Blood from a stone

15

Signorina Elettra’s arrival interrupted these reflections. She knocked and came in without waiting to be told to do so, approached his desk, and all but demanded, ‘What did he want?’ Then, as if aware of the effrontery of her question, she stepped back and added, ‘He seemed so eager to talk to you, I mean.’
An impulse Brunetti recognized as protective led him to answer, as calmly as though hers had been a normal question, ‘To ask about the murder of the black man.’
‘He was in a very strange mood,’ she volunteered, prodding for a more satisfactory answer.
Brunetti shrugged. ‘He’s always upset when there’s trouble. It reflects badly on the city.’
‘And that reflects badly on him,’ she completed.
‘Even if the victim isn’t one of us,’ Brunetti said, conscious as he spoke of how much he sounded like Chiara. Before Signorina Elettra’s universalist sympathies were offended, he explained, ‘A Venetian, I mean.’
She appeared to accept this and asked, ‘But why one of those poor devils? They never cause any trouble. All they want to do is stand there and sell their bags and try to have a chance at a decent life.’ She drew herself from these sentiments and asked, ‘Did he assign it to you?’
‘No, not specifically. But he didn’t say he wanted anyone else to handle it, so I assume I’m to continue.’ As he said these bland things, his mind kept attempting to follow the trail that led from Patta’s warning back to its source: if Patta had been threatened to warn Brunetti away, then those who continued the investigation would be in danger.
How had Patta phrased it? ‘We have to leave this alone’? How typical that was of him, to make the statement as though it were the result of long consideration and general assent. And ‘have to’, as if it were a truth universally acknowledged that the case was to be abandoned, the man’s murder forgotten or quietly assigned to the realm of forgetting, that overcrowded land.
A Patta who had never existed might have said, ‘I’m being threatened into silencing you, and the thought of losing my job or being hurt fills me with such fear that I will do whatever I can to corrupt the system of justice and stop you from doing your job, just to keep myself safe.’ This phantom Patta’s voice was so real that it all but blocked out Signorina Elettra’s speaking one. Brunetti blinked a few times and drew his attention back in time to hear her ask, ‘. . . still report to you?’
‘Yes, of course,’ he answered, as if he had heard the first half of her question. ‘I’ll go on as though I were in charge until I’m told otherwise.’
‘And then?’ she asked.
‘And then I’ll see who he puts in charge and either help that person or else continue to do things on my own.’ It was not necessary to name the person whose appointment would lead to the latter possibility: even in an organization that did not often hunger and thirst for justice’s sake, Lieutenant Scarpa’s contempt for it was noteworthy. Some of the other commissari were unlikely to achieve success in a case that presented difficulties or complexities, but under the direction of a competent magistrate, they would at least make an attempt to apprehend the guilty and would be handicapped only by inexperience or lack of imagination. Scarpa, however, knew no motivation save self-advancement, and even a whisper from his superior – or from forces Brunetti was reluctant to name – that the case not be pursued would suffice to guarantee its doom.
Luckily, the case could not be given to Scarpa, still only a lieutenant, in spite of all of Patta’s efforts to have him promoted. A commissario would still be the chief police officer in charge of the investigation, though nothing could prevent Patta, should he choose to do so, from assigning Scarpa to the case, as well.
‘If only we didn’t have to worry about him,’ Brunetti said, knowing it was unnecessary to pronounce Scarpa’s name and bemused to hear himself sounding so much like an English king trying to resolve a personnel problem.
Her smile began in her eyes, then progressed across the rest of her face. Finally she said, ‘Don’t tempt me, sir.’
‘Only in the sense of transferring him, Signorina,’ he said with exaggerated emphasis, never quite sure where his suggestions might take her.
She gazed out of the window in contemplation of the fa?ade of the church of San Lorenzo. ‘Ah,’ she breathed in a sigh that seemed to go on for ever, and then silence. She tilted her head to one side, as if adjusting her vision to the contemplation of some object only she could see, and then at last she smiled.
‘The Interpol class on technological surveillance,’ she said.
Amazed, Brunetti asked, ‘The one in Lyon?’
‘Yes.’
‘But isn’t that open only to officers who have been selected by them, before they’re transferred to Interpol?’
‘Yes,’ she answered. ‘He’s been applying to Interpol for years.’
‘But always unsuccessfully, I thought.’
With her most minimal smile, Signorina Elettra remarked, ‘So long as Georges runs the personnel office there, Lieutenant Scarpa’s application will remain unsuccessful.’
‘Georges?’ Brunetti inquired, as if they had discovered they had the same accountant.
‘I was much younger then,’ she offered by way of explanation.
Brunetti, as if he understood exactly what this meant, said only, ‘Of course,’ and then, trying to reel her back, ‘Scarpa?’
She returned to the present and explained the future. ‘He could be invited to Lyon and do the course, but then when it’s finished, someone could discover that the invitation was meant to go to some other Lieutenant Scarpa.’
‘What other Lieutenant Scarpa?’ Brunetti asked.
‘I’ve no idea,’ she said impatiently. ‘Surely there must be a score of them in the police.’
‘And if there aren’t?’
‘Then surely there has to be a Lieutenant Scarpa in the Army, or the Carabinieri, or the Finanza or the Polizia di Frontiera.’
‘Don’t forget the Railway Police,’ Brunetti reminded her.
‘Thank you.’
‘How long does this course last?’ he asked.
‘Three weeks, I think.’
‘And Interpol will pay for it?’
‘Of course.’
‘Are you sure Georges will do it?’
If she had been an antinomian questioned about the importance of faith, she could have looked no more surprised, but still she did not deign to answer. When Brunetti said no more, she moved towards the door. Pausing there, she said, ‘J’appellerai Georges,’ and left.
Brunetti took the thought of who might be behind the warning given to Patta to a lunch of fellow police officials from the Veneto, and it kept him silent company as he talked amiably with his colleagues and listened to the usual speeches about the need to protect the social order from the forces which menaced it from all sides. Idly, Brunetti flipped over his menu and took a pen from his pocket. As the minutes – and then the quarter-hours – passed, he made a list of the concrete nouns that were most frequently invoked as well as any proposal for a specific course of action. As the second hour began, he had three nouns on his paper, ‘home’, ‘family’, and ‘security’, but no note of a specific project or plan beyond ‘decisive action’ and ‘swift intervention’. Why can we never talk in the concrete? he asked himself. Why must we always speak in generalities as glowing as they are meaningless?
Back in his office, Brunetti remembered that this was one of the days when Paola did not have to go back to the university after lunch, leaving her free to spend the afternoon at home, reading or commenting on student papers or, for all he knew, lying on the sofa and watching soap operas. How wonderful it would be, he thought, to have such a job. Five hours a week in the classroom, seven months a year, and the rest of the time free to read. Paola was expected to attend various faculty meetings and sit on two separate committees, though she had never succeeded in communicating to him just what it was these committees were meant to do, nor did she seem ever to attend the meetings.
He had once asked her, years ago, why she bothered to keep the job, and she had explained that, if nothing else, her active participation in classes exposed the students to at least one professor who did something more than stand in front of them and read from a textbook she had herself written some years before. At this accurate description of his own years at university, Brunetti realized how long he had harboured the hope that, at least in the humanities, these days things would somehow be different.
He looked over the papers on his desk, filled to the point of pain with the awareness that all he would do, if he were to remain in the office, would be to add to their quantity. He longed to be away from there: in the mountains, the tropics, some island where he could walk on the beach, ankle deep in warm water. He put out a hand to draw some papers towards him, a phantom hand rejecting the temptation to get up and leave. But after a while he realized how meaningless the words beneath his eyes were and gave in to his desire for freedom. Telling no one what he was doing, he left the Questura and took the first vaporetto to San Silvestro and home.
Biancat was open, so he went in and asked for a dozen irises. While the salesman was selecting them, Brunetti decided to take flowers to Chiara, as well, and asked for a dozen yellow tulips. When he got home, he went into the kitchen and set the tulips on the counter, then went down to Paola’s office, carrying the irises.
She smiled when he came in, refrained from asking why he was home so early, and said, ‘Guido, how sweet.’
Warmed by her smile and hoping for another, he said, ‘I brought some tulips for Chiara, too.’
Her smile disappeared. ‘Bad move,’ she said, getting to her feet. She kissed his cheek, and took the flowers from him.
‘What?’ he asked of her retreating back, following her towards the kitchen.
She started to remove the paper from the bouquet and said, ‘She read an article about the way they’re shipped all over the world.’
‘And?’ he asked, utterly at a loss.
‘And the article talked about how much fuel is consumed just in shipping them, then how much is consumed keeping the greenhouses warm in the winter, and how much fertilizer is used to nourish them and how it leaches into the soil.’ This said, she turned her attention to Chiara’s tulips, removed the paper wrapping, then bent to take out a dark brown vase. She filled it with water.
‘More eco-criminals?’ he asked ironically. ‘It sounds like she believes we’re surrounded by them.’
Paola slipped the tulips one by one into the vase, pausing after every few to see how they looked. She took a step back, the better to examine them, then drew close to the counter and finished arranging them. ‘It’s a valid position, I’d say,’ she answered calmly.
‘Does she seriously mean this?’ Brunetti demanded. ‘Now she’s declared war on flowers?’
Paola turned and placed a calming hand on his arm. ‘Don’t get so excited, Guido. And try to remember that she’s right.’ She pointed to the tulips. ‘These were probably grown in the Netherlands, shipped here by truck. They’ll last four or five days, then they’ll go into a plastic bag and into the garbage, and we’ll use more petroleum to burn them.’
‘That’s a terrible way to look at flowers,’ he insisted.
‘What would make it less terrible?’ she asked. ‘If the product were ugly? Plastic gondolas made in Hong Kong and flown here by air freight? Those dreadful masks?’
‘But they’re flowers, for heaven’s sake,’ he insisted, pointing at the vase as if demanding that the beauty of the flowers confirm his judgement or that they stand up straighter and defend themselves.
‘And we like flowers, and they’re beautiful, but the point I’m trying to make, Guido, is that they are no more necessary than are the plastic gondolas or the masks. We could just as easily live without them, but we choose to live with them, and because we do, we are forced to pay the ecological cost to get them here from wherever it is they come from.’ He thought she had stopped, then she added, ‘But we don’t mind, or we mind less, because they’re beautiful. So we persuade ourselves that it’s somehow different. Only it isn’t.’ Another moment’s pause and then she concluded, ‘Or so Chiara believes.’
Brunetti felt suddenly at sea, as though he had stepped into the shallow waters at the Alberoni and been swept off his feet by an invisible current. ‘She worries about the flowers, but she can still dismiss the death of a vu cumprà?’ he asked, fully conscious of how illogical a question it was but unwilling to stop himself from asking it.
Paola smiled as if to suggest she had already asked herself the same question. ‘I think she’s still too young for us to expect much consistency in her ideas, or in her ideals,’ she said.
‘What does that mean?’
‘Exactly what I said: she’s still a child in many ways, so she’s discovering all the fine and noble causes for the first time, and she still sees each one as a discrete unit: she hasn’t seen the connections or contradictions among them; not yet.’
She looked across at him, but he said nothing, merely stood there looking unconvinced, so she went on. ‘I remember when I was her age, Guido, and the causes I thought were good ones. I’m embarrassed by some of them now and positively ashamed of one or two.’
‘For instance?’ he asked, making no attempt to disguise his scepticism.
‘For instance the Red Brigades,’ she answered instantly, suddenly far more serious than she had been. ‘I’m ashamed now to remember what I thought of them, that they were idealists who wanted to bring about a revolution that would lead to social and political justice.’ She closed her eyes at the memory of the person she had been then.
Not without a certain discomfort, Brunetti recalled his own enthusiasm for the slogans and the professed ideals that had been in fashion then. ‘And now?’ he finally asked.
She tilted her head and shrugged, then said, ‘Now I think they were just a bunch of spoiled young people who wanted to attract the world’s attention and didn’t much care who they hurt or killed in the attempt. All suffering from protagonismo, all infected with the same disease of needing to be the centre of the world’s attention. And we gave them all the attention they wanted, and some of us gave them our praise and approval.’ She picked up the vase of tulips and walked towards the living room. ‘So if there’s a certain inconsistency in Chiara’s enthusiasms or beliefs, and if she repeats slogans or ideas she’s heard from other people, I think we have to be patient with her and hope she’ll come to her senses.’
‘The way we did?’ he asked, following her down the hall.
‘I think so.’
‘Have you said anything to her?’ Brunetti asked.
‘About what she said?’
‘Yes.’
‘No,’ Paola answered, stopping beside the narrow table that held a majolica bowl and a small marble bust of Hermes. ‘That’s not necessary.’ She set the flowers down to the left of the statue, moved the vase a few centimetres forward, then stepped back to admire it.
‘What do you mean, it’s not necessary?’ he asked, making no attempt to disguise his disapproval.
Paola looked at him. ‘She knows what she said was wrong, and she’s been thinking about it since she said it. Or, rather, since I jumped on her for saying it. But she hasn’t finished thinking about it yet, and when she does, she’ll say something.’
Brunetti folded his arms and asked, ‘And you’re not only the earth mother? In your spare time you double as a mind-reader?’
Paola smiled and waved him out of her way. Heading back to the kitchen, she said over her shoulder, ‘Something like that.’
He followed, reluctant to acknowledge his conviction that she was right. He compromised by asking, ‘And what about the flowers?’ nodding with his chin at the irises, which she had begun to slip into the tall blue vase she always used for them.
‘When I’m finished putting them into the vase, I’ll put them in my study, and then anyone who sees them will enjoy looking at them.’
‘And if she says something?’ he asked.
‘I’ll tell her I agree entirely with her principles, but that you brought them to me, so she will have to address her comments or criticisms to you.’
He laughed, opened the door to the cabinet under the sink, and stuffed the wrappers into the garbage. ‘You really are a snake, Paola,’ he said, not without admiration.
‘Yes, I know,’ she agreed. ‘It’s a form of adaptive behaviour forced upon me by the nature of my work.’
‘Me too,’ he said, then asked, ‘Shall we go and have a coffee?’
She slid the vase of irises to one side of the counter and stepped back to admire them. ‘Yes, if we can go to Tonolo and have un cigno. And while we’re over there, we could go to San Barnaba and see if they have any of that good bread.’
It would take, he calculated, more than an hour. First a cream-filled swan and a coffee at Tonolo, then the walk to Campo San Barnaba and the store that sold the good cheese and the bread from Puglia. He had fled his office in search of peace and quiet, seeking some evidence that sanity still existed in a world of violence and crime, and his wife suggested they spend an hour eating pastry and buying a loaf of bread. He leaped at the chance.
As they walked, occasionally stopping to say hello to people they met or to look into shop windows, he told her about Patta’s warning and what he thought it might mean. She listened, saying nothing, until they had had their cream-filled swans and coffee and were on the way to Campo San Barnaba.
‘You think he’s afraid for his job or for his life?’ she asked, then added, ‘or his family?’
Brunetti stopped at the first of the two produce-filled boats moored to the riva, then moved on to the second. Ignoring Patta for the moment, they discussed dinner and bought a dozen artichokes and a kilo of Fuji apples. As they moved away, Brunetti returned to Paola’s question and said, ‘I’m not sure, only that he’s frightened.’
‘Could be any one of them, then,’ she said, turning into the store. Ten minutes later, they emerged with an entire loaf of the Pugliese bread, a wedge of pecorino, and a jar of the pesto sauce the owner swore was the best in the city.
‘What do you think?’ she asked in a voice so level he had no idea if she was talking about the pesto or the reason for Patta’s fear. He waited, knowing his silence would prod her to explain. ‘You know him better than I do,’ she finally said, ‘so I thought you’d be able to sense which it is, his job or his safety.’
Brunetti thought about this for some time and finally admitted, ‘No, nothing more than that he’s very frightened.’
‘If you keep going, you’ll find out,’ she volunteered.
‘Investigating, you mean?’
She stopped and looked at him, surprised. ‘I assumed you’d continue to investigate, no matter what he said. What I meant was if you continue to let him know that you’re doing it.’
‘I’ll try to see that he doesn’t find out,’ Brunetti said.
‘To spare his feelings?’
Brunetti laughed. ‘No, to spare my job.’
‘He can’t fire you, can he?’ she asked, and he could already see her marshalling the forces of her family and their network of connections.
Brunetti considered this, then answered, ‘No, I don’t think he could do that on his own. But he could suggest that I be transferred. That’s the usual way of getting rid of people.’
‘What sort of people?’ she asked.
Walking at her side, he occasionally fell back a step to allow others to pass them on the narrow calli. ‘Inconvenient people,’ he answered finally.
‘Which means?’
‘People who ask questions and who try to prevent the entire system from becoming hopelessly corrupt,’ he said, surprising himself with his own seriousness.
She reached and took his arm and tucked it under her own. He had no idea if the gesture was a request for help or an offer to provide it. It didn’t much matter to him which it was.