close to tears.
Tears appeared in her eyes too and began to spill down her face. She
drew her mouth tight, incapable of speech, and shook her head. Finally
she held up her right hand, her palm
facing her nephew, as if asking him to be patient long enough for words
Lo come back lo her. More lime passed and then she said, 'I was
afraid.'
'Of what?' the boy demanded.
To hurt you she said.
'And a lie wouldn't?' he asked, but in confusion, without anger.
She turned her palm upwards, splaying open her fingers, in a gesture
that spoke of uncertainty and, in a strange way, of hope.
'What happened?' Giuliano asked. When she didn't answer, he added,
'Please tell me, Zia.'
Brunetti watched her struggle towards speech. Finally she said, 'He
was jealous of your mother and accused her of having an affair.' As
the boy showed no curiosity about this, she went on. 'He shot her and
then himself.'
'Is that why Mamma is the way she is?'
She nodded.
'Why didn't you tell me? I always thought it was a disease you were
afraid to tell me about.' He stopped and then, as if carried forward
on the current of his own confessions, added, 'That it was something in
the family. And it would happen to me, too.'
This broke her, and she started to cry openly, silently, save for an
occasional deep intake of breath.
Brunetti turned his attention to the boy and asked, 'Will you tell me
what you think happened, Giuliano?'
The boy looked at Brunetti, at the weeping woman, and then back at
Brunetti. The think they killed him,' he finally said.
'Who?'
The others.'
'Why?' Brunetti asked, leaving for later the question of who 'they'
were.
'Because of his father and because he tried to help me.'
'What did they say about his father?' Brunetti asked.
Thai he was a traitor.'
'A traitor to what?'
'La Patria,' the boy answered, and never had Brunetti heard the words
spoken with such contempt.
'Because of his report?'
The boy shook his head. 'I don't know. They never said. They just
kept telling him his father was a traitor.'
When it seemed that Giuliano had reached a halting place, Brunetti
prodded him by asking, 'How did he try to help you?'
'One of them started talking about my father. He said he knew what had
happened and that my mother was a whore. That there wasn't any
accident, and that she'd gone crazy when my father killed himself
because it was her fault that he did.'
'And what did Moro do?'
'He hit him, the one who said this, Paolo Filippi. He knocked him down
and broke one of his teeth.'
Brunetti waited, not wanting to press him, afraid that it would break
the thread of the boy's revelations.
Giuliano went on. 'That stopped it for a while, but then Filippi began
to threaten Ernesto, and then a bunch of his friends did, too.'
Branetti's.attention was riveted by the name Filippi, the third-year
student whose father supplied material to the military.
'What happened?'
The don't know. I didn't hear anything that night, the night he died.
But the next day they all seemed strange worried and happy at the same
time, like kids who have a secret or a secret club.'
'Did you say anything? Ask anyone?'
'No.'
