strange about Moro's behaviour in the last few days, and all of them
said he was a fine, fine boy but were quick to insist that they really
didn't know him very well.'
All three of them recognized the phenomenon: most people refused to
know anything. It was rare for any person who was subject to
questioning or interrogation to admit to familiarity with the subject
of police inquiries. One of the texts Paola had dealt with in her
doctoral thesis was a medieval one entitled The Cloud of Unknowing. For
an instant Brunetti pictured it as a warm, dry place to which all
witnesses and potential witnesses fled in lemming-like terror and where
they huddled until no single question remained to be asked.
Pucetti went on. 'I wanted to speak to his roommate, but he wasn't
there last night, nor the night before.' Seeing interest in their
faces, he explained, Twenty-three boys, including Moro's roommate, were
on a weekend trip to the Naval Academy in Livorno. Soccer. The game
was Sunday afternoon, and then they spent yesterday and this morning
going to classes there. They don't get home until this evening.'
Vianello shook his head in tired resignation. 'I'm afraid this is all
we're going to get from any of them.' Pucetti shrugged in silent
agreement.
Brunetti stopped himself from remarking that it was what they could
expect from a public which viewed authority and all who attempted to
impose it as adversaries. He had read enough to know that there were
countries whose citizens did not perceive their government as an
inimical force, where they believed, instead, that the government
existed to serve their needs and respond to their wishes. How would he
react if someone he knew were to maintain this to be true here, in this
city, in this country? Religious mania would be less convincing proof
of mental imbalance.
Vianello and Pucetti were to go back that afternoon and question the
rest of the boys and the remaining faculty. Leaving it at that,
Brunetti told them he would be up in his office, and left.
Curiosity and the desire to see Signorina Elettra and learn what she
had managed to discover led him off the stairs at her floor and into
her small office. Here he had the sensation that he had stepped into a
jungle or a forest: four tall trees with enormous leaves, broad, dark
green and shiny, stood in terra cotta pots against the back wall. With
their darkness as a backdrop, Signorina Elettra, today dressed in
colours usually seen only on Buddhist monks, sat at her desk. The
total effect was of an enormous piece of exotic fruit exposed in front
of the tree from which it had fallen.
'Lemons?' he asked.
'Yes/
'Where did you get them?'
'A friend of mine just directed Lulu at the opera. He had them sent
over after the last performance.'
'Lulu?'
She smiled. 'The very same.'
'I don't remember lemons in Lulu,' he said, puzzled, but willing, as
ever, to be graced with illumination.
'He set the opera in Sicily,' she explained.
'Ah,' Brunetti whispered, trying to remember the plot. The music,
mercifully, was gone. At a loss for what else to say, he asked, 'Did
you go and see it?'
She took so long to answer that, at first, he thought he had somehow
offended her with the question. Finally, she said, 'No, sir. My
standards are very low, of course, but I do draw the line at going to
the opera in a tent. In a parking lot.'
Brunetti, whose aesthetic principles were entrenched well behind that
same line, nodded and asked, 'Have you been able to find out anything
about Moro?'
Her smile was fainter, but it was still recognizably a smile. 'Some
things have come in. I'm waiting for a friend in Siena to tell me more
about the wife Federica.'
'What about her?' Brunetti asked.
'She was involved in an accident there.'
'What kind of accident?'
'Hunting.'
'Hunting? A woman in a hunting accident?' he asked, his disbelief
audible.
She raised her eyebrows as if to suggest that anything at all was
possible in a world where Lulu was set in Sicily, but instead said, 'I
shall pass over the glaring sexism in that remark, Commissario.' She
paused a didactic moment, then continued, 'It happened a couple of
years ago. She was staying with friends in the countryside near Siena.
