Beastly Things

26

‘WHAT DID YOU make of her?’ Brunetti asked as they walked toward the unmarked car parked at the kerb.

‘My guess is she’s never going to forgive herself, or if she does, it will take a long time.’

‘For what?’

‘For not having listened to him.’

‘Not for having thrown him out?’

Vianello shrugged. ‘To a woman like that, it’s what he deserved. But not to listen to him when he asked her to: that’s what’s going to haunt her.’

‘I’d say it already does,’ Brunetti said.

‘Yes. And the rest of what she said?’

Brunetti got into the back seat with Vianello and told the driver to take them back to Piazzale Roma. As the car pulled away from the kerb, he said, ‘You mean his saying that taking the job there ruined everything?’

‘Yes,’ Vianello said, and then added, ‘I don’t think we should forget about the woman.’

‘Perhaps,’ Brunetti said, his memory running back over the conversation with Nava’s widow.

‘Then what else?’

‘Lots of things can ruin a job. You hate your boss or the people you work with. Or they hate you. You hate the work,’ Brunetti suggested, then added, ‘But none of that makes sense, if you think of the story he told his son.’

‘Couldn’t it just have been a story?’

‘Would you tell one of your kids a story like that?’ Brunetti asked.

Vianello considered this for a moment and then answered, ‘Probably not. I’m not good at stories with morals.’

‘Neither are most kids, I’d say,’ Brunetti added.

Vianello laughed at this. ‘Mine always like the ones where the well-behaved little girl ends up being eaten by the lion and the bad kids get to eat all the chocolate cake.’

‘Mine did, too,’ Brunetti agreed. Then, back to what was bothering him, he asked, ‘So why tell him such a story?’

‘Maybe because he knew his wife would be listening?’

‘Perhaps,’ Brunetti said.

‘In which case?’ Vianello asked.

‘In which case, he was trying to tell her something.’

‘Without having to tell her.’

Brunetti sighed. ‘How many times have we all done that?’

‘And what was he trying to tell her?’

‘That he was in a situation where he was being told to do bad things to people, and he thought it was wrong and didn’t want to do it.’

‘People, not animals?’ Vianello asked.

‘That’s what he said. If he’d wanted to talk about animals, he would have told a story about an animal that had to hurt other animals. Kids have literal minds.’

‘You think they care when they’re told not to do bad things to people?’ Vianello asked, sounding not at all convinced.

‘If they trust the person telling them, I think they do,’ Brunetti said.

‘So how does a veterinarian do bad things to people except by hurting their pets?’

‘It was the job at the macello that troubled him,’ Brunetti insisted.

‘You saw the butchers. It wouldn’t be easy to cause them pain.’

With that, the two men stopped talking. The ride continued, up on to the overpasses that led from Mestre to the bridge. Then in front of the rows of factories to the right, past the smokestacks that spewed out God knows what for human consumption.

A possibility came to Brunetti, and he said it aloud: ‘For human consumption.’

‘What?’ Vianello asked, his attention summoned back from the giant digital thermometer on the Gazzettino building.

‘For human consumption,’ Brunetti repeated. ‘That’s what he did at the macello. He inspected the animals that were brought in and he inspected the meat that they became. He decided what was acceptable to be sold as food; he declared it fit for human consumption.’ His mind on the story Nava had told his son, Brunetti repeated, ‘His job was to see that nothing bad happened to people.’

When Vianello said nothing, Brunetti added, ‘To keep them from eating bad meat.’ Vianello didn’t grace this with an answer, and Brunetti asked, ‘How much does a cow weigh?’

Vianello still did not answer.

From the front seat, the driver said, ‘My brother-in-law’s a farmer, Commissario: a good cow weighs up to seven hundred kilos.’

‘How much of it can be turned into meat?’

‘I’m not sure, Commissario, but I’d guess about half.’

‘Think about it, Lorenzo,’ Brunetti said. ‘If he refused them or condemned them or did whatever it was a veterinarian is supposed to do, the farmer would lose everything.’

In the face of Vianello’s silence, Brunetti asked the driver, ‘How much do they get a kilo?’

‘I don’t know for sure, Commissario. My brother-in-law always calculates that a cow is worth fifteen hundred Euros. Maybe a bit more, but that’s the figure he uses.’

Turning to Vianello and responding to his continued lack of enthusiasm, Brunetti said, though he was aware of how disgruntled he sounded, ‘It’s the first thing we’ve had that might be a reason to kill him.’

It wasn’t until they were on the causeway and the city was in sight that Vianello permitted himself to say, ‘Even if Patta doesn’t like it as a possibility, I think I prefer assault.’

Brunetti returned his attention to the water on the right side of the car.

As soon as the boat pulled up in front of the Questura, Brunetti and Vianello stepped on to the landing and walked into the building. They entered Signorina Elettra’s office together, an arrival that seemed to register on her face as a twin delight.

‘You’ve come for Papetti?’ she asked, the question suggesting that, if they had, they’d come to the right place.

‘Yes,’ Brunetti answered. ‘Tell us.’

‘Dottor Papetti is married to the daughter of Maurizio De Rivera,’ she said, which information Vianello greeted with a low whistle, Brunetti with a whispered ‘Ah.’

‘I take your noises as indication that you are aware of her father’s position and power,’ she said.

And who in the North-east was not? Brunetti asked himself. De Rivera was to construction what Thyssen was to steel: the family name sufficed to conjure the product, was almost synonymous with it. The daughter, his only child – unless some other had been slipped into the family while the gossip columnists were heavily sedated – had spent a good deal of her youth under the very public influence of various substances as illegal as they were harmful.

‘When was the fire?’ Vianello asked.

‘Ten, eleven years ago,’ Brunetti answered, referring to the fire in her apartment in Rome from which the daughter – he could no longer remember her name – had been saved at the cost of the lives of three firefighters. The public feeding frenzy had lasted months, during which she disappeared from the news, only to reappear a year or so later as a volunteer at some soup kitchen or shelter, apparently having undergone a transformative experience as a result of having been saved at the cost of three lives. But then she had again disappeared from the papers and thus from the public consciousness.

No transformative experience, however, had affected her father, nor his reputation. Speculation continued about his company’s repeated winning of contracts for municipal and provincial building projects, especially in the