Uniform Justice (20 page)

‘Moro’s mother’s been hurt.’

‘What?’

Sudden static filled the line, drowning out Vianello. When it came to an end, Brunetti heard only, ‘… no idea who.’

‘Who what?’ Brunetti demanded.

‘Did it.’

‘Did what? I didn’t hear you.’

‘She was hit by a car, sir. I’m in Mestre, at the hospital.’

‘What happened?’

‘She was going to the train station in Mogliano, where she lives. At least she was walking in that direction. A car hit her, knocked her down and didn’t stop.’

‘Did anyone see it?’

‘Two people. The police there talked to them, but neither was sure about anything other than that it was light-coloured and the driver might have been a woman.’

Glancing at his watch, Brunetti asked, ‘When did this happen?’

‘At about seven, sir. When the police saw that she was Fernando Moro’s mother, one of them remembered the boy’s death and called the Questura. They tried to get you, and then they called me.’

Brunetti’s glance fell on the answering machine. A tiny pulsating light illuminated the one message that awaited him. ‘Has he been told?’

‘They called him first, sir. She’s a widow, and his name and address were in her purse.’

‘And?’

‘He came out.’ Both men thought of what that must have been for Moro, but neither said anything.

‘Where is he now?’ Brunetti asked.

‘In the hospital here.’

‘What do the doctors say?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Some cuts and bruises, but nothing broken. The car must just have brushed her. But she’s seventy-two, so the doctors decided to keep her overnight.’ After a pause, Vianello added, ‘He just left.’

There was a lengthy silence. Finally, Vianello said, in response to Brunetti’s unspoken question, ‘Yes, it might be a good idea. He was very shaken.’

Part of Brunetti’s mind was aware that his instinctive desire to profit from Moro’s weakness was no less reptilian than Vianello’s encouragement that he do so. Neither idea stopped him. ‘How long ago?’ Brunetti asked.

‘About five minutes. In a taxi.’

Familiar sounds came from the back of the apartment: Paola moving about in the bathroom, then going down the corridor to their bedroom. Brunetti’s imagination soared above the city and the mainland and watched a taxi
make
its way through the empty streets of Mestre and across the long causeway that led to Piazzale Roma. A single man emerged, reached back inside, shoving money at the driver, then turned away and began to walk towards the
imbarcadero
of the Number One. ‘I’ll go,’ Brunetti said and hung up.

Paola was already asleep when he looked into the bedroom, a stream of light falling across her legs. He wrote a note then couldn’t decide where to leave it. Finally he propped the sheet of paper on the answering machine, where the flickering light still called for attention.

As Brunetti walked through the quiet city, his imagination took flight again, but this time it observed a man in a dark suit and a grey overcoat walking from San Polo towards the Accademia bridge. As he watched, the man crossed in front of the museum and made his way into the narrow
calli
of Dorsoduro. At the end of the underpass that ran beside the church of San Gregorio, he crossed the bridge to the broad
riva
in front of the Salute. Moro’s house, off to his right, was dark, though all the shutters were open. Brunetti moved along the canal and stopped at the foot of the bridge leading back over the small canal and to the door of Moro’s house. From there, he would see Moro returning, whether he walked, came by taxi or took the Number One. He turned and looked across the still waters at the disorderly domes of San Marco and the piebald walls of Palazzo Ducale, and thought of the peace their beauty brought
him
. How strange it was: nothing more than the arrangement of lines and colours, and he felt better than he had before he looked at them.

He heard the throb of the motor of the vaporetto arriving; then saw the prow emerge from behind the wall of a building. The noise moved into a different key, and the boat glided up to the
imbarcadero
. The crewman tossed out the rope with effortless accuracy and whipped it around the metal stanchion in the centuries-old knot. A few people got off the boat, none of them Moro. The metal scraped as the gate was pulled shut; a careless flip and the rope came free, and the boat continued.

Another boat arrived twenty minutes later, but Moro wasn’t on this one, either. Brunetti was beginning to think the doctor might have decided to go back to his mother’s home in Mogliano when, off to the left, he heard footsteps approaching. Moro emerged from the narrow
calle
between the houses at the end of the tiny
campo
. Brunetti crossed the bridge and stood at the bottom, just short of the door to Moro’s house.

The doctor came towards him, hands stuffed into the pockets of his jacket, head lowered as if he had to take particular care of where he placed his feet. When he was a few metres from Brunetti, he stopped and reached first his left hand, then his right, into the pockets of his trousers. On the second attempt, he pulled out a set of keys but looked at them as if he didn’t quite understand what they were or what he was meant to do with them.

He raised his head then and saw Brunetti. There was no change in his expression, but Brunetti was sure Moro recognized him.

Brunetti walked towards the other man, speaking before he thought, surprised by the force of his own anger. ‘Are you going to let them kill your wife and daughter, too?’

Moro took a step backwards, and the keys fell from his hand. He raised one arm and shielded his face with it, as though Brunetti’s words were acid and he had to protect his eyes. But then, with a speed that astonished Brunetti, Moro moved up to him and grabbed at his collar with both hands. He misjudged the distance, and the nails of his forefingers dug into the skin at the back of Brunetti’s neck.

He pulled Brunetti towards him, yanking so savagely that he pulled him a half-step forwards. Brunetti flung his hands out to the side in an attempt to balance himself, but it was the strength of Moro’s hands that kept him from falling.

The doctor pulled him closer, shaking him the way a dog shakes a rat. ‘Stay out of this,’ Moro hissed into his face, sprinkling him with spittle. ‘They didn’t do it. What do you know?’

Brunetti, allowing Moro to support him, recovered his balance, and when the doctor shoved him to arm’s length, still holding tight, Brunetti stepped back and flung his hands up, breaking the doctor’s grip and freeing himself. Instinctively he put his hands to his neck: his fingers felt torn skin and the beginnings of pain.

He leaned forward until his face was dangerously close to the doctor’s. ‘They’ll find them. They found your mother. Do you want them to kill them all?’

Again the doctor raised his hand, warding off Brunetti’s words. Robot-like, he raised the other hand, now a blind man, a trapped man, seeking a place of safety. He turned away and staggered, stiff-kneed, to the door of his house. Leaning brokenly against the wall, Moro began to pat his pockets for his keys, which lay on the ground. He dug his hands into his pockets, turning them out and scattering coins and small pieces of paper around him. When no pockets remained unturned, Moro lowered his head to his chest and began to sob.

Brunetti bent and picked up the keys. He walked over to the doctor and took his right hand, which was hanging limply at his side. He turned the doctor’s palm up and placed the keys in it, then closed his fingers over them.

Slowly, like a person long victim to arthritis, Moro pushed himself away from the wall and put one key, then another, then another into the lock until he found the right one. The lock turned noisily four times. Moro pushed the door open and disappeared inside. Not bothering to wait to see if lights went on inside, Brunetti turned away and started to walk home.

20

BRUNETTI WOKE GROGGILY
the next morning to the dull sound of rain against the bedroom windows and to Paola’s absence from his side. She was nowhere in the apartment, nor was there any sign of the children. A glance at the clock showed him why: everyone had long since gone off to the business of their day. When he went into the kitchen, he was grateful to see that Paola had filled the Moka and left it on the stove. He stared out the window while he waited for the coffee, and when it was ready took it back into the living room. He stood looking through the rain at the bell tower of San Polo, and sipped at his coffee. When it was finished, he went back into the kitchen and made more. This time, he came back and sat on the sofa, propped his
slippered
feet on the table, and stared out the glass doors that led to the terrace, not really aware of the rooftops beyond.

He tried to think of who ‘they’ could be. Moro had been too stunned by Brunetti’s attack to prepare a defence and so had made no attempt to deny or pretend not to understand Brunetti’s reference to this nameless ‘they’. The first possibility that occurred to Brunetti, as it would to anyone who knew even the least bit about Moro’s career, was someone at the health services, the target of the Moro Report’s accusation of institutionalized corruption and greed. Closing his eyes, Brunetti rested his head against the back of the sofa and tried to remember what had become of the men who had been in charge of the provincial health services at the time of the Moro Report.

One had disappeared into private law practice, another had retired, and a third currently held a minor portfolio in the new government: in charge of transportation safety or relief efforts for natural disasters; Brunetti couldn’t recall which. He did remember that, even in the face of the scandal and indignation at the gross pilfering from the public purse revealed by the report, the government’s response had proceeded with the stateliness of the Dead March from
Saul
. Years had passed: the hospitals remained unbuilt, the official statistics remained unchanged, and the men responsible for the deceit had moved on quite undisturbed.

Brunetti realized that, in Italy, scandal had the
same
shelf life as fresh fish: by the third day, both were worthless; one because it had begun to stink, the other because it no longer did. Any punishment or revenge that ‘they’ might have inflicted upon the author of the report would have been exacted years ago: punishment that was delayed six years would not dissuade other honest officials from calling attention to the irregularities of government.

That possibility dismissed, Brunetti turned his thoughts to Moro’s medical career and tried to see the attacks on his family as the work of a vengeful patient, only to dismiss that immediately. Brunetti didn’t believe that the purpose of what had happened to Moro was punishment, otherwise he would have been attacked personally: it was threat. The origin of the attacks against his family must lie in what Moro was doing or had learned at the time his wife was shot. The attacks, then, could make sense as a repeated and violent attempt to prevent the publication of a second Moro Report. What struck Brunetti as strange, when he reconsidered Moro’s reaction the night before, was not that the doctor had made no attempt to deny that ‘they’ existed so much as his insistence that ‘they’ were not responsible for the attacks.

Brunetti took a sip of his coffee but found it was cold; and it was only then that he heard the phone ringing. He set the cup down and went into the hall to answer it.

‘Brunetti,’ he said.

‘It’s me,’ Paola said. ‘Are you still in bed?’

‘No, I’ve been up a long time.’

‘I’ve called you three times in the last half-hour. Where were you, in the shower?’

‘Yes,’ Brunetti lied.

‘Are you lying?’

‘Yes.’

‘What have you been doing?’ Paola asked with real concern.

‘Sitting and looking out the window.’

‘Well, it’s good to know your day has started out as a productive one. Sitting and looking or sitting and looking and thinking?’

‘And thinking.’

‘What about.’

‘Moro.’

‘And?’

‘And I think I see something I didn’t see before.’

‘Do you want to tell me?’ she asked, but he could hear the haste in her voice.

‘No. I need to think about it a little more.’

‘Tonight, then?’

‘Yes.’

She paused a moment and then said, using a voice straight out of Brazilian soap opera, ‘We’ve got unfinished business from last night, big boy.’

With a jolt, his body remembered that unfinished business, but before he could speak, she laughed and hung up.

He left the apartment half an hour later, wearing a pair of rubber-soled brogues and sheltered under a dark umbrella. His pace was
slowed
by the umbrella, which caused him to duck and bob his way between the other people on the street. The rain appeared to have lessened, not eliminated, the streams of tourists. How he wished there were some other way he could get to work, some means to avoid being trapped in the narrow zigs and zags of Ruga Rialto. He cut right just after Sant’ Aponal and walked down to the Canal Grande. As he emerged from the underpass, a
traghetto
pulled up to the
riva
. After the passengers had got off, he stepped aboard, handing the
gondoliere
one of the Euro coins he still found unfamiliar, hoping it would be sufficient. The young man handed him back a few coins, and Brunetti moved to the rear of the gondola, allowing his knees to turn to rubber and thus help maintain his balance as the boat bobbed around on the water.

When there were thirteen people, one of them with a sodden German Shepherd, standing in the gondola, all trying to huddle under the umbrellas spread above their heads in an almost unbroken shield, the
gondolieri
shoved off and took them quickly to the other side. Even in this rain, Brunetti could see people standing without umbrellas at the top of the bridge, their backs to him, while other people took their photos.

The gondola slid up to the wooden steps, and everyone filed off. Brunetti waited while the
gondoliere
at the front handed a woman’s shopping cart up to her. One of its wheels caught on the side of the steps and it tilted back towards the
gondoliere
, who caught it by the
handle
and handed it up. Suddenly the dog jumped back into the boat and picked up something that once had been a tennis ball. With it firmly between his jaws, he leaped back on to the dock and ran after his master.