Beastly Things

on Vianello, who remained still and silent.

Brunetti was about to suggest disguising or camouflaging the cameras when he sensed motion from Vianello, and a moment later the Inspector was at his side. ‘Yes, a coffee would be good.’

Without another word to Masiero, Brunetti left the squad room and led the way down to the front door and then along the riva towards the bar up near the bridge. Neither had much to say, though Vianello did observe dully that it would probably be easier simply to check the schedule of the people working at the garage for the nights of the thefts. That failing, he went on, it would be easy enough to check the computer list of those who had used their entrance cards to park or remove their cars on the nights in question.

They entered the bar and, united in their hunger, stood and studied the tramezzini on offer. Bambola asked what they would like. Brunetti asked for a tomato and egg and a tomato and mozzarella. Vianello said he’d have the same. Both asked for white wine and took their glasses to the booth at the far end of the bar.

It was only a moment before Bambola was there with the sandwiches. Ignoring them, Vianello drank half his wine; Brunetti did the same, then nodded to Bambola, holding up his glass and pointing to Vianello’s.

He set his glass down and picked up one of the tramezzini, not bothering to see which it was. Hunger demanded haste, not consideration. Less mayonnaise than Sergio used, Brunetti determined with the first bite, and all the better for that. He finished his glass and handed it to the returning Bambola.

‘Well?’ Brunetti finally said as the barman went off with the empty glasses.

‘What did Patta say?’ Vianello asked, then smiled at Brunetti’s look. ‘Alvise saw you going in.’

‘He told me to get on with it, without specifying what he meant. I take it to mean the Borelli woman.’

‘It didn’t look like a place a woman would want to be,’ Vianello said, echoing his and Patta’s thought while somehow managing to make it sound less objectionable. Then the Inspector surprised him by saying, ‘My grandfather was a farmer.’

‘I thought he was Venetian,’ Brunetti said, one thing making the other impossible.

‘Not until he was almost twenty. He came here just before the First World War. My mother’s father. His family was starving to death on a farm in Friuli, so they took the middle boy and sent him to the city to work. But he grew up on a farm. I remember, when I was a kid, he used to tell me stories about what it was like to work under a padrone. The man who owned the farm would ride over on his horse every day and count the eggs, or at least count the chickens and then demand more eggs if he didn’t get the number he thought was right.’ Vianello looked out the window of the bar at the people walking up and down the bridge. ‘Think of it: the guy owned most of the farms in the region, and he spent his time counting eggs.’ He shook his head at the thought and added, ‘He told me the only thing they could do, sometimes, was drink some of the milk while it was set out to settle overnight.’

Caught by memory, Vianello placed his glass on the table, his sandwiches forgotten. ‘He told me he had an uncle who starved to death. They found him in his barn one morning, in the winter.’

Brunetti, who had heard similar stories when he was a boy, asked nothing.

Vianello looked across at Brunetti and smiled. ‘But it doesn’t help anything, does it, talking about these things?’ He picked up one of his sandwiches, took a tentative bite, as if to remind himself what eating was, apparently liked it, and finished the tramezzino in two more quick bites. And then the other.

‘I’m curious about this Borelli woman,’ Brunetti said.

‘Signorina Elettra will find whatever there is,’ Vianello observed, repeating one of the Seven Pillars of Wisdom of the Questura.

Brunetti finished his wine and set down his glass. ‘Patta wouldn’t like it to have been a robbery,’ he said, repeating another one. ‘Let’s go back.’

21

THE RELIEF OF sitting and talking while eating and drinking restored their spirits, and when they left the bar, it seemed the lingering odour was gone from their jackets. Walking along the riva, Brunetti said he would ask Signorina Elettra to have a look into the life of Signorina Borelli. Vianello offered to see what there was to be found out about Papetti, the director of the slaughterhouse, both from official sources and from ‘friends on the mainland’, whatever that might mean. When they entered the Questura, the Inspector went into the officers’ room and Brunetti continued up to Patta’s office.

Signorina Elettra was behind her computer, her arms raised over her head, hands clasped. ‘I hope I’m not disturbing you,’ Brunetti said as he came in.

‘Not at all, Dottore,’ she said, lowering her arms but continuing to wiggle her fingers as she did so. ‘I’ve been sitting behind this screen all day, and I suppose I’m tired of it.’

Had his son said he was tired of eating, or Paola said she was tired of reading, Brunetti could have been no more astonished. He wanted to ask if she was tired of… but he failed to find the word that adequately named what she did all day. Snooping? Unearthing? Breaking the law?

‘Is there something else you’d rather do?’ he asked.

‘Is that a polite question or a real question, Signore?’

‘I believe it’s a real one,’ Brunetti admitted.

She ran her hand through her hair and considered his question. ‘I suppose if I had to choose a profession, I’d like to have been an archaeologist.’

‘Archaeologist?’ he could only repeat. Oh, the secret dream of so many people he knew.

She put on her most public smile and voice. ‘Of course, only if I could make sensational discoveries and become very, very famous.’

Aside from Carter and Schliemann, Brunetti thought, few archaeologists became famous.

Refusing to believe her about this part of her desire, he asked, with audible scepticism, ‘Only for fame?’

She was silent a long time, considering, then smiled and admitted, ‘No, not really. I’d like to find the pretty trinkets, of course – that’s the only reason archaeologists become famous – but what I’d really like to know is how people lived their daily lives and how much they were like us. Or different, in fact. Though I’m not sure it’s archaeology that tells us that.’

Brunetti, who believed that it wasn’t and that literature had far more to tell about how people were and lived, nodded. ‘What do you look at in the museums?’ he asked. ‘The beautiful pieces or the belt loops?’

‘That’s what’s so perplexing,’ she answered. ‘So much of their everyday stuff was beautiful that I never know what to look at. Belt loops, hairpins, even the clay dishes they ate from.’ She thought about this and then added, ‘Or maybe we consider them beautiful only because they’re handmade, and we’re so accustomed to seeing mass- produced things that we say they’re beautiful only because each one is different and because we’ve come to place a higher value on handmade objects.’

She gave a quick laugh and then added, ‘I suspect most of them would be willing to trade their beautiful clay drinking cup for a glass jam jar with a lid, or their hand-carved ivory comb for a dozen machine-made needles.’

To show that he agreed, he upped the ante and said, ‘They’d probably give you anything you asked for in exchange for a washing machine.’

She laughed again. ‘I’d give you anything you asked for in exchange for a washing machine.’ Then, suddenly serious, she added, ‘I suspect that most people – at least women – would be willing to renounce their right to vote in exchange for a washing machine. God knows I would.’

Brunetti at first thought she was joking, pushing things over the top as was her wont, but then he realized she was not.

‘Would you really?’ he asked, incredulous.

‘For a vote in this country? Absolutely.’

‘And in some other country?’ he asked.

This time she ran the fingers of both hands through her hair and lowered her head. She sat as though she were watching the names of the nations of the world scroll by on the surface of her desk. Finally she looked up and said, all playfulness removed from her voice, ‘I’m afraid I would.’

Rejoinder or comment had he none, and so he said, ‘I’ve got some things I’d like you to find, Signorina.’