Blood from a stone

21

Like most Italians, Brunetti had mixed feelings about Rome. As a city he loved it, himself a willing victim of the excess of its beauty, in no way reluctant to admit that its majesty equalled that of his own city. As a metonym, however, he viewed it with jaundiced suspicion as the source of most of what was filthy and corrupt in his country. Power resided there, power gone mad, like a ferret at the taste of blood. Even as this exaggerated abhorrence registered, his more logical self told him how mistaken it was: surely his career had revealed to him the countless honest bureaucrats and officials who worked there; and surely there were politicians who were motivated by something other than greed and personal vanity. Surely there were.
He looked at his watch, unwilling to let himself continue along this too familiar train of thought. It was long after noon, so he called Paola and said he was just leaving, would take the vaporetto, but not to wait lunch for him. She said only that of course they would wait and hung up.
When he emerged from the Questura, it had begun to rain heavily, sheets of it skidding almost horizontally across the surface of the canal in front of the building. He noticed one of the new pilots just stepping on to the deck of his launch and called out, still huddled at the entrance, ‘Foa, which way are you going?’
The man turned back towards him and looked – even at this distance – guilty. This prompted Brunetti to add, ‘I don’t care if you’re going home to lunch, just tell me which way.’
Foa’s face seemed to relax and he called back, ‘Up towards Rialto, sir, so I can take you home.’
Brunetti pulled the collar of his coat over his head and made a dash for the boat. Foa had raised the canvas cover, so Brunetti chose to stay on deck with him: if they were going to abuse the power of office by using a police boat for private transportation, then they had better do it together.
Foa dropped him at the end of Calle Tiepolo, but even though the tall buildings on either side offered some protection from the rain, his coat was soaked by the time he reached the front door of the building. In the entrance hall, he took it off and shook it, spattering water all around. As he climbed the stairs, he could feel the dampness seeping through the wool of his jacket, and the sound of repeated squelching told him, even before he looked, that his shoes were sodden.
He had removed his shoes and hung up his coat and jacket before he became conscious of the warmth or the scent of his home, and when both penetrated, he finally allowed himself to relax. They must have heard him come in, for Paola called out a greeting as he went down the corridor to the kitchen.
When he entered, shoeless, he found a stranger at his table: a young girl sat in Raffi’s place. She got to her feet as he came into the kitchen. Chiara said, ‘This is my friend, Azir Mahani.’
‘Hello,’ Brunetti said and put out his hand.
The girl looked at him, at his hand, and then at Chiara, who said, ‘Shake his hand, silly. He’s my father.’
The girl leaned forward, but she did so stiffly, and put out her hand as if suspecting Brunetti might not give it back. He took it and held it briefly, as though it were a kitten, a particularly fragile one. He was curious about her shyness but said nothing more than hello and that he was glad she could join them for lunch.
He waited for the girl to seat herself, but she seemed to be waiting for him. Chiara reached up and yanked at the bottom of the girl’s sweater, saying, ‘Oh, sit down, Azir. He’s going to eat his lunch, not you.’ The girl blushed and sat down. She looked at her plate.
Seeing this, Chiara got up and went over to Brunetti. ‘Azir, look,’ she said. As soon as she had her friend’s attention, Chiara bent down and stared directly into Brunetti’s eyes, saying, ‘I am going to hypnotize you with the power of my gaze and put you into a deep sleep.’
Instantly, Brunetti closed his eyes.
‘Are you asleep?’ Chiara asked.
‘Yes,’ Brunetti said in a sleepy voice, letting his head fall forward on his chest. Paola, who had had no time to greet Brunetti, turned back to the stove and continued filling four dishes with pasta.
Before she spoke again, Chiara made a business of waving her open hand back and forth in front of Brunetti’s eyes, to show Azir that he was really asleep. She leaned down and spoke into his left ear, dragging out the final syllable in every word. ‘Who is the most wonderful daughter in the whole world?’
Brunetti, keeping his eyes closed, mumbled something.
Chiara gave him an irritated glance, bent even closer and asked, ‘Who is the most wonderful daughter in the whole world?’
Brunetti fluttered his eyelids, indicating that the question had finally registered. In a voice he made intentionally indistinct, he began, speaking as slowly as had Chiara, ‘The most wonderful daughter in the world is . . .’
Chiara, triumph at hand, stepped back to hear the magic name.
Brunetti raised his head, opened his eyes, and said, ‘Is Azir,’ but as a consolation prize, he grabbed Chiara and pulled her close, kissing her on the ear. Paola chose this moment to turn from the stove and say, ‘Chiara, would you be a wonderful daughter and help serve?’
As Chiara set a dish of pappardelle with porcini in front of Brunetti, he sneaked a glance across the table at Azir, relieved to see she had survived the ordeal of being mentioned by name.
Chiara took her place and picked up her fork. Suddenly she looked suspiciously at her pasta and said, ‘There isn’t any ham in this, is there, Mamma?’
Surprised, Paola said, ‘Of course not. Never, with porcini.’ Then, ‘Why do you ask?’
‘Because Azir can’t eat it.’ Hearing this, Brunetti consciously kept his eyes on his own daughter and did not glance at the most wonderful one in the whole world.
‘Of course she can’t, Chiara. I know that.’ Then, to Azir, ‘I hope you like lamb, Azir. I thought we’d have broiled lamb chops.’
‘Yes, Signora,’ Azir said, the first words she had spoken since what Brunetti had come to think of as her ordeal began. There was a trace of an accent, but only a trace.
‘I was going to try to make fessenjoon,’ Paola said, ‘but then I thought your mother probably makes it much better than I could, so I decided to stick with the chops.’
‘You know about fessenjoon?’ Azir asked, her face brightening.
Paola smiled around a mouthful of pappardelle. ‘Well, I’ve made it once or twice, but it’s hard to find the right spices here, and especially the pomegranate juice.’
‘Oh, my mother has some bottles my aunt brought her. I’m sure she’d give you one,’ Azir said, and as her face took on animation, Brunetti saw how lovely she was: sharp nose, almond eyes, and two wings of the blackest hair he had ever seen swinging down alongside her jaw.
‘Oh, that would be lovely. Then maybe you could come and help me cook it,’ Paola said.
‘I’d like that,’ Azir said. ‘I’ll ask my mother to write it down, the recipe.’
‘I can’t read Farsi, I’m afraid,’ Paola said in what sounded very much like an apologetic tone.
‘Would English be all right?’ Azir asked.
‘Of course,’ Paola said, then looked around the table. ‘Would anyone like more pasta?’
When no one volunteered, she started to reach for the plates, but Azir got to her feet and cleared the table without being asked. She attached herself to Paola at the counter and happily carried the platter of lamb to the table, then a large bowl of rice and after that a platter of grilled radicchio.
‘How is it that your mother speaks English?’ Paola asked.
‘She taught it at the university in Esfahan,’ Azir said. ‘Until we left.’
Though the word hung in the air, no one asked Azir why her family had decided to leave or if, in fact, it had been their decision.
The girl had eaten very little of her pasta, but she dug into the lamb and rice with a vigour that even Chiara found hard to match. Brunetti watched the tiny curved bones pile up on the sides of the plates of the two girls, marvelled at the mounds of rice that seemingly evaporated as soon as they got within a centimetre of their forks.
After a time, Paola took both the platter and the bowl back to the sink and refilled them, leaving Brunetti impressed at how she had foreseen this adolescent plague of locusts. Azir, after saying that she had never eaten radicchio and had no idea what it was, allowed Paola to pile some on her plate. While no one was watching, it disappeared.
When offers of more food met with honest protests, Paola and Azir cleared the table, and Paola handed the girl smaller plates and fruit dishes. Then she opened the refrigerator and pulled out a large bowl of chopped fruit.
Paola asked who wanted macedonia, and Azir asked, ‘Why is it called that, Dottoressa?’
‘I think because of the country, Macedonia, which is made up of small groups of people who have been all cut up and segmented. But I’m not sure.’ She turned to Chiara and, as was usual in such situations, said, ‘Get the Zanichelli, Chiara.’
Because the dictionary was now kept in Chiara’s room, she disappeared and returned with the heavy volume. She opened the book and started flipping pages, muttering under her breath as she went: ‘macchia’, ‘macchiare’, ‘macedone’, until she finally found the right place and read out, ‘Macedonia’, and the origin, proving Paola’s guess correct. After that her voice dropped into the mumble of a person reading to herself. She slid her plate to one side and replaced it with the open book. Then, as if the other people at the table had evaporated along with the rice, she began to read the other entries on the page.
Azir finished her fruit, refused a second helping, and got to her feet saying, ‘May I help you with the dishes, Signora?’
Brunetti pushed back his chair and went into the living room, thinking that perhaps he had been mistaken about Chiara all these years and Azir really was the most wonderful daughter in the whole world.
When Paola came in about half an hour later, Brunetti asked, ‘Do you want to say it or shall I?’
‘What, that she can say, “only a vu cumprà ”, at the same time she can be concerned that her Muslim friend isn’t served pork?’ Paola asked as she sat down beside him. She set a book and her glasses to one side of the low table in front of them.
Brunetti might not have phrased it this way, but nevertheless he answered, ‘Yes, I suppose so.’
‘She’s an adolescent, Guido.’
‘And that means?’
Absently, Paola pulled a cushion from behind her and tossed it on to the table, then kicked off her shoes and put up her feet. ‘It means that the only constant in her life is that she’s inconsistent. If enough people approve of an idea or an opinion, then she’s likely to think it’s a reasonable proposition; if enough people object, then she’ll probably reconsider it and perhaps change her mind. And because of her age, there’s all that adolescent static flying around in her head, so it’s difficult for her to think straight for a long time without worrying what her friends will think of her for saying or doing what she does.’ She paused, then said, ‘Or, for that matter, for wearing or eating or drinking or liking or listening to or watching what she does.’
‘But isn’t she aware of the inconsistency?’ he asked doggedly.
‘Between attending to one foreigner’s needs and casually dismissing the death of another?’ Paola inquired, again phrasing it bluntly.
‘Yes.’
Adjusting to a more comfortable position, Paola leaned her shoulder up against his chest. ‘She knows Azir, likes her, so she’s real to Chiara: the black man was a faceless stranger,’ Paola said, then added, ‘And she’s probably still too young to be affected by how beautiful they are.’
‘By what?’ asked Brunetti.
‘By how beautiful they are,’ Paola repeated.
‘The vu cumprà?’ Brunetti asked with open surprise.
‘Beautiful,’ Paola repeated. She watched Brunetti’s face and then asked, ‘Have you ever looked at them, Guido? Really looked? They’re beautiful men: tall and straight and in perfect shape, and many of them have the sort of faces you see on carvings.’ When he still looked unpersuaded, she asked, ‘Would you prefer to look at fat tourists in shorts?’
Accepting that he was not going to answer, she went back to the original subject. ‘It’s also about class, I think, much as I don’t like to say it.’
‘Class?’ he asked, still puzzling over the idea of the beauty of the Africans.
‘Azir’s parents are professionals. The black man was a street pedlar.’
‘Is it better or worse if that’s the reason she said it?’ asked a genuinely confused Brunetti.
Paola gave this a great deal of thought and finally answered. ‘I’d say it’s better, in a perverse sort of way.’
‘Why?’
‘Because it’s more easily corrected.’
‘I’m lost,’ Brunetti confessed, which was often the case when Paola’s mind moved to consideration of the abstract.
‘Think of it this way, Guido: if it’s based on the difference in race, thinking that one race is superior, then it’s lodged in some inner space in her mind, some atavistic place where sweet reason is unlikely to penetrate. But if it’s based on the belief that people are better than others because they have more money or are better educated, then she’s bound sooner or later to encounter enough counter-examples of this to see how ridiculous the idea is.’
‘Should we point it out to her?’ he asked, dreading her answer.
‘No,’ Paola’s response was instant. ‘She’s intelligent, so she’ll figure this one out by herself.’ When Brunetti said nothing, Paola added, ‘If we’re lucky, and she is, too, then she’ll figure both out.’
‘Because you did?’ Brunetti had never been satisfied with any explanation she had ever given him of how a person from a family as limitlessly wealthy as hers could have ended up with social and economic ideas so different from those of her class and most of her relatives.
‘It was easier for me, I think,’ Paola said. ‘Because I never actually believed it. There was never any suggestion, when I was growing up, that we were better than other people. Different, for sure: it would have been hard to disguise that, with all that money washing around.’ She turned to him and tilted her head to one side, the way she did when new ideas sneaked up on her. ‘You know, Guido, hard as this will be for you to believe, I think it never occurred to me – at least when I was young – that we really were rich. After all, my father went off to work every day, just like everybody else’s: we didn’t have a car; we didn’t go on expensive vacations. But it was more than that, I think,’ she said, and he turned to watch the play of thought on her face as she worked this out.
‘It was more a question of what was approved of or disapproved of, sort of without saying. At home, I mean. What I learned to be important about people.’
‘Give me an example,’ he said.
‘The worst, I think – the worst disapproval, that is – was of people who didn’t work. It didn’t much matter to my parents what work a person did, whether they ran a bank or a workshop: the important thing was that they worked and that they thought their work was important.’
Paola pulled away and turned to face him. ‘I think that’s why my father has always liked you so much, Guido, because your work is so important to you.’
Discussion of Paola’s father, his likes and dislikes, always made Brunetti faintly edgy, so he turned back to the matter at hand. ‘And Chiara?’
‘She’ll be all right,’ Paola said with what Brunetti suspected she forced to sound like certainty. Then, after a long pause, she added, ‘At first, I thought I’d reacted too strongly to what she said about him, but now I think I was right.’
‘Better than hitting her, at any rate,’ Brunetti said.
‘And probably more effective,’ Paola added. She leaned back against him and said, ‘We’ll just have to wait and see.’
‘See what?’
‘How she turns out,’ Paola said and reached forward to pick up her glasses and her book.