Death in a Strange Country (25 page)

Signora Concetta Ruffolo
lived, her son Giuseppe sharing it with her during those brief periods when he
was not incarcerated, in a two-room apartment near Campo San Boldo, an area of
the city characterized by proximity to the severed tower of that church, to no
convenient vaporetto stop, and, if one is but willing to expand the definition
of the word ‘proximity’, to the church of San Simeone Piccolo, where Sunday
Mass is still said, in open protest to concepts such as modernity or relevance,
in Latin. The widow lived in an apartment owned by a public foundation, IRE,
which rents its many apartments to those people judged sufficiently needy to be
awarded them. Often, they were given to Venetians; how Signora Ruffolo had been
given one remained a mystery, though no mystery surrounded the reality of her
need.

Brunetti crossed the
Rialto Bridge and went down past San Cassiano, then cut to his left, soon to
find the squat tower of San Boldo on his right. He turned into a narrow
calle
and stopped in front of a low building. The name ‘Ruffolo’ was engraved in
delicate script on a metal nameplate to the right of the bell; rust streaked
down from both and discoloured the plaster that slowly peeled from the front
wall of the building. He rang the bell, waited a moment, rang it again, waited,
and rang it a third time.

A full two minutes after
his last ring, he heard a voice ask from inside,
‘Si, chi
è
?’

‘It’s me, Signora Concetta.
Brunetti.’

The door was quickly
pulled open and, looking into the dark hall, he had his usual sensation that he
was looking at a barrel and not a woman. Signora Concetta, her family history
recounted, had forty years ago been the reigning beauty of Caltanisetta. Young
men, it was maintained, would spend hours walking up and down Corso Vittorio
Emmanuele in the hope of no more than a glimpse of the fair Concetta. She could
have had her pick of them, from the mayor’s son to the doctor’s younger
brother, but instead she had chosen the third son of the family which had once
ruled the entire province with an iron fist. She had become a Ruffolo by
marriage, and when Annuziato’s debts had driven them from Sicily, she had
become an alien in this cold and inhospitable city. And, in quick succession,
she had become a widow, living on a pension paid by the State and the charity
of her husband’s family, and, even before Giuseppe could finish school, she had
become the mother of a felon.

From the day of her
husband’s death, to which event her emotional response was unfathomable, even
to her son, perhaps even to her herself - she had clothed herself solidly in
black: dress, shoes, stockings, even a scarf for those times she left the
house. Though she grew stouter with the years, her face more lined with the
grief of her son’s life, the black remained unchanged: she would wear it to her
grave, perhaps beyond.
 
                     
               

‘Buon giorno,
Signora Concetta,’
Brunetti said, smiling and offering her his hand

He watched her face, read
her expression as a child would the quickly-turning pages of a comic book.
There was the instant recognition, the instinctive chill of disgust at what he
represented, but then he saw her remember the kindness he had shown to her son,
her star, her sun, and with that her face softened and her mouth turned up in a
smile of real pleasure. ‘Ah, Dottore, you’ve come to visit me again. How nice,
how nice. But you should have called so that I could give the house a real
cleaning, make you some fresh pastries.’ He understood ‘called’, ‘house’, ‘cleaning’,
and ‘pastries’, so he constructed her speech to mean that.

‘Signora, a cup of your
good coffee is more than I could hope to have.’

‘Come in, come in,’ she
said, putting her hand under his arm and pulling him towards her. She backed
through the open door of her apartment, keeping her hold on his arm, as if she
were afraid he would try to escape her.

When they were inside the
apartment, she closed the door with one hand and continued to pull him forward
with the other. The apartment was so small that no one could be lost in it, and
yet she kept her hand on his arm and led him into the small living room. ‘Take
this chair, Dottore,’ she said, leading him to an overstuffed armchair covered
in shiny orange cloth, where she finally released him. When he hesitated, she
insisted, ‘Sit, sit. I’ll make us some coffee.’

He did as she commanded,
sinking down until his knees were on a level almost with his chin. She switched
on the light that stood beside his chair; the Ruffolos lived in the endless
twilight of ground-floor apartments, but even lights at midday could do nothing
to work against the damp.

‘Don’t move,’ she
commanded and went to the other side of the room, where she pushed aside a
flowered curtain, behind which lay a sink and stove. From his side of the room,
he could see that the taps gleamed and the surface of the stove was almost
radiant in its whiteness. She opened a cabinet and pulled down the straight
cylindrical espresso pot he always associated with the South, he didn’t know
why. She unscrewed it, rinsed it carefully, rinsed it again, filled it with water,
and then reached down a glass canister filled with coffee. With gestures grown
rhythmic with decades of repetition, she filled the pot, lit the stove, and
placed the pot over the flame.

The room was unchanged
from the last time he was there. Yellow plastic flowers stood in front of the
plaster statue of the Madonna; embroidered lace ovals, rectangles, and circles
covered every surface; on top of them stood ranks of family photos, in all of
which appeared Peppino: Peppino dressed as a tiny sailor, Peppino in the
brilliant white of his First Communion, Peppino held on the back of a donkey,
grinning through his fear. In all of the photos, the child’s outsized ears were
visible, making him look almost like a cartoon figure. In one corner stood what
could only be described as a shrine to her late husband: their wedding photo,
in which Brunetti could see her long-gone beauty; her husband’s walking stick
propped in a corner, ivory knob aglow even in this dim light; his
lupara,
its
deadly short barrels kept polished and oiled, more than a decade after his
death, as if even death had not freed him from the need to live up to the cliché
of the Sicilian male, ever ready to defend with his shotgun any offence to his
honour or his family.

He continued to watch as,
seeming to ignore him, she pulled down a tray, plates, and, from another
cabinet, a metal tin that she prised open with a knife. From it, she removed
pastries, and then more pastries, piling them high on one of the plates. From
another tin, she took sweets wrapped in violent-coloured foil and stacked them
on another plate. The coffee boiled up, and she quickly grabbed the pot,
flipped it upside down in one swift motion, and carried the tray to the large
table that took up most of one side of the room. Like a dealer, she passed out
plates and saucers, spoons and cups, setting them carefully on the plastic
tablecloth, and then went back to bring the coffee to the table. When
everything was done, she turned to him and waved her hand towards the table.

Brunetti had to push
himself up out of the low chair, both hands pressing firmly down upon the arms.
When he was at the table, she pulled his chair out for him and then, when he
was seated, sat opposite him. The Capodimonte saucers both had hairline cracks
in them, radiating from the edges to the centres like the papery wrinkles he
remembered in his grandmother’s cheeks. The spoons gleamed, and beside his
plate lay a linen napkin ironed into a state of rectangular submission.

Signora Ruffolo poured
two cups of coffee, placed one in front of Brunetti, and then put the silver
sugar bowl beside his plate. Using silver tongs, she piled six pastries, each
the size of an apricot, on his plate, and then used the same tongs to set four
of the foil-wrapped sweets beside it.

He added sugar to his
coffee and sipped at it. ‘It’s the best coffee in Venice, Signora. You still
won’t tell me your secret?’

She smiled at that, and
Brunetti saw that she had lost another tooth, this the right front one. He bit
into a pastry, felt the sugar surge out into his mouth. Ground almonds, sugar,
the finest of pastry dough, and yet more sugar. The next had ground pistachios.
The third was chocolate, and the fourth exploded with pastry crème. He took a
bite of the fifth and set half of it down on his plate.

‘Eat. You’re too thin,
Dottore. Eat. Sugar gives energy. And it’s good for your blood.’ The nouns
conveyed the message.

‘They’re wonderful,
Signora Concetta. But I just had lunch, and if I eat too many of them, I won’t
eat my dinner, and then my wife will be angry with me.’

She nodded. She
understood the anger of wives.

He finished his coffee
and set the cup down on the saucer. Not three seconds passed before she was up,
across the room, and back with a carved glass decanter and two glasses no
bigger than olives. ‘Marsala. From home,’ she said, pouring him a thimbleful.
He took the glass from her, waited while she poured no more than a few drops
into her own glass, tapped his glass to hers, and sipped at it. It tasted of
sun, and the sea, and songs that told of love and death.

He set his glass down,
looked across the table at her, and said, ‘Signora Concetta, I think you know
why I’ve come.’

She nodded. ‘Peppino?’

‘Yes, Signora.’

She held her hand up,
palm towards him, as if to ward off his words or perhaps to protect herself
from the
malocchio.

‘Signora, I think Peppino
is involved in something very bad.’

‘But this time . . .’ she
began, but then she remembered who Brunetti was, and she said only, ‘He is not
a bad boy.’

Brunetti waited until he
was sure she was not going to say anything else, and then he continued. ‘Signora,
I spoke to a friend of mine today. He tells me that a man I think Peppino might
be involved with is a very bad man. Do you know anything about this? About what
Peppino is doing, about the people he’s been seeing since . . .’ He wasn’t sure
how to phrase it. ‘Since he came home?’

She considered this for a
long time before she answered. ‘Peppino was with very bad people when he was in
that place.’ Even now, after all these years, she could not bring herself to
name that place. ‘He talked about those people.’

‘What did he say about
them, Signora?’

‘He said that they were
important, that his luck was going to change.’ Yes, Brunetti remembered this
about Peppino: his luck was always going to change.

‘Did he tell you anything
more, Signora?’

She shook her head. It
was a negation, but he wasn’t sure what she was denying. Brunetti had never
been sure in the past just how much Signora Concetta knew of what her son
actually did. He imagined she knew far more than she indicated, but he feared
she probably kept that knowledge hidden even from herself. There is only so
much truth a mother can permit herself.

‘Did you meet any of
them, Signora?’

She shook her head
fiercely. ‘He will not bring them here, not to my home.’ This, beyond question,
was the truth.

‘Signora, we are looking
for Peppino now.’

She closed her eyes and
bowed her head. He had been out of that place for only two weeks, and already
the police were looking for him.

‘What did he do, Dottore?’

‘We’re not sure, Signora.
We want to talk to him. Some people say they saw him where a crime took place.
But all they saw is a photo of Peppino.’

‘So maybe it wasn’t my
son?’

‘We don’t know, Signora.
That’s why we want to talk to him. Do you know where he is?’

She shook her head, but,
again, Brunetti didn’t know if that meant she didn’t know or she didn’t want to
say.

‘Signora, if you talk to
Peppino, will you tell him two things for me?’
         
           

‘Yes, Dottore.’

‘Please tell him that we
need to talk to him. And tell him that these people are bad people, and they
might be dangerous.’