Transient Desires (Commissario Brunetti #30)(2)
He left the house and started for the Questura, but turned immediately into Rizzardini for a coffee and a brioche, and then another coffee and a glass of mineral water. Braced by caffeine and sugar, Brunetti turned towards Rialto and the business of passing through the centre of the city at half past ten in the morning, just as the people who had done their grocery shopping at the market were beginning to be replaced by the tourists in search of their first ombra or prosecco, all bent on having what they had been told was a real Venetian experience.
Twenty minutes later, he turned right on to the riva that led to the Questura and, looking across the canal, saw the cleaned and restored fa?ade of the church of San Lorenzo, no longer a church but a gallery of some sort, dedicated, he had been told, to the salvation of the seas. The decades-old billboard giving the year of the beginning of the ever-unconcluded restoration had been removed, as had the wooden condominium built by local residents for stray cats that had stood there for as long as Brunetti could remember.
As he arrived outside the Questura, he saw his superior, Vice-Questore Giuseppe Patta, at the bottom of the staircase at the far end of the entrance hall. Instinctively, Brunetti pulled his telefonino from the pocket of his jacket and bent his head over it, nodding to the officer who opened the glass door for him but not moving into the building. He stopped and poked angrily at the front of his phone, then turned to the officer and said, making no attempt to disguise his irritation, ‘Do you have any connection down here, Graziano?’
The officer on guard duty, aware that Brunetti was arriving for work two hours late and that the Vice-Questore did not view the Commissario with a benevolent eye, said, ‘It’s been going in and out all morning, Signore. Did you manage to connect by going out there?’ He nodded towards the space in front of the Questura.
Brunetti shook his head, saying, ‘It’s no better out there. Makes me crazy that there’s . . .’ but stopped when he saw his superior walking towards him. ‘Good morning, Vice-Questore,’ he said, then added in a helpful voice, holding up his phone, ‘Don’t even bother going outside to try, Dottore. There’s no hope. Nothing’s working.’
That said, Brunetti slipped the phone back into his pocket and pointed, quite unnecessarily, towards the stairs. ‘I’m going to check the phone on my desk again and see if it’s working yet.’
Patta, entirely confused, asked, ‘What’s wrong, Brunetti?’ His tone, Brunetti thought, was remarkably similar to the one he had himself used, when the kids were younger and told him they had no homework to do that evening.
Like a prosecutor holding up the plastic bag with the bloodstained knife inside to show to the press photographer, he pulled out his phone again and showed it to his superior. ‘There’s no connection.’
From the corner of his eye, he saw Graziano nod in agreement, quite as if he had watched Brunetti’s failure to make a call.
Patta turned from Brunetti and asked the officer, ‘Where’s Foa?’
‘He should be here in three minutes, Vice-Questore,’ Graziano assured him, looking at his watch and somehow managing to seem taller when he spoke to their superior. As if summoned by the Vice-Questore’s desire, the police launch turned into the canal and passed quickly in front of the church, under the bridge, and slowed to a stop at the dock just beyond where the three men stood.
Patta turned away silently from the two men and walked towards the boat, its motor reduced to a purr. Foa tossed a rope around the nearest stanchion and jumped down to the pavement, saluted the Vice-Questore, stepped back and extended his arm, as if to clear a group of pesky reporters from the space between them. Patta viewed any motion made within a metre of his person as an attempt to help him and placed a hand upon Foa’s forearm to steady himself as he stepped up on to the boat.
Foa smiled to his two colleagues, flipped the rope free, leaped over the gunwale and landed in front of the wheel. The engine gave a roar, and Foa spun the launch in a tight U and headed back the way he’d come.
2
Brunetti continued up to his office, his story to the Vice-Questore about telephone problems still on his mind. What might be called the infrastructure of the Questura was, not to put too fine a point on it, a mess, and thus Brunetti’s invention was completely credible. The heating system was quixotic and throughout the winter shifted its faint results from side to side of the building as it willed; there was no air conditioning save in a few select offices. The electricity functioned, more or less, although occasional surges of current had killed a few computers and one printer. By now, the staff was so inured that the occasional exploding light bulb was treated as no more than a presage of the fireworks of Redentore; the plumbing was rarely a problem; the roof leaked only in two places, and most of the windows could be closed, though some didn’t open.
As he climbed the steps, Brunetti thought of the ways he resembled the building, with a bit of stiffness here, something that occasionally malfunctioned there, but he soon ran out of comparisons. The original thought, however, prompted him to drop his hand from the railing and stand a bit straighter as he climbed the stairs.
Inside his office, Brunetti tossed the newspaper he’d bought in Campo Santa Marina on to his desk. He found the room uncomfortably warm and went to open a window. The view from here had been improved, he was forced to admit, by the general sprucing-up of the church and the removal of the condominium. But still he missed the cats.