The Girl of his Dreams

Brunetti by saying, If I have any reservations, my son, it's about you and why you're trying so hard to disguise this interrogation.' He smiled, as if to sweeten his words, then added, 'You ask questions about him, but it seems to me that you've already made up your mind about him.'

After a brief pause the old man went on. 'You seem like an honest man, so it confuses me that you come here and ask about him in this way, with a suspicion you try to hide.' Almost as if a light had been turned on behind them, the priest's eyes had taken on a new intensity. 'May I ask you one thing, my son?'

'Of course,' Brunetti answered, meeting the old man's eyes but wanting to look away.

'You don't come from Rome, do you?'

Given that they were carrying on the conversation in Veneziano, the question puzzled Brunetti, who replied, 'No, of course not. I'm Venetian. Like you.'

The priest smiled, either at Brunetti's claim or at the intensity of it.

'No, I don't mean that, my son. I hear it in every word you say. I mean do you represent Rome?'

'You mean the government?' Brunetti asked, confused.

It took the priest some time before he said, 'No, the Church.'

'Me?' Brunetti asked, scandalized.

The old priest smiled, gave a snort of laughter, tried to stifle the sound, but then gave in and put his head back and started to laugh. The sound was remarkably deep, like water running in a far-off pipe. He leaned across and patted Brunetti's knee, still laughing, then fought for a moment until he could control himself. 'I'm sorry, I'm sorry, my son,' he said at last, then pulled up the bottom of his scapular and wiped tears from his eyes. 'But you do have the air of a policeman, so I thought you might be from them.'

‘I am a policeman,' Brunetti said, 'but a real one.'

For some reason, this set the priest laughing again, and it was some time before he stopped, and more time before Brunetti had explained fully the reason for his curiosity about Antonin. Brunetti realized he was now just as curious about the reason for the old priest's suspicions of him as he was about Antonin.

A comfortable silence fell between them after Brunetti had stopped speaking, until finally the old man said, 'He is a guest in my home, and so I have towards him the obligation of a host.' From the way the priest spoke, Brunetti had no doubt that he would defend his guest with his life, should that be necessary. 'He was sent back from Africa amidst circumstances which were not made clear. The official documents I received telling me that Padre Antonin' – Brunetti was conscious of the warmth with which the old man now used the first name – 'would be my guest made it clear that he is considered to be in disgrace by the people who sent him.'

He paused, as if inviting questions. When Brunetti asked none, he went on. 'He has been with me for some time now, and I have seen nothing that would explain that opinion. He is a decent and kind man. Perhaps he is too convinced of the lightness of his judgements, but that is something that can be said of most of us, I'm afraid. As we get older, some of us become less certain about what we think we know.'

'Apart from the certainty that we're never good enough to anyone?' Brunetti asked.

'That surely.'

Brunetti took this as the admonition it so clearly was and nodded in agreement. He saw that exhaustion had slipped into the room and taken its place in the old man's eyes and mouth.

'I would like to know how much he is to be trusted’ Brunetti suddenly said.

The old man shifted his weight to one side of the chair, and then to the other. He was so frail that it was more a matter of shifting bones and the cloth that covered them. ‘I believe he deserves not to be distrusted, my son,' the priest said, and then added, looking secretly gleeful when he said it, 'but at my age that's advice I give about almost everyone, and to almost everyone.'

Brunetti proved incapable of resisting the temptation to ask, 'Unless they come from Rome?'

The old priest's face grew serious and he nodded.

'Then I'll take your advice as given,' Brunetti said, getting to his feet. 'And thank you for giving it to me.'

7

As he continued on the way to the Questura, Brunetti considered what the priest had told him. Decades of exposure, not only to criminality, but to the daily business of life, had worn from Brunetti the capacity for instinctive trust. Perhaps, like the Contessa's faith and in the face of experience, it was something a person had to choose.

Good sense interrupted his reflections to remind him that nothing anyone had told him mentioned any specific action on the part of Antonin that would or could render him suspect in any way. In fact, all Antonin had done was come to give a blessing at the funeral of the mother of an old friend: what prevented Brunetti, then, from viewing this as an act of simple generosity? Decades ago, Antonin had brushed past Brunetti with an abrasive edge, and then he had become a priest.

Despite his mother's faith, anti-clericalism was part of Brunetti's genetic structure: his father had had only the worst to say about the clergy, an attitude explained by the contempt for power his experience of war had created in him. His mother had never offered opposition to her husband's beliefs just as she had never offered a good word about the clergy, though she was a woman who managed to find something good to say about most people – once even about a politician. These thoughts and memories kept pace with him as he walked back to work.

On his desk at the Questura, as he had feared, Brunetti discovered the fallout from Vice-Questore Giuseppe Patta's attendance at the Berlin conference – no doubt transmitted by phone from his room at the Adlon. Their weekly 'crime alert' would next week be dedicated to the Mafia, no doubt with a view to extirpating it root and branch, something the country had been trying to do, with varying degrees of flaccidity, for more than a century.

He read through the copy of Patta's message, probably emailed to the Questura by Signorina Elettra from her own room in Abano Terme.

This is a war situation: we must consider ourselves to be at war with the Mafia, which is to be treated as a separate state existing within other states.

All of our forces to be mobilized.

Inter-agency cooperation to be maximized.

Liaison officer to be named.

Ministry of the Interior, Carabinieri, Guardia di Finanza contacts to be created and maintained.

Application to be made for special funding under Legge 41 bis.

Inter-Cultural dynamics to be stressed.

Brunetti stopped reading here, perplexed by the precise meaning of 'Inter-Cultural dynamics'. He knew from long experience that the people of the Veneto viewed things differently from those of Sicily, but he did not believe it was a gulf that required bridging by 'inter-cultural' anything. But trust Patta to have already seen the advantage to be offered by the possibility of 'special funding'.

Brunetti turned his attention to the growing file of papers and witness statements that had accumulated about a knife-fight that had taken place the week before in front of a bar on the riva of the Giudecca. The fight had ended with two men in the hospital, one with a lung that had been punctured by a fish- scaling knife and the other with an eye he was likely to lose, the result of a wound caused by the same knife.

The statements given by four witnesses explained that the knife had been drawn during an exchange of words, after which it had been thrust, then dropped, by one of the men, only to be picked up by the other and used again. Where the statements did not concur was in the attribution of ownership and original use of the knife, and in the chronology of the struggle. The brother and cousin of one man, who had been in the bar at the time the fight broke out, insisted that he had been assaulted, while the brother-in-law and friend of the other said that he had been the victim of unprovoked aggression. On both sides thus was simple truth suppressed. Both men's fingerprints were on the handle, both men's blood on the blade. Six of the other people in the bar, all natives of the Giudecca, could not remember seeing or hearing anything, and two Albanian workers who had stopped for a beer disappeared after the original questioning but before being asked for identity papers.

Brunetti looked up from reading the last papers in the file, struck by just how similar cultural dynamics on the Giudecca were to those said to be current in Sicily.