or two. If, however, he stood by the window, it meant he was in a hurry and whoever spoke to him had best be quick about it.
In this case, Patta walked over and placed the paper on his desk, then glanced at Brunetti and turned it upside down. He turned and leaned back against the desk, hands braced on either side of him. This left Brunetti in a kind of procedural limbo: he certainly could not sit down in the presence of his standing superior, and the thought that Patta might well launch himself to some other place in the room made him uncertain where to stand.
He took a few steps towards Patta, who today wore a slate grey suit so sleek of line as to render him both taller and more slender. Brunetti's eyes were drawn to a small gold pin – was it some sort of cross? – on Patta's lapel. Refusing to allow himself to be distracted, Brunetti said, ‘I went out there, as you asked me to, Vice- Questore.'
Patta nodded, a hint that his role today was as the silent, watchful guardian of public security.
'A maresciallo of the Carabinieri came along, as well as a woman from social services who works with the Rom.'
Patta nodded again, either to acknowledge that he was following Brunetti's account or in tribute to the political correctness of Brunetti's choice of noun.
'At first, the man who seems to be the leader didn't want to let us talk to the parents, but when we made it clear that we were going to stay until we did, he called the father and I told him about the child.' Silence from Patta. 'He asked how we could be sure of her identity, and I gave him the photos. He showed them to the mother. She was' – Brunetti had no idea how to describe the woman's agony to Patta – 'she was distraught.' Brunetti could think of nothing more to say. Those were the facts.
'I'm sorry,' Patta surprised him by saying.
'For what, sir?' Brunetti asked, wondering if perhaps some opportunity of publicity had presented itself in the afternoon and Patta now regretted not having gone out to the camp.
'For the woman's pain,' Patta said soberly. 'No one should lose a child.' With a sudden lightening of tone, he asked, 'And the other woman?'
'You mean the woman from the social services, sir?'
'No. The one whose house you went to. About the jewellery.'
'The child must have been in their home,' he answered. Seeing Patta start to speak, he added, 'How else can the ring and the watch be explained?' As soon as he said that, Brunetti realized he was sounding too involved, too interested, so he tempered his voice and said, 'Well, that is, it's difficult to think of some other way she might have got them.'
'But that doesn't mean much, does it?' Patta asked. ‘I mean, that's no reason to believe that anything happened to her while she was in there, that she did anything but trip and fall. Why, people are falling off roofs all the time’
Brunetti had heard of one case in the last ten years, but he knew better than to argue. Perhaps roofs were more dangerous in Patta's home town of Palermo. Most things were.
'They usually work in groups, sir,' Brunetti observed.
'I know, I know,' Patta answered, waving a hand in Brunetti's direction as though he were a particularly annoying fly. 'But that doesn't mean anything, either.'
As if he were indeed a fly, Brunetti's antennae began to pick up another strange buzz in this room, some other emanation coming at him from Patta, either from his eyes or his tone or the way the fingers of his right hand occasionally moved towards that sheet of paper, then suddenly skittered back to his side.
Brunetti made his face display the play of thought. ‘I suppose you're right, sir,' he finally said, careful to speak with acquiescent disappointment. 'But it might be useful to be able to talk to them.'
'To whom?'
'The other children.'
'Out of the question,' Patta said in an unrestrainedly loud voice. Then, as if sharing Brunetti's surprise at the volume with which he had spoken, the Vice-Questore continued more softly, 'That is, it's too complicated: you'd need an order from a judge from the minors' court, and you'd need someone from the social services to go along with you and be there while you talked to them, and you'd need a translator.' Patta spoke as though the matter had been settled, but then, after a careful pause, he added, 'Besides, you'd never be sure you'd got the right children in the first place.' He shook his head in contemplation of the impossibility of Brunetti's ever being able to achieve all of this.
‘I see what you mean, sir,' Brunetti said with a resigned shrug, lowering his voice and closing his heart to the temptations of irony or sarcasm. For he did indeed see what Patta meant: the prosperous middle class was involved here, so Patta had decided it would be best to avoid any examination of what might have happened on that roof.
And Brunetti, like a snail that brushes something rough with one of its feelers, opted to retreat into his shell. ‘I hadn't considered all of that, sir,' he admitted grudgingly. He waited to see if Patta would drive another nail into the coffin of possibility, and when he did not, Brunetti did it for him and said, 'And there's no chance that we could ever get these kids to testify, anyway, is there?'
'No, none,' Patta agreed. He shoved himself away from his desk and walked behind it to his chair. 'See if there's anything that can be done for the mother,' Patta said, and Brunetti rejoiced greatly in the request, for to learn what might be done for her, he would surely have to go and talk to her, would he not?
'I'll leave you to your work, sir,' Brunetti said.
Patta was already too busy to reply, and Brunetti left him there to get on with it.
Signorina Elettra looked up as he emerged from Patta's office. 'The Vice-Questore,' Brunetti said, having been careful to leave the door to the office open behind him, 'thinks there's no point in pursuing this.'
Glancing at the open door, she fed him his next line, 'And do you agree with him, Commissario?'
'Yes, I think I do. The poor girl fell from the roof and drowned’ He suddenly remembered that no disposition had been made for the girl's body. Now that Patta had effectively closed the investigation, she should be returned to her family, though in a case of accidental death, Brunetti had no idea whose responsibility that would be.
'Would you call Dottor Rizzardi and see when the body can be released?' he asked. For a moment, Brunetti considered accompanying the girl's body, but he was not prepared to do that. 'There's a woman at the social services, Dottoressa Pitteri -I can't remember her first name. She's been working with the Rom for some time, so she might have an idea of what… well, of what they might want to do.'
'With the girl, do you mean?' Signorina Elettra asked. 'Yes.'
'All right,' she said, then, 'I'll call her, Commissario, and let you know what happens.'
'Thank you,' he said and left her office.
23
As he climbed the steps to his office, Brunetti was suddenly overcome with a desire to turn around and leave the Questura and, as he had sometimes done as a schoolboy, take the vaporetto out to the Lido and go for a walk on the beach. Who would know? Worse, who would care? Patta was probably congratulating himself at his easy success in having protected the middle class from any embarrassing investigation, while Signorina Elettra was busy with the sombre task of finding a way to send the dead child back to her family.
He went up to his office and immediately dialled down to Signorina Elettra's office. When she answered, he said, 'When Patta came out of his office, he had a sheet of paper in his hand. Have you any idea what it was?'
'No, sir’ came her answer, as laconic as it could be.
'Do you think you might have a look?'
'One moment, and I'll ask Lieutenant Scarpa’ she said,
then he heard her asking, voice a bit fainter as she held the receiver away from her mouth, 'Lieutenant, do you know what's wrong with the photocopying machine on the third floor?' There was a long silence, and then he heard her add, voice even louder, as if she were now talking to someone at a greater distance, 'It seems there's a paper jam, Lieutenant. Would you mind having a look?'
