‘Dottoressa Griffoni refuses to walk back to the Questura.’
The pilot changed his tone and said with approval, ‘Sensible woman. Where are you?’
‘At the Fatebenefratelli.’
‘Hummm,’ the pilot began, and Brunetti could all but hear his brain calculating route and time. ‘Twenty minutes. There’s a bar if you turn right when you walk out the front door. I’ll pick you up there.’
Brunetti put the phone in his pocket and said, ‘He’ll pick us up at the bar down the street in twenty minutes.’
‘He’s married, isn’t he?’ Griffoni asked.
‘What?’
‘Foa. He’s married.’
‘Yes. Two kids.’
‘Pity,’ Griffoni said, emerging from the shadow and turning to the right.
Brunetti caught up with her and said, ‘Why?’
‘Because if I’m going to be here a few years, I’d like to spend them with a man who has a boat and who will come and pick me up whenever I call him.’
‘I called him,’ Brunetti said.
‘Does that mean you want to marry him, instead?’
Surely the heat had got to her. ‘I’m already married.’
‘Does she have a boat?’
‘No, but her father does.’
‘And a driver?’
‘A pilot’, Brunetti corrected automatically. ‘He’s the man who takes care of everything for my father-in-law.’
‘What sort of things?’
‘Broken windows, leaking pipes, acqua alta, electrical problems, locks, the roof, and the boat.’
‘Is he married?’
‘Yes. To the cook. And he’s more than sixty.’
Without breaking step, Griffoni turned into the open door of the bar. Brunetti followed her and found himself greeted by a loud, cheerful clinking noise, as though the owner had started to shake a tambourine at the sight of two potential customers. That, however, could not be, for the man standing behind the bar – presumably the owner – was braced, elbows locked, staring down at the open pages of a newspaper. He was tall, broad, and bald.
The noise came from the back of the bar, where three slot machines stood, blinking happily into the reduced light, one of them clanking out victory in a crash of coins spitting into the metal till. A very short man holding the sort of plastic bucket used by children to dig beach fortifications moved to the winning machine and scooped the coins into the bucket. He slapped his palm on the face of the machine and let out a joyous hoot. ‘Who says you can’t win?’ he shouted, perhaps at the machine, perhaps at the other machines standing in the row.
He took two steps to the side and fed a coin into the last machine, then plucked out another to feed the middle one. He poked the button on that one, then leaned over the last machine and poked the red button there. Lights flashed, whizzes and soft bangs came from both machines, but then they stopped, and the silence expanded into the room.
Not bothering to look up from his newspaper, the barman said, ‘Don’t hit the machine, Toni. It’s bad for it, and it’s bad for your hand.’
‘My hand’s all right,’ the man called Toni yelled back to him and returned to feeding the machines, this time all three of them.
The barman shrugged and folded the paper closed. He looked up and asked, ‘Sì, signori?’
‘A coffee, please,’ Brunetti said.
‘Acqua naturale,’ Griffoni told him.
The barman turned away, shifting the paper to the side and leaving it on the counter for them to read if they chose. Brunetti ignored the offer, fearing that the heat in combination with the Gazzettino might be damaging to his health.
The familiar noise of the coffee machine – click, click, tap, thud, squeak, hiss – calmed him, as did the anticipation of the liquid that would show him what hot really felt like. Two lighter clicks and the cup appeared in front of him, and then a full glass of water, condensation beaded on the outside, slid towards Griffoni. He used what little energy remained to him to thank the barman, who moved to the other end of the bar and busied himself there.
Brunetti turned to his colleague and asked, ‘What do you think?’ wondering if the mental distortion brought on by the heat had ended and she could think again. He poured sugar into the coffee and swirled it round without bothering to use the spoon. He sipped at it and relaxed into its bittersweet heat.
‘First we have to find out more about how her husband died,’ she said, then picked up the glass and drank half of it. ‘Then we have to follow the money and see how the other clinic was paid.’
‘And then?’ Brunetti asked, happy at the jolt the coffee had given him and beginning to believe they would both return to their former state as sentient beings.
She finished the water and pushed the glass back on the counter, pointing to it and smiling to the barman, who came back and refilled it quickly. ‘You can’t drink enough in this heat,’ he said, speaking Veneziano with what Brunetti thought was a Burano accent. ‘Sweats right out of you,’ he continued. He took a glass from the shelves behind him, filled it, and slid it across the counter towards Brunetti. ‘Drink it,’ he said, somewhere between a suggestion and a command, and Brunetti did as he was told.
‘You people visiting at the Fatebenefratelli?’ he asked, still speaking Veneziano but now in a tone sober enough to suit the question.
Brunetti nodded and thanked him for the water. With no introduction to the change of subject, the barman said, ‘I never liked terroni,’ using the pejorative term for southerners as though it were a word as neutral as ‘pane’.
He took Brunetti’s cup and saucer and set them into a sink filled with cups and glasses. ‘But then I went down there on vacation. My wife wanted to visit the Basilica of San Nicola in Bari, so we went last year.’
Brunetti nodded, and the blonde-haired Griffoni did what she could not to look like the terrona she was.
‘And you know what?’ the barman asked rhetorically; Brunetti shifted his feet about and ended up with the toe of one tapping against the side of Griffoni’s left foot.
In her best and clearest Italian, sounding as though Dante himself had taught her elocution, Griffoni said, her voice eager with curiosity, ‘Something wonderful, I hope.’
The barman gave her a quick glance, but she charmed it away with a smile that added a few degrees to the temperature of the room. ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘It was wonderful. Everyone we met was helpful, friendly, honest.’ He gave a rueful smile and added, ‘It’s what we used to be like up here in the North, maybe until twenty years ago. And then we all became gran signori, and now no one much cares about anyone else any more. But not down there; they still do.’
Brunetti and Griffoni competed with one another to seem more interested in what the barman had to say. Griffoni finished her water and set the glass on the counter, and the barman went on. ‘And they’d never let us pay for water. After walking around, seeing things, being tourists, we couldn’t drink another coffee, so we’d go into a bar and ask for mineral water. But they never let us pay. I’d offer, but they all said, “L’acqua non si paga.”’ He raised his hands in surprise or praise. ‘Think about that. Here, people get charged two Euros for a glass of water. And down there they won’t let you pay.’ Then he added, as if to forestall their question, ‘And they don’t try to give you tap water.’