Paola must have heard him, for she uncovered her eyes and looked at him. ‘Pucetti came to the university. He appeared at the back of the classroom where I was teaching. In his uniform. With a terrible look on his face.’
Ah, faithful, dutiful Pucetti, trying to amend things by bringing the real news, the good news, to his commander’s wife. Brunetti could imagine the scene: the pale-faced officer at the door, distress written plain across his face.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
‘I thought you were dead, Guido,’ Paola said in a ravaged voice. ‘I thought that was why he’d come, to tell me that you’d been killed. By someone who was trying to rob a bank or some crazy person who had a hostage. I saw him, and I knew for an instant that you were dead.’ Her voice was hoarse, and the words came out with rough edges, as though she had been screaming for hours.
Paola had not cried, he saw; there were no traces of that around her eyes. She was a woman who lived in her imagination, who immediately turned what she saw into stories, who caught a person’s expression and made up what had happened to them, and she believed in tragedy. She lived a happy life, but her vision of life was tragic.
‘And then what happened?’ he asked, still on his guard.
‘And then he smiled and held up his thumb to show me things were all right. I still didn’t know what had happened, but he was telling me not to worry.’ Paola stopped and breathed deeply a few times.
Brunetti waited.
‘I looked back at the students. Some of them were turned around, watching Pucetti; the others started to talk.’ She raised her right hand in a gesture that could have signified anything. ‘So I told them class was over.’
Brunetti nodded. That made sense, letting them go, not pretending that she’d be able to concentrate any longer.
‘You’d think they’d never seen a policeman before,’ she said in something that approached her normal voice.
Brunetti looked down and saw that his feet were naked. Where had his shoes gone? He urgently wanted to be wearing them, to be able to joke with his wife, to sit in his office and be bored.
‘When they were gone, Pucetti came across to my desk and told me that it was all an act, done to protect him. I had no idea what he was talking about, and I don’t think I really understand it now, either.’
Brunetti walked to the chair standing against the wall and brought it back for her. He touched her then, holding her shoulders and guiding her to the chair as though she were an old woman and needed help.
‘Tell me what you’ve done, please,’ she asked, the same request that had accompanied her dramatic entrance into the room, but, oh, so different now.
‘I was questioning a suspect together with Pucetti. All of a sudden, Pucetti lost control of himself. I thought he was going to grab the guy’s throat. So I jumped up to block him and cause confusion – I really didn’t think about it – and a few minutes later, I was lying on the floor with Pucetti giving me CPR and Scarpa looking down at me.’
‘You think Scarpa understood what had happened?’ she asked.
‘God knows,’ Brunetti answered. ‘I was on the floor with Pucetti pumping away at my heart, so I didn’t have a clear vision of what was going on.’ Brunetti cast his mind back over the Lieutenant’s behaviour and said, ‘He was worried, but I’m not sure about what.’ How difficult, to think the Lieutenant could have felt concern for him. Perhaps Pucetti would know: after all, he had seen Scarpa’s face and had spoken to him.
‘Next thing, Patta will be sending you flowers.’
‘I think I’m going to let him,’ Brunetti said.
‘What?’ she asked.
‘I think I’m going to keep this.’
‘Keep what?’ she asked, clearly not understanding.
‘This thing. Collapse. Sickness. Attack. Whatever it was.’
‘Or wasn’t,’ Paola corrected him.
Brunetti smiled. Life was good again: his wife could joke with him.
‘I can’t stand it any longer, doing what I do,’ Brunetti surprised himself by saying. ‘I had to fake all this and end up here in the hospital, with doctors prodding and poking at me, just because I have to protect the people I work with from reacting to the work they do.’ He had never spoken this aloud, never thought it out in this fashion before.
He leaned against the mattress, glad to have its solidity behind him. Brunetti wanted, even though he was speaking to the one person he trusted without reserve, not to have to explain anything more. He was tired of the whole thing.
‘It sounds like you want to run away,’ she said, trying to make it sound like a joke.
Brunetti nodded.
She looked at him the same way the doctor had, even tilting her head at the same angle to study him. He watched his response mirrored in her face: her eyes widened and she glanced away. Her lips grew tight as they sometimes did when she was reading a difficult text. Experience had taught him that he had no option save to give her time to study the text, wait and see what she would decide.
The door to the room opened, but neither of them bothered to look to see who it was. Silence. The person retreated and the door closed.
She studied his face for a long time before she asked, ‘Are you sure?’ Then, as though she wanted to be sure they were talking about the same thing, she added, ‘Run away from home?’
His soul knew that she was his home. ‘In a way,’ he admitted, shocked at how it must sound to her. ‘Not from you. Not from the kids. But from all of the rest.’ To make the distinction clear, he waved at the room in which they found themselves, as though asking her to see it as evidence of everything he was talking about.
‘I‘ve been thinking about it for a long time,’ Brunetti continued, discovering truth as he spoke it. ‘I need not to have to do this work for a while. Not think about it and not do it, and not end up in a hospital because a suspect said something offensive about a girl.’
‘What girl?’ Paola asked.
‘A girl who was given pills at a party and who died here last night,’ he said, remembering where the girl must be.
Paola let some time pass, the way people do when they hear of an unknown person’s death. Finally she said, ‘If you shot Patta for every offensive thing he’s said, he’d look like Swiss cheese.’ She smiled; Brunetti’s life straightened out and returned to its normal course.
‘Pucetti’s young,’ he explained.
‘It’s a while since he was the bright young recruit, Guido. He’s in his thirties now.’ Brunetti wondered if she would draw her conclusion, and she did. ‘He should be able to control himself, Guido. He carries a gun, for God’s sake.’