Drawing Conclusions Read Free Page A

In the face of it, he had added, ‘If the Chinese in Europe were all wearing uniforms, we’d be forced to see it as the invasion it is.’ He had then returned his attention to his grilled calamari.
    Two doors down he found another shop, with still another young Chinese girl behind the cash register. More light spilled into the street from a bar; in front of it four or five young people stood, smoking and drinking. He noticed that three of them drank Coca-Cola: so much for the nightlife of Venice.
    He came out into the campo; it too was flooded with light. Years ago, just when he had been transferred back from Naples, this campo had been infamous as a place to buy drugs. He remembered the stories he’d heard about the abandoned needles that had to be swept up every morning, had a vaguememory of some young person who had been found dead, overdosed, on one of the benches. But gentrification had swept it clean; that or the shift to designer drugs that had rendered needles obsolete.
    He glanced at the buildings on his right, just opposite the apse. The shadowy form of a woman stood outlined in the light from a window on the fourth floor of one of them. Resisting the impulse to raise his hand to her, Brunetti went over to the building. The number was nowhere evident on the façade, but her name was on the top bell.
    He rang it and the door snapped open almost immediately, suggesting that she had gone to the door at the sight of a man walking into the campo . Brunetti had been the solitary walker at this hour, tourists apparently evaporated, everyone else at home and in bed, so the odd man out had to be the policeman.
    He walked up the steps, past the shoes and the papers: to a Venetian, this amoeba-like tendency to expand one’s territory beyond the confines of the walls of an apartment seemed so entirely natural as barely to merit notice.
    As he turned into the last ramp of stairs, he heard a woman’s voice ask from above him, ‘Are you the police?’
    ‘ Sì , Signora,’ he said, reaching for his warrant card and stifling the impulse to tell her she should be more prudent about whom she let into the building. When he reached the landing, she took a half-step forward and put out her hand.
    ‘Anna Maria Giusti,’ she said.
    ‘Brunetti,’ he answered, taking her hand. He showed her the card, but she gave it the barest glance. He estimated she was in her early thirties, tall and lanky, with an aristocratic nose and dark brown eyes. Her face was stiff with tension or tiredness; he guessed that, in repose, it would soften into something approaching beauty. She drew him towards her and into the apartment, then dropped his hand and took a step back from him. ‘Thank you for coming,’ she said. She looked around and behind him to verify that no one else had come.
    ‘My assistant and the others are on their way, Signora,’ Brunetti said, making no attempt to advance farther into the apartment. ‘While we wait for them, could you tell me what happened?’
    ‘I don’t know,’ she said, bringing her hands together just at her waist in a visual cliché of confusion, the sort of gesture women made in the movies of the fifties to show their distress. ‘I got home from vacation about an hour ago, and when I went down to Signora Altavilla’s apartment, I found her there. She was dead.’
    ‘You’re sure?’ Brunetti asking, thinking it might upset her less if he asked it that way rather than asking her to describe what she had seen.
    ‘I touched the back of her hand. It was cold,’ she said. She pressed her lips together. Looking at the floor, she went on. ‘I put my fingers under her wrist. To feel her pulse. But there was nothing.’
    ‘Signora, when you called, you said there was blood.’
    ‘On the floor near her head. When I saw it, I came up here to call you.’
    ‘Anything else, Signora?’
    She raised a hand and waved it towards the staircase behind him, as if pointing to things in the one below. ‘The front