For a moment, Brunetti was confused, but then he understood: Vianello simply was not opting to accompany him back the way they had come, towards Rialto, where the Inspector could get the One to take him towards Castello. Like Brunetti, he was eager to get home for lunch, and the boat that went back behind the island and down to the Celestia stop was the faster way to do it.
‘Later, then,’ Brunetti said and turned towards home. As his feet took care of navigation, Brunetti turned his imagination to what they had just heard. Calle Bernardo took him out into Campo San Polo, but he was blind to everything and everyone he passed, trying to picture the young woman with the bloody face crouched on the landing he had just crossed. He tried not only to picture her there but to imagine what had put her there or where she might have gone after Signora Giusti found her.
The existence of the man who had beaten the girl – Brunetti entertained no doubt as to the aggressor’s sex – was the first evidence that Signora Altavilla’s desire to help the unfortunate might have led to something other than sweetness and harmony. At this thought and his recognition of the cynicism with which he phrased it, Brunetti gave an involuntary grunt, something he did when he was surprised by his own worst thoughts.
If her son had known about the arrival and departure of these girls and women, it might explain his nervousness. He might have cautioned his mother against sheltering the women in her own home: Brunetti found it hard to think of a son who would not so warn his mother. But he lived in Lerino, she in Venice, and so he could exercise little real control over what she did or did not do, whom she did or did not receive in her own home.
He found himself in front of his own house, stopped there in the manner of a wind-up toy that had run into a wall but kept trying to move forward, still preoccupied with Signora Giusti’s story about the women going into and out of the apartment and with the memory of Dottor Niccolini standing outside the door of the mortuary. And, like tinnitus, he felt the low rumble of Patta’s need to do as little as possible to upset the public.
Someone came up behind him and said good afternoon. Brunetti turned and said hello to Signor Vordoni, who put his key into the lock and pushed open the door, waiting for Brunetti to precede him. Brunetti muttered his thanks and went in, then held the door for the older man, closed it quietly after him, and made a business of checking their mailbox to delay having to go up the stairs with him.
As he knew it would be, the box was empty, but by the time he had flipped it closed and turned his key in the lock, Signor Vordoni had disappeared. Brunetti started up the steps, all but heedless of the smells of lunch that greeted him on every landing.
He opened his own door, and at the scent of what must be something concerning pumpkin and something else that involved chicken, he rediscovered his interest in aromas and the food that produced them.
In the kitchen he found Paola at the table, intent on a magazine: one of the habits she had developed over the years was to read soft-covered material only in the kitchen, books in her study and in bed. ‘The university on strike?’ he asked as he bent down to kiss her. She turned as he spoke, so he ended up kissing her right ear instead of the top of her head. Neither minded.
‘No,’ she answered. ‘Only one of my students showed up, so I cancelled the class and came home.’ She let the magazine slip on to the table, where it fell open at the article she was reading. Brunetti glanced down and saw what looked like an agitated white cloud covering the top half of the left page. ‘What’s that?’ he asked, picking it up and holding it at the distance his eyesight now dictated. She passed her reading glasses to him; he closed one earpiece and held the lenses up to his eyes. ‘Chickens?’ he asked. He took a closer look. Chickens.
He dropped the magazine on the table and handed her back her glasses. ‘What’s it about?’
‘It’s one of the usual horror articles, the sort of thing you wish you hadn’t started reading but then can’t stop once you begin. About what’s done to them.’
‘Chickens? Horror chickens?’ he enquired, listening to the sound of crackling from the oven, a sure portent of what was roasting inside.
‘It’s something Chiara brought home and told me to read.’ Paola rested her head on her hand and asked, ‘Do you think that’s another sign that they’ve grown beyond your control?’
‘What?’
‘When they stop asking you to read things and start telling you to read them?’
‘It could be,’ he said and went over to the refrigerator in search of something that would dull the horror of the chicken. Lying in one of the drawers at the bottom he saw a few bottles of Moët. ‘Where’d the champagne come from?’ he asked.
‘One of my students,’ she answered.
‘Students?’
‘Yes. He passed his final exam a few days ago, and he sent me a few bottles.’
‘Why?’
‘I oversaw his thesis. It was brilliant, about the use of the imagery of light in the late novels.’ Suddenly alert, Brunetti realized this was the moment crucial for intervention. If he did not act immediately, head her off, stop her, he was faced with a yet-to-be-determined period of time listening to what a student had written, under the direction of his lady wife, about the use of light imagery in the late novels of Henry James. Considering the fact that he had recently endured a meeting with Vice-Questore Giuseppe Patta and yesterday had had only three tramezzini – one stolen – for lunch, he decided that no time was to be lost.
‘How many bottles did he send you?’ he asked, stalling for time.
‘A few cases.’
‘What?’
‘A few cases. Three or four, I don’t remember.’
This, Brunetti knew, was the consequence of being born into a noble family that was possessed not only of pedigree but of great wealth: you lost count of the cases of Moët that a student sent you.
‘That’s a bribe,’ he declared in his bad cop voice.
‘What?’
‘A bribe. I’m shocked you’d accept it. I hope you didn’t give him a high grade on this thesis.’
‘As high as I could. It was brilliant.’
Brunetti buried his face in his hands and moaned. He pulled out one of the bottles and took two glasses from the cabinet. He put the glasses on the table, making a lot of noise as he set them down, then turned his attention to the bottle, ripping off the gold foil. He aimed the cork at the far corner and pushed it off: the explosion shot through the house and warmed his heart.
He had disturbed the bottle, and so the champagne foamed out and ran across his hand. Quickly, he poured some into the first glass, which it overran, then into the second, where the same thing happened. Two small puddles spread round the glasses.
‘Quick, quick,’ he said, handing her a glass. Saying nothing else, he tapped his glass against hers, said ‘Cin, cin,’ and drank deep. ‘Ah,’ he said, at peace with the world once more. With another quick swig, he emptied the glass.
‘What’s the matter with you?’ Paola asked, then picked up her glass and took a sip after she said it. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Destroying the evidence.’
‘Oh, you are a fool, Guido,’ she said, but she laughed while she said it and the bubbles went up her nose and made her cough.
Lunch was, perhaps because of the bubbles or the laughter or some combination of the two, an easy, comfortable meal. Chiara seemed satisfied when her mother assured her that the chicken was a free range, bio chicken, that it had lived a healthy, happy life, and Brunetti, a man sworn to keep the peace, did so by not enquiring just how one was meant to tell if a chicken had been happy or not.
Chiara, of course, did not eat any of the chicken, but her vegetarian principles were sufficiently assuaged by her mother’s assurances as to the lifestyle of the chicken to cause her not to provoke the other members of the family with her comments upon the profoundly disgusting act they were engaged in by eating said chicken. Her brother Raffi, unconcerned as to the chicken’s happiness, cared only for its flavour.