Authors: Donna Leon
Moro blinked twice, appeared to consider Brunetti’s question, and then answered, ‘My wife and I are separated.’
‘Your daughter, then?’ Brunetti said, recalling a reference to the child in one of the articles he had read about Moro.
‘She’s in her mother’s care,’ Moro said with every evidence of indifference.
Brunetti wanted to say that he was still the girl’s father, but he couldn’t bring himself to do so. Instead, he contented himself with saying, ‘That’s a legal situation, a separation.’
It took Moro a long time to answer. Finally he said, ‘I’m not sure I understand you.’
Until now Brunetti had paid little attention to their words, allowing his consciousness to move ahead as if on automatic pilot. His mind detached from meaning, he paid closer attention to Moro’s tone and gestures, the way he sat and the pitch of his voice. Brunetti sensed that the man had moved to some place distant from pain, almost as if his heart had been put in protective custody and his mind had been left behind to answer questions. But there remained,
as
well, an enormous sense of fear; not fear of Brunetti but of saying something that might reveal what lay behind the façade of calm restraint.
Brunetti decided to answer what the doctor clearly intended as a question. ‘I’ve spoken to your wife, sir, and she voices no rancour towards you.’
‘Did you expect her to?’
‘In the situation, yes, I think it would be understandable if she did. That way, she could somehow hold you responsible for what happened to your son. Presumably it was your decision that he attend the Academy.’
Moro shot him a stunned glance, opened his mouth as if to speak in his own defence, but stopped himself and said nothing. Brunetti averted his eyes from the other man’s anger, and when he looked back, Moro’s face was empty of feeling.
For a long time, Brunetti could think of nothing to say until at last he spoke entirely without thinking. ‘I’d like you to trust me, Dottore.’
After a long time, Moro said, voice tired, ‘And I’d like to trust you, Commissario. But I do not and will not.’ He saw Brunetti preparing to object and quickly went on, ‘It’s not because you don’t seem like a perfectly honest man but because I have learned to trust no one.’ Brunetti tried to speak again, and this time Moro held up a hand to stop him. ‘Further, you represent a state I perceive as both criminal and negligent,
and
that is enough to exclude you, absolutely, from my trust.’
The words, at first, offended Brunetti and roused in him a desire to defend himself and his honour, but in the stillness that fell after Moro stopped talking, he realized that the doctor’s words had nothing at all to do with him personally: Moro saw him as contaminated simply because he worked for the state. Brunetti realized he had too much sympathy for that position to attempt to argue against it.
Brunetti got to his feet, but he did so tiredly, with none of the faked energy he had devoted to the same gesture when talking to Patta. ‘If you decide you can talk to me, Dottore, please call me.’
‘Of course,’ the doctor said with the pretence of politeness. Moro pushed himself from his own chair, led Brunetti to the door, and let him out of the apartment.
15
OUTSIDE, HE REACHED
for his
telefonino
, only to realize he’d left it in the office or at home in another jacket. He resisted the siren song whispering to him that it was futile to call Signora Moro this late in the afternoon, that she wouldn’t talk to him. He resisted it, at any rate, long enough to make two unsuccessful attempts to call her from public phones. The first, one of the new, aerodynamic silver phones that had replaced the reliable ugly orange ones, refused to accept his plastic phone card, and the second rejected his attempts with a repeated mechanical bleat in place of a dialling tone. He yanked the card from the phone, slipped it back in his wallet and, feeling justified that he had at least made the effort, decided to go back to the
Questura
for what little remained of the working day.
As he stood in the gondola
traghetto
that ran between the Salute and San Marco, his Venetian knees adjusted automatically to the thrust and counter-thrust between the strokes of the
gondolieri
’s oars and the waves of the incoming tide. He looked ahead as they made their slow passage across the Canal Grande, struck by just how jaded a person could become: ahead of him lay Palazzo Ducale, and behind it popped up the gleaming domes of the Basilica di San Marco: Brunetti stared as though they were nothing more than the painted backdrop in a dull, provincial production of
Otello
. How had he got to the point where he could look on such beauty and not be shaken? Accompanied by the dull squeal of the oars, he followed this train of thought and asked himself how, equally, he could sit across from Paola at a meal and not want to run his hands across her breasts or how he could see his children sitting side by side on the sofa, doing something stupid like watching television, and not feel his bowels churn with terror at the many dangers that would beset their lives.
The gondola glided in to the landing, and he stepped up on to the dock, telling himself to leave his stupid preoccupations in the boat. Long experience had taught him that his sense of wonder was still intact and would return, bringing back with it an almost painful awareness of the beauty that surrounded him at every turn.
A beautiful woman of his acquaintance had, years ago, attempted to convince him that her beauty was in some ways a curse because it was all that anyone cared about, to the almost total exclusion of any other quality she might possess. At the time, he had dismissed it as an attempt to win compliments, which he was more than willing to give, but now perhaps he understood what she meant, at least in relation to the city. No one really cared what happened to her – how else explain her successive recent governments? – just so long as they could profit from and be seen in the reflection of her beauty, at least for as long as that beauty lasted.
At the Questura, he went up to Signorina Elettra’s office, where he found her reading that day’s
Gazzettino
. She smiled at his arrival and pointed at the lead story. ‘The Americans’ Appointed President seems to want to eliminate all restrictions on the burning of carbon-based fuels,’ she said, then read him the headline: ‘“
A SLAP IN THE FACE FOR THE ECOLOGISTS
”.’
‘Sounds like something he’d do,’ Brunetti said, not interested in continuing the discussion and wondering if Signorina Elettra had been converted to Vianello’s passionate ecological views.
She looked up at him, then back to the paper. ‘And this: “
VENICE CONDEMNED
”.’
‘What?’ Brunetti demanded, taken aback by headline and with no idea of what it referred to.
‘Well, if the temperature rises, then the icecaps will melt, and then the seas will rise, and
there
goes Venice.’ She sounded remarkably calm about it.
‘And Bangladesh, as well, one might observe,’ Brunetti added.
‘Of course. I wonder if the Appointed President has considered the consequences.’
‘I don’t think that’s in his powers, considering consequences,’ Brunetti observed. It was his custom to avoid political discussions with the people with whom he worked; he was uncertain whether foreign politics were included under that ban.
‘Probably not. Besides, all the refugees will end up here, not there.’
‘What refugees?’ Brunetti asked, not clear where the conversation was going.
‘From Bangladesh. If the country is flooded and finds itself permanently under water, the people certainly aren’t going to remain there and agree to drown so that they don’t inconvenience anyone. They’ll have to migrate somewhere, and as there’s little chance they’ll be allowed to go east, they’ll end up here.’
‘Isn’t your geography a bit imaginative here, Signorina?’
‘I don’t mean they, the Bangladeshis, will come here, but the people they displace will move west, and the ones they displace will end up here, or the ones that they in their turn displace will.’ She looked up, confused at his slowness in understanding. ‘You’ve read history, haven’t you, sir?’ At his nod, she concluded, ‘Then you know that this is what happens.’
‘Perhaps,’ Brunetti said, his scepticism audible.
‘We’ll see,’ she said mildly and folded the paper closed. ‘What can I do for you, sir?’
‘I spoke to the Vice-Questore this morning, and he seemed reluctant to put his entire faith in Lieutenant Scarpa’s opinion that the Moro boy killed himself.’
‘Is he afraid of a Moro Report on the police?’ she asked, grasping at once what Patta himself probably refused to admit.
‘More than likely. At any rate, he wants us to exclude all other possibilities before he closes the case.’
‘There’s only one other possibility, isn’t there?’
‘Yes.’
‘What do you think?’ She shoved the paper aside on her desk and leaned slightly forward, her body giving evidence of the curiosity she managed to keep out of her voice.
‘I can’t believe he committed suicide.’
She agreed. ‘It doesn’t make sense that a boy that young would leave his family behind.’
‘Kids don’t always have their parents’ feelings in mind when they decide to do something,’ Brunetti temporized, unsure why he did so; perhaps to muster the arguments he knew would be presented against his own opinion.
‘I know that. But there’s the little sister,’ she said. ‘You’d think he’d give her some thought. But maybe you’re right.’
‘How old is she?’ Brunetti asked, intrigued by
this
mystery child in whom both parents had displayed so little interest.
‘There was something about her in one of the articles about the family, or perhaps someone I know said something about her,’ Signorina Elettra answered. ‘Everyone’s talking about them now.’ She closed her eyes, trying to remember. She tilted her head to one side, and he imagined her scrolling through the banks of information in her mind. Finally she said, ‘It must be something I read because I don’t have any emotional memory of having heard it, and I’d have that if someone had told me about her.’
‘Have you saved everything?’
‘Yes, all of the newspaper clippings and the articles from the magazines are in the file, the same one that has the articles about Dottor Moro’s report.’ Before he could ask to see it, she said, ‘No, I’ll look through them. I might remember the article when I see it or start reading it.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘Give me fifteen minutes and I’ll bring it up to you.’
‘Thank you, Signorina,’ he said and went to his office to wait for her. He called Signora Moro’s number, but still there was no answer. Why had she not mentioned the daughter, and why, in both houses, had there been no sign of the child? He started to make a list of the things he wanted Signorina Elettra to check and was still adding to it when she came into the office, the file in her hand. ‘Here it is, sir,’ she said as she came in. ‘Valentina. She’s nine.’
‘Does it say which parent she lives with?’
‘No, nothing at all,’ she said. ‘She was mentioned in an article about Moro, six years ago. It said he had one son, Ernesto, twelve, and the daughter, Valentina, three. And the article in
La Nuova
mentions her.’
‘I didn’t see any sign of her when I spoke to the parents.’
‘Did you say anything?’
‘About the girl?’
‘No, I don’t mean that, sir. Did you say anything that might have given her mother the opportunity to mention her?’
Brunetti tried to recall his conversation with Signora Moro. ‘No, nothing that I can remember.’
‘Then it’s possible she wouldn’t have mentioned her, isn’t it?’
For almost two decades, Brunetti had shared his home with one, then both, of his children, and he could not recall a single instant when physical proof of their existence had been absent from their home: toys, clothing, shoes, scarves, books, papers, Discmen lay spread about widely and chaotically. Words, pleas, threats proved equally futile in the no doubt biological need of the young of the human species to litter their nest. A man of meaner spirit might have considered this an infestation: Brunetti thought of it as one of nature’s ways to prepare a parent’s patience for the future, when the mess would become emotional and moral, not merely physical.
‘But I would have seen some sign of her, I think,’ he insisted.
‘Maybe they’ve sent her to stay with relatives,’ Signorina Elettra suggested.
‘Yes, perhaps,’ Brunetti agreed, though he wasn’t convinced. No matter how often his kids had gone to stay with their grandparents or other relatives, signs of their recent habitation had always lingered behind them. Suddenly he had a vision of what it must have been for the Moros to attempt to remove evidence of Ernesto’s presence from their homes, and he thought of the danger that would remain behind: a single, lonely sock found at the back of a closet could break a mother’s heart anew; a Spice Girls disc carelessly shoved into the plastic case meant to hold Vivaldi’s flute sonatas could shatter any calm. Months, perhaps years, would pass before the house would stop being a minefield, every cabinet or drawer to be opened with silent dread.
His reverie was interrupted by Signorina Elettra, who leaned forward to place the file on his desk.
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘I have a number of things I’d like you to try to check for me.’ He slid the paper towards her, listing them as he did so.
‘Find out, if you can, where the girl goes to school. If she’s living here or lived here with either of them, then she’s got to be enrolled in one of the schools. There are the grandparents: see if you can locate them. Moro’s cousin, Luisa Moro – I don’t have an address for her – might know.’ He thought of the people in Siena and asked her to call the police there and have them
find
out if the child was living with them. She ran her finger down the list as he spoke. ‘And I’d like you to do the same for his wife: friends, relatives, colleagues,’ he concluded.
She looked at him and said, ‘You aren’t going to let this go, are you?’