Blood from a stone

4

Paola sat, mouth agape, fearing that everything she had ever tried to do as a parent had failed miserably and she had produced a monster, not a child. She stared at her daughter, her baby, her bright, shining angel, and wondered if demonic possession were possible.

Up until that point, dinner had been a normal enough affair, at least as normal as a meal can be when it has been delayed by murder. Brunetti, who had been called from home only minutes before they sat down, had phoned a little after nine, saying he would still be some time. The children’s complaints that they were on the verge of expiring from hunger had by then worn down Paola’s resistance, so she fed them, putting her own dinner and Guido’s back in the oven to keep warm. She sat with the children, sipping idly from a glass of prosecco that gradually grew warm and flat as the children ate their way through enormous portions of a pasticcio made of layers of polenta, ragu, and parmigiano. To follow there was only roasted radicchio smothered in stracchino, though Paola marvelled that either one of her children could possibly eat anything else.

‘Why’s he always have to be late?’ Chiara complained as she reached for the radicchio.

‘He’s not always late,’ a literal-minded Paola answered.

‘It seems that way,’ Chiara said, selecting two long stalks and lifting them on to her plate, then carefully spooning melted cheese on top.

‘He said he’d be here as soon as he could.’

‘It’s not like it’s so important or anything, is it? That he has to be so late?’ Chiara asked.

Paola had explained the reason for their father’s absence, and so she found Chiara’s remark not a little strange.

‘I thought I told you someone was killed,’ she said mildly.

‘Yes, but it was only a vu cumpra,’ Chiara said as she picked up her knife.

It was at this remark that Paola’s mouth fell open. She picked up her glass of wine, pretended to take a sip, moved the platter of radicchio towards Raffi, who appeared not to have heard his sister, and asked, ‘What do you mean by, “only”, Chiara?’ Her voice, she was glad to note, was entirely conversational.

‘Just what I said, that it wasn’t one of us,’ her daughter answered.

Paola tried to identify sarcasm or some attempt to provoke her in Chiara’s response, but there was no hint of either. Chiara’s tone, in fact, seemed to echo her own in terms of calm dispassion.

‘By “us”, do you mean Italians or all white people, Chiara?’ she asked.

‘No,’ Chiara said. ‘Europeans.’

‘Ah, of course,’ Paola answered, picking up her glass and toying with the stem for a moment before setting it down, untasted. ‘And where are the borders of Europe?’ she finally asked.

‘What, Mamma?’ asked Chiara, who had been answering a question put to her by Raffi. ‘I didn’t hear you.’

‘I asked where the borders of Europe were.’

‘Oh, you know that, Mamma. It’s in all the books.’ Before Paola could say anything, Chiara asked, ‘Is there any dessert?’

As a young mother, Paola, herself an only child and without any previous experience of small children, had read all the books and manuals that gave modern parents advice on how to treat their children. She had, further, read many books of psychology, and knew that there was a general professional consensus that one should never subject a child to severe criticism until the reasons for their behaviour or words had been explored and examined, and even then, the parent was enjoined to take into consideration the possibility of damaging the developing psyche of the child.

‘That’s the most disgusting, heartless thing I’ve ever heard said at this table, and I am ashamed to have raised a child capable of saying it,’ she said.

Raffi, who had tuned in only when his radar registered his mother’s tone, dropped his fork. Chiara’s mouth fell open in a mirror of her mother’s expression, and for much the same reason: shock and horror that a person so fundamental to her happiness could be capable of such speech. Like her mother, she dismissed even the possibility of diplomacy and demanded, ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘It’s supposed to mean that vu cumpras are not only anything. You can’t dismiss them as if their deaths don’t matter.’

Chiara heard her mother’s words; more significantly, she felt the force of her mother’s tone, and so she said, ‘That’s not what I meant.’

‘I’ve no idea what you meant, Chiara, but what you said was that the dead man was only a vu cumpra. And you’d have to do a lot of explaining to make me believe that there’s any difference between what those words say and what they mean.’

Chiara set her fork down on her plate and asked, ‘May I go to my room?’

Raffi, his own fork motionless in his hand, turned his head back and forth between them, confused that Chiara had said what she did and stunned by the power of his mother’s response.

‘Yes,’ Paola said.

Chiara stood, quietly pushed her chair back under the table, and left the room. Raffi, who was familiar with his mother’s sense of humour, turned to her, waiting for the one-line remark he was sure would come. Instead, Paola got to her feet and picked up her daughter’s plate. She placed it in the sink, then went into the living room.

Raffi finished his radicchio, resigned himself to the fact that there would be no dessert that night, set his knife and fork neatly parallel on his plate, then took it over to the sink. He went back to his room.

Brunetti returned to this scene half an hour later. Comforted by the scents that filled the entire apartment, he was eager to see his family and talk of things other than violent death. He went into the kitchen and, instead of the family he expected to see eating dessert and eagerly awaiting his return, he found an all-but empty table and dishes stacked in the sink.

He went searching for them in the living room, wondering if there was something interesting on television, impossible as he knew that to be. He found only Paola, lying on the sofa, reading. She looked up when he came in and said, ‘Would you like to eat something, Guido?’

‘Yes, I think I would. But first I’d like a glass of wine and for you to tell me what’s wrong.’ He went back into the kitchen and got a bottle of Falconera and two glasses. He opened the wine, dismissed all the nonsense about leaving it unpoured long enough to breathe, and went back into the living room. He sat down near her feet, set the glasses on the table in front of the sofa, and poured out two large glasses. He leaned towards her and handed her one, then used the same hand to take her left foot. ‘Your feet are cold,’ he said, then pulled a balding old afghan down from the back of the sofa and covered them.

He took a sip large enough to complement the size of the glass and said, ‘All right, what is it?’

‘Chiara complained that you were late, and when I told her it was because someone had been killed, she said that it was only a vu cumpra.’ She kept her voice dispassionate, reportorial.

‘Only?’ he repeated.

‘Only.’

Brunetti took another drink of wine, rested his head on the back of the sofa, and swirled the wine around in his mouth. ‘Hummm,’ he finally said. ‘Not nice at all, is it?’

Though he couldn’t see Paola, he felt the sofa move as she nodded.

‘You think she heard it in school?’ he asked.

‘Where else? She’s too young to be a member of the Lega.’

‘So is it something her friends bring in from their parents, or is it something the teachers give them?’ he asked.

‘It could be either, I’m afraid,’ she said. ‘Or both.’

‘I suppose so,’ Brunetti agreed. ‘What did you do?’

‘I told her what she said was disgusting and that I’m ashamed she’s my daughter.’

He turned, smiled, held his glass up and saluted her. ‘Always prone to moderation, aren’t you?’

‘What was I supposed to do, send her to some sort of sensitivity training class or give her a sermon on the