Drawing Conclusions - Donna Leon [61]
‘No, Signora, he didn’t,’ Brunetti said, with no idea who they were talking about. ‘I came to see you, just as I came to see Signora Cannata: to tell you how important your friendship was to Signora Altavilla and how very fond of you she was.’
She must have preferred whatever she saw on the other side of the calle, for she turned her eyes back to it.
He let some more time pass. ‘You told her what you did,’ he said in an entirely conversational voice, phrasing it as something halfway between a question and a reminder.
His words seemed to strike a blow, for she hunched her shoulders and brought her fists together at the centre of her chest, but she did not turn to face him.
Casually, as though presenting some old adage about the behaviour of children, Brunetti said, ‘I think it helps, to be able to tell people what we did and why we did it. Talking about it helps it to go away.’ Speaking to her seemed to Brunetti like trying to order from a menu in a language he did not speak: he might see a familiar word or two, but he had no idea what was going to arrive after he spoke those words.
‘Trouble comes,’ she said to the window on the other side of the calle.
As if summoned by her words, a man walked through the door. He was older than she, well into his eighties, one of those common types seen in bars: short, stocky, nose thickened by decades of hard drinking, a bit askew from years of hard living. His sparse hair, dyed a dark mahogany, was longer on one side of his head; it had been carefully combed over his bald scalp and sealed in place by some sort of shiny gel that made his head look as though it had recently been painted or oiled, then streaked with dark paint.
He came in just as she spoke, his arrival an antiphon to her words. He stopped short, apparently at the sight of Brunetti on the chair near the door. ‘Who are you?’ he demanded angrily, as if Brunetti had been provoking him and he wasn’t going to put up with it any longer. When Brunetti did not answer immediately, the man took a few steps towards him, stopped and planted his feet solidly, giving himself a firm base from which to launch an attack. ‘I asked you who you are,’ he said.
The broken veins in his cheeks and nose grew red, as if his anger had switched them on. ‘What are you doing in here?’ he demanded, looking at the woman, whose attention had remained on the window. His face softened when he looked at her, but she ignored him and he made no move to approach her. He turned back to Brunetti. ‘Are you bothering her?’
Brunetti got slowly to his feet and adopted a look of mild relief. He bent down and carefully pulled at the knees of his trousers to show his concern that they should not wrinkle. ‘Ah,’ he said with relief he made audible, ‘if you’re the Signora’s husband, perhaps you could give me the information.’
This confused the old man and he asked, ‘Who do you think you are to ask me questions? And what are you doing here?’ In the face of Brunetti’s refusal to answer, he repeated, voice rising another notch, ‘Have you been bothering her?’ He stepped closer to the woman, placing the thickness of his body between her and Brunetti.
Brunetti reached into his pocket for his notebook. ‘All I did was try to ask a question,’ he said, allowing annoyance to slip into his own voice. ‘But I realized I’d have to speak to someone else, Signore.’ He pursed his lips and, making no attempt to disguise his irritation, said, ‘I couldn’t get any sense out of her.’ A look between anger and pain crossed the old man’s face. Brunetti licked a finger and turned a few pages, then pointed down at a page on which he had written, in preparation for a parent–teacher meeting that was to be held at Chiara’s school the following week, a list of her teachers and the subjects they taught.
‘I need the information about the years 1988 and 1989. There’s nothing we can do until we have it.’
‘Go to hell with your 1988, and take 1989 with you,’ the old man said, pleased that he now