Death and Judgement (21 page)

Some more people drifted away. The woman on the platform walked down the steps and disappeared into the crowd, quickly followed by two of the men. When the noise didn't stop, the man in the jacket got to his feet and had a huddled conference with the man with the microphone. By the time Brunetti turned his attention away from them, only a handful of people remained in front of the platform.

He climbed back over the low fence and headed towards the Accademia Bridge. Just as he was passing in front of
the
small florist's kiosk at the end of the
campo
,
the music and static came to a
sudden halt, and a man's voice,
amplified by nothing more than anger, called out,
'Cittadin
i,
Italiani
’
but Brunetti didn't stop, nor did he bother to turn around.

He realized that he wanted to talk to Paola. He had, as always and as was against
the
regulations, kept her informed about the progress of
the
investigation, had given her his impressions of
the
people he questioned and
the
answers they gave him. This time, because there had been no one standing naked in guilt's spotlight at
the
very beginning, Paola had refrained from naming the person she believed to be the murderer, a habit Brunetti had never been able to break her of. Devoid of that
a
priori
certainty, she served as the perfect listener: prodding him with questions, forcing him to explain things so clearly that she would understand. Often, forced to explain some lingering uneasiness, he better understood it himself. This time, she had suggested nothing, hinted nothing, displayed no suspicion of any of
the
people he mentioned. She listened, interested, and that was all she did.

When he got home, he found that Paola wasn't there yet, but Chiara was waiting for him. 'Papa,' she called from her room when she heard him open the door. A second later, she appeared at
the
door of her room, a magazine hanging open in
her hand. He recognized the yellow b
ordered cover of
Airone,
just as he recognized in its lavish photos, glossy paper, and simple prose style more signs of the American magazine it so closely imitated.

'What is it, sweetheart?' he asked, bending down to kiss the top of her head and then turning to hang his coat in the closet near the door.

'There's a competition. Papa, and if you win it, you get a free subscription.'

'But don't you already have a subscription?' he asked, having given it to her for Christmas.

'That's not the point, Papa.'

'What is the point, then?' he asked, making his way down the hallway towards the kitchen. He flipped on the light and went over to the refrigerator.

The point is winning,' she said, following him down the hall and making Brunetti wonder if the magazine might be a bit too American for his daughter.

He found a bottle of Orvieto, checked the label, put it back, and pulled out the
bottle
of Soave they had begun with dinner the night before. He took down a glass, filled it, and took a sip. 'All right, Chiara, what's the contest?'

'You have to name a penguin.'

'Name a penguin?' Brunetti repeated stupidly.

'Yes, look here,' she said, holding the magazine out towards him with one hand and pointing down towards a photo with the other. As she did, he saw a picture of what looked to be the fuzzy mass that Paola sometimes emptied from the vacuum cleaner. 'What's that?' he asked, taking the magazine and turning it towards the light

its the
baby penguin. Papa. It was born
last month at the Rome Zoo, and it doesn't have a name yet So they're offering a prize to whoever comes up with
the
best name for it
’

Brunetti pulled open
the
magazine and looked more closely at
the
photo. Sure enough, he saw a beak and two round black eyes. Two yellow flippers. On the opposite page was a full-grown penguin, but Brunetti looked in vain for some familial resemblance between the two.

‘
What name?' he asked, flipping through the magazine and watching hyenas, ibis, and elephants stream past him.

'Spot,' she said.

'What?
’

'Spot
’
she repeated.

'For a penguin?' he asked, flipping back to the original article and staring at
the
photos of the adult birds. Spot?

'Sure. Everyone else is going to call him "Flipper
’’
or
^‘
Wa
iter
’’
.' No one else will think of calling him Spot'

That, Brunetti allowed, was probably true. 'You could always save the name,' he suggested, putting the bottle back in the refrigerator.

'What for?' she asked and took the magazine back.

‘I
n case
there
's a contest for a zebra,' he said.

'Oh, Papa, you're so sill
y sometimes,' she said and
went back towards her room, littl
e aware of how much her judgement pleased him.

In the living room, he picked up his book, left ace down when he went to bed the night before. While waiting for Paola, he
might as well fight the Pelopon
nesian War again.

She came home an hour later, let herself into the apartment, and came into the living room. She tossed her coat over the back of the sofa and flopped down next to him, her scarf still around her neck. 'Guido, you ever consider the possibility
that
I'm insane?'

'Often,' he said and turned a page.

'No, really. I've got to be, working for those cretins.'

'Which c
retins?' he asked, still not both
ering to look up from
the
book.

The ones who run th
e university.'

'What now?'

'They asked me, three months ago, to give a lecture in Padua, to the English Faculty. They said it would be on
the
British novel Why do you think I was reading all those books for the last two months?'

'Because you like them. That's why you've read them for the last twenty yean.'

'Oh, stop it,
Guido,' she said, digging a gentl
e elbow into his ribs.

'So what happened?'

'I went into the office today to pick up my mail, and they told me that they'd got it all wrong, that I was supposed to be lecturing on American poetry, but no one thought to tell me about the change.'

'And so, which is it?'

'I won't know until tomorrow. They'll go ahead and tell
Padua about the new topic if Il
Magnifico approves it
’
Both
of
them
had always take
n delight in this most wonderfu
l of holdovers from the academic Stone Age, the fact that the Rector of th
e university was addressed as 'Il
Magnifico Rettore', the only thing Brunetti had learned in twenty years on the fringes of the university that had managed to make academic life sound interesting to him.

'What's he likely to do?' Brunetti asked.

Toss a coin, probably.'

'Good luck,' Brunetti said, putting down his book. 'You don't like
the
American stuff, do you?'

'Holy heavens, no,' she explained, burying her face in her hands. 'Puritans, cowboys, and strident women. I'd rather teach the Silver Fork Novel,' she said, using the English words.

The what?
’
Brunetti asked.

'Silver Fork Novel,
’
she repeated. 'Books with simple plots written to explain to people who made a lot of money how to behave in polite company.'

'For yuppies?' Brunetti asked, honesdy interested.

Paola erupted in laughter. 'No, Guido, not for yuppies. They were written in
the
eighteenth century, when all the money poured into England from the colonies, and the fat wives of Yorkshire weavers had to be taught which fork to use.
’
She was quiet for a few minutes, considering what he said. 'But if I
think
about it for a minute, with a little updating, there's no reason the same couldn't be said of Bret Easton Ellis.' She put her face in his shoulder and gave herself up to giggles, laughing herself weak at a joke Brunetti didn't understand.

When she stopped laughing, she took the scarf from her neck and tossed it on the table. 'And you?
’
she asked.

He put his book face down on his knees and faced her.
‘I
talked to the whore and her pimp and then to Signora Trevisan and her lawyer.' Slowly, attentive to his story and careful to get the details right, he told her everything that had happened that day, finishing with Signora Trevisan's reaction to his question about the prostitutes.

'Did her brother have anything to do with prostitutes?' Paola repeated, careful to duplicate Brunetti's exact phrasing. 'And you think she understood what you meant?'

Brunetti nodded.

'But the lawyer misunderstood?'

'Yes, but I don't think it was deliberate. He just didn't get it, that the question was ambiguous and didn't mean that he had sex with them.'

'She did, though?'

Brunetti nodded again. 'She's much brighter than he is.'

'Women usually are,' Paola said and then asked, 'What do you think he might have had to do with them?'

‘I
don't know, Paola, but her reaction tells me that, whatever it was, she knew about it.'

Paola said nothing, waiting for him to think it through. He took one of her hands in his, kissed the palm, and let it fall to his bp, where she left it, waiting still.

'It's the only common thread,' he began, talking more to himself than to her. 'Both of them, Trevisan and Favero, had the number of the bar in Mestre, and that's the place where a pimp is running a string of girls, and there's always a supply of new ones. I don't know about Lotto, except that he ran Trevisan's business for him.'

He turned Paola's hand over and ran his forefinger across the faint blue veins visible on the back. 'Not a lot, is it?' Paola finally asked. He shook his head.

The one you talked to, Mara, what did she ask you about the others?'

'She wanted to know if I knew anything about a girl who died in Treviso, and she said something about girls in a truck. I don't know what she meant.'

Like an aged carp slowly swimming towards the light of day, a memory stirred in the recesses of Paola's mind, a memory that had to do with a truck and with women. She rested her head against the back of the sofa and closed her eyes. And saw snow. And that small detail was enough to bring the memory to the surface.

'Guido, early this autumn - I
think it was when you were in Rome for the conference - a truck ran off the highway, up near Udine, I think. I forget the details — I think it skidded on the ice and went off a cliff or something. Anyway, there were women in the back of the truck, and they were all killed, eight or ten of them. It was strange. The story was in the papers one day, but then it disappeared and I never saw anything else about it,' Paola felt his hand grip hers a bit more firmly. 'Was she talking about that, do you think?'

'I remember something about it, a reference to it in a report from Interpol about women who are being brought here as prostitutes,
’
Brunetti said. 'The driver was killed, wasn't he?'

Paola nodded. 'I think so.'

The Udine police would have a report; he could call them tomorrow. He tried to remember more about the report from Interpol, or perhaps it had been from some other agency - God alone knew where it was filed. Time enough for all of this tomorrow.

Paola pulled gently on his hand 'Why do you use them?'

'Hum?' Brunetti asked not really paying attention.

'Why do you use whores?' Then, before he could misunderstand she clarified the question, 'Men, that is. Not you. Men.'

He picked up their joined hands and waved them in the air,
a vague, aimless gesture. 'Guiltl
ess sex, I guess. No strings, no obligations. No need to be polite.
’

'Doesn't sound very appealing,' Paola said and then added 'But I suppose women always want to sentimentalize sex.
’

‘
Yes,
you do,' Brunetti said

Paola freed her hand from his and got to her feet. She glanced down at her husband for a moment, then went into the kitchen to begin dinner.