A Venetian Reckoning (12 page)

'Work,' Vianello repeated but said no
more. He got to his feet. 'Will there be anything else, sir?' Brunetti
remembered that Topa had been Vianello s partner for more than seven years and
that the sergeant had wanted to quit when Topa was forced into retirement, persuaded
away from that idea only by Brunetti's fierce opposition. Topa had never seemed
to Brunetti the sort of man over whom a high moral position could be taken.

'No, nothing else. On your way down,
would you ask Signorina Elettra to get on to the people at SIP and see if she
can get the list of Trevisan's local calls from them?'

'Pinetta's isn't the sort of place an
international lawyer would call,' Vianello said.

It didn't sound like the sort of
place a successful accountant would call, either, but Brunetti chose not to volunteer
this. "The records will tell us’ he said blandly.

Vianello waited, but when Brunetti
said nothing further, he went down to his office, leaving Brunetti to speculate
on the reasons wealthy and successful men might have for making calls to public
telephones, especially in a place as squalid as Pinetta's.

13

Dinner that night for the three of
them was enlivened — Brunetti could think of no kinder word — by a heated
confrontation between Chiara and her mother which blew up when Chiara told her
father that, after school, she had gone back to do her maths homework at the
home of the girl who was Francesca Trevisan's best friend.

Before Chiara could say any more than
that, Paola slammed her hand down on the table. 'I will not live in the same
house as a spy,' she shouted at her daughter.

'I'm not a spy,' Chiara answered
sharply. ‘I’m working for the police.' Then, turning to Brunetti, she asked,
'Aren't I, Papa?'

Ignoring her, Brunetti reached across
the table and picked up the nearly empty bottle of Pinot noir.

'Well, aren't I?' Chiara insisted.

'It doesn't matter', her mother
began, 'if you're working for the police or not. You can't go around trying to
get information from your friends.'

'But Papas always getting information
from his friends, too. Does that mean he's a spy?'

Brunetti sipped at his wine and
peered across the top of his glass at his wife, curious how she would answer
this.

Paola looked at him but spoke to
Chiara. 'It's not that he gets information mom his friends, it's that when he
does it, they know who he is and why he's doing it.'

'Well, my friends know who I am and
they ought to be able to figure out why I'm doing it,' Chiara insisted, her
cheeks slowly suffusing with red.

'It's not the same thing, and you
know it,' Paola answered.

Chiara muttered something that, to
Brunetti, sounded like, 'Is so,' but her head was lowered over her empty plate,
and so he wasn't sure.

Paola turned to Brunetti. 'Guido,
would you please try to explain the difference to your daughter?' As ever, in
the heat of argument, Paola, like some sort of negligent rodent, had sloughed
off all claim to motherhood and abandoned the young thing to its father.

'Your mother's right,' he said. 'When
I question people, they know I'm a policeman, and so they tell me things in
knowledge of that fact. And they know that they can be held liable for what
they say, so that allows them the chance to be cautious, if they want to be.'

'But don't you ever trick anyone?' Chiara
asked. 'Or try to?' she added before he could answer.

'I'm sure I've done both,' he
admitted. 'But remember, nothing that anyone says to you has any legal weight.
They can always deny they said it, and then it would just be your word against
theirs.'

'But why would I lie?'

'Why would they?' Brunetti returned.

'Who cares if what people say is
legally binding or not?' Paola asked, jumping back into the fray. "We're
not talking about what's legally binding; we're talking about betrayal. And, if
the people at this table will permit me the use of the word,' she said, looking
at the two of them in turn, 'honour.'

Chiara, Brunetti observed, got one of
those, 'Oh, here she goes again' looks on her face and turned to him for moral
support, but he gave her none.

'Honour?' Chiara asked.

'Yes, honour,' Paola said, suddenly
calm, but no less dangerous for that. 'You can't get information from your
friends. You can't take what they say and make use of it against them.'

Chiara interrupted her here. 'But
nothing Susanna said can be used against her.'

Paola closed her eyes for a moment,
then picked up a piece of bread and began to crumble it into small pieces,
something she often did when she was upset 'Chiara, it doesn't matter what use
ever gets made or doesn't get made of anything she told you. What cannot be
done,' she began and then repeated the entire phrase, 'what cannot be done is
to lead our friends on to say things to us when we are alone with them and then
turn around and repeat that information or make some use of it that they didn't
know we had in mind when they were talking to us. That's to betray a
confidence.'

'You make it sound like a crime,'
Chiara said.

it's worse than a crime,' Paola shot
back, it's wrong.'

'And crime isn't?' Brunetti asked
from the sidelines.

She pounced. 'Guido, unless I
invented them, we had three plumbers in the house last week, for two days. Can
you produce a
ricevuto fiscale
for
that work? Do you have some proof that the money we paid them will be reported
to the government and taxes be paid on it?' When he said nothing, she insisted,
'Do you?' His silence continued. 'That's a crime, Guido, a crime, but I defy
you or anyone in this stinking government of pigs and thieves we have to tell
me that it's wrong.'

He reached for the bottle but it was
empty.

'You want more?' Paola asked, and he
knew she wasn't talking about the wine. He didn't particularly, but Paola was
up on her soapbox now, and long experience told him that there was no getting
her down until she had finished. He regretted only that he had finished the
wine.

From the corner of his eye, he saw
Chiara get out of her chair and go over to the cabinet. In a moment she was
back with two small glasses and a bottle of grappa, which she slid silently
across the table towards him. Her mother could call her whatever she pleased -
traitor, spy, monster - to him, the child was an angel.

He saw Paola give Chiara a long look
and was glad to see her eyes soften, however momentarily. He poured himself a
small glass of grappa, sipped at it and sighed.

Paola reached across the table and
picked up the bottle. She poured herself some and took a sip. The truce was
held.

'Chiara,' Paola said, 'I don't mean
to yell at you about this.’

'But you just did,’ her ever-literal
daughter replied.

'I know I did, and I'm sorry.' Paola
took another sip. 'You know I feel strongly about this.'

'You get it from those books, don't
you?' Chiara asked simply, managing to suggest that her mother's career as a
professor of English Literature had somehow exerted a pernicious influence on
her moral development.

Both of her parents sought sarcasm or
disdain in her tone, but neither was there, nothing more than the desire for
information.

'I suppose I do,' Paola admitted.
'They knew about honour, the people who wrote those books, and it was important
to them.' She paused here and considered what she had just said. 'But it wasn't
important just to them, the writers; their whole society thought some things
were important: honour, a person's good name, one's word.'

'I think those things are important,
Mamma,' Chiara said, sounding, as she spoke, far younger than she was.

'I know you do. And I do, and Raffi
does, and your father does, too. But our world doesn't, not any more.'

'Is that why you like those books so
much, Mamma?'

Paola smiled and, Brunetti thought,
clambered down from her soapbox before she answered, ‘I suppose so,
cara.
Besides, knowing about them gives me a job at the
university.'

Brunetti's pragmatism had been
butting itself against the various forms of Paola's idealism for more than two
decades, so he believed that she looked to 'those books' for considerably more
than a job.

'Do you have much homework tonight,
Chiara?'

Brunetti asked, knowing that he could
ask her later, or tomorrow morning, to tell him whatever she had learned fiom
Francesca's friend. Seeing this as the dismissal it was, Chiara said that she
had and went back to her own room to begin it, leaving her parents alone to
continue to discuss, if they chose, honour.

'I didn't know she'd take my offer so
seriously, Paola, and go out and start asking people questions,' Brunetti said
by way of explanation and, at least partly, apology.

‘I don't mind her getting the information,'
Paola said. 'But I don't like the way she got it.' She took another sip of her
grappa. 'Do you think she understood what I was trying to say?'

'I think she understands everything
we say,' Brunetti answered. 'I'm not sure she agrees with a lot of it, but she
certainly understands.' Then, going back to what she had said earlier, he
asked, 'What other examples did you have of things that are criminal but not
wrong?’

She rolled her small glass between her
palms. ‘I think that's too easy,' she said, 'especially given the insane laws
in this country. The harder one to figure out is the things that are wrong but
not criminal.’

'Like what?' he asked.

'Like letting your children watch
television,' she said with a laugh, apparently tired of the subject.

'No, tell me, Paola,' he said,
interested now. 'I'd like you to give me an example.'

Before she spoke, she pinged a
fingernail against the glass bottle of mineral water that stood on the table.
'I know you're tired of hearing me say this, Guido, but I think plastic bottles
are wrong, but they're certainly not criminal. Though', she quickly added, 1
think they will be within a few years. If we have any sense, that is.'

1 was hoping for a larger example,'
Brunetti said.

She thought for a while and then
answered. 'If we were to have raised the children to believe that my family's
wealth gave them special privileges, that would be wrong.’

It surprised Brunetti that Paola
would use this example: over the years, she had seldom alluded to her parents'
wealth save, at those times when political discussion escalated into argument,
to point to it as an example of social injustice.

They exchanged a look, but before
Brunetti could say anything, Paola continued, 'I'm not sure it's all that much
larger an issue, but I think if I were to speak slightingly of you, it would be
wrong.'

'You always speak slightingly of me,'
Brunetti said, forcing himself to smile.

'No, Guido, I speak slightingly
to
you. That's different. I would never say any of
those things
about
you.'

'Because that's dishonourable?'

'Precisely,' she said, smiling.

'But it's not dishonourable to say
them
to
me?'

'Of course not, especially if they're
true. Because that's between us, Guido, and that doesn't belong, in any sense, to
the world.'

He reached over and took back the
grappa bottle. it seems to me it's getting harder and harder to tell the
difference,' he said.

'Between what?'

The criminal and the wrong.'

'Why do you chink that is, Guido?'

'I'm not sure. Perhaps because, as
you said, before, we don't believe in the old things any more, and we haven't
found anything new, anything else, to believe in.’

She nodded, considering this.