Authors: Donna Leon
‘It gets them away from their mothers.’
She laughed. ‘That’s perhaps the only certain good thing it does. Unfortunately, after they have their eighteen months, they all come back home to roost.’
‘Is that what you think Raffi will do?’ he asked.
‘If I have any say,’ she began, causing Brunetti to wonder when she had not, ‘he won’t do military service. It would be better for him to go to Australia and spend eighteen months hitchhiking around the country and working as a dish-washer. He’d certainly learn more by doing that, or by opting to do his service as a volunteer in a hospital, instead.’
‘You’d actually let him go off to Australia by himself? For eighteen months? To wash dishes?’
Paola looked at him and, at the expression of real astonishment she read on his face, she smiled. ‘What do you think I am, Guido, the mother of the Gracchi, that I must forever hold my children to my bosom as though they were my only jewels? It wouldn’t be easy to see him go, no, not at all, but I think it would do him a world of good to go off and be independent.’ When Brunetti remained silent, she said, ‘At least it would teach him how to make his own bed.’
‘He does that already,’ a literal-minded Brunetti answered.
‘I mean in the larger sense,’ Paola explained. ‘It would give him some idea that life is not only this tiny city with its tiny prejudices, and it might give him some idea that work is what you do if you want something.’
‘As opposed to asking your parents?’
‘Exactly. Or your grandparents.’
It was rare for Brunetti to hear Paola make a criticism, however veiled, of her parents, and so he was curious to follow this up. ‘Was it too easy for you? Growing up, I mean.’
‘No more than it was too hard for you, my dear.’
Not at all sure what she meant by that, Brunetti was about to ask, when the door to the apartment flew open and Chiara and Raffi catapulted into the corridor. He and Paola exchanged a glance, and then a smile, and then it was time to eat.
13
AS OFTEN HAPPENED
, Brunetti was immeasurably cheered by having lunch at home in the company of his family. He was never certain if his response was different from that of an animal returned to its den: safe, warmed by the heat of the bodies of its young, slavering over the fresh kill it had dragged home. Whatever the cause, the experience gave him fresh heart and sent him back to work feeling restored and eager to resume the hunt.
The imagery of violence dropped away from him when he entered Signorina Elettra’s office and found her at her desk, head bowed over some papers on her desk, chin propped in one hand, utterly relaxed and comfortable. ‘I’m not interrupting you, am I?’ he asked, seeing the seal
of
the Ministry of the Interior on the documents and below it the red stripe indicating that the material it contained was classified.
‘No, not at all, Commissario,’ she said, casually slipping the papers inside a file and thus arousing Brunetti’s interest.
‘Could you do something for me?’ he asked, his eyes on hers; he was careful to avoid lowering them to the label on the front of the file.
‘Of course, sir,’ she said, slipping the file into her top drawer and pulling a notepad over in front of her. ‘What is it?’ she asked, pen in hand, smile bright.
‘In the files for the Academy, is there anything about a girl who had been raped?’
Her pen clattered to the desk, and the smile disappeared from her lips. Her entire body pulled back from him in surprise, but she said nothing.
‘Are you all right, Signorina?’ he asked, with concern.
She looked down at the pen, picked it up, made quite a business of replacing the cap and removing it again, then looked up at him and smiled. ‘Of course, sir.’ She looked at the pad, pulled it closer to her, and poised her pen over it. ‘What was her name, sir? And when did it happen?’
‘I don’t know,’ Brunetti began. ‘That is, I’m not even sure it happened. It must have been about eight years ago; I think it was when I was at a police seminar in London. It happened at the San Martino. The original report was that the
girl
had been raped, I think by more than one of them. But then no charges were pressed, and the story disappeared.’
‘Then what is it you’d like me to look for, sir?’
‘I’m not sure,’ Brunetti answered. ‘Any sign of something that might have happened, who the girl was, why the story disappeared. Anything at all you can find out about it.’
She seemed to be a long time writing all of this down, but he waited until she was finished. Pen still in her hand, she asked, ‘If charges weren’t pressed, then it’s not likely we’ll have anything here, is it?’
‘No, it isn’t. But I’m hoping that there might be some report of the original complaint.’
‘And if there isn’t?’
Brunetti was puzzled to find her so hesitant about following up an investigation. ‘Then perhaps the newspapers. Once you have the date, that is,’ he said.
‘I’ll have a look at your personnel file, sir, and find the dates when you were in London,’ she said, then looked up from her notebook, face serene.
‘Yes, yes,’ he said, then, lamely, ‘I’ll be in my office.’
As he went upstairs, he reconsidered what Paola had said about the military, trying to figure out why he couldn’t bring himself to condemn them as universally or as strongly as she did. Part of it, he knew, was because of his own experience under arms, however brief it had been, and the lingering fondness he felt
for
that period of unexamined comradeship. Perhaps it was nothing more elevated than the instinct of the pack, gathered round the kill, retelling stories of that day’s hunt while great gobbets of fat dripped into the fire. But if memory was to be trusted, his loyalty had been to his immediate group of friends and not to some abstract ideal of corps or regiment.
His reading in history had given him many examples of soldiers who died in proud defence of the regimental flag or while performing remarkable acts of heroism to save the perceived honour of the group, but these actions had always seemed wasteful and faintly stupid to Brunetti. Certainly, reading accounts of the actual events or even the words of the decorations bestowed, too often posthumously, upon these brave young men, Brunetti had felt his heart stir in response to the nobility of their behaviour, but the antiphon of pragmatic good sense had always rung out in the background, reminding him that, in the end, these were boys who threw their lives away in order to protect what was nothing more than a piece of cloth. Bold, certainly, and brave, but also foolish to the point of idiocy.
He found his desk covered with reports of one sort or another, the detritus of several days’ lack of attention. He wrapped himself in the cloak of duty and, for the next two hours, engaged himself in behaviour as futile as any he thought to criticize on the part of those valiant young men. As he read through accounts of
arrests
for burglary, pickpocketing, and the various types of fraud currently practised on the streets of the city, he was struck by how often the names of the people arrested were foreign and by how often their age exempted them from punishment. These facts left him untroubled: it was the thought that each of these arrests guaranteed another vote for the Right that disturbed him. Years ago, he had read a short story, he thought by some American, which ended with the revelation of an endless chain of sinners marching towards heaven along a broad arc in the sky. He sometimes thought the same chain of sinners marched slowly through the skies of Italian politics, though hardly towards paradise.
Stupefied by the boredom of the task, he heard his name called from the door and looked up to see Pucetti.
‘Yes, Pucetti?’ he said, beckoning the young officer into his office. ‘Have a seat.’ Glad of the excuse to set the papers aside, he turned his attention to the young policeman. ‘What is it?’ he asked, struck by how young he looked in his crisp uniform, far too young to have any right to carry the gun at his side, far too innocent to have any idea of how to use it.
‘It’s about the Moro boy, sir,’ Pucetti said. ‘I came to see you yesterday, sir, but you weren’t here.’
It was close to a reproach, something Brunetti was not used to hearing from Pucetti. Resentment flared in Brunetti that the young officer
should
dare to take this tone with him. He fought down the impulse to explain to Pucetti that he had decided there was no need for haste. If it was generally believed the police were treating Moro’s death as suicide, people might be more willing to speak about the boy openly; besides, he had no need to justify his decisions to this boy. He waited longer than he usually would, then asked simply, ‘What about him?’
‘You remember the time we were there, talking to the cadets?’ Pucetti asked, and Brunetti was tempted to ask if the younger man thought he had arrived at an age where his memory needed to be prodded in order to function.
‘Yes,’ Brunetti limited himself to saying.
‘It’s very strange, sir. When we went back to talk to them again, it was as if some of them didn’t even know he had been in the same school with them. Most of the ones I talked to told me they didn’t know him very well. I spoke to the boy who found him, Pellegrini, but he didn’t know anything. He was drunk the night before, said he went to bed about midnight.’ Even before Brunetti could ask, Pucetti supplied the information: ‘Yes, he’d been at a party at a friend’s house, in Dorsoduro. I asked him how he’d got in, and he said he had a key to the
portone
. He said he paid the
portiere
twenty Euros for it, and the way he said it, it sounded like anyone who wants one can buy one.’ He waited to see if Brunetti had any questions about this, but then continued, ‘I asked his roommate, and he said it was true, that Pellegrini woke him
up
when he came in. Pellegrini said he got up about six to get some water and that’s when he saw Moro.’
‘He wasn’t the one who called, though, was he?’
‘Called us, you mean, sir?’
‘Yes.’
‘No. It was one of the janitors. He said he’d just got there for work and heard a commotion in the bathroom, and when he saw what had happened, he called.’
‘More than an hour after Pellegrini found the body,’ Brunetti said aloud.
When Pucetti made no response, Brunetti said, ‘What else? Go on. What did they say about Moro?’
‘It’s in here, sir,’ he said, placing a file on Brunetti’s desk. He paused, weighing what to say next. ‘I know this sounds strange, sir, but it seemed like most of them really didn’t care about it. Not the way we would, or a person would, if something like this happened to someone you knew, or you worked with.’ He gave this some more thought and added, ‘It was creepy, sort of, the way they talked as if they didn’t know him. But they all live there together, and take classes together. How could they not know him?’ Hearing his voice rise, Pucetti forced himself to calm down. ‘Anyway, one of them told me that he’d had a class with Moro a couple of days before, and they’d studied together that night and the following day. Getting ready for an exam.’
‘When was the exam?’
‘The day after.’
‘The day after what? That he died?’
‘Yes, sir.’
Brunetti’s conclusion was instant, but he asked Pucetti, ‘How does that seem to you?’
It was obvious that the young officer had prepared himself for the question, for his answer was immediate. ‘People kill themselves, well, at least it seems to me, that they’d do it after an exam, at least they’d wait to see how badly they’d done in it, and then maybe they’d do it. At least that’s what I’d do,’ he said, then added, ‘not that I’d kill myself over a stupid exam.’
‘What would you kill yourself over?’ Brunetti asked.
Owl-like, Pucetti stared across at his commander. ‘Oh, I don’t think over anything, sir. Would you?’
Brunetti shook the idea away. ‘No, I don’t think so. But I suppose you never know.’ He had friends who were killing themselves with stress or cigarettes or alcohol, and some of his friends had children who were killing themselves with drugs, but he could think of no one he knew, at least not in this instant, whom he thought capable of suicide. But perhaps that’s why suicide fell like lightning: it was always the most unexpected people who did it.
His attention swung back to Pucetti only at the end of what he was saying: ‘… about going skiing this winter.’
‘The Moro boy?’ Brunetti asked to disguise the fact that his attention had drifted away.
‘Yes, sir. And this kid said Moro was looking forward to it, really loved to ski.’ He paused to see if his superior would comment, but when he did not, Pucetti went on, ‘He seemed upset, sir.’
‘Who? This boy?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
Pucetti gave him a startled glance, puzzled that Brunetti hadn’t figured this out yet. ‘Because if he didn’t kill himself, then someone else did.’
At the look of pleased satisfaction on Brunetti’s face as he heard him explain this, Pucetti began to suspect, not without a twinge of embarrassment, that perhaps his superior had figured it out.
14
IN THE DAYS
that followed, Brunetti’s thoughts were distracted from the Moro family and its griefs and directed towards the
Casinò
. The police, this time, were not asked to investigate the frequent and refined forms of peculation practised by guests and croupiers, but the accusations brought against the casino’s administration for having enriched itself at public expense. Brunetti was one of the few Venetians who bothered to remember that the
Casinò
belonged to the city; hence he realized that any theft or embezzlement of
Casinò
earnings came directly from the funds earmarked for the aid of orphans and widows. That people who spent their lives among gamblers and card-sharks should steal was no surprise to Brunetti: it was
only
their boldness that occasionally astonished him, for it seemed that all of the ancillary services offered by the
Casinò
– banquets, private parties, even the bars – had quietly been turned over to a company that turned out to be run by the brother of the director.