Puzzled, Brunetti asked, ‘Was there any explanation?’
‘No, sir: after the call, they sent a directive. They don’t have to give reasons. So I called a friend in the mayor’s office to ask.’
‘And learned?’
‘The sirens frighten the tourists if they’re riding in taxis. Apparently, if it’s the police, they’re afraid there will be violence, maybe a crash. And most Chinese don’t know how to swim.’
Knowing he shouldn’t ask, Brunetti did. ‘And ambulances?’
‘He said the Chinese aren’t afraid of them, the way they are of the police.’
Brunetti turned to the right and watched the hospital as it rode off into the distance.
Foa suddenly spun the wheel and swept to the left to draw up close behind two boys in a boat with a very large motor that was slapping down repeatedly from the effect of the tremendous surges of power the driver was giving it. He got within three metres of them and flicked the siren into life long enough for one sharp shriek, startling Brunetti and bringing Griffoni to the door of the cabin.
The boy at the motor turned and saw them. The prow thudded down on the water and remained there; the speed evaporated. Foa pulled up beside the boys and yanked the bull horn from a shelf behind the tiller. He switched it on and, into the silence of the two idling engines, shouted across at them, speaking in rough dialect. ‘I’ve got your number, ragazzi, and I’m putting it on the list. Do that again, and you lose your licence. Do it twice, and you lose your boat. Then, ominously, ‘Ti ga capio?’
‘Sì, Signore,’ the boy called back, barely daring to look at the two men on deck.
Foa suddenly picked up speed and whipped past them. ‘Good work, Foa,’ Brunetti said and started down the steps to the cabin.
Griffoni had returned to her seat by the time he came in. ‘No treat for you today, Claudia. Foa said there’s too much traffic on the Grand Canal.’
Her smile froze for a moment, then removed itself. ‘Traffic,’ she said, as though repeating a new word aloud so as to remember it more easily.
‘Taxis filled with tourists, to be more exact,’ Brunetti explained.
She folded her hands in her lap and sat without saying anything until they arrived at the Questura, when they both came out of the cabin, back into the power of the sun. Brunetti stepped up to the dock and turned to extend his hand to Griffoni. Before taking it, she turned to thank Foa for the ride, then joined Brunetti on the pavement, saying, ‘I’ll check for her husband’s name in the accident reports for the whole province.’
Brunetti opened the door for her and held it while she entered the Questura. In the high entrance hall, the temperature was almost as bad as it was outside, the humidity certainly worse. The new city administration had cut back on spending for public services, and the allowance for electricity was not sufficient to provide air conditioning to the entire palazzo.
He followed her inside, saying, ‘I’ll try to find out where she was before she went to the hospice.’
Griffoni nodded and turned away. He saw her pause at the bottom of the stairs. Like a diver on the high board, she raised her head and stretched it back, arching her neck taut, then quickly looked beneath her and launched herself upwards.
Brunetti waited a moment and, sparing himself the preparatory pause, went upstairs towards the office of his superior, Vice-Questore Giuseppe Patta. He lacked the energy to do anything but tap lightly on the door of Patta’s secretary and open it without waiting to be told to do so.
The room was so cool that Brunetti paused on the threshold and waited to determine if this was a heat-induced hallucination. ‘Please close the door, Commissario,’ said the familiar voice of Signorina Elettra Zorzi, the Vice-Questore’s secretary and éminence grise of the Questura.
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Sorry.’ He closed the door quietly and came to stand near her desk.
‘It’s one of the Vice-Questore’s chief concerns at the moment,’ she said, smiling at him.
‘To keep people out?’
‘To keep the cool air in,’ she answered. The state of her own unwrinkled linen jacket was evidence that the Vice-Questore’s wishes, as so often happened in the Questura, had been granted.
‘Foa told me he was going over to get you and Commissario Griffoni at the Fatebenefratelli,’ she said. ‘I hope it was nothing unpleasant.’
‘Why do you call her “Commissario Griffoni”?’ Brunetti asked, surprising her with the question.
‘It’s to show professional courtesy, sir. While I’m inside this building, everyone is to be addressed by his or her rank.’
‘Did you pick that up from a ministerial directive about appropriate behaviour among colleagues?’
‘That wasn’t necessary, Signore,’ she said demurely. ‘I learned it from my late grandmother, who always maintained that a person must be, first before all things, polite.’
‘But you and Commissario Griffoni seem to be friends.’
‘Oh, we are, sir,’ she said, and left the matter there. With a change of gears Foa would no doubt have admired, she asked, ‘Is there any way I can help you?’
He approached her desk, saying, ‘We learned from the doctor at the hospice that the husband of the woman we went to see – Vittorio Fadalto – was killed recently in a motorcycle accident. Commissario Griffoni is looking into that and will get a copy of the accident report: it must have been somewhere in the Veneto.’
She nodded, as if to acknowledge how easy such a thing would be, and he went on, ‘I’ll try to find out the name of the clinic where she was before she went to the hospice, and perhaps then you could find out why she was transferred.’
‘Was the other clinic private?’ Signorina Elettra asked.
‘I think so.’
‘Then it’s likely she left because of money,’ she observed. ‘Think about it, Commissario.’ She pushed back in her chair. ‘A person goes to the hospice only when they accept the fact that there’s no hope, and they’re going to die. And they can be accepted by the hospice only if that’s true.’
Brunetti had seen Signora Toso and felt sure this was the case.
‘So to move from one place to another in that state – so close to death – is an enormous decision. Physically. Mentally.’ She closed her eyes and said, ‘Think of the pain.’
‘Her daughters are in the city,’ Brunetti said.
‘Where was the clinic?’
‘On the mainland, but I don’t know where,’ Brunetti said, regretting that he had not asked Dottoressa Donato because he was uncertain the doctor would give him further information about Signora Toso.
‘How does she look?’ Signorina Elettra asked, surprising him with the question.
‘She looks like she’s dying.’ He realized how sharp his voice sounded and tried to temper it with a different tone. ‘I just saw her, and it’s terrible.’
‘Then it would have been easier if she had stayed where she was,’ Signorina Elettra said. ‘If there was no more money, however, she’d have to leave.’
She pulled her lips together and tilted her head to one side, looking away from him.