Drawing Conclusions

direction of his lady wife, about the use of light imagery in the late novels of Henry James. Considering the fact that he had recently endured a meeting with Vice-Questore Giuseppe Patta and yesterday had had only three tramezzini – one stolen – for lunch, he decided that no time was to be lost.

‘How many bottles did he send you?’ he asked, stalling for time.

‘A few cases.’

‘What?’

‘A few cases. Three or four, I don’t remember.’

This, Brunetti knew, was the consequence of being born into a noble family that was possessed not only of pedigree but of great wealth: you lost count of the cases of Moet that a student sent you.

‘That’s a bribe,’ he declared in his bad cop voice.

‘What?’

‘A bribe. I’m shocked you’d accept it. I hope you didn’t give him a high grade on this thesis.’

‘As high as I could. It was brilliant.’

Brunetti buried his face in his hands and moaned. He pulled out one of the bottles and took two glasses from the cabinet. He put the glasses on the table, making a lot of noise as he set them down, then turned his attention to the bottle, ripping off the gold foil. He aimed the cork at the far corner and pushed it off: the explosion shot through the house and warmed his heart.

He had disturbed the bottle, and so the champagne foamed out and ran across his hand. Quickly, he poured some into the first glass, which it overran, then into the second, where the same thing happened. Two small puddles spread round the glasses.

‘Quick, quick,’ he said, handing her a glass. Saying nothing else, he tapped his glass against hers, said ‘Cin, cin,’ and drank deep. ‘Ah,’ he said, at peace with the world once more. With another quick swig, he emptied the glass.

‘What’s the matter with you?’ Paola asked, then picked up her glass and took a sip after she said it. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Destroying the evidence.’

‘Oh, you are a fool, Guido,’ she said, but she laughed while she said it and the bubbles went up her nose and made her cough.

Lunch was, perhaps because of the bubbles or the laughter or some combination of the two, an easy, comfortable meal. Chiara seemed satisfied when her mother assured her that the chicken was a free range, bio chicken, that it had lived a healthy, happy life, and Brunetti, a man sworn to keep the peace, did so by not enquiring just how one was meant to tell if a chicken had been happy or not.

Chiara, of course, did not eat any of the chicken, but her vegetarian principles were sufficiently assuaged by her mother’s assurances as to the lifestyle of the chicken to cause her not to provoke the other members of the family with her comments upon the profoundly disgusting act they were engaged in by eating said chicken. Her brother Raffi, unconcerned as to the chicken’s happiness, cared only for its flavour.

Later, when they went into the living room to drink their coffee, Brunetti, profoundly happy that no one had asked him about Signora Altavilla, asked, ‘What do they do to those chickens?’

‘Not the one we ate, I hope you understand,’ Paola said.

‘So it wasn’t a lie?’

‘What wasn’t?’

‘That it was a bio chicken?’

‘No, of course not,’ Paola said, not indignant but perhaps ready to be, if provoked.

‘Why?’

‘Because the others are filled with hormones and chemicals and antibiotics and God knows what, and if I get cancer, I want it to be because I drank too much red wine or ate too much butter, not because I ate too much factory meat.’

‘You really believe that?’ he asked, curious, not sceptical.

‘The more I read,’ she began, turning on the sofa to face him, ‘the more I believe much of what we eat is contaminated in some way.’ Before he could comment, she said it for him. ‘Yes, Chiara’s a bit gone on the subject, but she’s right in principle.’

Brunetti closed his eyes and slid down on the sofa. ‘It’s exhausting, always worrying about these things,’ he said.

‘Yes, it is,’ Paola agreed. ‘But at least we live in the North, so we’re less at risk.’

‘“At risk”?’ he asked.

‘You read the articles, you know what they’ve been doing down there,’ she said. He glanced aside and saw her pick up her glasses and, apparently unwilling to talk about such things so soon after lunch, return her attention to the book she had brought from her study.

He sat up again and returned his attention to his own book, Tacitus’ Annals of Imperial Rome, a book he had not read for at least twenty years. And which he was now reading with the attention of a man a generation older than the one who had read it last. The savagery of much of what Tacitus described seemed fitted to the times in which Brunetti found himself living. Government sunk in corruption, power concentrated in the hands of one man, public taste and morals debased almost beyond recognition: how familiar it all sounded.

His eyes fell upon this sentence: ‘Fraudulence, attacked by repeated legislation, was ingeniously revived after each successive counter-measure.’ He replaced his bookmark and closed the book. He decided that he would not return to work that afternoon but would instead engage in an act of fraudulence and go for a long walk, perhaps in the company of his lady wife.

13

The next morning, Paola brought him coffee in bed and gave him that day’s edition of the Gazzettino, she equally persuaded of its lesser toxicity when confined to paper. Brunetti sipped at his coffee then set it on his night table, the better to free his hands for the reading of the paper. Sometime in the last years, even the Gazzettino had given in to the necessities of cost and was printed in the reduced size most newspapers now favoured. Even though the smaller-sized edition was easier to read in bed, Brunetti – just as he missed the typeface he had read for decades – missed the older, full- sized paper that demanded it be read with outstretched arms. He recalled the many times his reading of that invasive larger edition had provoked angry nudges and comments from the people sitting beside him on the vaporetto. But still he missed it, perhaps because its very size made the reading of it a quasi-public act: there was no way to limit its encroaching on the space of other people. This new version was too private an affair.

The story about Signora Altavilla’s death had all but disappeared from the papers. Elderly woman found dead of a probable heart attack: what sort of news was that? The best the editors could do was work it for some residual pathos: they mentioned her widowhood as well as the son and three grandchildren she left. He turned to the notices of mourning and found two, one from her son and family and one from the Alba Libera organization.

He read a few more articles and then, interest in the paper exhausted, got up, shaved and showered, and went into the kitchen, where he found Paola with La Repubblica spread on the table in front of her, chin propped in her palms.

Hearing him come in, she said, ‘I was never able to read Pravda, but I wonder if all other newspapers are simply variations on it.’

‘Probably,’ he said, going over to the sink to refill the coffee pot.

‘When I was studying in England,’ she went on, ‘I got accustomed to newspapers that had a part for news and a separate part for editorials.’ She saw she had his attention, so she picked up the paper from the bottom and flapped the pages, as if she were trying to shake crumbs off a tablecloth. ‘There’s no difference here. It’s all editorializing.’

‘The other one’s no better,’ he said. ‘And remember, La Repubblica has a good