* * * *
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.