She nodded her thanks for his wishes but said nothing.
'Well,' Brunetti said, 'I'll go back now. Thanks for the tour. It brings back a lot of memories.'
'And thank you for going to the trouble of coming out here to tell me.'
'Don't worry,' he said. 'Your father's not likely to do anything rash.'
'I hope not,' she said, shaking his hand and turning back towards the office and her world.
13
The following morning, Brunetti arrived at the Questura after nine and went into Signorina Elettra's office, having forgotten that this was the day when she did not come in until after lunch. He started to write her a message, asking her if she could find De Cal's hospital records, but the thought that either Patta or Scarpa could read anything left on her desk made him change it to a simple request that she call him in his office when she could.
Upstairs, he read through the reports on his desk, had a look at the list of proposed promotions, and then started to read his way through a thick folder of papers from the Ministry of the Interior relating to new laws regarding the arrest and detention of suspected terrorists. National law did not accord with European law, it seemed, and that in its turn failed to conform to international law. Brunetti read with mounting interest as the confusions and contradictions became increasingly evident.
The section on interrogation was brief, as though the person commissioned to write it wanted to get through the assignment as quickly as possible without taking a stand of any sort. The document repeated something Brunetti had read elsewhere, that some foreign authorities— left unnamed—believed that the infliction of pain during interrogation was permissible up 'to the level of serious illness'. Brunetti turned from these words to a consideration of the doors of his wardrobe. 'Diabetes or bone cancer?' he asked the doors, but they made no response.
He read the report until the end, closed it, and pushed it to one side of his desk. During his early years as a policeman, he remembered, people still argued about whether it was right or wrong to use force during an interrogation, and he had heard all of the arguments from both sides. Now they argued about how much pain they could inflict.
Euclid came to mind: was it he who had claimed that, given a lever long enough, he could move the Earth itself? Brunetti's experience and his reading of history had led him to believe that, given the right pressure, almost anyone could be moved to confess to anything. So it had always seemed to him that the important question to be asked about interrogation was not how far the subject had to be pushed in order to confess, so much as how far the questioner was willing to go in order to get the inevitable confession.
These melancholy thoughts remained with him for some time, after which he decided to go downstairs to see if Vianello was in. As he went down the stairs, he encountered Lieutenant Scarpa, coming up them. They nodded but did not speak as they registered one another's presence. But Brunetti was brought up short when Scarpa moved to the left, effectively blocking his descent.
'Yes, Lieutenant?'
Without introduction, Scarpa asked, 'This Hungarian, Mary Dox, is she your doing?'
'I beg your pardon, Lieutenant?'
Scarpa held up a folder, as if the sight of it would make things clear to Brunetti. 'Is she yours?' the lieutenant asked again, his voice neutral.
'I'm afraid I don't know what you're talking about, Lieutenant’ Brunetti said.
In an intentionally melodramatic gesture, Scarpa raised the hand with the folder in the air between them, as if he had suddenly decided to auction it off, and asked, 'You don't know what I'm talking about? You don't know anything about Mary Dox?'
'No.'
Just as Assunta De Cal had done when confronted with evidence of knuckle-headed masculinity, Scarpa threw his hands up in the air, then stepped to the right and continued on up the stairs without saying anything further.
Brunetti went to the officers' room in search of Vianello. He found, instead, Pucetti, hunched over his desk and deeply engrossed in what looked like the same report Brunetti had just finished. The young officer was so engrossed in what he was reading that he did not hear Brunetti approach.
'Pucetti’ Brunetti said as he reached the desk, 'have you seen Vianello?'
At the sound of his name, Pucetti looked up from the papers, but it took him a few seconds to tear his attention away from them; he pushed his chair back and got to his feet. 'Excuse me, Commissario, I didn't hear you,' he said. His right hand still grasped the papers, so he was prevented from saluting. To compensate, he stood as straight as he could.
'Vianello,' Brunetti said and smiled. 'I'm looking for him.'
He watched Pucetti's eyes and saw him force himself to recall who Vianello was. Then Pucetti said, 'He was here before.' He looked around the office, as if curious to discover where he found himself. 'But he must have gone out.'
Brunetti let almost a full minute pass, and during that time he watched Pucetti return from the land where interrogation techniques were discussed with cold dispassion—if, in fact, that was the subject that had so fully captured the attention of the young man.
When he had Pucetti's full attention, Brunetti said, 'Lieutenant Scarpa asked me about a folder he had, dealing with a Hungarian woman named Mary Dox. Do you have any idea what this is about?'
Pucetti's face registered comprehension and he said, 'He came in here this morning, sir, asking about the same woman. He wanted to know if any of us knew about her case.'
'And?'
'And no one did.'
Aware of the uniformed staff's opinion of the lieutenant, Brunetti asked, 'No one did or no one said they did?'
'No one did, sir. We talked about it after he left, and no one knew what he was talking about.'
'Is this where Vianello's gone?'
'I don't think so. He didn't know anything, either. My guess is that he's just gone down to get a coffee.'
Brunetti thanked him and told him to continue with his reading, to which Pucetti did not respond.
At the bar near Ponte dei Greci, Brunetti found Vianello at the counter, a glass of wine in front of him as he leafed through that day's paper.
'What did Scarpa want?' Brunetti asked as he came in. He asked the barman for a coffee.
Vianello folded the newspaper and moved it to one side of the bar. 'I've no idea,' he answered. 'Whatever it is, or whoever she is, it's trouble. I've never seen him so angry.'
'No idea?' Brunetti asked, nodding his thanks to the barman as he set down the coffee.
'None’ Vianello answered.
Brunetti stirred in sugar and drank half the coffee, then finished it. 'You read these regulations from the Ministry of the Interior?' he asked Vianello.
'I never read their directives,' Vianello said and took a sip of his wine. 'I used to, but I don't care about them any more.'
'Why?'
'They never say anything much: just words, words all tortured so as to sound good while justifying the fact that they really don't want to achieve anything.'
'Anything about what?' Brunetti asked.
'You ever been sent to ask one of the Chinese where the cash came from to buy his bar? You ever been asked to check the work permits of the people who work in those bars? You ever been sent out to close down a factory that got caught dumping its garbage in a national forest?'
What struck Brunetti was not the subject of Vianello's questions—questions that floated around the Questura like lint in a shirt factory— but the cool dispassion with which he asked them. 'You don't sound like you care much’ he observed.
