Falling in Love (7 page)

Flavia was not finished. ‘Days can be very long if you’re alone in a city you don’t know. Or one you don’t like. Maybe that’s the bad part.’

‘What ones are those?’ Brunetti interrupted to ask.

‘Brussels,’ she said with no hesitation. ‘And Milano.’

He didn’t like them either, but said nothing about her choice to live in one of them.

‘Do you get tired of hearing people say how exciting your life must be?’ the Contessa asked, curious and ready to be sympathetic.

Flavia laughed. ‘I don’t know how many times I’ve been told that. I suppose people say it to anyone who travels a lot.’

‘But no one would say it to an accountant or an insurance salesman, would they?’ Paola asked.

‘I doubt it,’ Flavia answered. Then she lapsed into silence for a moment before saying, ‘The strange thing is that the people who say it probably don’t understand anything about the way we actually live our lives.’

‘Are fans really curious about that?’ Paola asked.

Involuntarily, Flavia moved back in her seat, as though trying to escape the words. ‘What’s wrong?’ the Contessa asked, her alarm as audible as Flavia’s was visible.

‘Nothing,’ Flavia said. ‘Nothing.’

Brunetti felt the air stiffen: Flavia sat, unable to say any more, and the others carefully avoided looking at one another for fear of calling attention to her behaviour. Finally Flavia, in a tight voice, asked Paola, ‘Did someone tell you?’

‘Tell me what?’ Paola asked, her confusion evident.

‘About the flowers.’

Paola leaned towards the other woman, as if hoping nearness would help. ‘Flavia, I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she said. She watched Flavia’s face and waited until it was evident that she had registered the words.

Speaking slowly and clearly, Paola went on, ‘I don’t know anything about flowers.’

Flavia lowered her head over the empty place in front of her, reached aside and slid the knife to a horizontal position. Index fingers pushing at the ends, she swivelled it repeatedly in a half-circle, as if it were the speedometer in the car of a very erratic driver. Without looking at Paola, she said, ‘Someone’s been sending me flowers.’ The nervousness of her tone corrupted the banality of the words.

‘And that frightens you?’ Paola asked.

Flavia slid the knife to vertical before looking back at her. ‘Yes,’ she answered. ‘Dozens of them: ten, twelve bouquets. On the stage. In my dressing room.’ She looked at Brunetti. ‘In front of the door of my apartment.’

Brunetti asked, ‘In front of the building or inside, by the apartment door?’

‘Inside,’ Flavia answered. ‘I asked my friend who lives upstairs if he knew anything about it, but he didn’t: no one asked him to open the door.’

‘Are there other people living in the building?’ Brunetti asked, this time sounding like a policeman.

‘Yes. But they’re away.’

This must be what was bothering her, Brunetti realized, not really understanding her evident fear. Flowers were not sent to menace but to give pleasure or offer praise. The delivery man could have found the main door open; a maid could have opened it for him.

The Conte saved Brunetti from suggesting either of these possibilities by asking, ‘Have you had this sort of thing happen before, my dear?’

The warm concern in his voice and the final endearment proved too much for Flavia, who looked at him but found herself unable to speak; tears appeared in her eyes but did not fall. She held up her hand and patted at the air between them, and the Conte picked up his glass and held it, waiting for her courage to return. No one spoke.

Finally Flavia said, ‘I’ve had fans, but it’s always been a friendly thing. Not like this. It frightens me.’

‘How long has it been happening, my dear?’ the Count asked, setting his glass down untouched.

‘About two months.’ Then she added, ‘In London and St Petersburg. And now here.’

The Conte nodded to suggest he found her reaction entirely natural and justified.

‘It’s too much,’ Flavia continued. ‘There are too many flowers, and it’s all so attention-seeking.’

‘To draw attention to you?’ the Conte asked.

‘No, to the person who’s sending them. That’s what’s wrong with it. He sent a note saying he knew I threw them away.’ Her voice was higher than usual.

‘What did you do with the letter?’ Brunetti asked in a normal voice.

The look she shot him was suffused with anger. ‘I tore it up and threw it in the garbage at the theatre.’

Brunetti began to understand her response. People left flowers at the artists’ entrance or came to the front of the theatre and tossed them in homage at the feet of the singer. The audience would watch the flowers and the singer, not the person who brought them. ‘The ones on the stage,’ he said. ‘Do you know who threw them?’

‘No.’

‘No idea?’ Brunetti asked.

‘No.’ Then, in a calmer voice, she said, ‘You saw it the other night, the heap of them. I didn’t want them. You saw how we had to step on them when we came out for our bows.’ She grimaced at the memory.

‘They were for you?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Who else would they be for?’ she snapped, sounding like the woman Brunetti had met years before. Flavia, however, had simply been clarifying something that should have been self-evident.

‘Did you speak to the people there?’

‘The porter at the entrance said two men he’d never seen before brought the flowers that were in my dressing room. That’s all he knew.’ She waved a hand, as if pointing up at the balconies, and said, ‘I didn’t ask about the ones that were thrown down on to the stage.’

Though the maid had brought the peaches with cream and amaretti while they were talking, none of them had much interest in them, and so, by general agreement, they went back to the main salon and to the sofas. The maid came in with coffee; the Conte asked if anyone would like to join him for a grappa, but only Brunetti was interested.

Silence settled on the room: they sat for some time, listening to the boats moving up and down the Grand Canal, looking out at the windows on the opposite side. Lights went on and off, but there was no motion to be seen behind the windows.

Brunetti was struck by how comfortable their silence was, even in the face of events that were, at least, disquieting, at worst . . . he wasn’t sure. Strange and unsettling, out of place in a world that was meant to present beauty and provide pleasure.

He thought of a friend of his father’s, a man who had fought in the war with him. Angelo was probably illiterate, not so startling for a man born in the desperate Thirties, when young people went to work at the age of ten. His wife did the reading for the family, paid the bills, kept things going.

Brunetti’s father had once expressed one of his bizarre opinions about the world to Angelo: Brunetti couldn’t remember any longer what it was, although he did recall thinking, at the time, that the idea was strange.

Hearing it, Angelo had not opposed or contradicted his friend, and when the elder Brunetti insisted that he tell him what he thought, Angelo sat back in his chair and rubbed the side of his face a few times, then said, smiling at his friend, ‘My idea is different from yours, but that’s because all I have is one head, and it lets me have only one idea about things.’ Angelo had made it sound as if he were apologizing for a mental handicap and could never match his friend in being able to hold some more complicated idea in that head of his, or perhaps even more than one idea. Perhaps the person sending the flowers had room in his head for only one idea about how to show his appreciation. Or perhaps he had even stranger ideas.

Looking at Flavia, Brunetti asked, ‘Would you like me to try to do something about this?’

She answered him but spoke to everyone in the room. ‘No, I don’t think that’s necessary. It helps just to be able to talk about it and hear how strange it is.’

‘Nothing stronger than strange?’ the Conte asked.

‘If I were sitting home alone in the apartment, and no one else was in the building, I’d probably say yes,’ Flavia began. Looking around at their concerned faces, she gave a small smile and added, ‘But here, with you, it seems only strange.’

‘Who are the people upstairs?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Freddy d’Istria,’ she said, and when they nodded, she amended it to, ‘Federico, that is.’

‘That’s all right,’ Paola broke in, smiling. ‘We call him Freddy, too.’

‘How do you know him?’ Flavia asked.

‘He and I were at elementary school together,’ Paola said. ‘We were in the same class for four years, and for three of them we sat beside each other.’

‘And I met him in
liceo
,’ Brunetti said; no more than that.

‘A state school?’ Flavia asked Paola without thinking.

‘Of course,’ Paola said, as if there were no other sort of school to which children would be sent. ‘It’s the nearest school to both our homes.’

The Contessa interrupted them. ‘I wanted Paola to learn Veneziano from other children, not only from the staff here. It’s her language, after all. ‘

‘Do you speak it, Signora?’ Flavia asked, stopping short of using the title and moving away from her surprise that aristocrats would go to state schools.

‘No. I think it’s pretentious to try to speak it if you’re not Venetian,’ the Contessa said. ‘But Paola’s home is here, and I wanted her to grow up speaking it.’

Paola sat back in the sofa and rolled her eyes, as if she had been hearing this all her life.

Brunetti watched as Flavia’s eyes went back and forth between the two other women while she searched for something to say. ‘I could have a word with Freddy,’ he interposed. Freddy was as much his friend as Paola’s, after all, perhaps even more so. There were times when Brunetti thought this was because they had met when they were boys, not children, and had been good friends while they ceased being boys and began to be men.

‘Flowers in the theatre are one thing; getting into a private home to leave them is something else entirely,’ he added.

He watched her consider what he’d said. Brunetti wasn’t sure about the legal distinction between the two, nor that it was a crime to enter a building where you did not live and into which you had not been invited. Surely, tourists did it every day: how many times had he been told by friends about finding strangers in their courtyard or on their staircase? And what sort of crime was it to leave flowers in front of a person’s door?

‘It might be a good idea, my dear,’ the Conte said to Flavia. ‘I think Guido should talk to him, if only to show him that someone is taking this seriously.’

‘But are you?’ Flavia turned to Brunetti to ask.

Brunetti uncrossed his legs and took time to think, then said, ‘I don’t see anything that would persuade a magistrate that it’s worth pursuing. There’s no criminal act and no evidence of threat.’

The Conte spoke, sounding protective and indignant. ‘Does that mean something else has to happen before you’ll act?’

‘
Papà
,’ Paola broke in, sounding exasperated. ‘That sounds so melodramatic: “something has to happen”. All that’s happened is that Flavia’s been given flowers and a note. Nothing’s even been
said
to her.’

‘It’s bizarre behaviour,’ the Conte replied sharply. ‘A normal person would simply sign a card and send it along. Or have a florist deliver them to the house in the usual way. There’s no reason for the secrecy. It’s not right.’ He turned to Flavia and said, ‘In my opinion, you have every reason to be concerned: you don’t know whom you’re dealing with, and you don’t know what they’ll do next.’

‘You don’t have to make it sound so threatening,’ Paola said to her father. And, to Flavia, ‘I don’t agree with my father at all. Whoever’s doing this just wants to be able to tell his friends how strong his passion for music is. It’s all about boasting and proving how much better his taste is, how very strong his aesthetic responses.’ She said it as though she thought it ridiculous.

The Conte reached for the grappa the maid had brought and poured some into two glasses. He handed one to Brunetti and took a sip from his own. ‘Well, I suppose we’ll find out.’

‘What does that mean, dear?’ his wife asked.

‘This isn’t over.’ In one sip he finished the grappa, and then set down the empty glass.

8

Emerging from the
palazzo
a half-hour later, Paola suggested to Brunetti that they take the Accademia Bridge and walk home on the other side of the canal for a change. Both of them knew this would add fifteen minutes to their walk, but it would also mean they could go at least that far with Flavia, who was staying only a few minutes from the bridge. Since she had no reason to know where their home was, she would not see Paola’s long detour as the protective gesture it was.

Brunetti, still curious about the changes that seemed to have taken place in Flavia over the years, wondered if they would talk of music and thus put her at the centre of the conversation. She, however, chose to speak of those things that parents talk about. She told them that she worried terribly about drugs, even though neither of her children had ever shown much interest in them. And she feared that one of them – she admitted that she feared more for her daughter than for her son – would fall into the wrong company and be led to do things she would not ordinarily do.