‘Do you mean do this by yourself in a legal way or’ – and here even greater warmth came into her voice – ‘do it by using your own friends and connections?’
Brunetti smiled, a sure sign that peace had been restored, ‘Of course I’ll use them.’
‘Ah,’ she said, smiling too, ‘that’s entirely different.’ Her smile broadened and she turned her mind to tactics. ‘Who?’ she asked, all thought of her father swept from the room.
‘There’s Rallo, on the Fine Arts Commission.’
‘The one whose son sells drugs?’
‘Sold,’ Brunetti corrected.
‘What did you do?’
‘A favour,’ was Brunetti’s only explanation.
Paola accepted this and asked only, ‘But what’s the Fine Arts Commission got to do with it? Wasn’t this floor built after the war?’
‘That’s what Battistini told us. But the lower part of the building is listed as a monument, so it might be affected by whatever happens to this floor.’
‘Uh huh,’ Paola agreed. ‘Anyone else?’
‘There’s that cousin of Vianello’s, the architect, who works in the Comune, I think in the office where they issue building permits. I’ll get Vianello to ask him to see what he can find out.’
Both sat for a while, drawing up lists of favours they’d done in the past and that could be called in now. It was almost noon before they had compiled a list of possible allies and agreed on their probable usefulness. It was only then that Brunetti asked, ‘Did you get the
Turning, as was her decades-long habit, to the invisible person who she pretended listened to her husband’s worst excesses, she asked, ‘Did you hear that? We are about to lose our home, and all he thinks about is soft- shelled crabs.’
Offended, Brunetti objected: ‘That’s not all I think about.’
‘What else, then?’
‘Risotto.’
The children, who came home for lunch, were told about the situation only after the last of the crabs had been sent to their reward. At first, they refused to treat it seriously. When their parents managed to persuade them that the apartment really was in jeopardy, they immediately began to plan the move to a new home.
‘Can we get a house with a garden so I can have a dog?’ Chiara asked. When she saw her parents’ faces, she amended this to, ‘Or a cat?’ Raffi displayed no interest in animals and opted, instead, for a second bathroom.
‘If we got one, you’d probably move into it and never come out again, trying to grow that silly moustache of yours,’ Chiara said – the family’s first public recognition of a light shadow that had been gradually making itself visible under her older brother’s nose for the last few weeks.
Feeling not unlike a blue-helmeted UN peacekeeper, Paola intervened. ‘I think that’s enough from the two of you. This isn’t a joke, and I don’t want to listen to you talk about it as though it were.’
The children looked at her, and then, like a pair of baby owls perched on a limb, watching to see which of two nearby predators would strike first, swivelled their heads to look at their father. ‘You heard what your mother said,’ Brunetti told them, a sure sign that things were serious.
‘We’ll do the dishes,’ offered Chiara in a conciliatory way, knowing full well that it was her turn, anyway.
Raffi pushed his chair back and got to his feet. He picked up his mother’s plate, then his father’s, then Chiara’s, stacked them on his own plate, and took them to the sink. More remarkably, he turned on the water and pushed up the sleeves of his sweater.
Like superstitious peasants in the presence of the numinous, Paola and Brunetti fled into the living room, but not before he had grabbed a bottle of grappa and two small glasses.
He poured the clear liquid out and handed a glass to Paola. ‘What are you going to do this afternoon?’ she asked after the first calming sip.
‘I’m going back to Persia,’ Brunetti answered. Kicking off his shoes, he lay back on the sofa.
‘Rather an excessive response to Signor Rossi’s news, I’d say.’ She took another sip. ‘This is that bottle we brought back from Belluno, isn’t it?’ They had a friend up there, who had worked with Brunetti for more than a decade but who had abandoned the police force after being wounded in a shootout and had gone back to take over his father’s farm. Every fall, he set up a still and made about fifty bottles of grappa, an entirely illegal operation. He gave the bottles to family and friends.
Brunetti took another sip and sighed.
‘Persia?’ she finally asked.
He set his glass on the low table and picked up the book he had abandoned on Signor Rossi’s arrival. ‘Xenophon,’ he explained, opening it to the marked page, back in that other part of his life.
‘They managed to save themselves, didn’t they, the Greeks? And get back home?’ she asked.
‘I haven’t got that far yet,’ Brunetti answered.
Paola’s voice took on a faint edge. ‘Guido, you’ve read Xenophon at least twice since we’ve been married. If you don’t know whether or not they got back, then you weren’t paying attention, or you’ve got the first symptoms of Alzheimer’s.’
‘I’m pretending I don’t know what happens so I’ll enjoy it more,’ he explained and put on his glasses. He opened the book, found his place, and began reading.
Paola stared across at him for quite a long time, poured herself another glass of grappa, and took it back with her to her study, abandoning her husband to the Persians.
4
As happens with these things, nothing happened. That is, no further communication arrived from the Ufficio Catasto, and nothing further was heard from Signor Rossi. In the face of this silence, and perhaps moved by superstition, Brunetti made no attempt to speak to the friends who might have helped him clarify the legal status of his home. Early spring passed into mid-spring and that in its turn passed. The weather became warm, and the Brunettis began to spend more and more time on their terrace. On the fifteenth of April, they ate lunch there for the first time, though by dinnertime it was again too cold to think about eating outside. The days lengthened, but still nothing further was heard about the dubious legality of the Brunettis’ home. Like farmers living beneath a volcano, the instant the earth ceased to rumble, they went back to tilling their fields, hoping that the gods who governed these things had forgotten about them.
With the change in season, more and more tourists began to flood into the city. A large number of gypsies followed in their wake. The gypsies had been suspected of countless burglaries in the cities, but now they started to be accused of pickpocketing and minor street crimes, as well. Because these crimes were a bother to tourists, the principal source of the city’s revenue, and not merely to residents, Brunetti was assigned to see if something could be done about them. The pickpockets were too young to be prosecuted; they were repeatedly apprehended and taken to the Questura, where they were asked to identify themselves. When the few who carried papers turned out to be under age, they were cautioned and released. Many were back the next day; most were back within a week. Since the only viable options Brunetti could see were to change the law regarding juvenile offenders or expel them from the country, he found it difficult to write his report.
He was at his desk, devoting a great deal of thought to how best to avoid stating self-evident truths, when his phone rang. ‘Brunetti,’ he said and flipped over to the third page of the names of those arrested for petty theft in the last two months.
‘Commissario?’ a man’s voice asked.
‘Yes.’
