Brunetti did not have to use his professional skills to know that lunch was roast pork and potatoes: he had smelled them when he entered the building. As he passed by what must have been the door to the kitchen, he realized just how good roast pork and potatoes could be.
Six or seven tables, half of them small and set for only one or two persons, sat in front of the windows that looked out on the campo. There were a dozen or so people, some sitting in couples, one quartet, some alone. No table was empty. There were bottles of wine and mineral water on all of the tables, and the plates looked like porcelain. Heads turned as he entered the room, but soon two dark-skinned young women appeared behind him, dressed in a simplified version of the habit worn by Madre Rosa and the other sister. Hidden in the midst of the headcloth and veil of the first one were the almond eyes and long-arched nose of a Toltec statue. The lips carved into her mahogany face were surrounded by a thin line of lighter skin which exaggerated their natural redness. Brunetti stared at her until she turned in his direction; then he did what he did when a suspect gazed his way: he changed the focus of his eyes to long vision and panned around the room, as though she were not there or were not worthy of his attention.
The two novices went quickly around the tables, stacking the dishes in which pasta had been served. As they went past on the way to the kitchen, Brunetti saw deep green traces of pesto, a sauce he had never liked. The novices were quickly back, each carrying three plates that held pork, sliced carrots, and roasted potatoes. They served the people at the nearest tables, disappeared, then returned with more plates.
The hum of conversation that had broken off at the sight of him resumed, and the heads – most of them white but some defiantly not – bent over their lunch. Forks clicked against china, bottles against glass; the usual sounds of a communal meal.
The nun who had opened the main door suddenly appeared at his side and asked, ‘Would you like me to tell you who they are, Signore?’
Assuming that she had been sent by the Mother Superior, Brunetti said, ‘That would be very kind of you, Suora.’
‘Dottor Grandesso is having lunch in his room today, Signora Sartori is over there, at the second table, in the black dress, and Signora Cannata is with the other people at the table next to her. She’s the one with the red hair.’
Brunetti looked across the room and singled out the two women. Signora Sartori was hunched over her food, her left arm encircling her plate, almost as if she were trying to protect her dish from someone who wanted to snatch it from her. He saw her in profile: one high cheekbone with little flesh covering it, but with a plump pouch of skin hanging under her chin. Her lipstick was a violent red and veered beyond the line of her lips. Her skin, like the skin of old people who no longer see the light of day, had a slightly greenish cast, an effect intensified by the inky blackness of her shoulder-length hair.
She held her fork in her gnarled fist and shovelled up the potatoes. Brunetti noticed that her meat had arrived pre-cut in smallish pieces. While he watched, she finished her potatoes and then, just as quickly, the carrots. She took a piece of bread, broke it in half, and proceeded to wipe half of her plate clean, then the other side with the remaining piece of bread. As he watched, she went on to finish two more slices of bread, and when there was no more, she stopped and sat immobile. One of the novices took her empty plate away and received a sharp, angry look for doing so.
Brunetti walked towards the table where the woman with the red hair sat. The novices swept past him, setting a piece of apple cake in front of each of the three people at the table. Brunetti stopped a bit before the table and addressed the woman with the wispy red hair, ‘Signora Cannata?’
She looked up at him with a smile in which he read automatic flirtatiousness. Her eyes blinked rapidly and she raised a palm to keep Brunetti at bay, as though she were a teenager and he the first boy who had paid her a compliment. Her nose was thin and finely drawn, the taut skin under her eyes a few shades lighter than the skin on the rest of her face. Her mascara had been applied with a heavy hand, as had her lipstick, traces of which were visible on her napkin and in small cracks running off from both sides of her mouth. She might have been sixty; she might have had a child of sixty.
The other people at the table turned to him, a man with thinning white hair and a suspiciously black moustache and a blonde woman whose face and what Brunetti could see of her chest appeared to be made of well-tanned leather. The woman’s head and, when he looked, her hands moved erratically in the telltale tremor.
He nodded and smiled at them all. ‘And you are?’ the man with the moustache asked.
‘Guido Brunetti,’ he said, adding, careful to use a more sober tone, ‘a friend of Costanza Altavilla.’
Their eyes did not change, though the blonde overcame the tremor for a moment to turn down the sides of her mouth and tilt her head to the side while she said, ‘Ah, povera donna,’ and the man shook his head and made a clicking noise with his tongue. Was this what happened, Brunetti wondered? Did we all reach a point in our lives when the death of other people didn’t matter, and the best we could be expected to produce was a kind of formulaic sadness, the generic form of grief instead of the real? What he observed in them was something much more like disapproval than sadness. Shame on death for having shown his face at the window of our lives; shame on death for having reminded us that he was lurking outside and waiting for us.
‘Oh, a friend of Costanza’s,’ Signora Cannata sighed.
‘More of her son’s, really. In fact, he asked me to come along to speak to the sisters,’ he began, telling the truth, then quickly segued into the lie. ‘He asked me, while I was here, if I’d try to speak to some of the people she mentioned and tell them how very fond she was of them.’
Hearing this, Signora Cannata placed her open palm on her chest, as if to ask, ‘Who? Me?’
Brunetti gave her a beneficent smile and said, ‘And I hoped I’d be able to take some words to her son, some sign of how much she was appreciated here.’
The man got to his feet abruptly, as if tired of all of this talk of affection and regard. The blonde stood, as well, and linked her arm in his. ‘We’re going out to get a coffee,’ he said, to Brunetti or to Signora Cannata or, for all anyone knew, to the Recording Angel. He nodded to Brunetti, made no motion to shake his hand, and turned away from them, taking the woman with him.
Ignoring them, Brunetti asked, ‘May I join you, Signora?’ and at her smile and wave, sat in the chair to her left, where no one had been seated. He smiled in return and said, ‘As you can well understand, Signora, her son is very troubled by this. You know how close they were.’
She raised her napkin, which Brunetti noticed was cloth and not paper, folded it to a clean patch, and made two dainty dabs at the corner of her left eye, then at the right. ‘It’s a terrible thing,’ she said. ‘But I suppose her son – he’s a doctor, isn’t he? – knew that she was not in good health.’ Her mouth turned down at the sides and she said, ‘It was a heart attack, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes, it was. At least the poor woman didn’t suffer,’ he said, doing his best to use the voice of piety he remembered hearing in his youth.
‘Ah, thank God,’ she said. ‘At least for that.’ Unconsciously, she placed her palm against her chest again; this time the gesture had nothing artificial about it.
‘Her son told me that you were one of the people she mentioned frequently. And she said how much she enjoyed talking to you.’
‘Oh, how very flattering,’ Signora Cannata said. ‘Not that I have much to talk about. Well, perhaps, when I was younger and my husband was still alive. He was an accountant, you know, helped so many important people in the city.’