Wilful behaviour

'Why do you need to know that?'

'I could ask Signorina Elettra to see if there's anything in the files’

'But the old woman isn't related to her,' Paola protested, somehow reluctant to give the girl up to police investigation, no matter how delicate and no matter how well intended that investigation might be. Who knew the consequences of introducing her name into the police computer?

'Presumably her grandfather would be,' Brunetti said, sounding far more pedantic than he wanted to but irritated that his wife had brought this homework back with her.

'Guido,' Paola said in a voice she herself found unusually firm, 'all she wanted to know was whether it was theoretically possible that a pardon could be granted. She didn't ask for a police examination, just for information.' Paola, a professor of the old school, could not shake herself of the belief that, in some way, she functioned in loco parentis to her students, a belief which hardened her resolve not to reveal the girl's name.

He set his cup down. 'I don't think I can do anything until I know what he was convicted of, this man who is or is not her grandfather’ If things like this had ever come up in any of his university law classes, he had long since forgotten. 'If it was something minor, like theft or assault, a pardon would hardly be necessary, especially after all this time, but if it was a major crime, like murder, then perhaps, perhaps..He considered further. ‘Did she say how long ago it happened?'

'No, but if he was sent to San Servolo, then it had to be before the Legge Basaglia, and that was in the Seventies, wasn't it?' Paola said.

Brunetti considered this. 'Umm,' he muttered. After a long silence, he said, 'It’ll be hard, even if we learn his name.'

'We don't need to know his name, Guido,' Paola insisted. 'All the girl wants is a theoretical answer.'

Then the theoretical answer is that no other kind of answer is possible until I know what the crime was.'

'Which means no answer is possible?' Paola asked acerbically.

'Paola,' Brunetti said in much the same tone, 'I'm not making this up. If s like asking me to put a value on a painting or a print without letting me see it.' Both of them, later, were to recall this comparison.

'Then what am I supposed to tell her?' Paola asked.

Tell her exactly what I've said. It's what any lawyer of good conscience . . .' he began, ignored Paola's raised eyebrows at this most absurd of possibilities, and went on, 'would tell her. What is it that schoolmaster in that book you're always quoting says? 'Facts, facts, facts'? Well, until I have the facts or anyone else has the facts, that's the only answer she's going to get’

Paola had been weighing the cost and consequences of further opposition and had decided they were hardly worth it. Guido was acting in good faith, and the fact that she didn't much like his answer didn't make it any less true. 'Good, I'll tell her,' she said. Thank you.' Smiling, she added, 'It makes me feel like that other Dickens character and makes me want to tell her that she's saved five million lire in lawyer's costs and should go right out and spend it on something else.'

Toil can always find whatever you're looking for in a book, can't you?' he asked with a smile.

Instead of a simple answer, something she seldom gave him, Paola said, 'I think it was Shelley who said that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. I don't have any idea if that's true or not, but I do know that novelists are the unacknowledged gossip-mongers of the world. No matter what it is, they thought of it first.'

He pushed back his chair and stood. 'I'll leave you to the contemplation of the splendours of literature.'

He leaned down to kiss her head and waited for her to come up with another literary reference, but she did not. Instead, she reached behind with one hand and patted him on the back of his calf, then said, Thank you, Guido. I'll tell her’

4

Because the requests for information came from what might be termed minor players in their lives, both Brunetti and Paola forgot about them or at least allowed them to slip to the back of their minds. A police department burdened with the increase in crime resulting from the flood of unregulated immigration from Eastern Europe would no more have concerned itself with the attempt to stamp out minor corruption in a city office than Paola would have turned from rereading The Golden Bowl to attend to those semicolons in Calvino.

When Claudia did not show up for the next lecture, Paola realized that she felt almost relieved. She didn't want to be the bringer of her husband's news, nor did she want to grow more involved in the personal life or non- academic concerns of one of her students. She had, as had most professors, done so in the past, and it had always either led nowhere or ended badly. She had her own children, and their lives were more than enough to satisfy whatever nurturing instincts the current wisdom told her she must have.

But the girl was present the following week. During the lecture, which dealt with the parallels between the heroines of James and those of Wharton, Claudia behaved as she always did: she took notes, asked no questions, and seemed impatient with the student questions that displayed ignorance or insensitivity. When the class was over, she waited while the other students left the room and then came up to Paola's desk.

‘I’m sorry I wasn't here last week, Professoressa.'

Paola smiled but before she could say anything Claudia asked, 'Did you have time to speak to your husband?'

It occurred to Paola to ask the girl if she thought that perhaps she might not have had occasion to speak to her husband during the last two weeks. Instead, she turned to face Claudia and said, ‘Yes, I asked him about it, and he said that he can't give you an answer until he has an idea of the seriousness of the crime for which the man was convicted.'

Paola watched the girl's face register this information: surprise, suspicion, and then a quick assessing glance at Paola, as if to assure herself that no trick or trap lay in her answer. These expressions flashed by in an instant, after which she said, 'But in general? I only want to know if he thinks if s possible or if he knows there's some sort of process that would allow, well, that would allow a person's reputation to be restored.'

Paola did not sigh, but she did speak with a sort of over-patient slowness. That's what he can't say, Claudia. Unless he knows what the crime was.'

The girl considered this, then surprised Paola by asking, 'Could I speak to your husband myself, do you think?'

Either the girl was too obsessed with finding an answer to care about the distrust her question showed of Paola or too artless to be aware of it. In either case, Paola's response was a lesson in equanimity. ‘I see no reason why you couldn't. If you call the Questura and ask for him, I'm sure he'd tell you when you could go and speak to him.'

'But if they won't let me speak to him?'

Then use my name. Tell them you're calling for me or that I told you to call. That should be enough to make them put you through to him.'

'Thank you, Professoressa,' Claudia said and turned to leave. As she turned, she bumped her hip against the edge of the desk, and the books she was holding fell to the floor. Bending to pick them up, Paola, with the instinct of every lover of books, had a look at them. She saw a book with a title in German, but because it was upside down she couldn't make it out. There was Denis Mack Smith's history of the Italian monarchy as well as his biography of Mussolini, both in English.

'Do you read German, Claudia?'

'Yes, I do. My grandmother spoke it to me when I was growing up. She was German’

'Your real grandmother, that is?' Paola said with an encouraging smile.

Still on one knee, arranging the books, the girl shot her a very suspicious glance but answered calmly, 'Yes, my mother's mother.'

Not wanting to be perceived as prying, Paola contented herself with saying only, How lucky you were to be raised bilingual’