by Donna Leon
Brunetti stopped himself from remarking that it was what they could
expect from a public which viewed authority and all who attempted to
impose it as adversaries. He had read enough to know that there were
countries whose citizens did not perceive their government as an
inimical force, where they believed, instead, that the government
existed to serve their needs and respond to their wishes. How would he
react if someone he knew were to maintain this to be true here, in this
city, in this country? Religious mania would be less convincing proof
of mental imbalance.
Vianello and Pucetti were to go back that afternoon and question the
rest of the boys and the remaining faculty. Leaving it at that,
Brunetti told them he would be up in his office, and left.
Curiosity and the desire to see Signorina Elettra and learn what she
had managed to discover led him off the stairs at her floor and into
her small office. Here he had the sensation that he had stepped into a
jungle or a forest: four tall trees with enormous leaves, broad, dark
green and shiny, stood in terra cotta pots against the back wall. With
their darkness as a backdrop, Signorina Elettra, today dressed in
colours usually seen only on Buddhist monks, sat at her desk. The
total effect was of an enormous piece of exotic fruit exposed in front
of the tree from which it had fallen.
"Lemons?" he asked.
"Yes/
"Where did you get them?"
"A friend of mine just directed Lulu at the opera. He had them sent
over after the last performance."
"Lulu?"
She smiled. "The very same."
"I don't remember lemons in Lulu," he said, puzzled, but willing, as
ever, to be graced with illumination.
"He set the opera in Sicily," she explained.
"Ah," Brunetti whispered, trying to remember the plot. The music,
mercifully, was gone. At a loss for what else to say, he asked, "Did
you go and see it?"
She took so long to answer that, at first, he thought he had somehow
offended her with the question. Finally, she said, "No, sir. My
standards are very low, of course, but I do draw the line at going to
the opera in a tent. In a parking lot."
Brunetti, whose aesthetic principles were entrenched well behind that
same line, nodded and asked, "Have you been able to find out anything
about Moro?"
Her smile was fainter, but it was still recognizably a smile. "Some
things have come in. I'm waiting for a friend in Siena to tell me more
about the wife Federica."
"What about her?" Brunetti asked.
"She was involved in an accident there."
"What kind of accident?"
"Hunting."
"Hunting? A woman in a hunting accident?" he asked, his disbelief
audible.
She raised her eyebrows as if to suggest that anything at all was
possible in a world where Lulu was set in Sicily, but instead said, "I
shall pass over the glaring sexism in that remark, Commissario." She
paused a didactic moment, then continued, "It happened a couple of
years ago. She was staying with friends in the countryside near Siena.
One afternoon, while she was out for a walk, she was shot in the leg.
Luckily, she was found before she bled to death and taken to the
hospital."
"Was the hunter ever found?"
"No, but it was hunting season so they assumed that a hunter had heard
her and thought she was an animal and shot at the noise without seeing
what it was."
"And didn't bother to come and see what he had shot?" an indignant
Brunetti asked. He added another question. "Or when he saw what he
had shot, he didn't help her or call for help?"
"It's what they do," she said, her voice matching his own in
indignation. "You read the papers, don't you, every year when the
season opens, about the way three or four of them get shot on the first
day? It goes on all during hunting season. It's not only the ones who
stumble over their own guns and blow their brains out." Brunetti
thought her tone was devoid of anything approaching sympathy as she
said this. They shoot one another, too," she went on, 'and get left to
bleed to death because no one wants to run the risk of being arrested
for having shot someone."
He started to speak, but she cut him off and added, "As far as I'm
concerned, it can't happen often enough."
Brunetti waited for her to calm down and retract her words but then
decided to leave the issue of her feelings toward
hunters unexamined and asked, "Were the police called? When she was
shot?"
"I don't know. That's what I'm waiting for the police report."
"Where is she now?" Brunetti asked.
That's something else I'm trying to find out."
"She's not with her husband?"
"I don't know. I had a look at the files at the Comune, but she's not
listed as resident at his address, even though they own the apartment
jointly." So habituated had Brunetti become to her useful criminality
that it did not for an instant trouble him that a person with greater
sympathy for legal precision would translate her phrase, 'had a look
at' as 'broke into'.
There could certainly be many explanations for why Moro's wife was not
registered as resident at his Dorsoduro address, though the most
obvious interpretation was that she did not live with her husband. "Let
me know when you get hold of the report on the shooting he said,
wondering if this would launch her into further denunciation. Like
most Venetians, Brunetti had no interest in hunting, judging it an
endeavour that was expensive, inconvenient, and excessively loud.
Further, experience as a policeman as well as his habit of reflecting
upon human behaviour had too often suggested a frightening correlation
between a man's interest in firearms and feelings of sexual
inadequacy.
"It could have been a warning," she said without preamble.
The know," he answered, having thought this the instant she told him
about the shooting. "But of what?"
The scepticism that had seeped into Bmnetti's bones over the years
forced him to suspect that Signora Moro's accident might have been
something other than that. She must have cried out when she was shot,
and the sound of a woman's scream would surely have brought any hunter
running. Low as his opinion of hunters was, Brunetti could not believe
that one of them would leave a woman lying on the ground, bleeding.
That conviction led him to the consideration of what sort of person
would be capable of doing so, which in its turn led him to consider
what other sorts of violence such a person might be capable of.
He added to these speculations the fact that Moro had served in
Parliament for some time but had resigned about two years ago.
Coincidence could link events either in kind or subject or time: the
same sort of thing happened to different people or different things
happened to the same person, or things happened at the same time. Moro
had resigned from Parliament around the time his wife was injured.<
br />
Ordinarily, this would hardly arouse suspicion, even in someone as
instinctively mistrustful as Brunetti, were it not that the death of
their son provided a point from which to begin a process of speculative
triangulation around the ways in which the third event might be related
to the other two.
Brunetti thought of Parliament in the way most Italians thought of
their mothers-in-law. Not due the loyalties created by ties of blood,
a mother-in-law still demanded obedience and reverence while never
behaving in a manner that would merit either. This alien presence,
imposed upon a person's life by sheerest chance, made ever-increasing
demands in return for the vain promise of domestic harmony. Resistance
was futile, for opposition inevitably led to repercussions too devious
to be foreseen.
He lifted the phone and dialled his home number. When the machine
answered after four rings, he hung up without speaking, bent down to
his bottom drawer, and took out the phone book. He flipped it open to
the Ps and kept turning pages until he found Perulli, Augusto. He
tossed the book back into the drawer and dialled the number.
After the third ring a man's voice answered. "Perulli."
This is Brunetti. I need to speak to you."
After a long pause, the man said, "I wondered when you'd call."
"Yes," was Brunetti's only response.
"I can see you in half an hour. For an hour. Then not until
tomorrow
"I'll come now Brunetti said.
He kicked the drawer shut and left his office, then the Questura.
Because he had half an hour, he chose to walk to Campo San Maurizio,
and because he was early, he chose to stop and say hello to a friend in
her workshop. But his mind was on things other than jewellery, so he
did little more than exchange a kiss and promise to bring Paola to
dinner some time soon; then he crossed the campo and headed up towards
the Grand Canal.
5"
He had last been to the apartment six years ago, near the end of a long
investigation of a trail of drug money that led from the noses of
adolescents in New York to a discreet account in Geneva, a trail that
paused long enough in Venice to invest in a couple of paintings meant
to join the money in the vault of that eminently discreet bank. The
money had made its way safely through the empyrean realms of
cyberspace, but the paintings, made of less celestial matter, had been
stopped at Geneva airport. One by Palma il Vecchio and the other by
Marieschi and thus both part of the artistic heritage of the country,
neither could be exported, at least not legally, from Italy.
A mere four hours after the discovery of the paintings, Augusto Perulli
had called the Cambinieri to report their theft. No proof could be
found that Perulli had been informed of their discovery a possibility
that would raise the unthinkable idea of police corruption and so it
was decided that Brunetti, who had gone to school with Perulli and had
remained on friendly terms with him for decades, should be sent to talk
to him. That decision had not been taken until the day after the
paintings were found, by which time the man who was transporting them
had somehow been released from police custody, though the precise
nature of the bureaucratic oversight permitting that error had never
been explained to the satisfaction of the Italian police.
When Brunetti finally did talk to his old schoolfriend, Perulli said
that he had become aware of the paintings' disappearance only the day
before but had no idea how it could have happened. When Brunetti asked
how it could be that only two paintings had been taken, Perulli
prevented all further questioning by giving Brunetti his word of honour
that he knew nothing about it, and Brunetti believed him.
Two years later, the man who had been detained with the paintings was
again arrested by the Swiss, this time for trafficking in illegal
aliens, and this time in Zurich. In the
5i hope of making a deal with the police, he admitted that he had
indeed been given those paintings by Perulli, and asked to take them
across the border to their new owner, but by then Perulli had been
elected to Parliament and was thus exempt from arrest or prosecution.
"Ciao, Guido Perulli said when he opened the door to Brunetti,
extending his hand.
Brunetti was conscious of how theatrical was his own hesitation before
he took Perulli's hand: Perulli was equally conscious of it. Neither
pretended to be anything but wary of the other, and both were open in
studying the other for signs of the years that had passed since their
last meeting.
"It's been a long time, hasn't it?" Perulli said, turning away and
leading Brunetti into the apartment. Tall and slender, Perulli still
moved with the grace and fluidity of the youth he had shared with
Brunetti and their classmates. His hair was still thick, though longer
than he had worn it in the past, his skin smooth and taut, rich with
the afterglow of a summer spent in the sun. When was it that he had
begun searching the faces of the acquaintances of his youth for the
telltale signs of age? Brunetti wondered.
The apartment was much as Brunetti remembered it: high ceilinged and
well-proportioned, sofas and chairs inviting people to sit at their
ease and speak openly, perhaps indiscreetly. Portraits of men and
women from former eras hung on the walls: Perulli, he knew, spoke of
them casually, suggesting that they were ancestors, when in reality his
family had for generations lived in Castello and dealt in sausage and
preserved meat.
New were the ranks of silver-framed photos that stood on a not
particularly distinguished copy of a sixteenth-century Florentine
credenza. Brunetti paused to examine them and saw reflected in them
the trajectory of Perulli's career: the young man with his friends; the
university graduate posed with one of the leaders of the political
party to which Perulli
had then given allegiance; while the adult man stood arm in arm with a
former mayor of the city, the Minister of the Interior, and the
Patriarch of Venice. Behind them, in an even more elaborate frame,
Perulli's face smiled from the cover of a news magazine that had since
abandoned publication. This photo, and Perulli's need that people see
it, filled Brunetti, against his will, with an enormous sadness.
"Can I offer you something?" Perulli asked from the other side of the
living room, standing in front of a leather sofa and clearly wanting to
settle this before he sat down.
"No, nothing," Brunetti said. "Thanks."
Perulli sat, pulling fussily at both legs of his trousers to keep them
from stretching at the knees, a gesture Brunetti had observed before,
but only in the old. Did he sweep the bottom part of his overcoat
aside before he sat down on the vaporetto?
The don't suppose you want to pretend we're still friends?" Perulli
asked.
The don't want to pretend anything, Augusto," Brunetti said. The just
want to as
k you a few questions, and I'd like you to give me honest
answers."
"Not like the last time?" Perulli asked with a grin he tried to make
boyish but succeeded only in making sly. It caused Brunetti a moment's
uncertainty: there was something different about Perulli's mouth, about
the way he held it.
"No, not like the last time," Brunetti said, surprised at how calm he
sounded, calm but tired.
"And if I can't answer them?"
Then tell me so, and I'll go
Perulli nodded, and then said, The didn't have any choice, you know,
Guido."
Brunetti acted as though the other hadn't spoken and asked, "Do you
know Fernando Moro?"
He watched Perulli react to the name with something stronger than mere
recognition.
"Yes."
"How well do you know him?"
"He's a couple of years older than we are, and my father was a friend
of his, so I knew him well enough to say hello to on the street or
maybe go and have a drink with, at least when we were younger. But
certainly not well enough to call him a friend." Some sense warned
Brunetti what was going to come next, so he was prepared to hear
Perulli say, "Not like I know you and so did not respond.
"Did you see him in Rome?"
"Socially or professionally?"
"Either."
"Socially, no, but I might have run into him a few times at