Drawing Conclusions - Donna Leon [57]
‘Excuse me,’ he began, uncertain what title to give her, ‘could you tell me where I might find Dottor Grandesso?’
‘Oh, he’s at the back of the hall, Signore, down on the right. Last door.’ She looked around Brunetti and pointed down the corridor, as if she feared he could not follow her instructions.
‘Thank you,’ he said and made off down the corridor. The last door on the right was closed, so he knocked. He knocked again and then, hearing no response, slowly opened the door and called into the room, ‘Dottor Grandesso?’
A noise answered. It might have been a word, though it might have been a grunt, but it was definitely a noise, so Brunetti took it as an invitation to enter. Inside, he saw what he at first took to be a skull propped on the pillow of the bed. But the skull had tufts of hair attached and a thin covering of grooved skin. There was a long, narrow form under the covers, and at the end of it a miniature bishop’s mitre of feet. The eyes were still there, and they were turned in his direction. They did not blink and they did not move, merely opened up a conduit between him and a skull. Brunetti recognized the smell he had come to know in his mother’s room.
‘Dottor Grandesso?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Sì,’ the skull answered without moving its lips, the single word pronounced in a voice that surprised Brunetti with its depth and resonance.
‘I’m a friend of Signora Altavilla’s son. He’s asked me to come to speak to the sisters and to those of you who knew his mother best. If it doesn’t upset you, that is.’
The eyes blinked. Or, more accurately, they closed and stayed closed for some time. When they reopened, they had somehow been transformed into the eyes of a living man, filled with emotion and, Brunetti was certain, pain. ‘What happened?’ he asked in that same deep voice.
As Brunetti approached the bed he was acutely aware of how Dottor Grandesso’s eyes studied him; their scrutiny filled Brunetti with a sense of the man’s oxymoronic vitality. ‘She died of a heart attack,’ Brunetti said. ‘The autopsy results said it would have been immediate and whatever pain there was would have lasted only a short time.’
‘Rizzardi?’ the other man surprised Brunetti by asking.
‘Yes. Do you know him?’ Brunetti had not considered the possibility that this man’s title was a medical one.
‘I know of him. Or did, when I still worked. Solid man,’ he said. The doctor’s lips moved as he spoke, and his eyes paid careful attention to Brunetti, but the grooves in his cheeks remained motionless, and his expression was to be read only in his eyes.
What he said of Rizzardi was both description and praise, pronounced in a voice that should not have been able to emerge from that form. The doctor closed his eyes again, and that simple act transformed him, subtracting the spirit and leaving in its place nothing more than that ravaged head and the sticks below it, under the covers.
Not wanting to invade, Brunetti glanced away, but the window beside the bed gave out on a narrow calle and provided nothing more than a view of a wall and a shuttered window. He continued to look at them until the other man said, ‘Did you know her?’
He looked back then, and saw animation and interest reborn. ‘No. Only her son. I was with him while Rizzardi …’ The sentence languished, Brunetti uncertain what to do with it.
‘He asked me to come here to speak to the sisters,’ Brunetti resumed. ‘He said his mother was happy when she came here. I took it upon myself, after I spoke to the Mother Superior, to try to speak to the people she was especially fond of.’
‘Did the son know our names?’ he asked, and Brunetti heard the surge of hope in his voice.
He wanted to lie and tell the doctor that, yes, she had spoken to her son about the people she cared for most, but Brunetti couldn’t bring himself to do it. Instead, he said, ‘I don’t know. I decided to try to speak to you after I talked to the Mother Superior. She gave me your name.’
The man in the bed turned his head aside when he heard this, surprising Brunetti with the motion. But his eyes