One afternoon, while she was out for a walk, she was shot in the leg.
Luckily, she was found before she bled to death and taken to the
hospital.'
'Was the hunter ever found?'
'No, but it was hunting season so they assumed that a hunter had heard
her and thought she was an animal and shot at the noise without seeing
what it was.'
'And didn't bother to come and see what he had shot?' an indignant
Brunetti asked. He added another question. 'Or when he saw what he
had shot, he didn't help her or call for help?'
'It's what they do,' she said, her voice matching his own in
indignation. 'You read the papers, don't you, every year when the
season opens, about the way three or four of them get shot on the first
day? It goes on all during hunting season. It's not only the ones who
stumble over their own guns and blow their brains out.' Brunetti
thought her tone was devoid of anything approaching sympathy as she
said this. They shoot one another, too,' she went on, 'and get left to
bleed to death because no one wants to run the risk of being arrested
for having shot someone.'
He started to speak, but she cut him off and added, 'As far as I'm
concerned, it can't happen often enough.'
Brunetti waited for her to calm down and retract her words but then
decided to leave the issue of her feelings toward
hunters unexamined and asked, 'Were the police called? When she was
shot?'
'I don't know. That's what I'm waiting for the police report.'
'Where is she now?' Brunetti asked.
That's something else I'm trying to find out.'
'She's not with her husband?'
'I don't know. I had a look at the files at the Comune, but she's not
listed as resident at his address, even though they own the apartment
jointly.' So habituated had Brunetti become to her useful criminality
that it did not for an instant trouble him that a person with greater
sympathy for legal precision would translate her phrase, 'had a look
at' as 'broke into'.
There could certainly be many explanations for why Moro's wife was not
registered as resident at his Dorsoduro address, though the most
obvious interpretation was that she did not live with her husband. 'Let
me know when you get hold of the report on the shooting he said,
wondering if this would launch her into further denunciation. Like
most Venetians, Brunetti had no interest in hunting, judging it an
endeavour that was expensive, inconvenient, and excessively loud.
Further, experience as a policeman as well as his habit of reflecting
upon human behaviour had too often suggested a frightening correlation
between a man's interest in firearms and feelings of sexual
inadequacy.
'It could have been a warning,' she said without preamble.
The know,' he answered, having thought this the instant she told him
about the shooting. 'But of what?'
The scepticism that had seeped into Bmnetti's bones over the years
forced him to suspect that Signora Moro's accident might have been
something other than that. She must have cried out when she was shot,
and the sound of a woman's scream would surely have brought any hunter
running. Low as his opinion of hunters was, Brunetti could not believe
that one of them would leave a woman lying on the ground, bleeding.
That conviction led him to the consideration of what sort of person
would be capable of doing so, which in its turn led him to consider
what other sorts of violence such a person might be capable of.
He added to these speculations the fact that Moro had served in
Parliament for some time but had resigned about two years ago.
Coincidence could link events either in kind or subject or time: the
same sort of thing happened to different people or different things
happened to the same person, or things happened at the same time. Moro
had resigned from Parliament around the time his wife was injured.
Ordinarily, this would hardly arouse suspicion, even in someone as
instinctively mistrustful as Brunetti, were it not that the death of
their son provided a point from which to begin a process of speculative
triangulation around the ways in which the third event might be related
to the other two.
Brunetti thought of Parliament in the way most Italians thought of
their mothers-in-law. Not due the loyalties created by ties of blood,
a mother-in-law still demanded obedience and reverence while never
behaving in a manner that would merit either. This alien presence,
imposed upon a person's life by sheerest chance, made ever-increasing
demands in return for the vain promise of domestic harmony. Resistance
was futile, for opposition inevitably led to repercussions too devious
to be foreseen.
He lifted the phone and dialled his home number. When the machine
answered after four rings, he hung up without speaking, bent down to
