face with it. She started back in her seat and took the handkerchief from him. She wiped her face, blew her nose, and put it in her pocket, the second he had lost in a week.
‘She said it was my fault, that none of this would have happened if it weren’t for me.’ Her voice was tight and raspy. She grimaced. ‘The awful thing is it’s true. I know it’s not really true, but I can’t make it not be true, the way she says it is.’
‘Did the letter say where the information came from?’
‘No. But it had to be Wellauer.’
‘Good.’
She looked at him in surprise. ‘How can that be good? The lawyer said they were going to bring charges. That would make everything public’
‘Brett,’ he said, voice level and calm. ‘Think about it. If his witness was Wellauer, he’d have to testify. And even if he were still alive, he’d never get himself caught in something like this. It’s just a threat.’
‘But still, if they bring charges ...’
‘All he’s trying to do is scare you. And look how he’s succeeded. No court, even an Italian court, would admit anything on hearsay, and that’s all the letter is, without the person who wrote it to give evidence.’ He watched her as she considered this. ‘There isn’t any evidence, is there?’
‘What do you mean by evidence?’
‘Letters. I don’t know. Conversations.’
‘No, nothing like that. I’ve never written anything, not even from China. And Flavia’s always too busy to write.’
‘What about her friends? Do they know?’
‘I don’t know. It’s not something that people like to talk about.’
‘Then I don’t think you have anything to worry about.’
She tried to smile, tried to convince herself that he had somehow managed to bring her back from grief to safety. ‘Really?’
‘Really,’ he said, and smiled. ‘I spend a lot of time with lawyers, and all this one is trying to do is scare you and threaten you.’
‘Well,’ she began, with a laugh that turned into a hiccup, ‘he certainly managed to do that.’ Then, under her breath, ‘The bastard.’
With that, Brunetti thought it was safe to order two brandies, which the waiter was very quick to bring. When the drinks arrived, she said, ‘She was awful.’
He took a sip and waited for her to say more.
‘She said terrible things.’
‘We all do sometimes.’
‘I don’t,’ she retorted immediately, and he suspected that she didn’t, that she would use language as a tool and not a weapon.
‘She’ll forget it, Brett. People who say such things always do.’
She shrugged, dismissing that as irrelevant. She, clearly, wouldn’t forget.
‘What are you going to do?’ he asked, really interested in her answer.
‘Go home. See if she’s there. See what happens.’
He realized that he had never so much as bothered to learn if Petrelli had her own home in the city, had never initiated an investigation of her behavior, either before or after Wellauer’s death. Was it that easy for him to be misled? Was he so different from the rest of men—show him a pretty face, cry a little, appear to be intelligent and honest, and he’d just cancel out the possibility that you could have killed a man or could love someone who did?
He was frightened by how easily this woman had disarmed him. He pulled some loose bills from his pocket and dropped them on the table. ‘Yes, that’s a good idea,’ he finally said, pushing back his chair and getting to his feet.
He caught her sudden insecurity at seeing him so suddenly change from friend to stranger. He couldn’t even do this well. ‘Come on, I’ll go as far as San Giovanni e Paolo with you.’ Outside, because it was night and because it was habit, he linked his arm with hers as they walked. Neither one of them spoke. He was aware of how much she felt like a woman, of the wider arc of her hips, of how pleasant it was to have her move close against him when they passed people on the narrow streets. All this he realized as he walked her home to her lover.
They said goodbye under the statue of Colleoni, no more than that, just a simple goodbye.
* * * *
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Brunetti walked back through the quiet city, troubled by what he had just heard. He thought he knew something of love, having learned about it with Paola. Was he so conventional, then, that this woman’s love— for there was no question that it was love—had to remain alien to him because it didn’t conform to his ideas? He dismissed that all as sentimentality at its worst and concentrated, instead, on the question he had asked himself in the bar: whether his affection for this woman, his attraction toward something in her, had blinded him to what he was supposed to be doing. Flavia Petrelli just didn’t seem to be someone who would kill in cold blood. He had no doubt that, in a moment of heat or passion, she would be capable of killing someone; most people are. For her, it would have been a knife in the ribs or a shove down the steps, not poison, administered coolly, almost dispassionately.
