you to commit suicide, and I don't think I want to do that’ He wondered how Marco could continue to open new businesses if this was the sort of thing he met at every turn. He thought about that restless boy, the one with the big dreams, who had shared his school bench for three years in a row, and he remembered how Marco could never sit still for long, yet he always managed to find the patience to complete one task before rushing off to another. Maybe Marco was programmed like a bee and had no option but to work at something and fly off to something new as soon as he'd finished.
'Well,' Marco began, slipping out of the bench and getting to his feet. He reached into his pocket, but Brunetti held up a monitory hand. Marco understood, took his hand out of his pocket and extended it to the still-sitting Brunetti.
'Next time, mine?'
'Of course’
Marco glanced at his watch. ‘I’ve got to run, Guido. I've got a shipment of Murano glass’ he began, placing a light smile and heavy emphasis on Murano', 'coming in from the Czech Republic and I've got to be at the Customs to see it gets through without any trouble.'
Before Brunetti could rise from the bench, Marco was gone, walking quickly, as he had always walked, off to some new project, some new scheme.
3
Though Brunetti and Paola listened, after dinner, to each other's account of the day, neither of them saw much of a connection between the two events; certainly neither of them connected the stories they'd heard to the idea of honour or its demands. Paola, in sympathy with Marco, said she'd always liked him, surprising Brunetti into saying, 'But I thought you didn't.'
'Why's that?'
‘I suppose because he's so different from the sort of person you tend to like.' 'Specifically?'
‘I always thought you considered him something of a hustler.'
'He is a hustler. That's precisely why I like him.' When she saw his confusion, she explained, 'Remember, I spend most of my professional life in the company of students or academics. The first are usually lazy, and the second are always self-satisfied. The first want to talk about their delicate sensibilities and wounded souls, some sudden injury to which has prevented them from completing what they were meant to do for class; and the second want to talk about how their last monograph on Calvino's use of the semicolon is going to change the entire course of modern literary criticism. So someone like Marco, who talks about tangible things, about making money and running a business, and who has never, once, in all these years, tried to impress me with what he knows or where he's been or burdened me with long stories of his suffering; someone like Marco's a glass of prosecco after a long afternoon spent drinking cold camomile tea.'
'Cold camomile tea?' he inquired.
She smiled. ‘I threw it in for the effect achieved by the contrast with the prosecco. If s a technique of artful exaggeration, akin to the
'Who, I imagine, are not at all like prosecco.'
She closed her eyes and put her head back in an attitude of exquisite pain, the sort usually observed in pictures of Saint Agatha. 'There are days when I'm tempted to steal your gun and take it with me.'
'Who would you use it on, students or professors?'
'Surely you're joking,' she said in feigned astonishment.
'No, who?'
'On my colleagues. The students, poor babies, they're just young and callow and will grow up, most of them, and turn into reasonably pleasant human beings. It's my colleagues I long to destroy, if only to put a stop to the endless litany of self-congratulation I have to listen to.'
'All of them?' he asked, accustomed to hear her denounce particular people and thus surprised at her scope.
She considered this, as if she knew there were six bullets in his gun and she was preparing a list. After a while she said, not without a certain disappointment, 'No, not all of them. Maybe five or six.'
'But that’s still half of your department, isn't it?' Twelve on the books, but only nine teach.' 'What do the other three do?' 'Nothing. But if s called research.' 'How can that be?'
'One of them is aggressive and probably gaga; Professoressa Bettin had what is described as a crisis of nerves and has been put on medical leave until further notice, which probably means until she retires; and the Vice-Chairman, Professore Delia Grazia, well, he's a special case.'
'What does that mean?'
'He's sixty-eight and should have retired three years ago, but he refuses to leave.' 'But he doesn't teach?' 'He can't be trusted with female students.' 'What?'
'You heard me. He can't be trusted with female students. Or, for that matter,' she added after a reflective pause, 'with female faculty.'
'What does he do?'
'With the students it's a kind of dirty-minded subtext to everything he says during his tutorials, well, when he still used to have them. Or he'd read graphic descriptions of sex in his classes. But always from the classics, so no one could complain, or if they did, he'd take on an attitude of shocked disdain, as if he were the only protector of the Classical tradition.' She paused for him to respond, but when he didn't she went on: 'With the younger faculty members I've been told that he blocks their chance of promotion unless there's an exchange of sex. He's the Vice- Chairman of the department, so he gets to approve promotions or, in some cases, disapprove them.'
‘You said he's sixty-eight’ Brunetti said, not without a certain disgust.
'Which, if you think about it, just gives you some idea of how long he's got away with it.' 'But no longer?'
To a lesser degree, at least since he was taken out of the classroom.'
'What does he do?' ‘I told you, research.' 'What does that mean?'
'It means he collects his salary and, when he decides to leave, he'll collect a generous bonus and then an even more generous pension.'
'Is all of this common knowledge?'
'Among the faculty, certainly; probably among the students, as well.'
'And nothing is done about it?'
As soon as he spoke, he knew what she was going to answer, and she did. 'If s no different from what Marco told you today. Everyone knows these things go on, but no one is willing to take the risk of making a formal complaint because of the consequences. To be the first one to make this public would be professional suicide. They'd be sent to some place like Caltanissetta and made to teach a class in something like...' He watched her attempting to formulate a subject of sufficient horror. 'Elements of Bardic Verse in Early Catalan Court Poetry.'
'It's strange,' he said. I suppose we've all come, more or less, to expect this sort of thing in a government office. But we all think, or maybe we hope - or maybe I do, anyway - that it's somehow different in a university.'
Paola repeated her imitation of Saint Agatha and soon after they went to bed.
In the morning, over coffee, Paola asked, 'Well?'
Brunetti knew exactly what this referred to: the answer he had not given the previous evening, when Paola had told him about the request of her student, and so he said, It depends on what the crime was that was committed, and what the sentence was’
'She didn't say what the crime was, only that he was convicted and sent to San Servolo’
Idly stirring his coffee, Brunetti asked, 'And the woman's Austrian? Did she say who the man was?'
Paola thought back to her hurried conversation with the girl, trying to remember details. 'No, but she did say the woman was an old friend of her grandfather, so I assume she's talking about him.'
'What's the girl's name?' Brunetti asked.
