by Donna Leon
back home to roost."
"Is that what you think Raffi will do?" he asked.
"If I have any say," she began, causing Brunetti to wonder when she had
not, 'he won't do military service. It would be better for him to go
to Australia and spend eighteen months hitchhiking around the country
and working as a dishwasher. He'd certainly learn more by doing that,
or by opting to do his service as a volunteer in a hospital,
instead."
"You'd actually let him go off to Australia by himself? For eighteen
months? To wash dishes?"
Paola looked at him and, at the expression of real astonishment she
read on his face, she smiled. "What do you think I am, Guido, the
mother of the Gracchi, that I must forever hold my children to my bosom
as though they were
my only jewels? Tt wouldn't be easy to see him go, no, not at all, but
I think it would do him a world of good to go off and be independent."
When Brunetti remained silent, she said, "At least it would teach him
how to make his own bed."
"He does that already a literal-minded Brunetti answered.
"I mean in the larger sense," Paola explained. "It would give him some
idea that life is not only this tiny city with its tiny prejudices, and
it might give him some idea that work is what you do if you want
something."
"As opposed to asking your parents?"
"Exactly. Or your grandparents."
It was rare for Brunetti to hear Paola make a criticism, however
veiled, of her parents, and so he was curious to follow this up. "Was
it too easy for you? Growing up, I mean."
"No more than it was too hard for you, my dear."
Not at all sure what she meant by that, Brunetti was about to ask, when
the door to the apartment flew open and Chiara and Raffi catapulted
into the corridor. He and Paola exchanged a glance, and then a smile,
and then it was time to eat.
no
As often happened, Brunetti was immeasurably cheered by having lunch at
home in the company of his family. He was never certain if his
response was different from that of an animal returned to its den:
safe, warmed by the heat of the bodies of its young, slavering over the
fresh kill it had dragged home. Whatever the cause, the experience
gave him fresh heart and sent him back to work feeling restored and
eager to resume the hunt.
The imagery of violence dropped away from him when he entered Signorina
Elettra's office and found her at her desk, head bowed over some papers
on her desk, chin propped in one hand, utterly relaxed and comfortable.
"I'm not interrupting you, am I?" he asked, seeing the seal of the
Ministry of the Interior on the documents and below it the red stripe
indicating that the material it contained was classified.
"No, not at all, Commissario/ she said, casually slipping the papers
inside a file and thus arousing Brunetti's interest.
"Could you do something for me?" he asked, his eyes on
hers; he was careful to avoid lowering them to the label on the front
of the file.
"Of course, sir she said, slipping the file into her top drawer and
pulling a notepad over in front of her. "What is it?" she asked, pen
in hand, smile bright.
"In the files for the Academy, is there anything about a girl who had
been raped?"
Her pen clattered to the desk, and the smile disappeared from her lips.
Her entire body pulled back from him in surprise, but she said
nothing.
"Are you all right, Signorina?" he asked, with concern.
She looked down at the pen, picked it up, made quite a business of
replacing the cap and removing it again, then looked up at him and
smiled. "Of course, sir." She looked at the pad, pulled it closer to
her, and poised her pen over it. "What was her name, sir? And when
did it happen?"
"I don't know," Brunetti began. "That is, I'm not even sure it
happened. It must have been about eight years ago; I think it was when
I was at a police seminar in London. It happened at the San Martino.
The original report was that the girl had been raped, I think by more
than one of them. But then no charges were pressed, and the story
disappeared."
"Then what is it you'd like me to look for, sir?"
"I'm not sure," Brunetti answered. "Any sign of something that might
have happened, who the girl was, why the story disappeared. Anything
at all you can find out about it."
She seemed to be a long time writing all of this down, but he waited
until she was finished. Pen still in her hand, she asked, "If charges
weren't pressed, then it's not likely we'll have anything here, is
it?"
"No, it isn't. But I'm hoping that there might be some report of the
original complaint."
"And if there isn't?"
Brunetti was puzzled to find her so hesitant about
following up an investigation. Then perhaps the newspapers. Once you
have the date, that is he said.
Till have a look at your personnel file, sir, and find the dates when
you were in London/ she said, then looked up from her notebook, face
serene.
"Yes, yes he said, then, lamely, Till be in my office
As he went upstairs, he reconsidered what Paola had said about the
military, trying to figure out why he couldn't bring himself to condemn
them as universally or as strongly as she did. Part of it, he knew,
was because of his own experience under arms, however brief it had
been, and the lingering fondness he felt for that period of unexamined
comradeship. Perhaps it was nothing more elevated than the instinct of
the pack, gathered round the kill, retelling stories of that day's hunt
while great gobbets of fat dripped into the fire. But if memory was to
be trusted, his loyalty had been to his immediate group of friends and
not to some abstract ideal of corps or regiment.
His reading in history had given him many examples of soldiers who died
in proud defence of the regimental flag or while performing remarkable
acts of heroism to save the perceived honour of the group, but these
actions had always seemed wasteful and faintly stupid to Brunetti.
Certainly, reading accounts of the actual events or even the words of
the decorations bestowed, too often posthumously, upon these brave
young men, Brunetti had felt his heart stir in response to the nobility
of their behaviour, but the antiphon of pragmatic good sense had always
rung out in the background, reminding him that, in the end, these were
boys who threw their lives away in order to protect what was nothing
more than a piece of cloth. Bold, certainly, and brave, but also
foolish to the point of idiocy.
He found his desk covered with reports of one sort or another, the
detritus of several days' lack of attention. He wrapped himself in the
cloak of duty and, for the next two
hours, engaged himself in behaviour as futile as any he thought to
criticize on the part of those valiant young men. As he read through
accounts of arrests for burglary, pick pocketing, and the various types
&nb
sp; of fraud currently practised on the streets of the city, he was struck
by how often the names of the people arrested were foreign and by how
often their age exempted them from punishment. These facts left him
untroubled: it was the thought that each of these arrests guaranteed
another vote for the Right that disturbed him. Years ago, he had read
a short story, he thought by some American, which ended with the
revelation of an endless chain of sinners marching towards heaven along
a broad arc in the sky. He sometimes thought the same chain of sinners
marched slowly through the skies of Italian politics, though hardly
toward paradise.
Stupefied by the boredom of the task, he heard his name called from the
door and looked up to see Pucetti.
"Yes, Pucetti?" he said, beckoning the young officer into his office.
"Have a seat." Glad of the excuse to set the papers aside, he turned
his attention to the young policeman. "What is it?" he asked, struck
by how young he looked in his crisp uniform, far too young to have any
right to carry the gun at his side, far too innocent to have any idea
of how to use it.
"It's about the Moro boy, sir," Pucetti said. "I came to see you
yesterday, sir, but you weren't here."
It was close to a reproach, something Brunetti was not used to hearing
from Pucetti. Resentment flared in Brunetti that the young officer
should dare to take this tone with him. He fought down the impulse to
explain to Pucetti that he had decided there was no need for haste. If
it was generally believed the police were treating Moro's death as
suicide, people might be more willing to speak about the boy openly;
besides, he had no need to justify his decisions to this boy. He
waited longer than he usually would, then asked simply, What about
him?"
"You remember the time we were there, talking to the cadets?" Pucetti
asked, and Brunetti was tempted to ask it the younger man thought he
had arrived at an age where his memory needed to be prodded in order to
function.
"Yes," Brunetti limited himself to saying.
"It's very strange, sir. When we went back to talk to them again, it
was as if some of them didn't even know he had been in the same school
with them. Most of the ones I talked to told me they didn't know him
very well. I spoke to the boy who found him, Pellegrini, but he didn't
know anything. He was drunk the night before, said he went to bed
about midnight." Even before Brunetti could ask, Pucetti supplied the
information: "Yes, he'd been at a party at a friend's house, in
Dorsoduro. I asked him how he'd got in, and he said he had a key to
the port one He said he paid the portiere twenty Euros for it, and the
way he said it, it sounded like anyone who wants one can buy one." He
waited to see if Brunetti had any questions about this, but then
continued, "I asked his roommate, and he said it was true, that
Pellegrini woke him up when he came in. Pellegrini said he got up
about six to get some water and that's when he saw Moro."
"He wasn't the one who called, though, was he?"
"Called us, you mean, sir?"
"Yes."
"No. It was one of the janitors. He said he'd just got there for work
and heard a commotion in the bathroom, and when he saw what had
happened, he called."
"More than an hour after Pellegrini found the body," Brunetti said
aloud.
When Pucetti made no response, Brunetti said, "What else? Go on. What
did they say about Moro?"
"It's in here, sir," he said, placing a file on Brunetti's desk. He
paused, weighing what to say next. "I know this sounds strange, sir,
but it seemed like most of them really didn't care about it. Not the
way we would, or a person would, if
"5
something like this happened to someone you knew, or you worked with."
He gave this some more thought and added, "It was creepy, sort of, the
way they talked as if they didn't know him. But they all live there
together, and take classes together. How could they not know him?"
Hearing his voice rise, Pucetti forced himself to calm down. "Anyway,
one of them told me that he'd had a class with Moro a couple of days
before, and they'd studied together that night and the following day.
Getting ready for an exam."
"When was the exam?"
"The day after."
"The day after what? That he died?"
"Yes, sir."
Brunetti's conclusion was instant, but he asked Pucetti, "How does that
seem to you?"
It was obvious that the young officer had prepared himself for the
question, for his answer was immediate. "People kill themselves, well,
at least it seems to me, that they'd do it after an exam, at least
they'd wait to see how badly they'd done in it, and then maybe they'd
do it. At least that's what I'd do he said, then added, 'not that I'd
kill myself over a stupid exam."
"What would you kill yourself over?" Brunetti asked.
Owl-like, Pucetti stared across at his commander. "Oh, I don't think
over anything, sir. Would you?"
Brunetti shook the idea away. "No, I don't think so. But I suppose
you never know." He had friends who were killing themselves with
stress or cigarettes or alcohol, and some of his friends had children
who were killing themselves with drugs, but he could think of no one he
knew, at least not in this instant, whom he thought capable of suicide.
But perhaps that's why suicide fell like lightning: it was always the
most unexpected people who did it.
His attention swung back to Pucetti only at the end of what he was
saying."... about going skiing this winter."
The Moro boy?" Brunetti asked to disguise the fact that his attention
had drifted away.
"Yes, sir. And this kid said Moro was looking forward to it, really
loved to ski." He paused to see if his superior would comment, but
when he did not, Pucetti went on, "He seemed upset, sir."
"Who? This boy?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
Pucetti gave him a startled glance, puzzled that Brunetti hadn't
figured this out yet. "Because if he didn't kill himself, then someone
else did."
At the look of pleased satisfaction on Brunetti's face as he heard him
explain this, Pucetti began to suspect, not without a twinge of
embarrassment, that perhaps his superior had figured it out.
In the days that followed, Brunetti's thoughts were distracted from the
Moro family and its griefs and directed towards the Casino. The
police, this time, were not asked to investigate the frequent and
refined forms of peculation practised by guests and croupiers, but the
accusations brought against the casino's administration for having
enriched itself at public expense. Brunetti was one of the few
Venetians who bothered to remember that the Casino belonged to the
city; hence he realized that any theft or embezzlement of Casino
earnings came directly from the funds earmarked for the aid of orphans
and widows. That people who spent their lives among gamblers and
&nb
sp; card-sharks should steal was no surprise to Brunetti: it was only their
boldness that occasionally astonished him, for it seemed that all of
the ancillary services offered by the Casino banquets, private parties,
even the bars had quietly been turned over to a company that turned out
to be run by the brother of the director.
Since detectives had to be brought in from other cities so as
not to be detected as they presented themselves at the Casino in the
role of gamblers, and employees had to be found who would be willing to
testify against their employers and colleagues, the investigation had
so far been a slow and complicated one. Brunetti found himself
involved in it at the expense of other cases, including that of Ernesto
Moro, where the evidence continued to pile up in support of a judgment
of suicide: the crime lab's report on the shower stall and the boy's
room contained nothing that could be used to justify suspicions about
his death, and none of the statements of students or teachers suggested
anything at variance with the view that it was suicide. Brunetti,
though unpersuaded by the absence of credible evidence in support of
his own view, recalled occasions in the past when his impatience had
proven harmful to investigations. Patience, then, patience and calm
would be his watchwords.
The magistrate appointed to the investigation of the Casino was on the
point of issuing warrants for the arrest of the entire directorate when