The Waters of Eternal Youth (19 page)

Brunetti had sent Foa back to the Questura; now, because San Giacomo dell'Orio wasn't very far from where they were, they decided to pass by the home of this Stefano dalla Lana. Chatting easily and paying no attention to where they were going, they made their way effortlessly to the large
campo
, so different now from what it had been when both of them had begun their police careers. Officers had patrolled it only in pairs then, when it was notorious as a centre for drug dealing, a place where the garbage men routinely complained about the number of used syringes on the pavement every morning. Gentrification had only just begun, but the signs were already evident: a new bar, tables still set outside, and inside everything slick and linear; a good restaurant just over the bridge towards Rialto; and the final proof for local residents of what was coming: three separate buildings wrapped in scaffolding.

‘I was down in Santa Giustina a few days ago to meet a friend for a drink,' Vianello said with no introduction. ‘Man who runs the bar's closing. They doubled his rent. Same with the guy who sells antiques.' They walked another minute and then the Inspector exclaimed, half angry, half astonished, ‘Santa Giustina, for God's sake. Who'd live down there?'

‘Foreigners, probably,' Brunetti said as they came into the
campo
. They started to circle around the apse of the church and saw a tall, ­grey-­haired man approaching them. ‘Are you the police?' he asked as he drew near. It was a deep voice, speaking Italian clearly but with the ­give-­away Venetian sibilance.

‘Yes,' Brunetti said.

‘I'm Stefano dalla Lana,' he said but did not extend his hand. ‘Ruggiero at the bar called and said you wanted to talk to me and would probably come to find me.' Then, before either of them could ask, he added, ‘I thought it would be better to meet you here. My wife's a very nervous person: it would upset her if the police came to the house.' He pointed to one of the benches placed under the trees.

‘Of course,' Brunetti said. ‘I'm sorry about your wife.'

‘Oh, it's all right,' he said. ‘It's just that bad news bothers her more than it should.'

He led them to a bench and sat in the middle, leaving room for them on either side. ‘What was it you wanted to know?' dalla Lana asked. He had deep brown eyes from the sides of which radiated the lines that years of strain had left behind.

‘We heard that you were a friend of Pietro Cavanis,' Brunetti began.

Though he must have known this was their reason for coming, his face tightened when he heard his friend's name. He looked away, towards the church, and when he looked back at Brunetti, his eyes had grown moist. ‘I'd known him all my life. We went to school together,' he said, then began to examine the roots of the tree, resting his elbow on his knee and cupping his hand over his forehead to hide his eyes.

Brunetti let the silence do what it wanted, stay as long as it pleased. A dog ran past, followed by two children, one of them on a scooter.

Dalla Lana looked up. ‘Excuse me, please. I still can't get used to it.'

‘That he's gone?' Brunetti said.

‘I wish it were only that,' dalla Lana said with a sad smile. ‘That he'd moved away or gone somewhere for a while. But that he's dead . . .' He broke off and pressed the same hand over his mouth. He shook his head repeatedly, as if the energy of that would be enough to change things.

Knowing that it was not, Brunetti waited a moment and then said, ‘The man in the bar told us that Signor Cavanis had been talking about a change in his life that was about to happen. Did he say anything about this to you?' When dalla Lana did not respond, Brunetti continued, ‘Since you were his best friend – I wondered if he'd told you about it.'

Dalla Lana grasped his hands together and leaned forward to shove them down between his knees, then in that posture studied the pavement. ‘In school, we were the two dreamers. Pietro wanted to do something big in life: become a doctor and cure some terrible disease; become an engineer and invent something that would make life easier; or go into politics and make a difference to people's lives.'

‘What did you dream?' Brunetti asked.

Dalla Lana looked at him quickly, as if no one had ever asked him this question. ‘I wanted to write poetry.'

‘And what happened?' Brunetti asked.

Dalla Lana shook his head again, started to speak but stopped, took a long breath and said, ‘Pietro was enrolled at the university to study engineering, but that summer his father died and he had to try to find work.'

‘As a baker?'

‘How did you know that?' he asked, not attempting to hide his surprise.

‘The man in the bar told me.'

‘Did he tell you about his father?'

‘Only that he died,' Brunetti said, giving half of the truth. ‘He said that your friend had to stop working some years ago.'

‘His liver.'

‘That's what he said.'

‘It's what killed his father,' dalla Lana explained, then went on. ‘The owner offered him his father's job. It was the only thing he could find. His mother had never worked, and his father's pension wasn't very big.'

‘I see,' Brunetti said.

‘He had no choice,' dalla Lana said, then, after a long time, ‘Bakers have to drink a lot because of the heat and because of the strange hours. That's how it started. But it didn't change him, not really. He was still a dreamer, even till the end. The last time we spoke, he was . . . well, he was dreaming.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘He called once last week, but I couldn't answer because I was in class, and then I forgot to call him back. Then he called me again on Saturday night. It was late, and he was drunk. He usually didn't call me when he'd been drinking, but this time he couldn't stop talking. He said he'd found a way to pay me back.'

He saw their failure to understand and said, ‘Over the years, I've helped him when I could. Never anything big. To help him pay a bill. Or for the rent.' Seeing their faces, he said quickly, ‘That was only once. And it wasn't very much.' He looked down again, as if embarrassed.

‘What else did he say?' Brunetti asked softly.

Head still lowered, dalla Lana sighed deeply. ‘I didn't understand a lot of what he said. About always being in debt to me.'

He looked up at Brunetti, then at Vianello, then back to Brunetti. ‘I didn't want it back. I never asked, never said anything. I wanted to help him. He was my friend.'

Neither Brunetti nor Vianello spoke, and after a time dalla Lana went on. ‘He said he saw what would get the money, then he said something about television, but he wasn't making sense. I didn't understand him. I still don't. He said he did one good thing in his life, and now he'd do another because he remembered something, and everything would be all right.'

Dalla Lana stopped and looked back and forth between the two men again.

‘Did he tell you what he remembered?'

‘No.' Suddenly his mouth contracted in pain and he said, ‘I told him to go to sleep and call me the next day. I don't think he understood, but he hung up. And the next I knew, he was dead.' Then, before Brunetti could ask if Cavanis had called again, dalla Lana said, ‘When he didn't call, I figured he'd forgotten all about it.'

Out of simple curiosity and to draw dalla Lana away from the thought of his friend's death, Brunetti asked, ‘And the poetry?'

‘I don't have the talent,' he said, as though Brunetti had asked him the time and he'd said he wasn't wearing a watch.

The three men sat silent after that until Vianello asked, ‘If you don't mind telling me, why did you remain such good friends all these years?'

Dalla Lana moved restlessly at that, pulled his jacket tighter around him, making Brunetti conscious that the day had suddenly lost what little warmth it had had. Dalla Lana got to his feet and ran his curved palm up and down the trunk of one of the trees a few times. Then he came back to the bench and looked at them. ‘Because he was brave and decent and worked hard when he had a job, until his health betrayed him. And because he read my poetry all these years and told me how good it was, how much it moved him.'

He kicked an empty cigarette packet away. ‘Is there anything else you'd like to know, gentlemen?'

Brunetti got to his feet and took dalla Lana's hand. ‘No, thank you. You've told us a great deal.'

Vianello stepped up and offered his hand. ‘Thank you. I'm sorry for your friend.'

Dalla Lana said goodbye and turned to walk back to where the Billa had been before gentrification had discovered Campo San Giacomo dell'Orio.

They stopped on the way to the vaporetto and had a few
tramezzini
, but they were so filled with mayonnaise that they left Brunetti feeling stuffed but not satisfied. As they headed for the stop at Riva di Biasio, he pulled out his
telefonino
and called Signorina Elettra. He'd had enough of going by the official route, so he gave her Cavanis'
telefonino
number and asked if she could somehow obtain a list of the numbers he'd phoned, starting on the Monday before he died.

‘ “Somehow obtain”,' she repeated. ‘How elegant, Com­missario. Yes, I'm sure I can obtain them. Somehow.' She paused and then asked, ‘Is there any need for haste?'

‘As in: is there time to wait for a magistrate to authorize the search?' he asked.

‘Yes.'

‘No.'

‘Ah,' she said, dragging out the sound while she, no doubt, considered methods. ‘Are you coming back to the Questura?'

‘Yes, we're on the way now.'

‘I'll have the numbers for you when you get here.'

He and Vianello had fallen into step, and as he walked, Brunetti repeated, silently, ‘I do not want to
know
, I do not want to
know
', coming down hard with the step that synchronized with the last word of the phrase. To Vianello, he said, ‘She'll have the numbers he called for us when we get there.'

Vianello turned to look at Brunetti and smiled. ‘When they fire us all, I wonder if we'll still be eligible for pensions.'

When they arrived half an hour later, they went directly to Signorina Elettra's office. She greeted them with evident pleasure and handed Brunetti a sheet of paper. He took it but kept his thoughts to himself. On it were listed only three phone calls. On Monday and Saturday, Cavanis had called a number belonging to Stefano dalla Lana: the first call went unanswered; the next one, made at 11.11 on Saturday evening, lasted eight minutes. The final call, made at 11.22, was a wrong number, made to the office of the Fine Arts Commission. This call lasted six seconds.

‘Too drunk to dial,' Vianello said.

‘Strange that he didn't try again with the right number,' Brunetti said.

‘Drunks are strange,' Vianello observed.

‘He didn't make any calls the day he was killed,' Brunetti said, holding up the paper for both of them to see.

Less than ­twenty-­four hours later, however, Cavanis was lying dead on the floor of his apartment. Brunetti had little faith in coincidence, especially regarding a man who claimed he was going to change his luck and suddenly have lots of money. If there was any truth in what he had said to dalla Lana, he had made no attempt to pursue it, at least not that night and not with his
telefonino
. And then he had been murdered. ‘Is there a public phone anywhere near his home?' he surprised Signorina Elettra by asking.

She and Vianello were silent, and Brunetti watched their faces as they tried to picture the
calli
and
campi
in that area of Santa Croce. After a moment Vianello said, ‘They're almost all gone, aren't they?'

Signorina Elettra held up her hand in a ­waiter-­hailing gesture. ‘Telecom must have a map of where their phones still are,' she said, looking at her computer as though it were the taxi she had hailed and she were impatient to climb into it.

‘And then what?' Brunetti asked.

‘If I find a map, I'll send one of the uniformed men to get the serial numbers of the phones. With that, it should be easy to find the numbers called from the phones.'

‘Ah,' Brunetti whispered, then ‘find', as though he were marvelling at some archaic magical formula.

He returned his thoughts to the call that Cavanis might not have wanted to make on his
telefonino
, but it was impossible to enter into the alcoholic mind. Perhaps not reaching the number he wanted had jolted Cavanis into momentary sobriety. Or by the morning he might have realized that he should not use his own phone for the call he wanted to make.

‘We'll leave you to look for the map,' Brunetti said, having thought of another possibility.

Before they could leave, however, Signorina Elettra said, ‘I found the name of Manuela's family doctor in the medical report you left with me, but he retired soon after the incident and died about five years ago.' Another dead end. Brunetti thanked her, and they left. Outside, they separated, Brunetti to go down to talk to Bocchese, and Vianello back to the squad room.

When Brunetti reached the laboratory where Bocchese worked, he knocked on the door, didn't bother to wait, and entered. The technician looked up, then returned his attention to a
telefonino
that he appeared to be in the process of reassembling.

‘Is that Cavanis'?' Brunetti said before he could stop himself.

‘No,' Bocchese answered, then added, ‘You can have his phone now.'

Feeling some satisfaction at being able to tell him, Brunetti said, ‘We've already got the numbers he called.'

The technician nodded in approval and said, ‘She's good,' then picked up a small screwdriver and placed the tip inside the exposed viscera of the phone. He turned it, removed it, put the tip back inside and turned it again. The phone rang, a normal ring like the one made by most landlines. The technician pushed a key, and the noise stopped.

‘What are you doing?'

‘Fixing the ring signal,' Bocchese said.

‘Isn't there an easier way to do that?' Brunetti, a techno Neanderthal, asked.

‘Yes. But I dropped it and it wouldn't work. So the only thing to do was fix it by ­re-­establishing the contacts.'

‘I see,' Brunetti said, quite as if he understood what Bocchese meant. He counted six long beats before he said, ‘Have you finished with the things from Cavanis' apartment?'

‘About an hour ago,' Bocchese said, tapping a number into the keyboard of his phone.

An instant later, Brunetti's phone rang, and he reached into his pocket to answer it but removed his hand when he saw Bocchese's face.

‘Very funny. Very funny,' Brunetti said in a sour voice, unwilling to reveal his amusement at Bocchese's trick. ‘Can I have a look?'

Bocchese pointed with his chin towards a table at the back of the lab, its surface covered with many small items. ‘Be my guest,' he said, slipping the back cover of his
telefonino
back on, and starting to insert the tiny screws that held the front in place.

Brunetti walked over to the table and circled it, looking down at the objects exposed on the surface. He recognized some of them. There was a toothbrush, bristles tormented to all four sides, a tube of toothpaste that had been squeezed so tightly that Brunetti would not have been surprised to hear it weep. The meagre contents of the medicine cabinet were laid out in a paltry line. He recognized the bar of kitchen soap. Further along were pieces of orange peel and a plastic container that had once held food that itself had contained an inordinate amount of tomato sauce. Next to this was a can that had once held tuna fish and two empty ­two-­litre wine bottles.

Flattened on the table were four pieces of paper and two plastic phonecards, both the worse for wear and no doubt discarded because the time on them had been used up. ‘All right to touch these things?' Brunetti called over to the technician, who was now talking on his phone. Bocchese nodded and waved his hand, concentrating on his conversation.

Brunetti took out his notebook and set it on the table next to the cards and carefully copied out the long serial number on each card. Big Brother was not only watching us, he reflected; he was also able to trace any call that had been made using these cards.

He turned his attention to the scraps of paper. One was a flyer announcing the appointment of a new pastor to the parish of San Zan Degolà. Another was a wadded tissue which the technicians had decided not to open, and two more were receipts from shops.

Brunetti turned the receipts over; on the back of the second one he saw the familiar 52, the initial digits of a local phone number, followed by five more. He pulled out his phone and dialled the number.

‘Soprintendenza di Belle Arti,' a woman's voice answered after six rings. Brunetti ended the call without bothering to speak. So Cavanis had dialled the number he had written down, but why call the Belle Arti? Anyone's guess. Only a fool – or a drunk – would call a city office at eleven at night. Or, for that matter, his cynic's voice added, at eleven in the morning. He thanked Bocchese and said he'd come back to see him if anything ever went wrong with his own phone.

‘Most people just throw them away,' the technician said with audible disapproval.

Brunetti nodded and went up to Signorina Elettra's office. She was not there, so he carefully copied the numbers of the phonecards on a sheet of paper and wrote a note asking her to find the numbers called using both. When he got back to his office, he took out his phone and dialled the number for dalla Lana that Vianello had given him. Because dalla Lana was a teacher, Brunetti was prepared to leave a message, but dalla Lana answered with his name.

‘Signor dalla Lana, this is Commissario Brunetti. There's one thing I forgot to ask you.'

‘What's that?' dalla Lana asked in a tired, patient voice.

‘Did your friend say anything recently about the Soprintendenza di Belle Arti?'

‘I don't understand your question, Commissario,' dalla Lana said, sounding confused. ‘What could Pietro have had to do with them?'

‘He had their phone number in his home, and he called it after he spoke to you the other night.'

‘Saturday?'

‘Yes.'

‘What would he want with them?' dalla Lana asked. ‘At that hour?'

‘I've no idea,' Brunetti admitted. ‘You're sure he never mentioned them to you?'

‘No. Never.' Then, after a moment, dalla Lana added, ‘He was very drunk when I spoke to him, Commissario, not really coherent.' Dalla Lana was simply stating a fact and making no attempt to draw conclusions from that.

‘Do you know who his other friends were?' Brunetti asked, adding, ‘I should have asked you that earlier.'

‘There are the men at the bar,' dalla Lana said after a pause, ‘but I'm not sure they were really friends. I don't think Pietro saw them anywhere else. And I never met any other friends; I don't know if he had any.'

What did Cavanis do all day? Brunetti asked himself. He visited a bar a few times, watched television, and drank. Is this what's left of life after retirement? Six hundred euros a month didn't permit much else, he had to remember. But still.

‘Did he ever mention an incident in Campo San Boldo, when he saved a girl's life?' Brunetti asked.

‘Yes, he told me about it when it happened, but he said it wasn't important. He said he dived in and pulled her out without thinking about it.' There was a long silence. ‘In fact, he laughed about it, said he was so drunk when it happened that he was lucky he didn't drown himself.'

‘Is that all he remembered?' Brunetti asked.

‘As far as I know, yes. It's all he ever told me about it, at any rate.'

‘Thank you, Signor dalla Lana,' Brunetti said and then, hoping that hearing a compliment for his friend would somehow comfort him, added, ‘It was a very brave thing for him to do.'

‘Yes,' dalla Lana said and broke the connection.

If Cavanis had told his best friend no more than this about the incident at San Boldo, that would be the end of that. Or it would be, were it not that Cavanis had also said he'd remembered something that was going to make him a lot of money and shortly afterwards had been found lying dead on the floor of his apartment, a knife driven into his neck.

Brunetti found himself thinking of Dante's belief that heresy was a form of intellectual stubbornness, the refusal to abandon a mistaken idea. In Dante's case, this path led to eternal damnation; in his own case, Brunetti reflected, intellectual stubbornness might well be leading him deep into the Dark Wood of Error. Saving part of Manuela from the waters of the canal was hardly the only thing Cavanis had done in his life; it need not have been the cause of his death. Drunks are reckless, thoughtless, rash. They drive off the road or into walls, they start fights they know they cannot win, and they say things that cannot be forgiven or forgotten. They menace and they brag, and very often they push people too hard or too far. Nothing linked his murder to the incident with Manuela ­Lando-­Continui. Nothing linked his murder to anything save Brunetti's own suspicions. This was real life, random and messy and uncontrolled.

His phone rang. He answered with his name.

‘Get down here,' came the unconfoundable voice of his superior.

‘
Sì
,
Dottore
,' Brunetti said and got to his feet.

Signorina Elettra was still not at her desk, thus he went into the lion's den with no advance warning and no way to prepare his excuses and prevarications. Even before Brunetti was halfway across the room, Patta demanded, ‘Did you put her up to this?'

Patta's wife? Signorina Elettra? Contessa ­Lando-­Continui? Brunetti kept his face motionless.

‘I'm afraid I don't know what you're talking about, ­Vice-­Questore,' Brunetti said, for once telling Patta the simple truth.

‘This email,' Patta said, slamming his palm down on some sheets of paper at the centre of his desk. ‘From the Assistant to the Minister of the Interior, for God's sake. Do you know what this can do to my career?'

‘I must repeat, ­Vice-­Questore, that I know nothing about any email sent to you.' He looked Patta in the eye when he said this, hoping that the tactic he used when he lied to his superior would prove equally effective when he told the truth.

‘Don't lie to me, Brunetti,' Patta said.

‘I'm not lying, Dottore,' Brunetti answered. ‘I know nothing about that,' he said, daring to point at the papers in front of his superior.