A Question of Belief

‘Poor man. His face got red when she used his first name, and I thought he was going to have a seizure.’

‘But he didn’t?’

‘No, he didn’t. And he didn’t answer, either, so Umberto told her we’d been talking about work at the courthouse.’ She paused, shaking her head. ‘Probably the worst thing he could have said.’ She looked at Brunetti. ‘You should have seen her face when he said that. It could have been made from ice.’

‘How long did she stay after that?’ Brunetti asked.

‘I don’t know. I picked up the flowers and said I had to get back to the office. Umberto said he’d walk me to the traghetto: he thinks I work in Ca Farsetti, so I had to take it across the canal and then go into the main entrance because Umberto was on the other side, waving at me.’

‘But the judge doesn’t think you work there?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Hardly. It was written all over her face. She’s a judge, for heaven’s sake: of course she’d know who works at the Questura.’

‘Perhaps,’ Brunetti tried to temporize.

Signorina Elettra pushed herself to her feet and came towards him so quickly that Brunetti stepped aside to avoid her. Ignoring him, she picked up the flowers and ripped the paper from them. She set them on her desk, walked over to her armadio and took out two large vases, then went out into the hall. Brunetti remained where he was, considering what she had just told him.

When she returned, he took one of the water-filled vases from her and set it on the windowsill. She put the other one on the small table against the wall, then went over and picked up one of the bunches of flowers. With no ceremony, she pulled the rubber bands from the stems, tossed them on her desk, and stuffed the flowers into the first vase, then repeated the process with the second bunch.

She sat back in her chair, looked at Brunetti, looked at the flowers, and said, ‘Poor things. I shouldn’t take it out on them.’

‘I don’t think you have anything to take out on anything,’ he said.

‘You wouldn’t say that if you had seen her reaction,’ she insisted.

‘What are you going to do?’ he asked.

‘I’d like to take a look at whatever it is that aroused your curiosity about the judge.’

14

Signorina Elettra came back to his office with him, where he gave her the sheets of paper that had come to him from the Tribunale. He explained what he had made of the delays in certain cases heard by Judge Coltellini and pointed to Fontana’s signature at the bottom of the papers.

‘Child’s play,’ she said in reference to the system used by the Ministry of Justice to preserve the integrity of the judicial system. Looking at Fontana’s signature, she said, ‘You know, I’ve begun to think there’s something strange about the way Fontana behaved with the judge.’

‘Unrequited love is always strange to the people who don’t feel it,’ Brunetti observed, conscious of sounding more sententious than Polonius.

‘That’s just it,’ Signorina Elettra said, looking at him. ‘I’m not sure it is unrequited love.’

‘Then what is it?’

‘I don’t know,’ she answered. She crossed her arms and tapped the corner of the papers idly against her lower lip. ‘I’ve seen unrequited love,’ she said, failing to explain from which side. ‘At first I thought that’s what it was, but the more I think about it, the more it seems like something different. He’s too abject, too servile when he speaks to her: even a man as dull as he is would realize that no one likes to be talked to that way.’

‘Some people do,’ Brunetti said.

‘I know, I know. But she doesn’t. That much is clear. One thing I didn’t tell you — it’s really embarrassing to talk about it — was the way he kept offering to get her things: a coffee, a glass of water, a pastry. It was as if he felt indebted to her, but in an odd way.’

‘If they’re in this together, then she’s probably already getting the bigger share of whatever’s being paid,’ Brunetti said, admitting to both of them the interpretation he had made of the lists he had been sent. ‘So she’s the one who should be paying for the coffees.’

‘No, no,’ Signorina Elettra said, shaking away both his interpretation and his attempt at humour. ‘It’s not as if he thinks he can actually pay her back. It’s as if there’s some great gaping hole between them and all he can think of doing is to try to fill it up, though it’s so big he knows he never can.’ She thought for a moment, then added, ‘No, that’s not it, either. He’s grateful to her, but grateful the way people are when the Madonna answers a prayer. It’s embarrassing to see it.’

‘Did your friend Umberto notice this?’

‘If he did, he didn’t comment. And I was so eager to get away that I didn’t ask him. Besides, I dreaded the thought of standing on the riva, in the sun, and talking to him for a minute longer. All I wanted to do was get in the gondola and get to the other side.’

Brunetti couldn’t resist asking, ‘Is that how Umberto treats you — like the Madonna?’

‘Oh no,’ she said, without a pause. ‘For him, it’s unrequited love.’

Neither that day nor the next did Signorina Elettra manage to discover anything about the cause of the postponements in the law cases listed on the paper. The computer system at the Courthouse was down, and because the two people who were in charge of it were on vacation, the database would not be available for at least a week. Unfortunately, this exclusion applied equally, she discovered, to both authorized and unauthorized attempts to consult the information it contained.

Hoping for some news of success before he went on vacation, Brunetti called down to her and asked if she had had time to follow up on Fontana’s landlord, Marco Puntera. She came close to apologizing for not having been able to do so, explaining that her friend no longer worked at the bank and she had been so busy drawing up Vice- Questore Patta’s instructions for the holiday period that she had been too busy to see what she could find about Signor Puntera. She promised to get to it when the Vice-Questore was safely off to the island of Ponza, where he and his family were to be guests of the head of the city council of Venice, who had a summer home there.

‘Yet another way to ensure the complete objectivity of the forces of order in any investigation of local politicians,’ Brunetti said when he heard the name of Patta’s host.

‘I’m sure the Vice-Questore is resistant to blandishments of any kind,’ Signorina Elettra said in response to Brunetti’s suggestion. ‘You know how often he speaks of the need to avoid even the possibility of favouritism of any sort.’

‘I know well how he speaks of it,’ Brunetti said, and then they turned their attention to his absence during vacation and what needed to be done while Brunetti was gone. She wished him a buona vacanza and said she’d see him in two weeks.

Taking her good wishes as permission to leave, Brunetti went home and began to pack things other than books.

The next morning, the Brunettis got the 9:50 Eurostar, changed in Verona, and headed north with mounting enthusiasm. In Bolzano, they would change to a local train to Merano, and then the Vinchgau trenino to Malles, where the car would be waiting for them. Soon after they left Verona, they were travelling through a universe of grapevines. There was some poem that Brunetti had been forced to read in his third-year English class, something about cannon on the left and cannon on the right; only in this case it was grapevines, kilometre after kilometre of them, all pruned to an identical size; and for all he knew, the grapes as well identical in variety and size.

The time passed as time does in a train: Brunetti, happy to be in open country, looked out the window; Chiara talked to the two young people sharing the compartment with them; while Raffi, seated opposite his mother in one of the centre seats, hid under his headphones, occasionally nodding his head to the rhythm. At one point, as