The Art of Waiting by Christopher Jory Page B

Inspector’s words, like a judge reading out a verdict, and his mother’s silence in response. Then the sound of the Chief Inspector lifting himself up out of the chair and pacing across the floor and into the hall, and his hand on Aldo’s shoulder, a hard bony hand, and looking Aldo in the eye, a knowing look, then the Chief Inspector turning away and walking down the hall and out into thestreet, the door pulled shut behind him. And Aldo silent in the hall, and his mother silent on the sofa in the living room, each out of sight of the other, both of them like that for what seemed like hours, neither of them able to speak.
    And then Aldo went upstairs and closed the bedroom door and lay on his bed and closed his eyes upon the world.

    They buried Luca Gardini on a grey October Friday, a large black gondola carrying the coffin the short distance across the lagoon from Cannaregio to the island of San Michele. Luca lay in his box beneath a gilded awning as the oarsmen pulled their long poles through the green water. Aldo sat beside his mother next to the coffin and fought off a desire to rip open the lid and shake the corpse, to wake Luca from his sleep, to tell him he was not really dead and must come back to her, must tell the oarsmen to stop rowing and take the vessel back to the house on Fondamenta della Sensa, where they would sit at dinner and forget the whole thing had ever happened. But instead she sat motionless and watched the bow of the boat as it cut through the drizzle, the brass eagle on the prow coated with fine drops that slid across its outstretched wings and slipped one by one onto the waves of the lagoon. And she thought of Luca’s barrel chest and how, when she had first lain next to him in the house on Burano, her head resting on the mattress beside him, he had towered above her like a protecting mountain, a wall that would keep out all the bad in the world for the rest of their life together. But now the mountain had gone and she lay open to the wild creatures that roamed the plains and she would have to create her own refuge again.
    The gondola hugged the outer wall of the cemetery as it moved up the western side of the island. It drew alongside the jetty near the north-west point, where the cypress trees stood, dark sentinels against the sky, the small dome of the church of San Michele in Isola, so white when the sun shone, now grey and indistinguishablefrom the clouds and the rain. The pall-bearers carried Luca into the cemetery, through the lines of vertical tombs and the silent corridors of graves. Many were ornate, others simple, some well tended, fresh flowers in the holders, others uncared for and colourless, and Aldo noted that it was not necessarily the simplest that were the least cherished or the most ornate that bore the freshest flowers. He listened as the priest spoke the eloquent words that Luca had not been able to say in life, and then his father’s body was passed over to the land of the dead. He stood beside his mother, looking around at the faces, the occasional glance in his direction, that questioning look, the one he had seen so many times since the shooting, sympathy and accusation rolled into one, and the blood drained from his face whenever he saw their eyes. His face was thinner than ever now, grey as wet ashes, his eyes as blank as the sodden sky. The name of Fausto Pozzi seeped like an illness from his mind, out of his mouth in a silent obsessive flow. The man himself stood a little further back, not welcome, as ever, barely tolerated but still going through the appropriate motions of sorrow. No one had turned him away and so there he was, hanging over Luca in death as he had done in life. A tragic accident, he had said. The poor boy, shooting his father dead, of course he would want to distance himself from blame, deny to everyone, including himself, what he had done. But it was Aldo who had fired the gun, of that the police, who had been most helpful in the