The Bellini Card

63

Scorlotti understood that the commissario wanted to be alone. He was not fooled by his air of weary calm. Brunelli might despise the politics of his situation, but he hated injustice even more-especially injustice perpetrated by people whose job was to dispense it fairly.

The walk, Scorlotti dimly supposed, would lead to a resolution.

Brunelli’s own thoughts were equally vague, as he stepped out of the Procuratie and began to stump angrily along the Molo. He did not exercise enough, as it was, and as a matter of course he liked to eat too well- seppia con nero was just the tip of the iceberg. He counted himself lucky that he could eat well, for many people in Venice had been on rations for years, ever since the arrival of the friends and the decline of the port. Sometimes his wife reminded him to be more forgiving. Hunger makes thieves, she said.

He walked, without really choosing where he went, following the invitation of a bridge or the angle of an alleyway, but the intricacy of the walk pleased him, not least because it reflected the intricacies of his own mind. The stadtmeister complained of having nowhere to ride, or to hit his stride when he wanted a walk; sometimes he had himself shipped out to the Lido for an afternoon. “I like a straight line, Brunelli, and-let us not delude ourselves-that goes for police work, too.”

Brunelli knew every inch of his city, from the water and from the land. The Grand Canal curved in a lazy backward S between islands with different dialects, different loyalties, different saints, and separate traditions. Even faces could vary from parish to parish. But Venice itself was compacted out of all these differences. Together, Brunelli sensed, they made a whole.

That explained how the city had subdued a straggling empire, fought and traded and conceded ground when pushed, and regained what it could when the opportunity arose. The money that had built Venice-the money that had paid for the bricks and stones and crockets and secret gardens, for the handsome wellheads in every campo, and the churches and the schools-came from anything but following the straight line. It came, Brunelli thought, as he turned into a sotoportego beneath a building constructed on the profit of camel trading in the Negev, from a habit of looking around the next corner, from regularly observing juxtapositions-the curve of a bridge, the redness of an old wall, and the reflection of a tiny votive niche in a canal at night. It came from a certain sort of efficiency-not the straight-lined sort, but one that could hold a thousand turnings and windings in the mind at once.

He found himself at the Rialto and crossed the bridge.

According to the stadtmeister, the Austrians had plans to fill in canals and bring a railway across the lagoon. Why not? The city was dying on its feet. Carrots were cheaper in Padua or Mestre. Lawyers were busy along the coast-but in Venice, for sure, they wanted work like everyone else.

Brunelli found himself on a bridge with a parapet-another Austrian felicity-and leaned on the wall, looking down into the green water of the canal.