Donna Leon - The Girl of his Dreams

When she remained silent, Brunetti asked, 'Can you imagine if a child went missing here? It would be all over the papers, on every television station.' Still she did not answer, and so Brunetti asked, 'Well? Isn't that true?'

'I'm not sure they can be expected to respond the way we would, sir’

'What do you mean?'

He watched her strive for words, and finally she said, 'I think their attitude towards the law is more tentative than ours.'

'Tentative?' he asked with a sharpness of tone that surprised even him. Deliberately softening his voice, he asked, 'What do you mean?'

Finally, she set her pen down and pushed herself back from her desk. She looked different, somehow, when she did that, and he wondered if she had lost weight or got her hair cut or had done one of those other things women do. 'It's not as if their first thought, when something goes wrong, is to call the police, is it, sir?' When he said nothing, she added, 'Which is certainly understandable, given the way people in their community are treated’

'No one out there – except the mother – showed much concern that the girl was dead,' Brunetti allowed himself to be goaded into saying.

'And you think they'd do that in front of four policemen, sir?' she asked mildly.

He would stand no more of this. 'Why do you look different, Signorina?' he asked.

She was unable to disguise how much his question surprised her. 'You noticed?' she asked.

'Of course’ he answered, still puzzled.

She got gracefully to her feet. She extended her arms to the side, curved them upwards, then leaned towards him as she swept her right arm in his direction. 'I've started taking lessons’ she said, leaving him none the wiser. Yoga? Karate? Ballet?

His confusion must have been evident, for she laughed, then bent her knees, turning to face him sideways, her right hand cupped around an invisible something that she jabbed in his direction.

'Fencing?' he asked.

If so graceful a motion could be thought of as a lunge, she lunged forward and took two tiny steps in his direction, only to come up against the side of her desk.

The door to Patta's office opened suddenly, and the Vice-Questore emerged, a folder in his right hand, eyes on a single sheet he held in his left, the perfect image of a busy commander of men. By the time he glanced up, Signorina Elettra's rapier had disappeared, and she was just turning to him. 'Ah, Vice-Questore, I was coming in to tell you that Commissario Brunetti was here to report to you.'

'Ah, yes’ Patta said, giving Brunetti a speculative glance, as if he could free himself from the weight of the cares of office for just long enough to speak to him. 'All right, Brunetti’ he finally said. 'Come in and tell me.'

Patta put the folder of papers on Signorina Elettra's desk, keeping the single sheet in his hand. He left the door of his office open after he went in, an invitation to Brunetti to follow.

Brunetti attempted to intuit how much time Patta would allow him. Usually, if the Vice-Questore went back to his desk, it meant he wanted to be comfortable, and that meant he was willing to listen for more than a moment 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.