Signorina Elettra had found the name of the riding school near Preganziol, not far from Treviso. Using the internet as though he were an adept, he found the phone number, and, horses on his mind, typed in ‘dressage’ and read a general description of the sport, though he found it difficult to think of it as such. The grace and elegance of the horses and their riders reminded him of ballet. But art belonged to humans, didn’t it, not to animals?
He read quickly, growing more and more interested as he learned more. There were the top hats, white saddle blankets, boots, jackets, braided manes and flash nosebands: endless paraphernalia for man and beast. He studied a chart of the various tests imposed upon horse and rider, saw how they could move at an angle while appearing to move straight forward, looked at photos and prints of ‘capriole ’ and ‘levade ’. When he read that one of his favourite writers, Xenophon, had written about the systematic training of the horse, he knew he had been right to find it interesting.
He went back to Google and added ‘Claudia Griffoni’ to ‘dressage’, curious to see what he would find. A silver medal, as it turned out. Griffoni had won it for the Italian Olympic Team eighteen years before. In all of the time they had worked together, she had never mentioned much about her past, had definitely never spoken about horses, yet here she was, a silver medallist. His first thought was how important it was that this be kept from Patta, who was sure to tell Scarpa about it, a possibility that rendered Brunetti nervous.
Like many men on the force, Scarpa didn’t like women, although in his case it would be closer to the truth to say he disliked them. He went out of his way to show his disrespect for Signorina Elettra; she countered by ignoring him unless he addressed her directly, when the sweetness of some of the responses Brunetti had heard her give the Lieutenant had caused his insulin level to rise.
The Lieutenant especially didn’t like women with authority. He made a point of being slow to acknowledge any orders he received from Griffoni, but eventually he had no choice but to obey them, and her. Signorina Elettra, on the other hand, was, in the end, only a secretary, and he was a Lieutenant of police, and so it set his universe on end to have to do what she told him to do. Even now, he refused to believe that his patron, Vice-Questore Giuseppe Patta, was completely in thrall to her powers and abilities and would, if asked to choose, happily chop up his Lieutenant for bait, should that be necessary to maintain his rapport with his secretary.
Better that a man with opinions such as these floating around in his head not learn that Commissario Griffoni not only knew how to ride a horse, but rode it in something as frivolous as dressage and, worse, had won an Olympic medal doing so. Brunetti feared that learning this might well unhinge the Lieutenant.
Brunetti dialled the number of the school and introduced himself, explaining that he was calling about someone who had kept a horse there fifteen years before and would like to speak to anyone who might have worked there at that time.
The woman who answered the phone said, ‘It’s Signora Enrichetta you need to talk to.’
‘And she is?’ Brunetti asked.
‘The owner. Now, that is. She took over when her husband died. She’s the only person who might know.’
‘Is she there?’
‘She might be out in the ring. Could you call back in ten minutes?’ she asked.
‘I’ll wait, if you don’t mind,’ Brunetti said, life having given him long experience of those ten minutes, after which too often no one was there to answer the phone when he called again.
‘All right,’ she said and set the phone down. Brunetti put his own phone face up on the desk and grabbed a stack of papers. Most of them concerned new regulations from the Ministry. One specified how officers were to secure their weapons at home: the gun in one locked box and the ammunition in another, the gun to be left unloaded at all times when it was in the house.
He had been reading similar regulations, it seemed, for decades. Yet often he read newspaper accounts of the children of officers who managed to get their hands on their parents’ guns and shoot some other member of the family, or themselves. Nothing more terrible, nothing more true.
The next contained new regulations for parking a service car when the officer driving it was not in service. Curious, Brunetti leafed through it, not to read the text but to see how many pages it was. Four. He set it aside.
He heard a voice speaking from the receiver on his desk. ‘Sì ?’ he answered.
‘Are you the policeman?’ a woman asked.
‘Yes. Are you Signora Enrichetta?’
‘Yes. My helper wasn’t too clear about the message. Could you tell me who you are and what it is you’d like?’
‘My name is Brunetti: I’m a commissario in Venice. I’m calling to get information about a girl who kept a horse at your stable about fifteen years ago.’
‘And you expect me to remember?’ she asked, but with amused surprise and not with the certainty that she would not remember.
‘I hope so,’ Brunetti said in his friendliest manner. ‘The girl’s name is Manuela Lando-Continui. Though she’s a woman now.’
‘Ah,’ she said, and then, ‘Manuela. Poor thing. I know about her. My husband liked her a great deal.’