Transient Desires (Commissario Brunetti #30)(17)

‘And where did you go?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Campo Santa Margherita,’ Vio answered. ‘That’s where I saw her.’

‘Oh, did you walk all that way?’ Griffoni asked, with great display of sympathy, as if she suspected that the walk to anywhere in the city from any of the stops the Number Two vaporetto made on its arrival from the Giudecca was the same distance as Venice to Rome.

‘No,’ Vio said, almost inaudibly.

‘Oh,’ she all but chirped, ‘Did you take a boat?’

‘Yes.’

Proudly, the foreigner showing off her familiarity with the vaporetto, she asked, ‘Numero Due?’ Brunetti hoped she would not overdo this fey demonstration of familiarity with the routes of the vaporetti and ask if he’d gone all the way to Santa Marta before getting off.

Vio sat alone on his side of the long table. The chair on his left was empty, and Pucetti, still silent, stood almost two metres from him. Yet Vio looked uncomfortable, as if people were crowding in at him from every side. He looked, in a word, trapped.

He lowered his head and spoke to the top of the table.

‘Excuse me,’ Griffoni said pleasantly. ‘I’m afraid I didn’t hear you.’

The young man mumbled something.

She gave a small laugh and said, ‘Sorry, I still didn’t hear what you said.’

He looked up and across the table at her, there beside the stolid Brunetti. He pulled his lips inside his mouth and made a soft humming sound. His fingers tightened until they became two fists resting on the table.

He closed his eyes, opened them, closed them again and kept them closed while the humming noise grew louder.

Vio opened his eyes again and turned to Brunetti. He opened his hands and pressed them against the table, as if to give himself strength. ‘I took . . .’ he began, then pushed himself suddenly to his feet and turned as if to flee the room. His foot blundered into the leg of the chair and, trying to free himself, he twisted his body sharply; once, twice, unaware of what trapped him and wanting only to escape it. When his foot finally pulled free, his entire upper body twisted again to the right.

He moaned, then moaned again as though the other people in the room had suddenly pressed sharp objects against his skin. He collapsed against the table, tried to find something to cling to, failed, and started to sink to the floor, his moaning louder.

Suddenly, as though there had not been shock enough, he was racked by coughing and a tiny thread of blood-mottled saliva came from his mouth, paralysing the others until his body fell to the floor.





7


The first to react was Pucetti, who braced his hands on the surface of the table and leaped over to land beside Vio, who was reduced to whimpers and savage coughing. The young officer tore Vio’s shirt partly open and reached to put his palms on his chest, but one of his fingers caught on the shirt and pulled it entirely open. His hands, one palm above the other, rose above Vio’s chest, ready to press down to re-start the beating of his heart, when Griffoni, who had come around the table, pushed Pucetti so hard that he fell away from Vio and crashed into the wall.

Brunetti knelt on the other side of Vio and saw what she had seen.

‘Look at him, look at him,’ Griffoni said in a rough voice, pointing down at Vio’s chest.

He was a man who worked all day, heaving and hauling and shifting heavy weights from one place to another, and he had the torso of every body-builder’s dreams. The ribs on his left side could be counted, as clearly defined as the slats in a wall. But the ribs on the right side had relaxed into the body and could not be discerned. The entire right side was bruised almost black in a streak as wide as an iPad that ran from collarbone to waist.

Vio moved, moaned, moved again, and then his entire body was shaken as he gasped in air, fish-like, and then again and then again. He expelled it all at once, along with another trickle of blood-threaded saliva. There followed a racking cough that shook his entire body and brought forth more saliva.

Brunetti pulled out his phone and dialled 118, gave his name and rank and told them to send an ambulance to the Questura immediately and to send a doctor with the ambulance. He cut off the call, knowing he was unable to explain the situation but wanting to leave the line open should the hospital try to contact him.

Brunetti looked back at Vio and saw that the coughing had slowed and grown weaker. Griffoni had somehow managed to find a blanket and was stretching it over the young man’s body: Pucetti had disappeared. Brunetti dared not touch the young man for fear of adding to the damage so clearly etched on his body. He got to his feet, helpless in the face of damage he could not estimate, suffering he could not relieve.

He stood there, surrounded by the latest products of technology, promising to help him call up aid from the entire country – from the entire world – if he chose. A man lay at his feet, twisted in pain, bleeding, barely able to breathe, and Brunetti had no idea what to do. Except to wait for the arrival of those who knew more about saving lives or resolving the mysteries of the human body.

Brunetti had been present at the birth of both of his children, if to be standing in the hall outside the delivery room – there by virtue of his brother’s connections at the hospital – was to be present. There, too, he had heard the laboured gasps of pain, with no specific idea of what was causing them, although he knew full well what would stop them. And did.