‘It isn’t
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he said, though he feared he did.
She pushed back the covers and sat up, facing him. ‘What I’m talking about is rape, Guido.’ Then, before he had the chance to say anything, she said, ‘And don’t give me that look, as if all of a sudden I’m a hysterical woman, afraid that any man I smile at is going to jump out of the wardrobe, or that I assume every compliment is the prelude to an assault.’
He turned away and switched on his own lamp. If this was going to go on a long time — and he now suspected it would — he might as well be able to see her clearly.
‘It’s different for us, Guido, and you men simply don’t want to see that or you can’t see it.’
She paused after that and he took the opportunity to say, ‘Paola, it’s four in the morning, and I don’t want to listen to a speech, all right?’
He feared that would inflame her yet it seemed to do just the opposite. She reached aside and put a hand on his arm. ‘I know, I know. All I want you to do is try to see it as a situation in which a woman consented to sex with a man with whom she did not want to have sex.’ She thought for some time, then added, ‘I’ve spoken to her only a few times. It’s my mother who likes her — loves her, really — and her judgement is good enough for me.’
‘What judgement did your mother make about her?’ he asked.
‘That she wouldn’t lie,’ Paola said. ‘So if she told you she did this unwillingly — and I think “unpleasant tastes” is enough to suggest it was — then it’s rape. Even if it went on for two years, and even if her reason was to protect her husband’s sense of himself.’ When his expression did not change, she said, in a much warmer voice, ‘You work around the law in this country, Guido, so you know what would have happened if she had gone to the police and if any of this had ever been dragged into the courts. What would happen to that old man, and to her.’
She stopped and looked at him, but he chose not to answer and chose not to object.
‘Our culture has very primitive ideas about sex,’ she said.
To lighten the mood, Brunetti said, ‘I think our society has very primitive ideas about a number of things.’ But as soon as he said it, he realized how firmly he believed this and so it did little to cheer him.
And that was when she said it: ‘Well, I’d give her a medal.’
Brunetti sighed, then shrugged, then reached aside to turn off the light.
When he felt the pressure, he noticed that her hand had never left his arm. ‘What are you going to do?’ she asked.
‘I’m going to go to sleep,’ he said.
‘And in the morning?’ she asked, switching off her light.
‘I’ll go and talk to Patta.’
‘What will you tell him?’
Brunetti turned on to his right side, though to do so, he had to pull his arm free of her hand. He rose up and pounded his pillow a few times, then pulled himself over so that he could put his left hand on the inside of her arm. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Really?’
‘Really,’ he said, and then they slept.
The newspapers latched on to the story and would not let it go. They sank their teeth into it and shook it, for it had just what their public loved: wealthy people caught in apparent misbehaviour; the younger wife caught with the lover; violence, sex, and death. On the way to the Questura, Brunetti saw again the photo of the young Franca Marinello; in fact, he saw a number of photos of her and wondered how it was possible that the press could have found so many and so soon. Did her university classmates sell them? Her family? Friends? When he got to his office, he opened the papers and read through the story as it was presented in all of them.
Amidst the tumble of words, there were more photos of her at various social functions during the last few years, and speculation was rife about what would have driven an attractive young woman to have tampered with — they drew themselves short of talking about ‘God’s gift’, limiting themselves to ‘her natural appearance’ — in order to end up looking the way she did. Various psychologists were inter-viewed: one of them said she was a symbol of a consumerist society, never satisfied with what it had, always looking for some symbolic achievement to validate its worth; while another, in
A different journalist speculated about the nature of Franca Marinello’s relationship with Terrasini, whose criminal past was splattered across the pages. They had become a well known couple, it was said by a number of unnamed people, and had been seen at the best restaurants in the city and often at the Casino.
Cataldo, it seemed, had been selected to play the role of the betrayed husband. Entrepreneur, former city councillor, well regarded by his fellow businessmen of the Veneto, he had ended his former marriage of thirty-five years in order to marry Franca Marinello, a woman more than thirty years his junior. Neither he nor Marinello was available for comment, nor had a warrant been issued for her arrest. The police were still questioning witnesses and waiting for the results of the autopsy.
Brunetti, one of the witnesses to the crime, had certainly not been questioned, nor, it turned out when he phoned both Griffoni and Vasco, had they. ‘And who the hell is supposed to be questioning us?’ he could not stop himself from asking out loud.
He closed the papers and, realizing it was nothing more than a gesture of protest and, as such, self-indulgent and meaningless, tossed them into the wastepaper basket — and felt better for having done it. Patta did not come in until after lunch, but when he arrived Signorina Elettra phoned Brunetti, and he went downstairs.
Signorina Elettra was at her desk and said, when he came in, ‘I see I didn’t find enough about her, or about Terrasini. Or I didn’t find it soon enough.’
‘You’ve read the papers, then?’
‘I looked at them and found them more disgusting than usual.’
‘How is he?’ Brunetti asked, nodding towards Patta’s door.
‘He’s just finished speaking to the Questore, so I suspect he’ll want to see you.’
Brunetti knocked on the door and went in, knowing that Patta’s mood usually had a one-note overture. ‘Ah, Brunetti,’ the Vice-Questore said when he saw him. ‘Come in.’
Well, it was more than one note, but they had all been in a minor key, so that meant a subdued Patta and that meant a Patta who was up to something and not certain about whether he could get away with it and even more uncertain about whether he could count on Brunetti to help him with it.
‘I thought you might like to speak to me, sir,’ Brunetti said in his most deferential voice.
‘Yes, I do,’ Patta said expansively. He waved Brunetti to a seat, waited until he was comfortable, and said, ‘I’d like you to tell me about this incident in the Casino.’
Brunetti was growing more and more uneasy: a civil Patta always had that effect on him. ‘I was there because of the man, Terrasini. His name had come up’ — Brunetti thought it best not to mention the photo Guarino had sent him, and Patta would never be curious enough to ask — ‘in my investigation into Guarino’s death. The chief of security at the Casino called me and told me he had come in, so I went over. Commissario Griffoni came with me.’
Patta sat, all but regal, behind his desk. He nodded and said, ‘Yes. Go on.’
‘Soon after we came in, Terrasini had a sudden losing streak and, when it looked like he might cause trouble, the head of security and his assistant intervened and started to take him downstairs.’ Patta nodded again, understanding so well how important it was that trouble be removed quickly from the public eye.
‘He had been at the table with a woman, and she followed them.’ Brunetti closed his eyes, as if reconstructing the scene, then continued. ‘They took him to the bottom of the first flight of steps, and I suppose they judged he wasn’t going to give them any trouble because they let go of his arms and waited to see if he had cooled down. Then they started up the steps, back to the gaming rooms.’
