Uniform Justice (25 page)

Again, she crossed her arms in front of her and turned to face him. ‘You didn’t read about it, then?’

‘No, not that I recall.’ He wondered how he could have missed a case like this: it must have been a three-day wonder for the press.

‘It happened when they were in Sardegna, on the naval base there,’ she said, as though that would explain it. ‘And my sister’s father-in-law managed to keep it quiet.’

‘Who is he, her father-in-law?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Ammiraglio Giambattista Ruffo,’ she said.

Brunetti recognized the name instantly: the man known as the ‘King’s Admiral’ for his avowedly monarchist sentiments and opinions. Brunetti thought Ruffo was Genovese by birth, had a vague memory of having heard people talk about him for decades. Ruffo had risen through the ranks of the Navy on merit, keeping his ideas to himself, but once his senior rank was confirmed – and Brunetti thought this had been about fifteen years ago – he had ceased to disguise or equivocate about his belief that the monarchy should be restored. The attempt on the part of the War Ministry to silence Ruffo had given him a sort of overnight celebrity, for he refused to retract any of his statements. The serious newspapers, if, in fact, any can be said to exist in Italy, quickly tired of the story, and it was relegated to those weekly magazines whose
covers
devote attention week by week to various parts of the female anatomy.

Given his celebrity, it was nothing short of miraculous that his son’s suicide could have been kept from turning into a media feeding frenzy, but Brunetti had no memory of the case. ‘How did he manage to silence it?’ Brunetti asked.

‘In Sardegna, at the naval base, he was in command,’ she began.

‘You mean the Admiral?’ Brunetti interrupted to ask.

‘Yes. Because it all happened there, the press could be kept out.’

‘How was it reported?’ Brunetti asked, knowing that, given these conditions, almost anything was possible.

‘That he had died in an accident, and Luigina had been seriously injured at the same time.’

‘That’s all they said?’ he asked, surprised at his own ingenuousness at thinking this unusual.

‘Of course. The naval police investigated, and a naval doctor did the autopsy. Luigina wasn’t even badly hurt by the bullet. It hit her in the arm. But she fell and hit her head. That’s what did the damage.’

‘Why are you telling me this?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Because Giuliano doesn’t know what really happened.’

‘Where was he?’ Brunetti asked. ‘When it happened, I mean.’

‘There. But in a different part of the house, with his grandparents.’

‘And no one’s ever told him?’

She shook her head. ‘I don’t think so. At least, not until now.’

‘Why do you say that?’ he asked, sensitive to a sudden lessening of confidence in her tone.

She raised her right hand and rubbed at her temple, just at the hairline. ‘I don’t know. He asked me about it when he came home this time. I’m afraid I didn’t handle it well. Instead of just telling him what we’ve always told him, about the accident, I asked him why he was asking.’ She stopped speaking, glancing at the floor, her fingers still busy at the edge of her hair.

‘And?’ Brunetti prodded.

‘And when he didn’t answer me, I told him that he already knew what happened, that there was a terrible accident and his father was killed.’ She stopped again.

‘Did he believe you?’

She shrugged the question away like a wilful child refusing to deal with an unpleasant subject.

Brunetti waited, not repeating the question. Finally she said, raising her eyes to meet his, ‘I don’t know if he did or not.’ She stopped, considering how to explain this, then went on, ‘When he was younger, he used to ask about it. It was almost like a fever: it would grow and grow on him until he couldn’t do anything except ask me about it again, no matter how many times I’d told him what happened. And then he’d be all right for a time, but then it would start again, and he’d refer to his father or
ask
questions about him, or about his grandfather, until he couldn’t stand it any more, and then he’d ask about his father’s death.’ She closed her eyes, letting her hands fall to her sides. ‘And I’d tell him the same old lie again. Until I was sick of hearing it.’

She turned away from him and started towards the back of the house again. Following her, Brunetti risked one last question: ‘Did he seem different this time?’

She kept walking, but he saw the sudden rise and fall of her shoulders as she shrugged the question away. After a few more steps, she stopped just in front of a door but did not turn to face him. ‘Every time he asked, he was calmer for a while after I told him what had happened, but this time he wasn’t. He didn’t believe me. He doesn’t believe me any more.’ She didn’t explain why she thought this, and Brunetti didn’t think it necessary to ask: the boy would be a far more reliable source.

She opened a door that gave on to another long corridor, then stopped at the second door on the right and knocked. Almost immediately it opened, and Giuliano Ruffo came out into the corridor. He saw his aunt and smiled, then turned to Brunetti and recognized him. The smile disappeared, flared up for a hopeful moment, then died away again.

‘Zia,’ he named her. ‘What is it?’ When she didn’t answer, the boy said to Brunetti, ‘You’re the man who came to my room.’ At Brunetti’s nod, he asked, ‘What do you want now?’

‘The same thing I did last time, to talk about Ernesto Moro.’

‘What about him?’ Giuliano asked neutrally. Brunetti thought the boy should have been more disturbed to have the police pursuing him to his home to ask about Ernesto Moro. Suddenly he was conscious of the awkwardness of their situation, the three of them standing in the unheated corridor, the woman silent while Brunetti and the boy circled one another with questions. As if sensing his thoughts, the woman said, indicating the room behind her nephew, ‘Shall we go somewhere warmer to talk?’

If it had been a command, the boy could not have responded more quickly. He went back inside, leaving the door open for them to follow. Entering, Brunetti was reminded of the unnatural orderliness of Giuliano’s room at the Academy, but reminded only because here he saw its antithesis: clothing lay discarded across the bed and on top of the radiator; compact discs, vulnerable and naked outside of their boxes, covered the desk; boots and shoes cluttered the floor. The only thing that surprised him was the absence of the smell of cigarettes, though he saw an open pack on the desk and another on the table beside the bed.

Giuliano went to the armchair in front of the window and picked up the clothing draped over it, then told his aunt that she could sit there. He tossed the clothing on to the foot of the bed, adding it to a pair of jeans already there. He
nodded
his head towards the chair in front of his desk, indicating to Brunetti that he could sit there, then sat down in the space he had just made on the bed.

Brunetti began, ‘Giuliano, I don’t know what you’ve been told or have read, and I don’t care what you might have told anyone. I don’t believe that Ernesto killed himself; I don’t believe he was the kind of boy to do it, and I don’t think he had any reason to do it.’ He paused, waiting for the boy or his aunt to say something.

Neither did, so he continued, ‘That means either he died in an accident of some sort or that someone killed him.’

‘What do you mean, accident?’ Giuliano asked.

‘A practical joke that went wrong, one he was playing or that someone was playing on him. If that was the case, then I think the people involved would have panicked and done the first thing that they thought of: faking a suicide.’ He stopped there, hoping to provide the boy with the opportunity to agree, but Giuliano remained silent.

‘Or else,’ Brunetti continued, ‘for reasons I don’t understand, he was killed, either deliberately or, again, when something went wrong or got out of hand. And then the same thing happened: whoever did it tried to make it look like a suicide.’

‘But the newspapers say it was suicide,’ the aunt interrupted.

‘That doesn’t mean anything, Zia,’ the boy surprised Brunetti by saying.

Into the silence that radiated from this exchange, Brunetti said, ‘I’m afraid he’s right, Signora.’

The boy put both hands on the surface of the bed and hung his head, as if examining the jumble of shoes and boots that lay on the floor. Brunetti watched his hands turn into fists then unfold themselves again. He looked up, suddenly leaned aside, and picked up the pack of cigarettes on the table beside him. He held it tight in his right hand, like a talisman or the hand of a friend, but he made no move to take a cigarette. He switched the pack to his left hand and finally took a cigarette from it. Standing, he tossed the pack down on the bed and came towards Brunetti, who remained motionless.

Giuliano took a disposable plastic cigarette lighter from the desk and went to the door. Saying nothing, he left the room, closing the door behind him.

His aunt said, ‘I’ve asked him not to smoke in the house.’

‘Don’t you like the smell?’ Brunetti asked.

She pulled a battered packet of cigarettes from the pocket of her sweater and said, holding it up to him, ‘Quite the opposite. But Giuliano’s father was a heavy smoker, so my sister associates the smell with him: we both smoke only outside the house not to upset her.’

‘Will he come back?’ Brunetti asked; he had made no attempt to stop Giuliano from leaving
and
was fully convinced that the boy could not be forced to reveal anything he did not want to.

‘There’s nowhere else he can go,’ his aunt said, though not unkindly.

They sat in silence for a while, until Brunetti asked, ‘Who runs this farm?’

‘I do. With a man from the village.’

‘How many cows do you have?’

‘Seventeen.’

‘Is that enough to make a living?’ Brunetti asked, curious to learn how the family managed to survive, though he admitted to himself he knew so little about farming that the number of cattle could give him no indication of wealth or the ability to produce it.

‘There’s a trust from Giuliano’s grandfather,’ she explained.

‘Is he dead?’

‘No.’

‘Then how can there be a trust?’

‘He set it up when his son died. For Giuliano.’

Brunetti asked, ‘What does it stipulate?’ When she didn’t answer, he added, ‘If you’ll permit me to ask.’

‘I can’t stop you asking anything,’ she said tiredly.

After some time, she apparently decided to answer the question. ‘Giuliano receives a sum every four months,’ she told him.

A certain hesitation at the end of her statement led Brunetti to ask, ‘Are there any conditions?’

‘So long as he is actively pursuing a career in the military, he’ll continue to receive it.’

‘And if he stops?’

‘It does, too.’

‘His time at the Academy?’

‘That’s part of the pursuing.’

‘And now?’ he asked, waving a hand to indicate the unmilitary chaos of Giuliano’s room.

She shrugged, a gesture he was beginning to associate with her, then answered, ‘So long as he’s still officially on leave, he’s considered …’ her voice trailed off.

‘Pursuing?’ Brunetti ventured and was pleased by her smile.

The door opened then and Giuliano came into the room, bringing with him the scent of cigarette smoke. He walked back to the bed, and Brunetti noticed that his shoes left muddy tracks on the tiles of the floor. He sat, propping his hands on either side, looked at Brunetti and said, ‘I don’t know what happened.’

‘Is that the truth or what you decided to tell me while you were outside?’ Brunetti asked mildly.

‘It’s the truth.’

‘Do you have any idea at all?’ Brunetti asked. The boy gave no sign that he had even heard the question, so Brunetti asked an even more hypothetical question: ‘Or of what might have happened?’

After a long time, head still lowered and eyes still on his shoes, the boy said, ‘I can’t go back there.’

Brunetti did not for an instant doubt him: no one who heard him would. But he was curious about the boy’s reasons. ‘Why?’

‘I can’t be a soldier.’

‘Why is that, Giuliano?’ he asked.

‘It’s not in me. It just isn’t. It all seems so stupid: the orders and the standing in line and everyone doing the same thing at the same time. It’s stupid.’

Brunetti glanced at the boy’s aunt, but she sat motionless, staring at her nephew, ignoring Brunetti. When the boy spoke again, Brunetti turned his attention back to him. ‘I didn’t want to do it, but my grandfather said it’s what my father would have wanted me to do.’ He glanced up at Brunetti, who met his eyes but remained silent.

‘That’s not true, Giuliano,’ his aunt interrupted. ‘He always hated the military.’

‘Then why did he join?’ Giuliano snapped back, making no attempt to disguise his anger.

After a long time, as if she’d considered the effect her words were bound to have, she answered, ‘For the same reason you did: to make your grandfather happy.’

‘He’s never happy,’ Giuliano muttered.

A silence fell on them. Brunetti turned and looked out the window, but all he saw was the long expanse of muddy fields and, here and there, a tree trunk.

It was the woman who finally broke the silence. ‘Your father always wanted to be an architect, at least that’s what your mother told
me
. But his father, your grandfather, insisted that he become a soldier.’

‘Just like all the other Ruffos,’ Giuliano spat out with undisguised contempt.

‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘I think that was part of the cause of his unhappiness.’

‘He killed himself, didn’t he?’ Giuliano startled both of the adults by asking.

Brunetti turned his gaze back to the woman. She looked at him, then at her nephew, and finally said, ‘Yes.’

‘And before, he tried to kill
Mamma
?’

She nodded.

‘Why didn’t you ever tell me?’ the boy asked, his voice tight and close to tears.

Tears appeared in her eyes too and began to spill down her face. She drew her mouth tight, incapable of speech, and shook her head. Finally she held up her right hand, her palm facing her nephew, as if asking him to be patient long enough for words to come back to her. More time passed and then she said, ‘I was afraid.’