Authors: Donna Leon
‘And an even surer way to get yourself a seat on the vaporetto tomorrow.’
Brunetti laughed, feeling his tension begin to evaporate. He remembered their friend Guglielmo, who had served as military attaché in Cairo for four years, during which time he had studied Arabic, converted to Coptic Christianity, and made a fortune smuggling archaeological artefacts out of the country on military aeroplanes. Devoted to food, he had taken with him,
when
he left, a broad variety of recipes, most of which called for inordinate quantities of garlic.
‘Is it true that they’ve found dried-up garlic in mummy coffins?’ Brunetti asked, pushing himself away from the door.
‘You’d probably find it in the pockets of Guglielmo’s dress uniform, too,’ Paola observed, replacing the lid and taking her first good look at her husband. Her voice changed. ‘What’s the matter with you?’
He tried to smile but failed. ‘Bad day.’
‘What?’
‘A suicide that might not be.’
‘Who?’
‘A boy.’
‘How old?’
‘Seventeen.’
The death, the gender and the age stopped Paola in her tracks. She took a deep breath, shook her head as if to dismiss superstitious possibility, and put her hand on his arm. ‘Tell me about it.’
For a reason he didn’t understand, perhaps the same superstition, Brunetti didn’t want to have to look at Paola as he told her about Ernesto Moro, so he busied himself with taking down two glasses and getting a chilled bottle of Tokay out of the refrigerator. As he went through the business of opening the bottle, he spoke, deliberately slowing his actions so that they would last as long as the explanation he had to give. ‘He was a student at the San Martino. We had a call this morning, and when
we
got there, we found him hanging in the shower. Vianello did, that is.’
He poured two glasses of wine and handed one to Paola, who ignored it and asked, ‘Who was he?’
‘Fernando Moro’s son.’
‘Dottor Moro?’
‘Yes,’ Brunetti said and pressed the glass into her hand until she accepted it.
‘Does he know?’
Brunetti turned away from her, set his glass down, and opened the refrigerator, searching for something he could eat by way of distraction. His back to her, he went on, ‘Yes.’
She said nothing while he rooted around and found a plastic container of olives, which he opened and put on the counter. As soon as he saw them, dark and plump in their yellow oil, he lost the taste for them and picked up his glass again. Conscious of Paola’s attention, he glanced at her.
‘Did you have to tell him?’
‘He came while I was there with the boy’s body, then I went and talked to him at his home.’
‘Today?’ she asked, unable to disguise what was either astonishment or horror.
‘I wasn’t there long,’ he said and regretted the words the instant they were out of his mouth.
Paola shot him a look, but what she saw on his face made her let his remark pass without comment. ‘The mother?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know where she is. Someone said she was here, in the city, but I couldn’t call her.’
Perhaps
it was the way he said ‘couldn’t’ that caused Paola not to question him about this, either.
Instead, she asked, ‘What makes you think it might not be?’
‘Habit,’ he ventured.
‘The habit of doubt?’ she asked.
‘I suppose you could call it that,’ Brunetti answered and finally allowed himself a sip of wine. Cool, tight on his tongue, it gave him little comfort, though it reminded him that comfort did exist in the world.
‘Do you want to talk about it?’ Paola asked, sipping for the first time at her own wine.
‘Later, perhaps. After dinner.’
She nodded, took another sip, and set the glass down. ‘If you want to go and read for a while, I’ll set the table. The kids should be home soon,’ she began, and both of them were conscious of the word ‘kids’ and the casual assertion it made that things had at least remained the same for them, their family safe. Like a horse suddenly breaking stride to avoid a hole below its front foot, her voice jogged over into artificial jollity and she added, ‘And then we’ll eat.’
Brunetti went into the living room. He placed his glass on the table, sat on the sofa, and picked up his book, Anna Comnena’s life of her father, the Emperor Alexius. Half an hour later, when Chiara came in to tell her father that dinner was ready, she found him on the sofa, his book lying open and forgotten in his lap, as he stared out at the rooftops of the city.
10
MUCH AS BRUNETTI
hoped that talking to Paola about the boy’s death would serve to lessen the horror with which it filled him, it did not. In bed, Paola curled beside him, he told her the events of his day, struck by the grotesqueness of their bedtime talk. When he finished, not hiding from her the anguish that had caused him to flee from his office without trying to contact Signora Moro, she propped herself up on one elbow and looked down at his face.
‘How much longer can you do this, Guido?’ she asked.
In the dim moonlight, he glanced at her, then returned his attention to the opposite wall, where the mirror glowed dimly in the light reflected from the tiles of the terrace.
She allowed a certain time to pass in silence, and then asked, ‘Well?’
‘I don’t know,’ he answered. ‘I can’t think about that until this is finished.’
‘If it’s decided he committed suicide, then isn’t it already finished?’ she asked.
‘I don’t mean finished that way,’ he said dismissively. ‘I mean really finished.’
‘Finished for you, you mean?’ she asked. At other times, the words would have been a demand, perhaps even a sarcastic observation, but tonight they were only a request for information.
‘I suppose so,’ he admitted.
‘When will that be?’
The accumulated exhaustion of the day enveloped him, almost as if it had decided to wrap its arms around him and lull him to sleep. He felt his eyes close and he rested in those other arms for a moment. The room began to move away from him as he felt himself drawn towards sleep. Suddenly able to see the events affecting the Moro family only as a triangle created by coincidence, he whispered, ‘When the lines aren’t there,’ and gave himself to sleep.
The next morning, he woke to ignorance. The rays of the sun, reflected off the same mirror and on to his face, pulled him from sleep, and in the first moments of waking, he had no memory of the events of the previous day. He moved a bit to the right and his body sensed Paola’s absence; he turned his head to the left and saw the bell tower of San Polo, the sunlight so clear upon it
that
he could make out the grey blobs of cement that held the bricks together. A pigeon glided towards the eaves under the tower roof, spread its wings to reduce speed, and then set itself down in a soft-footed landing. It turned around twice, bobbed about a bit, and then tucked its head under one wing.
Nothing the bird did was reminiscent of the events of the previous day, but as its head disappeared under its wing, Brunetti had a sharp vision of Ernesto Moro’s face at the moment that Vianello pulled the hem of his cape across it.
Brunetti got out of bed and, careful to avoid himself in the mirror, went down to the bathroom to take a shower. As he stood there, shaving, he had no choice but to confront his own eyes, and the face he saw looking back at him had the weary dullness of every grief-stricken parent he had ever had to speak to. How to explain that a child was dead, and even if it could be explained, what explanation could hope to stem the torrent of grief that must flow from those words?
Paola and the children were long gone, so he left the house, glad of the chance to drink his coffee in the company of a familiar
pasticceria
, with conversation no more demanding than the idle comments someone might make to him. He bought both
Il Tempo
and
Il Gazzettino
at the
edicola
in Campo Santa Marina and went into Didovich for a coffee and a brioche.
CADET AT EXCLUSIVE VENETIAN SCHOOL HANGS
HIMSELF
, the first paper declared on one of the inner pages, while the front page of the second carried the headline,
SON OF EX-PARLIAMENTARIAN FOUND DEAD AT SAN MARTINO
. The lower-case headlines informed the people of Venice that the father of the victim had resigned from Parliament after his hotly contested health report had been condemned by the then Minister of Health, that the police were investigating the boy’s death, and that his parents were separated. Reading the lead paragraphs, Brunetti was sure that anyone who read them, regardless of the information contained in the article that followed, would already suspect that the parents or the way they lived was somehow related to, if not directly responsible for, the boy’s death.
‘Terrible, isn’t it? This boy?’ one of the women at the counter asked the owner, waving her hand towards Brunetti’s newspaper. She bit into her brioche and shook her head.
‘What’s the matter with kids today? They have so much. Why can’t they be content with it?’ another one answered.
As if on cue, a third woman the same age as the other two, her hair the standard post-menopausal red, set her coffee cup resoundingly back into its saucer and said, ‘It’s because the parents don’t pay attention to them. I stayed home to take care of my children, and so nothing like this ever happened.’ A stranger to this culture might well assume that no option was open to the children of working mothers but suicide. The three women nodded in united
disapproval
at this latest proof of the perfidy and ingratitude of youth and the irresponsibility of all parents other than themselves.
Brunetti folded his paper, paid, and left the
pasticceria
. The same headlines blared forth from the yellow posters taped to the back wall of the
edicola
. In their real grief, attacks like this could do no more than glance off the souls of the Moros: this belief was the only comfort Brunetti could find in the face of this latest evidence of the mendacity of the press.
Inside the Questura, he went directly to his office, where he saw new files lying on his desk. He dialled Signorina Elettra, who answered the phone by saying, ‘He wants to see you immediately.’
It no longer surprised him when Signorina Elettra knew that it was he who was calling: she had spent considerable police funds in having Telecom install a new phone line in her office, though the moneys currently available could not provide for anyone except her to have a terminal on which the number of the caller appeared. Nor was he surprised by her use of the pronoun: she granted this distinction only to her immediate superior, Vice-Questore Giuseppe Patta.
‘Immediately now?’ he asked.
‘Immediately yesterday afternoon, I’d say,’ she answered.
Brunetti went downstairs and into her office without taking time to examine the folders. He had expected to find Signorina Elettra at her
desk
, but her office was empty. He stuck his head back outside the door to check to see if she were in the hallway, but there was no sign of her.
Reluctant to present himself to Patta without first having some indication of his superior’s mood or what it was Patta wanted to see him about, Brunetti toyed with the idea of going back to his office to read the folders or to the officers’ room to see if Vianello or Pucetti were there. As he stood undecided, the door to Vice-Questore Patta’s office opened, and Signora Elettra emerged, today wearing what looked very much like a bomber jacket, buttoned tight at the waist, puffy and full over the bust and shoulders; well, a bomber jacket, were bombardiers given to the wearing of uniforms made of apricot-coloured raw silk.
Patta had a clear view from his office into hers. ‘I’d like to see you, Brunetti,’ he called. Brunetti glanced at Signorina Elettra as he turned towards Patta’s door, but the only thing she had time to do was push her lips tightly together in either disapproval or disgust. Like ships in the night, they passed, barely acknowledging the presence of the other.
‘Close the door,’ Patta said, glancing up and then back at the papers on his desk. Brunetti turned to do so, certain that Patta’s use of the word ‘please’ would provide the clue to what sort of meeting this would be. The fact that Brunetti had time to formulate this thought destroyed any possibility that it was going to be
a
pleasant interchange of ideas between colleagues. A short delay would be the habitual flick of the whip from a carriage driver: aimed to snap the air and catch the beast’s attention without doing it any harm, it was an unconscious assertion of command, not meant to inflict damage. A longer delay would demonstrate Patta’s irritation without revealing its cause. The complete absence of the word, as on this occasion, was indicative of either fear or rage: experience had taught Brunetti that the first of these was the more dangerous, for fear drove Patta to the reckless endangerment of other people’s careers in his attempt to protect his own. This evaluation was complete long before Brunetti turned to approach his superior, and so the sight of a glowering Patta did not intimidate him.
‘Yes, sir?’ he asked with a serious face, having learned that neutrality of expression and tone was expected of him in these moments. He waited for Patta to wave him to a chair, consciously imitating the behaviour of a non-Alpha male dog.
‘What are you waiting for?’ Patta demanded, still without looking at him. ‘Sit down.’
Brunetti did so silently and placed his arms in neat horizontals on the arms of the chair. He waited, wondering what scene Patta was going to play and how he was going to play it. A minute passed silently. Patta continued to read through the file that lay open before him, occasionally turning a page.
Like most Italians, Brunetti respected and approved of beauty. When he could, he chose to surround himself with beauty: his wife, the clothes he wore, the paintings in his home, even the beauty of thought in the books he read: all of these things gave him great pleasure. How, he wondered, as he did whenever he encountered Patta after a gap of a week or so, how could a man so very handsome be so utterly devoid of the qualities usually attributed to beauty? The erect posture was solely physical, for the ethical Patta was an eel; the firm jaw bespoke a strength of character that was manifested only in stubbornness; and the clear dark eyes saw only what they chose to see.