towards him, as though he were afraid to leave them hanging in the air
so close to Pucetti's teeth. As Brunetti came in, Cappellini raised a
hand, but he used it to wave Brunetti closer, not to tell him to
stop.
'What do you want?' the boy asked, unable to disguise his terror.
At the question, Pucetti turned his head slowly to Brunetti and raised
his chin, as if asking if Brunetti wanted him to climb up on the bed
and hurl the boy down.
'No, Pucetti/ Brunetti said in a voice generally used to dogs.
Pucetti lowered his hands, but not by much, and turned his head back to
face the boy on the bed. He kicked the door shut with his heel.
Into the reverberating silence, Brunetti asked, 'Cappellini?'
'Yes, sir.'
'Where were you on the night Cadet Moro was killed?'
Before he thought, the boy blurted out, 'I didn't do it,' voice high
and himself too frightened to realize what he'd just admitted. 'I
didn't touch him.'
'But you know,' Brunetti said in a firm voice, as if repeating what
he'd already been told by someone else.
'Yes. But I didn't have anything to do with it,' the boy said. He
pushed himself farther back on the bed, but his shoulders and back were
flat against the wall, and there was no place for him to go, no way he
could escape.
'Who was it?' Brunetti added, stopping himself from suggesting
Filippi's name. When the boy hesitated, he demanded, Tell me.'
Cappellini hesitated, calculating whether this current danger were
worse than the one he lived with. Obviously he decided in Brunetti's
favour, for he said, 'Filippi. It was his idea, all of it.'
At the admission, Pucetti lowered his hands, and Brunetti sensed a
general relaxing of his body as he allowed the menace of his presence
to slip away. He had no doubt that, were he to take his eyes off
Cappellini, he would see that Pucetti had managed to return to his
normal size.
The boy calmed down, at least minimally. He allowed
himself to slip down lower on the bed, extended his legs and let one of
his feet hang off the side. 'He hated him, Filippi. I don't know why,
but he always did, and he told us all that we had to hate him, too,
that he was a traitor. His family was a family of traitors.' When he
saw that Brunetti made no response to this, Cappellini added, 'That's
what he told us. The father, too. Moro.'
'Do you know why he said that?' Brunetti asked in a voice he allowed
to grow soft.
'No, sir. It's what he told us.'
Much as Brunetti wanted to know who the others were, he was aware that
it would break the rhythm, so he asked, instead, 'Did Moro complain or
fight back?' Seeing Cappellini's hesitation, he added, When Filippi
called him a traitor?'
Cappellini seemed surprised by the question. 'Of course. They had a
couple of arguments, and one time Moro hit him, but somebody stopped
it, pulled them apart.' Cappellini ran his right hand through his
hair, then propped himself up on both hands, letting his head sink down
between his shoulders. There was a long pause. Pucetti and Brunetti
might just as easily have been two stones.
'What happened that night?' Brunetti finally prodded him.
'Filippi came in late. I don't know whether he had permission or he
used his key,' Cappellini explained casually, as if he expected them to
know about this. The don't know who he was with; it might have been
his father. He always seemed angrier, somehow, when he came back from
seeing his father. Anyway, when he came in here .. .' Cappellini
paused and waved his hand at the space in front of him, the same space
now filled by the motionless bodies of the two policemen. 'He started
talking about Moro and what a traitor he was. I'd been asleep and I
didn't want to hear it, so I told him to shut up.'
He stopped speaking for so long that Brunetti was finally prompted to
ask, 'And then what happened?'
'He hit me. He came over here to the side of the bed and reached up
and hit me. Not really hard, you understand. Just sort of punched me
on the shoulder to show me how mad he was. And he kept saying what a
shit Moro was and what a traitor.'
Brunetti hoped the boy would continue. He did. 'And then he left,
just turned and walked out of the room and went down the hall, maybe to
get Maselli and Zanchi. I don't know.' The boy stopped and stared at
the floor.
'And then what happened?'
