Free By Its Cover by Donna Leon Page B

so I didn’t say anything, just did my best to stand there and look stupid.’
    ‘Battistella always liked that,’ Brunetti permitted himself to observe. ‘What happened?’
    ‘It was a nice day, as I remember, so the two of them walked to the Questura together, chatting like the best of old friends.’ He paused, then added, ‘I’m surprised they didn’t hold hands.’
    ‘And you?’

    ‘Oh, I walked behind them, and I made it obvious that I wasn’t interested in what they said. I walked next to the other guy – I don’t even remember who it was any more – and we occasionally said something to one another. But I listened to a lot of their conversation.’ After a moment, he said, ‘It was hard not to hear it.’
    ‘About?’
    ‘About young girls.’
    ‘Ah,’ Brunetti said. ‘It’s not a terribly long walk from their palazzo to the Questura, so you didn’t have to listen to much of it, at least.’
    ‘As my grandmother often told us, God’s mercy is everywhere.’ Vianello got to his feet and they started down towards Castello.

7
    They walked because not to do so would be to throw away the joy of this waning day. It had grown warm enough to encourage the wisteria buds to flex their muscles, like athletes who scrape their feet on the ground prior to a sprint or a leap: they’d begun their yearly creep over the brick wall of the garden on the opposite side of the canal they were passing, Brunetti noticed. Within a week, their panicles would be suspended over the water, and after another their lavender eruption would take place overnight, hurling scent across to every passer-by, enough to make anyone who caught a whiff wonder what in heaven’s name he or she was doing going to work on a day like this, staring at a computer screen, when outside, life was starting all over again.
    For Brunetti, springtime was a succession of scent memories: the lilacs in a courtyard over by Madonna dell’Orto; the bouquets of lily of the valley brought in by the old man from Mazzorbo, who each year sold them onthe steps of the church of the Gesuiti and who had been coming for so many years that no one dared to question his right to set up shop; and the smell of fresh sweat from clean bodies pressed together on the now-crowded vaporetti, a welcome relief after a winter of the musty smell of jackets and coats worn too many times, sweaters unwashed for too long.
    If life had a smell, it was to be found in springtime. There were times when Brunetti wanted to bite at the air to try to taste it, impossible as he knew that to be. It was too soon to start ordering a spritz, but his desire for rum punch had disappeared with the last cold day.
    As had happened to him since boyhood, Brunetti felt a surge of directionless goodwill towards everything and everyone around him, as at the end of a period of emotional hibernation. His eye approved of all it saw, and the possibility of a walk was an intoxication. Like a sheepdog, he guided Vianello the way he wanted to go, leading him past S. Antonin and out to the riva . San Giorgio stood opposite them, the view of it filtered through the tallmasted boats moored along the side wall that faced them.
    ‘It’s days like this that make me want to quit,’ Vianello surprised him by saying.
    ‘Quit what?’
    ‘Work. Being a policeman.’
    Brunetti exercised his will and remained calm. ‘And do what?’ he asked.
    Both of them knew it would have been shorter to go the back way and over the bridge in front of the Arsenale and then along the Tana, but the chance to look at that open expanse of water had lured them, and they had proved incapable of resisting its force.
    Vianello stood for some time, looking across at the church and the waves that flopped about in the bacino ,then turned left and started towards Via Garibaldi. ‘I don’t know. Nothing interests me as much as work. I like what we do. But it’s these first spring days: they make me want to run away and join the Gypsies, or