Uniform Justice (17 page)

He pushed himself back in his chair but didn’t get to his feet. ‘I don’t like any of it, and I don’t like anything I’ve heard. Nobody’s told me the truth and nobody’s told me why they won’t.’

‘What does that mean?’

Brunetti smiled and said it gently. ‘For the moment, all it means is that I’d like you to get me all the information I’ve asked for.’

‘And when I do?’ she asked, not for an instant doubting that she would find it.

‘Then perhaps we’ll start proving a negative.’

‘Which negative, sir.’

‘That Ernesto Moro didn’t kill himself.’

16

BEFORE HE LEFT
the Questura, he made one more call to Signora Moro’s number, feeling not unlike an importunate suitor growing ever more persistent in the face of a woman’s continued lack of response. He wondered if he’d overlooked some mutual friend who might put in a good word for him and realized how he was returning to the tactics of former times, when his attempts to meet women had been animated by entirely different hopes.

Just as he was approaching the underpass leading into Campo San Bartolomeo, his mind on this unsettling parallel, he registered a sudden darkness in front of him. He looked up, still not fully attentive to his surroundings, and saw four San Martino cadets wheeling, arms
linked
, as straight across as if on parade, into the
calle
from the
campo
. The long dark capes of their winter uniforms swirled out on either flank and effectively filled the entire width of the
calle
. Two women, one old and one young, instinctively backed up against the plate-glass windows of the bank, and a pair of map-embracing tourists did the same against the windows of the bar on the other side. Leaving the four shipwrecked pedestrians in their wake, the unbroken wave of boys swept towards him.

Brunetti raised his eyes to theirs – boys no older than his own son – and the glances that came back to him were as blank and pitiless as the sun. His right foot might have faltered for an instant, but by an act of will he shoved it forward and continued towards them, stride unbroken, his face implacable, as though he were alone in Calle della Bissa, the entire city his.

The boys drew closer, and he recognized the cadet to the left of centre as the one who had tried to interrogate him at the school. The atavistic urge of the more powerful male to assert his supremacy shifted Brunetti’s direction two compass points until he was heading straight for the boy. He tightened his stomach muscles and stiffened his elbows, preparing for the shock of contact, but at the instant before impact, the boy next to the one who had become Brunetti’s target loosened his grip and moved to the right, creating a narrow space through which Brunetti could pass. As his foot entered
the
space, he saw, from the corner of his eye, the left foot of the boy he recognized move minimally to the side, surely bent on tripping him. Carefully, thrusting forward with his full weight behind him, he took aim at the boy’s ankle and felt a satisfying jolt as the toe of his shoe found its target, glanced off, and came down on the pavement. Not pausing for an instant, Brunetti strode on and out into the
campo
, cut left, and started for the bridge.

Because Raffi as well as Chiara was at dinner, and because he thought it unseemly to manifest pride in such mean-spirited behaviour in their presence, he said nothing about his meeting with the cadets and contented himself with the meal. Paola had brought home
ravioli di zucca
and had prepared them with salvia leaves quickly sautéed in butter, then smothered them with Parmigiano. After that, she had switched to fennel, serving it interspersed with pan-fried veal pieces that had spent the previous night in the refrigerator, marinating in a paste of rosemary, garlic, fennel seed and minced pancetta.

As he ate, delighted by the mingled tastes and the pleasant sharpness of his third glass of Sangiovese, he remembered his earlier uneasiness about the safety of his children, and the thought made him feel foolish. He could not, however, dismiss it or allow himself to scoff at the desire that nothing would ever invade their peace. He never knew if his perpetual readiness for things to change for the worse was the result of his native pessimism or of the experiences his
profession
had exposed him to. In either case, his vision of happiness had always to pass through a filter of uneasiness.

‘Why don’t we ever have beef any more?’ Raffi asked.

Paola, peeling a pear, said, ‘Because Gianni can’t find a farmer he trusts.’

‘Trusts to do what?’ Chiara asked between grapes.

‘To have animals he’s sure are healthy, I suppose,’ Paola answered.

‘I don’t like eating it any more, anyway,’ Chiara said.

‘Why not? Because it’ll make you crazy?’ her brother asked, then amended it to ‘Crazier?’

‘I think we’ve had more than enough mad-cow jokes at this table,’ Paola said with an unusual lack of patience.

‘No, not because of that,’ Chiara said.

‘Then why?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Oh, just because,’ Chiara answered evasively.

‘Because of what?’ her brother asked.

‘Because we don’t need to eat them.’

‘That never bothered you before,’ Raffi countered.

‘I know it never bothered me before. Lots of things didn’t. But now they do.’ She turned to him and delivered what she clearly thought would be a death blow. ‘It’s called growing up, in case you’ve never heard of it.’

Raffi snorted, driving her to new defences.

‘We don’t need to eat them just because we can. Besides, it’s ecologically wasteful,’ she
insisted
, like someone repeating a lesson, which Brunetti thought was most likely the case.

‘What would you eat instead?’ Raffi asked, ‘Zucchini?’ He turned to his mother and asked, ‘Are we allowed to make mad-zucchini jokes?’

Paola, displaying the Olympian disregard for the feelings of her children which Brunetti so admired, said only, ‘I’ll take that as an offer to do the dishes, Raffi, shall I?’

Raffi groaned, but he did not protest. A Brunetti less familiar with the cunning of the young would have seen this as a sign that his son was willing to assume some responsibility for the care of their home, perhaps as evidence of burgeoning maturity. The real Brunetti, however, a man hardened by decades of exposure to the furtiveness of criminals, could see it for what it was: cold-blooded bargaining in which immediate acquiescence was traded for some future reward.

As Raffi reached across the table to pick up his mother’s plate, Paola smiled upon him with favour and, displaying a familiarity with slyness equal to that of her husband, got to her feet, saying, ‘Thank you so much, dear, for offering, and no, you cannot take scuba lessons.’

Brunetti watched her leave the room, then turned to watch his son’s face. Raffi’s surprise was patent, and when he saw that his father was looking at him, he removed that expression but had the grace to smile. ‘How does she do that?’ Raffi asked. ‘All the time.’

Brunetti was about to offer some bromide
about
its being one of the powers of mothers to be able to read the minds of their children, when Chiara, who had been busy finishing the fruit on the platter, looked up at them and said, ‘It’s because she reads Henry James.’

In her study, Brunetti told Paola about his run-in with the cadets, deciding not to mention the rush of animal triumph he had felt when his foot made contact with the boy’s ankle.

‘It’s a good thing it happened here,’ she said when he finished, then added, ‘in Italy.’

‘Why? What do you mean?’

‘There are a lot of places where something like that could get you killed.’

‘Name two,’ he said, offended that she could so cavalierly dismiss what he saw as evidence of his bravery.

‘Sierra Leone and the United States, to begin with,’ she said. ‘But that doesn’t mean I’m not happy you did it.’

Brunetti said nothing for a long time, then asked, ‘Does it show, how much I dislike them?’

‘Them who?’

‘Boys like that, with their wealthy, well-connected families and their sense of command.’

‘Families like mine, you mean?’ In their early years together, before Brunetti came to realize that the shocking brutality of Paola’s honesty was often entirely unaggressive, he would have been astonished by her question. Now all he did was answer it. ‘Yes.’

She laced her fingers together and propped her chin on her knuckles. ‘I think only someone
who
knows you very well would see it. Or someone who pays close attention to what you say.’

‘Like you?’ he asked, smiling.

‘Yes.’

‘Why do you think it is, that they get to me so easily?’

She considered this; it was not that she had not thought about it before, but he had never asked the question so directly. ‘I think part of it is your sense of justice.’

‘Not jealousy?’ he asked, trying to make sure she would be complimentary.

‘No, at least not jealousy in any simple sense.’

He leaned back on the sofa and latched his fingers behind his head. He shifted around, seeking a comfortable position, and when she saw that he’d found it, she went on. ‘I think part of it comes from your resentment – not that some people have more than others, but that they don’t realize or don’t want to admit that their money doesn’t make them superior or give them the right to anything they choose to do.’ When he didn’t query this she continued: ‘And from their refusal to consider the possibility that their greater fortune is not anything they’ve earned or merited.’ She smiled at him, then said, ‘At least I think that’s why you dislike them as much as you do.’

‘And you?’ he asked. ‘Do you dislike them?’

With a ringing laugh, she said, ‘There are too many of them in my family to allow me to.’ He laughed along with her, and she added, ‘I did,
when
I was young and more idealistic than I am now. But then I realized they weren’t going to change, and I had come by then to love some of them so much and I knew nothing was ever going to change that, so I saw that I had no choice but to accept them as they are.’

‘Love before truth?’ he asked, striving for irony.

‘Love before everything, I’m afraid, Guido,’ she said in deadly earnest.

As he walked to the Questura the next morning, it occurred to Brunetti that he had been overlooking at least one anomaly in all of this: why had the boy been boarding at the school? So caught up had he been in the order and rules of life at the Academy that, as he searched Ernesto’s room, the obvious question had not arisen: in a culture that encouraged young people to live at home until their marriage, why was this young man living away from home, when both parents lived in the city?

At the Questura, he almost bumped into Signorina Elettra emerging from the front door. ‘Are you going somewhere?’ he asked.

She glanced at her watch. ‘Do you need something, sir?’ she asked, not really an answer, though he didn’t notice.

‘Yes, I’d like you to make a phone call for me.’

She stepped back inside the door and asked, ‘To whom?’

‘The San Martino Academy.’

With no attempt to disguise the curiosity in
her
voice, she asked, ‘And what would you like me to tell them?’ She started to walk back towards the stairs that led to her office.

‘I want to know if it’s obligatory for the boys to sleep in the dormitory or if they’re allowed to spend the night at home if their parents live in the city. I’d like to get an idea of just how inflexible the rules are there. Perhaps you could say you’re a parent and want to know something about the Academy. You can say your son is just finishing school and has always wanted to be a soldier, and as you’re Venetian, you’d like him to have the opportunity to attend the San Martino because of its high reputation.’

‘And is my voice to be filled with pride and patriotism as I ask these questions?’

‘Choking with them,’ he said.

She could not have done it better. Though Signorina Elettra spoke an Italian as elegant and pure as any he had heard, as well as a very old-fashioned Venetian dialect, she managed to mingle the two perfectly on the phone and succeeded in sounding exactly like what she said she was: the Venetian wife of a Roman banker who had just been sent north to head the Venice branch of a bank she carelessly avoided naming. After making the secretary at the Academy wait while she found a pen and pencil and then apologizing for not having them next to the phone the way her husband insisted she do, Signorina Elettra asked for particulars of the date of the beginning of the next school term, their policy on late admission, and where to
have
letters of recommendation and academic records sent. When the school secretary offered to provide details about school fees and the cost of uniforms, the banker’s wife dismissed the very idea, insisting that their accountant dealt with things like that.

Listening to the conversation on the speaker phone, Brunetti was amazed at the way Signorina Elettra threw herself into the role, could all but see her returning home that evening after a hard day’s shopping to check if the cook had found real
basilico genovese
for the pesto. Just as the secretary said she hoped that young Filiberto and his parents would find the school satisfactory, Signorina Elettra gasped, ‘Ah, yes, one last question. It will be all right if he sleeps at home at night, won’t it?’

‘I beg your pardon, Signora,’ the secretary said. ‘The boys are expected to live here at the school. It’s included in the fees. Where else would your son live?’

‘Here with us in the
palazzo
, of course. You can’t expect him to live with those other boys, can you? He’s only sixteen.’ Had the secretary asked her to give her life-blood, the banker’s wife could have sounded no less horrified. ‘Of course we’ll pay the full fees, but it’s unthinkable that a child that young should be taken from his mother.’

‘Ah,’ the secretary answered upon hearing the first part of Signorina Elettra’s last sentence, managing not to register the second, ‘in a few cases, with the approval of the Comandante
some
exceptions can perhaps be made, though the boys have to be at their first class at eight.’