Drawing Conclusions - Donna Leon [43]
Vianello shrugged. ‘You mean because it’s boastful?’
Brunetti nodded, adding, ‘No more so than Opus Dei, I suppose.’
Vianello laughed and ran both hands through his hair, as if ridding himself of the events of the morning. ‘I’ll take the 51,’ the Inspector said. ‘It’s faster.’
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