Transient Desires (Commissario Brunetti #30)(58)

‘Who else could he have worked for?’ Griffoni asked. ‘They’re the only employers in that area,’ she said, then added, ‘and the only work is crime.’

Neither of them spoke for some time, until Griffoni tired of the silence and asked, ‘What do we do?’

‘Nothing,’ Brunetti said immediately. ‘I think we assume he’s involved with them and continue to learn whatever else we can about him.’

After a long time, Griffoni said, ‘I’ve never known you to say there’s nothing we can do.’

It troubled Brunetti to hear it put like that, but that made it no less true. He’d read and heard – every police officer in the country had – about the Nigerian mafia for years: impenetrable, vicious, omnipresent in the area around Castel Volturno. A colleague of Brunetti’s had spent a year there and then taken early retirement rather than endure a second. He refused to speak of the experience, save to say that the city was in ‘another country’.

‘The only thing we can do for the moment is learn as much as we can about him,’ he said. ‘We need more than the fact that he lived in Castel Volturno: he’s not a criminal because he lived there. Until we find a link . . .‘ he began and decided to repeat himself, ‘there’s nothing we can do.’

Brunetti knew Griffoni well enough to read her frustration and anger simply by looking at her hands, which were clenched tightly in her lap.

‘I’m still interested in the accident with the Americans. It was Borgato’s boat,’ he said.

Silence fell between them until Brunetti said, ‘I called the hospital.’

That surprised her into asking, ‘And?’

‘I spoke to one of the doctors, who didn’t seem to know much. He passed me to a nurse, who said she thought the girl was awake.’

Griffoni failed to restrain her surprise and said, ‘I hope they know what’s going on and this isn’t some sort of mix-up.’

‘What do you mean?’

She picked up her cup, looked at it as though surprised to see it in her hand, and set it back in the saucer. ‘When I called them yesterday morning, I was told she was still unconscious.’

‘Then she might have woken up,’ Brunetti said, although well he knew the danger of putting trust in the information a hospital released on the phone.

‘What will you do?’ Griffoni asked.

‘I’ll go and at least talk to her father,’ Brunetti said. ‘When did you last actually see her?’

‘Two days ago, on my way home; she was unconscious then, too. The nurse told me she was being given painkillers, and that might be the cause.’ It did not sound as though Griffoni believed what she had been told.

‘How long were you there?’ Brunetti asked.

‘An hour, perhaps less.’ Seeing Brunetti’s surprise at this, she said, ‘Her father was there, and I told him to go down to the cafeteria and have something to eat while I sat with her.’

She poured more tea into her cup and took a sip. A few drops of colourless tea had fallen on the table. Griffoni stuck her finger into them and drew them into circles, wiped her fingers on her napkin, then said, ‘The assistant surgeon was on duty, but he couldn’t tell me much. He said the only thing to do was wait and see what happens, that she’ll wake up when she’s ready.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Brunetti asked.

Looking across at him, Griffoni said, ‘It means they don’t have any idea of what’s going on.’ She lifted her cup to her lips, sipped, and put it down again.

‘He told me they did what they could for her nose,’ she said.

‘Meaning?’

Griffoni ran the first fingers of her right hand across her eyebrow. ‘He told me the cut above the eye was easy and will be pretty much invisible in six months. They taped it closed.’

She looked out the window at the people passing on the riva. ‘Then he told me that they moved her nose back in place and taped it. They can’t operate until she’s conscious again.’ She spoke hurriedly, not wanting to linger over this.

Brunetti continued to look at Griffoni’s eyebrow, recalling the photo he had seen of the girl’s face. Unconscious of his gaze, she raised her hand and placed it over both eyes, as though the gesture would ward off imagination. Keeping it there, she continued. ‘It’s all they could do, at least for the moment.’ She uncovered her eyes and looked at him with a face wiped clean of all emotion, then said, ‘Later I found myself thinking it was like having an archaeologist tell you how he repaired a Greek vase.’ Griffoni paused, then added, ‘God, surgeons are strange.’ She looked down at the table and shook her head, as if unable to believe what the doctor had said.

She looked up at Brunetti and took him prisoner with the power of her gaze. ‘I couldn’t believe it when he kept talking about it. We were at the nurses’ station – it was after her father came back and I was leaving – and he wanted to draw me a picture to make it clear just what they’d done.’

‘Does he have an idea of how she’ll look?’

‘I asked,’ Griffoni answered. ‘He told me there might be a small difference in the arch in the middle of the eyebrow, but taping the wound was something they did often, and it would be covered by her eyebrow, anyway. He said the nose was different and might not look the same. But then he smiled and said that she could have it repaired surgically in a year or so, and she’ll look like she did before the accident.’