who is too aggressive, or not aggressive
enough. Someone who is too smart and makes the others embarrassed. Or
shows off, or ...'
Brunetti cut her off. Those still seem like trivial reasons. Even for
teenagers.'
Not the least offended, she said, That's the best I can come up with
Nodding at the keyboard, she said, 'Let me take a look and see what I
can find.'
'Where will you look?'
'Class lists and then members of their families. Faculty lists and
then the same. Then cross-check them with, well, with other things.'
'Where did you get those lists?'
Her intake of breath was stylishly long. 'It's not that I have them,
sir, but that I can get them.' She looked at him and waited for his
comment; outflanked, Brunetti thanked her and asked her to bring him
whatever information she could find as soon as she had it.
In his office, he set himself to attempting to recall anything he'd
heard or read, over the years, about the Academy. When nothing came,
he turned his reflections to the military at large, recalling that most
of the faculty were former officers of one branch or other.
A memory slipped in from somewhere, tantalizing him and refusing to
come into focus. Like a sharpshooter straining to see at night, he
addressed his attention, not to the target that wouldn't appear, but to
whatever stood beside or beyond it. Something about the military,
about young men in the military.
The memory materialized: an incident from some years before, when two
soldiers paratroopers, he thought had been directed to jump from a
helicopter somewhere in, he thought, former Yugoslavia. Not knowing
that the helicopter was hovering a hundred metres above the ground,
they had jumped to their death. Not knowing, and not having been told
by the other men in the helicopter, who
had known but were members of a military corps different from their
own. And with that memory came another one, of a young man found dead
at the bottom of a parachute jump, perhaps the victim of a nighttime
hazing prank gone wrong. To the best of his knowledge, neither case
had ever been resolved, no satisfactory explanation provided for the
completely unnecessary deaths of these three young men.
He recalled, as well, a morning at breakfast some years ago when Paola
looked up from the newspaper which contained an account of the
country's then-leader offering to send Italian troops to aid an ally in
some bellicose endeavour. 'He's going to send troops,' she said. 'Is
that an offer or a threat, do you think?'
Only one of Brunetti's close friends had opted for a career in the
military, and they had lost touch over the last few years, so he did
not want to call him. What he would ask him, anyway, Brunetti had no
idea. If the Army were really as corrupt and incompetent as everyone
seemed to believe it was? No, hardly the question he could ask, at
least not of a serving general.
That left his friends in the press. He called one in Milano but when
the machine answered, he chose not to leave either his name or a
message. The same happened when he called another friend in Rome. The
third time, when he called Beppe Avisani, in Palermo, the phone was
answered on the second ring.
'Avisani.'
'Ciao, Beppe. It's me, Guido.'
'Ah, good to hear your voice,' Avisani said, and for a few minutes they
exchanged the sort of information friends give and get when they
haven't spoken for some time, their voices perhaps made formal by a
shared awareness that they usually now spoke to one another only when
one of them needed information.
After everything that had to be said about families had been said,
Avisani asked, 'What can I tell you?'
'I'm looking into the death of the Moro boy,' Brunetti answered and
waited for the reporter to answer.
'Not suicide, then?' he asked, not bothering with polite pieties.
That's what I want to know,' Brunetti answered.
Without hesitation, Avisani volunteered. 'If it wasn't suicide, then
the obvious reason is the father, something to do with him.'
'I'd got that far, Beppe,' Brunetti said with an entire absence of
sarcasm.
'Of course, you would. Sorry.'
'The report came out too long ago,' Brunetti said, certain that a man
who had spent twenty years as a political reporter would follow his
thinking and also dismiss the report as a possible cause. 'Do you know
