Fatal Remedies (23 page)

‘And’, Morosini continued, ‘Dottoressa Filomena Santa Lucia and her husband, Luigi Bernardi.’ The second couple placed their glasses next to the others and extended their hands. The same compliments flowed back and forth. This time, Brunetti registered a sort of tactile reluctance on both their parts to allow their hands to be held overlong by strangers. He also noticed that, though they spoke to both him and Paola, they spent far more time observing her. The woman was dark-eyed and had the air of one who believed herself to be far prettier than she was. The man spoke with the elided R of Milano.

Clara’s voice called out from behind them,
‘A tavola, a tavola, ragazzi’
and Giovanni led them into the next room, where a long oval table stood parallel to a bank of tall windows that looked across at the buildings on the other side of the
campo.

Clara appeared from the kitchen then, head enveloped in a cloud of vapour rising from a tureen that she carried in front of her like a votive offering. Brunetti could smell broccoli and anchovies, and remembered just how hungry he was.

Conversation during the pasta course was general, the sort of delicate jockeying that always goes on when eight people who really aren’t sure of where sympathies lie try to settle what the topics of interest are. Brunetti was struck, as he had been frequently and strongly in recent years, by the absence of talk about politics. He wasn’t sure if no one cared any more or if the subject had simply become too inflammable to permit strangers to attempt it. Regardless of the cause, it had joined religion in some sort of conversational gulag where no one any longer dared, or cared, to go.

Dottor Rotgeiger was explaining, in Italian Brunetti thought was quite good, the problems he was having at the Ufficio Stranieri in getting permission to prolong his stay in Venice for another year. Each time he went, he was assailed by self-proclaimed ‘agents’ who lingered by the long lines and said they could help speed up the paperwork.

Brunetti accepted a second helping of pasta and said nothing.

By the time the fish course began - an enormous boiled branzino that must have been half a metre long - conversation had passed to Dottoressa Santa Lucia, a cultural anthropologist who had just returned from a long research trip to Indonesia, where she had spent a year studying familial power structures.

Though she directed her remarks at the entire table, Brunetti could see that her eyes were most often directed at Paola. ‘You have to understand’, she said, not quite smiling but with the satisfied look of one who was able to grasp the subtlety of an alien culture, ‘that the family structure is based upon the preservation of same. That is, everything must be done to keep the family intact, even if it means the sacrifice of its least important members.’

‘As defined by whom?’ Paola asked, taking a tiny piece of fish bone from her mouth and placing it with excessive care at the side of her plate.

‘That’s a very interesting question,’ Dottoressa Santa Lucia said in exactly the tone she must have used when explaining the same thing hundreds of times to her students. ‘But I think this is one of the few cases where the social judgements of their very complex and sophisticated culture agree with our own more simplistic view.’ She paused, waiting for someone to ask for clarification.

Bettina Rotgeiger complied: ‘In what way the same?’

‘In that we agree on who they are, the least important members of the society.’ Having said this, the dottoressa paused and, seeing that she had the full attention of everyone at the table, took a small sip of wine while they awaited her answer.

‘Let me guess,’ Paola interrupted, smiling, her chin propped in her open palm, her fish forgotten below her. ‘Young girls?’

After a brief pause, Dottoressa Santa Lucia said, ‘Exactly,’ giving no sign that she was disconcerted at having had her thunder stolen. ‘Do you find that strange?’

‘Not in the least,’ Paola answered, smiled again, and returned her attention to her branzino.

‘Yes,’ the anthropologist continued, ‘in a certain sense, societal norms being what they are, they’re expendable, given that more of them are born than most families can support and the fact that male children are far more desirable.’ She looked around to see how this went down and added with a haste she made obvious was caused by fear that she had somehow offended their rigidly Western sensibilities, ‘In their terms, of course, thinking as they do. After all, who else will provide for aged parents?’

Brunetti picked up the bottle of Chardonnay and leaned across the table to fill Paola’s glass, then filled his own. Their eyes met; she gave him a small smile and a smaller nod.

‘I think it’s necessary that we see this issue through their eyes, that we try to consider it as they do, at least so far as our own cultural prejudices will allow us to do so,’ Dottoressa Santa Lucia proclaimed and was gone for some minutes, explaining the need to expand our vision so as to encompass cultural differences and give to them the respect that was earned by having been developed over the course of many millennia to respond to the specific needs of diverse societies.

After a while that Brunetti measured as the time it took him to finish a refill of wine and eat his helping of boiled potatoes, she finished, picked up her glass and smiled, as if waiting for the appreciative members of her class to approach the podium to tell her how illuminating the lecture had been. A lengthening pause stretched out and was at last broken by Paola, who said, ‘Clara, let me help you carry these plates into the kitchen.’ Brunetti was not the only person who breathed a sigh of relief.

* * * *

Later, on the way home, Brunetti asked, ‘Why did you let her go?’

Beside him Paola shrugged.

‘No, why? Tell me.’

‘Too easy,’ Paola said dismissively. ‘It was obvious from the beginning that she wanted to get me to talk about it, about why I did it. Why else would she bring up all that nonsense about girls being expendable?’

Brunetti walked beside her, her elbow tucked into the angle of his arm. He nodded. ‘Maybe she believed it.’ They walked a few more paces, considering this, then he said, ‘I always hate to see women like that.’

‘Like what?’

‘Who don’t like women.’ They walked a few more steps. ‘Can you imagine what a class of hers must be like?’ Before Paola could answer he continued, ‘She’s so sure of everything she says, so absolutely certain she’s found the single truth.’ He paused for a moment. ‘And imagine what it would be like to have her on your exam committee. Differ from her on anything and there goes your chance for a degree.’

‘Not that anyone would want one in cultural anthropology, anyway.’ Paola remarked.

He laughed out loud and in complete agreement. As they turned into their
calle
he slowed his steps, then stopped and turned her so that she was facing him. ‘Thank you, Paola,’ he said.

‘For what?’ she asked in feigned innocence.

‘For avoiding combat.’

‘It would have ended up with her asking me why I let myself get arrested and I don’t think she’s anyone I want to talk about that with.’

‘Stupid cow,’ Brunetti muttered.

‘That’s a sexist remark,’ Paola observed.

‘Yes, isn’t it?’

* * * *

19

Their foray into society left them both wanting no more of it, so they resumed their policy of refusing invitations of any sort. Though both Paola and Brunetti chafed under the restriction of staying home night after night and Raffi seemed to find their continued presence worthy of ironic comment, Chiara loved having them there every evening and insisted on engaging them in card games, watching endless television programmes about animals and initiated a Monopoly tournament that threatened to stretch into the new year.

Each day, Paola went off to the university and Brunetti to his office at the Questura. For the first time in their careers, they were glad of the endless mountains of paperwork created by the Byzantine state which employed them both.

Because of Paola’s involvement with the case, Brunetti made up his mind not to attend Mitri’s funeral, something he ordinarily would have done. Two days after it, he decided to read again through the lab and scene-of-crime reports of Mitri’s murder, as well as Rizzardi’s four-page report on the autopsy. It took him a good part of the morning to get through them all, and the process left him wondering why it was that both his professional and his personal life seemed to be so much taken up with going over the same things again and again. During his temporary exile from the Questura he had finished rereading Gibbon and was currently tackling Herodotus, and for when that was finished, he had the
Iliad
ready at hand. All the deaths, all the lives cut short by violence.

He took the autopsy report and went down to Signorina Elettra’s office, where he found her looking like the antidote to everything he’d just been thinking about. She wore a jacket redder than any he had ever seen and a white silk-crepe blouse open to the second button. Strangely enough, she was doing nothing when he came in, simply sitting at her desk, chin lodged in one palm, staring out of the window towards San Lorenzo, a sliver of which was visible in the distance.

‘Are you all right, Signorina?’ he asked when he saw her.

She sat up and smiled. ‘Of course, Commissario. I was just wondering about a painting.’

‘A painting?’

‘Uh huh,’ she said, putting her chin back on her hand and staring off again.

Brunetti turned to follow her gaze, as if he thought the painting in question might be there, but all he saw was the window and, beyond it, the church. ‘Which one?’ he asked.

‘That one in the Correr, of the courtesans with their little dogs.’ He knew it, though he could never remember who had painted it. They sat, as absent and bored as Signorina Elettra had seemed when he came in, looking away to the side, as if uninterested in the thought that life was about to happen to them.

‘What about it?’

‘I’ve never been sure if they were courtesans or just wealthy women of those times, so bored with having everything and with nothing at all to do every day that all they could do was sit and stare.’

‘What makes you think of that?’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she answered with a shrug.

‘Are you bored with this?’ he asked, encompassing the office and all it signified with a wave of his hand and hoping her answer would be no.

She turned her head and looked up at him. ‘Are you joking, Commissario?’

‘No, not at all. Why do you ask?’

She studied his face for a long time before saying, ‘I’m not at all bored with it. Quite the opposite.’ Brunetti was not surprised in the least at how glad he was to hear this. After a moment’s pause, she added, ‘Though I’m never quite sure just what my position is here.’

Brunetti had no idea what she meant by that. Her official title was Secretary to the Vice-Questore. She was also meant to be of part-time secretarial help to Brunetti and another commissario, but she had never written a letter or a memo for either of them. ‘I suppose you mean your real position, as opposed to your official position,’ he suggested.

‘Yes, of course.’

Brunetti’s hand, the one holding the reports, had fallen to his side during all this. He raised it in front of him, held it a bit towards her and said, ‘I think you are our eyes and our nose, and the living spirit of our curiosity, Signorina.’

Her head rose from her hand and she graced him with one of her radiant smiles. ‘How nice it would be to read that in a job description, Commissario.’

‘I think it would be best,’ Brunetti said, shaking the folder in the general direction of Patta’s office, ‘if we left your job description alone, as written.’

‘Ah,’ was all she said, but the smile grew even warmer.

‘And didn’t worry about what to call the help you give us.’