Uniform Justice (6 page)

Both of the girls had cigarettes in their hands, something that usually filled Brunetti with the desire to tell them, if they valued their health and well-being, to stop. Instead, he turned and looked after them, filled with a sense of almost religious awe at the sight of their youth and joy.

By the time he reached his office, the feeling had passed. On his desk he found the first of the many forms that were generated by any case of suicide; he didn’t bother to fill it out. It was only after he heard from Venturi that he would know how to proceed.

He called down to the officers’ room, but neither Vianello nor Pucetti was there. He dialled Signorina Elettra’s extension and asked her to begin a complete search through all the sources available to her, official and unofficial, for information on Fernando Moro’s careers as both a doctor and a Member of Parliament. Saying that she had already begun, she promised to have something for him later in the day.

The thought of lunch displeased him: food seemed an irrelevant extravagance. He felt a gnawing desire to see his family, though he knew his current mood would render him so solicitous as to make them uncomfortable. He called Paola and told her he couldn’t make it home for lunch, saying that something had come up at the Questura that would keep him there and, yes, yes, he’d eat something and be home at the regular time.

‘I hope it’s not too bad,’ Paola said, letting him know that she had registered his tone, however neutral he had tried to make his words.

‘I’ll see you later,’ he said, still unwilling to tell her what had happened. ‘Hug the kids for me,’ he said before he hung up.

He sat at his desk for a few minutes, then drew some papers towards him and looked at them, reading through the words, understanding each one but not certain he understood what they intended to say. He set them aside, then pulled them back and read them again; this time the sentences made sense to him, though he could see no reason why anyone should find their messages important.

He went to the window and studied the crane that stood constant guard over the church and the restoration that had yet to begin. He had read or been told once how much the equally motionless cranes that loomed over the empty shell of the opera house cost the city to maintain each day. Where did all the money go? he wondered. Who was it that reaped such enormous
profits
from so much inactivity? Idly, keeping his mind occupied with matters other than the death of young men, he began rough calculations. If the cranes cost five thousand Euros a day, it would cost the city almost two million Euros to keep them there a year, whether they worked or not. He stood for a long time, numbers moving around in his head in far greater activity than had been shown by any of those cranes for some time.

Abruptly he turned away and went back to his desk. There was no one to call, so he left his office, went downstairs and out of the Questura. He walked to the bar at the foot of the bridge, where he had a
panino
and a glass of red wine and let the words of the day’s newspaper pass under his eyes.

6

THOUGH HE PREVARICATED
as much as he could, Brunetti still had no choice but eventually to return to the Questura. He stopped in the officers’ room to look for Vianello and found him there with Pucetti. The younger officer started to get to his feet, but Brunetti waved him back. There was only one other policeman in the room, sitting at a desk off to one side, talking on the phone.

‘Anything?’ he asked the two seated policemen.

Pucetti glanced at Vianello, acknowledging his right to speak first.

‘I took him back,’ the Inspector began, ‘but he wouldn’t let me go in with him.’ He shrugged this away and asked, ‘You, sir?’

‘I spoke to Moro and to his cousin, who was there with him. She said the boy couldn’t have killed himself, seemed pretty insistent on it.’ Something kept Brunetti from telling the others how easy it had been for Moro to dismiss him.

‘His cousin, you said?’ Vianello interrupted, echoing his neutrality.

‘That’s what she told me.’ The habit of doubt, Brunetti reflected, the habit of seeking the lowest possible common moral denominator, had been bred into all of them. He wondered if there were some sort of psychological equation which correlated years of service with the police and an inability to believe in human goodness. And whether it was possible, or for how long it would be possible, to go back and forth between his professional world and his private world without introducing the contamination of the first to the second.

His attention was recalled by Vianello, who had just finished saying something.

‘Excuse me?’ Brunetti said.

‘I asked if his wife was there,’ Vianello repeated.

Brunetti shook his head. ‘I don’t know. No one else came in while I was there, but there’s no reason she would want to talk to me.’

‘Is there a wife?’ Pucetti asked, emphasizing the first word.

Rather than admit that he didn’t know, Brunetti said, ‘I asked Signorina Elettra to see what she can find out about the family.’

‘There was something in the papers about them, I think,’ Vianello said. ‘Years ago.’ Brunetti and Pucetti waited for him to continue, but all the Inspector finally said was, ‘I don’t remember, but I think it was something about the wife.’

‘Whatever it is, she’ll find it,’ Pucetti declared.

Years ago, Brunetti would have responded with condescension to Pucetti’s childlike faith in Signorina Elettra’s powers, as one would to the excesses of the peasant believers in the liquefaction of the blood of San Gennaro. Himself presently numbered among that unwashed throng, he made no demurral.

‘Why don’t you tell the Commissario what you’ve told me?’ Vianello asked Pucetti, drawing him back from his devotions and Brunetti back from his reflections.

‘The
portiere
told me that the gate is kept locked after ten at night,’ the young officer began, ‘but most faculty members have keys, and students who stay out later than that have to ring him to let them in.’

‘And?’ Brunetti asked, sensing Pucetti’s reservations.

‘I’m not sure,’ Pucetti answered, then explained. ‘Two of the boys I spoke to, separately, that is, seemed to make fun of the idea. I asked why, and one of them smiled and went like this,’ Pucetti concluded, raising the thumb of his right hand towards his mouth.

Brunetti registered this but left it to Pucetti to continue. ‘I’d say the boys are right and he’s a
drunk
, the
portiere
. It was what – eleven in the morning when I spoke to him, and he was already halfway there.’

‘Did any of the other boys mention this?’

‘I didn’t want to push them on it, sir. I didn’t want any of them to know just what I had learned from the others. It’s always better if they think I already know everything there is to know: that way, they think I’ll know when they lie. But I got the feeling that they can get in and out when they please.’

Brunetti nodded for him to continue.

‘I’m not sure I learned much more than that, sir. Most of them were so shocked that all they could do was ask more questions,’ Pucetti answered.

‘What exactly did you ask them?’ Brunetti inquired.

‘What you told me to, sir: how well they knew Moro and if they had spoken to him in the last few days. None of them could think of anything special the boy had said or done, nor that he had been behaving strangely, and none of them said that Moro had been a particular friend.’

‘And the faculty?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Same thing. None of the ones I spoke to could remember anything strange about Moro’s behaviour in the last few days, and all of them said he was a fine, fine boy but were quick to insist that they really didn’t know him very well.’

All three of them recognized the phenomenon: most people refused to know anything. It
was
rare for any person who was subject to questioning or interrogation to admit to familiarity with the subject of police inquiries. One of the texts Paola had dealt with in her doctoral thesis was a medieval one entitled
The Cloud of Unknowing
. For an instant Brunetti pictured it as a warm, dry place to which all witnesses and potential witnesses fled in lemming-like terror and where they huddled until no single question remained to be asked.

Pucetti went on. ‘I wanted to speak to his roommate, but he wasn’t there last night, nor the night before.’ Seeing interest in their faces, he explained, ‘Twenty-three boys, including Moro’s roommate, were on a weekend trip to the Naval Academy in Livorno. Soccer. The game was Sunday afternoon, and then they spent yesterday and this morning going to classes there. They don’t get home until this evening.’

Vianello shook his head in tired resignation. ‘I’m afraid this is all we’re going to get from any of them.’ Pucetti shrugged in silent agreement.

Brunetti stopped himself from remarking that it was what they could expect from a public which viewed authority and all who attempted to impose it as adversaries. He had read enough to know that there were countries whose citizens did not perceive their government as an inimical force, where they believed, instead, that the government existed to serve their needs and respond to their wishes. How would he react if someone he knew were to maintain this to be
true
here, in this city, in this country? Religious mania would be less convincing proof of mental imbalance.

Vianello and Pucetti were to go back that afternoon and question the rest of the boys and the remaining faculty. Leaving it at that, Brunetti told them he would be up in his office, and left.

Curiosity and the desire to see Signorina Elettra and learn what she had managed to discover led him off the stairs at her floor and into her small office. Here he had the sensation that he had stepped into a jungle or a forest: four tall trees with enormous leaves, broad, dark green and shiny, stood in terracotta pots against the back wall. With their darkness as a backdrop, Signorina Elettra, today dressed in colours usually seen only on Buddhist monks, sat at her desk. The total effect was of an enormous piece of exotic fruit exposed in front of the tree from which it had fallen.

‘Lemons?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Where did you get them?’

‘A friend of mine just directed
Lulu
at the opera. He had them sent over after the last performance.’

‘
Lulu?
’

She smiled. ‘The very same.’

‘I don’t remember lemons in
Lulu
,’ he said, puzzled, but willing, as ever, to be graced with illumination.

‘He set the opera in Sicily,’ she explained.

‘Ah,’ Brunetti whispered, trying to remember the plot. The music, mercifully, was gone. At a loss for what else to say, he asked, ‘Did you go and see it?’

She took so long to answer that, at first, he thought he had somehow offended her with the question. Finally, she said, ‘No, sir. My standards are very low, of course, but I do draw the line at going to the opera in a tent. In a parking lot.’

Brunetti, whose aesthetic principles were entrenched well behind that same line, nodded and asked, ‘Have you been able to find out anything about Moro?’

Her smile was fainter, but it was still recognizably a smile. ‘Some things have come in. I’m waiting for a friend in Siena to tell me more about the wife Federica.’

‘What about her?’ Brunetti asked.

‘She was involved in an accident there.’

‘What kind of accident?’

‘Hunting.’

‘Hunting? A woman in a hunting accident?’ he asked, his disbelief audible.

She raised her eyebrows as if to suggest that anything at all was possible in a world where
Lulu
was set in Sicily, but instead said, ‘I shall pass over the glaring sexism in that remark, Commissario.’ She paused a didactic moment, then continued, ‘It happened a couple of years ago. She was staying with friends in the countryside near Siena. One afternoon, while she was out for a walk, she was shot in the leg.
Luckily
, she was found before she bled to death and taken to the hospital.’

‘Was the hunter ever found?’

‘No, but it was hunting season so they assumed that a hunter had heard her and thought she was an animal and shot at the noise without seeing what it was.’

‘And didn’t bother to come and see what he had shot?’ an indignant Brunetti asked. He added another question. ‘Or when he saw what he had shot, he didn’t help her or call for help?’

‘It’s what they do,’ she said, her voice matching his own in indignation. ‘You read the papers, don’t you, every year when the season opens, about the way three or four of them get shot on the first day? It goes on all during hunting season. It’s not only the ones who stumble over their own guns and blow their brains out.’ Brunetti thought her tone was devoid of anything approaching sympathy as she said this. ‘They shoot one another, too,’ she went on, ‘and get left to bleed to death because no one wants to run the risk of being arrested for having shot someone.’

He started to speak, but she cut him off and added, ‘As far as I’m concerned, it can’t happen often enough.’

Brunetti waited for her to calm down and retract her words but then decided to leave the issue of her feelings towards hunters unexamined and asked, ‘Were the police called? When she was shot?’

‘I don’t know. That’s what I’m waiting for – the police report.’

‘Where is she now?’ Brunetti asked.

‘That’s something else I’m trying to find out.’

‘She’s not with her husband?’

‘I don’t know. I had a look at the files at the Comune, but she’s not listed as resident at his address, even though they own the apartment jointly.’ So habituated had Brunetti become to her useful criminality that it did not for an instant trouble him that a person with greater sympathy for legal precision would translate her phrase ‘had a look at’ as ‘broke into’.

There could certainly be many explanations for why Moro’s wife was not registered as resident at his Dorsoduro address, though the most obvious interpretation was that she did not live with her husband. ‘Let me know when you get hold of the report on the shooting,’ he said, wondering if this would launch her into further denunciation. Like most Venetians, Brunetti had no interest in hunting, judging it an endeavour that was expensive, inconvenient, and excessively loud. Further, experience as a policeman as well as his habit of reflecting upon human behaviour had too often suggested a frightening correlation between a man’s interest in firearms and feelings of sexual inadequacy.