by Donna Leon
‘That’s not funny.’
‘I didn’t mean it as a joke, Guido,’ Paola said, voice injured. ‘I’m quite serious. If she grew up in that society . . .’ She turned away from the stove. ‘How old did you say she was when she joined?’
‘Fifteen, I think.’
‘Then, if she grew up in Sicily, she had sufficient exposure to human behaviour to accept the possibility of evil. Don’t romanticize her. She’s not a plaster saint who will collapse at the first sight of impropriety or misbehaviour.’
Brunetti couldn’t keep the resentment out of his voice when he shot back, ‘Killing five old people can hardly be considered misbehaviour.’ Paola made no rejoinder, merely stared at him and then turned to add salt to the boiling water.
‘All right, all right, I know there’s not much proof,’ he temporized, and then when Paola refused to turn around, he corrected even that. ‘All right, no proof. But then why would there be a rumour that she had stolen the money and hurt one of the old people? And why would she have been hit and left by the road?’
Paola opened the package of dry corn meal that stood next to the pot and grabbed up a handful. As she spoke, she trickled a fine stream into the boiling water with one hand, stirring with the other. ‘It could have been a hit and run,’ she said. ‘And women alone don’t have much to do except gossip,’ she added.
Brunetti sat with his mouth open. ‘And this,’ he finally said, ‘this from a woman who considers herself a feminist? Heaven save me from hearing what women who are not feminists say about women who live alone.’
‘I mean it, Guido. Women or men, it’s all the same.’ Undisturbed by his opposition, she continued to dribble the corn meal into the boiling water, slowly stirring all the while. ‘Leave people alone long enough, and all they can do is gossip about one another. It’s worse if there are no diversions.’
‘Like sex?’ he asked, hoping to shock her or at least to make her laugh.
‘Especially if there is no sex.’
She finished adding the corn meal, and Brunetti considered what they had both just said.
‘Here, stir this while I set the table,’ she said, standing aside and leaving the place in front of the stove free. She held the wooden spoon out to him.
‘I’ll set the table,’ he said, getting up and opening the cabinet. Slowly, he laid out the plates, glasses, and silverware. ‘We having salad?’ he asked. When Paola nodded, he pulled down four salad plates and placed them on the counter. ‘Dessert?’ he asked.
‘Fruit.’
He pulled down four more plates.
He sat back in his place and picked up his glass. He took a sip, swallowed, and said, ‘All right. Maybe it was an accident, and maybe it’s entirely accidental that they’re speaking badly of her in the casa di cura.’ He set the glass down and poured some more wine into it. ‘Is that what you think?’.
She gave the polenta another stir and placed the wooden spoon across the open top. ‘No, I think someone tried to kill her. And I think someone planted the story about taking the money. Everything you’ve ever said about her tells me it’s impossible that she would lie or steal. And I doubt that anyone who knew her well would believe it. Not unless the story came from someone in a position of authority.’ She picked up his glass and took a sip, then set the glass down.
‘It’s funny, Guido, I was just listening to the same thing.’
‘What same thing?’
‘There’s a wonderful aria inBarbiere — and don’t interrupt me and say that there are many wonderful arias in Barbiere. It’s the one where, what’s his name, Basilio, the music teacher, talks about “una calunnia”, the way once a slander is started, it will grow until the accused person’ — and here she astonished Brunetti by bursting into the final words of the bass aria, but in her own bright soprano — ‘Avvilito, calpestrato, sotto il pubblico flagello per gran sorte va a crepar.’
Before she was finished, both children were at the kitchen door, looking in, astonished, at their mother. When Paola finished, Chiara blurted out, ‘But Mamma, I never knew you could sing.’
Paola looked at her husband, not her daughter, when she answered, ‘There’s always something to discover about the people you think you know well.’
* * * *
Toward the end of the meal, the subject of school came up and, as day must lead to night, that led Paola to ask about Chiara’s R.E. class.
‘I’d like to stop going,’ Chiara said, taking an apple from a bowl of fruit at the centre of the table.
‘I don’t see why you don’t let her stop,’ Raffi interrupted. ‘It’s just a waste of time, anyway.’
Paola didn’t grace his contribution with a response but, instead, asked, ‘Why do you say that, Chiara?’
She shrugged.
‘I believe you have been graced with the power of speech, Chiara,’ Paola said.
‘Oh, come on, Mamma. Once you start using that tone with me, I know you’re not going to listen to anything I say.’
‘And what tone is that, if I might ask?’ enquired Paola.
‘That one,’ Chiara shot back.
Paola looked to the males in her family for support against this unwarranted attack from her last-born child, but they turned implacable eyes upon her. Chiara continued to peel her apple, bent on creating a single strip out of the peel, now certainly long enough to reach the end of the table.
‘I’m sorry, Chiara,’ Paola said.
Chiara shot her a glance, cut off the last of the peel, sliced a piece of apple, and placed it on her mother’s plate.
Brunetti decided to reopen negotiations. ‘Why do you want to stop going to the classes, Chiara?’
‘Raffi’s right. It’s a waste of time. I memorized the catechism the first week, and all we do is recite it back to him when he asks us questions. It’s boring, and I could be reading or doing my other homework. But the worst thing is that he doesn’t like it if we ask questions.’
‘What sort of questions?’ Brunetti asked, accepting the last piece of her apple and thus setting Chiara free to begin peeling another one.
‘Well,’ she said, attention on the knife, ‘today he was talking about how God is our father and when he was talking about God, he kept saying “He” and “Him”. So I raised my hand and asked if God was a spirit. And he said yes, He was. So I asked if it was right that a spirit was different from a person because it didn’t have a body, wasn’t material. And when he agreed, I asked how, if God was a spirit, He could be a man, if He didn’t have a body or anything.’
Brunetti glanced across Chiara’s lowered head, but he was too late and there was no trace of a smile of triumph on Paola’s face. ‘So what did Padre Luciano say?’
‘Oh, he got mad and yelled at me. Said I was showing off.’ She looked up at Brunetti, the apple momentarily forgotten. ‘But I wasn’t, Papà. I wasn’t showing off at all. I really wanted to know. It doesn’t make any sense to me. I mean, God can’t be both things, can—’ Chiara caught herself before using the questionable pronoun and asked instead, ‘Can it be like that?’
‘I don’t know, angel, it’s been a long time since I studied that stuff. I guess God can be whatever God wants to be. Maybe God’s so great that even our little rules about material reality and our tiny little universe don’t mean anything to God. You ever think of that?’
‘No, I never did,’ she said, pushing her plate away. She considered it for a while, then said, ‘I suppose it’s possible.’ Another speculative silence. ‘Can I go and do my homework now?’
‘Of course,’ Brunetti said, leaning over to ruffle her hair. ‘If you have any trouble with your maths problems, the really hard ones, just bring them right to me.’
‘And what will you do, Papà, tell me how you can’t help because maths is so different from when you went to school?’ Chiara asked with a laugh.
‘Isn’t that what I always do with your maths homework, cara?’
‘Yes. I suppose it’s the only thing you c
an do, huh?’
‘I’m afraid so,’ Brunetti said, pushing back his chair.
* * * *
Chapter Thirteen
Prompted by the theme of religion that he seemed unable to prevent from invading both his personal and his professional life, Brunetti that night devoted himself to the reading of the early Church Fathers, a form of entertainment to which he was not much given. He began with Tertulian but found that his immediate dislike for that man’s rantings drove him to consult the writings of Saint Benedict. But then he came upon a passage declaring that, ‘The husband who, transported by immoderate love, has intercourse with his wife so ardently in order to satisfy his passion that even had she not been his wife, he would have wished to have commerce with her, is committing a sin.’
‘Commerce?’ Brunetti asked himself aloud, looking up from the page and managing to startle Paola, who sat beside him, half asleep over the notes for the class she was to give the next day.
‘Humm?’ she asked in mild interrogation.
‘We really let these people educate our children?’ he asked and then read the passage out to her.
He felt, rather than saw, her shrug. ‘What’s that mean?’ he asked.
‘It means that, if you put people on a diet, they start thinking about food. Or if you make someone stop smoking, all they think about is cigarettes. It seems logical enough to me that if you tell a person he can’t have sex, he’s going to be obsessive about the subject. Then to give him the power to tell other people how to run their sex lives, well, that’s just asking for trouble. In a way, it’s like having a blind person teach Art History, isn’t it?’
‘Why haven’t you ever said any of this to me?’ he asked.
‘We made a deal. I promised that I would never interfere with the religious education of the children.’
‘But this is lunacy,’ he said, pounding his hand down on the open pages of the book.
‘Of course it’s lunacy,’ she replied in an entirely calm voice. ‘But is it any more lunatic than most of what they see or read?’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘Madonna. Sex clubs, phone sex. You name it, it’s just the other side of the coin to the maniac who wrote that,’ she said, pointing dismissively to the book in his hands. ‘In either case, sex becomes an obsession.’ She turned her attention back to her notes.
After a few moments, Brunetti said, ‘But,’ and then stopped until she looked up at him. When he saw that he had her attention, he repeated, ‘But do they really tell them things like this?’
‘I told you, Guido, I leave all of that to you. It was you who insisted that they needed to learn about — if I recall your precise phrase — “Western Culture”. Well, Saint Benedict — if it is he from whom that particularly infelicitous passage comes — Saint Benedict is part of Western Culture.’
‘But they can’t teach them this,’ he insisted.
She shrugged. ‘Ask Chiara,’ she said and bent back over her notes.
Left alone to his fulminations, Brunetti resolved to do just that the following day. He closed the book, set it aside, and pulled another from the stack on the floor beside the sofa. He settled in with Josephus’s History of the Jewish War and had just got to the description of the Emperor Vespasian’s siege of Jerusalem when the phone rang.
He reached across to the small table beside him and picked up the receiver. ‘Brunetti,’ he said.
‘Sir, this is Miotti.’
‘Yes, Miotti, what is it?’
‘I thought I should call you, sir.’
‘What for, Miotti?’
‘One of those people you and Vianello went to see has died, sir. I’m there now.’
‘Who is it?’
‘Signor da Prè.’
‘What happened?’
‘We aren’t sure.’
‘What do you mean, you aren’t sure?’
‘Maybe you’d better come and have a look, sir.’
‘Where are you?’
‘We’re at his home, sir. It’s at—’
Brunetti cut him off. ‘I know where it is. What happened?’
‘Water started to come through the ceiling into the apartment below him, so the neighbour went up to see what was wrong. He had a key, so he let himself in, and he found da Prè on the floor of the bathroom.’
‘And?’
‘It looks like he fell and broke his neck, sir.’
Brunetti waited for further explanation, but when none was forthcoming, he said, ‘Call Dottor Rizzardi.’
‘I’ve already done that, sir.’
‘Good. I’ll see you in about twenty minutes.’ Brunetti hung up and turned to Paola, who was no longer reading but curious to learn the other half of the conversation she had just overheard. ‘Da Prè. He fell and broke his neck.’
‘The little hunchback?’
‘Yes.’
‘Poor man, what rotten luck,’ was her immediate response.
Brunetti’s took longer to come and, when it did, reflected the difference in both their dispositions and their professions. ‘Perhaps.’
Paola ignored this and looked down at her watch. ‘It’s almost eleven.’
Brunetti dropped Josephus on top of St Benedict and got to his feet. ‘I’ll see you in the morning, then.’
Paola touched the back of his hand. ‘Wear a scarf, Guido. It’s cold tonight.’
He bent down and kissed the top of her head, got his coat, remembered to take his scarf, and left the house.
When he got to da Prè’s address, he found a uniformed policeman standing across the street from the front door. Recognizing Brunetti, the officer saluted and, in response to his question, told him that Dr Rizzardi had already arrived.
Upstairs, another uniformed officer, Corsaro, stood just inside the open door of the apartment. He saluted Brunetti and stepped aside. ‘Dottor Rizzardi is inside, sir.’
Brunetti entered and went toward the back of the apartment, from which both light and male voices emerged. He entered what must be the bedroom and saw a low bed, almost as small as a child’s crib, against the wall. As he started across the room, he stepped into something soft and liquid. Immediately he stopped in his tracks and called out, ‘Miotti!’
In an instant, the young officer appeared at a door on the far side of the room. ‘What is it, sir?’
‘Switch on the light.’
Miotti did that, and Brunetti looked down at his feet, vainly attempting to stifle an irrational fear that he was standing in blood. He breathed with relief when he saw that it was nothing more than a carpet soaked with the water that had flowed through the open door of the bathroom. Seeing this, he continued across the room and stopped at the lighted doorway, from which came the sounds of human motion.
Stepping inside, he saw Dr Rizzardi bent, as he had seen him too many times, over the supine body of a dead man.
Hearing the noise behind him, Dr Rizzardi got to his feet. He extended his hand, then paused to remove the thin rubber glove that covered it. Extending it anew, he said, ‘Buona sera, Guido.’ He didn’t smile, and even if he had, it would not have made much difference in the austere severity of his face. Too long an exposure to violent death in all its forms had honed away the flesh from nose and cheeks, as if his face were made of marble, and each death had chipped away yet another minuscule fragment.
Rizzardi stepped aside, allowing Brunetti to see the tiny body that lay below them. Grown even smaller in death, Da Prè seemed to lie beneath the feet of giants. He lay on his back, his head tilted wildly to one side but not touching the ground, as though he were some sort of clothed turtle that had been flipped over and abandoned on his shell by wanton boys.
‘What happened?’ Brunetti asked. As he spoke, he noticed that the legs of Rizzardi’s trousers were soaked from the knee to the cuff and that his own shoes were growing damp from standing in the half centimetre of water that covered the floor all around them.
‘It looks like he turned on the water f
or his bath and then slipped on the floor.’ Brunetti looked. The tub was empty, the water no longer running. A round black rubber plug stood on the side of the tub.
Brunetti looked down again at the dead man. He was dressed in a suit and tie, but he wore no shoes or socks. ‘Slipped on the tile in his bare feet?’ he asked.
‘Looks that way,’ Rizzardi answered.
Brunetti backed out of the bathroom, and Rizzardi, his work finished, followed him. Brunetti looked around the bedroom, though he had no idea what he was looking for. He saw three windows, curtains drawn against the night, a few paintings on the walls, looking as though they’d been put there decades ago and never again noticed. The rug was a thick old Persian tribal, sodden now and colours dulled. A red silk dressing gown lay across the foot of the bed, and beneath it, just beyond the point where the water had reached, Brunetti saw da Prè’s tiny shoes placed neatly side by side, his dark socks folded and laid on top of them.