctor saw that she was shivering and asked, ‘Are there more blankets?’ Hearing that, Luca went into the bedroom and came back with a quilt, which he and the doctor placed on top of her, though it seemed to do no good. The world had become cold, and she knew only cold and growing pain.

The doctor stood and turned to Flavia. ‘What happened?’

‘I don’t know. I was in the kitchen. I came out, and she was on the floor, like that, and there were two men.’

‘Who were they?’ Luca asked.

‘I don’t know. There was a tall one and a short one.’

‘What happened?’

‘I went for them.’

The men exchanged a glance. ‘How?’ Luca asked.

‘I had a knife. I was in the kitchen, cooking, and when I came out, I still had the knife, and when I saw them, I didn’t think, I just went at them. They ran down the steps.’ She shook her head, uninterested in all of this. ‘How is she? What have they done?’

Before he answered, the doctor moved a few steps away from Brett, though she was far removed from hearing or understanding his words. ‘There are some broken ribs, and some bad cuts. And I think her jaw might be broken.’

‘Oh, Gesù ,’ Flavia said, clapping her hand to her mouth.

‘But there are no signs of concussion. She responds to light, and she understands what I say to her. But we have to take X-rays.’

Even as he spoke, they heard voices from below. Flavia knelt beside Brett. ‘They’re coming now, cara. It’s going to be all right.’ All she could think of to do was place her hand on the covers over Brett’s shoulder and leave it there, hoping that its warmth would sink down to the woman below. ‘It’s going to be all right.’

Two white-jacketed men appeared at the door, and Luca waved them into the apartment. They had left their stretcher four flights below, near the front door, as it was always necessary to do in Venice, and carried with them instead the wicker chair they used to navigate the sick down the narrow, winding staircases of the city.

Entering, they glanced down at the blood-covered face of the woman lying on the floor as though they were accustomed to seeing things like this every day, as perhaps they were. Luca removed himself into the living room, and the doctor warned them to be especially careful when they picked her up.

Through all of this, Brett felt nothing but the strong embrace of pain. It came at her from all over her body, from her chest that tightened and made each breath an agony, from the very bones that made up her face, and from her back, which burned. At times, she could feel separate pieces of the pain, but then it all melted together and flowed across her, blending into itself and blotting out anything that wasn’t pain. Later, she was to remember only three things: the doctor’s hand on her jaw, a touch that turned itself into a white flash of light to her brain; Flavia’s hand on her shoulder, the only warmth in this sea of cold; and the moment when the men lifted her from the ground, when she screamed and fainted.

Hours later, when she woke, the pain was still there, but something kept it at arm’s length. She knew that, if she were to move, even so little as a millimetre, it would come back and be even worse, so she lay perfectly motionless, feeling into each separate part of her body to see where the worst of the pain was lurking, but before she could command her mind to begin, she was overpowered by sleep.

Later, she woke again and, this time, with great caution sent her mind exploring to various parts of her body. The pain was still being held far away from her, and it no longer seemed that motion would be so dangerous. She brought her mind to her eyes and tried to determine what lay beyond them, light or darkness. She couldn’t tell, so she let her mind roam on, down across her face, where pain lurked, then to her back, which throbbed warmly, and then to her hands. One was cold, the other warm. She lay motionless for what seemed hours and considered this: how could one hand be cold and the other warm? She lay still for eternity and let her mind consider that puzzle.

One warm and one cold. She determined that she would move them to see if that made a difference, and, an age later, she began. She tried to pull them into fists and managed to move them only slightly. But it was enough - the warm one found itself embraced by increased warmth and the gentlest of pressures from above and below. She heard a voice, one that she knew to be familiar but couldn’t recognize. Why was that voice speaking Italian? Or was it Chinese? She understood what it said, but she couldn’t remember what language it was. She moved her hand again. How pleasant that answering warmth had been. She tried it again, and she heard the answering voice, felt the warmth. Oh, how magical that was. There was speech that she understood, and warmth, and a part of her body that was free of pain. Comforted by this, she slept again.

Finally she was conscious and realized why one hand was warm and one cold, ‘Flavia,’ she said, barely making a noise.

The pressure on her hand increased. And the warmth. ‘I’m here,’ Flavia said, voice very close to her.

Without knowing how she knew it, Brett knew that she couldn’t turn her head to speak to or look at her friend. She tried to smile, tried to say something, but some force held her mouth shut and prevented her from opening it. She tried to scream out or cry for help, but the invisible force held her mouth shut and prevented her.

‘Don’t try to talk, Brett,’ Flavia said, increasing the pressure on her hand. ‘Don’t move your mouth. It’s wired. One of the bones in your jaw is cracked. Please don’t try to talk. It’s all right. You’ll be all right.’

It was very difficult to understand all those words. But the weight of Flavia’s hand was enough, the sound of her voice sufficient to calm her.

When she woke, she was fully conscious. It was still something of an effort to open her eye, but she could do it, though the other wouldn’t open. She sighed in relief that cunning was no longer necessary to outwit her body. She looked around and saw Flavia asleep, hunched down in her chair, mouth agape and head tilted back. Her arms hung slack on either side of her chair, leaving her completely abandoned to sleep.

As she watched Flavia, Brett again scouted her own body. She might be able to move her arms and legs, though it would be painful, in a generalized, unspecified way. She seemed to be lying on her side, and her back ached, a dull, fiery pain. At last, knowing that this was the worst, she tried to open her mouth and felt the terrible inner pressure against her teeth. Wired shut, but she could move her lips. The worst was that her tongue was trapped in her mouth. At the realization, she felt real panic. What if she coughed? Choked? She pushed that thought away violently. If she was this lucid, then she was all right. She saw no tubes running from her bed, knew nothing was in traction. So this was as bad as it was going to be, and this was bearable. Just. But bearable.

Suddenly, jokingly, she was conscious of thirst. Her mouth burned with it, throat aching. ‘Flavia,’ she said, voice soft, barely audible, even to herself. Flavia’s eyes opened and she stared about herself in near-panic, the way she always did when she woke suddenly. After a moment, she leaned forward in her chair and brought her face close to Brett’s.

‘Flavia, I’m thirsty,’ she whispered.

‘And good morning to you, too,’ Flavia answered, laughing out loud in relief, and Brett knew then that she was going to be all right.

Turning, Flavia picked up a glass of water from the table behind her. She bent the plastic straw and set it between Brett’s lips, careful to place it on the left side, away from the swollen cut that pulled her mouth down. ‘I’ve even got it filled with ice, the way you like it,’ she said, holding the straw steady in the glass while Brett tried to sip from it. Her dry lips were sealed closed, but finally she managed to pry one corner open, and blessed cold, blessed wet water spilled across her teeth and down her throat.

After she had taken only a few swallows, Flavia pulled the glass away, saying, ‘Not so much. Wait for a bit, and then you can have more.’

‘I feel doped,’ Brett said.

‘You are, cara. A nurse comes in every few hours and gives you an injection.’

‘What time is it?’

Flavia looked down at her watch. ‘Quarter to eight.’

The number had no meaning at all. ‘Morning or night?’

‘Morning.’

‘What day?’

Flavia smiled and answered, ‘Tuesday.’

‘In the morning?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why are you here?’

‘Where else do you expect me to be?’

‘Milan. You have to sing tonight.’

‘That’s why they have understudies, Brett,’ Flavia said dismissively. ‘To sing when the principal singers get sick.’

‘But you aren’t sick,’ Brett said, made dull by pain and drugs.

‘Don’t let the general manager of La Scala hear you say that, or I’ll make you pay the fine for me.’ It was difficult for Flavia to keep her voice light, but she tried.

‘But you never cancel.’

‘Well, I did, and that’s the end of it. You Anglo-Saxons are so serious about work,’ Flavia said, voice now artificially light. ‘Do you want some more water?’

Brett nodded and immediately regretted the motion. She lay still for a few moments and closed her eyes, waiting for the wave of nausea and dizziness to pass. When she opened her eyes, she saw Flavia leaning over her with the cup. Again, she tasted the blessed coolness, closed her eyes, and drifted away for a while. Suddenly, she asked, ‘What happened?’

Alarmed, Flavia asked, ‘Don’t you remember?’

Brett closed her eyes for a moment. ‘Yes, I remember. I was afraid they’d kill you.’ Her head rang with the dull resonance created by her wired teeth.

Flavia laughed at this, consistent in her bravado. ‘No chance of that. It must have been all those Toscas I’ve sung. I just went at them with the knife, and I got one of them, right across the arm.’ She waved her arm in the air in front of her, repeating the gesture and smiling at the memory, Brett was sure, of the knife cutting into him. ‘I wish I’d killed him,’ Flavia said in an absolutely conversational voice, and Brett believed her.

‘Then what?’

‘They ran. Then I went downstairs and got Luca, and he went for the doctor, and we brought you here.’ As Flavia watched, Brett’s eyes drifted closed, and she slept for a few minutes, lips open, steel wires grotesquely visible.

Suddenly, her eye snapped open and she looked around the room as if surprised to find herself there. She saw Flavia and grew calm.

‘Why did they do it?’ Flavia asked, voicing the question that had been with her for two days.

A long time passed before Brett answered. ‘Semenzato.’

‘At the museum?’

‘Yes.’

‘What? What did they say?’

‘I don’t understand.’ If she had been capable of shaking her head without pain, Brett would have done it. ‘Makes no sense.’ Her voice was garbled by the heavy trap that held her teeth together. She said Semenzato’s name again and closed her eyes for a long time. When she opened them, she asked, ‘What’s wrong with me?’

Flavia was ready for this question and answered it briefly. ‘Two ribs are broken. And your jaw is cracked.’

‘What else?’

‘That’s the worst. Your back is badly scraped.’ She saw Brett’s confusion and explained. ‘You fell against the wall and dragged your back down the bricks when you fell. And your face is very, very blue,’ Flavia concluded, trying to make light of it. ‘The contrast makes your eyes stand out, but I don’t think I like the total effect.’

‘How bad is it?’ Brett asked, not liking the joking tone.

‘Oh, not so bad,’ Flavia said, obviously lying. Brett gave a long one-eyed look that forced Flavia to amend things. ‘You have to keep the ribs bandaged, and you’ll be very stiff for a week or so. He said there’ll be no permanent damage.’ Because it was the only good news she had, she completed the doctor’s report. ‘They’ll take the wires out in a few days. It’s just a hairline crack. And your teeth are all right.’ When she saw how little encouragement Brett took from this, she added, ‘And your nose.’ Still no smile. ‘There won’t be any scars on your face: once the swelling goes away, you’ll be fine.’ Flavia said nothing about the scars that would remain on Brett’s back, nor did she say anything about how long it would take for the swelling and bruising to disappear from her face.

Suddenly Brett realized how tired this brief conversation had made her, and she felt new waves of sleep pulling at her body. ‘Go home for a while, Flavia. I’ll sleep and then . . .’ Her voice trailed away before she could finish, and she was asleep. Flavia pushed herself back into her chair and studied the damaged face that lay sideways on the bed in front of her. The bruises that spread across the forehead and the cheeks had gone almost black during the last day and a half, and one eye was still swollen shut. Brett’s lower lip was swollen up and around the vertical split that left it gaping wide.

Flavia had been forcibly kept out of the emergency room while the doctors worked on Brett, cleaning her back and taping her ribs. Nor had she been there to watch them thread the thin wires between her teeth, binding her jaws together. She had been left to pace the long corridors of the hospital, joining her fear with that of the other visitors and patients who walked, crowded into the bar, caught what little light filtered into the open courtyard. She had paced for an hour, begging three cigarettes from different people, the first she had smoked in more than ten years.

Since late Sunday afternoon, she had been at the side of Brett’s bed, waiting for her to wake up, and had gone back to the apartment just once, the day before, and then only to shower and make a few phone calls, inventing the phantom illness that was to keep her from singing at La Scala that evening. Her nerves were pulled tight by too little sleep, too much coffee, the renewed craving for a cigarette, and the oily slick of fear that clings to the skin of all those who spend too long a time inside a hospital.

She looked across at her lover and wished again that she had killed the man who did this. Flavia Petrelli had no comprehension of regret, but there was very little she didn’t understand about revenge.

* * * *

Chapter Three

Behind her, a door opened, but Flavia didn’t turn her head to see who it was. Another nurse. Hardly a doctor: they were in rare supply here. After a few moments, she heard a man’s voice ask, ‘Signora Petrelli?’

She turned, wondering who it was and how they had found her here. Just inside the door stood a man, tallish and heavily built, who looked vaguely familiar but whom she couldn’t place. One of the ward doctors? Worse, a reporter? He stood by the door, seeming to wait to be invited into the room and closer to Brett.

‘Good morning, signora,’ he said, not moving from the door. ‘I’m Guido Brunetti. We met a few years ago.’

It was that policeman, the one who had investigated the Wellauer affair at La Fenice. He had been not unintelligent, she recalled, and Brett, for reasons Flavia had never been able to fathom, had found him simpatico.

‘Good morning, Dottor Brunetti,’ Flavia answered formally, keeping her voice low. She stood, gave a look at Brett to see that she was still sleeping, and went over to where he stood. She extended her hand and he took it, shaking it briefly.

‘Did they assign you to this?’ she asked. As soon as she spoke, she realized how aggressive her question was and regretted it.

He ignored the tone and answered the question. ‘No, signora, I recognized Dottoressa Lynch’s name on the report of the assault, so I came to see how she was.’ Even before Flavia could remark on his slowness, he explained, ‘The case was given to someone else; I didn’t see the report until this morning.’ He looked over towards the sleeping woman, letting his glance ask the question.

‘Better,’ Flavia said. She stepped back and gestured for him to come closer to the bed. Brunetti walked across the room and stopped just behind Flavia’s chair. He set his briefcase on the floor, rested both hands on the back of the chair, and looked down at the face of the beaten woman. Finally, he asked, ‘What happened?’ He had read the report and the transcripts of the account Flavia had given, but he wanted to hear her version of it.

Flavia resisted the impulse to tell him that this was precisely what he was supposed to be finding out; instead, she explained, keeping her voice low, ‘Two men came to the apartment on Sunday. They said they were from the museum and had some papers for Brett. She answered the door. After she had been out in the hall with them a long time, I went to see what was keeping her, and I found her on the floor.’ As she spoke, he nodded; all of this was in the report she had given to two different policemen.

‘When I went out, I had a knife in my hand. I’d been chopping vegetables, and I simply forgot I had it. When I saw what they were doing, I didn’t think. I cut one of them. Very badly, on the arm. They ran out of the apartment.’

‘Robbery?’ he asked.

She shrugged. ‘It’s possible. But why would they have done that?’ she asked, waving her hand towards Brett.

He nodded again and muttered. ‘Right, right.’ He backed away and returned to stand near her, then asked in a normal voice, ‘Is there much of value in the apartment?’

‘Yes, I think so. Carpets, paintings, ceramics.’

‘So it could have been a robbery?’ he asked, and it sounded to Flavia as if he were trying to convince himself.

‘They said they were from the director of the museum. How did they know to say that?’ she asked. Robbery made no sense to her, and it made less sense each time she looked at Brett’s face. If this policeman didn’t understand that, he understood nothing.

‘How badly is she hurt?’ he asked, not answering her question. ‘I haven’t had time to speak to the doctors.’

‘Broken ribs and a cracked bone in her jaw, but there’s no sign of concussion.’

‘Have you spoken to her?’

‘Yes.’ Her brusque reply reminded him that there had been no great sympathy between them the last time they met.

‘I’m sorry this happened.’ He said it like a man, not a public official.

Flavia nodded in cursory acknowledgement but said nothing.

‘Is she going to be all right?’ The question, phrased like that, honoured her intimate knowledge of Brett, acknowledged her ability to, as it were, touch her spiritual pulse and see how much damage it would do her to have been treated like this.

Flavia was confused by her desire to thank him for asking the question and, with it, acknowledging her position in Brett’s life. ‘Yes, she’ll be all right.’ And then, more practically, ‘What about the police? Have you found anything?’

‘No, I’m afraid not,’ Brunetti said. ‘The descriptions you gave of the two men don’t correspond to anyone we know here. We’ve checked the hospitals, here and in Mestre, but no one was admitted with a knife wound. We’re checking the envelope for fingerprints.’ He did not tell her that the blood covering one side of it made that difficult to do, nor did he tell her that the envelope had proved to be empty.

Behind him, Brett shifted on the bed, sighed, and then was quiet.

‘Signora Petrelli,’ he began, then paused, searching for the right words. ‘I’d like to sit with her for a while, if you don’t mind.’

Flavia caught herself wondering why she was so flattered by his casual acceptance of what she and Brett were to each other, then surprised herself even more by realizing that she had no clear idea of what that was. Spurred by those thoughts, she pulled a chair from behind the door and placed it next to the one she had been sitting on.

‘Grazie,’ he said. He sat, leaned back in the chair, and crossed his arms. She had the impression that he was prepared to sit there all day, if necessary.

He made no further attempt to speak to her, sat quietly and waited for whatever would happen. She took her place on the chair next to him, surprised by how little need she felt to make conversation with him or be socially correct. She sat. Ten minutes passed. Gradually, her head fell back against the top of the chair and she drifted off to sleep, then yanked awake when her head fell forward. She glanced at her watch. Eleven thirty. He had been there an hour.

‘Has she been awake?’ she asked him.

‘Yes, but only for a few minutes. She didn’t say anything.’

‘Did she see you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did she know who you are?’

‘Yes, I think so.’

‘Good.’

After a long pause, he said, ‘Signora, would you like to go home for a while? Perhaps get something to eat? I’ll stay here. She’s seen me with you, so she won’t be afraid if she wakes up and I’m here.’

Hours ago, Flavia had felt gnawing hunger; now all sign of it had disappeared. But the combination of fatigue and dirt lingered with her, and at the thought of a shower, clean towels, clean hair, clean clothes, she almost gasped with yearning. Brett was asleep, and who safer to leave her with than a policeman? The idea grew too strong. ‘Yes,’ she said, getting to her feet. ‘I won’t be long. If she wakes up, please tell her where I’ve gone.’

‘Certainly,’ he said, standing as Flavia gathered her bag and took her coat from behind the door. At the door, she turned in farewell and gave him the first real smile she had ever given him, then left the room, careful to close the door quietly after her.

* * * *

When Signorina Elettra had handed him the robbery report that morning, he had barely glanced at it, especially when he saw that it was being handled by the uniformed branch. When she saw him place it to the side of his desk, Signorina Elettra had said, ‘You might want to take a look at that, Dottore,’ before going back down to her office.

The address had meant nothing to him, but addresses were relatively meaningless in a city with only six separate mailing addresses. The name had jumped up from the page: Brett Lynch. He had no idea she was back from China, had forgotten about her in the years that had elapsed since their last meeting. It was the memory of that meeting and all that preceded it that had brought him to the hospital.

The beautiful young woman he had met some years ago was unrecognizable, could easily have changed places with any of the scores of battered and beaten women he had seen during his years with the police. Looking at her, he drew up a list of the men he knew to be capable of this sort of violence towards a woman — not one they knew, but one they met in the commission of a crime. It turned out to be a very short list: one of them was in jail in Trieste, and the other was in Sicily or believed to be. The list of those who would do it to women they knew was much longer, and some of them were in Venice, but he doubted that any of those men would know her or, if they did, would have cause to do this.

Robbery? Signora Petrelli had told the two policemen who interviewed her that the two men who had come to the apartment had no idea that anyone else was there, so the beating made no sense. If they had come to rob Brett’s apartment, they could have tied her up or locked her in a room and then taken whatever they wanted at their leisure. None of the thieves he knew in Venice would have done something like this. If not a robbery, then what?

Because she didn’t open her eyes, her voice, when she spoke, surprised him. ‘Mi dai da bere?’

Startled, he moved closer to her.

‘Water,’ she asked.

On the table beside the bed he saw a plastic carafe and a cup with a plastic straw. He filled the cup and held the straw to her lips until she had drunk all the water. Behind her lips, he saw the cage of wires that bound her jaws together. That accounted for the slurred speech, that and the drugs.

Her right eye opened, a brighter blue than the flesh around it. ‘Thank you, Commissario.’ The single eye blinked, stayed open. ‘Strange place to meet again.’ Because of the wires, her voice sounded as if it issued from a badly tuned radio.

‘Yes,’ he agreed, smiling at the absurdity of her remark, at its banal formality.

‘Flavia?’ she asked.

‘She’s gone home for a moment. She’ll be back soon.’

Brett moved her head on her pillow, and he heard the sudden intake of breath. After a moment, she asked, ‘Why are you here?’

‘I saw your name on the crime report, so I came to see how you were.’

There was the faintest motion of her lip, a smile, perhaps, cut off by pain. ‘Not very good.’

Silence stretched out between them. Finally, he asked, though he had told himself he wouldn’t, ‘Do you remember what happened?’

She made a noise of assent and then began to explain. ‘They had papers from Dottor Semenzato, at the museum.’ He nodded, familiar with both the name and the man. ‘I let them in. Then this. . .’ Her voice trailed off, then she said, ‘Started this.’

‘Did they say anything?’

Her eye closed and she lay silent for a long time. He couldn’t tell if she was trying to remember or deciding whether to tell him. So long a time passed that he began to think she had gone back to sleep. But finally she said, ‘Told me not to go to meeting.’

‘What meeting?’

‘With Semenzato.’ So it hadn’t been a robbery. He said nothing. This was not the time to push her, not now.

Voice growing thicker and slower, she explained. ‘This morning, at the museum. Ceramics in the China exhibition.’ There was a long pause and she fought to keep her eye open. ‘They knew about me and Flavia.’ After that, her breathing slowed and he realized she was asleep again.

He sat, watching her, and tried to make some sense out of what she had said. Semenzato was the director of the museum at the Doge’s Palace. Until the reopening of the restored Palazzo Grassi, it had been the most famous museum in Venice, Semenzato the most important museum director. Perhaps he still was. After all, the Doge’s Palace had mounted the Titian show; all Palazzo Grassi had presented in recent years was Andy Warhol and the Celts, both shows the product of the ‘new’ Venice and hence more the outcome of media hype than of serious artistic study.

It was Semenzato, Brunetti recalled, who had helped arrange, about five years ago, the exhibition of Chinese art, and it was Brett Lynch who had served as intermediary between the city administration and the Chinese government. He had seen the show long before he met her, and he could still remember some of the exhibits: the life-size terracotta statues of soldiers, a bronze chariot, and a full suit of decorative mail, constructed from thousands of interlocking pieces of jade. There had been paintings as well, but he had found them boring: weeping willows, men with beards, and the same old flimsy bridges. The statue of the soldier, however, had stunned him, and he remembered standing motionless in front of it, studying the face and reading in it fidelity, courage and honour, signs of a common humanity that had spanned two millennia and half the world.

Brunetti had met Semenzato on various occasions and had found him an intelligent, charming man, with the patina of graceful manners that men in public positions acquire with the passing of years. Venetian, of an old family, Semenzato was one of several brothers, all of whom had to do with antiquities, art, or the trade in those things.

Because Brett had arranged the show, it made sense that she would see Semenzato when she was back in Venice. What made no sense at all was that someone would try to prevent that meeting and would go to such brutal lengths to do so.

A nurse with a pile of sheets in her arms came into the room without knocking and asked him to leave while she bathed the patient and changed the linen. Obviously, Signora Petrelli had been at work on the hospital staff, seeing that the little envelopes, bustarelle, were delivered into the proper hands. In the absence of those ‘gifts’, even the most basic services wouldn’t be performed for patients in this hospital, and even in their presence, it often fell to the family to feed and bathe the patient.

He left the room and stood at a window in the corridor, gazing down into the central courtyard that was part of the original fifteenth-century monastery. Opposite him he saw the new pavilion that had been built and opened with such public shouts of glory — nuclear medicine, most advanced technologies to be had in all of Italy, most famous doctors, a new age in health care for the exorbitantly taxed citizens of Venice. No expense had been spared; the building emerged an architectural wonder, its high marble arches giving a modern-day reflection of the graceful arches that stood out in Campo SS. Giovanni e Paolo and led the way into the main hospital.

The opening ceremony had been held, there had been speeches and the press had come, but the building had never been used. No drains. No sewers. And no responsibility. Was it the architect who had forgotten to put them in the original blueprints, or the builders who had failed to put them where they were meant to go? The only thing that was certain was that responsibility fell on no one and that the drains would have to be added to the already finished building, at enormous expense.

Brunetti’s reading of the event was that it had been planned like this from the very moment of inception, planned so that the builder would get not only the original contract to construct the new pavilion but the work, later, to destroy much of what had been built in order to install the forgotten drains.

Did one laugh or cry? The building had been left unprotected after the opening that was not an opening, and vandals had already broken in and damaged some of the equipment, so now the hospital paid for guards to patrol the empty corridors, and patients who needed the treatments and procedures it was supposed to provide were sent to other hospitals, or told to wait, or told to go to private clinics. He could no longer remember how many billion lire had been spent. And nurses had to be bribed to change the sheets.

Suddenly, Flavia Petrelli appeared at the far end of the courtyard, and he watched her progress, all but imperial, across its open space. No one recognized her, but every man she passed noticed her. She had changed into a long purple dress which swirled from side to side as she walked. Over her shoulder she had draped a fur, nothing so prosaic as mink. As he watched her cross the courtyard, he was reminded of a passage he had read, years ago, that described a woman’s entrance into a hotel. So secure was she in her wealth and position that she had shrugged her mink from her shoulders without looking, certain that there would be a servant there to catch it. Flavia Petrelli had no need to read about such things in a book: she had that same absolute certainty about her place in the world.

He watched as she passed into one of the arched stairwells that led to the upper floors. She took the steps, he noticed, two at a time, a haste which was entirely at odds with both the dress and the fur.

Seconds later, she appeared at the top of the steps, and her face grew tense when she saw him outside the room. ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked, walking quickly towards him.

‘Nothing. A nurse came in.’

She entered the room without bothering to knock. Minutes later, the nurse emerged, carrying an armful of bedding and an enamel pan. He waited a few minutes more, then knocked on the door and was told to enter.

When he came into the room, he saw that the head of the bed had been raised minimally, and Brett was lying up, head cushioned by pillows. Flavia stood beside her and held the cup to her lips, while she drank through a straw. The effect of her face was less shocking now, either because he had had time to grow accustomed to it or because he could see that parts of it were unbruised.

He stooped down and picked up his briefcase from where he had left it and approached the bed. Brett took one hand out from under the covers and slid it across the bed towards him. He covered it briefly with his own. ‘Thank you,’ she said.

‘I’ll come back tomorrow, if I may.’

‘Please. I can’t explain now, but I will.’

Flavia began to object but cut herself off short. She gave Brunetti a smile that began as a professional one but surprised both of them by becoming entirely natural. ‘Thank you for coming,’ she said, surprising both of them again with the sincerity of her voice.

‘Until tomorrow, then,’ he said, giving Brett’s hand a squeeze. Flavia remained at the bedside while he let himself out of the room. He took the steps she had used and turned left at the bottom, into the covered portico that ran alongside the open courtyard. An old woman wrapped in an army overcoat sat in a wheelchair at the side of the corridor, knitting. At her feet three cats fought over the body of a mouse.

* * * *

Chapter Four

As he walked back towards the Questura, Brunetti found himself troubled by what he had seen and heard. She would heal, he realized; her body would become well and return to what it had been before. Signora Petrelli believed she would be all right, but his experience told him that the effects of violence such as this would linger, perhaps for years, if only as a real and sudden fear that would come on her unexpectedly. Well, perhaps he was wrong and Americans were tougher than Italians, and perhaps she would emerge the same person, but he couldn’t stifle his concern for her.

When he entered the Questura, one of the uniformed officers approached him. ‘Dottor Patta is looking for you, sir,’ he said, keeping his voice low and neutral. It seemed that everyone in the place kept their voices low and neutral when they spoke of the Vice-Questore.

Brunetti thanked him and proceeded towards the steps at the back of the building, the quickest way to his office. The intercom was ringing as he entered. He set his briefcase down on top of the desk and picked up the receiver.

‘Brunetti?’ Patta asked, quite unnecessarily, even before Brunetti could say his name. ‘Is that you?’

‘Yes, sir,’ he answered, flicking through the papers that had accumulated on his desk in the hours he had been gone.

‘I’ve been trying to get you on the phone all morning, Brunetti. We’ve got to make a decision about the Stresa conference. Come down to my office right now,’ he ordered, then tempered it with a very grudging, ‘would you?’

‘Yes, sir. Immediately’ Brunetti hung up, leafed through the rest of the papers, opening one letter and reading it through twice. He walked over to stand by the window and again read through the report of the attack at Brett’s house, then left and went down to Patta’s office.

Signorina Elettra was not at her desk, but a low bowl overflowing with yellow freesias filled the room with a scent almost as sweet as her presence.

He knocked and waited to be told to enter. A muffled sound told him to do so. Patta was posed in the frame created by one of the large windows in his office, gazing across at the eternally scaffolded fa ç ade of the church of San Lorenzo. What little light came in managed to glimmer from the radiant points on Patta’s body: the tips of his shoes, the gold chain that ran across the front of his vest, and the tiny ruby that flickered dully in his tie-pin. He glanced at Brunetti and crossed the room to his desk. As he did, Brunetti was struck by how much his progress across the room strove to imitate Flavia Petrelli’s through the hospital. The contrast lay in her complete indifference to the effect she might be making; to Patta, that was the purpose of his every motion. The Vice-Questore took his place behind die desk and gestured to Brunetti to take a chair in front of him.

‘Where have you been all morning?’ Patta asked without preamble.

‘I went to speak to the victim of an attempted robbery,’ Brunetti explained. He kept his remarks as vague and, he hoped, as meaningless as possible.

‘That’s why we have men in uniform.’

Brunetti made no response.

Turning his attention to the business at hand, Patta asked, ‘What about the Stresa conference? Which of us is going to attend?’

Two weeks before, Brunetti had received an invitation to a conference being organized by Interpol, to be held at the resort town of Stresa on Lago Maggiore. Because it would allow him to renew friendships and contacts with police officers from the various members of the Interpol network and because the programme offered training in the latest computer techniques for the storage and retrieval of information, Brunetti wanted to attend. Patta, who knew Stresa to be one of the most fashionable resorts in Italy, possessed of a climate that invited escape from the damp chill of a late Venetian winter, had suggested that it might be better were he to go instead. But as the invitation was specifically directed to Brunetti and bore a handwritten note to him from the organizer of the conference, Patta had found it hard to convince Brunetti to renounce his right to go. With great reluctance, Patta drew the line just short of ordering him not to attend.

Brunetti crossed his legs and pulled his notebook from his pocket. As always, the pages were blank of anything that pertained to police business, but Patta, as always, failed to realize this. ‘Let me check the dates,’ Brunetti said, flicking through the pages. ‘The sixteenth, isn’t it? Until the twentieth?’ His pause was dramatic, orchestrated to Patta’s mounting impatience. ‘I’m not sure any longer that I’m free that week.’

‘What dates did you say?’ Patta asked, flipping his desk calendar forward a few weeks. ‘Sixteenth to the twentieth?’ His pause was even more dramatic than Brunetti’s had been. ‘Well, if you can’t do it, I might be able to go. I’d have to reschedule a meeting with the Minister of the Interior, but I think I might be able to do so.’

‘That might be better, sir. Are you sure you can allow the time?’

Patta’s glance was illegible. ‘Yes.’

‘Well, that’s settled, then,’ Brunetti said with false heartiness.

It must have been something in his tone, or perhaps in his alacrity, that triggered alarm bells in Patta. ‘Where were you this morning?’

‘I told you, sir, speaking to the victim of a reported robbery attempt.’

‘What victim?’ Patta asked, voice heavy with suspicion.

‘A foreigner who lives here.’

‘What foreigner?’

‘Dottoressa Lynch,’ Brunetti answered and watched Patta’s face register the name. For a moment, his face was blank, but then his eyes narrowed as he pulled up the memory of who she was. As Brunetti watched, he registered the precise moment when Patta remembered not only who, but what, she was.

‘The lesbian,’ he muttered, showing what he thought of her with the contempt with which he pronounced the word. ‘What happened to her?’

‘She was attacked in her home.’

‘Who did it? Some butch dyke she picked up in a bar?’ When he saw the effect his words had on Brunetti, he moderated his tone and asked, ‘What happened?’

‘She was attacked by two men,’ Brunetti explained, and added, ‘neither of whom appeared to be a “butch dyke”. She’s in hospital.’

Patta struggled to prevent himself from remarking on this and instead asked, ‘Is this why you’re too busy to attend the conference?’

‘The conference isn’t until next month, sir. I’ve got a number of cases current.’

Patta snorted to express his disbelief then suddenly asked, ‘What did they take?’

‘Apparently nothing.’

‘Why? If it was a robbery?’

‘Someone stopped them. And I don’t know that it was a robbery.’

Patta ignored the second part of what Brunetti said and jumped on the first. ‘Who stopped them, that singer?’ he asked, suggesting that Flavia Petrelli sang on street corners for coins rather than at La Scala for a fortune.

When Brunetti didn’t rise to this, Patta continued, ‘Of course it was robbery. She’s got a fortune in that place.’ Brunetti was surprised, not by the raw envy in Patta’s voice, which seemed his normal response to wealth, but by the fact that he had any idea of what was in Brett’s apartment.

‘Perhaps,’ Brunetti said.

‘There’s no perhaps about it,’ Patta insisted. ‘If it was two men, it was robbery.’ Did women, Brunetti prevented himself from asking, busy themselves naturally with other crimes? Patta looked directly at him. ‘That means it belongs to the robbery squad. Leave it to them. This isn’t a social club here, Commissario. We’re not in business to help your friends when they get into trouble, especially not your lesbian friends,’ he said in a tone that conjured up scores of them, as if Brunetti were a latter-day St Ursula, eleven thousand young women following in his train, all virgin and all lesbian.

Brunetti had had years to accustom himself to the fundamental irrationality of much of what his superior said, but there were times when Patta still managed to amaze him with the breadth and passion of some of his wilder pronouncements. And anger him. ‘Will that be all, sir?’ he asked.

‘Yes, that will be all. Remember, this is a robbery, and it’s to be handled—’ He broke off at the sound of the telephone. Irritated by the noise, Patta grabbed the receiver and shouted into the mouthpiece, ‘I told you not to put through any calls.’ Brunetti waited to see him slam the phone down but, instead, Patta pulled it closer to his ear, and Brunetti saw shock register.

‘Yes, yes, I’m certainly here,’ Patta said. ‘Put him through.’

Patta sat a little bit higher in his chair and ran one hand through his hair, as if he expected the caller to look through the receiver and see him. He smiled, smiled again, and waited for the voice at the other end. Brunetti heard the far-off rumble of a man’s voice, and then Patta answered, ‘Good morning, sir. Yes, yes, very well, thank you. And you?’

An answer of some sort filtered through to Brunetti. As he watched, Patta reached for the pen that lay at the side of his desk, forgetting the Mont Blanc Meisterstück in his jacket pocket. He grabbed at a piece of paper and pulled it in front of him. ‘Yes, yes, sir. I’ve heard about it. In fact, I was just discussing it now.’ He paused and more words floated to him over the phone, arriving at Brunetti as no more than a dim murmur.

‘Yes, sir. I know. It’s terrible. I was shocked to hear of it.’ Another pause to wait for the voice to say something else. His eyes flashed to Brunetti and then as quickly away. ‘Yes, sir. One of my men has already spoken to her.’ There was a sharp eruption of words from the other end. ‘No, sir, of course not. It’s someone who knows her. I told him, specifically, not to disturb her, merely to see how she was and to speak to her doctors. Of course, sir. I realize that, sir.’

Patta picked up the pen by its point and tapped it rhythmically on the desk. He listened. ‘Of course, of course, I’ll assign as many men as necessary, sir. We know of her generosity to the city.’

He shot another look at Brunetti, then glanced down at the tapping pen, forcing himself to lay it flat on the desk.

He listened for a long time, staring at the pen. Once or twice, he tried to speak, but the distant voice cut him off. Finally, hand clenched on the phone, he managed to say, ‘As soon as possible. I’ll keep you informed myself. Yes, sir. Of course, sir. Yes.’ He didn’t have time to say goodbye; the voice at the other end was gone.

He put the phone down gently and looked at Brunetti. ‘That, as I suppose you realize, was the mayor. I don’t know how he found out about this, but he did.’ He made it clear that he suspected Brunetti of having called and left an anonymous message in the mayor’s office.

‘It seems the Dottoressa,’ he began, pronouncing the word in a tone that called into question the quality of instruction of both Harvard and Yale, the schools from which Dottoressa Lynch had taken her degrees, ‘is a friend of his, and,’ he added, after a pregnant pause, ‘a benefactor of the city. So the mayor wants this looked into and settled as quickly as possible.’

Brunetti remained silent, knowing how dangerous it would be for him to make any sort of suggestion at this point. He glanced down at the paper on Patta’s desk then up at his superior’s face.

‘What are you working on now?’ Patta asked, which, Brunetti realized, meant that he was to be given the investigation.

‘Nothing that can’t wait.’

‘Then I want you to look into this.’

‘Yes, sir,’ he said, hoping that Patta wouldn’t suggest any specific steps.

Too late. ‘Go over to her apartment. See what you can find out. Talk to her neighbours.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Brunetti said and stood, hoping to cut him off.

‘Keep me up to date on this, Brunetti.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘I want this settled quickly, Brunetti. She’s a friend of the mayor’s.’ And, Brunetti knew, any friend of the mayor’s was a friend of Patta’s.

* * * *

Chapter Five

Back in his office, he called down and asked Vianello to come up. After a few minutes, the sergeant came in and lowered himself heavily into the chair in front of Brunetti’s desk. He took a small notebook from his uniform pocket and gave Brunetti an inquisitive glance.

‘What do you know about gorillas, Vianello?’

Vianello considered the question for a moment and then asked, unnecessarily, ‘The kind in the zoo or the kind that get paid to hurt people?’

‘The kind that get paid.’

Vianello paused for a moment, running through lists he appeared to keep filed in his mind. ‘I don’t think there are any here in the city, sir. But in Mestre there are four or five of them, mostly Southerners.’ He paused for a moment, nipping through more lists. ‘I’ve heard that there are a few in Padua and some who work in Treviso and Pordenone, but they’re provincials. The real ones are the boys in Mestre. Trouble with them here?’

Because the uniformed branch had done the initial investigation and conducted the interviews with Flavia, Brunetti knew Vianello had to be aware of the attack. ‘I spoke to Dottoressa Lynch this morning. The men who attacked her told her not to attend a meeting with Dottor Semenzato.’

‘At the museum?’ Vianello asked.

‘Yes.’

Vianello considered this for a moment. ‘Then it wasn’t a robbery?’

‘No, it would seem not. Someone stopped them.’

‘Signora Petrelli?’ Vianello asked.

The Swiss bank secret wouldn’t last a day in Venice. ‘Yes. She drove them off. But it didn’t seem they were interested in taking anything.’

‘Short-sighted on their part. It would be a good place to rob.’

At this, Brunetti broke down. ‘How do you know that, Vianello?’

‘My sister-in-law’s next-door neighbour is her maid. Goes in three times a week to clean, keeps an eye on the place for her when she’s in China. She’s talked about what’s in there, says it must be worth a fortune.’

‘Not the best thing to be saying about a place that’s left empty so much, is it?’ Brunetti asked, voice stern.

‘That’s just what I told her, sir.’

‘I hope she listened.’

‘I do, too.’

His indirect reprimand having failed to work, Brunetti returned to the gorillas. ‘Check the hospitals again to see if the one she wounded has been in. It sounds like she cut him badly. What about the prints on that envelope?’

Vianello looked up from his notebook. ‘I’ve sent copies to Rome and asked them to let us know what they have.’ Both of them knew how long that could take.

‘Try Interpol, as well.’

Vianello nodded and added the suggestion to his notes. ‘What about Semenzato?’ Vianello asked. ‘What was the meeting about?’

‘I don’t know. Ceramics, I think, but she was too drugged to explain anything clearly. Do you know anything about him?’

‘No more than anyone in the city does, sir. He’s been at the museum for about seven years. Married, wife from Messina, I think. Somewhere in Sicily. No children. Good family, and his reputation at the museum is good.’

Brunetti didn’t bother to ask Vianello how he came by this information, no longer surprised by the archive of personal information the sergeant had accumulated during his years with the police. Instead, he said, ‘See what you can find out about him. Where he worked before he came here and why he left, where he studied.’

‘You going to talk to him, sir?’

Brunetti considered this for a moment. ‘No. If whoever sent them wanted to scare her away from him, then I want them to believe they succeeded. But I want to see what there is to find out about him. And see what you can learn about those men in Mestre.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Vianello answered, making note of this. ‘You ask her about their accent?’

Brunetti had already thought of this, but there had been too little time with Brett. Her Italian was perfect, so their accents would have given her an idea of what part of the country they came from. ‘I’ll ask her tomorrow.’

‘In the meantime, I’ll look into gorillas in Mestre,’ Vianello said. With a grunt, he got out of the chair and left the office.

Brunetti pushed back his chair, pulled the bottom drawer of his desk open with his toe, and rested his crossed feet on it. He slouched down in his chair and latched his fingers behind his head, then turned and looked out of the window. From this angle, the fa ç ade of San Lorenzo wasn’t visible, but he could see a patch of cloudy, late-winter sky, a monotony that might induce thought.

She had said something about the ceramics in the show, and that could only mean the show she had helped arrange four or five years ago, the first time in recent years that museum-goers in the West had been allowed to see the marvels currently being excavated in China. And he had thought her to be in China still.

He had been surprised to see her name on the crime report that morning, shocked to see her bruised face in the hospital. How long had she been back? How long was she intending to stay? And what had brought her back to Venice? Flavia Petrelli would be able to answer some of those questions; Flavia Petrelli might herself be the answer to one of them. But those questions could wait; for the moment, he was more interested in Dottor Semenzato.

He let his chair drop forward with a bang, reached for the phone, and dialled a number from memory.

‘Pronto,’ said the familiar deep voice.

‘Ciao, Lele,’ Brunetti responded. ‘Why aren’t you out painting?’

‘Ciao, Guido, come stai?’ Then, without waiting for an answer, he explained. ‘Not enough light today. I went out to the Zattere this morning, but I came back without doing anything. The light’s flat, dead. So I came back here to fix lunch for Claudia.’

‘How is she?’

‘Fine, fine. And Paola?’

‘Good, so are the kids. Look, Lele, I’d like to talk to you. Can you spare me some time this afternoon?’

‘Talk talk or police talk?^?

‘Police talk, I’m afraid. Or I think it is.’

‘I’ll be at the gallery after three if you want to come over then. Until about five.’ From the background, Brunetti heard a hissing sound, a muttered, ‘Puttana Eva,’ and then Lele said, ‘Guido, I’ve got to go. The pasta’s boiling over.’ Brunetti barely had time to say goodbye before the phone went dead.

If anyone would know about Semenzato’s reputation, it was Lele. Gabriele Cossato, painter, antiquarian, lover of beauty, was as much a part of Venice, it seemed, as were the four Moors, poised in eternal confabulation to the right of the basilica of San Marco. For as far back as Brunetti could remember, there had been Lele, and Lele had been a painter. When Brunetti remembered his childhood, he recalled Lele, a friend of his father, and he remembered the stories, told then even to him, for he was a boy and so was expected to understand, about Lele’s women, that endless succession of donne, signore, ragazze, with whom Lele would appear at the Brunettis’ table. The women were all gone now, forgotten in his love for his wife of many years, but his passion for the beauty of the city remained, that and his limitless familiarity with the art world and all it encompassed: antiquarians and dealers, museums and galleries.

He decided to go home for lunch and then go to see Lele directly from there. But then he remembered that it was Tuesday, which meant that Paola would be having lunch with the members of her department at the university, and that in its turn meant that the children would eat with their grandparents, leaving him to cook and eat a meal alone. To avoid that, he went to a local trattoria and spent the meal thinking about what could be so important about a discussion between an archaeologist and a museum director that it had to be prevented with such violence.

A little after three, he crossed the Accademia Bridge and cut left towards Campo San Vio and, beyond it, Lele’s gallery. The artist was there when he arrived, perched on a ladder, a torch in one hand, a pair of electrical clippers in the other, reaching into a spaghetti-like mass of electrical wires housed behind a wooden panel above the door to the back room of the gallery. Brunetti was so accustomed to seeing Lele in his three-piece pin-striped suits that, even though the painter was perched at the top of the ladder, his position seemed not at all incongruous. Looking down, Lele greeted him, ‘Ciao, Guido. Just a minute while I join these together.’ So saying, he laid the torch on the top of the ladder, peeled back the plastic covering off one wire, twisted the exposed part around a second wire, then took a thick roll of black tape from his back pocket and bound the two together. With the point of the clippers, he poked the wire back among the others that ran parallel to it. Then, looking down at Brunetti, he said, ‘Guido, go into the storeroom and throw the switch for the current.’

Obedient, he went into the large storeroom on the right and stood for a moment at the door, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the deeper darkness.

‘Just on the left,’ Lele called.

Turning, he saw the large electrical panel attached to the wall. He pulled the main circuit breaker down, and the storeroom was suddenly flooded with light. He waited again, this time for his eyes to adjust to the brightness, then went back into the main room of the gallery.

Lele was already down from the ladder, the panel closed above him. ‘Hold the door,’ he said and walked towards Brunetti, carrying his ladder. He quickly stored it in the back room and emerged, brushing dust from his hands.

‘Pantegana,’ he explained, giving the Venetian name for rat, a word which, though it named them clearly - rat - still managed to make them, in the naming, somehow charming and domestic. ‘They come and eat the covering on the wires.’

‘Can’t you poison them?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Bah,’ Lele snorted. ‘They prefer the poison to the plastic. They thrive on it. I can’t even keep paintings in the storeroom anymore; they come in and eat the canvas. Or the wood.’

Brunetti looked automatically at the paintings hanging on the walls of the gallery, vividly coloured scenes of the city, alive with light and filled with Lele’s energy.

No, they’re safe. They’re too high up. But some day I expect to come in and find the little bastards have moved the ladder in the night and climbed up to eat them all.’ The fact that Lele laughed when he said this made him sound no less serious about it. He dropped the clippers and tape into a drawer and turned to Brunetti. ‘All right, what is this talk that might be police talk?’

‘Semenzato, at the museum, and the Chinese exhibition held there a few years ago,’ Brunetti explained.

Lele grunted in acknowledgement of the request and moved across the room to stand under a wrought-iron candelabrum attached to the wall. He reached up and bent one of the leaf-shaped prongs a bit to the left, stepped back to examine it, then leaned forward to bend it a tiny bit more. Satisfied, he went back to Brunetti.

‘He’s been at the museum for about eight years, Semenzato, and he’s managed to organize a number of international shows. That means he’s got good connections with museums or their directors in foreign countries, knows a lot of people in lots of places.’

‘Anything else?’ Brunetti asked, voice neutral.

‘He’s a good administrator. He’s hired a number of excellent people and brought them to Venice. There are two restorers he all but stole from the Courtauld, and he’s done a lot to change the way the exhibitions are publicized.’

‘Yes, I’ve noticed that.’ At times, Brunetti felt that Venice had been turned into a whore forced to choose between different Johns: first the city was offered the face from a Phoenician glass earring, saw the poster reproduced a thousand times, then that was quickly replaced with a portrait by Titian, which in turn was driven out by Andy Warhol, himself then quickly banished by a Celtic silver deer as the museums covered every available surface in the city and vied endlessly for the attention and box office receipts of the passing tourists. What would come next, he wondered, Leonardo T-shirts? No, they already had them in Florence. He’d seen enough posters for art shows to last a lifetime in hell.

‘Do you know him?’ Brunetti asked, wondering if that was the reason for Lele’s uncharacteristic objectivity.

‘Oh, we’ve met a few times.’

‘Where?’

‘The museum has called me in a few times to ask about majolica pieces they were offered, if I thought they were genuine or not.’

‘And you met him then?’

‘Yes.’

‘What did you think of him personally?’

‘He seemed a very pleasant, competent man.’

Brunetti had had enough. ‘Come on, Lele, this is unofficial. It’s me, Guido, asking you, not Commissario Brunetti. I want to know what you think of him.’

Lele looked down at the surface of the desk that stood beside him, moved a ceramic bowl a few millimetres to the left, glanced up at Brunetti, and said, ‘I think his eyes are for sale.’

‘What?’ asked Brunetti, not understanding at all.

‘Like Berenson. You know, you become an expert on something, and then people come to you and ask you if a piece is genuine or not. And because you’ve spent years or perhaps even your entire life studying something, learning about a painter or a sculptor, they believe you when you say a piece is genuine. Or that it’s not.’

Brunetti nodded. Italy was full of experts; some of them even knew what they were talking about. ‘Why Berenson?’

‘It seems he sold his eyes. Gallery owners or private collectors would ask him to authenticate certain pieces, and sometimes he’d say that they were genuine, but later they’d turn out not to be.’ Brunetti started to ask a question, but Lele cut him off. ‘No, don’t even ask if it could have been an honest mistake. There’s proof that he was paid, especially by Duveen, that he got a share of the take. Duveen had a lot of rich American clients; you know the type. They can’t be bothered learning about art, probably don’t even like it much, but they want to be known to have it, to own it. So Duveen matched their desire and their money with Berenson’s reputation and expertise, and everyone was happy; the Americans with their paintings, all with clear attributions; Duveen with the profits from the sales; and Berenson with both his reputation and his cut of the take.’

Brunetti paused a moment before he asked, ‘And Semenzato does the same?’

‘I’m not sure. But of the last four pieces they brought me in to take a look at, two were imitations.’ He thought for a moment, then added, grudgingly, ‘Good imitations, but still imitations.’

‘How did you know?’

Lele looked at him as though Brunetti had asked him how he knew a particular flower was a rose and not an iris. ‘I looked at them,’ he said simply.

‘Did you convince them?’

Lele weighed for a moment whether to be offended by the question or not, but then he remembered that Brunetti was, after all, only a policeman. ‘The curators decided not to acquire the pieces.’

‘Who had decided, originally, to buy them?’ But he knew the answer.

‘Semenzato.’

‘And who was offering to sell them?’

‘We were never told. Semenzato said it was a private sale, that he had been contacted by a private dealer who wanted to sell the pieces, two plates that were supposed to be Florentine, fourteenth century, and two Venetian. Those two were genuine.’

‘All from the same source?’

‘I think so.’

‘Could they have been stolen?’ Brunetti asked.

Lele considered this for a while before he answered. ‘Perhaps. But major pieces like that, if they’re genuine, people know about them. There’s a record of sales, and people who know majolica have a pretty good idea of who owns the best pieces and when they’re sold. But that’s not an issue with the Florentine pieces. They were fakes.’

‘What was Semenzato’s reaction when you said they were?’

‘Oh, he said that he was very glad I’d discovered it and saved the museum from an embarrassing acquisition. That’s what he called it, “an embarrassing acquisition”, as though it was perfectly all right for the dealer to try to sell pieces that were frauds.’

‘Did you say any of this to him?’ Brunetti asked.

Lele shrugged, a gesture that summed up centuries, perhaps millennia, of survival. ‘I didn’t have the feeling that he wanted to hear anything like that.’

‘And what happened?’

‘He said he’d return them to the dealer and tell him that the museum wasn’t interested in those two pieces.’

‘And the others?’

‘The museum went ahead and bought them.’

‘From the same dealer?’

‘Yes, I think so.’

‘Did you ask who it was?’

That question earned Brunetti another of those looks. ‘You can’t ask that,’ Lele explained.

Brunetti had known Lele all his life, so he asked, ‘Did the curators tell you who he was?’

Lele laughed in open delight at having his high-minded pose so easily shattered. ‘I asked one of them, but they had no idea. Semenzato never mentioned the name.’

‘How did he know the seller wouldn’t try to sell the ones you didn’t buy again, to another museum or to a private collector?’

Lele smiled his crooked smile, one side of his mouth turning down, the other up, a smile Brunetti had always thought best expressed the Italian character, never quite sure of gloom or glee and always ready to switch from one to the other. ‘I saw no point in mentioning it to him.’

‘Why?’

‘He’s always struck me as the kind of man who doesn’t like to be questioned or given advice.’

‘But you were called in to look at the plates.’

Again, that grin. ‘By the curators. That’s why I said he didn’t like to be given advice. He didn’t like it that I said they weren’t genuine. He was gracious and he thanked me for my help, said the museum was grateful. But he still didn’t like it.’

‘Interesting, isn’t it?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Very,’ Lele agreed, ‘especially from a man whose job is to protect the integrity of the museum’s collection. And,’ he added, ‘to see that fakes don’t remain on the market.’ He moved in front of Brunetti and crossed the room to straighten a painting hanging on the far wall.

‘Is there anything else I should know about him?’ Brunetti asked.

Facing away from Brunetti, looking at his own painting, Lele replied, ‘I think there’s probably a lot more you should know about him.’

‘Such as?’ he asked.

Lele came back towards him and studied the picture from the greater distance. He seemed pleased with whatever correction he had made. ‘Nothing specific. His reputation is very high in the city, and he has a lot of friends in high places.’

‘Then what do you mean?’

‘Guido, ours is a small world,’ Lele began and then stopped.

‘Do you mean Venice or those of you who work with antiques?’

‘Both, but especially us. There are only about five or ten of us in the city who really count: my brother, Bortoluzzi, Ravanello. And most of what we do is done by suggestions and hints so subtle that no one else would understand what was happening.’ He saw that Brunetti didn’t understand this, so he tried to explain. ‘Last week, someone showed me a polychrome Madonna with the Christ Child lying asleep in her lap. She was perfect fifteenth century. Tuscan. Perhaps even the end of the fourteenth century. But the dealer who showed it to me picked up the baby — they were carved in separate pieces — and pointed to a place on the back of the statue, just below the shoulder, where the faintest of patches could be seen.’ He waited for Brunetti’s response.

When that didn’t come, he continued. ‘That meant it was an angel, not a Christ Child. The patch covered the place where the wings had been, where they had been taken out, who knows when, and covered up so that it would look like a Christ Child.’

‘Why?’

‘Because there have always been more angels than Christs. So the removal of the wings. . .’ Lele’s voice trailed off.

‘Gave him a promotion?’ Brunetti asked, understanding.

Lele’s shout of laughter filled the gallery. ‘Yes, that’s it. He was promoted to Christ, and the promotion meant he’d earn a lot more money when he was sold.’

‘But the dealer showed you?’

‘That’s what I’m getting at, Guido. He told me by not telling me, just by showing me that tiny patch, and he would have done the same with any one of us.’

‘But not a casual client?’ Brunetti suggested.

‘Perhaps not,’ Lele agreed. ‘The patch was so well done, and the paint covered it so perfectly, that very few people would have noticed it. Or if they had noticed it, would not have known what it meant.’

‘Would you have?’

Lele nodded quickly. ‘Eventually, yes, I would have noticed it, if I had taken it home and lived with it.’

‘But not the casual buyer?’

‘No, probably not.’

‘Then why did he show you?’

‘Because he thought I might still like to buy the piece. And because it’s important to us to know that, at least among ourselves, we won’t lie or cheat or try to pass something off as what we know it isn’t.’

‘Is there a moral in all of this, Lele?’ Brunetti asked with a smile. Since his childhood, there had often been a lesson hidden in what Lele had told him.

‘I’m not sure if it’s a moral, Guido, but Semenzato is not a member of the club. He isn’t one of us.’

‘And who made that decision, he or you?’

‘I don’t think anyone ever really decided it. And I’ve certainly never heard anything about him directly.’ Lele, a man of images and not of words, looked out of the wide gallery window and studied the patterns of light on the canal beyond. ‘It’s more a question that he was never assumed to be one of us than that he was consciously excluded.’

‘Who else knows this?’

‘You’re the first person I’ve told about the majolica. And I’m not sure that anyone can be said to “know” this, at least not at any level he’d be aware of. It’s just something that we all understand.’

‘About him?’

With a laugh, Lele said, ‘About most of the antique dealers in the country, if you want the truth.’ Then, more soberly, he added, ‘And, yes, about him, too.’

‘Not the best recommendation for the director of one of the leading museums in Italy, is it?’ Brunetti asked. ‘It would make a person reluctant to buy a polychrome Madonna from him.’

With another loud burst of laughter, Lele said, ‘You should meet some of the others. I wouldn’t buy a plastic hairbrush from most of them.’ Both laughed at that for a moment, but then Lele asked, serious now, ‘Why are you interested in him?’

Part of Brunetti’s sworn trust as an officer of the law was never to reveal police information to anyone unauthorized to hear it. ‘Someone doesn’t want him to talk about the China exhibition, the one held here five years ago.’

‘Um?’ Lele murmured, asking for more information.

‘The person who arranged the show had an appointment to see him, but she was beaten, badly beaten, and told not to keep it.’

‘Dottoressa Lynch?’ Lele asked.

Brunetti nodded.

‘Have you spoken to Semenzato?’ Lele asked.

‘No. I don’t want to call any attention to him. Let whoever did this believe the warning worked.’

Lele nodded and rubbed his hand lightly across his lips, something he always did when trying to work out a problem.

‘Could you ask around, Lele? See if there’s any talk about him?’

‘What kind of talk?’

‘I don’t know. Debts, perhaps. Women. Whether you can get an idea of who that dealer was, or any other people he might know who are involved in . . .’ He trailed off, not sure what to name it.

‘He’s bound to know everyone in the trade.’

‘I know that. But I want to know whether he’s involved with anything illegal.’ When Lele didn’t answer, Brunetti said, ‘I’m not even sure what that means, and I’m not sure you can find it out.’

‘I can find out anything,’ Lele said dispassionately; it was a statement of fact, not a boast. He said nothing for a moment, hand still rubbing lightly back and forth on his compressed lips. Finally, he took his hand down and said, ‘All right. I know a few people I can ask, but I’ll need a day or two. One of the men I need to talk to is in Burma. I’ll call you by the end of the week. Is that all right?’

‘It’s fine, Lele. I don’t know how to thank you.’

The painter dismissed this with a wave of his hand. ‘Don’t thank me until I find out something.’

‘If there is anything,’ Brunetti added, as if to disarm the antipathy he had sensed in Lele towards the museum director.

‘Oh, there’s always something.’

* * * *

Chapter Six

When he left Lele’s gallery, he turned left and ducked into the underpass that led out to the Zattere, the long, open fondamenta that ran alongside the canal of the Giudecca. Across the water he saw the church of the Zittelle and then, further along, that of the Redentore, their domes soaring up above them. A strong wind came in from the east, stirring up whitecaps that knocked and bounced the vaporetti around like toys in a tub. Even at this distance, he could hear the thundering reverberation as one of them crashed against its mooring, saw it buck and tear at the rope that held it to the dock. He pulled up his collar and let the wind push him forward, keeping to the right, close against the buildings, to avoid the spray that spewed up from the embankment. Il Cucciolo, the waterside bar where he and Paola had spent so many hours during the first weeks after their meeting, was open, but the vast wooden deck in front of it, built out over the water, was completely empty, stripped of tables, chairs and umbrellas. To Brunetti, the first real sign of spring was the day when those tables and chairs appeared after their winter’s hibernation. Today, the thought made him shiver. The bar was open, but he avoided it, for the waiters were the rudest in the city, their arrogant slowness tolerable only in exchange for idle hours in the sun.

A hundred metres along, past the church of the Gesuati, he pulled open the glass door and slipped into the welcoming warmth of Nico’s bar. He stamped his feet a few times, unbuttoned his coat, and approached the counter. He ordered a grog and watched the waiter hold a glass under the spigot of the espresso machine and shoot it full of steam that quickly condensed to boiling water. Rum, a slice of lemon, a generous dash of something from a bottle, and then the barman placed it in front of him. Three sugars, and Brunetti had found salvation. He stirred the drink slowly, cheered by the aromatic steam that rose up softly from it. Like most drinks, it didn’t taste as good as it smelled, but Brunetti had grown so accustomed to this truth that he was no longer disappointed by it.

The door opened again, and a rush of icy wind blew two young girls in before it. They wore ski parkas lined with fur that burst out and surrounded their glowing faces, thick boots, leather gloves, and woollen slacks. From the look of them, they were American, or possibly German; if they were rich enough, it was often hard to tell.

‘Oh, Kimberly, are you sure this is the place?’ the first one said in English, sweeping the place with her emerald eyes.

‘It said so in the book, Alison. Nico’s is, like, famous.’ (She pronounced ‘Nico’ to rhyme with ‘sicko’, a word Brunetti had picked up at his last Interpol convention.) ‘It’s famous for gelato.’

It took a moment for the possibility of what might be about to happen to register on Brunetti. The instant it did, he sipped quickly at his grog, which was still so hot it burned his tongue. Patient, he took his spoon and began vigorously to stir the drink, moving it up high on the sides of the glass in hopes that this would somehow force it to cool more rapidly.

‘Oh there it is, I bet, under those round lid things,’ the first one said, coming to stand next to Brunetti and peering over the bar, down at where Nico’s famous gelato, production severely cut back in acknowledgement of the season, did indeed lie under those round lid things. ‘What flavour do you want?’

‘Do you think they’d have Heath Bar?’

‘Nah, not in Italy.’

‘Yeah, I guess not. I guess we’re gonna have to stick to, like, basics.’

The barman approached, smiling in acknowledgement of their beauty and radiant good health, to make no mention of their courage. ‘Si?’ he asked, smiling.

‘Do you have any gelato?’ one of them asked, pronouncing the last word loudly, if not correctly.

Without a pause, apparently accustomed to this, the barman smiled again and reached behind him to pull two cones from a tall pile on the counter.

‘What flavour?’ he asked in passable English.

‘What flavours have you got?’

‘Vaniglia, cioccolato, fragola, fior di latte, e tiramis ù .’

The girls looked at each other in great perplexity. ‘I guess we better stick with vanilla and chocolate, huh?’ one asked. Brunetti could no longer distinguish between them, so similar was the bored nasality of their voices.

‘Yeah, I guess.’

The first one turned to the barman and said, ‘Due vanilla and chocolatto, please.’

In a moment, the deed was done, the cones made and handed across the counter. Brunetti found the only consolation he could in taking a long drink of his grog, holding the half-full glass under his nose for a long time after he had swallowed.

The girls had to remove their gloves to take the cones, then one of them had to hold both cones while the other dug into her pockets for four thousand lire. The barman handed them napkins, possibly in the hope that this would keep them inside while they ate the ice cream, but the girls were not to be stopped. They took the napkins and wrapped them carefully around the base of the cones, pushed open the door, and disappeared into the increasing gloom of the afternoon. The bar filled with the sad boom of another boat as it crashed against the wharf.

The barman glanced at Brunetti. Brunetti met his eyes. Neither said a word. Brunetti finished the grog, paid, and left.

It was fully dark now, and Brunetti found himself eager to be at home, out of this cold, and away from the wind that still sliced across the open space along the waterside. He crossed in front of the French consulate, then cut back alongside the Giustiniani Hospital, a dumping ground for the old, and headed towards home. Because he walked quickly, it took him only ten minutes to get there. The entrance hall smelled damp, but the pavement was still dry. The sirens for acqua alta had sounded at three that morning, waking them all, but the tide had turned before the waters had seeped up through the chinks in the pavement. The full moon was only a few days away, and it had been raining heavily up north in Friuli, so there was a chance that the night would bring the first real flooding of the year.

At the top of the stairs, inside his home, he found what he wanted: warmth, the scent of a fresh-peeled tangerine, and the certainty that Paola and the children were at home. He hung his coat on one of the pegs beside the door and went into the living room. There he found Chiara, propped on her elbows at the table, holding a book open with one hand and stuffing peeled sections of tangerine into her mouth with the other. She looked up as he came in, smiled broadly, and held out a section of tangerine to him. ‘Ciao, Pap à .’

He came across the room, glad of the warmth, suddenly aware of how cold his feet were. He stood beside her and bent down far enough to allow her to pop a section of tangerine into his mouth. Then another, and another. While he chewed, she finished the peeled sections that lay on a dish beside her.

‘Papà, you hold the match,’ she said, reaching across the table and handing him a book of matches. Obedient, he peeled one off and lit it, holding the flame towards her. From, the pile on the table beside her, she selected a piece of tangerine peel and bent it until the two inner sides touched. As she did, a fine mist of oil shot out from the cracking skin and flared up in a blazing rocket of coloured flames. ‘Che bella’, Chiara said, eyes wide with delight that never seemed to diminish, no matter how many times they did this.

‘Are there any more?’ he asked.

‘No, Papà, that was the last one.’ He shrugged but not before a look of real sorrow flashed across her face. ‘I’m sorry I ate them all, Papà. There are some oranges. Do you want me to peel you one?’

‘No, angel, that’s all right. I’ll wait till dinner.’ He leaned to the right and tried to look into the kitchen. ‘Where’s Mamma?’

‘Oh, she’s in her study,’ Chiara said, turning back to her book. ‘And she’s in a really bad mood, so I don’t know when we’re going to eat.’

‘How do you know she’s in a bad mood?’ he asked.

She looked straight up at him and rolled her eyes. ‘Oh, Papà, don’t be silly. You know what she’s like when she’s in one of her moods. Told Raffi she couldn’t help him with his homework, and she yelled at me because I didn’t take the rubbish downstairs this morning.’ She propped her chin on both fists and looked down at her book. ‘I hate it when she’s like that.’

‘Well, she’s been having a lot of trouble at the university, Chiara.’

She turned a page. ‘Oh, you always stick up for her. But she’s no fun when she’s like that.’

‘I’ll go and talk to her. Maybe that will help.’ Both of them knew the unlikelihood of this but, the optimists of the family, they smiled to each other at the possibility.

She slumped back down over her book, Brunetti bent and kissed the top of her head and switched on the overhead light as he left the room. At the end of the corridor, he stopped in front of the door to Paola’s study. Talking to her seldom helped, but listening to her sometimes did. He knocked.

‘Avanti,’ she called out, and he pushed back the door. The first thing he noticed, even before he saw Paola standing at the glass door that led to the terrace, was the chaos on her desk. Papers, books, magazines spilled across its surface; some open, some closed, some used to mark pages in others. Only the self-deceived or the vision-impaired would ever call Paola either neat or orderly, but this mess was pushed out way beyond even her very tolerant limits. She turned from the door and noticed the way he stared at her desk. ‘I’ve been looking for something,’ she explained.

‘The person who killed Edwin Drood?’ he asked, referring to an article she had spent three months writing the previous year. ‘I thought you found him.’

‘Don’t joke, Guido,’ she said, in that voice she used when humour was as welcome as the old boyfriend of the bride. ‘I’ve spent most of the afternoon trying to hunt down a quotation.’

‘What do you need it for?’

‘A class. I want to begin with the quotation, and I need to tell them where it comes from, so I’ve got to locate the source.’

‘Who is it?’

‘The Master,’ she said, in English, and Brunetti watched her go all misty-eyed, the way she always did when she talked about Henry James. Did it make sense, he wondered, to be jealous? Jealous of a man who, it seemed to him from what Paola had said about him, not only couldn’t decide what his nationality was, but couldn’t seem to decide what sex he was, either?

For twenty years, this had gone on. The Master had gone on their honeymoon with them, was in the hospital when both of their children were born, seemed to tag along on every holiday they had ever taken. Stout, phlegmatic, possessed of a prose style that proved impenetrable to Brunetti, no matter how many times he tried to read him in either English or Italian, Henry James appeared to be the other man in Paola’s life.

‘What’s the quotation?’

‘He said it in response to someone who asked him, late in his life, what he had learned by all his experience.’

Brunetti knew what he was meant to do. He did it. ‘What did he say?’

‘ “Be kind and then be kind and then be kind,” ‘ she said in English.

The temptation proved too strong for Brunetti. ‘With or without commas?’

She shot him a grim look. Obviously not the day for jokes, especially about the Master. In an attempt to worm out from under the weight of that look, he said, ‘Seems a strange quotation to begin a literature class.’

She weighed whether to take his remark about the commas as still standing or to address herself to his next. Luckily, for he did want to eat dinner that night, she picked up the second. ‘We begin with Whitman and Dickinson tomorrow, and I’m hoping that the quotation will serve to pacify a few of the more horrible students in the class.’

‘Il piccolo marchesino?’ he asked, slighting, with the use of the diminutive, Vittorio, heir apparent to Marchese Francesco Bruscoli. Vittorio, it seemed, had been persuaded to terminate his attendance at the universities of Bologna, Padua and Ferrara, and had, six months ago, ended up at C à Foscari, attempting to take a degree in English, not because he had any interest in or enthusiasm for literature — indeed, for anything that resembled the written word — but simply because the English nannies who had raised him had made him fluent in that language.

‘He’s such a dirty-minded little pig,’ Paola said vehemently. ‘Really vicious.’

‘What’s he done now?’

‘Oh, Guido, it’s not what he does. It’s what he says, and the way he says it. Communists, abortion, gays. Any of those subjects just has to come up and he’s all over them, like slime, talking about how glorious it is that Communism’s been defeated in Europe, that abortion is a sin against God, and gays—’ She waved a hand towards the window, as if asking the roofs to understand. ‘My God, he thinks they should all be rounded up and put in concentration camps, and anyone with AIDS should be sequestered. There are times when I want to hit him,’ she said, with another wave of her hand but ending, she realized, weakly.

‘How do these subjects come up in a literature class, Paola?’

‘They rarely do,’ she admitted. ‘But I hear about him from some of the other professors.’ She turned to Brunetti and asked, ‘You don’t know him, do you?’

‘No, but I know his father.’

‘What’s he like?’

‘Pretty much the same. Charming, rich, handsome. And utterly vicious.’

‘That’s what’s so dangerous about him. He’s handsome and very rich, and many of the students would kill to be seen with a marchese, regardless, of what a little shit he is. So they ape him and repeat his opinions.’

‘But why are you so bothered about him now?’

‘Because tomorrow I begin with Whitman and Dickinson, I told you.’

Brunetti knew they were poets; had read the first and not liked him, found Dickinson difficult but, when he understood, wonderful. He shook his head from side to side, asking for an explanation.

‘Whitman was gay, and Dickinson probably was, too.’

‘And that sort of thing is not on il marchesino’s list of acceptable behaviour?’

‘To say the very least,’ replied Paola. ‘That’s why I want to begin with that quotation.’

‘You think something like that will make any difference?’

‘No, probably not,’ she admitted, sitting down in her chair and beginning to straighten out some of the mess on her desk.

Brunetti sat in the armchair against the wall and stretched his feet out in front of him. Paola continued closing books and placing magazines on neat piles. ‘I had a taste of the same today,’ he said.

She stopped what she was doing and looked across at him. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Someone who didn’t like gays.’ He paused and then added, ‘Patta.’

Paola closed her eyes for second, then asked, ‘What was it?’

‘Do you remember Dottoressa Lynch?’

‘The American? The one who’s in China?’

‘Yes to the first, and no to the second. She’s back here. I saw her today, in the hospital.’

‘What’s the matter?’ Paola asked with real concern, hands grown suddenly still over her books.

‘Someone beat her. Well, two men, really. They went to her place on Sunday, said they had come on business, and when she let them in, they beat her.’

‘How badly is she hurt?’

‘Not as badly as she could have been, thank God.’

‘What does that mean, Guido?’

‘She’s got a cracked jaw, and a few broken ribs, and some bad scrapes.’

‘If you think that’s not bad, I tremble to think of what would be,’ Paola said, then asked, ‘Who did it? Why?’

‘It might have something to do with the museum, but it might have something to do with what my American colleagues insist on calling her “lifestyle”.’

‘You mean that she’s a lesbian?’

‘Yes.’

‘But that’s insane.’

‘Agreed. But none the less true.’

‘Is it starting here?’ Clearly, rhetorical. ‘I thought that sort of thing happened only in America.’

‘Progress, my dear.’

‘But what makes you say that’s the reason?’

‘She said that the men knew about her and Signora Petrelli.’

Paola could never resist a set-up. ‘Before she went back to China a few years ago, you would have had trouble finding anyone in Venice who didn’t know about her and Signora Petrelli.’

More literal-minded, Brunetti protested, ‘That’s an exaggeration.’

‘Well, perhaps. But there was certainly talk at the time,’ Paola insisted.

Having corrected Paola once, Brunetti was content to leave it. Besides, he was growing hungrier, and he wanted his dinner.

‘Why wasn’t it in the papers?’ she suddenly asked.

‘It happened on Sunday. I didn’t find out about it until this morning and then only because someone noticed her name on the report. It had been given to the uniformed branch and was being treated as routine.’

‘Routine?’ she repeated in astonishment. ‘Guido, things like that don’t happen here.’

Brunetti chose not to repeat his remark about progress, and Paola, realizing he was going to offer no explanation, turned back to the desk. ‘I can’t spend any more time looking for it. I’ll have to think of something else.’

‘Why don’t you lie?’ Brunetti suggested casually.

Paola snapped her head up to look at him and asked, ‘What do you mean, lie?’

It seemed clear enough to him. ‘Just think of a place in one of the books where it might have been and tell them that’s where it is.’

‘But what if they’ve read the book?’

‘He wrote a lot of letters, didn’t he?’ Brunetti knew full well that he had: the letters had gone to Paris with them two years ago.

‘And if they ask what letter?’

He refused to answer so stupid a question.

‘To Edith Wharton, 26 July 1906,’ she supplied immediately, putting into her voice the tone of absolute certainty that Brunetti recognized as always sustaining her in her most outrageous inventions.

‘Sounds good to me,’ he said and smiled.

‘Me, too.’ She closed the last book, looked at her watch, then up at him. ‘It’s almost seven. Gianni had some beautiful lamb chops today. Come and have a glass of wine and talk to me while I cook them.’

Dante, Brunetti recalled, punished the Evil Counsellors by enclosing them within enormous tongues of flame, where they were to twist and burn for eternity. There had been, he remembered, no mention of lamb chops.

* * * *

Chapter Seven

When the story finally appeared the following day, it carried the headline ‘Attempted Robbery in Cannaregio’ and gave the briefest of accounts. Brett was described as an expert on Chinese art who had returned to Venice to seek funding from the Italian government for the excavations in Xian, where she co-ordinated the work of Chinese and Western archaeologists. There was a brief description of the two men, who had been foiled in their attempt by an unidentified ‘amica’ who happened to be in the apartment with Dottoressa Lynch at the time. When he read it, Brunetti wondered at the identity of the ‘amico’ who had suppressed the use of Flavia’s name. It might well have been anyone, from the mayor of Venice to the director of La Scala, attempting to protect his chosen prima donna from the possibility of harmful publicity.

When he got to work, he stopped in Signorina Elettra’s office on the way up to his own. The freesias were gone today, replaced by a luminous spray of calla lilies. She looked up when he came in and said immediately, without even bothering to say good morning, ‘Sergeant Vianello asked me to tell you that there was nothing in Mestre. He said he spoke to some people there, but no one knew anything about the attack. And,’ she continued, looking down at a paper on her desk, ‘no one has been admitted to any of the hospitals in the area with a cut on his arm.’ Before he could ask, she said, ‘And nothing from Rome yet about the fingerprints.’

Faced with dead ends on every side, Brunetti decided it was time to see what else there was to be learned about Semenzato. ‘You used to work at Banca d’ltalia, didn’t you, signorina?’

‘Yes, sir, I did.’

‘And you still have friends there?’

‘And in other banks.’ Not one to hide her light, Signorina Elettra.

‘Do you think you could spin a web of gossamer with your computer and see what you can find out about Francesco Semenzato? Bank accounts, stock holdings, investments of any sort.’

Her response was a smile so broad as to leave Brunetti wondering at the exact velocity with which news travelled at the Questura.

‘Of course, Dottore. Nothing easier. And would you like me to check on the wife, as well? I believe she’s Sicilian.’

‘Yes, the wife as well.’

Even before he could ask, she volunteered. ‘They’ve been having trouble with their phone lines, so it might take me until tomorrow afternoon.’

‘Are you at liberty to reveal your source, signorina?’

‘Someone who has to wait until the director of the bank’s computer system goes home,’ was all she revealed.

‘Very well,’ Brunetti said, content with her explanation. ‘I’d like you to check it with Interpol in Geneva, as well. You can contact—’

She cut him short, but she smiled as she did it. ‘I know the address, sir, and I think I know whom to contact.’

‘Heinegger?’ Brunetti asked, naming the captain in charge of the office of financial investigation.

‘Yes, Heinegger,’ she answered and repeated his address and fax number.

‘How did you learn that so quickly, signorina?’ he asked, honestly surprised.

‘I dealt with him often in my last job,’ she replied blandly.

Though he was a policeman, the connection between Banca d’ltalia and Interpol was one he didn’t want to ask about just then. ‘So you know what to do,’ was all he could think of to say.

‘I’ll bring you Heinegger’s reply as soon as it comes in,’ she said, turning to her computer.

‘Yes, thank you. Good morning, signorina.’ He turned and left the office, but not before taking another look at the flowers, framed against the open window behind them.

* * * *

The rain of the last few days had stopped, taking with it the immediate threat of acqua alta and bringing, instead, crystalline skies, so there was no chance of catching Lele at home: he would be somewhere in the city, painting. Brunetti decided to go to the hospital and continue his questioning of Brett, for he still had no clear idea of the reasons that had brought her back halfway across the world.

When he entered the hospital room, he thought for a moment that Signorina Elettra had been at work here as well, for masses of flowers exploded from every available flat surface. Roses, iris, lilies and orchids flooded the room with their mingled sweetness, and the wastepaper basket overflowed with crumpled wrapping paper from Fantin and Biancat, the two florists where Venetians were most likely to go. He noticed that Americans, or at least foreigners, had also sent flowers: no Italian would have sent a sick person those immense bouquets of chrysanthemums, flowers used exclusively for funerals and for the tombs of the departed. He realized that it made him uncomfortable to be in a hospital room with them but dismissed the sensation as the worst sort of superstition.

Both women were, as he had either expected or hoped, in the room, Brett propped up against the raised back of the bed, head cushioned between two pillows, and Flavia sitting in a chair at her side. Spread out on the surface of the bed between them were a number of coloured sketches of women in long, elaborate gowns. Each wore a diadem that surrounded her head in a jewelled sunburst. Brett glanced up from the drawings when he came in, and her lips moved minimally; the smile was all in her eyes. Flavia, after a moment, and at a reduced temperature, did the same.

‘Good morning,’ he said to both of them and glanced down at the pictures. The wave-patterned border at the hem of two of the dresses made them look oriental. But, instead of the usual dragons, the dresses were patterned with abstract splashes that hurled violent colours at one another and yet managed to create harmony, not dissonance.

‘What are those?’ he asked with real curiosity and, as soon as he spoke, realized he should have been asking Brett how she was.

Flavia answered him. ‘Sketches for the new Turandot at La Scala.’

‘Then you are going to sing it?’ he asked. The press had been buzzing with this for weeks, even though the opening night was almost a full year away. The soprano whose name had been ‘hinted at’ as the one ‘rumoured to be’ the ‘possible choice’ — this was the way things were expressed at La Scala — had said she was interested in the possibility and would consider it, which clearly meant she wasn’t, and wouldn’t. Flavia Petrelli, who had never sung the role, was named as the next possibility, and she had issued, just two weeks ago, a statement to the press saying she refused absolutely even to consider the idea, as close to a formal acceptance as a soprano could be expected to come.

‘You should know better than to try to solve the riddles of Turandot,’ Flavia said, voice falsely light, letting him know he had seen something he was not to have seen. She leaned forward and gathered the drawings together. Quickly translated, both messages meant he was to say nothing about this.

‘How are you?’ he finally asked Brett.

Though her jaws were no longer wired together, Brett’s smile was still faintly idiotic, lips separate from one another and pulling up at the corners. ‘Better. I can go home in a day.’

‘Two,’ Flavia corrected.

‘A day or two,’ Brett amended. Seeing him standing there, still in his coat, she said, ‘Excuse me. Please sit down.’ She pointed to a chair that stood behind Flavia. He picked it up and placed it beside the bed, folded his coat over the back and sat.

‘Do you feel like talking about what happened?’ he asked, encompassing both of them in the question.

Puzzled, Brett asked, ‘But we talked about this before, didn’t we?’

Brunetti nodded and asked, ‘What did they say to you? Exactly. Can you remember?’

‘Exactly?’ she repeated, confused.

‘Did they say enough to let you know where they came from?’ Brunetti prompted.

‘I see,’ Brett said. She closed her eyes and put herself momentarily back in the hall of her apartment, remembered the men, their faces and voices. ‘Sicilian. At least the one who hit me was. I’m less sure about the other. He said very little.’ She looked at Brunetti. ‘What difference does it make?’

‘It might help us identify them.’

‘I certainly hope so,’ Flavia broke in, giving no clues whether she spoke in reproach or hope.

‘Did either of you recognize any of the photos?’ he asked, though he was sure the officer who had brought over the photos of men who matched the descriptions the two women had given would have told him if they had.

Flavia shook her head, and Brett said, ‘No.’

‘You said they warned you not to go to a meeting with Dottor Semenzato. Then you said something about ceramics from the China exhibition. Do you mean the one that was here, at the Doge’s Palace?’

‘Yes.’

‘I remember,’ Brunetti said. ‘You organized it, didn’t you?’ he asked.

She forgot and nodded, then rested her head back on the pillows and waited a moment for the world to stop spinning. When it did, she said, ‘Some pieces came from our dig, in Xian. The Chinese chose me as liaison. I know people.’ Even though the wires were gone, she still moved her jaw gingerly; a deep buzz still underlay everything she said and filled her ears with its constant whine.

Flavia interrupted and explained for her. ‘The show opened first in New York and then went to London. Brett went to the New York opening and then back to close it down for shipment to London. But she had to go back to China before the London opening. Something happened at the dig.’ Turning to Brett, she asked, ‘What was it, cara?’

‘Treasure.’

That, apparently, was enough to remind Flavia. ‘They’d just opened up the passage into the burial chamber, so they called Brett in London and told her she had to go back to oversee the excavation of the tomb.’

‘Who was in charge of the opening here?’

This time, Brett answered. ‘I was, I got back from China three days before it closed in London. And then I came here with it to set it up.’ She closed her eyes then, and Brunetti thought she was tired with the talking, but she opened them immediately and continued. ‘I left before the exhibition closed, so they sent the pieces back to China.’

‘They?’ Brunetti asked.

Brett glanced across at Flavia before she answered, then said, ‘Dottor Semenzato was here, and my assistant came from China to close the show and send everything back.’

‘You weren’t in charge?’ he asked.

Again, she looked at Flavia before answering. ‘No, I couldn’t be here. I didn’t see the pieces again until this winter.’

‘Four years later?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Yes,’ she said and waved her hand as if that would help explain. ‘The shipment got held up on the way back to China and then in Beijing. Red tape. It ended up in a customs warehouse in Shanghai for two years. The pieces from Xian didn’t get back until two months ago.’ Brunetti watched her consider her words, searching for a way to explain. ‘They weren’t the same. Copies. Not the soldier or the jade shroud: they were the originals. But the ceramics, I knew it, but I couldn’t prove it until I tested them, and I couldn’t do that in China.’

He had learned enough from Lele’s offended glance not to ask her how she knew they were false. She just knew, and that was that. Prevented from asking a qualitative question, he could still ask a quantitative one. ‘How many pieces were fake?’

‘Three. Maybe four or five. And that’s only from the dig in Xian where I am.’

‘What about other pieces from the show?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know. That’s not the sort of question you can ask in China.’

Through all of this, Flavia sat quietly, turning her head back and forth as they spoke. Her lack of surprise told him that she already knew about this.

‘What have you done?’ Brunetti asked.

‘So far, nothing.’

Given the fact that this conversation was taking place in a hospital room and she was speaking through swollen lips, this seemed, to Brunetti, something of an understatement. ‘Who did you tell about it?’

‘Only Semenzato. I wrote to him from China, three months ago, and told him some of the pieces sent back were copies. I asked to see him.’

‘And what did he say?’

‘Nothing. He didn’t answer my letter. I waited three weeks, then I tried to call him, but that’s not easy, from China. So I came here to talk to him.’

Just like that? You can’t get through-on the phone, so you jump on a plane and fly halfway around the world to talk to someone?

As if she had read his thoughts, she answered. ‘It’s my reputation. I’m responsible for those pieces.’

Flavia broke in here. ‘The pieces could have been switched when they got back to China. It didn’t have to happen here. And you’re hardly responsible for what happened when they got there.’ There was real animosity in Flavia’s voice. Brunetti found it interesting that she sounded jealous, of all things, of a country.

Her tone wasn’t lost on Brett, who answered sharply, ‘It doesn’t matter where it happened; it happened.’

To divert them both and remembering what Lele had said about ‘knowing’ that something was genuine or false, Brunetti the policeman asked, ‘Do you have proof?’

‘Yes,’ Brett began, voice more slurred than it had been when he arrived.

Hearing that, Flavia interrupted them both and turned to Brunetti. ‘I think that’s enough, Dottor Brunetti.’

He looked across at Brett, and he was forced to agree. The bruises on her face seemed darker now than when he had come in, and she had sunk lower on the pillows. She smiled and closed her eyes.

He didn’t insist. ‘I’m sorry, signora,’ he said to Flavia. ‘But it can’t wait.’

‘At least until she’s home,’ Flavia said.

He glanced at Brett, to see what she thought of this, but she was asleep, head turned to one side, mouth slack and open. ‘Tomorrow?’

Flavia hesitated, then gave him a reluctant ‘Yes’.

He stood and took his coat from the chair. Flavia came as far as the door with him. ‘She’s not just worried about her reputation, you know,’ she said. ‘I don’t understand it, but she needs to see that these pieces get back to China,’ she added, shaking her head in apparent confusion.

Because Flavia Petrelli was one of the best singing actresses of her day, Brunetti knew it was impossible to tell when the actress spoke and when the woman, but this sounded like the second. Assuming that it was, he answered, ‘I know that. I think it’s one of the reasons I want to find out about this.’

‘And the other reasons?’ she asked suspiciously.

‘I won’t work any better if I’m doing it out of personal motives, signora,’ he said, signalling the end of their brief personal truce. He pulled on his coat and let himself out of the room. Flavia stood for a moment staring across at Brett, then returned to her seat beside the bed and picked up the pile of costume drawings.

* * * *

Chapter Eight

Leaving the hospital, Brunetti noticed that the sky had darkened, and a sharp wind had risen, sweeping across the city from the south. The air was heavy and damp, presaging rain, and that meant they might be awakened in the night by the shrill blast of the sirens. He hated acqua alta with the passion that all Venetians felt for it, felt an anticipatory rage at the gaping tourists who would cluster together on the raised wooden boards, giggling, pointing, snapping pictures and blocking decent people who just wanted to get to work or do their shopping so they could get inside where it was dry and be rid of the bother, the mess, the constant irritation that the unstoppable waters brought to the city. Already calculating, he realized that the water would affect him only on the way to and from work, when he had to pass through Campo San Bartolomeo at the foot of the Rialto Bridge. Luckily, the area around the Questura was high enough to be free of all but the worst flooding.

He pulled up the collar of his coat, wishing he had thought to wear a scarf that morning, and hunched his head down, propelled from behind by the wind. As he crossed behind the statue of Colleoni, the first fat drops splattered on the pavement in front of him. The only advantage of the wind was that it drove the rain at a sharp diagonal, keeping one side of the narrow calle dry, protected by the roofs. Those wiser than he had thought to bring umbrellas and walked protected by them, ignoring anyone who had to dodge around or under them.

By the time he got to the Questura, the shoulders of his coat were wet through and his shoes soaked. In his office, he removed his coat and put it on a hanger, then hung it on the curtain rod that ran in front of the window above the radiator. Anyone looking into the room from across the canal would see, perhaps, a man who had hanged himself in his own office. If they worked in the Questura, their first impulse would no doubt be to count the floors, looking to see if it was Patta’s window.

Brunetti found a single sheet of paper on his desk, a report from Interpol in Geneva saying that they had no information about and no record of Francesco Semenzato. Below that neatly typed message, however, there was a brief handwritten note: ‘Rumours here, nothing definite. I’ll ask around.’ And below that was a scrawled signature he recognized as belonging to Piet Heinegger.

His phone rang late that afternoon. It was Lele, saying that he had managed to get in touch with a few friends of his, including the one in Burma. No one had been willing to say anything about Semenzato directly, but Lele had learned that the museum director was believed to be involved in the antiques business. No, not as a buyer but as a seller. One of the men he had spoken to said he had heard that Semenzato had invested in an antique shop, but he knew no more than that, not where it was or who the official owner might be.

‘Sounds like that would create a conflict of interest,’ Brunetti said, ‘buying from his partner with the museum’s money.’

‘He wouldn’t be the only one,’ Lele muttered, but Brunetti let the remark lie. ‘There’s another thing,’ the artist added.

‘What?’

‘When I mentioned stolen art works, one of them said he’d heard rumours about an important collector in Venice.’

‘Semenzato?’

‘No,’ Lele answered. ‘I didn’t ask, but the word is out that I’m curious about him, so I’m sure my friend would have told me if it was Semenzato.’

‘Did he say who it was?’

‘No. He didn’t know. But the rumour is that it’s a gentleman from the South.’ Lele said this as if he believed it impossible for any gentleman to come from the South.

‘But no name?’

‘No, Guido. But I’ll keep asking around.’

‘Thanks. I appreciate this, Lele. I couldn’t do this myself.’

‘No, you couldn’t,’ Lele said evenly. Then, not even bothering to brush off Brunetti’s thanks, Lele said, ‘I’ll call you if I hear anything else,’ and hung up.

Believing that he had done enough for the afternoon and not wanting to be trapped on this side of the city by the arrival of acqua alta, Brunetti went home early and had two quiet hours to himself before Paola got back from the university. When she got home, soaked by the increasing intensity of the rain, she said that she had used the quotation, given the spurious attribution, but still the dreaded marchese had managed to spoil it, suggesting that a writer such as James, who was supposed to have such a good reputation, certainly could have avoided such simple-minded redundancies. Brunetti listened as she explained, surprised at how much he had come, over the last months, to dislike this young man he had never met. Food and wine tempered Paola’s mood, as they always did, and when Raffi volunteered to do the dishes, she radiated contentment and well-being.

They were in bed by ten, she deeply asleep over a particularly infelicitous example of student writing and he deeply engrossed in a new translation of Suetonius. He had just reached the passage describing those little boys swimming in Tiberius’ pool at Capri when the phone rang.

‘Pronto’ he answered, hoping it wouldn’t be police business but knowing that, at ten to eleven, it probably was.

‘Commissario, this is Monico.’ Sergeant Monico, Brunetti recalled, was in charge of the night shift that week.

‘What is it, Monico?’

‘I think we’ve got a murder, sir.’

‘Where?’

‘Palazzo Ducale.’

‘Who is it?’ he asked, though he knew.

‘The director, sir.’

‘Semenzato?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘What happened?’

‘It looks like a break-in. The cleaning woman found him about ten minutes ago and went screaming down to the guards. They went back up to the office and saw him, and they called us.’

‘What have you done?’ He dropped the book on to the floor at the side of the bed and began looking around the room to see where he had left his clothes.

‘We called Vice-Questore Patta, but his wife said he wasn’t there, and she has no idea of how to get in touch with him.’ Either of which, Brunetti reflected, could be a lie. ‘So I decided to call you, sir.’

‘Did they tell you what happened, the guards?’

‘Yes, sir. The man I spoke to said there was a lot of blood, and it looked like he’d been hit on the head.’

‘Was he dead when the cleaning lady found him?’

‘I think so, sir. The guards said he was dead when they got there.’

‘All right,’ Brunetti said, flipping back the covers. ‘I’ll go over there now. Send whoever’s there — who is it tonight?’

‘Vianello, sir. He was here on night shift with me, so he went over as soon as the call came in.’

‘Good. Call Dottor Rizzardi and ask him to meet me there.’

‘Yes, sir, I was going to call him as soon as I spoke to you.’

‘Good,’ Brunetti said, swinging his feet out and putting them on the floor. ‘I should be there in about twenty minutes. We’ll need a team to photograph and take prints.’

‘Yes, sir. I’ll call Pavese and Foscolo as soon as I’ve spoken to Dottor Rizzardi.’

‘All right. Twenty minutes,’ Brunetti said and hung up. Was it possible to be shocked and still not be surprised? A violent death, and only four days after Brett was attacked with similar brutality. While he pulled on his clothing and tied his shoes, he warned himself against jumping to conclusions. He walked around to Paola’s side of the bed, leaned down, and shook her gently by the shoulder.

She opened her eyes and looked up at him over the top of the glasses she had begun, that year, to use for reading. She wore a ragged old flannel dressing gown she had bought in Scotland more than ten years ago and, pulled over it, an Irish knit cardigan her parents had given her for Christmas almost as long ago. Seeing her like that, momentarily confused by his having pulled her from her first deep sleep and peering myopically at him, he thought how much she looked like the homeless and apparently mad women who passed their winter nights in the railway station. Feeling traitorous for the thought, he leaned into the circle of light created by her reading lamp and bent down to kiss her forehead.

‘Was that the sovereign call of duty?’ she asked, immediately awake.

‘Yes. Semenzato. The cleaning woman found him in his office at the Palazzo Ducale.’

‘Dead?’

‘Yes.’

‘Murdered?’

‘It looks that way.’

She removed her glasses and placed them on the papers that spilled across the covers in front of her. ‘Have you sent a guard to the American’s room?’ she asked, leaving it to him to follow the swift logic of what she said.

‘No,’ he admitted, ‘but I will as soon as I get to the Palazzo. I don’t think they’d risk two in the same night, but I’ll send a man over.’ How easily ‘they’ had come into existence, created by his refusal to believe in coincidence and Paola’s to believe in human goodness.

‘Who called?’ she asked.

‘Monico.’

‘Good,’ she said, recognizing the name and familiar with the man. ‘I’ll call him and tell him about the guard.’

‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘Don’t wait up. I’m afraid this will take a long time.’

‘So will this,’ she said, leaning forward and gathering up the papers.

He bent again and this time kissed her on the lips. She returned his kiss and turned it into a real one. He straightened up and she surprised him by wrapping her arms around his waist and pressing her face into his stomach. She said something that was too mumbled to understand. Gently, he stroked her hair, but his mind was on Semenzato and Chinese ceramics.

She pulled herself away and reached for her glasses. Putting them on, she said, ‘Remember to take your boots.’

* * * *

Chapter Nine

When commissario Brunetti of the Venice police arrived at the scene of the murder of the director of the most important museum in the city, he carried in his right hand a white plastic shopping bag which bore in red letters the name of a supermarket. Inside the bag were a pair of size ten rubber boots, black, which he had bought at Standa three years before. The first thing he did when he arrived at the guards’ station at the bottom of the staircase that led up to the museum was hand the bag to the guard he found there, saying he’d pick it up when he left.

As he placed the bag on the floor beside his desk, the guard said, ‘One of your men is upstairs, sir.’

‘Good. More will be coming soon. And the coroner. Has the press showed up yet?’

‘No, sir.’

‘What about the cleaning woman?’

‘They had to take her home, sir. She couldn’t stop crying after she saw him.’

‘That bad, is it?’

The guard nodded. ‘There’s an awful lot of blood.’

A head wound, Brunetti remembered. Yes, there’d be a lot of blood. ‘She’s bound to make a stir when she gets there, and that means someone will call Il Gazzetino. Try to keep the reporters down here when they arrive, will you?’

‘I’ll try, sir, but I don’t know if it’ll do any good.’

‘Keep them here,’ Brunetti said.

‘Yes, sir.’

Brunetti looked down the long corridor that led to a flight of stairs at the end. ‘Is the office up there?’ he asked.

‘Yes, sir. Turn left at the top. You’ll see the light at the end of the passage. I think your man is in the office.’

Brunetti turned away and started down the corridor. His steps echoed eerily, reverberating back at him from both sides and from the staircase at the end. Cold, the penetrating damp cold of winter, seeped out from the pavement below him and from the brick walls of the corridor. Behind him, he heard the sharp clang of metal on stone, but no one called out, so he continued down the corridor. The night mist had set in, painting a slippery film of condensation on the broad stone steps under his feet.

At the top, he turned left and made towards the light pouring from an open door at the end of the passage. Halfway there, he called out, ‘Vianello?’ Instantly, the sergeant appeared at the door, dressed in a heavy woollen overcoat, from under the bottom of which protruded a pair of bright yellow rubber boots.

‘Buona sera, signore,’ he said, and raised a hand in a gesture that was part salute, part greeting.

‘Buona sera, Vianello,’ Brunetti said. ‘What’s it like in there?’

Vianello’s lined face remained impassive when he answered, ‘Pretty bad, sir. It looks like there was a struggle: the place is a mess, chairs turned over, lamps knocked down. He was a big man, so I’d say there had to be two of them. But that’s just first impressions. I’m sure the lab boys can tell us more.’ He stepped back as he spoke, leaving room for Brunetti to follow him inside.

It was just as Vianello said: a floor lamp pitched forward against the desk, its glass dome shattered across the surface; a chair sprawled on its side behind the desk; a silk carpet lying in a bunched heap in front of the desk, its long fringe caught around the ankle of the man who lay dead on the floor beside it. He lay on his stomach, one arm trapped under the weight of his body, the other flung out ahead of him, fingers cupped upward, as if already begging mercy at the gate of heaven.

Brunetti looked at his head, at the grotesque halo of blood that surrounded it, and he quickly looked away. But wherever his eye rested, he saw blood: drops of it had fallen on the desk, a thin trickle of it led from the desk to the carpet, and more of it covered the cobalt blue brick which lay on the floor half a metre from the dead man.

‘The guard downstairs said it’s Dottor Semenzato,’ Vianello explained into the silence that radiated out from Brunetti. ‘The cleaning lady found him at about ten thirty. The office was locked from the outside, but she had a key, so she came in to check that the windows were closed and to clean the room, and she found him here. Like that.’

Brunetti still said nothing, merely moved over to one of the windows and looked down into the courtyard of the Palazzo Ducale. All was quiet; the statues of the giants continued to guard the staircase; not even a cat moved to disturb the moonlit scene.

‘How long have you been here?’ Brunetti asked.

Vianello shot back his cuff and looked at his watch. ‘Eighteen minutes, sir. I touched his pulse, but it was gone, and he was cold. I’d say he’d been dead at least a couple of hours, but the doctor can tell us better.’

From off to the left, Brunetti heard a siren shriek out and shatter the tranquillity of the night, and for a moment he thought it was the lab team, arriving in a boat and being stupid about it. But the siren rose in pitch, its insistent whine ever louder and more strident, and then it wailed its slow way down to the original note. It was the siren at San Marco, calling out to the sleeping city the news that the waters were rising: acqua alta had begun.

The noise of their actual arrival camouflaged by the siren, the two men of the lab crew set their equipment down in the hall outside the room. Pavese, the photographer, stuck his head into the room and saw the dead man on the floor. Apparently unmoved by what he saw, he called across to the other two, voice raised to be heard above the siren, ‘You want a whole set, Commissario?’

Brunetti turned from the window at the sound of the voice and walked over towards him, careful not to go near the body until it had been photographed and the floor around it checked for fibres and hairs or possible scuff marks. He wondered if this caution served any real purpose: Semenzato’s body had been approached by too many people, and the scene was already contaminated.

‘Yes, and as soon as you’re done with them, see what there is in the way of fibres and hairs, then we’ll have a look.’

Pavese displayed no irritation at having his superior tell him to do the obvious and asked, ‘Do you want a separate set of the head?’

‘Yes.’

The photographer busied himself with his equipment. Foscolo, the second member of the team, had already assembled the heavy tripod and was attaching the camera to it. Pavese bent down and rummaged in his equipment bag, pushing aside rolls of film and slim packets of filters, and finally pulled out a portable flash that trailed a heavy electrical cord. He handed the flash to Foscolo and picked up the tripod. His quick professional glance at the body had been enough. ‘I’ll get a couple of the whole room from here, Luca, then from the other side. There’s an electrical outlet under the window. When I’m done with the shot of the entire room, we’ll set up there, between the window and the head. I want to get a few of the whole body, then we’ll switch to the Nikon and do the head. I think the angle from the left would be better.’ He paused for a moment, considering. ‘We won’t need the filters. The flash is enough to get the blood.’

Brunetti and Vianello waited outside the door, through which burst the intermittent glow of the flash. ‘You think they used that brick?’ Vianello finally asked.

Brunetti nodded. ‘You saw his head.’

‘They wanted to make sure, didn’t they?’

Brunetti thought of Brett’s face and suggested, ‘Or perhaps they liked doing it.’

‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ Vianello said. ‘I suppose it’s possible.’

A few minutes later, Pavese stuck his head out. ‘We’re finished with the photos, Dottore.’

‘When will you have them?’ Brunetti asked.

‘This afternoon, about four, I’d say.’

Brunetti’s acknowledgement of this was cut off by the arrival of Ettore Rizzardi, medico legale, there to represent the state in declaring the evident, that the man was dead, and then to suggest the probable cause of death, in this case not hard to determine.

Like Vianello, he was wearing rubber boots, though his were a conservative black and came only to the hem of his overcoat. ‘Good evening, Guido,’ he said, as he came in. ‘The man downstairs said it’s Semenzato.’ When Brunetti nodded, the doctor asked, ‘What happened?’

Rather than answer, Brunetti stepped aside, allowing Rizzardi to see the unnatural posture of the body and the bright splashes of blood. The technicians had been at work, and now strips of bright yellow tape surrounded two rectangles the size of phone books in which faint scuff marks were visible.

‘Can we touch him?’ Brunetti asked Foscolo, who was now busy sprinkling black powder on the surface of Semenzato’s desk.

The technician exchanged a quick glance with his partner, who was placing tape around the blue brick. Pavese nodded.

Rizzardi approached the body first. He set his bag down on the seat of a chair, opened it, and removed a pair of thin rubber gloves. He slipped them on, crouched beside the body, and stretched his hand towards the dead man’s neck, but, seeing the blood that covered Semenzato’s head, he changed his mind and reached, instead, for the outflung wrist. The flesh he touched was cold, the blood inside it forever stilled. Automatically, Rizzardi shot back his starched cuff and looked at the time.

The cause of death was not far to seek: two deep indentations penetrated the side of his head, and there seemed to be a third on his forehead, though Semenzato’s hair had fallen forward in death to cover it partially. Bending closer, Rizzardi could see jagged pieces of bone within one of the holes, just behind the ear.

Rizzardi dropped on to both knees to get greater leverage and reached under the body to shift it over on to its back. The third indentation was now clearly visible, the flesh around it bruised and blue. Rizzardi reached down and lifted first one dead hand and then the other. ‘Guido, look at this,’ he said, indicating the back of the right hand; Brunetti knelt beside him and looked at the back of Semenzato’s hand. The skin on the knuckles was scraped raw, and one of the fingers was swollen and bent brokenly to one side.

‘He tried to defend himself,’ Rizzardi said, then looked down the length of the body that lay below him. ‘How tall would you say he is, Guido?’

‘One-ninety, certainly-taller than either of us.’

‘And heavier, too,’ Rizzardi added. ‘There’d have to have been two of them.’

Brunetti grunted in agreement.

‘I’d say the blows came from the front, so he wasn’t surprised by them, not if he was hit with that,’ Rizzardi said, pointing to the bright blue brick that lay inside its taped rectangle less than a metre from the body. ‘What about noise?’ Rizzardi asked.

‘There’s a television in the guards’ office downstairs,’ Brunetti answered. ‘It wasn’t on when I came in.’

‘I should think not,’ Rizzardi said, getting to his feet. He stripped the gloves from his hands and stuffed them carelessly in the pocket of his overcoat. ‘That’s all I can do tonight. If your boys can get him out to San Michele for me, I’ll take a closer look tomorrow morning. But it seems pretty clear to me. Three hard blows to the head with the corner of that brick. Wouldn’t take more than that.’

Vianello, who had been silent through all of this, suddenly asked, ‘Would it have been quick, Dottore?’

Before he answered, Rizzardi looked down at the body of the dead man. ‘It would depend on where they hit him first. And how hard. It’s possible that he could have fought them off, but not for long. I’ll check to see if there’s anything under his nails. My guess is that it was fast, but I’ll see what shows up.’

Vianello nodded and Brunetti said, ‘Thanks, Ettore. I’ll have them take him out tonight.’

‘Not to the hospital, remember. To San Michele.’

‘Of course,’ Brunetti answered, wondering if his insistence meant some new chapter in the doctor’s on-going battle with the directors of the Ospedale Civile.

‘I’ll say goodnight then, Guido. I should have something for you by tomorrow afternoon, but I don’t think there are going to be any surprises here.’

Brunetti agreed. The physical causes of violent death seldom revealed secrets: they lay, if anywhere, in the motive.

Rizzardi exchanged a nod with Vianello and turned to go. Suddenly he turned back and looked down at Brunetti’s feet. ‘Didn’t you wear boots?’ he asked with real concern.

‘I left them downstairs.’

‘Good thing you brought them. It was already way above my ankles in Calle della Mandola when I came. Lazy bastards hadn’t got the boards up yet, so I’m going to have to go back to Rialto to get home. It’ll be above my knees by now.’

‘Why don’t you take the Number One and get off at Sant’ Angelo?’ Brunetti suggested. Rizzardi lived, he knew, by the Cinema Rossini, and he could get there quickly from that boat stop without having to use Calle della Mandola, one of the lowest parts of the city.

Rizzardi looked at his watch and made quick calculations. ‘No. The next one leaves in three minutes. I’ll never make it. And then I’d have to wait twenty minutes at this time of night. Might as well walk. Besides, who knows if they’ve bothered to put the boards up in the Piazza?’ He started towards the door, but his real anger at this latest of the many inconveniences of living in Venice drew him back. ‘We ought to elect a German mayor some time. Then things would work.’

Brunetti smiled and said goodnight and listened to the doctor’s boots slapping on the stones of the corridor until the noise disappeared.

‘I’ll talk to the guards and have a look around downstairs, sir,’ Vianello said and left the office.

Brunetti went over to Semenzato’s desk. ‘You finished with this?’ he asked Pavese. The technician was busy with the telephone, which had ended up on the other side of the room, smashed against the wall with such force that it had gouged a chunk from the plaster before falling in pieces to the floor.

At Pavese’s nod, Brunetti pulled open the first drawer. Pencils, pens, a roll of cellophane tape and a packet of mints.

The second held a box of stationery engraved with Semenzato’s name and title and the name of the museum. Brunetti found it interesting that the name of the museum was in smaller type.

The bottom drawer held a few thick manila files, which Brunetti pulled out. He opened the top file on the desk and began to leaf through the papers.

Fifteen minutes later, when the technicians called across the room that they were finished, Brunetti knew little more about Semenzato than he had when he came in, but he did know that the museum was planning to mount, two years from now, a major show of Renaissance drawings and had already arranged extensive borrowings from museums in Canada, Germany and the United States.

Brunetti replaced the files and closed the drawer. When he looked up, he saw a man standing in the doorway. Short and sturdily built, he wore a rubber parka which hung open to reveal the white jacket of the hospital staff. Below this, Brunetti saw that he wore high black rubber boots. ‘You finished here, sir?’ he asked, giving a vague nod in the direction of Semenzato s body. As he spoke, another man, similarly dressed and booted, appeared at his side, a rolled canvas stretcher balanced on his shoulder as casually as if it were a pair of oars.

A nod from one of the technicians confirmed this, and Brunetti said, ‘Yes. You can take him now. Out to San Michele directly.’

‘Not to the hospital?’

‘No. Dottor Rizzardi wants him at San Michele.’

‘Yes, sir,’ the attendant said with a shrug. It was all overtime for them, and San Michele was further than the hospital.

‘Did you come through the Piazza?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Yes, sir. Our boat’s over by the gondolas.’

‘How high is it?’

‘About thirty centimetres, I’d say. But the boards are up in the Piazza, so it wasn’t too bad getting here. Which way are you going when you leave here, sir?’

‘Over towards San Silvestro,’ Brunetti answered. ‘I wondered how bad Calle dei Fuseri is.’

The second attendant, taller and thinner, with wispy blond hair that stuck out under the edges of his watch cap, answered, ‘It’s always worse than the Piazza, and there weren’t any boards there when I went through two hours ago, on the way to work.’

‘We can go up the Grand Canal,’ the first one said. ‘We could drop you at San Silvestro,’ he offered, smiling.

‘That’s very kind of you,’ Brunetti said, returning his smile and, like them, not unaware of the existence of overtime. ‘I’ve got to go back to the Questura,’ he lied. ‘And I’ve got my boots downstairs.’ That was true enough, but even if he had not brought them, he would have refused their offer. He did not relish the company of the dead and would have preferred to ruin his shoes than to share his ride home with a corpse.

Vianello came back in then and reported that there was nothing new to learn from the guards. One of them had admitted that they had been in the small office, watching television, when the cleaning lady came screaming down the stairs. And those steps, Vianello assured him, were the only access to this part of the museum.

They stayed until the body was removed, then waited in the corridor while the technicians locked the office and sealed it against unauthorized entry. The four of them went down the stairs together and stopped outside the open door of the guards’ office. The guard who had been there when Brunetti came in looked up from reading Quattro Ruote when he heard them come in. It always surprised Brunetti that anyone who lived in a city where there were no cars would read an automobile magazine. Did some of his sea-locked fellow citizens dream of cars the way men in prison dreamed of women? In the midst of the absolute silence that reigned over Venice at night, did they long for the roar of traffic and the blare of horns? Perhaps, less fantastically, they wanted no more than the convenience of being able to drive home from the supermarket, park the car in front of the house and unload the groceries, rather than carry the heavy bags along crowded streets, up and down bridges, and then up the many flights of stairs that seemed, inevitably, to lurk in wait for all Venetians.

Recognizing Brunetti, he asked, ‘Are you here for your boots, sir?’

‘Yes.’

He reached under the desk to pull out the white shopping bag and handed it to Brunetti, who thanked him.

‘Safe and sound,’ the guard said and smiled again.

The director of the museum had just been beaten to death in his office and whoever did it had walked past the guards’ station unseen, but at least Brunetti’s boots were safe.

* * * *

Chapter Ten

Because it was after two when Brunetti got home that night, he slept until well past eight the next morning and woke only, and grudgingly, when Paola shook him lightly by the shoulder and told him coffee was beside him. He managed to tight off full consciousness for another few minutes, but then he smelled the coffee, gave up and seized the day. Paola had disappeared after bringing the coffee, a decision the wisdom of which had been taught to her over the years.

When he finished the coffee, he pushed back the covers and went to look out of the window. Rain. And he remembered that the moon had been almost full the night before, so that meant more acqua alta with the change of tide. He went down the corridor to the bathroom and took a long shower, trying to store up enough heat to last him the day. Back in the bedroom, he began to dress and, while knotting his tie, decided he had better wear a sweater under his jacket because the visits he had already planned to both Brett and Lele would have him walking from one side of the city to the other. He opened the second drawer in the armadio and reached for his grey lambswool. Not finding it, he reached into the next drawer, then the one above it. Detective-like, he thought of the places where it could be, checked the remaining two, and then remembered that Raffi had borrowed the sweater last week. That meant, Brunetti was sure, that he would find it lying in a crumpled ball in the bottom of his son’s closet or in a bunched heap at the back of a drawer. The recent improvement in his son’s academic performance had not, alas, extended to habits of personal cleanliness or general neatness.

He went across the hall and, because the door was open, into his son’s room. Raffi had already left for school, but Brunetti hoped he wasn’t wearing the sweater. The more he thought about it, the more he wanted to wear that sweater, and the more irritated he became at being frustrated in that desire.

He opened the cupboard. Jackets, shirts, a ski parka, and on the floor assorted boots, tennis shoes and a pair of summer sandals. But no sweater. It wasn’t draped over the chair, nor over the end of the bed. He opened the first drawer in the dresser and found an upheaval of underwear. The second held socks, none of them matching and, he feared, few of them clean. The third drawer looked more promising: it held a sweatshirt and two T-shirts that bore insignia Brunetti didn’t bother to read. He wanted his sweater, not publicity for the rainforest. He pushed aside the second T-shirt, and his hand froze.

Lying below the T-shirts, half hidden, but lazily so, were two syringes, neatly wrapped in their sterile plastic wrappers. Brunetti felt his heartbeat quicken as he stared down at them. ‘Madre di Dio’ he said out loud and looked quickly over his shoulder, afraid that Raffi would come in and find his father searching his room. He pushed the T-shirts back over the needles and slipped the drawer closed.

Suddenly, he found himself remembering the Sunday afternoon, a decade ago, when he had gone to the Lido with Paola and the children. Raffi, running on the beach, had stepped on a piece of broken bottle and sliced open the sole of his foot. And Brunetti, mute in the face of his son’s pain and his own aching love for him, had wrapped a towel around the cut, gathered him up in his arms and carried him, running all the way, the kilometre to the hospital that stood at the end of the beach. He had waited for two hours, dressed in his bathing suit and chilled to the bone by fear and the air conditioning, until a doctor came out and told him the boy was fine. Six stitches and crutches for a week, but he was fine.

What made Raffi do it? Was he too strict a father? He had never raised his hand to either child, seldom raised his voice; the memory of the violence of his own upbringing was enough to destroy any violent impulse he might have had towards them. Was he too busy with his work, too busy with the problems of society to worry about those of his own children? When was the last time he had helped either one with homework? And where did he get the drugs? And what was it? Please, let it not be heroin, not that.

Paola? She usually knew before he did what the kids were doing. Did she suspect? Could it be that she knew and hadn’t told him? And if she didn’t know, should he do the same, protect her from this?

He reached out an unsteady hand and lowered himself to the edge of Raffi’s bed. He locked his hands together and stuck them between his knees, staring down at the floor. Vianello would know who sold drugs in this neighbourhood. Would Vianello tell him if he knew about Raffi? One of Raffi’s shirts lay beside him on the bed. He reached out and pulled it towards him, pressed it to his face and smelled his son’s odour, that same scent he had first smelled the day Paola came home from the hospital with Raffi and he pressed his face into the round belly of his naked son. His throat closed and he tasted salt.

He sat on the edge of the bed for a long time, remembering the past and shying away from any thought of the future beyond the conviction that he would have to tell Paola. Though he had already embraced his own guilt, he hoped she would deny it, assure him that he had been father enough to his two children. And what about Chiara? Did she know, or suspect? And what beyond that? He stood up at that thought and left the room, leaving the door open, as he had found it.

Paola sat on the sofa in the living room, feet propped up on the low marble table, reading that morning’s paper. That meant she had already been out in the rain to get it.

He stood at the door and watched her turn a page. The radar of long marriage caused her to turn to him. ‘Guido, will you make more coffee?’ she asked and turned back to the paper.

‘Paola,’ he began. She registered the tone and lowered the paper to her lap. ‘Paola,’ he repeated, not knowing what he had to say or how to say this. ‘I found two syringes in Raffi’s room.’

She paused, waiting for him to say more, then picked up the paper and continued to read.

‘Paola, did you hear what I said?’

‘Hm?’ she asked, head tilted back to read the headline at the top of the page.

‘I said I found two syringes in Raffi’s room. In the bottom of a drawer.’ He moved towards her, possessed for an instant of the mad urge to rip the paper from her hands and hurl it to the floor.

‘That’s where they were, then,’ she said, and turned the page.

He sat beside her on the sofa and, forcing the gesture to remain cairn, placed his palm flat on the page in front of her and pushed the paper slowly on to her lap. ‘What do you mean, “That’s where they were’’?’ he asked, voice tight.

‘Guido,’ she asked, turning her full attention to him, now that the paper was gone, ‘what’s the matter with you? Don’t you feel well?’

Entirely unaware of what he was doing, he contracted his hand into an angry fist, dragging the paper into a loose ball. ‘I said I found two syringes in Raffi’s room, Paola. Syringes. Don’t you understand?’

She stared at him for a moment, eyes wide in confusion, and then she understood what the syringes meant to him. Their eyes locked, and he watched as Raffi’s mother registered his own belief that their son was addicted to drugs. Her mouth contracted, her eyes opened wide, and then she put back her head and began to laugh. She laughed, exploded into peals of real mirth and fell away from him sideways on the sofa, tears filling her eyes. She wiped at them, but she couldn’t stop laughing. ‘Oh, Guido,’ she said, hand to her mouth in a vain effort to stop herself. ‘Oh, Guido, no, you can’t be thinking that. Not drugs.’ And she was gone in another fit of laughter.

Brunetti thought for a moment that this was the hysteria of real panic, but he knew Paola too well for that; this was the pure laughter of high comedy. With a violent gesture, he grabbed the newspaper from her lap and hurled it to the floor. His rage sobered her instantly, and she pushed herself upright on the sofa.

‘Guido. I tarli,’ she said, as though that explained it all.

Was she drugged too? What did woodworm have to do with this?

‘Guido,’ she repeated, keeping her voice soft, her tone level, as if speaking to the dangerous or the mad. ‘I told you last week. We’ve got woodworm in the table in the kitchen. The legs are full of them. And the only way to get rid of them is to inject poison into the holes they leave. Remember, I asked you if you’d help me move it out on to the terrace the first sunny day we have, so the fumes won’t kill us all?’

Yes, he remembered this, but vaguely. He hadn’t been paying attention when she told him, but it came back now.

‘I asked Raffi to get me the syringes and some rubber gloves so we can inject the poison into the table. I thought he’d forgotten them, but I suppose he just put them in his drawer. And then forgot to tell me he’d got them.’ She reached out and placed her hand over his. ‘It’s all right, Guido. It isn’t what you thought.’

He had to lean against the back of the sofa as a burning rush of relief swept over him. He rested his head back and closed his eyes. He wanted to laugh at the absurdity of it, wanted to be as free to make fun of his fear as Paola was, but that wasn’t possible, not yet.

When he could finally speak, he turned to her and asked, ‘Don’t ever tell Raffi, please, Paola.’

She leaned towards him and placed her palm against his cheek, studying his face, and he thought she was going to promise, but then she collapsed helplessly on his chest, lost again to laughter.

The contact of her body freed him at last, and he began to laugh, beginning with a faint chuckle and a shake of his head, but then graduating into real laughter, shouts of it, wild hoots of relief and joy and pure delight. She tightened her arms around him and then inched her body up across his chest, seeking his lips with hers. Like a pair of adolescents, then, they made love there on the sofa, heedless of the clothes that ended up heaped on the floor below them, heaped with much the same abandon as were those in Raffi’s cupboard.

* * * *

Chapter Eleven

At the bottom of the Rialto Bridge, he slipped under the covered passageway to the right of the statue of Goldoni, heading back towards SS. Giovanni e Paolo and Brett’s apartment. He knew she was home because the officer who had sat outside her hospital room for a day and a half had reported back to the Questura when she checked herself out and returned to her apartment. No guard had been posted at her home because a uniformed policeman could not stand in one of the narrow calli of Venice without being asked by everyone who passed what he was doing there, nor could a detective who was not a resident of the neighbourhood stand around for more than half an hour without the Questura receiving phone calls reporting his suspicious presence. Non-Venetians thought of it as a city; residents knew it was just a sleepy little country town with an impulse towards gossip, curiosity and small-mindedness no different from that of the smallest paese in Calabria or Aspromonte.

Though it had been years since he had been in her apartment, he found it with little difficulty, on the right side of Calle dello Squero Vecchio, a street so small that the city had never bothered to paint its name on the wall. He rang the bell and, moments later, a voice came through the intercom asking who he was. He was glad they were taking at least this minimum precaution; too often the people of this peaceful city merely clicked open their doors without bothering to learn who was there.

Though the building had been restored within the last few years and the stairwells newly plastered and painted, salt and humidity had already begun their work, devouring the paint and scattering large droppings of it on the floor, like scraps under a table. As he turned into the fourth and final flight of steps, he looked up and saw that the heavy metal door to the apartment was open, held back by Flavia Petrelli. However nervous and strained it was, that actually did seem to be a smile.

They shook hands at the door, and she stepped back to allow him to enter. They spoke at the same time, she saying, ‘I’m glad you came,’ and he, ‘Permesso,’ as he stepped inside.

She wore a black skirt and a low-necked sweater in a canary yellow that few women would risk. Flavia’s olive complexion and nearly black eyes glowed in response to the colour. But on closer inspection he saw that the eyes, however beautiful, were tired, and small lines of tension radiated from her mouth.

She asked for his coat and hung it in a large armadio that stood on the left of the hallway. He had read the report of the officers who responded to the attack, so he couldn’t keep himself from looking down at the floor and at the brick wall. There was no sign of blood, but he could smell strong cleansers and, he thought, wax.

Flavia made no motion to go back into the living room but kept him there and asked, her voice low, ‘Have you found out anything?’

‘About Dottor Semenzato?’

She nodded.

Before he could answer, Brett called out from the living room, ‘Stop plotting, Flavia, and bring him in here.’

She had the grace to smile and shrug, then turned and led him back into the living room. It was as he remembered it, filled, even on this dreary day, with light that filtered in from the six immense skylights cut into the roof. Brett sat, dressed in burgundy slacks and a black turtleneck sweater, on a sofa placed between two tall windows. Brunetti could see that parts of her face, though far less swollen than they had been in the hospital, were still angry blue. She shifted herself to the left, leaving him a space next to her, and extended her hand.

He took her hand and sat beside her, looking at her more closely.

‘No more Frankenstein,’ she said, smiling to show not only that her teeth were free of the wires that had bound them together for most of the time that she was in the hospital, but that the cut on her lip had healed sufficiently for her to be able to close her mouth.

Brunetti, familiar with the assumed omniscience of Italian doctors and their concomitant inflexibility, asked in real surprise, ‘How did you get them to let you out?’

‘I made a scene,’ she said quite simply.

Offered no more than that, Brunetti glanced at Flavia, who covered her eyes with her hand and shook her head at the memory.

‘And?’ he asked.

‘They said I could go if I’d eat, so now my diet has progressed to bananas and yoghurt.’

With the talk of food, Brunetti looked more closely at her and saw that, under the bruises and scrapes, her face was indeed thinner, the lines finer and more angular.

‘You should eat more than that,’ he said. From behind him, he heard Flavia laugh, but when he turned to her, she recalled him to the business at hand by asking, ‘What about Semenzato? We read about it this morning.’

‘It’s pretty much as they wrote. He was killed in his office.’

‘Who found him?’ Brett asked.

‘The cleaning woman.’

‘What happened? How was he killed?’

‘He was hit on the head.’

‘With what?’ asked Flavia.

‘A brick.’

Suddenly curious, Brett asked, ‘What kind of brick?’

Brunetti remembered where he had first seen it, beside the body. ‘It’s dark blue, about twice the size of my hand, but there are some markings on it, in gold.’

‘What was it doing there?’ Brett asked.

‘The cleaning woman said he used it as a paperweight. Why do you want to know?’

She nodded as if in answer to a different question and pushed herself up from the sofa and walked across the room to the bookshelves. Brunetti winced at the gingerly way she walked, at how slowly she raised her arm to pull a thick book down from a high shelf. Tucking it under one arm, she came back towards them and placed the book on the low table that stood in front of the sofa. She flipped it open, riffled through a few pages, then pushed it open and held it there with both palms pressed down on the outer edge of the pages.

Brunetti bent forward and looked at the coloured photo on the page. It appeared to be an immense gate, but all scale was missing because it wasn’t attached to walls of any sort; instead, it stood free in a room, perhaps a museum gallery. Immense winged bulls stood in protective posture on either side of the opening. The background was the same cobalt blue of the brick that had been used to kill Semenzato, the body of the animals the same vibrant gold. A closer look showed him that the wall was entirely constructed of rectangular bricks, the form of the bulls raised up upon its surface in low relief.

‘What is it?’ he asked, pointing down at the photo.

‘The Ishtar Gate of Babylon,’ she said. ‘Much of it’s been reconstructed, but that’s where the brick came from. That or a structure like it, from the same place.’ Before he could ask, she explained, ‘I remember that some of the bricks were in the storerooms of the museum when we were working there.’

‘But how did it get on to his desk?’ Brunetti asked.

Brett smiled again. ‘The perks of the job, I suppose. He was the director, so he could have pretty well anything he wanted from the permanent collection brought up to his office.’

‘Is that normal?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Yes, it is. Of course, they can’t have a Leonardo or a Bellini hanging there just for them to look at, but it’s not unusual for pieces from a museum’s holdings to be used to decorate an office, especially the director’s.’

‘Are records kept of this kind of borrowing?’ he asked.

From the other side of the table, Flavia crossed her legs with a slither of silk and said softly, ‘Ah, so that’s how it is.’ Then she added, as if Brunetti had asked, ‘I met him only once, but I didn’t like him.’

‘When did you meet him, Flavia?’ Brett asked, ignoring Brunetti’s question.

‘About a half hour before I met you, cara. At your exhibition at the Palazzo Ducale.’

Almost automatically, Brett corrected her, ‘It wasn’t my exhibition.’ Brunetti had the feeling that this same correction had been made many times before.

‘Well, whosever it was, then,’ Flavia said. ‘It had just opened, and I was being shown around the city, given the full treatment — visiting diva and all that.’ Her tone made the idea of her fame sound faintly ridiculous. Since Brett must know this story of their meeting, Brunetti assumed the explanation was directed at him.

‘Semenzato showed me through the galleries, but I had a rehearsal that afternoon, and I suppose I might have been a bit brusque with him.’ Brusque? Brunetti had seen Flavia’s ill humour, and brusque was hardly an adequate term to describe it.

‘He kept telling me how much he admired my talent.’ She paused and leaned towards Brunetti, placing a hand on his arm while she explained, ‘That always means they’ve never heard me sing and probably wouldn’t like it if they did, but they’ve heard enough to know that I’m famous, so they feel they have to flatter me.’ That explanation given, she removed her hand and sat back in her chair. ‘I had the feeling that, while he was showing me how wonderful the exhibition was—’ here she turned to Brett and added, ‘and it was,’ then turned her attention back to Brunetti and continued — ‘what I was supposed to be registering was how wonderful he was for having thought of it. Though he didn’t. Well, I didn’t know that at the time — that it was Brett’s show — but he was pushy about it, and I didn’t like it.’

Brunetti could well imagine that she wouldn’t like the competition of pushy people. No, that was unfair, for she didn’t push herself forward. He had to admit that he had been wrong the last time he met her. There was no vanity here, only the calm acceptance of her own worth and of her own talent, and he knew enough about her past to realize how hard that must have been to achieve.

‘But then you came by with a glass of champagne and rescued me from him,’ she said, smiling at Brett.

‘That’s not a bad idea, champagne,’ Brett said, cutting short Flavia’s flow of memory, and Brunetti was struck at how very similar her reaction was to Paolas whenever he began to tell people about the way they met, crashing into one another at the end of one of the aisles in the library of the university. How many times in their years together had she asked him to get her a drink or otherwise interrupted his story by asking someone else a question? And why did the telling of that story bring him such joy? Mysteries. Mysteries.

Taking the hint, Flavia got out of her chair and went across the room. It was only eleven thirty in the morning, but if they felt like drinking champagne, he hardly thought it his place to contradict or try to prevent them.

Brett flipped a page in the book, then sat back in the sofa, and the pages floated back into place, showing Brunetti the gold bull, part of which had killed Semenzato.

‘How did you meet him?’ Brunetti asked.

‘I worked with him on the China show, five years ago. Most of our contact was through letters because I was in China while most of the arrangements were being made. I wrote and suggested a number of pieces, sending photos and dimensions, and weights, since they all had to be air-freighted from Xian and Beijing to New York and London for the exhibition there, and then to Milan, and then trucked and boated here.’ She paused for a moment and then added, ‘I didn’t meet him until I got here to set the show up.’

‘Who decided what pieces would come here from China?’

This question caused her to grimace in remembered exasperation. ‘Who knows?’ When he failed to understand, she tried to explain. ‘Involved in this were the Chinese government, their ministries of antiquities and foreign affairs, and, on our side’— he noticed that Venice was, unconsciously, ‘our side’ — ‘the museum, the department of antiquities, the finance police, the ministry of culture, and a few other bureaus I’ve forced myself to forget about.’ She allowed the memory of officialdom to flow across her. ‘Here, it was awful, far worse than for New York or London. And I had to do all this from Xian, with letters delayed in the mail, or held up by the censors. Finally, after three months of it - this was about a year before it opened - I came here for two weeks and got most of it done, though I had to fly down to Rome twice to do it.’

‘And Semenzato?’ Brunetti asked.

‘I think, first, you have to understand that his was pretty much a political appointment.’ She saw Brunetti’s surprise and smiled. ‘He had museum experience, I forget where. But his selection was a political payoff. Anyway, there were—’ she corrected herself immediately - ‘there are curators at the museum who actually take care of the collection. His job was primarily administrative, and he did that very well.’

‘What about the exhibition here? Did he help you set it up?’ From the other side of the apartment, he could hear Flavia moving around, hear drawers and cabinets being opened and closed, the clink of glasses.

‘To a small degree. I told you how I more or less commuted back and forth from Xian for the openings in New York and London, but I came here for the opening.’ He thought she was finished, but then she added, ‘And I stayed on for about a month after it.’

‘How much contact did you have with him?’

‘Very little. He was on vacation for much of the time it was being set up, and then when he got back, he had to go to Rome for conferences with the Minister, trying to arrange an exchange with the Brera in Milan for another exhibition they were planning.’

‘But certainly you dealt with him personally at some time during all of this?’

‘Yes, I did. He was utterly charming and, when he could be, very helpful. He gave me carte blanche with the exhibition, allowed me to set it up as I pleased. And then, when it closed, he did the same for my assistant.’

‘Your assistant?’ Brunetti asked.

Brett glanced across towards the kitchen and then answered, ‘Matsuko Shibata. She was my assistant in Xian, on loan from the Tokyo Museum, in an exchange policy between the Japanese and Chinese governments. She’d studied at Berkeley but gone back to Tokyo after she got her degree.’

‘Where is she now?’ Brunetti asked.

She bent down over the book and turned a block of pages, her hand coming to rest beside a delicate Japanese screen painting that showed herons in flight above a tall growth of bamboo. ‘She’s dead. She was killed in an accident on the site.’

‘What happened?’ Brunetti spoke very softly, aware that Semenzato’s death made this accident into something that Brett had already begun to examine in an entirely new fashion.

‘She fell. The dig in Xian is little more than an open pit covered by an aeroplane hangar. All of the statues were buried, part of the army that the emperor would take into eternity with him. In some places, we’ve had to dig down three or four metres to reach them. There’s an outer perimeter above the dig, and there’s a low wall that protects tourists from falling into it or from kicking dirt down on us when we’re working. In some areas, where tourists aren’t permitted, there’s no wall. Matsuko fell,’ she began, but Brunetti watched as she continued to process new possibilities and adjusted her language accordingly. She restated this. ‘Matsuko’s body was found at the bottom of one of these places. She’d fallen about three metres and broken her neck.’ She glanced across at Brunetti and made open admission of her new doubts by changing that last sentence. ‘She was found at the bottom, with a broken neck.’

‘When was she killed?’

A loud shot rang out from the kitchen. Entirely without thinking, Brunetti pivoted out of his chair and crouched in front of Brett, his body placed between her and the open door to the kitchen. His hand was underneath his jacket, pulling at his revolver, when they heard Flavia shout, ‘Porco vacca,’ and then both of them heard the unmistakable sound of champagne splashing from the neck of a bottle on to the floor.

He released his hold on the pistol and moved back into his seat without saying anything to Brett. In different circumstances, it might have been funny, but neither of them laughed. By silent consent, they decided to ignore it, and Brunetti repeated his question: ‘When was she killed?’

Deciding to save time and answer all of his questions at once, she said, ‘It happened about three weeks after I’d sent my first letter to Semenzato.’

‘When was that?’

‘In the middle of December. I took her body back to Tokyo. That is, I went with it. With her.’ She stopped, voice dried up by memory that she was not going to let Brunetti have any part of.