Authors: Donna Leon
‘Violent?’
‘No, not really, but very easily led. He had all of the core beliefs. You know the sort of things they say: honour and discipline and the need for order. I suppose he got it from his family. His
father
had been a general or something, so it’s all he’d ever been exposed to.’
‘Like you, only different?’ Brunetti asked, smiling. He knew her sister, and so he knew what the politics of the Zorzis were.
‘Exactly, only no one in my family has ever had a good word to say about discipline or the need for order.’ The pride with which she said this was unmistakable.
He started to ask another question, but she got to her feet, as though suddenly conscious of how much she had revealed, and leaned forward to place the file on his desk. ‘That’s what’s come in, sir,’ she said with a briskness that was strangely dissonant with the easy familiarity of their conversation up to that point.
‘Thank you,’ he said.
‘It should all be clear, but if you need any explanation, call.’
He noticed that she didn’t tell him to come down to her office or to ask her to come up to explain. The geographical limits of their formality had been re-established.
‘Certainly,’ he said, and then repeated, as she turned towards the door, ‘Thank you.’
9
THE FOLDER CONTAINED
photocopies of newspaper articles about Fernando Moro’s careers as doctor and politician. The first seemed to have led to the second: he had first caught the public eye about six years ago, when, as one of the inspectors commissioned to examine the quality of hospital care in the Veneto, he had submitted a report calling into question the statistics issued by the provincial government, statistics which boasted one of the lowest patient to doctor ratios on the continent. It was the Moro Report which indicated that the low figure resulted from the inclusion in the statistics of three new hospitals, facilities which were planned to provide medical care at the highest level. Money had been allocated for their construction, and that
money
had been spent, and thus the statistics included these hospitals and factored in all of the services they were planned to provide. The resulting figures were a three-day marvel, for the Veneto was thus shown to have the best health care in Europe.
It was Fernando Moro’s report that pointed out the inconvenient fact that those three hospitals, however grandiose their plans, however extensive their staffs, and however varied the services they were meant to provide, had never actually been built. Once their services were subtracted from the tabulations, the health care provided to the citizens of the Veneto fell to where its patients were accustomed to judging it to be: somewhat below that of Cuba, though certainly above that of Chad.
In the aftermath of the report, Moro had been lauded as a hero by the press and had become one in the popular mind, but he found that the administration of the hospital where he worked had decided that his many talents would be better utilized if he were to take over the administration of the old people’s home attached to the hospital. His protest that, as an oncologist, he would be better employed in the hospital’s oncology ward was brushed aside as false humility, and his lateral transfer was confirmed.
This in its turn led to his decision to attempt to achieve public office before his name dropped from public memory; perhaps a tactical decision, but a no less successful one for that.
Moro had once remarked that his long familiarity with terminal illness was perhaps the best preparation he could have had for a career in Parliament. Late at night and only when among old and trusted friends, he was rumoured to expand upon that metaphor, a fact which was not long in filtering back to his fellow parliamentarians. This might well have affected the nature of the committees to which he was appointed.
As he read the newspaper articles, all purporting to be neutral presentation of fact but all tinted by the political affiliation of the particular paper or journalist, Brunetti realized that he was colouring the articles with the hues of his own memory. He had known, or at least heard, about Moro for years, and as he tended to share the man’s political leanings, he knew he was prejudiced in the man’s favour and that he presupposed his honesty. He knew just how dangerous this sort of thinking was, especially for a policeman, yet Moro was hardly a suspect: the totality of his grief excluded him from any suspicion of involvement in his son’s death. ‘Or else I’ve never had a son; or else I’ve never had a soul,’ Brunetti caught himself whispering.
He looked up at the door, embarrassed to have been so distracted by his thoughts, but no one was there. He continued reading: the other articles merely repeated the essential information contained in the first few. Regardless of how insinuating the tone of some of the journalists, no matter how carefully they constructed their specious explanations of
Moro’s
behaviour, not even the dullest reader could doubt the man’s integrity.
The tone of innuendo became even stronger in some of the articles dealing with Moro’s sudden withdrawal from Parliament, a decision he refused to attribute to anything other than ‘personal reasons’. The first article, written by one of the best-known apologists of the Right, raised the rhetorical question of the sort of connection that might exist between Moro’s resignation and the arrest, two weeks before, of one of the last members of the Baader–Meinhof Gang. ‘None, probably,’ Brunetti found himself whispering again, as had become his annoying habit when reading this particular adornment of the free press.
The shooting of Moro’s wife was mentioned in two small articles, neither of which did more than report the barest facts of the case. The second article, however, provided the name of the people with whom she was staying at the time of the shooting.
He picked up the phone and dialled 12, then asked for the number of Giovanni Ferro in Siena or in the province of Siena. There were two, and he took down both numbers.
He dialled the first number and a woman answered.
‘Signora Ferro?’
‘Who’s calling, please?’
‘This is Commissario Guido Brunetti, in Venice,’ he said.
He heard a startled gasp and then she asked,
voice
tight and fast and apparently beyond her control, ‘Is it Federica?’
‘Federica Moro?’ he asked.
The woman was evidently too shaken to do more than answer, ‘Yes.’
‘Signora, nothing’s happened to her, please believe me. I’m calling to ask about the incident two years ago.’ She said nothing, but Brunetti could hear her rapid breathing down the line. ‘Signora, can you hear me? Are you all right?’
There was another long silence, and he was afraid she was going to hang up or already had, but then her voice came back, ‘Who did you say you were?’
‘Commissario Guido Brunetti. I’m with the police in Venice, Signora.’ Again, silence. ‘Signora, can you hear me?’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I can hear you.’ There was another long pause, and then the woman said, ‘I’ll call you back’, and was gone, leaving Brunetti with the memory of her terror and the strong aspirants of her Tuscan speech.
And indeed, thought Brunetti, as he replaced the receiver, why should she believe that he was who he said he was? There was no way to prove it, and the call was being made about a woman who had been shot and whose assailant, presumably, had never been found by the police Brunetti claimed to represent.
The phone rang after a few minutes. He picked it up on the first ring and gave his name.
‘Good,’ she said. ‘I wanted to be certain.’
‘That’s very wise of you, Signora,’ he said. ‘I
hope
you’re reassured that I am who I said I was.’
‘Yes,’ she agreed, then went on, ‘What do you want to know about Federica?’
‘I’m calling about the shooting because there’s a case it might be related to. The newspapers said that she was staying with you and your husband when it happened.’
‘Yes.’
‘Could you tell me something more about it, Signora?’
Yet again there was a long pause, and then the woman asked, ‘Have you spoken to her?’
‘Signora Moro?’
‘Yes.’
‘No, I haven’t, not yet.’ He waited for her to speak.
‘I think you should talk to her,’ Signora Ferro said.
There was something in the way she said the last word that warned Brunetti not to dispute this. ‘I’d very much like to,’ he agreed amiably. ‘Could you tell me where I might find her?’
‘Isn’t she there?’ the woman asked, the nervousness flooding back into her voice.
He adopted his most soothing tone. ‘You’re the first person I’ve called, Signora. I haven’t had time to try to locate Signora Moro.’ He felt like an explorer on a glacier who suddenly sees an enormous crevasse yawn open in front of him: so far he had said nothing about the death of Signora Moro’s son and to do so at this point would be impossible. ‘Is she here with her husband?’
Her voice became bland and noncommittal. ‘They’re separated,’ she said.
‘Ah, I didn’t know that. But is she still here in Venice?’
He could all but follow her thoughts as she considered this. A policeman would find her friend; sooner or later, he’d find her. ‘Yes,’ she finally answered.
‘Could you give me the address?’
Slowly she answered: ‘Yes, wait while I get it, please.’ There was a soft tap as she set the phone down, then a long silence, and then the woman was back. ‘It’s San Marco 2823,’ she said, then gave him the phone number, as well.
Brunetti thanked her and was considering what else he could ask her when the woman said, ‘What you need to do is let the phone ring once and then call back. She doesn’t want to be disturbed.’
‘I can understand that, Signora,’ he said, the memory of Ernesto Moro’s limp body suddenly appearing to him like the ghost of one of Ugolino’s sons.
The woman said goodbye and hung up, leaving Brunetti, he realized, in possession of little more information than he had had before he made the call.
He was aware of how dark his office had become. The late-afternoon sun had faded away, and he doubted that he could any longer see the numbers on the phone clearly enough to dial them. He walked over to the switch by the door and turned on the light and was surprised by the
unaccustomed
order he had established on his desk while talking to Signora Ferro: a stack of folders sat at the centre, a piece of paper to one side, a pencil placed across it in a neat horizontal. He thought of the obsessive neatness of his mother’s house in the years before she lapsed into the senility in whose embrace she still lay, and then the explosion of disorder in the house during the last months before she was taken from it.
Seated at his desk again, he was suddenly overcome by exhaustion and had to fight the impulse to lay his head on the desk and close his eyes. It had been more than ten hours since they had been called to the school, hours during which death and misery had soaked into him like liquid into blotting paper. Not for the first time in his career he found himself wondering how much longer he could continue to do this work. In the past, he had comforted himself with the belief that a vacation would help, and often his physical removal from the city and the crimes he saw there did in fact serve to lift his mood, at least for the time he was away. But he could think of no removal in time or space that would lift from him the sense of futility that he now felt assailing him from every side.
He knew he should try to call Signora Moro, willed himself to reach for the phone, but he could not do it. Who was it whose gaze could turn people to stone? The Basilisk? Medusa? With serpents for hair and an open, glaring mouth. He conjured up an image of the tangled,
swirling
locks, but could not remember who had painted or sculpted them.
His departure from the Questura had the feel of flight about it, at least to Brunetti. His chair remained pushed back from his desk, his door open, the papers set neatly at the centre of his desk, while he fled the place and went home in a state not far from panic.
His nose brought him back to his senses. As he opened the apartment door he was greeted by aromas from the kitchen: something roasting, perhaps pork; and garlic, so pervasive it suggested that an entire field of garlic had been seized and tossed into the oven along with the pork.
He hung up his jacket, remembered that he had left his briefcase in his office and shrugged off the thought. He paused at the door to the kitchen, hoping to find his family already seated at the table, but the room was empty, except for the garlic, the odour of which seemed to be coming from a tall pot boiling over a low flame.
Devoting his entire attention to the smell, he attempted to remember where he had smelled it before. He knew it was familiar, as a melody is familiar even when a person cannot remember the piece from which it comes. He tried to separate the scents: garlic, tomato, a touch of rosemary, something fishy like clams or shrimp – probably shrimp – and, perhaps, carrots. And the garlic, a universe of garlic. He summoned up the sensation he had experienced in the office, of his spirit being steeped in misery. He breathed
deeply
, hoping that the garlic would drive the misery out. If it could drive away vampires, then surely it could work its herbal magic against something as banal as misery. He stood propped against the jamb, his eyes closed, inhaling the scents, until a voice behind him said, ‘That is not the proud stance of a defender of justice and the rights of the oppressed.’
Paola appeared beside him, kissed his cheek without really looking at him, and slipped past him into the kitchen.
‘Is that Guglielmo’s soup?’
‘The very same,’ Paola said, lifting the lid from the pot and taking a long wooden spoon from the counter to stir at the contents. ‘Twelve heads of garlic,’ she whispered, her voice filled with something that approached awe.
‘And we’ve survived it every time,’ Brunetti added.
‘Proof of divine intervention, I think,’ Paola suggested.
‘And, if Guglielmo is to be believed, a sure cure for worms and high blood pressure.’