Brunetti went back to his office but found himself thinking about the lunchtime discussion of eating habits. Chiara had, it seemed, adopted the entire planet and now felt it her obligation to do everything she could to protect it. Thus the glass bottles of mineral water, all of them carried up five flights of stairs with the constancy and determination of ants.
Brunetti had called in decades of favours done for almost everyone in their building and had won the approval of the other residents (with the single exception of the pair of French lawyers on the second floor, who had refused him permission – a decision Brunetti chose to ignore) to leave plastic cases of glass bottles of mineral water in the crawl space beneath the main staircase. Because there was no door, the bottles were accessible to everyone in the building, although instead of stealing them – as Brunetti had thought possible – those on the upper floors carried one or two bottles each time they went upstairs and left them on their landings for the next passing Brunetti to pick up and carry the remaining distance.
In return, Chiara – and sometimes Raffi – carried down the plastic and paper garbage of three elderly couples and left it inside the front door for the spazzini to remove each morning.
How different the Venice in which his children lived. He remembered his mother’s stories about when she was a girl and they burned everything in ‘la cucina economica ’, that workhorse of a stove that heated the apartment, boiled the water both for cooking and bathing, and cooked the meals, its fuel any spare paper or wood and coal that was delivered to the house. No one had talked about pollution then, only about the fine grains of coal dust that were everywhere, the cost one paid for heat. What would she think of the current fetid air of winter and early spring, of the constant assault on every embankment from the motorized boats that passed, of the tons of plastic tossed into the garbage every day? What, in fact, would his youthful mother have known of plastic?
He hauled his mind back to the issue of meat and to Chiara’s decision no longer to eat it. In the past, she had made no objection to their eating it, so long as she was given something else. But meat and fish together had been too much for her. For the first time in his life, Brunetti thought about meat, what it was, where it came from, what it did for the beings in which it … here, he found himself unable to find a comfortable verb. Did the meat and flesh ‘live’ in their hosts or did they only work or function there?
He tried to recall when he and Raffi and Paola had stopped joking with Chiara about her environmental ideas and ideals. There had been no decisive action or remark, no illumination on the road to Damascus, only the dawning realization of how right she was. He was called back from this aimless musing by a noise at the door. When he looked over, he saw Signora Elettra. Perhaps because she had been at her computer much of the day, she had turned back the sleeves of her blouse, exposing the same yellow lining of the cuffs. Brunetti wondered how a detail as small as this could give such disproportionate delight.
‘Yes, Signorina?’ he asked.
She raised the manila folder in her hand and approached his desk. Smiling, she placed it in front of him.
‘Interesting?’ he asked, sliding it towards him.
‘In part,’ she answered, that apparently being the only introduction she was prepared to give. She gestured towards the folder. ‘There are a few things I couldn’t find.’ Seeing his surprise, she quickly added, ‘I’ve contacted friends who might be able to help me, but not before tomorrow.’
For a moment, Brunetti thought she might apologize for the slowness of her associates. Instead, she looked at her watch and said, ‘There’s nothing more I can do until they answer me, so I thought I might leave now.’
‘And the Vice-Questore?’ Brunetti inquired, familiar with the fact that what little work Patta did usually got done in the late afternoon.
‘He’s gone home already, Dottore. Before he left, he said there was something he wanted to talk over with you but that it could wait until tomorrow.’
He gave her a steady look, but she shrugged her shoulders by way of answer, leaving it to Brunetti to fathom what Vice-Questore Patta might have in mind for him.
‘Thank you for this,’ he said, wished her a pleasant evening, and reached to open the folder.
Time passed. Someone poised on the roof of the building on the other side of the canal would have seen within the office across from him a robust man seated at his desk, slowly making his way through the pages that lay in front of him, just to the left of the keyboard of his computer. Occasionally, the man shifted his eyes from the document to the window, after which he folded his arms and sat for varying periods of time. His gaze was such that he would not have noticed the person on the opposite roof.
Other times, the man turned from the document to his computer, punched things into the keyboard and gazed at the screen, glanced out of the window, then back to the screen. Every so often, the man looked back at the papers on his desk; now and then he made a note on one or more of them, only to return his attention to the screen.
Once, he got up and came over to the window, but his attention was never directed at the roof opposite. If anything, it was directed at the long open view above the roof. Occasionally, standing there, the man stuffed his hands in the pockets of his trousers and raised and lowered himself on his toes before removing his hands and returning to the desk.
Some time later, as he was gazing at the papers, the man started as at a thunderclap and smacked his hands on his breast, a gesture that would alarm any observer. But then he slipped his right hand inside his jacket, removed his phone, and put it to his ear. He listened for some time, spoke for some time, listened again, tried to speak but stopped, listened some more, said a few words, pressed the surface of the phone, and replaced it in his jacket pocket.
He appeared to say something to himself and then turned to his computer again. His attention remained on the screen for a long time, while he ran his right forefinger down the margin as he read, now and again pausing to glance away at the far wall.
He returned his attention to the printed document until he turned the last page and placed his left palm on top of it, as though he wanted to transmit some message to it, or perhaps wanted it to transmit its essence to him. After a long time, he gathered up the papers and tapped their bottoms against the desk to order them into a neat pile. He slipped them into the middle of his folded copy of Il Fatto Quotidiano and shoved it to the other side of the desk. He leaned closer to the screen, rubbed at his eyes and then his face and sat like that for a few moments. He covered the computer’s mouse with his right hand and moved it around, then removed his hand. As he did, the light from the screen disappeared, making him invisible in the now-darkened office.
Slowly, a grey penumbra slipped into the room from the lights on the riva below, faintly illuminating the man and the objects in the room. The man leaned back in his chair and raised his arms above his head, grabbing one wrist with the other hand. He waved his arms from side to side a few times, freed his wrist and put his hands on the arms of his chair. He pushed himself to his feet, reached for the newspaper but pulled his hand back and did not pick it up. He moved towards the door and reached for the handle. A flash of light cut into the room as the door to the corridor opened. The man walked through the door and pulled it closed.