than one of them. But then no charges were pressed, and the story
disappeared.'
'Then what is it you'd like me to look for, sir?'
'I'm not sure,' Brunetti answered. 'Any sign of something that might
have happened, who the girl was, why the story disappeared. Anything
at all you can find out about it.'
She seemed to be a long time writing all of this down, but he waited
until she was finished. Pen still in her hand, she asked, 'If charges
weren't pressed, then it's not likely we'll have anything here, is
it?'
'No, it isn't. But I'm hoping that there might be some report of the
original complaint.'
'And if there isn't?'
Brunetti was puzzled to find her so hesitant about
following up an investigation. Then perhaps the newspapers. Once you
have the date, that is he said.
Till have a look at your personnel file, sir, and find the dates when
you were in London/ she said, then looked up from her notebook, face
serene.
'Yes, yes he said, then, lamely, Till be in my office
As he went upstairs, he reconsidered what Paola had said about the
military, trying to figure out why he couldn't bring himself to condemn
them as universally or as strongly as she did. Part of it, he knew,
was because of his own experience under arms, however brief it had
been, and the lingering fondness he felt for that period of unexamined
comradeship. Perhaps it was nothing more elevated than the instinct of
the pack, gathered round the kill, retelling stories of that day's hunt
while great gobbets of fat dripped into the fire. But if memory was to
be trusted, his loyalty had been to his immediate group of friends and
not to some abstract ideal of corps or regiment.
His reading in history had given him many examples of soldiers who died
in proud defence of the regimental flag or while performing remarkable
acts of heroism to save the perceived honour of the group, but these
actions had always seemed wasteful and faintly stupid to Brunetti.
Certainly, reading accounts of the actual events or even the words of
the decorations bestowed, too often posthumously, upon these brave
young men, Brunetti had felt his heart stir in response to the nobility
of their behaviour, but the antiphon of pragmatic good sense had always
rung out in the background, reminding him that, in the end, these were
boys who threw their lives away in order to protect what was nothing
more than a piece of cloth. Bold, certainly, and brave, but also
foolish to the point of idiocy.
He found his desk covered with reports of one sort or another, the
detritus of several days' lack of attention. He wrapped himself in the
cloak of duty and, for the next two
hours, engaged himself in behaviour as futile as any he thought to
criticize on the part of those valiant young men. As he read through
accounts of arrests for burglary, pick pocketing, and the various types
of fraud currently practised on the streets of the city, he was struck
by how often the names of the people arrested were foreign and by how
often their age exempted them from punishment. These facts left him
untroubled: it was the thought that each of these arrests guaranteed
another vote for the Right that disturbed him. Years ago, he had read
a short story, he thought by some American, which ended with the
revelation of an endless chain of sinners marching towards heaven along
a broad arc in the sky. He sometimes thought the same chain of sinners
marched slowly through the skies of Italian politics, though hardly
toward paradise.
Stupefied by the boredom of the task, he heard his name called from the
door and looked up to see Pucetti.
'Yes, Pucetti?' he said, beckoning the young officer into his office.
'Have a seat.' Glad of the excuse to set the papers aside, he turned
his attention to the young policeman. 'What is it?' he asked, struck
by how young he looked in his crisp uniform, far too young to have any
right to carry the gun at his side, far too innocent to have any idea
of how to use it.
'It's about the Moro boy, sir,' Pucetti said. 'I came to see you
yesterday, sir, but you weren't here.'
It was close to a reproach, something Brunetti was not used to hearing
from Pucetti. Resentment flared in Brunetti that the young officer
should dare to take this tone with him. He fought down the impulse to
explain to Pucetti that he had decided there was no need for haste. If
it was generally believed the police were treating Moro's death as
suicide, people might be more willing to speak about the boy openly;
besides, he had no need to justify his decisions to this boy. He
waited longer than he usually would, then asked simply, What about
him?'
'You remember the time we were there, talking to the cadets?' Pucetti
asked, and Brunetti was tempted to ask it the younger man thought he
had arrived at an age where his memory needed to be prodded in order to
function.
