Chapter Sixteen

As he made his way across the rain-swept campo, Brunetti found himself wondering if Semenzato would have trusted a man like Murino to keep the records of all purchaser and sales. Brunetti had certainly known odder business arrangements, and he kept in mind the fact that he knew Semenzato, as it were, only in retrospect, a vision that seldom encouraged clarity. But still, who would be so dull as to believe the word of an antiquarian, as slippery a bunch as he could imagine? Here a voice stronger than his attempt to suppress it asked, ‘And a Neapolitan, to boot?’ No one would accept what they said as face value, without question. But if the major business of their partnership was in stolen or false pieces, then the earnings from the legitimate business of the shop wouldn’t matter. In that case, Semenzato would never have had to question Murino’s receipts or his word that an armadio or a table had been purchased for a certain price, sold for so much more. When he thought of the idea of profit, loss, price, he realized he had no base figures here, no idea whatsoever of the market value of the pieces Brett said were missing. For that matter, he didn’t even know what those pieces were. Tomorrow.

Because of the ever-increasing rain and the threat of acqua alta, the streets were strangely deserted, even though this was the time when most people would be hurrying home from work or out to do some last-minute shopping before the stores closed. Instead, Brunetti found that he could pass easily through the narrow streets without the repeated bother of turning his umbrella sideways to allow shorter people to pass under it with theirs. Even the broad top of the Rialto Bridge was strangely deserted, something he could not remember ever having seen before. Many of the stalls were empty, boxes of fruit and vegetables whisked away before closing time, owners escaped from the grinding cold and the rain that continued to pound down.

He slammed the door of his building behind him: in wet weather, the lock tended to stick, and only violence would get the massive door to close or open. He shook his umbrella a few times, then furled it and stuck it under his arm. With his right hand, he grabbed the handrail and began the long climb to their apartment. On the first floor, Signora Bussola, the deaf widow of a lawyer, was watching the telegiornale, which meant that everyone on the floor got to listen to the news. Predictably, she watched the news on RAI Uno; not for her those radical leftists and communist scum on RAI Due. On the second floor, the Rossis were quiet: that meant their argument was over and they were in the back of the house, in the bedroom. The third floor was silent. A young couple had moved in there two years ago and bought the entire floor, but Brunetti could count on one hand the times he had met either one of them on the stairs. He was said to work for the city, though no one was sure what he did. The wife left every morning and came home at five thirty every afternoon, but no one knew where she went or what she did, a fact which Brunetti thought miraculous. On the fourth floor, there were only scents. The Amabiles seldom emerged, but the stairwell was always awash with the glorious, tempting smells of food. Tonight it appeared to be capriolo and, if he wasn’t wrong, artichokes, though it might be fried aubergine.

And then there was his own door and the promise of peace. Which lasted only as long as it took him to open the door and step inside. From the back of the apartment, he could hear Chiara sobbing. This was his little Spartan, the child who almost never cried, the girl who could be punished by being deprived of the things she most desired and who would never shed a tear, this the child who had once broken her wrist but had sat tearless, however pale, while it was being set. And she was not merely crying; she was sobbing.

He walked quickly down the hall and into her room. Paola sat on the side of the bed, cradling Chiara in her arms. ‘But, baby, I don’t think there’s anything we can do. I’ve got the ice on it, but you’re just going to have to wait until it stops hurting.’

‘But, Mamma, it hurts. It hurts so much. Can’t you make it stop?’

‘I can give you more aspirin, Chiara. Maybe that will help.’

Chiara gulped back her tears and repeated, her voice gone strangely high, ‘Mamma, please do something.’

‘Paola, what is it?’ he asked, keeping his voice very calm, very level.

‘Oh, Guido,’ Paola said, turning to him but keeping firm hold of Chiara. ‘Chiara dropped the table on her toe.’

‘What table?’ he asked, rather than what toe.

‘The one in the kitchen.’ That was the one with the woodworm. What had they done, tried to move it themselves? But why do that when it was raining? They couldn’t take it out on to the terrace; it was too heavy for them.

‘What happened?’

‘She didn’t believe me that there were so many holes, so she turned it on its side to look, and it slipped out of her hands and landed on her toe.’

‘Let me see,’ he said and, as soon as he spoke, saw that her right foot lay on top of the coverlet, wrapped in a bath towel that held a plastic bag of ice against the injured toe to work against the swelling.

It proved to be just as he imagined, and the toe proved to be worse. It was the big toe of her right foot, swollen, the entire nail red with the promise of the blue that would emerge with time.

‘Is it broken?’ he asked.

‘No, Papà, I can bend it and that doesn’t hurt. But it throbs and throbs,’ Chiara said. She had stopped sobbing, but he could see from her face that the pain was still strong. ‘Papà, please do something.’

‘There’s nothing Papà can do, Chiara,’ Paola said, pushing the foot a bit to the side and placing the bag of ice back on top of it.

‘When did it happen?’ he asked.

‘This afternoon, right after you left,’ Paola answered.

‘And she’s been like that all day?’

‘No, Papà,’ Chiara said, defending herself from the unspoken accusation that she had spent the entire afternoon in tears. ‘It hurt at the beginning, and then it was all right for a while, but now it hurts a lot.’ She had already asked once if he could do something; Chiara was not the sort of person who repeated a request.

He remembered something he had learned years ago, when he was doing his military service and one of the men in his unit had dropped a manhole cover on his toe. Somehow, he had managed not to break it because it had caught his toe just at the end, but it had, like Chiara’s, gone red and swollen.

‘There is one thing,’ he began. Paola and Chiara swung their heads to look at him.

‘What?’ they asked in unison.

‘It’s disgusting,’ he said, ‘but it will help.’

‘What is it, Papà?’ Chiara asked through lips that were beginning to tremble again with pain.

‘I have to stick a needle through the nail and let the blood out.’

‘No,’ Paola shouted, tightening her grip around Chiara’s shoulder.

‘Does it work, Papà?’

‘It worked the one time I saw it done, but that was years ago. I’ve never done it, but I watched the doctor do it.’

‘Do you think you could do it, Papà?

He removed his coat and laid it across the foot of her bed. ‘I think so, angel. Do you want me to try?’

‘Will it make it stop hurting?’

‘I think so.’

‘All right, Papà.’

He glanced across at Paola, asking her opinion. She bent and kissed the top of Chiara’s head, wrapped her in an even tighter embrace, then nodded to Brunetti and tried to smile.

He went down the hall and took a candle from the third drawer to the right of the kitchen sink. He jammed it down into a ceramic candle-holder, grabbed a box of matches and went back into the bedroom. He set the candle down on Chiara’s desk, lit it and went down the hall into Paola’s study. From her top drawer he took a paper clip and bent it open into a straight rod as he went back towards Chiara’s room. He’d said ‘needle’, but then he’d remembered that the doctor had used a paper clip, saying a needle was too thin to burn through the nail quickly.

Back in Chiara’s room, he took the candle and set it at the foot of the bed, behind Paola’s back. ‘I think it might be better if you didn’t watch, angel,’ he told Chiara. To assure that, he sat on the edge of the bed, next to Paola, his back turned to hers, and uncovered Chiara’s foot.

When he touched it, she pulled it away instinctively, said ‘Sorry’ into her mother’s shoulder, and pushed her foot back near him. He took it with his left hand and moved the ice bag away from it. He had to change his position on the bed, careful not to let the candle spill over, until he was sitting facing the two of them. He took her heel and wedged it between his knees, pressing them together to hold it steady.

‘It’s all right, baby. It’s just going to take a second,’ he said, reaching for the candle with one hand and holding the end of the paper clip in the other. When the heat seared his fingers, he dropped the paper clip and spilled wax over the coverlet. Both his wife and his daughter winced away from his sudden motion.

‘One moment, one moment,’ he said and went back into the kitchen, muttering darkly under his breath. He took a pair of pliers from the bottom drawer and went back into the bedroom. When the candle was relit and everything was as it had been before, he grasped one end of the paper clip in the pliers and stuck the other into the flame. He waited until it glowed red and then, so quickly that he would not have time to think about what he was doing, he pressed the glowing end of the paper clip into the centre of the nail on Chiara’s toe. He held it there while the toenail began to smoke, grabbed her ankle with his left hand to prevent her from pulling her foot back.

Suddenly, the resistance disappeared from under the paper clip, and dark blood flooded up out of her toe and across his fingers. He pulled the paper clip out and, acting more from instinct than from anything he might have remembered, he pressed at the bottom of her toe, forcing the dark blood to flow out of the hole in the nail.

Through all of this, Chiara had wrapped herself around Paola, and she, in her turn, had kept her eyes turned away from what Brunetti was doing. When he glanced up, however, he saw that Chiara was looking at him over her mothers shoulder and then down at her foot. ‘Is that all?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ he answered. ‘How does it feel?’

‘It’s better already, Papà. All the pressure’s gone, and it doesn’t throb anymore.’ She studied the tools of his trade: candle, pliers, paper clips. ‘That’s all you need to do it?’ she asked with real curiosity, tears forgotten.

‘That’s all,’ he said, giving her ankle a squeeze.

‘Do you think I could do it?’ she asked.

‘Do you mean on yourself or on someone else?’ he asked.

‘Either.’

‘I don’t see why not.’

Paola, whose daughter seemed to have forgotten about her in the fascination of this new scientific discovery, removed her arms from that no-longer-suffering daughter and picked up the ice bag and towel from the bed. She stood, looked down at the two of them for a moment, as if studying some alien life form, and went down die hall towards the kitchen.

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