attention. They followed slowly, and Brunetti followed the three of them.
At the end of Via Garibaldi, the old woman walked on to the embarcadero and took a seat facing the water. The young couple stopped at the edicola, and the young man bought a copy of Men’s Health. A Number Two came from the left, and the old woman got to her feet. With no sign of haste, the young people swiped their iMOB cards and walked up into the waiting deck and on to the boat. As the boat was unmoored and starting to back away from the dock, Brunetti stepped on board just ahead of the gate the crewman was sliding closed.
The old woman sat in the cabin, in an aisle seat in the front row, closest to whatever air managed to sneak in from the open door. Pucetti had spread his magazine on the wooden counter behind the pilot’s cabin and was pointing to a grey linen jacket, asking his companion what she thought of it. His back was to the passenger cabin, but she was facing him, so she could see when the old woman got to her feet.
Brunetti came and stood alongside Pucetti. The young woman looked up at him and stood a bit straighter, but Pucetti, eyes still on the jacket, said, ‘I figured Vianello would call you, too, sir.’
‘Yes, he did.’
‘Do you want to continue the same way: we follow her and you follow us?’
‘Seems best,’ Brunetti said.
The boat pulled into the San Zaccharia stop, and Pucetti turned a few pages of the magazine, reaching out to draw his companion closer so that she could see something on the page. A few pages later, they passed under the Accademia Bridge, then San Samuele, and then Brunetti heard her say, ‘She’s getting up.’
Pucetti closed the magazine and leaned sideways to give the young woman a kiss on the side of her forehead. She bent her head close to his and said something, then they moved apart and got off at San Tomà, a few passengers behind the old woman with the brown leather bag and a few in front of the man in the blue cotton jacket.
At the end of the calle, the old woman turned right and then left into the campo. She crossed at a diagonal, heading to the right and into a narrow calle that led back towards the Frari. By unspoken agreement, they divided up, Brunetti taking the calle to the farther right to see that they did not lose track of her in this warren of narrow and suddenly turning calli.
As Brunetti was about to turn into Calle Passion, he saw the old woman ahead of him, stopped in front of a building on the right, hand raised to ring the bell. He kept on directly past the entrance to the calle, stopped and turned around, and when he came back, he saw what could have been a foot disappearing into a doorway. He turned into the calle and past the door, making a note of the number as he did.
As he emerged into Campo dei Frari, the young couple were just turning into the calle.
‘Number two thousand nine hundred and eighty-nine,’ Brunetti said casually. She looked at him as though he were one of those Internet magicians whose sites he had been consulting; Pucetti smiled and said, ‘I’ll tell my grandchildren about this, sir.’
Brunetti was uncertain whether the remark was meant to inflate or deflate his sense of accomplishment and thus said disparagingly, ‘I just happened to be the one who saw her.’ Pucetti nodded, while the young woman continued to stare at him.
‘Now what, sir?’
‘You two go and have a drink in the campo, and I’ll go into San Tomà and stand in front of the estate agency and look for a new apartment.’
‘Hot work, Commissario,’ the girl said with sympathy.
Brunetti nodded his thanks for the thought.
Luckily, he had remembered to bring his telefonino with him, so they agreed to keep in contact. He went back to the campo and put himself in front of the window of the estate agency. By this time of the afternoon, the sun was directly behind Brunetti and starting to burn its way slowly through his clothing. It was so intense that he turned first to expose one shoulder, then the other, like San Lorenzo on the grill.
The one advantage was that the angle of light turned the agency window into a giant mirror, in which he soon saw the approaching