Uniform Justice (8 page)

‘Could you talk to them?’

‘About what?’ Perulli asked, immediately suspicious.

‘Moro.’

‘No.’ His answer was immediate.

‘Why not?’ Brunetti asked, though he was sure he knew the answer.

‘Because, when you called, you said you wanted to ask me some questions. You didn’t say you wanted me to start doing your job for you.’ As he spoke, Perulli’s voice grew more heated. He looked at Brunetti, who said nothing,
and
that silence seemed to be enough to unleash even more of Perulli’s anger. ‘I don’t know why you want to know about Moro, but it’s a good thing someone’s going to take a closer look at him.’ Red spots the size of golf balls flashed into being on his cheeks.

‘Why?’ Brunetti asked.

Again, Perulli uncrossed his legs, but this time he leaned forward, towards Brunetti, the forefinger of his right hand jabbing the space between them. ‘Because he’s a sanctimonious bastard, always talking about fraud and dishonesty and …’ Here Perulli’s voice changed, deepening and dragging out the final syllables of words in a way Brunetti realized was very much like Moro’s. ‘Our responsibility to the citizen,’ he went on, the imitation suddenly becoming sarcastic exaggeration. ‘We can’t continue to treat our offices, this Parliament, as though it were a trough and we a herd of pigs,’ Perulli intoned. It was clear to Brunetti that he was again quoting Moro.

Brunetti thought the other man would go on: Augusto had never known when a joke had gone on long enough. But Perulli surprised him by lapsing into silence, though he couldn’t resist the temptation to goad Brunetti by saying, ‘If he’s done something, it’s no surprise to me: he’s no different from any one of us.’

‘With your front trotters in the trough?’ Brunetti asked mildly.

He might just as well have slapped the other man across the face. Perulli lurched forward, his
right
hand aiming for Brunetti’s throat, but he had forgotten the low table between them. It caught Perulli just below the knees and sent him sprawling across and then beyond it.

Brunetti had risen to his feet while Perulli was clattering across the table. Seeing him on the floor, stunned, he started to reach down to help him to his feet but then stopped himself. Curious, he stepped to one side and bent over to look closer. Perulli’s hair had fallen forward, and Brunetti could see the little round, puckered scar just behind the left ear. Gratified to have detected the cause of Perulli’s youthful appearance, he stood and waited, and when he saw Perulli pull his knees up under him and place his hands flat on the floor on either side of him, Brunetti turned and left the apartment.

8

WHEN HE GOT
outside and looked at his watch, Brunetti was surprised to see that it was almost five. He found himself very hungry and geographically halfway between work and home. He didn’t know what he’d find to eat at home, and by the time he got there and had something, it would be too late to bother to go back to the Questura. He sent the feet of memory up towards San Marco, recalling every bar or trattoria he knew on the way, then, at the thought of what he would encounter in that direction, he replotted the trip via Campo Sant’ Angelo and back through Campo San Fantin. Knowing it was absurd and aware that he had himself chosen to forgo lunch, he was assaulted by a wave of self-pity: he was doing his job as
best
he knew how, and he found himself hungry at a time when it would be impossible to get a meal.

He remembered then one of the few stories his father ever told about the war, though he recalled it in a garbled fashion, for it had never been told the same way twice. At some point, marching across Lower Saxony in the days just after the end of the war, his father and two companions had been befriended by a stray dog that emerged from under a bombed house to follow them. The next day, they ate the dog. Over the course of decades, this story had taken on talismanic powers for Brunetti, and he found himself unable to keep his mind from it whenever anyone talked about food in a way he thought too precious, as though it were a fashion accessory rather than a basic need. All he had to do was hear one of Paola’s friends go on about her delicate digestion and how she couldn’t even bear to buy vegetables that had been displayed next to garlic, and the story came to mind. He remembered, years ago, sitting across the table from a man who told the other guests how impossible it was for him to eat any meat that had not come from his own butcher, that he could taste the difference in quality instantly. When the man finished the story, and after he had received the required accolade for his delicacy of palate, Brunetti had told the story of the dog.

He cut through to Campo San Fantin and stopped in a bar for two
tramezzini
and a glass of
white
wine. While he was there, an attractive dark-haired woman came in for a coffee wearing a tight leopard-patterned coat and an outrageous black hat that looked like a black pizza balanced on a skullcap. He studied her for a moment as she sipped at her coffee; indeed, he joined every man in the bar in studying her. All of them, he concluded, joined with him in giving thanks that she had come in to lift their hearts and brighten their day.

Cheered by having seen her, he left the bar and walked back to the Questura. As he entered his office, he saw a folder lying on his desk, and when he opened it he was astonished to discover the autopsy report on Ernesto Moro. His immediate reaction was to wonder what Venturi was up to, what manoeuvre or power play he might be involved in and against whom. His speed in having performed the autopsy could be explained only as an attempt to win Brunetti’s favour, and that favour could be of use to the pathologist only if he were planning to move against some rival or perceived rival in either the police or the medical system.

Brunetti refused to speculate further about Venturi’s motives and directed his attention to the report. Ernesto Moro had been in excellent health at the time of his death, entirely free of any sign of disease, not a single cavity in his teeth, though there was evidence of previous orthodontic work. His left leg had been broken in the past, perhaps as long as ten years ago, but
had
healed completely; tonsils and appendix were still present.

The cause of death was strangulation. There was no way to judge how far his body had fallen before the noose had tightened around his throat, but it had not been sufficient to break his neck, so the boy had strangled to death. It had not been, Venturi stated, a quick process: the rope had caused extensive bruising of the front and right side of his neck. This suggested that his last moments had been spent in instinctive convulsions against the tightening cord. There followed the exact dimensions of the shower stall in which his body had been found and the possible extension of arms as long as his. Brunetti thought of those sweeping marks on the wall of the shower.

From the evidence of the food in the boy’s stomach, it was likely that he had died some time between midnight and three in the morning. There was no evidence of drug use, and it seemed that he had consumed only a moderate amount of wine with his last meal, probably no more than one glass and certainly not enough to cloud his judgement in any way.

Brunetti put the papers back in the folder and left it lying open on his desk. The report said everything just as it said nothing. He tried to subtract the knowledge that Signora Moro had been shot and view her son’s death as a separate event. The obvious possible motives were thus some disappointment the boy had suffered or the desire to pay someone back for a perceived
injury
. Once the mother was put back into the equation, the possible motives expanded exponentially. Instead of being viewed as the prime mover in the action, the boy became a means and some other person the mover.

Following this filament of vague speculation, Brunetti saw that the mother’s survival suggested she was not the prime target, which left Moro himself. But even that, he realized, led nowhere: until he had an idea of what Moro might be a target of, or for whom, all speculation was as flimsy as the jumbled bits and pieces of information upon which he chose to base it.

The arrival of Signorina Elettra put an end to his fragmentary musings. ‘You saw that?’ she asked as she came in, nodding towards the autopsy report.

‘Yes. What do you make of it?’

‘I can’t understand it, why a boy like that would kill himself. It doesn’t make any sense at all.’

‘It’s not so unusual, I’m afraid, kids killing themselves.’

His remark seemed to cause her pain. She stopped in front of his desk, another folder in one hand. ‘But why?’

‘I spoke to one of the cadets over there. He said there was no way to be sure about the future, or that there even would be one for them.’

‘That’s nonsense,’ she snapped angrily. ‘Of course there’s always a future.’

‘I’m just repeating what he told me.’

‘A cadet?’ she asked.

‘Yes.’

She was silent for a long time, then finally said, ‘I went out with one of them for a while.’

Immediately curious, Brunetti asked, ‘When you were a student?’

Her mouth moved in a sly smile: ‘Not last week, certainly.’ Then she went on, ‘Yes, when I was eighteen.’ She looked down at the floor in a moment’s reflection and then said, ‘No, as a matter of fact, I was only sixteen. That explains it.’

He knew a set-up line when he heard it. ‘Explains what?’

‘How I could have put up with him.’

Brunetti half rose in his chair and gestured towards the other. ‘Have a seat, please.’ She swept one hand behind her as she sat, straightening her skirt, then placed the folder flat on her lap.

‘What did you have to put up with?’ he asked, puzzled by the idea of Signorina Elettra as a person capable of enduring anything she didn’t wish to.

‘I was going to say that he was a Fascist and that they all were, and probably still are today, but it might not be true of all of them. So I’ll say only that
he
was a Fascist, and a bully, and a snob and that most of his friends were, too.’ From long experience of her, Brunetti could sense when Signorina Elettra was doing no more than practising verbal
solfeggi
and when she was preparing to launch into an aria; he detected signs of the second.

‘But you see that only now?’ he asked, offering her the briefest of
recitativi
as a means of prompting the aria.

‘We used to see them, my friends and I, swanning around the city in their capes, and we thought they were the most exciting, wonderful boys in the world. Whenever one of them spoke to one of us, it was as though the heavens had opened to allow a god to descend. And then one of them …’ she began. Then, seeking the proper words, she changed her mind and went on, ‘I began going out with one of them.’

‘Going out?’ he inquired.

‘For a coffee, for a walk, just to go down to the Giardini to sit on a bench and talk.’ With a rueful smile, she corrected herself. ‘To listen, that is.’ She smiled across at him. ‘I believe one could employ a new noun here, sir: a listen, instead of a conversation. That’s what I had whenever we met: a listen.’

‘Perhaps it was a quicker way for you to get to know him,’ Brunetti suggested drily.

‘Yes,’ she said brusquely. ‘I got to know him.’

He didn’t know quite what question to ask. ‘And what was it that makes you say those things about him?’

‘That he was a snob and a Fascist and a bully?’

‘Yes.’

‘You know Barbara, don’t you?’ she asked, mentioning her older sister.

‘Yes.’

‘She was in medical school at the time, living in Padova, so I didn’t see much of her except on
the
weekends. I’d been going out with Renzo for about three weeks when she came home one weekend, and I asked her to meet him. I thought he was so wonderful, so clever, so thoughtful.’ She snorted at the memory of her own youth and went on. ‘Imagine that, thoughtful. At eighteen.’ She took a deep breath and smiled at him, so he knew that this story was going to have a happy ending.

‘Whenever we were together, he talked about politics, history, all those things I’d heard Barbara and my parents talk about for so long. Nothing he said sounded much like what they said. But he had dark-blue eyes, and he had a car at home, in Milano, a convertible.’ Again, she smiled at the memory of the girl she had been, and sighed.

When she seemed reluctant to continue, he asked, ‘And did Barbara meet him?’

‘Oh yes, and they hated one another after three words. I’m sure he thought she was some sort of Communist cannibal, and she must have thought he was a Fascist pig.’ She smiled again at him.

‘And?’

‘One of them was right.’

He laughed outright and asked, ‘How long did it take you to realize it?’

‘Oh, I suppose I knew it all along, but he did have those eyes. And there was that convertible.’ She laughed. ‘He carried a photo of it in his wallet.’

At first, it was difficult for Brunetti to picture
a
Signorina Elettra capable of this folly, but after a moment’s reflection, he realized that it didn’t surprise him all that much.

‘What happened?’

‘Oh, once Barbara started on him, when we got home, it was as if – how do they describe it in the Bible? – as if “the scales fell from my eyes”? Well, it was something like that. All I had to do was stop looking at him and start listening to what he said and thinking about it, and I could see what a vicious creep he was.’

‘What sort of things?’

‘The same things people like him are always saying: the glory of the nation, the need to have strong values in the family, the heroism of men in war.’ She stopped here and shook her head again, like a person emerging from rubble. ‘It’s extraordinary, the sort of things a person can listen to without realizing what nonsense it is.’

‘Nonsense?’

‘Well, when the people who say it are still children, I suppose it’s nonsense. It’s when adults say it that it’s dangerous.’

‘What became of him?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. I imagine he graduated and went into the Army and ended up torturing prisoners in Somalia. He was that kind of person.’