The Golden Egg (3 page)

Since he would be passing her office, Brunetti decided to save Signorina Elettra the trip to his; besides, he was curious to learn whatever she might know about the reasons behind Patta's request. Good as his word, he decided to say nothing to her about Vianello's bucolic desires. The relaxed smile she gave him as he went in told Brunetti that the Vice-Questore had gone off on crusade against wrongdoing in some other location.

‘What have you managed to find about the mayor's son?' Brunetti asked, having no doubt that she had been in pursuit of that information.

She pushed back a vagrant curl and turned her screen towards him. ‘As you can see,' she said, pointing to the printed form he saw there, ‘it took him eight years to finish university and another three before he passed the state exams.'

‘And now?' Brunetti asked.

‘He works in the law office of a friend of his father's.'

She scrolled down to another document and pointed to the screen. ‘He also has a job as a regional counsellor.'

‘Doing what?' Brunetti asked, then, remembering that he was talking about a political position, changed it to, ‘Meant to be doing what?'

‘He has been appointed to serve as liaison between students and the regional department of sport.' Her delivery was as neutral as Médecins sans Frontières.

‘What does that mean?' Brunetti asked with curiosity he did not have to feign.

She typed in a few words and hit the
enter
key: a new document appeared on the screen. The young man's name was at the top and, below it, a row of figures. ‘And this is?' Brunetti asked.

‘It's the payment that was made to his bank account by the regional treasury last month,' she said. She turned the screen further in Brunetti's direction.

The young man's base salary was four thousand four hundred Euros a month; added to this was a fixed sum of nine hundred Euros for office expenses and one thousand nine hundred for a secretary.

‘Dare I ask the name of his secretary?' Brunetti asked.

‘Lucia Ravagni,' Signorina Elettra answered.

‘Is she by any chance the part owner of a shop in Campo San Barnaba?' he asked, almost as if a voice had whispered the necessary question into his ear.

‘Yes.'

‘If he's a lawyer and she's running a shop, when is it that they find time to work as a regional counsellor and a secretary? And where?' Brunetti asked.

‘There's an office assigned to them in the Uffici Regionali.'

‘“Assigned?”'

‘A friend of mine who works in one of the offices on the second floor – their offices are on the first – says they are seldom in evidence.'

‘No doubt keeping a careful eye on sporting events,' Brunetti suggested.

‘Or students,' she added in the bright tone she used in response to life's many absurdities. But then Signorina Elettra's voice grew serious and she asked, ‘Why do we tolerate this? Why do we let them appoint their friends and their wives and their children and not go after them with clubs?'

Brunetti, as he did with increasing frequency, chose to treat her outburst seriously. ‘I think it's because we're a tolerant people and understand human weakness. And because, for most of us, the only people we trust fully are members of our families, so we understand when other people do, as well.'

‘Do you trust yours?' she asked in an uncharacteristic display of curiosity.

‘Yes.'

‘Everyone in it?'

‘More than I would the state, or most of its
representatives
, yes,' Brunetti said and then, to extricate himself – perhaps both of them – from the unwonted intimacy of the conversation, said, ‘I'd like you to find out anything else you can about them.'

‘I've asked some people,' was her answer.

Very conscious of the fact that, as a civilian employee, Signorina Elettra had no official role in the work of the police and had taken no oath to the state, and thus should in no way be made privy to the investigations of the police, Brunetti said, ‘The mayor wants Patta to be sure that nothing is made public about the bribes her partner has been paying the vigili.'

She hit a key, and the screen grew dark. Idly, she turned it towards her but kept her eyes on Brunetti. ‘I wonder what's going on.'

‘Indeed,' Brunetti said.

As if surprised by her own realization, she said, ‘There's something of the purity of a syllogism in my eagerness to work on this.'

‘Meaning?'

‘I want bad things to happen to politicians. The mayor is a politician. Therefore, I want bad things to happen to the mayor.'

Her smile positively glowed. ‘It leaves me little choice, does it?' she asked.

‘As a syllogism, there is no flaw in it,' Brunetti said, logic having been one of his heart's delights at university. Then, soberly, ‘But it deals with emotions, not really with facts, doesn't it, so I'm not sure that it is within the mandate of the syllogism. At least as a means of proof.'

Her look was sober when she said, ‘There is no error of fact, Dottore: not in the first premise, and not in the second, and certainly not in the conclusion.' Then, lightly, ‘I'll let you know whatever I find.'

It made no sense. It made no sense. It made no sense. Brunetti repeated this to himself as he climbed the steps to his office. Then, for the last flight: no sense, no sense, no sense. What did the mayor have in mind when
he asked Patta to see if things could be kept quiet? The more people who were told to keep something quiet, the greater the certainty that it would become public information. Or was the mayor, like so many of his colleagues, convinced that he was somehow above the normal rules
that governed human behaviour? Why else would poli­t­
icians continue to speak so openly of their crimes and misdemeanours on
telefonini
that even they must know were open to the ears of many of the forces of order? Why continue to discuss bribes with the men who paid them? Why give thousands of Euros to prostitutes and, when caught, claim it was a payment made to keep them from falling into prostitution? How stupid they must believe us to be; what contemptible sheep we are to them.

Surely, not all politicians could be like this. Were this the case, Brunetti realized, the only options open to a decent person would be emigration, or suicide.

His phone was ringing when he entered his office. Believing it might be Patta, suddenly returned to the Questura, he answered with his name.

‘You know the boy who doesn't talk?' Paola asked. ‘At the dry cleaner's?'

His mind still on politicians and Patta, Brunetti could think of nothing more than, ‘What?'

‘The boy who worked in the dry cleaner's. The deaf one.' He could tell from her voice that Paola was troubled, but it took him a moment to recall the boy, who sometimes used to be seen in the back room of the shop, folding things or standing idly, head moving back and forth as his eyes followed the motions of the iron that imposed order on shirts and dresses. Brunetti's memory of him was hazy, save for the folding and for the odd, arrhythmic way the boy moved.

‘Yes,' he finally said. ‘Why?'

‘He's dead,' Paola said, sounding saddened by the news. But then she said, ‘At least that's the rumour in the neighbourhood.'

‘What happened?' Brunetti asked, wondering what sort of accident could have befallen him and how his deafness might have contributed to it. Many of the delivery men who pushed their wheeled metal carts around the city cried ahead to warn people to get out of the way: because he could not hear, the boy might have been run over, crushed, anything. Or knocked down the steps of a bridge or into the water.

‘A man at the bar where I was having coffee said he saw an ambulance in front of a house this morning, and when they came out they were carrying one of those plastic boxes. He knew that's where he lived – the deaf boy – so he asked the men if that's who it was. All they told him was that it was someone from the first floor, a man.' She paused, then asked, ‘They carry dead people in those, don't they?'

Brunetti, who had seen too many of them, confirmed this.

There was a long silence, and then Paola said, ‘I don't know what to do.'

Her remark confused Brunetti. If he was dead, there was nothing she, or anyone, could do. ‘I don't understand.'

‘His family. Do something for them.'

‘Do you even know who his family is?'

‘It's the people at the dry cleaner's, isn't it?'

Brunetti felt a flash of irritation that his time was being taken up with this, and that was followed by a flash of shame. Was he meant to reprimand his wife for an excess of compassion? ‘I don't know. I've never paid attention.'

‘It must be,' Paola said. ‘He was pretty useless as a worker. I always figured he was the son of the woman who runs the place or maybe of the one who irons. No one else would have hired him.' After a moment, she added, ‘Though I haven't seen him there for a long time. I wonder what happened?'

‘I've no idea,' Brunetti said. ‘You can't very well ask, can you?'

‘No. No.'

‘Maybe the newsagent?'

‘You know I can't ask him,' Paola said.

Four years ago, Paola and the newsagent had got into a heated discussion when she asked him why he sold a certain newspaper and the man replied that it was because people wanted it. That had led Paola, a woman not known for moderation in argument, to ask if he'd use the same justification if he sold drugs, before putting down the money for her newspapers and walking away.

It had been Brunetti, after she recounted the incident at dinner, who had told her that the man's son had died some years before of an overdose, information that had reduced Paola to tears of shame. She had gone back the next day and tried to apologize, but the man had turned his back on her and returned to untying a parcel of
magazines
. Since then, it had fallen to Brunetti to buy the newspapers.

‘Would you ask him? Or someone else in the neighbourhood?' she asked.

Before he agreed, Brunetti wanted to know: ‘Is this curiosity or concern?'

‘Concern,' she answered immediately. ‘He was such a miserable creature. I don't even know how long I saw him there. Or on the street. Or standing there in the back room, folding clothes or watching them work. And always looking so terribly sad.'

Brunetti remembered the boy's awkward gestures, the odd jerking of his head that suggested other problems more serious than the deafness that had cut him off from the world.

‘Was there anything else wrong with him?' he broke in to ask.

‘What do you mean? Isn't being a deaf mute enough?'

‘Was he mute, too?'

‘Did you ever hear him speak?'

‘No,' Brunetti answered, unsure whether this meant he had to be dumb, as well as deaf. ‘I told you; I hardly noticed him.'

Paola sighed, ‘I'm afraid that's what most people will say. How awful, eh?'

‘Yes. It is.'

‘Oh my God,' Paola said. ‘I don't even know his name if I want to ask about him. He's just the boy who doesn't talk. Didn't talk.'

‘I think people will know who you mean.'

‘That's not what I'm talking about, Guido,' she said, words that would usually be spoken angrily but now radiated only sadness. ‘That's what's so awful. Think about how old he must have been. Thirty-five? Forty? More? And we all referred to him as a boy.' Then, after another pause, ‘The boy who doesn't talk.'

‘I'll see if they know anything downstairs,' Brunetti volunteered. ‘And at the hospital.'

‘Thanks, Guido,' she said. ‘I know it sounds as if I'm being a baby over this, but it's terrible – to have a life like that, and then die, and people don't even know your name.'

‘I'll see what I can find out,' Brunetti said and replaced the phone.

He picked it up immediately and dialled the number of the morgue. Identifying himself to Rizzardi's assistant, he asked if they had had a man brought in from San Polo that morning.

‘He's with him now,' the man explained, quite as though Rizzardi were a normal doctor and were in the examining room having a look to see what the problem was.

‘I'm in my office. Would you ask him to call me when he's finished?'

‘Of course, Dottore.'

Paola was right, he realized. To have lived a life, even a life cut short in the middle, and not to have a name to be called by, to live among people who did not know your name – Brunetti had no word to describe it. If the man – he would call him a man now, not a boy – had been mute as well as deaf, how had he communicated with the world around him? How had he expressed even the most simple desire, save by pointing at the thing he wanted? But what if he were cold or hot or wanted something to eat: was he reduced to a life of pantomime? Had someone taught him to read? To write? To sign? And if not, then how did he establish contact with the world?

It daunted Brunetti, the pathos of it.

The phone rang, and when he answered he heard Rizzardi's voice. ‘
Ciao
, Guido. Franco said you called about the man from San Polo.'

‘Yes. My wife called me and told me he was dead. We knew him. Sort of.'

Rizzardi did not ask for clarification, leading Brunetti to wonder whether all any of us ever do is sort of know people. He continued, ‘So I called to ask you to tell me what you can about him.'

‘His name is,' Rizzardi began, said, ‘Wait a minute,' and set the phone down. He was back in a few seconds
and said, ‘Davide Cavanella, or at least that's the name written on the papers that came with him. Someone at the address must have given it to them.'

‘What caused his death?'

‘It could be suicide,' the pathologist said.