graceful, and pulled a chair up in front. ‘Here, please have a seat. Would you like some coffee? Please put your briefcase on the desk.’ He waited for Brunetti to answer.
‘Yes, coffee would be good.’
The Maggiore went to the door, opened it, and said to someone in the hall, ‘Pino, bring us two coffees and a bottle of mineral water.’
He came back into the room and took his place behind his desk. ‘I’m sorry we couldn’t send a car all the way to Venice to get you, but it’s difficult, these days, to get an authorization to move out of the province. I hope your trip was comfortable.’
It was necessary, Brunetti knew from long experience, to spend the proper amount of time on these things, to poke and prod about, to take the measure of the other person, and the only way to do this was with niceties and politeness.
‘No trouble at all with the train. Right on time. Padova filled with university students.’
‘My son’s at the university there,’ Ambrogiani volunteered.
‘Really? What faculty?’
‘Medicine,’ Ambrogiani said and shook his head.
‘Isn’t it a good faculty?’ Brunetti asked, honestly puzzled. He’d always been told that the University of Padova had the best medical school in the country.
‘No, it’s not that,’ the Maggiore answered and smiled. ‘I’m not pleased with his choice of medicine as a career.’
‘What?’ Brunetti asked. This was the Italian dream, a policeman with a son in medical school. ‘Why?’
‘I wanted him to be a painter.’ He shook his head again, sadly. ‘But, instead, he wants to be a doctor.’
‘A painter?’
‘Yes,’ Ambrogiani answered. Then, with a dimpled smile, he added, ‘And not of houses.’ He gestured behind him, and Brunetti saw that the walls were patterned with small paintings, almost all seascapes, some of them of ruined castles, all of them done in a delicate style that imitated the eighteenth-century Neapolitan school.
‘Your son’s?’
‘No,’ Ambrogiani said, ‘that one over there.’ He pointed to the left of the door, where Brunetti saw a portrait of an old woman staring boldly at the viewer, a half-peeled apple held between her hands. It lacked the delicacy of the others, though it was good in a pretty, conventional sense.
If the others had been by the son, Brunetti would have understood the man’s regret that he had chosen to study medicine. As it was, the boy had clearly made the right choice. ‘It’s very good,’ he lied. ‘And the others?’
‘Oh, I did them. But years ago, when I was a student.’ First, the dimples, and now these soft, delicate paintings. Perhaps this American base was to be a place of surprises.
There came a quiet knock at the door, which opened before Ambrogiani could reply. A uniformed corporal came into the room, carrying a tray with two coffees, glasses, and a bottle of mineral water. He set the tray on Ambrogiani’s desk and left.
‘It’s still hot like summer,’ Ambrogiani said. ‘Better to drink a lot of water.’
He leaned forward, handed Brunetti his coffee, then took his own. When they had drunk the coffee and each had a glass of water in his hand, Brunetti believed they could begin to talk. ‘Is anything known about this American, Sergeant Foster?’
Ambrogiani poked a fat finger at a slim file that sat at the side of his desk,apparently the file on the dead American. ‘Nothing. Not from us. The Americans won’t, of course, give us the file they have on him. That is,’ he quickly amended, ‘if they have a file on him.’
‘Why not?’
‘It’s a long story,’ Ambrogiani said, with a slight hesitation that made it evident he wanted to be prodded.
Ever-willing to oblige, Brunetti asked, ‘Why?’
Ambrogiani shifted around in his chair, body clearly too big for it. He poked at the file, sipped at his water, set the glass down, poked again at the file. ‘The Americans have been here, you understand, since the war ended. They’ve been on this base, and it’s grown bigger and continues to grow bigger. There are thousands of them, and their families.’ Brunetti wondered what the point of this long introduction would be. ‘Because they have been here so long, and perhaps because there are so many of them, they tend to be, well, they tend to see this base as theirs, though the treaty makes it clear that this is still Italian territory. Still. Part of Italy.’ He shifted around again.
‘Is there trouble?’ Brunetti asked. ‘With them?’
‘After a long pause, Ambrogiani answered, ‘No. Not exactly trouble. You know how Americans are.’
Brunetti had heard that many times, about Germans, Slavs, the British. Everyone assumed that other groups ‘were’ a certain way, though no one ever seemed to agree just what the way was. He raised his chin in an inquisitive gesture, prompting the Maggiore to continue.
‘It’s not arrogance, not really. I don’t think they have the confidence it takes for real arrogance, not the way the Germans do. It’s more like a sense of ownership, as if all of this, all of Italy, were somehow theirs. As if, by believing they kept it safe, they thought it was theirs.’
‘Do they really keep it safe?’ Brunetti asked.
Ambrogiani laughed. ‘I suppose they did, after the war. And perhaps during the Sixties. But I’m not sure that, with the way the world is now, a few thousand paratroopers in Northern Italy is going to make much of a difference.’
‘Are these popular feelings?’ Brunetti asked. ‘I mean among the military, the Carabinieri?’
‘Yes, I think they are. But you have to understand the way me Americans see things.’
To Brunetti, it was a revelation to hear the man speak like this. In a country where most public institutions were no longer worthy of respect, only the Carabinieri had managed to save themselves and were still generally believed to be above corruption. This no sooner granted, than popular opinion had to compromise it and had transformed these same Carabinieri into the butt of popular myth, the classic buffoons who never understood anything and whose legendary stupidity provided glee to the entire nation. Yet here was one of them, trying to explain the other person’s point of view. And apparently understanding it. Remarkable.
‘What do we have as a military here in Italy?’ Ambrogiani asked, his question clearly rhetorical. ‘We’re all volunteers, the Carabinieri. But the Army - they’ve all been drafted, except for the few who choose it as a career. They’re kids, eighteen, nineteen, and they no more want to be soldiers than they want to . . .’ Here he paused and searched for a simile that would do justice. ‘Than they want to do the dishes and make their own beds, which is what they have to do, probably for the first time in their lives, while they’re in the service. It’s a year and a half lost, thrown away, when they could be working or studying. They go through a brutal, stupid training, and they spend a brutal, stupid year, dressed in shabby uniforms and not getting paid enough to keep themselves in cigarettes.’ Brunetti knew all this. He’d done his eighteen months.
Ambrogiani was quick to sense Brunetti’s waning interest ‘I say this because it explains how the Americans see us here. Their boys, and girls, I suppose, all volunteer. It’s a career for them. They like it. They get paid for it, paid enough to live. And many of them take pride in it. And here, what do they see? Boys who would rather be playing soccer or going to the cinema, but who have to do work they despise instead, and who therefore do it badly. So they assume that we’re all lazy.’
‘And so?’ Brunetti asked, cutting him short.
‘And so,’ Ambrogiani repeated, ‘they don’t understand us and therefore think badly of us for reasons that we can’t understand.’
‘You ought to be able to understand them. You’re a military man.’ Brunetti said.
Ambrogiani shrugged, as if to suggest that, first and foremost, he was an Italian.
‘Is it unusual, that they wouldn’t show you a file if they had one?’
‘No. They tend not to help us much in things like this.’
‘I’m not sure what you mean by “things like this”, Maggiore.’
‘Crimes that they get involved in away from the base.’
Certainly this could be said to apply to the young man lying dead in Venice, but Brunetti found the wording strange. ‘Are they frequent?’
‘No, not really. A few years ago, some Americans were involved in a murder. An African. They beat him to death with wooden boards. They were drunk. The African danced with a white woman.’
