The noise of the engine deepened, and both Griffoni and Brunetti shoved themselves away from the railing and stood straight, waiting for whatever was to rise from those waters. They turned at the same instant and exchanged a glance, then turned back to the canal.
They heard the change of gear and the grating of the chain inside its rigid protection. The arm rose from the water, and then the jaws at the end of the crane’s arm slipped up into the light.
Brunetti braced himself to look straight at it, whatever it was. Griffoni was a statue beside him.
The metal head swung away from them for a moment, and as it turned back it revealed the soiled white body of a refrigerator emerging from the waters of the canal. It was small, would barely have reached Brunetti’s waist had it been on the floor of a kitchen somewhere. As it was, the door that hung from one hinge gave it the look of something destroyed in battle.
Brunetti and Griffoni turned to look at one another again. It was she who smiled first, then Brunetti, who added a shrug. Not speaking, they turned away and started down the other side of the bridge.
2
They walked in easy silence for some time until Griffoni finally asked, ‘What did you think it was going to be?’
Feeling not a little foolish, Brunetti said, ‘I was afraid – from the way the men behaved – that it was going to be a body.’
She stopped; Brunetti took two steps before he noticed, paused and turned to look at her.
‘Does that happen often?’ she asked, giving heavy emphasis to the last word.
Brunetti didn’t know whether to smile or not. ‘No, thank heaven. It doesn’t.’
Griffoni raised her chin and stared at nothing for a moment, then asked, ‘That murdered woman they found at Lido, when was it, six, seven years ago?’ Brunetti recalled it, and how it had shocked the city. ‘What were they, Bangladeshi?’ she asked.
‘Indian,’ he corrected her. ‘But that was before you came here.’
She nodded. ‘I read about it. Il Mattino went wild for it, like all the papers. There was a feeding frenzy about the whole thing, remember?’
Brunetti had been in Ljubljana at the time, persuading the authorities there to extradite an Italian who had fled the country after murdering his employer. By the time Brunetti returned to Venice, the case had been solved and the murderers arrested.
‘They found her in a canal on Lido, didn’t they?’ Griffoni asked. Then she added, ‘There was something about a suitcase.’ She shook her head when memory refused to function.
Brunetti tried to recall the lurid details of the case. ‘They brought her here in a suitcase, well, her body – they’d killed her in Milano – and took her out to the Lido and dumped her into a canal.’
‘It was an argument about money, wasn’t it?’ she asked.
‘Isn’t it always?’
‘I forget the rest,’ Griffoni said. ‘Something about a taxi.’
Brunetti stopped and plucked at his shirt to pull it away from his body. The heat had done nothing but increase over the last week, as had the humidity, although there was no talk of rain. The boats were crowded, breezes had died, tempers were short.
Brunetti gave a brief snort; he didn’t know if it was disgust or disbelief. ‘As I remember, they missed the last train to Milano, so they took a taxi from Piazzale Roma, paid I think it was five hundred Euros for it. They still had the empty suitcase with them. When the taxi driver read about the body the next day and thought about how nervous they had been, he called the Questura.’ He brushed his palms together and said, ‘It was over within a day.’
‘I never read anything more about it,’ Griffoni said. ‘Did you?’
‘No. They killed her in Milano, so that’s where the trial would have been held,’ Brunetti said and glanced at his watch. It was almost three, the time of their appointment at the Ospedale Fatebenefratelli to interview a patient in the hospice who had asked to speak to the police.
They knew her name and age: Benedetta Toso, 38, Venetian and resident in Santa Croce. They knew no more than that about her, although her presence as a patient in the hospice had persuaded them not to delay in going to see her. Brunetti had been contacted by Cecilia Donato, the doctor in charge of Signora Toso’s treatment, who had once worked with his brother, Sergio, an X-ray technician at the Ospedale Civile, and remembered that he had a brother who was a commissario.
She had called the Questura the day before and asked to speak to Brunetti. When she explained that she was chief doctor at the hospice at Ospedale Fatebenefratelli, the man answering the call had told her he would have to see if Commissario Brunetti was there; when she added that she was a friend of Brunetti’s brother, her call was transferred immediately.
The doctor would tell him no more than that Signora Toso was a patient under her care who, when asked if she would like to speak to a priest, had answered that she would like to speak to a policeman, preferably a female policeman.
And thus it was Griffoni who was chosen; Brunetti had come along to speak to Dottoressa Donato, hoping to capitalize on any trust she might have in his brother. He and Griffoni had discussed tactics, and she had suggested that he accompany her when she spoke to the patient, but show his submission to her.
They arrived at five minutes to three and went directly to the elevator. Brunetti had visited more than one friend who had passed through the hospice here on the way out of life, just as he had visited friends in the Ospedale Civile who found themselves at the same point. Should it be his fate to have to decide, he would want to come here.
They got out on the second floor, and Brunetti turned automatically to the left, down toward the nurses’ station. His experiences in hospitals, visiting patients, had usually been exercises in patience: waiting until the staff allowed visitors on to the wards; finding an empty chair in a room with usually two, and often four, patients; listening to the clang of meals being delivered to the wards and then to the rooms.
Here, however, the hallway was silent; the nurse at the desk was a young man with long fair hair pulled back in a braid. He wore jeans and a white T-shirt under a white lab jacket and smiled in welcome as they approached. He had a tag on his jacket with only ‘Domingo’ written on it. ‘Are you the police?’ he asked in lightly accented Italian, sounding pleased at their arrival.
Griffoni, ostensibly in charge, confirmed this. ‘Yes. Commissario Claudia Griffoni and’ – this with a wave towards Brunetti – ‘my colleague, Guido Brunetti.’
‘Welcome,’ the young man said with a smile. ‘Dottoressa Donato asked me to take you to her when you arrived.’ He got up and came around the counter, revealing a pair of white Converse sneakers. He reached out to shake their hands. ‘I’m glad you came. Signora Toso wants very badly to talk to you.’
Before they could ask about this, he turned and started down the hall. Brunetti noticed that the walls were decorated with black-and-white photos of beaches: straight or curved, surfless calm or raging waves, giant rocks or none. The only common element was the absence of human beings or human rubbish: no cans, plastic, chairs, boats; only space and water.
The young man stopped at the third door on the left, which stood open. From the doorway, he said, ‘Cecilia, the police are here for you.’