Drawing Conclusions - Donna Leon [55]
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