Chapter Ten

Because it was after two when Brunetti got home that night, he slept until well past eight the next morning and woke only, and grudgingly, when Paola shook him lightly by the shoulder and told him coffee was beside him. He managed to tight off full consciousness for another few minutes, but then he smelled the coffee, gave up and seized the day. Paola had disappeared after bringing the coffee, a decision the wisdom of which had been taught to her over the years.

When he finished the coffee, he pushed back the covers and went to look out of the window. Rain. And he remembered that the moon had been almost full the night before, so that meant more acqua alta with the change of tide. He went down the corridor to the bathroom and took a long shower, trying to store up enough heat to last him the day. Back in the bedroom, he began to dress and, while knotting his tie, decided he had better wear a sweater under his jacket because the visits he had already planned to both Brett and Lele would have him walking from one side of the city to the other. He opened the second drawer in the armadio and reached for his grey lambswool. Not finding it, he reached into the next drawer, then the one above it. Detective-like, he thought of the places where it could be, checked the remaining two, and then remembered that Raffi had borrowed the sweater last week. That meant, Brunetti was sure, that he would find it lying in a crumpled ball in the bottom of his son’s closet or in a bunched heap at the back of a drawer. The recent improvement in his son’s academic performance had not, alas, extended to habits of personal cleanliness or general neatness.

He went across the hall and, because the door was open, into his son’s room. Raffi had already left for school, but Brunetti hoped he wasn’t wearing the sweater. The more he thought about it, the more he wanted to wear that sweater, and the more irritated he became at being frustrated in that desire.

He opened the cupboard. Jackets, shirts, a ski parka, and on the floor assorted boots, tennis shoes and a pair of summer sandals. But no sweater. It wasn’t draped over the chair, nor over the end of the bed. He opened the first drawer in the dresser and found an upheaval of underwear. The second held socks, none of them matching and, he feared, few of them clean. The third drawer looked more promising: it held a sweatshirt and two T-shirts that bore insignia Brunetti didn’t bother to read. He wanted his sweater, not publicity for the rainforest. He pushed aside the second T-shirt, and his hand froze.

Lying below the T-shirts, half hidden, but lazily so, were two syringes, neatly wrapped in their sterile plastic wrappers. Brunetti felt his heartbeat quicken as he stared down at them. ‘Madre di Dio’ he said out loud and looked quickly over his shoulder, afraid that Raffi would come in and find his father searching his room. He pushed the T-shirts back over the needles and slipped the drawer closed.

Suddenly, he found himself remembering the Sunday afternoon, a decade ago, when he had gone to the Lido with Paola and the children. Raffi, running on the beach, had stepped on a piece of broken bottle and sliced open the sole of his foot. And Brunetti, mute in the face of his son’s pain and his own aching love for him, had wrapped a towel around the cut, gathered him up in his arms and carried him, running all the way, the kilometre to the hospital that stood at the end of the beach. He had waited for two hours, dressed in his bathing suit and chilled to the bone by fear and the air conditioning, until a doctor came out and told him the boy was fine. Six stitches and crutches for a week, but he was fine.

What made Raffi do it? Was he too strict a father? He had never raised his hand to either child, seldom raised his voice; the memory of the violence of his own upbringing was enough to destroy any violent impulse he might have had towards them. Was he too busy with his work, too busy with the problems of society to worry about those of his own children? When was the last time he had helped either one with homework? And where did he get the drugs? And what was it? Please, let it not be heroin, not that.

Paola? She usually knew before he did what the kids were doing. Did she suspect? Could it be that she knew and hadn’t told him? And if she didn’t know, should he do the same, protect her from this?

He reached out an unsteady hand and lowered himself to the edge of Raffi’s bed. He locked his hands together and stuck them between his knees, staring down at the floor. Vianello would know who sold drugs in this neighbourhood. Would Vianello tell him if he knew about Raffi? One of Raffi’s shirts lay beside him on the bed. He reached out and pulled it towards him, pressed it to his face and smelled his son’s odour, that same scent he had first smelled the day Paola came home from the hospital with Raffi and he pressed his face into the round belly of his naked son. His throat closed and he tasted salt.

He sat on the edge of the bed for a long time, remembering the past and shying away from any thought of the future beyond the conviction that he would have to tell Paola. Though he had already embraced his own guilt, he hoped she would deny it, assure him that he had been father enough to his two children. And what about Chiara? Did she know, or suspect? And what beyond that? He stood up at that thought and left the room, leaving the door open, as he had found it.

Paola sat on the sofa in the living room, feet propped up on the low marble table, reading that morning’s paper. That meant she had already been out in the rain to get it.

He stood at the door and watched her turn a page. The radar of long marriage caused her to turn to him. ‘Guido, will you make more coffee?’ she asked and turned back to the paper.

‘Paola,’ he began. She registered the tone and lowered the paper to her lap. ‘Paola,’ he repeated, not knowing what he had to say or how to say this. ‘I found two syringes in Raffi’s room.’

She paused, waiting for him to say more, then picked up the paper and continued to read.

‘Paola, did you hear what I said?’

‘Hm?’ she asked, head tilted back to read the headline at the top of the page.

‘I said I found two syringes in Raffi’s room. In the bottom of a drawer.’ He moved towards her, possessed for an instant of the mad urge to rip the paper from her hands and hurl it to the floor.

‘That’s where they were, then,’ she said, and turned the page.

He sat beside her on the sofa and, forcing the gesture to remain cairn, placed his palm flat on the page in front of her and pushed the paper slowly on to her lap. ‘What do you mean, “That’s where they were’’?’ he asked, voice tight.

‘Guido,’ she asked, turning her full attention to him, now that the paper was gone, ‘what’s the matter with you? Don’t you feel well?’

Entirely unaware of what he was doing, he contracted his hand into an angry fist, dragging the paper into a loose ball. ‘I said I found two syringes in Raffi’s room, Paola. Syringes. Don’t you understand?’

She stared at him for a moment, eyes wide in confusion, and then she understood what the syringes meant to him. Their eyes locked, and he watched as Raffi’s mother registered his own belief that their son was addicted to drugs. Her mouth contracted, her eyes opened wide, and then she put back her head and began to laugh. She laughed, exploded into peals of real mirth and fell away from him sideways on the sofa, tears filling her eyes. She wiped at them, but she couldn’t stop laughing. ‘Oh, Guido,’ she said, hand to her mouth in a vain effort to stop herself. ‘Oh, Guido, no, you can’t be thinking that. Not drugs.’ And she was gone in another fit of laughter.

Brunetti thought for a moment that this was the hysteria of real panic, but he knew Paola too well for that; this was the pure laughter of high comedy. With a violent gesture, he grabbed the newspaper from her lap and hurled it to the floor. His rage sobered her instantly, and she pushed herself upright on the sofa.

‘Guido. I tarli,’ she said, as though that explained it all.

Was she drugged too? What did woodworm have to do with this?

‘Guido,’ she repeated, keeping her voice soft, her tone level, as if speaking to the dangerous or the mad. ‘I told you last week. We’ve got woodworm in the table in the kitchen. The legs are full of them. And the only way to get rid of them is to inject poison into the holes they leave. Remember, I asked you if you’d help me move it out on to the terrace the first sunny day we have, so the fumes won’t kill us all?’

Yes, he remembered this, but vaguely. He hadn’t been paying attention when she told him, but it came back now.

‘I asked Raffi to get me the syringes and some rubber gloves so we can inject the poison into the table. I thought he’d forgotten them, but I suppose he just put them in his drawer. And then forgot to tell me he’d got them.’ She reached out and placed her hand over his. ‘It’s all right, Guido. It isn’t what you thought.’

He had to lean against the back of the sofa as a burning rush of relief swept over him. He rested his head back and closed his eyes. He wanted to laugh at the absurdity of it, wanted to be as free to make fun of his fear as Paola was, but that wasn’t possible, not yet.

When he could finally speak, he turned to her and asked, ‘Don’t ever tell Raffi, please, Paola.’

She leaned towards him and placed her palm against his cheek, studying his face, and he thought she was going to promise, but then she collapsed helplessly on his chest, lost again to laughter.

The contact of her body freed him at last, and he began to laugh, beginning with a faint chuckle and a shake of his head, but then graduating into real laughter, shouts of it, wild hoots of relief and joy and pure delight. She tightened her arms around him and then inched her body up across his chest, seeking his lips with hers. Like a pair of adolescents, then, they made love there on the sofa, heedless of the clothes that ended up heaped on the floor below them, heaped with much the same abandon as were those in Raffi’s cupboard.

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