Donna Leon - Fatal Remedies

After a while that Brunetti measured as the time it took him to finish a refill of wine and eat his helping of boiled potatoes, she finished, picked up her glass and smiled, as if waiting for the appreciative members of her class to approach the podium to tell her how illuminating the lecture had been. A lengthening pause stretched out and was at last broken by Paola, who said, ‘Clara, let me help you carry these plates into the kitchen.’ Brunetti was not the only person who breathed a sigh of relief.

Later, on the way home, Brunetti asked, ‘Why did you let her go?’

Beside him Paola shrugged.

‘No, why? Tell me.’

‘Too easy,’ Paola said dismissively. ‘It was obvious from the beginning that she wanted to get me to talk about it, about why I did it. Why else would she bring up all that nonsense about girls being expendable?’

Brunetti walked beside her, her elbow tucked into the angle of his arm. He nodded. ‘Maybe she believed it.’ They walked a few more paces, considering this, then he said, ‘I always hate to see women like that.’

‘Like what?’

‘Who don’t like women.’ They walked a few more steps. ‘Can you imagine what a class of hers must be like?’ Before Paola could answer he continued, ‘She’s so sure of everything she says, so absolutely certain she’s found the single truth.’ He paused for a moment. ‘And imagine what it would be like to have her on your exam committee. Differ from her on anything and there goes your chance for a degree.’

‘Not that anyone would want one in cultural anthropology, anyway.’ Paola remarked.

He laughed out loud and in complete agreement. As they turned into their calle he slowed his steps, then stopped and turned her so that she was facing him. ‘Thank you, Paola,’ he said.

‘For what?’ she asked in feigned innocence.

‘For avoiding combat.’

‘It would have ended up with her asking me why I let myself get arrested and I don’t think she’s anyone I want to talk about that with.’

‘Stupid cow,’ Brunetti muttered.

‘That’s a sexist remark,’ Paola observed.

‘Yes, isn’t it?’

Their foray into society left them both wanting no more of it, so they resumed their policy of refusing invitations of any sort. Though both Paola and Brunetti chafed under the restriction of staying home night after night and Raffi seemed to find their continued presence worthy of ironic comment, Chiara loved having them there every evening and insisted on engaging them in card games, watching endless television programmes about animals and initiated a Monopoly tournament that threatened to stretch into the new year.

Each day, Paola went off to the university and Brunetti to his office at the Questura. For the first time in their careers, they were glad of the endless mountains of paperwork created by the Byzantine state which employed them both.

Because of Paola’s involvement with the case, Brunetti made up his mind not to attend Mitri’s funeral, something he ordinarily would have done. Two days after it, he decided to read again through the lab and scene-of-crime reports of Mitri’s murder, as well as Rizzardi’s four-page report on the autopsy. It took him a good part of the morning to get through them all, and the process left him wondering why it was that both his professional and his personal life seemed to be so much taken up with going over the same things again and again. During his temporary exile from the Questura he had finished rereading Gibbon and was currently tackling Herodotus, and for when that was finished, he had the Iliad ready at hand. All the deaths, all the lives cut short by violence.

He took the autopsy report and went down to Signorina Elettra’s office, where he found her looking like the antidote to everything he’d just been thinking about. She wore a jacket redder than any he had ever seen and a white silk-crepe blouse open to the second button. Strangely enough, she was doing nothing when he came in, simply sitting at her desk, chin lodged in one palm, staring out of the window towards San Lorenzo, a sliver of which was visible in the distance.

‘Are you all right, Signorina?’ he asked when he saw her.

She sat up and smiled. ‘Of course, Commissario. I was just wondering about a painting.’

‘A painting?’

‘Uh huh,’ she said, putting her chin back on her hand and staring off again.

Brunetti turned to follow her gaze, as if he thought the painting in question might be there, but all he saw was the window and, beyond it, the church. ‘Which one?’ he asked.

‘That one in the Correr, of the courtesans with their little dogs.’ He knew it, though he could never remember who had painted it. They sat, as absent and bored as Signorina Elettra had seemed when he came in, looking away to the side, as if uninterested in the thought that life was about to happen to them.

‘What about it?’

‘I’ve never been sure if they were courtesans or just wealthy women of those times, so bored with having everything and with nothing at all to do every day that all they could do was sit and stare.’

‘What makes you think of that?’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she answered with a shrug.

‘Are you bored with this?’ he asked, encompassing the office and all it signified with a wave of his hand and hoping her answer would be no.

She turned her head and looked up at him. ‘Are you joking, Commissario?’

‘No, not at all. Why do you ask?’

She studied his face for a long time before saying, ‘I’m not at all bored with it. Quite the opposite.’ Brunetti was not surprised in the least at how glad he was to hear this. After a moment’s pause, she added, ‘Though I’m never quite sure just what my position is here.’

Brunetti had no idea what she meant by that. Her official title was Secretary to the Vice-Questore. She was also meant to be of part-time secretarial help to Brunetti and another commissario, but she had never written a letter or a memo for either of them. ‘I suppose you mean your real position, as opposed to your official position,’ he suggested.

‘Yes, of course.’

Brunetti’s hand, the one holding the reports, had fallen to his side during all this. He raised it in front of him, held it a bit towards her and said, ‘I think you are our eyes and our nose, and the living spirit of our curiosity, Signorina.’

Her head rose from her hand and she graced him with one of her radiant smiles. ‘How nice it would be to read that in a job description, Commissario.’

‘I think it would be best,’ Brunetti said, shaking the folder in the general direction of Patta’s office, ‘if we left your job description alone, as written.’

‘Ah,’ was all she said, but the smile grew even warmer.

‘And didn’t worry about what to call the help you give us.’

Signorina Elettra leaned forward and reached for the folder. Brunetti handed it to her. ‘I was wondering if it would be possible to check and see if this method of killing has been used before and, if so, by whom and on whom?’

‘The garotte?’

‘Yes.’

She shook her head in little angry movements. ‘If I hadn’t been so busy feeling sorry for myself, I would have thought of that,’ she said. Then, quickly, ‘All of Europe or only Italy, and how far back?’

‘Start with Italy and if you don’t come up with anything spread out, beginning with the south.’ It seemed to Brunetti a Mediterranean way of killing a person. ‘Go back five years. Then ten if you don’t find anything.’

She turned and flicked her computer to life, and Brunetti was struck by how completely an extension of her mind he had come to believe it. He smiled and left her office, leaving her to it, wondering if this was more sexist behaviour on his part, or if it degraded her in some way for him to think of her as being somehow part of a computer. On the steps, he found himself laughing, as it were, out loud, aware of what life with a zealot could do to a man and happy to realize he didn’t care.