CB18 About Face (2009) (32 page)

She laughed, low and musical; a beautiful sound. ‘And he told me he had never noticed, that maybe they didn’t have mirrors in hospital rooms in Australia. That night, after he was gone, I went down the corridor into the bathroom. And I saw this,’ she said, waving a hand under her chin.

She propped one elbow on the table and pressed three fingers against her mouth, staring off at that distant mirror. ‘It was horrible. To see that face and not be able to smile or frown or do anything with it, really.’ She took the fingers away. ‘And in the beginning it was a shock to see the way people looked at me. They couldn’t help it: they’d see this and a look of dull shock would appear on their faces, and then, a moment later, I’d see the puritanical disapproval, no matter how hard they tried to disguise or hide it. “
L
a
super liftata
”,’ she said and he heard the rage in her voice. ‘I know what I’m called.’

Brunetti thought she was finished, but that was not so. ‘The next day I told Maurizio what I’d seen in the mirror, and he said it didn’t matter. I still remember the way he waved his hand and said, “
sciochezze
”, as if this face were the least important thing about me.’

She pushed the cup and saucer away from her. ‘And I believe he meant that, and means it still. To him, I’m still the young woman he married.’

‘And during these last two years?’ Brunetti asked.

‘What do you mean?’ she asked angrily.

‘Has he never suspected?’

‘What? That Antonio was my – what do I call him? – my lover?’

‘Hardly,’ Brunetti said. ‘Has he suspected?’

‘I hope not,’ she said instantly. ‘But I don’t know what he knows, or if he can let himself think about it. He knew that I spent time with Antonio, and I think . . . I think he was afraid to ask. And I couldn’t tell him anything, could I?’ She sat back in her chair and crossed her arms. ‘It’s all such a cliché, isn’t it? The old man with the young wife. Of course she’ll take a young lover.’

‘“And so on both sides is simple truth suppressed,”’ Brunetti surprised himself by saying.

‘What?’ she asked.

‘Sorry, something my wife says,’ Brunetti answered, not explaining, not knowing himself how he had dredged that up.

‘Could you tell me about last night?’ he asked.

‘There’s little to say, really,’ she answered, again sounding very tired. ‘He told me to meet him there, and I’d got used to obeying him. So I went.’

‘And your husband?’

‘He’s become as accustomed to it as I have, I suppose,’ she said. ‘I told him I was going out, and he didn’t ask me anything.’

‘You didn’t get home until morning, did you?’ Brunetti asked.

‘I’m afraid Maurizio’s grown accustomed to that, as well.’ Her voice was bleak.

‘Ah,’ was the only thing Brunetti could find to say. Then, ‘What happened?’

She propped her elbows on the table and put her chin on her folded hands. ‘Why should I tell you that, Commissario?’

‘Because, sooner or later, you are going to have to tell someone, and I’m a good choice,’ he said, meaning both.

Her eyes, he thought, grew softer, and she said, ‘I knew that anyone who liked Cicero so much had to be a good man.’

‘I’m not,’ he said, meaning that, as well. ‘But I’m curious and, if I can – and within the limits of the law – I’d like to be able to help you.’

‘Cicero spent his life lying, didn’t he?’ she asked.

Brunetti’s first response was to be insulted, but then he realized that what he was hearing was a question, not a comparison. ‘Do you mean in the legal cases?’

‘Yes. He twisted evidence, certainly bribed every witness he could get money to, distorted the truth, and probably used every cheap trick lawyers have ever used.’ She seemed pleased with the list.

‘But not in his private life,’ Brunetti said. ‘Perhaps he was vain, and weak, but in the end he was an honest man, I think. And a brave one.’

She studied his face, weighing what he had said. ‘The first thing I said to Antonio was that you were a policeman and had come to arrest him,’ she told him. ‘He always carried a gun. I knew him well enough by then . . .’ she began and paused a long time after saying that, as if listening to an echo, then went on, ‘to know he would try to use it. But then he saw you – I think he saw you both, with guns – and I told him it was useless, that his family’s lawyers could get him out of any trouble he might be in.’

She pressed her lips together, and Brunetti was struck by how very unattractive the gesture was. ‘He believed me, or he was so confused he didn’t know what to do, so he handed me the gun when I told him to.’

The front door slammed and they both looked in that direction, but it was only a woman with a pram trying to leave. One of the women at the table near the door got up and held the door for her, and she left.

Brunetti looked back at her. ‘What did you say to him then?’ he asked.

‘I told you I knew him well enough by then, didn’t I?’

‘Yes.’

‘So I told him I thought he was gay, that he fucked like a fag, and that he probably wanted me because I didn’t really look like a woman.’

She waited for his response, but Brunetti made none, and she said, ‘It wasn’t true, of course. But I knew him, and I knew what he’d do.’ Her voice changed, all emotion long since leached from it, and she said with a detachment that was almost academic, ‘Antonio had only one reaction to oppo-sition: violence. I knew what he’d do. So I shot him.’ She paused, but when Brunetti remained silent, she went on, ‘And when he was on the ground, I realized I might not have killed him, so I shot him in the face.’ Her own face remained immobile as she said this.

‘I see,’ Brunetti finally said.

‘And I’d do it again, Commissario. I’d do it again.’ He was tempted to ask her why, but he knew she was now incapable of stopping herself from explaining. ‘I told you: he had unpleasant tastes.’

And that was the last thing she said.

‘Well,’ Paola said, ‘I’d give her a medal.’ Brunetti had gone to bed soon after dinner, saying he was tired, not explaining why. Paola had come to bed some hours later, had fallen instantly asleep, only to be awakened at three by a sleepless, motionless Brunetti lying beside her, his memory chasing after everything that had happened the day before. He went over his conversations with the Contessa, with Griffoni, and then with Franca Marinello.

It took him some time to tell all of this, his voice interrupted every so often by the sound of bells from different parts of the city that neither of them paid any attention to. He could explain, theorize, try to imagine, but his memory kept swirling back to that phrase she had sought, and found: ‘unpleasant tastes’.

‘God above,’ Paola had said when he repeated it. ‘I don’t know what it could mean. And I think I don’t want to know.’

‘Would a woman let something like that go on for two years?’ he finally asked, knowing as he spoke that he had sounded the wrong note.

Instead of answering, she switched on her bedside lamp and turned towards him.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘Nothing,’ Paola said. ‘I just want to see the face of a person capable of asking a question like that.’

‘What question?’ asked an indignant Brunetti.

‘Whether a woman would
let
something like that go on for two years.’

‘What’s wrong with it?’ he asked. ‘The question, I mean.’

She slid down a bit and pulled the covers over her shoulder. ‘To begin with, it assumes that there is something like the female mind, that all women would react in the same way in those circumstances,’ she said. Abruptly, she propped herself up on her elbow and said, ‘Think about the fear, Guido: think about what has been happening to her for two years. This man was a murderer, and she knew what he had done to the dentist and his wife.’

‘Do you believe that she felt she had to sacrifice herself to keep her husband’s illusions about himself intact?’ he asked, feeling quite virtuous in doing so and in phrasing it the way he did. He tried, but failed, to keep himself from going on and asked, ‘What sort of a feminist are you, to defend something like that?’

For a moment, even though she opened her mouth to speak, Paola found it difficult to find the words. Finally she said, ‘Look at the pulpit from which this sermon comes.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘It isn’t
supposed
to mean anything, Guido. But what it
does
mean is that you are not, especially in this matter, allowed to present yourself as a paladin of feminism. I will allow you a lot, and I will allow you at other times and in other circumstances to be a paladin of anything you like, even of feminism, but not now, not about this.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he said, though he feared he did.

She pushed back the covers and sat up, facing him. ‘What I’m talking about is rape, Guido.’ Then, before he had the chance to say anything, she said, ‘And don’t give me that look, as if all of a sudden I’m a hysterical woman, afraid that any man I smile at is going to jump out of the wardrobe, or that I assume every compliment is the prelude to an assault.’

He turned away and switched on his own lamp. If this was going to go on a long time – and he now suspected it would – he might as well be able to see her clearly.

‘It’s different for us, Guido, and you men simply don’t want to see that or you can’t see it.’

She paused after that and he took the opportunity to say, ‘Paola, it’s four in the morning, and I don’t want to listen to a speech, all right?’

He feared that would inflame her yet it seemed to do just the opposite. She reached aside and put a hand on his arm. ‘I know, I know. All I want you to do is try to see it as a situation in which a woman consented to sex with a man with whom she did not want to have sex.’ She thought for some time, then added, ‘I’ve spoken to her only a few times. It’s my mother who likes her – loves her, really – and her judgement is good enough for me.’

‘What judgement did your mother make about her?’ he asked.

‘That she wouldn’t lie,’ Paola said. ‘So if she told you she did this unwillingly – and I think “unpleasant tastes” is enough to suggest it was – then it’s rape. Even if it went on for two years, and even if her reason was to protect her husband’s sense of himself.’ When his expression did not change, she said, in a much warmer voice, ‘You work around the law in this country, Guido, so you know what would have happened if she had gone to the police and if any of this had ever been dragged into the courts. What would happen to that old man, and to her.’

She stopped and looked at him, but he chose not to answer and chose not to object.

‘Our culture has very primitive ideas about sex,’ she said.

To lighten the mood, Brunetti said, ‘I think our society has very primitive ideas about a number of things.’ But as soon as he said it, he realized how firmly he believed this and so it did little to cheer him.

And that was when she said it: ‘Well, I’d give her a medal.’

Brunetti sighed, then shrugged, then reached aside to turn off the light.

When he felt the pressure, he noticed that her hand had never left his arm. ‘What are you going to do?’ she asked.

‘I’m going to go to sleep,’ he said.

‘And in the morning?’ she asked, switching off her light.

‘I’ll go and talk to Patta.’

‘What will you tell him?’

Brunetti turned on to his right side, though to do so, he had to pull his arm free of her hand. He rose up and pounded his pillow a few times, then pulled himself over so that he could put his left hand on the inside of her arm. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Really?’

‘Really,’ he said, and then they slept.

The newspapers latched on to the story and would not let it go. They sank their teeth into it and shook it, for it had just what their public loved: wealthy people caught in apparent misbehaviour; the younger wife caught with the lover; violence, sex, and death. On the way to the Questura, Brunetti saw again the photo of the young Franca Marinello; in fact, he saw a number of photos of her and wondered how it was possible that the press could have found so many and so soon. Did her university classmates sell them? Her family? Friends? When he got to his office, he opened the papers and read through the story as it was presented in all of them.

Amidst the tumble of words, there were more photos of her at various social functions during the last few years, and speculation was rife about what would have driven an attractive young woman to have tampered with – they drew themselves short of talking about ‘God’s gift’, limiting themselves to ‘her natural appearance’ – in order to end up looking the way she did. Various psychologists were inter-viewed: one of them said she was a symbol of a consumerist society, never satisfied with what it had, always looking for some symbolic achievement to validate its worth; while another, in
L’Osservatore Romano
, a woman, saw it as a sad example of the way women were driven to attempt any means to make themselves younger or more attractive so as to compete for the approval of men. Sometimes, the psycho-logist said, with badly disguised glee, these attempts failed, though that failure seldom served as sufficient warning to those still willing to pursue the evanescent goal of physical beauty.

A different journalist speculated about the nature of Franca Marinello’s relationship with Terrasini, whose criminal past was splattered across the pages. They had become a well known couple, it was said by a number of unnamed people, and had been seen at the best restaurants in the city and often at the Casinò.

Cataldo, it seemed, had been selected to play the role of the betrayed husband. Entrepreneur, former city councillor, well regarded by his fellow businessmen of the Veneto, he had ended his former marriage of thirty-five years in order to marry Franca Marinello, a woman more than thirty years his junior. Neither he nor Marinello was available for comment, nor had a warrant been issued for her arrest. The police were still questioning witnesses and waiting for the results of the autopsy.