As he walked, Brunetti let his memory slip back to the time he had spent with Franca, more than two decades ago. He was conscious of how much he had enjoyed again putting his arms around that comfortable figure, once so familiar to him. He remembered a long walk they had taken on the beach of the Lido the night of Redentore; it must have been when he was seventeen. Fireworks long finished, they’d walked along, hand in hand, waiting for dawn, reluctant to let the night end.
But it had, as had many things between them, and now she had her Mario, and he had his Paola. He stopped at Biancat and bought a dozen irises for his Paola, happy to be able to do so, happy at the thought that she would be upstairs, waiting for him.
She was in the kitchen when he came in, seated at the table, shelling peas.
Smiling at the sight of the flowers, she said, ‘It’s the best thing to do with new peas, isn’t it, make risotto?’ and raised her cheek to receive his kiss.
Kiss given, he answered, for no real reason, ‘Unless you’re a princess and you need them to put under your mattress.’
‘I think the risotto’s a better idea,’ she answered. ‘Would you put them in a vase while I finish these?’ she asked, gesturing with one hand to the full paper bag on the table beside her.
He pulled a chair over to the cabinets, took a piece of newspaper from the table and spread it on the seat, then stepped up to reach for one of the tall vases that stood on top of one of the cabinets.
‘The blue one, I think,’ she said, looking up and watching him.
He stepped down, put the chair back in place, and took the vase over to the sink. ‘How full?’ he asked.
‘About halfway. What would you like after?’
‘What is there?’ he asked.
‘I’ve got that roast beef from Sunday. If you sliced it very thin, we could have that and then maybe a salad.’
‘Is Chiara eating meat this week?’ Spurred to it by an article about the treatment of calves, Chiara had a week ago declared that she would be a vegetarian for the rest of her life.
‘You saw her eat the roast beef on Sunday, didn’t you?’ Paola asked.
‘Ah, yes, of course,’ he answered, turning to the flowers and tearing the paper from them.
‘What’s wrong?’ she asked.
‘The usual things,’ he answered, holding the vase under the tap and turning on the cold water. ‘We live in a fallen universe.’
She returned to her peas. ‘Anyone who does either of our jobs should know that,’ she answered.
Curious, he asked, ‘How does it come from yours?’ A policeman for twenty years, he needed no one to tell him that mankind had fallen from grace.
‘You deal with moral decline. I deal with that of the mind.’ She spoke in the elevated, self-mocking tone she often used when she caught herself taking her work seriously. Then she asked, ‘Specifically, what’s done this to you?’
‘I had a drink with Franca this afternoon.’
‘How is she?’
‘Fine. Her son’s growing up, and I don’t think she much likes working in a bank.’
‘Who could?’ Paola asked, but it was more a ritual response than a serious question. She returned to his original unexplained statement and asked, ‘How does seeing Franca suggest it’s a post-lapsarian universe? It usually has the opposite effect, on all of us.’
Slowly slipping the flowers one by one into the vase, Brunetti played back her comment a few times, searching for some hidden and possibly rancorous meaning and finding none at all. She observed his pleasure in meeting this old, dear friend, and she shared the joy he took in her company. At that realization, his heart gripped tight for an instant, and he felt a sudden flush of heat in his face. One of the irises fell to the counter. He picked it up, put it in with the others, and set the vase carefully aside, safely back from the edge.
‘She said something about being afraid for Pietro if she talked to me about moneylenders.’
Paola stopped what she was doing and turned to look at him. ‘Moneylenders?’ she asked. ‘What have they got to do with anything?’
‘Rossi, that man from the Ufficio Catasto who died, he had the phone number of a lawyer in his wallet, a lawyer who had taken on a number of cases against them.’
‘A lawyer where?’
‘In Ferrara.’
‘Not that one they murdered?’ she asked, looking up at him.
Brunetti nodded, interested that Paola would so casually assume that Cappelli had been murdered by ‘them’, and then added, ‘The magistrate in charge of the investigation excluded moneylenders and seemed very interested in persuading me that the killer actually got the wrong man.’
After a long pause, during which Brunetti watched the play of thought reflect itself in her face, she asked, ‘Is that why he had his number, because of moneylenders?’
‘I’ve no proof. But it’s coincidental.’
‘Life’s coincidental.’
‘Murder’s not.’
She folded her hands on top of the pile of discarded pea pods. ‘Since when is this murder? Rossi, I mean.’
‘Since I don’t know when. Maybe since never. I just want to find out about this and see why Rossi called him, if I can.’
‘And Franca?’
‘I thought, because she works in a bank, she might know about moneylenders.’
‘I thought that’s what banks are supposed to do, lend money.’
‘They often don’t, at least not on short notice and not to people who might not pay it back.’
‘Then why ask her?’ From the immobility of her posture, Paola might have been an examining magistrate.
‘I thought she might know something.’
‘You said that. But why Franca?’
He had no reason, save that she was the first person whose name had occurred to him. Besides, it had been some time since he’d seen her and he’d wanted to do so, nothing more than that. He stuffed his hands into his pockets and shifted his weight to his other foot. ‘No real reason,’ he finally said.
She unlatched her fingers and went back to shelling the peas. ‘What did she tell you, and why is she afraid for Pietro?’
‘She mentioned, even showed me, two people.’ Before Paola could interrupt, he said, ‘We met in San Luca, and there was this couple there. They’re in their sixties, I’d say. She said they lent money.’
‘And Pietro?’
‘She said there might be a connection to the Mafia and money laundering, but she didn’t want to say anything more than that.’ He saw from Paola’s brief nod that she shared his opinion that the mere mention of the Mafia would be enough to make any parent fear for any child.
‘Not even to you?’ she asked.
He shook his head. She glanced up at him, and he repeated the gesture.
‘Serious, then,’ Paola said.
‘I’d say so.’
‘Who are the people?’
‘Angelina and Massimo Volpato.’
‘You ever heard of them?’ she asked
‘No.’
‘Who have you asked about them?’
‘No one. I just saw them twenty minutes ago, before I came home.’
‘What are you going to do?’
