by Donna Leon
Both turned toward the sound of the opening door, but it was Raffi, not Chiara, who let himself into the apartment. ‘Ciao, Mamma!’ he called, heading back toward his own room to put down his books. ‘Ciao, Papà! A short time later, he came down the hall and into the kitchen. He bent down and kissed Paola on the cheek, and Brunetti, still seated, saw his son from a different perspective and saw him taller.
Raffi lifted the top on the frying pan and, seeing what was inside, kissed his mother again. ‘I’m dying, Mamma. When are we going to eat?’
‘As soon as your sister gets here,’ Paola said, turning back to lower the flame under the now-boiling water.
Raffi pushed back his sleeve and checked the time. ‘You know she’s always on time. She’ll walk through the door in seven minutes, so why don’t you put the pasta in now?’ He reached down onto the table and ripped open a cellophane package of bread sticks and pulled out three of the thin grissini. He put the ends between his teeth and, like a rabbit chewing at three longs stalks of grass, nibbled at them until they were gone. He grabbed three more and repeated the process. ‘Come on, Mamma, I’m starved, and I’ve got to go over to Massimo’s this afternoon to work on physics.’
Paola placed a platter of fried aubergine on the table, nodded in sudden agreement, and began to drop the newly made strips of pasta into the boiling water.
Brunetti pulled the pagella from the envelope and handed it to Raffaele. ‘You know anything about this?’ he asked.
It was only in recent years and with the abandonment of what his parents referred to as his ‘Karl Marx Period’ that Raffi’s own report cards had come to take on the repetitive perfection his sister’s had had from her first days in school, but even in the worst academic disasters of that period, Raffi had never felt anything but pride in his sister’s achievements.
He looked up and down the page and handed it back to his father, saying nothing.
‘Well?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Disruptive, huh?’ was his only response.
Paola, stirring the pasta, managed to give the side of the pot a few heavy clangs.
‘You know anything about it?’ Brunetti repeated.
‘No, not really,’ Raffi said, obviously reluctant to explain whatever it was he knew. When neither of his parents said anything, Raffi said, voice aggrieved, ‘Mamma will just get mad.’
‘At what?’ Paola asked with false lightness.
‘At. . .’ Raffi was cut off by the sound of Chiara’s key in the door.
‘Ah, the guilty one arrives,’ Raffi said and poured himself a glass of mineral water.
All three of them watched Chiara hang her jacket on a hook in the hall, drop her books, then pick them up and set them on a chair. She came down the corridor toward them and stopped at the door. ‘Somebody die?’ she asked with no hint of irony in her voice.
Paola reached down and pulled a colander from a cabinet. She set it in the sink and poured the pasta and boiling water through it. Chiara remained at the door. ‘What’s wrong?’ she asked.
As Paola busied herself pouring the pasta and then the sauce into a large bowl, Brunetti explained. ‘Your report card came.’
Chiara’s face fell. ‘Oh,’ was the best she could say. She slid past Brunetti and took her place at the table.
Starting with Raffi’s plate, Paola served up four heaping dishes of pasta and then offered them grated parmegiano, which she sprinkled liberally over their pasta. She began to eat. They all began to eat.
When her plate was empty and she was holding it out to her mother for more, Chiara asked, ‘Religion, huh?’
‘Yes. You got a very low grade,’ Paola answered.
‘How low?’
‘Three.’
Chiara stopped herself from wincing, but just barely.
‘Do you know why the grade is so low?’ Brunetti asked, placing his hands over his empty plate to tell Paola he wanted no more.
Chiara started on her second helping while Paola spooned the rest into Raffi’s dish. ‘No, I guess I don’t have a reason.’
‘Don’t you study?’ Paola asked.
‘There’s nothing to study,’ Chiara said, ‘just that dumb catechism. You can memorize that in an afternoon.’
‘Then?’ Brunetti asked.
Raffi took a roll from the basket at the centre of the table, broke it in half, and began to wipe the pasta sauce from his plate. ‘Is it Padre Luciano?’ he asked.
Chiara nodded and set her fork down. She looked over toward the stove to see what else was for lunch.
‘Do you know this Padre Luciano?’ Brunetti asked Raffi.
The boy rolled his eyes in his head. ‘Oh, God, who doesn’t know him?’ Then, turning to his sister, he asked, ‘You ever go to confession to him, Chiara?’
She shook her head quickly from side to side but said nothing.
Paola got up from the table and took their pasta dishes from the plates on which they rested. She went to the oven, opened it, and brought out a platter of cotoletta milanese, placed some sliced lemon wedges around the edge of the platter, and set it on the table. While Brunetti took two cutlets, Paola helped herself to some aubergine, saying nothing.
Seeing that Paola was keeping out of this, Brunetti asked Raffi, ‘What’s it like, to go to confession to him?’
‘Oh, he’s famous with the kids,’ Raffi said, spooning two cutlets onto his plate.
‘Famous for what?’ Brunetti asked.
Instead of answering, Raffi shot a glance toward Chiara. Both of her parents saw her give a barely perceptible shake of her head and then bend down and devote her attention to her lunch.
Brunetti set his fork down. Chiara didn’t look up, and Raffi glanced over to Paola, who still said nothing. ‘All right,’ Brunetti said, voice heavier than he would have liked to hear it. ‘What’s going on here, and what aren’t we supposed to know about this Padre Luciano?’
He looked from Raffi, who refused to meet his eyes, to Chiara and was surprised to see that her face was suffused with a dark blush.
Softening his voice, he asked, ‘Chiara, can Raffi tell us what he knows?’
She nodded but didn’t look up.
Raffi imitated his father and set his fork down, too. But then he smiled. ‘It’s not like it’s any big thing, Papà!
Brunetti said nothing. Paola might as well have been mute.
‘It’s what he says to the kids. When they confess sex things.’ He stopped.
‘Sex things?’ Brunetti repeated.
‘You know, Papà. Things they do.’
Brunetti knew. ‘What does he do — Padre Luciano?’ Brunetti asked.
‘He makes them describe them. You know, talk about them.’ Raffi made a noise, something between a snicker and a groan, and stopped talking.
Brunetti glanced at Chiara and saw that the blush had grown even deeper.
‘I see,’ Brunetti said.
‘It’s really sort of sad,’ Raffi said.
‘Has he ever done this to you?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Oh, no, I stopped going to confession years ago. But he does it to the young boys.’
‘And the girls,’ Chiara added in a very soft voice, so soft that Brunetti asked her nothing.
‘Is that all he does?’ Brunetti asked Raffi.
‘That’s all I know, Papà. I had him for religious instruction about four years ago, and the only thing he made us do then was memorize the book and recite it back to him. But he used to say nasty things to the girls.’ Turning to his sister, he asked, ‘He still do that?’
She nodded.
‘Would anyone like another cutlet?’ Paola asked in an entirely normal voice. She got two shaken heads and a grunt and took that as sufficient response to remove the platter. There was no salad that day, and she had planned to serve only fruit for dessert. Instead, she opened a paper package on the counter and pulled out a heavy cake, laden with fresh fruit and filled with whipped cream, which she had intended to take back to the university th
at afternoon to offer to her colleagues after the monthly faculty meeting.
‘Chiara, dear, would you get plates?’ she asked while taking a broad silver knife from a drawer.
The pieces she cut them, Brunetti noticed, were large enough to catapult the entire lot of them into insulin shock, but the sweetness of the cake, and then the coffee, and then the talk of the equal sweetness of the first real day of springtime were enough to restore some sort of tranquillity to the family. After it, Paola said she would do the dishes, and Brunetti decided to read the paper. Chiara disappeared into her room, and Raffi went off to study physics with his friend. Neither Brunetti nor Paola said anything further about the subject, but they both knew that they had not heard the last of Padre Luciano.
* * * *
Chapter Three
Brunetti took his overcoat with him after lunch and walked back to the Questura with it draped over his shoulders, revelling in the softness of the day, comfortable and warm after the large meal. He forced himself to ignore the tightness of his suit, insisting to himself that it was no more than the unaccustomed warmth of the day that made him so sensitive to the weight of the heavy wool. Besides, everyone gained a kilo or two during the winter; probably did a person good: built up resistance to disease and things like that.
As he started the descent from the Rialto Bridge, he saw a number eighty-two pulling up to the embarcadero on his right and, without thinking, ran to get it, which he managed to do just as it was starting to pull away from the dock and out into the centre of the Grand Canal. He moved to the right side of the boat but stayed outside on the deck, glad of the breeze and the light that danced up from the water. He watched Calle Tiepolo approaching on the right side and peered up the narrowcalle, searching for the railing of his terrace, but they were past it too quickly for him to see it, and so he turned his attention back to the canal.
Brunetti often wondered what it must have been like to live in the days of the Most Serene Republic, to have made this grand passage by means of the power of oars alone, to move in silence without motors or horns, a silence broken by nothing more than the shouted ‘Ouie’ of boatmen and the slip of oars. So much had changed: today’s merchants kept in touch with one another with the odious ‘telefonini’, not by means of slant-rigged galleons. The very air stank of the miasma of exhaust and pollution that drifted over from the mainland; no sea breeze seemed any longer able to sweep the city entirely clean. The one thing that the ages had left unchanged was the city’s thousand-year-old heritage of venality, and Brunetti always felt uncomfortable at his inability to decide whether he thought this good or bad.
It had been his original intention to get off at San Samuele and take the long walk up toward San Marco, but the thought of the crowds that would have been induced out onto the streets by the mellow weather kept him on the boat, and he didn’t get off until San Zaccaria. He cut back toward the Questura, arriving there a little after three and apparently in advance of most of the uniformed staff.
In his office, he found that the papers on his desk had proliferated — perhaps they actually bred? — while he was at lunch. As promised, Signorina Elettra had given him a neatly typed list, providing the names of the principal heirs of the people Suor’Immacolata — he corrected himself: Maria Testa — had given him. She had also supplied addresses and phone numbers. Casting his eye down the list, Brunetti saw that three of them lived in Venice. The fourth lived in Torino, and the last will listed the names of six people, none of them resident in Venice. Underneath, a typed note from Signorina Elettra told him that she would have copies of the wills by the following afternoon.
For a moment, he thought of calling ahead, but then he reflected that a certain advantage was always to be gained by arriving, at least for the first interview, unannounced and, if possible, unexpected, and so he did no more than arrange the addresses in the most convenient geographic order on his mental map of the city and then slip the list into his jacket pocket. The advantage given by surprise was in no way related to the guilt or innocence of the people he spoke to, but long experience had taught him that surprise often spurred people toward the truth.
He bent his head over the remaining official papers and began to read. After the second, he sat back in his seat, pulled the stack toward him, and continued to read. It was after only a few minutes that the tedium of their contents, the warmth of the office, and the aftermath of his lunch lured Brunetti’s hands down onto his lap and his chin onto his chest. Sometime later, he was shocked awake by the sound of a door slamming out in the corridor. He shook his head, ran his hands across his face a few times, and wished he had a coffee. Instead, he looked up to see Vianello standing at the door, the door Brunetti realized had stood open during his entire nap.
‘Good afternoon, Sergeant,’ he said, giving Vianello the smile of a man who felt fully in control of everyone at the Questura. ‘What is it?’
‘I said I’d come and get you, sir. It’s quarter to four.’
‘That late?’ Brunetti said, glancing down at his watch.
‘Yes, sir,’ Vianello said. ‘I came up before, but you were busy.’ Vianello waited a minute for that to sink in and then added, ‘I’ve got the boat outside, sir.’
As they walked down the steps of the Questura, Brunetti asked, ‘Did you speak to Miotti?’
‘Yes, sir. It’s what I expected.’
‘His brother’s gay?’ Brunetti asked, not even bothering to look at Vianello.
Vianello stopped in the middle of the staircase. When Brunetti turned to him, the sergeant asked, ‘How did you know that, sir?’
‘He seemed nervous about his brother and his clerical friends, and I couldn’t think of anything else about a priest that would make Miotti nervous. It’s not as if he’s the most open-minded man we have.’ After a moment’s reflection, Brunetti added, ‘And it’s not as if it’s a surprise when a priest is gay.’
‘It’s the opposite that’s a surprise, I’d say,’ Vianello remarked and started back down the steps. He turned his attention back to Miotti, not needing to explain the leap to Brunetti. ‘But you’ve always said he’s a good policeman, sir.’
‘He doesn’t have to be open-minded to be a good policeman, Vianello.’
‘No, I suppose not,’ Vianello agreed.
They emerged from the Questura a few minutes later and found Bonsuan, the pilot, waiting for them aboard a police launch. Everything glistened: the brass fittings on the boat, one of the metal tags on Bonsuan’s collar, the new green leaves on the vine coming back to life on the wall across the canal, a wine bottle drifting by on the surface of the water, itself a gleaming field. For no reason other than the light, Vianello spread his arms wide and smiled.
Bonsuan’s attention was drawn by the movement, and he stared. Caught between embarrassment and joy, Vianello began to turn his motion into the tired stretch of a deskbound man, but then a pair of amorous swifts flashed by, low to the water, and Vianello dropped all pretence. ‘It’s springtime,’ he called happily to the pilot and leaped onto the deck beside him. He clapped Bonsuan on the shoulder, his own joy suddenly overflowing.
‘Do we owe all of this to your exercise class?’ Brunetti asked as he came aboard.
Bonsuan, who apparently knew nothing about Vianello’s latest enthusiasm, gave the sergeant a disgusted look, turned, hit the motor into life, and pulled the launch out into the narrow canal.
Spirits undampened, Vianello remained on deck while Brunetti went down into the cabin. He pulled down a city guide that rested on a shelf running along one side of the cabin and checked the locations of the three addresses on the list. From inside, he watched the interaction between the two men: his sergeant, as unashamedly filled with high spirits as an adolescent; the dour pilot, staring ahead as they pulled out into the bacino of San Marco. As he watched, Vianello placed a hand on Bonsuan’s shoulder and pointed off to the east, calling his attention to a thick-masted sailboat that came toward them, its sails fat-cheeked with the fres
h spring breeze. Bonsuan nodded once but turned his attention back to their course. Vianello tossed his head back and laughed, sending the deep sound spilling down into the cabin.
Brunetti resisted until they were in the middle of the bacino, but then he gave in to the magnet of Vianello’s happiness and came up on deck. Just as he stepped outside, the wake of a passing Lido ferry caught them broadside, knocking Brunetti off balance and toward the boat’s low railing. Vianello’s hand shot out; he grabbed Brunetti by the sleeve and pulled him back. He held his superior’s arm until the boat steadied, then let him go, saying, ‘Not in that water.’
‘Afraid I’d drown?’ Brunetti asked.
Bonsuan broke in. ‘More likely the cholera would get you.’