Authors: Donna Leon
Into the pause between tracks, Brunetti barked, his voice intentionally loud, ‘Cadet.’
The word cut through the low hiss of the headphones and the boy jumped to his feet. He turned towards the voice, his right hand leaping towards his forehead in salute, but he caught it in the wire of the headphones and the Discman crashed to the floor, dragging the headphones after it.
The impact seemed not to have dislodged the disc, for Brunetti could still hear the bass, loud even halfway across the room. ‘Hasn’t anyone ever told you how much that will damage your hearing?’ Brunetti asked conversationally.
Usually
, when he put this same question to his own children, he pitched his voice barely above a whisper, the first few times successfully tricking them into asking him to repeat himself. Wise to him now, they ignored him.
The boy slowly lowered his hand from his forehead, looking very confused. ‘What did you say?’ he asked, then added, by force of habit, ‘sir.’ He was tall and very thin, with a narrow jaw, one side of which looked as if it had been shaved with a dull razor, the other covered with signs of persistent acne. His eyes were almond-shaped, as beautiful as a girl’s.
Brunetti took the two steps that brought him to the other side of the room, and noticed that the boy’s body tightened in response. But all Brunetti did was bend down to pick up the Discman and headphones. He set them carefully on the boy’s desk, marvelling as he did at the spartan simplicity of the room: it looked like the room of a robot, not a young man, indeed, of two young men, if he was to believe the evidence provided by bunk beds.
‘I said loud music can damage your hearing. It’s what I tell my children, but they don’t listen to me.’
This confused the boy even more, as if it had been a long time since an adult had said anything to him that was both normal and understandable. ‘Yes, my aunt tells me that, too.’
‘But you don’t listen?’ Brunetti asked. ‘Or is it that you don’t believe her?’ He was honestly curious.
‘Oh, I believe her all right,’ the boy said, loosening up sufficiently to reach down and press the
OFF
button.
‘But?’ Brunetti insisted.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ the boy said with a shrug.
‘No, tell me,’ Brunetti said. ‘I’d really like to know.’
‘It doesn’t matter what happens to my hearing,’ the boy explained.
‘Doesn’t matter?’ Brunetti asked, utterly at a loss to grasp his meaning. ‘That you go deaf?’
‘No, not that,’ he answered, paying real attention to Brunetti and apparently now interested in making him understand. ‘It takes a lot of years for something like that to happen. That’s why it doesn’t matter. Like all that Global Warming stuff. Nothing matters if it takes a long time.’
It was obvious to Brunetti that the boy was in earnest. He said, ‘But you’re in school, studying for a future career – I presume in the military. That’s not going to happen for a number of years, either; doesn’t that matter?’
The boy answered after a few moments’ reflection. ‘That’s different.’
‘Different how?’ asked a relentless Brunetti.
The boy had relaxed now with the ease of their conversation and the seriousness with which Brunetti treated his answers. He leaned back against the top of his desk, picked up a packet of cigarettes and held it out to Brunetti. At his refusal the boy took one and patted around on the top of his desk until he
found
a plastic lighter hidden under a notebook.
He lit the cigarette and tossed the lighter back on to the desk. He took a long drag at the cigarette. Brunetti was struck by how very hard he tried to appear older and more sophisticated than he was; then the boy looked at Brunetti and said, ‘Because I can choose about the music but I can’t about the school.’
Sure that this made some sort of profound difference to the boy but unwilling to spend more time pursuing it, Brunetti asked, ‘What’s your name?’ using the familiar
tu
, as he would with one of his children’s friends.
‘Giuliano Ruffo,’ the boy answered.
Brunetti introduced himself, using his name and not his title, and stepped forward to offer his hand. Ruffo slid from the desk and took Brunetti’s hand.
‘Did you know him, the boy who died?’
Ruffo’s face froze, all ease fled his body, and he shook his head in automatic denial. As Brunetti was wondering how it was that he didn’t know a fellow student in a school this small, the boy said, ‘That is, I didn’t know him well. We just had one class together.’ Ease had disappeared from his voice, as well: he spoke quickly, as if eager to move away from the meaning of his words.
‘What one?’
‘Physics.’
‘What other subjects do you take?’ Brunetti asked. ‘What is it for you, the second year?’
‘Yes, sir. So we have to take Latin and Greek and Mathematics, English, History, and then we get to choose two optional subjects.’
‘So Physics is one of yours?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And the other?’
The answer was a long time in coming. Brunetti thought the boy must be trying to work out what this man’s hidden motive was in asking all of these questions. If Brunetti had a motive, it was hidden even from himself: all he could do at this point was try to get a sense of things at the school, to catch the mood of the place; all of the information he gained had more or less the same amorphous value and its meaning would not become clear until later, when each piece could be seen as part of some larger pattern.
The boy stabbed out his cigarette, eyed the packet, but did not light another. Brunetti repeated, ‘What is it, the second one?’
Reluctantly, as if confessing to something he perhaps construed as weakness, the boy finally answered, ‘Music.’
‘Good for you,’ came Brunetti’s instant response.
‘Why do you say that, sir?’ the boy asked, his eagerness patent. Or perhaps it was merely relief at this removal to a neutral subject.
Brunetti’s response had been visceral, so he had to consider what to say. ‘I read a lot of history,’ he began, ‘and a lot of history is military history.’ The boy nodded, prodding
him
along with his curiosity. ‘And historians often say that soldiers know only one thing.’ The boy nodded again. ‘And no matter how well they might know that one thing, war, it’s not enough. They’ve got to know about other things.’ He smiled at the boy, who smiled in return. ‘It’s the great weakness, knowing only that one thing.’
‘I wish you’d tell my grandfather that, sir,’ he said.
‘He doesn’t believe it?’
‘Oh, no, he doesn’t even want to hear the word “music”, at least not from me.’
‘What would he rather hear – that you’d been in a duel?’ Brunetti asked, not at all uncomfortable at undermining the concept of grand-parental authority.
‘Oh, he’d love that, especially if it were with sabres.’
‘And you went home with a scar across your cheek?’ Brunetti suggested.
They laughed at the absurdity, and it was like this, easy and comfortably united in gentle mockery of military tradition, that Comandante Bembo found them.
4
‘RUFFO!’ A VOICE
barked from behind Brunetti.
The boy’s smile vanished and he straightened up to stand as stiff as one of the pilings in the
laguna
, his heels clacking together at the same instant as his stiff fingers snapped to his forehead in salute.
‘What are you doing here?’ Bembo demanded.
‘I don’t have a class this hour, Comandante,’ Ruffo answered, staring straight ahead.
‘And what were you doing?’
‘I was talking to this gentleman, sir,’ he said, eyes still on the far wall.
‘Who gave you permission to talk to him?’
Ruffo’s face was a mask. He made no attempt to answer the question.
‘Well?’ demanded Bembo in an even tighter voice.
Brunetti turned to face the Comandante and acknowledged his arrival with a gentle nod. Keeping his voice mild, he asked, ‘Does he need permission to speak to the police, sir?’
‘He’s a minor,’ Bembo said.
‘I’m not sure I follow you, sir,’ Brunetti said, careful to smile to show his confusion. He could have understood if Bembo had said something about military rank or the need to respond only to orders from a direct superior, but to cite the boy’s youth as a reason why he should not talk to the police displayed what seemed to Brunetti an inordinate attention to legal detail. ‘I’m not sure I see how Cadet Ruffo’s age is important.’
‘It means his parents should be with him when you talk to him.’
‘Why is that, sir?’ Brunetti asked, curious to hear Bembo’s reason.
It took a moment for Bembo to find it. Finally he said, ‘To see that he understands the questions you ask.’
His doubts as to the boy’s ability to understand simple questions hardly spoke well of the quality of instruction on offer at the school. Brunetti turned back to the cadet, who stood rigid, arms rod-like at his side, his chin a stranger to his collar. ‘You understood what I asked you, didn’t you, Cadet?’
‘I don’t know, sir,’ the boy answered, keeping his eyes on the wall.
‘We were talking about his classes, sir,’
Brunetti
said, ‘and Cadet Ruffo was telling me how much he enjoyed Physics.’
‘Is this true, Ruffo?’ the Comandante demanded, not the least concerned that he was openly doubting Brunetti’s veracity.
‘Yes, sir,’ the boy answered. ‘I was telling the gentleman that I had two elective subjects and how much I liked them.’
‘Don’t you like the required subjects?’ Bembo demanded. Then, to Brunetti: ‘Was he complaining about them?’
‘No,’ Brunetti answered calmly. ‘We didn’t discuss them.’ He wondered, as he spoke, why Bembo should be so concerned at the mere possibility that a student had said something negative about his classes. What else would a student be expected to say about his classes?
Abruptly Bembo said, ‘You can go, Ruffo.’ The boy saluted and, ignoring Brunetti’s presence, walked out of the room, leaving the door open after him.
‘I’ll thank you to let me know before you question any of my cadets again,’ Bembo said in an unfriendly voice.
Brunetti hardly thought it worth contesting the point, so agreed that he would. The Comandante turned towards the door, hesitated for a moment as though he wanted to turn back and say something to Brunetti, but then thought better of it and left.
Brunetti found himself alone in Ruffo’s room, feeling in some way invited there as a guest and thus bound by the rules of hospitality, one of
which
was never to betray the host’s trust by invading the privacy of his home. The first thing Brunetti did was to open the front drawer of the desk and remove the papers he found there. Most of them were notes, what appeared to be rough drafts for essays the boy was writing; some were letters.
‘
Dear Giuliano
,’ Brunetti read, entirely without shame or scruple. ‘
Your aunt came to see me last week and told me you were doing well in school
.’ The calligraphy had the neat roundness of the generation previous to his own, though the lines wandered up and down, following an invisible path known only to the writer. It was signed ‘Nonna’. Brunetti glanced through the other papers, found nothing of interest, and put them all back into the drawer.
He opened the doors of the closet next to Ruffo’s desk and checked the pockets of the jackets hanging there; he found nothing but small change and cancelled vaporetto tickets. There was a laptop computer on the desk, but he didn’t even waste his time turning it on, knowing he would have no idea what to do with it. Under the bed, pushed back against the wall, he saw what looked like a violin case. The books were what he would have expected: textbooks, a driver’s manual, a history of AC Milan and other books about soccer. The bottom shelf held musical scores: Mozart’s violin sonatas and the first violin part of one of the Beethoven string quartets. Brunetti shook his head in bemusement at the contrast between
the
music in the Discman and the music on the shelf. He opened the door to the closet that must belong to Ruffo’s roommate and cast his eye across the surface of the second desk, but he saw nothing of interest.
Struck again by the neatness of the room, the almost surgical precision with which the bed was made, Brunetti toyed for a moment with the idea of drugging his son Raffi and having him brought down here to be enrolled. But then he remembered what it was that had brought him to this room, and levity slipped away on silent feet.
The other rooms were empty or, at least, no one responded to his knocking, so he went back towards the bathroom where the boy had been found. The scene of crime team was at work, and the body still lay there, now entirely covered with the dark woollen cloak.
‘Who cut him down?’ Santini asked when he saw Brunetti.
‘Vianello.’
‘He shouldn’t have done that,’ another of the technicians called from across the room.
‘That’s exactly what he told me,’ Brunetti answered.
Santini shrugged. ‘I would have done it, too.’ There were affirmative grunts from two of the men.
Brunetti was about to ask what the crew thought had happened, when he heard footsteps. He glanced aside and saw Dottor Venturi, one of Rizzardi’s assistants. Both men nodded,
as
much acknowledgement of the other’s presence as either was willing to give.
Insensitive to most human feelings that were not directed towards him, Venturi stepped up close to the body and set his medical bag by the head. He went down on one knee and drew the edge of the cloak from the boy’s face.
Brunetti looked away, back into the showers, where Pedone, Santini’s assistant, was holding a plastic spray bottle up towards the top of the right-hand wall. As Brunetti watched, he squirted cloud after tiny cloud of dark grey powder on to the walls, moving carefully from left to right and then back to his starting point to repeat the process about twenty centimetres below.
By the time all the walls were coated, Venturi was back on his feet. Brunetti saw that he had left the boy’s face uncovered.
‘Who cut him down?’ was the first thing the doctor asked.