Blood from a stone

found hard to match. Brunetti watched the tiny curved bones pile up on the sides of the plates of the two girls, marvelled at the mounds of rice that seemingly evaporated as soon as they got within a centimetre of their forks.

After a time, Paola took both the platter and the bowl back to the sink and refilled them, leaving Brunetti impressed at how she had foreseen this adolescent plague of locusts. Azir, after saying that she had never eaten radicchio and had no idea what it was, allowed Paola to pile some on her plate. While no one was watching, it disappeared.

When offers of more food met with honest protests, Paola and Azir cleared the table, and Paola handed the girl smaller plates and fruit dishes. Then she opened the refrigerator and pulled out a large bowl of chopped fruit.

Paola asked who wanted macedonia, and Azir asked, ‘Why is it called that, Dottoressa?’

‘I think because of the country, Macedonia, which is made up of small groups of people who have been all cut up and segmented. But I’m not sure.’ She turned to Chiara and, as was usual in such situations, said, ‘Get the Zanichelli, Chiara.’

Because the dictionary was now kept in Chiara’s room, she disappeared and returned with the heavy volume. She opened the book and started flipping pages, muttering under her breath as she went: ‘macchia’, ‘macchiare’, ‘macedone’, until she finally found the right place and read out, ‘Macedonia’, and the origin, proving Paola’s guess correct. After that her voice dropped into the mumble of a person reading to herself. She slid her plate to one side and replaced it with the open book. Then, as if the other people at the table had evaporated along with the rice, she began to read the other entries on the page.

Azir finished her fruit, refused a second helping, and got to her feet saying, ‘May I help you with the dishes, Signora?’

Brunetti pushed back his chair and went into the living room, thinking that perhaps he had been mistaken about Chiara all these years and Azir really was the most wonderful daughter in the whole world.

When Paola came in about half an hour later, Brunetti asked, ‘Do you want to say it or shall I?’

‘What, that she can say, “only a vu cumpra ”, at the same time she can be concerned that her Muslim friend isn’t served pork?’ Paola asked as she sat down beside him. She set a book and her glasses to one side of the low table in front of them.

Brunetti might not have phrased it this way, but nevertheless he answered, ‘Yes, I suppose so.’

‘She’s an adolescent, Guido.’

‘And that means?’

Absently, Paola pulled a cushion from behind her and tossed it on to the table, then kicked off her shoes and put up her feet. ‘It means that the only constant in her life is that she’s inconsistent. If enough people approve of an idea or an opinion, then she’s likely to think it’s a reasonable proposition; if enough people object, then she’ll probably reconsider it and perhaps change her mind. And because of her age, there’s all that adolescent static flying around in her head, so it’s difficult for her to think straight for a long time without worrying what her friends will think of her for saying or doing what she does.’ She paused, then said, ‘Or, for that matter, for wearing or eating or drinking or liking or listening to or watching what she does.’

‘But isn’t she aware of the inconsistency?’ he asked doggedly.

‘Between attending to one foreigner’s needs and casually dismissing the death of another?’ Paola inquired, again phrasing it bluntly.

‘Yes.’

Adjusting to a more comfortable position, Paola leaned her shoulder up against his chest. ‘She knows Azir, likes her, so she’s real to Chiara: the black man was a faceless stranger,’ Paola said, then added, ‘And she’s probably still too young to be affected by how beautiful they are.’

‘By what?’ asked Brunetti.

‘By how beautiful they are,’ Paola repeated.

‘The vu cumpra?’ Brunetti asked with open surprise.

‘Beautiful,’ Paola repeated. She watched Brunetti’s face and then asked, ‘Have you ever looked at them, Guido? Really looked? They’re beautiful men: tall and straight and in perfect shape, and many of them have the sort of faces you see on carvings.’ When he still looked unpersuaded, she asked, ‘Would you prefer to look at fat tourists in shorts?’

Accepting that he was not going to answer, she went back to the original subject. ‘It’s also about class, I think, much as I don’t like to say it.’

‘Class?’ he asked, still puzzling over the idea of the beauty of the Africans.

‘Azir’s parents are professionals. The black man was a street pedlar.’

‘Is it better or worse if that’s the reason she said it?’ asked a genuinely confused Brunetti.

Paola gave this a great deal of thought and finally answered. ‘I’d say it’s better, in a perverse sort of way.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it’s more easily corrected.’

‘I’m lost,’ Brunetti confessed, which was often the case when Paola’s mind moved to consideration of the abstract.

‘Think of it this way, Guido: if it’s based on the difference in race, thinking that one race is superior, then it’s lodged in some inner space in her mind, some atavistic place where sweet reason is unlikely to penetrate. But if it’s based on the belief that people are better than others because they have more money or are better educated, then she’s bound sooner or later to encounter enough counter-examples of this to see how ridiculous the idea is.’

‘Should we point it out to her?’ he asked, dreading her answer.

‘No,’ Paola’s response was instant. ‘She’s intelligent, so she’ll figure this one out by herself.’ When Brunetti said nothing, Paola added, ‘If we’re lucky, and she is, too, then she’ll figure both out.’

‘Because you did?’ Brunetti had never been satisfied with any explanation she had ever given him of how a person from a family as limitlessly wealthy as hers could have ended up with social and economic ideas so different from those of her class and most of her relatives.

‘It was easier for me, I think,’ Paola said. ‘Because I never actually believed it. There was never any suggestion, when I was growing up, that we were better than other people. Different, for sure: it would have been hard to disguise that, with all that money washing around.’ She turned to him and tilted her head to one side, the way she did when new ideas sneaked up on her. ‘You know, Guido, hard as this will be for you to believe, I think it never occurred to me — at least when I was young — that we really were rich. After all, my father went off to work every day, just like everybody else’s: we didn’t have a car; we didn’t go on expensive vacations. But it was more than that, I think,’ she said, and he turned to watch the play of thought on her face as she worked this out.

‘It was more a question of what was approved of or disapproved of, sort of without saying. At home, I mean. What I learned to be important about people.’

‘Give me an example,’ he said.

‘The worst, I think — the worst disapproval, that is — was of people who didn’t work. It didn’t much matter to my parents what work a person did, whether they ran a bank or a workshop: the important thing was that they worked and that they thought their work was important.’

Paola pulled away and turned to face him. ‘I think that’s why my father has always liked you so much, Guido, because your work is so important to you.’

Discussion of Paola’s father, his likes and dislikes, always made Brunetti faintly edgy, so he turned back to the matter at hand. ‘And Chiara?’

‘She’ll be all right,’ Paola said with what Brunetti suspected she forced to sound like certainty. Then, after a long pause, she added, ‘At first, I thought I’d reacted too strongly to what she said about him, but now I think I was right.’

‘Better than hitting her, at any rate,’ Brunetti said.

‘And probably more effective,’ Paola added. She leaned back against him and said, ‘We’ll just have to wait and see.’

‘See what?’