Donna Leon - The Girl of his Dreams

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.

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?'

There was a brief silence, into which Brunetti said, 'You shouldn't bait him, you know.'

‘I don't eat chocolates,' she answered sharply. 'Baiting the Lieutenant provides the same pleasure, but there's no risk of getting fat.' It did not seem to Brunetti that Signorina Elettra ran much of a risk of that, and it was hardly his place to question anyone else's pleasures, but to go out of her way repeatedly to antagonize Patta's assistant seemed riskier behaviour than eating a chocolate truffle or two.

'I wash my hands of you,' he said, laughing as he did so. 'Though I must say I admire your courage.'

'He's a paper tiger, sir; they all are.'

'All who?'

'Men like him, who make a habit of being tough and silent and looming over your desk. They always want to make you think they're getting ready to tear you into little pieces and use tiny slivers of your bones to pick your flesh out of their teeth.' He wondered if this would be her assessment of the men at the Gypsy camp, but before he had even finished formulating the thought, she added, 'Don't worry about him, Commissario.'

‘I think it would be wiser not to antagonize him.'

A hard edge came into her voice and she said, 'If it ever came to a choice, the Vice-Questore would cut him loose in a moment.'

'Why?' Brunetti asked, honestly puzzled. Lieutenant Scarpa had been the faithful henchman of the Questore for more than a decade: a fellow Sicilian, a man who appeared to enjoy feasting on the scraps that fell from the table of power, he had always seemed, to Brunetti, utterly ruthless in his desire to aid Patta in his career.

'Because the Vice-Questore knows he can trust him,' she answered, confusing Brunetti utterly.

'I don't understand,' he confessed.

'He knows he can trust Scarpa, so he knows it would be safe to get rid of him, so long as he saw to it that he went to some better job. But he's not sure he can trust me, so he'd be afraid, ever, to try to get rid of me.' He hardly recognized her voice, so absent was its usual bantering tone.

But then she went on in her usual pleasant voice, 'And to answer your question, the only person who went into his office today, aside from you, was Lieutenant Scarpa. He was in with him for an hour this morning.'

'Ah,' Brunetti allowed himself to say, thanked her, and replaced the phone. He pulled a sheet of paper towards him and began to make a list of names. First the owner of the ring and watch. He knew Fornari's name was familiar: he stared at the far wall and tried to summon the memory. His wife had said he was in Russia, but the name of the country was no aid. What was it he sold? Kitchen appliances? No, ready-made units, and he was trying to export them there. Yes, that was it, right on the edge of memory: export, licences, Guardia di Finanza, factories. Something about money or some foreign company, but no, it wouldn't come, so Brunetti decided to leave it.

He wrote the wife's name, the daughter's, the son's, even the cleaning woman's. They were the only people likely to have been in the apartment the night the girl died. He added the words, 'Zingara', 'Rom', 'Sinti', 'Nomadi', to the bottom of the list, and then he pushed his chair back and resumed his contemplation of the far wall, and the likeness of the dead girl slipped into his memory.

The woman looked old enough to be the child's grandmother, yet that seamed, hollow-cheeked face was the face of the mother of an eleven-year-old child. All three children were younger than fourteen, and so could not be arrested. He had seen no children when he was there; stranger still, there had been no sign of children, no bikes or toys or dolls left lying about in the midst of all that litter. Italian children would be at school during the day; the absence of the Gypsy children, however, suggested that they were at work, or what passed as work for them.

Surely, the Fornari children should have been at school at that time of day. If the girl was sixteen, then she would be finishing middle school; the son might well have already started university. He picked up the phone and redialled Signorina Elettra's number. When she answered, he said, 'I've got another favour to ask. Do you have access to the files of the schools in the city?'

'Ah, the Department of Public Instruction,' she said. 'Child's play.'

'Good. The Fornari's daughter is called Ludovica -she's sixteen. She's got a brother who's eighteen, Matteo. I'd like you to see if there is anything worth knowing about them.'