A Venetian Reckoning (7 page)

She took a small step backwards and
shot an accusing finger at his heart. 'The Republic's collapsing, and all he
can think about is food,' she said, this time addressing the invisible listener
who had, for more than twenty years, been a silent participant in their
marriage.

'Guido, these villains will destroy
us all. Perhaps they already have. And you want to know what's for lunch.'

Brunetti stopped himself from
remarking that someone wearing cashmere from Burlington Arcade made not the
best revolutionary and, instead, said, 'Feed me, Paola, and then
I’ll
go back to my
own commitment to justice.'

That was enough to remind her of
Trevisan and, as Brunetti knew she would, Paola eagerly abandoned her
philosophical fulminations for a bit of gossip. She turned off the radio and
asked, 'Has he given it to you?’

Brunetti nodded as he pushed himself
up from his knees. ‘He observed that I had nothing much to do at the moment.
The Mayor has already called, so I leave it to you to imagine the state he's
in.' There was no need to provide explication of ‘it’ or 'he’.

As Brunetti knew she would be, Paola
was diverted from considerations of political justice and rectitude. 'The story
I read said nothing more than that he had been shot. On the train from Torino.'

'He had a ticket from Padua. We're
trying to find out what he was doing there.'

'A woman?'

'Could be. Too early yet to say
anything. What's for lunch?'

'Pasta fagioli and then cotoletta.'
'Salad?'

'Guido,' she asked with pursed lips
and upraised eyes, 'when haven't we had salad with cutlets?’

Instead of answering her question, he
asked, 'Is there any more of that good Dolcetto?'

'I don't know.
We
had a bottle
of it last week, didn't we?'

He muttered something and knelt back
down in front of the cabinet Behind the bottles of mineral water were three
bottles of wine, all white. Getting to his feet again, he asked, 'Where's
Chiara?'

'In her room. Why?'

'I want her to do me a favour.'

Paola glanced at her watch. 'It's a
quarter to one, Guido. The stores will be closed.'

'Not if she goes up to Do Mori.
They're open until one.'

'And you're going to ask her to go up
there, just to get you a bottle of Dolcetto?'

Three,' he said, leaving the kitchen
and going down the hall towards Chiara's room. He knocked at the door and, from
behind him, heard the radio turned on.

'Avanti,
papa
,'
she called out

He opened the door and walked in. The
bed, across which Chiara sprawled, had a white ruffled canopy running above it.
Her shoes lay on the floor, next to her school bag and jacket. The shutters
were open, and light swept into the room, illuminating the bears and other
stuffed animals which shared the bed with her. She brushed a handful of dark
blonde hair back from her face, looked up at him, and gave him a smile that
competed with the light.

'Ciao, dolcezza?
he
said as he came in.

'You're home early, Papa.'

'No, right on time. You been
reading?' She nodded, glancing back at her book. 'Chiara, would you do me a
favour?' She lowered the book and peered at him over the top of the pages.

'Would you, Chiara?' 'Where?' she
asked. 'Just down to Do Mori.' 'What are we out of?' she asked. 'Dolcetto.'

'Oh, Papa, why can't you drink
something else with lunch?'

'Because I want Dolcetto, sweetie.' ‘I’ll
go if you'll come with me.' 'But then I might as well go by myself.' 'If you
want to do that, then just go, Papa.' 'I don't want to go, Chiara. That's why
I'm asking you to go for me.'

'But why should I go?'

'Because I work hard to support you
all.'

'Mamma works, too.'

'Yes, but my money pays for the house
and everything we buy for it.'

She set her book face down on the
bed. 'Mamma says that's capitalistic blackmail and I don't have to listen to
you when you do it’

'Chiara,' he said, speaking very
softly, 'your mother is a troublemaker, a malcontent, and an agitator.'

'Then how come you always tell me I
have to do what she says?’

He took a very deep breath. Seeing
that, Chiara slid

to the edge of the bed and fished for
her shoes with her toes. 'How many bottles do you want?' she asked truculently.
'Three.'

She bent down and tied her shoes.
Brunetti reached out a hand and caressed her head, but she pulled herself to
one side to avoid him. When her shoes were tied, she stood and snatched her
jacket up from the floor. She walked past him, saying nothing, and started down
the hall. 'Ask your mother for the money,' he called to her and went down the
hall to the bathroom. While he was washing his hands, he heard the front door
slam.

Back in the kitchen, Paola was busy
setting the table, but only for three. 'Where's Raffi?' Brunetti asked.

'He's got an oral exam this
afternoon, so he's spending the day in the library'

'What's he going to eat?'

'He'll get some sandwiches
somewhere.'

'If he's got an exam, he should have
a good meal first.'

She looked across the room at him and
shook her head.

'What?’ he asked. 'Nothing.'

'No, tell me. What are you shaking
your head for?'

'I wonder, at times, how it was I
married such an ordinary man.'

'Ordinary?' Of all the insults Paola
had hurled at him over the years, this one somehow seemed the worst.
'Ordinary?' he repeated.

She hesitated for a moment, then
launched herself into an explanation. 'First you try to blackmail your daughter
into going out to buy wine she doesn't drink, and then you worry that your son
doesn't eat. Not that he doesn't study, but that he doesn't eat.'

'What should I worry about if not
that?'

'That he doesn't study,' Paola shot
back.

'He hasn't done anything but study
for the last year, that and moon about the house, thinking about Sara.'

'What's Sara got to do with it?'

What did any of this, Brunetti
wondered, have to do with it.

'What did Chiara say?' he asked.

'That she offered to go if you'd go
with her, but you refused.'

'If I had wanted to go, I would have
gone myself.'

'You're always saying you don't have
enough time to spend with the children, and when you get the chance, you don't
want to.'

'Going to a bar to buy a bottle of
wine isn't exactly how I want to spend time with my children.’

'What is, sitting around the table
and explaining to them the way money gives people power?'

'Paola,' he said, enunciating all
three of the syllables slowly, 'I have no idea what any of this is about, but
I'm fairly sure it doesn't have anything to do with sending Chiara to the
store.'

She shrugged and turned back to the
large pot that was boiling on the stove.

'What is it, Paola?' he asked,
staying where he was but reaching out to her with his voice.

She shrugged again.

Tell me, Paola. Please.'

She kept her back to him and spoke in
a soft voice. 'I'm beginning to feel old, Guido. Raffi's got a girlfriend, and
Chiara's almost a woman. I’ll be fifty soon.’ He marvelled at her maths but
said nothing. 'I know it's stupid, but I find it depressing, as if my life were
all used up, the best part gone.' Good Lord, and she called him ordinary?

He waited, but it seemed she had
finished.

She took the lid off the pot and was,
for a moment, enveloped in the cloud of steam that spilled up from it. She took
a long wooden spoon and stirred at whatever was in the pot, managing to look
anything but witchlike as she did it. Brunetti tried, with very little success,
to strip his mind clear of the love and familiarity of more than twenty years
and look at her objectively. He saw a tall, slender woman in her early forties
with tawny blonde hair that spilled down to her shoulders. She turned and shot
him a glance, and he saw the long nose and dark eyes, the broad mouth which
had, for decades, delighted him.

'Does that mean I get to trade you
in?' he risked.

She fought the smile for an instant
but then gave in to it.

'Am I being a fool?' she asked.

He was about to tell her that, if she
was, it was no more than he was accustomed to when the door burst open and
Chiara launched herself back into the apartment

'Papa,' she shouted from down the
hall, 'you didn't tell me.'

'Tell you what, Chiara?’

'About Francesca's father. That
somebody killed him’

'You know her?’ Brunetti asked.

She came down the hall, cloth bag
hanging from one hand. Obviously, curiosity about the murder had driven her
anger with Brunetti from her mind. 'Sure. We went to school together. Are you
going to look for whoever did it?'

‘I’m going to help,' he said,
unwilling to open himself to what he knew would turn into unrelenting
questioning. 'Did you know her very well?’

'Oh, no,’ she said, surprising him by
not claiming to have been her best friend and, as such, somehow privy to
whatever he might learn. 'She hung around with that Pedrocci girl, you know,
the one who had all those cats at home. She smelled, so no one would be her
friend. Except Francesca.’

'Did Francesca have other friends?'
Paola asked, interested herself now and hence willingly complicit in her
husband's attempt to pry information from then-own child. 'I don't think I ever
met her.'

'Oh, no, she never came back here
with me. Anyone who wanted to play with her had to go back to her house. Her
mamma insisted on that.'

'Did the girl with all the cats go?'

'Oh, yes. Her father's a judge, so
Signora Trevisan didn't mind that she smelled.' Brunetti was struck by how
clearly Chiara saw the world. He had no idea in which direction Chiara would
travel, but he had no doubt that she would go far.

'What's she like, Signora Trevisan?'
Paola asked and then shot a glance toward Brunetti, who nodded. It had been
gracefully done. He pulled out a chair and silently took a place at the table.

'Mamma, why don't you let Papa ask these
questions since he's the one who wants to know about her?' Without waiting for
her mother's lie, Chiara walked across the kitchen and folded herself into
Brunetti's lap, placing the now forgotten, or forgiven, bottles on the table in
front of them. 'What do you want to know about her, Papa?' Well, at least she
hadn't called him Commissario.

'Anything you can remember, Chiara,'
he answered. 'Maybe you could tell me why everyone had to go and play at their
house.'

'Francesca wasn't sure, but once,
about five years ago, she said she thought it was because her parents were
afraid that someone would kidnap her.' Even before Brunetti or Paola could
comment on the absurdity of this, Chiara continued, 'I know, that's stupid.
But that's what she said. Maybe she was just making it up to make herself sound
important. No one paid any attention to her, anyway, so she stopped saying it.'
She turned her attention to Paola and asked,' When's lunch, Mamma? I'm starved,
and if I don't eat soon, I’ll faint,' whereupon she did just that, collapsing
and sliding down towards the floor, only to be saved by Brunetti, who
instinctively wrapped both arms around her and pulled her back towards him.

'Fake,' he whispered in her ear and
began to tickle her, holding her prisoner with one arm while he poked and
prodded her side, running his ringers up and down her ribs.

Chiara shrieked and waved her arms in
the air, gasping with shock and delight. 'No, Papa. No, let me go. Let me
..
The rest was
lost in high peals of laughter.