Brunetti had the strange sensation that he had just played another round of the backward plot game with his family. Wealthy blonde marries gigolo young enough to be her son. Wealthy man unable to produce a male heir, leaves wife for younger woman, only to have another daughter. Daughter dies. 'And the other daughter? Lavinia?'

Signorina Elettra made no move towards the keys. 'She studied abroad and lives abroad. She's fifty-one now.'

'Where is she?'

'Ireland. Teaching mathematics at Trinity College, Dublin.' Before he could ask, she said, 'She's been to her classes this week.'

Brunetti felt relief pass over him at this suggestion that one of the daughters had turned out well. He returned his attention to Lucrezia and asked, 'Could you go back and show me the name of her doctor again?'

'Whose?' she asked, surprised.

'Signora Cavanella's.'

She quickly brought up the medical records, and he wrote down the name, address, and phone number of the doctor. The name seemed familiar, Luca Proni. Hadn't he been at school with Umberto Proni? Surely there could not be more than one family in the city with that name.

He pulled out his phone and dialled the number of the doctor's office. A recorded message told him the doctor's office hours were 913 and 1619, Monday to Friday. For emergencies, patients could reach him on his telefonino. Brunetti was astonished to hear such a message from a family doctor, and even more so when it was followed by the number. He wrote down the number and immediately dialled it.

After three rings, a deep voice answered with, 'Proni.'

'Dottor Proni,' Brunetti said, deciding not to waste time and not to deceive. 'This is Guido Brunetti. I was at school with Umberto.'

'You're the one who became a policeman, aren't you?' he asked in an entirely neutral voice.

'Yes.'

'Umberto's often spoken of you.' From the way he said it, there was no way of gauging what Umberto might have said.

'Spoken well, I hope,' Brunetti said lightly, trying to remember anything Umberto might have told him, all those years ago, about his older brother. Nothing came.

'Always.' Then, 'How may I help you, Commissario?'

'You're listed as Ana Cavanella's doctor.'

There was a brief hesitation. 'Yes, I am.'

'Then you've been told, Dottore?' Brunetti asked. He was her doctor, so the hospital would have called him.

'About what?' Proni asked in a voice somewhere between curiosity and concern, but nowhere near alarm.

'Signora Cavanella's in the hospital.'

'What?' the doctor asked.

'I'm sorry, Dottore. I thought they would have called you.'

'No. What happened?'

'She was found over on the Zattere yesterday. She told the man who found her that she'd fallen down.' Brunetti spoke neutrally, merely repeating a piece of information. When Proni said nothing, Brunetti continued, 'She may have a concussion, two fingers are crushed, and her face is badly bruised. But the doctor who examined her says she's not in any danger.' Proni still said nothing.

'I'd like to speak to you,' Brunetti added.

'You realize I'm her doctor,' he said, this time using that fact to construct a barrier to information.

'I understand that, Dottore.' Brunetti abandoned any idea of asking about Davide: all he wanted was the chance to talk to Proni directly. 'I know what it means in terms of your professional responsibility.'

'But still you want to talk to me?'

Brunetti decided to tell him the truth. 'Yes, I do. There are things about her I don't understand. And about her son.'

'You mean his death?'

'Yes.'

'It was an accident,' Proni said.

'I believe that, Dottore. But I'd like to understand how it was possible.'

'This sounds like nothing more than personal curiosity, Commissario.'

Brunetti let out a small puff of air, exasperated at how transparent he had become. 'I suppose it is.'

'In that case, I'll speak to you,' Proni surprised him by saying.

Brunetti glanced at his watch. 'I could be at your office in twenty minutes, Dottore.'

'All right.' Brunetti heard the click of the phone as the doctor replaced it.

18.

Brunetti went to the window, leaned out and saw Foa on the fondamenta, talking to the guard at the door. Brunetti called the pilot's name and shouted down that he had to go over to San Polo; Foa raised an arm in assent. As he went down the stairs, Brunetti was conscious of the dim view Chiara would take of his crossing the entire city in a police boat when he could just as easily have used public transportation, even though the Number Two would take more than twenty minutes to get him there. 'People have to learn to wait,' was her current mantra.

He stepped on to the boat, ignoring the pilot's outstretched hand. Foa turned the key, revved the motor, and pulled them away from the dock towards the bacino. 'Last days for standing around outside, I'm afraid, sir,' the pilot said amiably.

'For the likes of me, it certainly is,' Brunetti said. 'Until the first sign of springtime, I'll leave being out in the weather to you.'

Foa heard the friendliness and smiled. 'I called a couple of people I know, sir. About the Lembo family, like you asked me to. To see what else I could learn.'

'Very good,' Brunetti said. 'What did they have to

tell you?'

'Well, sir,' Foa said, turning right in a broad sweep that would take them up the Grand Canal, 'It's una famiglia sfigata.' It was the language of the streets, but from the little Brunetti had heard, it did sound as if the whole family was screwed.

'What did they tell you?'

'Well, there's the daughter that died. In Brazil, I think. There's another one in Ireland or some place like that, but it seems she turned out all right. And then there's the one who had the kids, Lucrezia.' He gave a little puff of exasperation with the name. 'Who'd do that to a kid, give her a name like that?'

'She named her own children Loredano and Letizia.'

Foa made another exasperated noise. 'I suppose that was to keep in good with her parents. From what my friends said, they ran a tight ship.' Then, after a moment's reflection, Foa said, 'Though a couple of them said it was the mother. A real tiger. And a religious one at that.'

'What does that mean?' Brunetti looked up to the top of the bell tower of San Giorgio just at the instant when the angel chose to shift in the wind and wave his wings at Brunetti.

'She was a friend of the Patriarch, always wore a black veil when she went to Mass, the worst sort of basabanchi.' Then, after a pause, 'Got it from her family, I'm told.'

Brunetti smiled, in love with his own language. He'd seen them as a boy, those veiled women in black, bending forward as if to kiss the top of the pew in front of them. Baciare il banco. Only the dialect of anti-clerical proudly, historically anti-clerical Venice could transform the word, and the act, and the idea, with such acid contempt. Basabanchi.

'The mother had a nun living in the palazzo and governesses to turn the girls into ladies. Her father the mother's father, that is, so the girls' grandfather had some sort of title, but it was one that the Savoias gave him, so it was really just a piece of shit.'

Well, there's a bit of vox pop to tell Paola about, Brunetti reflected. He hoped she would pass the remark on to her father: because his own title was several centuries older, he was sure to appreciate it. Foa paused and looked aside at Brunetti, who nodded in agreement. 'This is all gossip, sir,' the pilot went on. 'You know what it's like when people sit around in the bars and talk about other people.'

'Who aren't there to defend themselves?' Brunetti asked with a laugh. He did not add that it also helped if the person under discussion was rich or successful, or both.

'Exactly. Besides, it sounds as if the family always well, the grandfather, they told me was always quick to go to law with everyone, and no one likes that. Cross him in a deal, try to buy a property he wanted, and you'd find six lawyers at breakfast the next morning. I asked my father, and he said he never heard a good word about him.'

Brunetti stopped himself from observing that the list of the people about whom he himself had never heard a good word was longer than Leporello's list of Don Giovanni's conquests, but, instead, he asked, 'Did you ever meet any of the daughters?'

'Me, no. But my best friend Gregorio told me he had an affair with Lucrezia. A long time ago, before they were married. Wasn't anything important, really.' Brunetti did not have to strain to understand that they did not marry one another. 'Gregorio always thought she did it to spite her mother.'

'What sort of reputation did she have?' Brunetti asked. 'When she was a girl, that is.'

'Oh, you know what it's like, Signore,' Foa said and cut to the left and into Rio de la Madoneta. 'Once a woman goes with a man, everyone's going to say he's had her, too.' Brunetti put this nugget in a side pocket in his memory to pull out the next time someone spoke to him of human progress.

Then, as if to make up for what he had said, Foa added, 'Gregorio said she was a nice girl. They remained friends for a long time.'

'But not now?'

'Not on your life, sir. He married a girl from Giudecca, and she keeps him on a short lead. If she found out he even telephoned another woman, she'd have the cross up in the garden, and she'd send him out to get the nails.'

'Would he go?'

'I'm afraid so, sir.' Foa brought the boat to a smooth stop on the right side of the canal.

'No need to wait for me, Foa,' Brunetti said.

'Thank you, sir. I'll have a coffee and go back to the Questura. If you change your mind, call me and I'll

come get you.'

Brunetti said he would, though he trembled at the thought of Chiara's reaction should she learn that he had had a boat travel twice all the way across the city, and the second time when there was no urgency. She'd probably send him out for the nails, too.

He had checked the address in Calli, Campielli e Canali, and so found it easily, an undistinguished building with a dark green double door. The doctor's name was on one of the bells, and the door opened soon after Brunetti rang. The entrance hall smelled of damp; no surprise after the previous day's rain. At the very end of the hallway, facing the entrance, a door stood open. Brunetti entered and found the standard chair-lined walls of a doctor's waiting room, though here the chairs were separate, wooden, antique, and beautiful. More surprisingly, the walls displayed, not the usual sentimental portraits of dogs and children, but three fine-lined drawings that drew his eye. At first, he thought they were surreal cityscapes, with abstract towers and cupolas, until closer examination showed that it was his eyes, and not the lines, that created the illusion of a city. The lines were so close together that the background of the drawing seemed grey: Brunetti wondered what technique the artist

had used to put them so flawlessly close, for nowhere did one line touch another.

Brunetti took his reading glasses from his pocket and put them on, the better to study these magical lines that drew the gaze of the viewer with the force of an electromagnet. The second drawing suggested a beach, though here again it was the viewer who imposed this reality on the drawing, where the varied spaces between horizontal lines of different widths and lengths suggested the variation in surface and texture between sand and sea.

The third had to be the facades of the buildings on the eastern side of Campo San Polo, but only a Venetian would see that, just as only a Venetian would recognize Palazzo Soranzo and Palazzo Maffetti-Tiepolo. Or perhaps not. When Brunetti stepped back from the drawing, the distance transformed it into mere lines, closely drawn but utterly abstract and devoid of meaning. He swept his eyes along the three drawings and was very relieved to see that they were covered with glass. Then he moved closer to the third one again, and the magic repeated itself: the palazzi materialized among the lines. Enough to move back forty centimetres, and again they dissolved.

'Commissario?' a man's voice said behind him.

He turned, removed his reading glasses, and saw a short, thickset man a decade younger than himself. Though the doctor wore glasses, Brunetti saw that one eye was slightly larger than the other, or angled differently in his face. Yet when he looked for similar imperfection in his mouth, he found it was perfectly proportioned. He searched for a resemblance to Umberto and found it in the general squareness of the face: ears tight to the head, jawbone prominent and almost as wide as the cheekbones.

Brunetti extended his hand. 'Thank you for letting me come,' he said. He had learned, when greeting people who had agreed to speak to him, to say only that and to say nothing at first that would remind them that he was there to ask them questions. He returned his glasses to his pocket.

'Do you like the drawings?' the doctor asked.

'More than that, I'd say.' Brunetti turned back to them and, from this distance, saw that all three had turned into entirely different images. 'Where did you get them?'

'Here,' Proni said. 'A local artist.' Then he turned, saying, 'Perhaps we'd be more comfortable in my office.'

He held the door open for Brunetti, who passed through what must be the nurse's reception room and then into the doctor's, in which there was a desk that held a computer and a small bouquet of orange tulips. Two more of the antique chairs stood in front of the desk, and Brunetti went over to one of them, leaving the doctor to take his seat behind the desk. Being questioned by the police was so alien an experience for most people that it was best to make the circumstances as comfortable and close to normal as possible.

Brunetti sat and glanced around the room. The windows were heavily barred, standard practice in any doctor's office where drugs might be, or be thought to be. A glass-doored cabinet between the windows, its shelves stacked with unruly piles of boxes of medicine, was exactly what addicts hoped to see: cocktail time. Brunetti was pleased to see another of the drawings on the wall opposite the windows. Had he not seen those in the waiting room, Brunetti would have taken it for an abstract watercolour in different tones of grey, but he now realized that the colour resulted from the closeness of the lines: there could not be a millimetre between them.

Proni called back Brunetti's attention by saying, 'I called the hospital and spoke to the doctor in charge of her ward. He says he wants to keep her there for at least another day. The concussion is very slight, but they want to be careful.'