Brunetti decided to walk home, to take advantage of the star-studded sky and the deserted streets. He paused in front of the hotel, measuring distances. The map of the city that lay imprinted in the minds of all Venetians showed him that the shortest way was across the Rialto Bridge. He cut across Campo San Fantin and into the labyrinth of narrow streets that wound back towards the bridge. No one passed him as he walked, and he had the strange sensation of having the sleeping city entirely to himself. At San Luca, he passed the pharmacy, one of the few places that were open all night, except for the train station, where slept the homeless and the mad.
And then he was at the water's edge, the bridge to his right. How typically Venetian it was, looking, from a distance, lofty and ethereal but revealing itself, upon closer reflection, to be firmly grounded in the mud of the city.
Across the bridge, he walked through the now abandoned market. It was usually a cross to bear, shoving and pushing through the crowded street, through herds of tourists jammed together between vegetable stalls on one side and shops filled with the worst sort of tourist junk on the other, but tonight he had it to himself and could stride freely. Ahead of him, in the middle of the street, a pair of lovers stood, glued hip to hip, blind to the beauty about them but perhaps, after all, somehow inspired by it.
At the clock, he turned left, glad to be almost home. Five minutes brought him to his favourite shop, Biancat, the florist, whose windows offered the city a daily explosion of beauty. Tonight, through the clinging humidity of the glass, tubs of yellow roses preened themselves, while behind them lurked a cloud of pale jasmine. He walked quickly past the second window, crowded with lurid orchids, which always looked faintly cannibalistic to him.
He let himself into the palazzo in which he lived, bracing himself, as he always had to do when he was tired, for the task of climbing the ninety-four steps to their fourth-floor apartment. The previous owner had built the apartment illegally more than thirty years before, simply added another floor to the existing building without bothering with official permission of any sort. This situation had somehow been obscured when Brunetti bought the apartment ten years ago, and ever since, he had lived in recurrent fear of being confronted with a summons to legalize the obvious. He trembled at the prospect of the Herculean task of getting the permits that would authenticate both that the apartment existed and that he had a right to live there. The mere fact that the walls were there and he lived within them would hardly be thought relevant. The bribes would be ruinous.
He opened the door, glad of the warmth and smell he associated with the apartment: lavender, wax, the scent of something cooking in the kitchen at the back; it was a mixture that represented to him, in a way he couldn't explain, the existence of sanity in the daily madness that was his work.
'Is that you, Guido?' Paolo called from the living room. He wondered who else she might be expecting at two in the morning, but he didn't ask.
'Yes,' he called back, kicking off his shoes and removing his coat, just now beginning to accept how tired he was.
'Would you like some tea?' She came into the hall and kissed him lightly on the cheek.
He nodded, making no attempt to hide his exhaustion from her. Trailing her down the hall towards the kitchen, he took a chair while she filled the kettle and put it on the stove to boil. She pulled down a bag of dried leaves from a cupboard above her head, opened it, sniffed, and asked, 'Verbena?'
'Fine, fine,' he answered, too tired to care.
She tossed a handful of dried leaves into the terra-cotta teapot that had been his grandmother's and came over to stand behind him. She kissed the back of his head, right on the spot where his hair was beginning to thin. 'What is it?'
'At La Fenice. Someone poisoned the conductor.'
'Wellauer?'
'Yes.'
She placed her hands on his shoulders and gave them a gentle squeeze that he found encouraging. No comment was necessary; it was obvious to both of them that the press would make a sensation of the death and become screamingly insistent that the culprit be found as quickly as possible. Either he or Paola could have written the editorials that would appear in the morning, were probably being written even now.
The kettle shot out a burst of steam and Paola went to pour the water into the chipped pot. As always, he found her mere physical presence comforting, found solace in observing the easy efficiency with which she moved and did things. Like many Venetian women, Paola was fair-skinned and had the red-gold hair so often seen in portraits of the women of the seventeenth century. Not beautiful by any ordinary canon, she had a nose that was a bit too long and a chin that was more than a bit too determined. He liked both.
'Any ideas?' she asked, bringing the pot and two mugs to the table. She sat opposite him, poured out the aromatic tea, then went back to the cupboard and returned with an immense jar of honey.
'It's too early,' he said, spooning honey into his mug. He swirled it around, clicking his spoon against the side of the mug, then spoke in rhythm with the clicking of the spoon. 'There's a young wife, a soprano who lied about not seeing him before he died, and a gay director who had an argument with him before he was killed.'
'Maybe you ought to try to sell the story. It sounds like something we'd see on TV.'
'And a dead genius,' he added.
'Yes, that would help.' Paola sipped at her tea, then blew on it to cool it. 'How much younger is the wife?'
'Easily young enough to be his daughter. Thirty years, I'd say.'
'OK,' she said, using one of the Americanisms towards which her vocabulary was prone. 'I say it was the wife.'
Though he had repeatedly asked her not to do this, she insisted on choosing a suspect at the beginning of any investigation he worked on, and she was generally wrong, for she always opted for the most obvious choice. Once, exasperated beyond bearing, he'd asked her why she insisted on doing it, and she'd explained that since she had written her dissertation on Henry James, she considered herself entitled to the release of finding the obvious in real life, since she'd never found it in his novels. Nothing Brunetti had ever done could stop her from making her choice, and nothing could ever induce her to inject any subtlety into her selection.
'Which means,' he said, still swirling his spoon, 'that it will turn out to be someone in the chorus.'
'Or the butler.'
'Hmm,' he agreed, and drank his tea. They sat in companionable silence until the tea was gone. He took both mugs and placed them in the sink, and set the teapot on the counter beside it, safe from harm.
