Drawing Conclusions - Donna Leon [60]
‘Signora Sartori,’ the novice said. ‘I’ve brought you a visitor.’ The woman remained intent in her contemplation of the wall.
‘Signora Sartori,’ she tried again, ‘This gentleman’s come to speak to you.’ Still no response.
There was a noise behind them, and when they turned they saw the other dark-skinned novice – the one Brunetti now thought of as the Toltec statue – who, careful to keep both hands hidden under her scapular, said, ‘Sister Giuditta needs your help in the kitchen.’ She gave Brunetti a nervous smile, uncertain whether she should say something to him, as well.
At the news, the first novice pressed her hands together, glanced at Brunetti, then at her companion, then back to Signora Sartori. Brunetti puffed himself up with the air of casual command and said, ‘Fine, then. You go and speak to Suora Giuditta, and I’ll wait for you here.’ To show how patient he was, as well as to assert his intention to remain in the room, he looked around and chose to sit on a chair to the left of the door, a safe, declared distance from the woman at the window.
In the face of this manifestation of male authority, both girls – for they were hardly more than that – nodded and left the room together, leaving him to Signora Sartori. Or her to him.
He sat quietly, trying to sense how aware, or unaware, she was of his presence, and as time passed he began to suspect that she was as sensitive to his presence as he to hers. He let more time pass. Occasionally people walked past the door, but because Brunetti was sitting to the side of it, no one noticed that he was there. No one stopped to look in, nor did anyone come in to speak to Signora Sartori. After ten minutes or so Brunetti began to suspect that the novices had forgotten about him or perhaps assumed that he had left.
He thought back to the tables in the dining room and his choice of seat. He had sat to Signora Cannata’s left, the seat closest to Signora Sartori. How easily she could have heard everything they said, especially in the silence left by the departure of the other two people. So intent had she been on her food that it had not occurred to him at the time that she might have been intent on anything else, though he had said little to Signora Cannata, certainly nothing to raise interest or arouse curiosity.
The silence and the passing of time began to weigh on him, but he forced himself to remain both silent and still.
Her voice, when it came, was rough, the voice of someone no longer accustomed to speech. ‘She was a good woman.’ How many times was Brunetti to hear this? he wondered. He had never questioned it, and nothing he had heard about her made him suspect that it was not true. Events, however, had placed Signora Altavilla beyond criticism, and so it now mattered little whether she had been a good person or not, or who maintained that she was.
‘She understood things. Why people do things.’ She spoke a dialect so dense a non-Venetian would have struggled to understand what she said. She nodded in self-affirmation, then again and then again, but without looking in Brunetti’s direction. In an entirely different voice, she said, ‘We had to,’ letting the last word die out in a terminal fall into silence.
‘It’s hard, sometimes, to know,’ Brunetti ventured.
‘We knew,’ she said, quickly, defensively.
‘Of course,’ Brunetti agreed.
She turned to look at him then. ‘Are you a friend of his?’ she asked.
Brunetti settled for a noncommittal noise.
‘Did he send you?’ Like a bad actress, she squinched up her eyes as she asked this question, as if to show that she was both a suspicious and a clever person and would know if he lied. Seeing her whole face for the first time, he was surprised by its plumpness and the fullness of her mouth. Two deep vertical lines ran beside it; a third line, this one horizontal and in the middle of her chin, turned her face into a wooden puppet’s,