Authors: Donna Leon
He pulled open the paper bag and dropped a few
fave
into his open palm. He tossed one into his mouth, then another, and finally two more. With a sudden flash of memory he remembered, decades ago, buying some for Paola when they were university students and still caught up in the first glow of love.
‘Aren’t you tired of people talking about Proust every time they eat a cake or biscuit?’ he’d asked as if he were graced with some open window to her mind.
A voice from behind startled him and brought him back from reverie. ‘Can I have some,
Papà?’
‘I got them for you, angel,’ he answered, reaching down and handing the bag to Chiara.
‘Do you mind if I eat just the chocolate ones?’
He shook his head. ‘Is your mother in her study?’
‘Are you going to have an argument?’ she enquired, hand poised above the neck of the open bag.
‘Why do you say that?’ he asked.
‘You always call
Mamma
“your mother” when you’re going to have an argument with her.’
‘Yes, I suppose I do,’ he agreed. ‘Is she there?’
‘Uh huh,’ she answered. ‘Is it going to be a big one?’
He shrugged. He had no idea.
‘I’d better eat all of these, then. In case it’s going to be.’
‘Why?’
‘Because dinner will be late. It always is.’
He reached into the bag and took a few
fave,
careful to leave her the chocolate ones. ‘I’ll try not to make it be an argument, then.’
‘Good.’ She turned and went down the corridor to her room, taking the bag with her. Brunetti followed a few moments later, stopping in front of the door to Paola’s study. He knocked.
‘Avanti,’
she called.
When he went in he found her, as he usually did when he got home from work, sitting at her desk, a pile of papers in front of her, glasses low on her nose as she read through them. She looked up at him, smiled a real smile, removed her glasses and asked, ‘What happened in Treviso?’
‘Just what I thought wouldn’t. Or couldn’t,’ Brunetti said and moved across the room to his usual place on a stout, middle-aged sofa that stood against the wall to her right.
‘He’ll testify?’ Paola asked.
‘He’s eager to testify. He identified the photo instantly and he’s coming down here tomorrow to have a look at him, but I’d say he’s certain.’ In response to her evident surprise Brunetti added, ‘And he’s from Salerno.’
‘And he’s really willing?’ She made no attempt to disguise her wonderment. When Brunetti nodded, she said, ‘Tell me about him.’
‘He’s a little man, about forty, supporting a wife and two children by working in a
pizzeria
in Treviso. He’s been up here for twenty years, but still goes down there every year for vacation. When they can.’
‘Does his wife work?’ Paola asked.
‘She’s a cleaning lady in an elementary school.’
‘What was he doing in a bank in Venice?’
‘He was paying the mortgage on his apartment in Treviso. The bank that gave the original mortgage was taken over by a bank here, so he comes down once a year to pay the mortgage himself. If he tries to do it through his bank in Treviso they charge him two hundred thousand lire, which is why he travelled to Venice on his day off to pay it.’
‘And found himself in the middle of a robbery?’
Brunetti nodded.
Paola shook her head. ‘It’s remarkable that he’d be willing to testify. You said the man who was arrested is mixed up with the Mafia?’
‘His brother is.’ Brunetti kept to himself his belief that this meant they both were.
‘And does the man in Treviso know this?’
‘Yes. I told him.’
‘And he’s still willing?’ When Brunetti nodded again, Paola said, ‘Then perhaps there is hope for all of us.’
Brunetti shrugged, conscious that there was some dishonesty, perhaps a great deal of dishonesty, in his not telling Paola what Iacovantuono had said about having to behave bravely for our children’s sake. He shifted himself lower on the sofa, stuck his feet out in front of him and crossed his ankles.
‘Are you finished with it?’ he asked, knowing she would understand.
‘I don’t think so, Guido,’ she said, both hesitation and regret audible as she spoke.
‘Why?’
‘Because the newspapers, when they write about what happened, will call it a random act of vandalism, like someone who knocks over a garbage can or slashes the seat on a train.’
Brunetti, though tempted, said nothing, waiting for her to continue.
‘It wasn’t random, Guido, and it wasn’t vandalism.’ She put her face down into her open palms and slid her hands up until they were covering the top of her head. From below, her voice came to him. ‘The public have got to understand why it was done, that these people are doing something that is both disgusting and immoral, and that they’ve got to be made not to do it.’
‘Have you thought about the consequences?’ Brunetti asked in a level voice.
She looked up at him. ‘I couldn’t be married to a policeman for twenty years and not have thought of the consequences.’
‘To yourself?’
‘Of course.’
‘And to me?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you don’t regret them?’
‘Of course I regret them. I don’t want to lose my job or have your career suffer.’
‘But...?’
‘I know you think I’m a terrible show-off, Guido,’ she began and continued before he had the chance to say anything. ‘And it’s true, but only at times. This isn’t like that, not at all. I’m not doing this to be in the newspapers. In fact, I can tell you honestly that I’m afraid of the trouble this is going to cause us all. But I have to do it.’ Again, when she saw him about to interrupt, she amended that. ‘I mean, someone has to do it, or, to use the passive voice you hate so much,’ she said with a gentle smile, ‘it has to be done.’ Still smiling, she added, ‘I’ll listen to anything you have to say, but I don’t think I can do anything different from what I’ve chosen to do.’
Brunetti changed the position of his feet, putting the left on top, and leaned a little to the right. ‘The Germans have changed the law. They can now prosecute Germans for things they do in other countries.’
‘I know. I read the article,’ she said sharply.
‘And?’
‘And one man was sentenced to a few years in jail. As the Americans say, “Big fucking deal.” Hundreds of thousands of men go there every year. Putting one of them in jail, in a well-lit German jail where he gets television and visits from his wife every week, is not going to stop men from going to Thailand as sex-tourists.’
‘And what you want to do, that will?’
‘If the planes don’t go, if no one’s willing to take the risk of organizing the tours, with hotel rooms and meals and guides to take them to the brothels, well, then fewer of them will go. I know it’s not much, but it’s something.’
‘They’ll go on their own.’
‘Fewer of them.’
‘But still some? But still a lot of them?’
‘Probably.’
‘Then why do it?’
She shook her head in annoyance. ‘Maybe all of this is because you’re a man,’ she said.
For the first time since coming into her study Brunetti felt anger. ‘What’s that suppose to mean?’
‘It means that men and women look at this differently. Always will.’
‘Why?’ His voice was level, though both of them knew that anger had slipped into the room and between them.
‘Because, no matter how much you try to imagine what this means, it’s always got to be an exercise in imagination. It can’t happen to you, Guido. You’re big and strong and, from the time you were a little boy, you’ve been accustomed to violence of some sort: soccer, rough-housing with other boys; in your case police training as well.’
She saw his attention drifting away. He’d heard this before and never believed it. She thought he didn’t want to believe it, but she had not told him that. ‘But it’s different for us, for women,’ she went on. ‘We spend our lives being made afraid of violence, made to think always of avoiding it. But still every one of us knows that what happens to those kids in Cambodia or Thailand or the Philippines could just as easily have happened to us, could still happen to us. It’s as simple as that, Guido: you’re big and we’re little.’
He gave no response, and so she went on, ‘Guido, we’ve been talking about this for years and we’ve never really agreed. We don’t now.’ She paused for a moment, then asked, ‘Will you listen to two more things, then I’ll listen to you?’
Brunetti wanted to make his voice sound amiable, open and accepting; he wanted to say ‘Of course’, but the best he could manage was a tight ‘Yes’.
‘Think of that vile article, the one in the magazine. It’s one of the major sources of information in this country and in it a sociologist - I don’t know where he teaches, but it’s certain to be at some important university, so he’s considered an expert and people will believe what he writes - can say that paedophiles love children. And he can say that because it’s convenient for men to have everyone believe it. And men run the country.’
She stopped for a moment, then added, ‘I’m not sure if this has anything to do with what we’re talking about, but I think another cause of the gulf that separates us on this - not just you and me, Guido, but all men from all women - is the fear that the idea that sex might sometimes be an unpleasant experience is real to all women and unthinkable to most men.’ As she saw him beginning to protest, she said, ‘Guido, the woman doesn’t exist who thinks for an instant that paedophiles love children. They lust after them or want to dominate them, but those things have nothing to do with love.’
He kept his head lowered; she saw that as she looked across the room at him. ‘That’s the second thing I want to say, dear Guido whom I love with all my soul. That’s how we look at it, most women, that love isn’t lust and domination.’ She stopped here and glanced down at her right hand, idly picking at a rough piece of cuticle on the nail of her thumb. ‘That’s all, I think. End of sermon.’
The silence between them stretched out until Brunetti broke it, but tentatively.
‘Do you believe all men or just some men think like this?’ he asked.
‘Just some, I think. The good ones - like you’re a good man - they don’t.’ But before he could say anything, she added, ‘They don’t think like us, either, like women. I don’t think that the idea of love as lust and violence and the exercise of power - I don’t think that idea is as entirely alien to them as it is to us.’
‘To all women? Alien to all of you?’
‘I wish. No, not to all of us.’
He looked up at her. ‘Have we resolved anything, then?’
‘I don’t know. But I want you to know how serious I am about this.’
‘And if I were to ask you to stop, not to do anything more?’
Her lips pressed together as she pulled her mouth closed, a gesture he’d watched for decades. She shook her head without saying anything.
‘Does that mean you won’t stop or you don’t want me to ask you?’
‘Both.’
‘I will ask you and I do ask you.’ But before she could give an answer, he raised a hand towards her and said, ‘No, Paola, don’t say anything because I know what you’ll say and I don’t want to hear it. But remember, please, that I’ve asked you not to do this. Not for me or my career, whatever that means. But because I believe that what you’re doing and what you think should be done is wrong.’