Falling in Love (13 page)

After a moment, the nurse came back and said, addressing them both, ‘She’d like you to come in.’

Brunetti stepped back to allow Griffoni to precede him. It was a double room with a view over the tops of tall trees just coming into leaf. The other bed was empty, though the covers were turned back, the pillows propped up and dented by the head of the person who had been resting against them.

Griffoni stopped two metres from the bed and stood still to allow Brunetti to approach the girl. She looked better: her hair was brushed, and there was some colour in her face. From her expression, it was evident that she remembered Brunetti and was glad to see him again.

Her smile broadened, and he again saw the beauty there. ‘I’m glad to see you looking better,’ he said and extended his hand. She took it with her good hand, saying, ‘Thank God I’m not a pianist.’ She lifted the cast a few centimetres to show her other hand, swollen and blue. Again, that sweet voice and precise diction.

Brunetti turned to Griffoni, who joined him next to the bed. ‘This is my colleague, Claudia Griffoni.’ Thinking truth would sit well with the girl in the bed, he added, ‘I thought I should bring a woman along.’

‘So I would be less frightened?’

‘Something like that.’

The girl looked at Griffoni and caught her eye. She pulled her lips together and raised her eyebrows in surprise at the quaintness of Brunetti’s remark. ‘Thank you.’ Then, looking at Griffoni, she added, ‘She doesn’t look very threatening.’

Griffoni laughed, and Brunetti felt strangely excluded from this feminine affinity. To re-establish his position, he said, ‘I’d like you to tell me again about last night, at least as much as you remember.’

Griffoni moved a step closer, set her bag on the floor by the wall, and took a pad and pen from it.

The girl smiled, as if not yet ready to take the risk of moving for fear of the whack her head had taken. ‘I’ve been thinking about it since I saw you this morning, trying to remember, but it’s hard because of what happened. I know that he pushed me. I don’t want to invent things that might have happened before that or let them change my memory.’

She raised her hand and let it fall helplessly back on the bed. ‘I’m sure of it: I really did hear something when I was walking, maybe from the time I left the pizzeria, or I sensed something, but I’m not sure what it was.’ She paused, and Brunetti again saw just how clear her eyes were, strangely at odds with her dark hair. Were she an older, or a vainer, woman, he’d suspect she dyed it. As it was, he thought she’d merely had the luck of the genetic grab that had put that chestnut hair above those clear blue eyes and that very pale skin.

‘Did you look back to see what it was?’ Griffoni asked.

The girl’s face relaxed at the ease with which Griffoni posed the question, as if she already believed the girl had indeed been aware of something and needed only a clearer idea of what it might have been.

‘No. It’s Venice. That doesn’t happen.’

Brunetti nodded. And waited.

‘When I got on to the bridge, I heard steps behind me, but before I could turn I heard him say,
“È mia
”, in a really creepy voice, and then I felt this shove. All I could think about then was not falling, of somehow getting to the bottom of the steps on my feet. But I didn’t. Then there was that man kneeling over me and asking me if I was all right.’

‘And here we are,’ Griffoni said, lifting her pen from the page and waving it at the room. Then, more seriously, she asked, ‘What do you mean by “creepy voice”?’

Francesca closed her eyes, and Brunetti knew she was putting herself back on the bridge. ‘It had too much breath,’ she said and opened her eyes. ‘Like it had been hard for him to follow me or come up the steps. I don’t know. There was a gasping sort of sound. Like you’d use to frighten children.’

‘Could he have been trying to disguise his voice?’ Brunetti asked.

The blue eyes looked out of the window and studied the trees for a long time. Singers, he had once been told, often had extraordinary memories. Had to have them. He imagined her remembering the voice on the bridge, and then she said, ‘Yes, that could be it. It wasn’t a real voice. I mean, it wasn’t a person’s real voice.’

‘You’re sure you heard correctly?’ Brunetti asked. ‘He said you were his.’

‘Yes.’ Her response was instant and unhesitating.

Brunetti glanced aside at Griffoni, wondering what she would make of his next question, but decided to ask it anyway. ‘Are you sure he meant you?’

‘Of course he did,’ she answered heatedly. ‘I told you, he said, “
È mia
.” He was talking to
me
.’

He heard Griffoni’s sudden intake of breath, but it was the girl who asked, ‘What?’

Brunetti watched as Claudia worked out the grammar. At the same time, he saw her studying Francesca’s face, her youth displayed there and in the small body under the covers.

‘He didn’t say,
“Sei mia”
?’ Griffoni asked, making no effort to disguise her disbelief. ‘To someone he’s pushing down the steps?’ The girl had told Brunetti twice that her attacker had addressed her formally, and both times he, like Claudia, had been surprised by this. Her youth was beyond question, and her attacker might well have been older. To address her with the formal was absurd. In that case, he was referring to some other woman: ‘
She’s
mine.’

14

‘I think he was telling me I was his,’ Francesca said, still not understanding that she might not have been the attacker’s main target. ‘That’s what’s so awful, that he just decides who belongs to him.’ Hearing her anger, Brunetti began to think she would come out of this unscathed: it was a much healthier response than fear and caution.

‘You said you didn’t see anyone following you,’ Brunetti reminded her.

It took her some time to answer. ‘On the bridge, I
felt
it.’

As she spoke, Brunetti saw her begin to fade, like a child who has played too hard all day and now needs to sleep. He turned to Griffoni and said, ‘I think that’s enough information for us to go on with, don’t you, Claudia?’

She closed her notebook and picked up her handbag. She put it over her shoulder and approached the bed. ‘Thank you for talking to us, Signorina Santello.’ Claudia reached down and placed her hand on the girl’s arm. She gave it a small squeeze and stepped back, leaving space for Brunetti.

‘Does your father know what’s happened?’ he remembered to ask.

‘He’s gone to Florence for a few days,’ she said in a voice that was sinking towards sleep. ‘He works there, for the Festival, playing for auditions.’

‘Did you tell him what happened?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Only that I fell and broke my arm,’ she said, drifted a bit and then came back to add, ‘I didn’t want to frighten him.’ Her lips turned up, either at the thought of her father or of having spared him worry, and then she was asleep.

They watched her for a while and then left. At the desk, Brunetti asked the nurse if anyone had been to visit her and was told that an aunt had come that morning and would return the next day and take her home the day after. ‘The aunt told me her parents are divorced and the mother lives in France,’ the nurse said, then shrugged. ‘Modern times, Commissario.’

Brunetti thanked her for her help; he and Griffoni left the hospital and started back to the Questura.

As they were crossing the
campo
, Claudia said. ‘
“È mia.”
Of course he was talking about another woman. He wouldn’t call her “
Lei
”. She’s little more than a kid, and he’s trying to kill her, for the love of God. He’d hardly address her formally.’

‘And the other woman?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Don’t be coy with me, Guido,’ she said with real irritation. ‘I believe in the possibility of what you said.’

‘Only the possibility?’ he asked, doing his best not to sound coy.

Griffoni smiled and punched at his arm. ‘All right, more than the possibility.’ They turned left at the bottom of Ponte dell’Ospedaleto and walked along the canal, Brunetti completely unconscious of choosing the direction and Griffoni tagging along like a pilot fish beside a shark, content to let it lead the way.

They came down the next bridge and stopped. She asked, ‘What do you want to do?’

‘Send Vianello to talk to people in the neighbourhood to see if they’ve seen anyone spending a lot of time near the place where she’s staying,’ Brunetti answered, then added, ‘I’d like to have someone keep an eye on the girl, but staffing’s so short with Alvise gone, I don’t know if there’s any way to do it.’

‘Why not ask him?’ she asked.

‘Who? Alvise?’

Griffoni nodded and said, ‘I haven’t known him very long, but he’s loyal and able to follow simple orders. And he’s bound to be eager to get back to work. So if he’s told this is a special assignment, to see that nothing happens to her at the hospital, he’ll jump at the chance to do it.’

‘He’s been suspended, which, as I understand it, means he cannot work and is not being paid,’ Brunetti said. ‘I can’t ask him to take the risk of working, and I certainly can’t ask him to do it for nothing.’

Griffoni looked thoughtful, then said, ‘I don’t think that will be a problem, Guido.’

‘Of course it is. How do we pay him – by going around and collecting from the rest of the staff?’ Even as he said it, he realized how bizarre this conversation was. Would they ask Scarpa to contribute to Alvise’s salary and thus make sure that Patta found out what they were doing?

Griffoni looked at him and started to speak but then stopped and studied the water in the canal. Finding no answer there, she returned her attention to Brunetti and said, ‘It’s possible that Signorina Elettra failed to file the request that his pay be stopped before she stopped working herself.’

‘She did not stop working,’ Brunetti said emphatically, trying to introduce some sense into this conversation. ‘She’s on strike.’ Was this how Alice felt, he wondered, lost in a forest of words she didn’t know how to escape?

Griffoni did not dispute this, and so he sought to enforce his argument.

‘Besides, he’s paid from Rome, not from here,’ Brunetti explained. ‘We all are.’ Surely, she must know at least this.

‘The order to stop his salary would originate here, wouldn’t it?’ Griffoni inquired. ‘From Lieutenant Scarpa, countersigned by the Vice-Questore.’ Taking his silence for assent, she added, ‘There are, however, ways to circumvent that.’

Brunetti put his right hand to his face and rubbed at the short hairs that had grown up under his bottom lip since he’d shaved that morning. He scratched them lightly, telling himself he could actually hear them springing up as soon as his nails passed over them. ‘“Circumvent”,’ he repeated.

Griffoni’s face remained strangely immobile as she said, ‘If that order were not passed on to Rome, and if he were assigned to a new employment category, then there would be no interruption in his salary.’

‘“If he were”?’ Brunetti repeated the subjunctive, a mood which tended to creep into many conversations with both Commissario Griffoni and Signorina Elettra. And then, ‘“New employment category”?’

Griffoni raised an eyebrow and both hands, as if to suggest the limitless meaning of that phrase.

Brunetti studied Griffoni’s face. Had it changed since her friendship with Signorina Elettra began? Was there not a certain veiled quality about her eyes that had not been there before?

He could not prevent the question escaping him. ‘She did all of this?’

‘Yes.’

‘What’s he been told?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Only that there will be a change of assignment while this matter is settled.’ She looked away, looked back. ‘He’s been helping in the archives.’

‘Helping how?’

‘To the degree that he is capable of helping,’ she answered, nothing more.

Brunetti looked at the buildings on the other side of the canal. The shutters on the largest of them were sun-bleached, some of them hanging askew. A drainpipe had come loose, and water had made a trail down the façade.

‘Tell him to go over to the hospital and check on her a few times a day, would you?’ he asked her. ‘Plainclothes work. He’ll like that.’ How easily these two women could suck a person into complicity.

‘And when she goes home?’ Griffoni asked. ‘What then?’

‘If she stays in the city, he can still go and check on her,’ he said. It wasn’t much. Alvise wasn’t much. But it was something.

He continued down the embankment towards the Questura.

She followed him. ‘I’d like to hear her sing,’ she surprised him by saying.

‘Why?’

‘Her voice is beautiful. Seems strange, though, coming from that wisp of a girl.’

As they entered the Questura, Claudia asked, ‘Is there anything you’d like me to do after I talk to Alvise?’

The fact that she was not Venetian had at first made Brunetti reluctant to ask her to go to the theatre, for people there might be reluctant to talk to a foreigner. Well, he tempered the word: a non-Venetian. But he had begun to suspect that her charm and beauty might be enough to overcome that handicap. ‘See if anyone at the theatre has noticed anything or anyone that ought not to be there.’