opinions of the clergy.' Before he could comment, she added, 'The other has a milder view. No doubt because he has less exhaustive information.'
'May I ask who these people are?'
'One is a priest, and one used to be.'
'Which one holds which opinion?' he asked.
She sat up straight, as if trying to view this question from his perspective, and then said, ‘I suppose the less interesting configuration would be for the former priest to be antagonistic, wouldn't it?'
'It's certainly more predictable’ Brunetti said.
She nodded and said, 'But that's not the way it is: it's the one who is still a priest who… well, who has a more adversarial stance towards his colleagues.' Absently, she pulled the cuff of her jacket forward and covered the face of her watch with it, then said, 'Yes, I think he might have more useful information.'
'What sort of information would that be?'
'He has access to the files kept by the Curia, both here and in Rome. I suppose they correspond to the personnel files we have, though we're less concerned with the private lives of our employees than they seem to be.' She clarified this by adding, 'At least from what he tells me. I've never actually seen the files’
'But he's told you what's in them?'
'Some of it. But never using names’ Her smile became impish as she added, 'Only the titles, both of who is reported on and who is doing the reporting: Cardinal, Bishop, Monsignor, altar boy.'
It proved too much for him. 'May I ask why you're interested in them, Signorina?' Brunetti was never certain of the depth or breadth of her curiosity, nor of its purpose.
'It's like the files of the Stasi’ she surprised him by answering. 'Since the fall of the Wall, we've read about private citizens who went in and read their files and found out who had been keeping an eye on them or reporting on them. And occasionally the name of one of the people who was spying was made public, or at least was made public when people still cared about such things.'
She looked up at him as if this were sufficient, but he shook his head and she continued. 'That's why I like to learn what's in the files on the private lives of the clergy: not for what they're doing, poor devils, but for who's giving the information about them. I find that far more interesting.'
'I'm sure it must be’ Brunetti agreed, thinking of some of the things he knew to be buried in those files and who might have put the information there.
However tempting it might have been to continue this discussion, Brunetti forced himself away from it. 'I'm curious about two men’ he said. 'One of them is called Leonardo Mutti, said to be from Umbria. He is also said to be a member of the clergy, but I don't know if that's true. He lives here and directs some sort of religious organization known as the Children of Jesus Christ’
Her lips pursed at the name, but she wrote it down.
'The second is Antonin Scallon, Venetian, who is a chaplain at the Ospedale and lives with the Dominicans in SS. Giovanni e Paolo. He was a missionary in the Congo for about twenty years’
'Do you want to know anything specific about either one?' she asked, looking up at him.
'No’ Brunetti admitted. 'Just anything that might be interesting.'
‘I see’ she responded. 'If one's a priest, then there will be a file.'
'And the other? If he's not a priest?'
'If he's running something with a name like that’ she began, tapping one incarnadined nail on her notes, 'he should be easy to find’
'Would you be willing to ask your friend to have a look?'
'I'd be delighted’ she answered.
Questions crowded into Brunetti's mind, but he tried to flail them away. He would not ask her who this person was. He would not ask her what she might have discovered about other priests in the city. And most importantly, he would not ask her what she had given in return for this information. To stop himself, he asked, instead, 'Does he have files on all of them – priests, bishops, archbishops?'
She paused before she answered that. 'They're supposed to have a higher level of access to get a look at the prelates.'
''Supposed to'?' he asked.
'Indeed.'
Brunetti put temptation behind him and said only, 'You'll ask him?'
'Nothing easier,' she answered, swinging around in her chair and tapping a few keys on her keyboard.
'What are you doing?' Brunetti asked.
'Sending him an email,' she said, not bothering to hide her surprise at his question.
'Isn't that risky?'
For a moment she didn't understand, but then he saw her get it. 'Oh, you mean for security?' she asked. 'Yes.'
'We always assume that our emails are recorded somewhere,' she said calmly, tapping a few more keys. 'So what are you asking him?' 'To meet me.' 'Just like that?'
'Of course,' she answered with a smile.
'And no one's suspicious? You send an email to a priest and ask him to meet you, and whoever is supposedly recording your messages won't be suspicious about this? About an email coming from the Questura?'
'Of course not, Cornmissario,' she said firmly. 'Besides, I'm using one of my private accounts.' Her growing smile told him she had not finished. 'And, you see, I have every reason to want to see him. He's my confessor.'
15
The amusement Brunetti would usually have felt at Signorina Elettra's relationship with the clergy was crushed by the lingering weight of the memory of the still unidentified child. In recent years, Brunetti had begun to see the death of the young as the theft of years, decades, generations. Each time he learned of the willed, unnecessary destruction of a young person, whether it was the result of crime or of one of the many futile wars that snuffed out their lives, he counted out the years until they would have been seventy and added up the plundered years of life. His own government had stolen centuries; other governments had stolen millennia, had stamped out the joy these kids might and should have had. Even if life had brought them misery or pain, it would still have brought them life, not the void that Brunetti saw looming after death.
He returned to his office and, to pass the time while he waited for some word of the autopsy, read more carefully through the three newspapers he had brought with him. When he looked up from the last page of the third, all he could remember were the sixty years of life that had been stolen from the girl Vianello had pulled from the water.
Brunetti looked at the surface of his desk, folded the last newspaper and moved it aside, placing it on top of the others. With the tip of one finger, he slid some specks of dust to the edge of the desk and let them drop invisibly to the floor. Maybe she tripped and fell and, unable to swim, drowned in the canal. Even so, as Paola insisted, one did not misplace a child. This was not drawing-room comedy with an infant in a leather handbag, left unclaimed in the cloakroom of Victoria station. This was a young girl, missing, but unmissed.
The phone rang.
‘I thought I'd call,’ he heard Rizzardi say when he answered. 'I'll send a written report, but I thought you'd want to know.'
'Thank you,' Brunetti said, then, unable to stop himself, added, 'I can't shake loose of her.'
The pathologist limited himself to a noise of assent-there was no knowing if he felt the same way.
Brunetti grabbed a sheet of paper and pulled it towards him.
'I'd say she was ten or eleven,' the pathologist began, then paused and cleared his throat. 'The cause of death was drowning. It looks like she was in the water about eight hours.' That, Brunetti calculated, meant she had gone into the water around midnight.
'It could have been longer,' Rizzardi said. 'The water's not the same temperature as the air, and that would
