About Face

much. They didn’t like to suffer. They seem not to have minded dying, were really quite noble about it. But they didn’t enjoy pain — at least if they had to suffer it themselves — not the way the Christians did.’

‘Have you finished with Cicero and moved on to the Christian era, then?’ he asked ironically, hoping to lighten her mood.

‘No,’ she said, ‘the Christians really don’t interest me. As I said, they like suffering too much.’ She stopped talking and gave him a long, level look, and then said, ‘At the moment, I’m reading Ovid’s Fasti. I never did before, never saw the need.’ Then, with special emphasis, as if the words were being forced from her and as if to suggest she thought Brunetti might want to go home and begin reading it, she added, ‘Book Two. Everything’s there.’

Brunetti smiled and said, ‘It’s been so long that I don’t even remember if I’ve ever read it. You must forgive me.’ It was the best he could think of to say.

‘Oh, there’s nothing to forgive, Commissario, in not having read it,’ she said, her mouth hinting at a smile. Then, her voice suddenly different and her face returned to immobility, she added, ‘Nothing to forgive in what’s there, either.’ Again, that long look. ‘You might want to read it some time.’

Then, with no transition, as if this incursion into Roman culture had not taken place or she had seen his growing restlessness, she said, ‘It’s kidnapping that I’m afraid of.’ She nodded a few times as if to confirm it as the truth. ‘I know it’s foolish, and I know Venice is a place where it never happens, but it’s the only explanation I can come up with. Someone might have done it because they wanted to know how much Maurizio might be able to pay.’

‘If you were kidnapped?’

Her surprise was completely unfeigned, ‘Who’d want to kidnap me?’ As if hearing herself, she hastened to add, ‘I thought of his son, Matteo. He’s the heir.’ Then, with a shrug that Brunetti could describe only as self- effacing, she added, ‘Even his ex-wife. She’s very rich, and she has a villa out in the countryside near Treviso.’

Speaking lightly, Brunetti said, ‘It sounds as if you’ve been thinking about this a great deal, Signora.’

‘Of course I have. But I don’t know what to think. I don’t know anything about all of this: that’s why I came to you, Commissario.’

‘Because it’s my line of work?’ he asked, smiling.

If nothing else, his tone broke her mounting tension: she relaxed visibly. ‘You could say that, I suppose,’ she said with a small laugh. ‘I suppose I needed someone I trust who can tell me I’m worrying about nothing.’

The plea was there: Brunetti could not have ignored it had he wanted to. Luckily, though, he had an answer to give her. ‘Signora, as I told you, I’m not an expert on these things, certainly not on the way the Guardia di Finanza chooses to conduct its business. But I think in this case the correct answer to who’s been trying to break in could also be the most obvious one, and the Finanza seems to be it.’ Unable to bring himself to the lie direct, Brunetti could do no more than tell himself that it could be the Finanza.

‘La Finanza?’ she asked in the voice of every patient who has ever received the less-bad diagnosis.

‘I think so. Yes. I don’t know anything about your husband’s businesses, but I’m sure they must be protected against anything except the most expert invasion.’

She shook her head and raised her shoulders in an admission of ignorance. Brunetti chose his words carefully. ‘It’s been my experience that kidnappers are not sophisticated people; much of what they do is impulsive.’ He saw how attentively she was following what he said. ‘The only people,’ he continued, ‘who could do something like this would have to have the technical skills to get past whatever barriers are in place at your husband’s companies.’ He smiled, then permitted himself a small ironic snort. ‘I must confess this is the only time in my career I’ve ever been happy to suggest to someone they’ve been the target of an exam by the Finanza.’

‘And the first time in the history of this country when someone’s been relieved to hear it,’ she finished, and this time she laughed. Her face took on the same mottled pattern Brunetti had seen when she first came in from the cold, and he realized she was blushing.

Signora Marinello got to her feet quickly, bent to retrieve her purse, then put out her hand. ‘I don’t know how to thank you, Commissario,’ she said, keeping his hand in hers while she spoke.

‘He’s a lucky man, your husband,’ Brunetti said.

‘Why?’ she asked, and he thought she meant it.

‘To have someone so concerned about him.’

Most women would smile at a compliment like this, or feign false modesty. Instead she pulled back from him and gave him a level gaze that was almost fierce in its intensity. ‘He’s my only concern, Commissario.’ She thanked him again, waited while he retrieved her things from the armadio, and left the room before Brunetti could move to the door to open it for her.

Brunetti took his normal seat behind his desk, resisting the temptation to phone Signorina Elettra and ask if her foray into the computers of Signor Cataldo’s businesses could have been detected. To do so would require that he explain his curiosity, and that was something he preferred not to do. He had not lied: a search by the Finanza was far more likely than an attempt by some putative kidnapper to gain information about Cataldo’s wealth. A search by the Finanza, however, was far less likely than the one he had asked Signorina Elettra to perform, but that was hardly information that would have comforted Signora Marinello. He had to find a way to warn Signorina Elettra that her deft hand had faltered while inside Cataldo’s computer systems.

Though it made sense that a wife should be worried to learn that her husband’s business interests were being tampered with, Brunetti thought her reaction had been excessive. Everything she had said to Brunetti that evening at dinner had revealed a sensible, intelligent woman: her response to her husband’s information suggested a different person entirely.

After a while, Brunetti decided he was spending too much time and energy on something that was not related to any of his current cases. In order to make a clean break with it before getting back to work, he would go and have a coffee or perhaps un’ombra to clear his mind.

Sergio saw him come in and, instead of his usual smile, narrowed his eyes and moved his chin minimally to the right, in the direction of the booths near the window. In the last one, Brunetti made out the back of a man’s head; narrow skull, short hair. The angle was such that he could see, opposite the first man and facing him, the halo of another man’s head; wider, with longer hair. He recognized those ears, pressed down and out by years spent under a policeman’s cap. Alvise: and that identified the back of Lieutenant Scarpa’s head. Ah, so much for the idea that Alvise would return to the flock and mingle again as an equal with his fellow officers.

Approaching the bar, Brunetti gave Sergio an equally minimal nod and asked quietly for a coffee. Something in Alvise’s expression must have alerted Scarpa, who turned and saw Brunetti. Scarpa’s face remained impassive, but Brunetti saw that Alvise’s face was crossed by something stronger than surprise — guilt, perhaps? The machine hissed, then a cup and saucer rattled and slid across the zinc bar.

None of them spoke; Brunetti nodded at the two men, turned back to the bar and ripped open a packet of sugar. He poured it into his coffee and stirred it around slowly, asked Sergio for the newspaper, and spread the Il Gazzettino on the counter beside him. He decided to wait them out and settled in to read.

He glanced at the first page, where the world outside Venice was referred to, then skipped over to page seven, lacking the mental energy — and the stomach — to endure the five pages of political chatter; one could hardly call it news. The same faces had been appearing and the same things happening, the same promises made — with a few minimal variations in cast and title — for the last forty years. The lapels of their jackets expanded and narrowed as fashion dictated, but those same front trotters remained in the trough. They opposed this, and they opposed that, and by their selfless efforts they vowed to bring the current government crashing down. So that what? So that, next year, he could stand at the bar and drink a coffee and read the same words, now in the mouths of the new opposition?

It was almost with relief that he turned the page. The woman convicted of infanticide, still at home, still crying out her innocence through the mouths of yet another legal team. And who now responsible in her mind for the murder of her son — extraterrestrials? More flowers placed at the curve in the road where four more teenagers had died a week before. Yet more uncollected garbage filling the streets in the suburbs of Naples. Another worker crushed to death by heavy equipment at his workplace. Another judge transferred away from the city where he had begun an investigation of a cabinet minister.

Brunetti slid the Venezia section out from under the first. A fisherman from Chioggia, arrested for assault