Donna Leon - About Face

‘I’ll have a look.’

He thanked her and left.

On the stairs back to his own office, Brunetti’s thoughts moved away from the unknown dead man to the people he had met at the dinner party the night before. He decided that the business of asking Paola for gossip — perhaps best to be honest with himself and call it what it was — about Cataldo and his wife could be done after lunch.

January had declared itself unkind this year and had assailed the city with damp and cold. A grey cloud had taken up residence over northern Italy, a cloud that begrudged the mountains snow at the same time as it kept the temperature warm enough for fog but no rain.

The streets had thus not been washed clean for weeks, though a viscous layer of condensation covered them every night. The one acqua alta , four days before, had done nothing but shift the dirt and grime around without leaving the streets any cleaner. Undispersed by bora or tramontana , the air from the mainland had gradually oozed eastward and now spread across the city, nudging the levels of pollution higher each day, covering Venice in who knew what sort of chemical miasma.

Paola had responded to the situation by asking them to take their shoes off before coming into the house, and so the landing in front of their door was rich enough in clues to tell Brunetti that the others had all got home before him. ‘Ah, superdetective,’ he whispered aloud as he bent to untie his shoes; he set them side by side to the left of the door and let himself into the apartment.

He heard voices from the kitchen and turned towards them, moving silently. ‘But it says in the paper,’ Chiara’s voice was filled with confusion and more than a touch of exasperation, ‘that the levels are beyond the legally permitted limit. That’s what it says here.’ He heard what sounded like a hand slapping against a newspaper.

‘What does that mean, “legally permitted”?’ she continued. ‘And if the levels are beyond the legal limit, then who’s supposed to do something about it?’

Brunetti wanted to eat his lunch in peace and then gossip with his wife. He had little desire to be drawn into a conversation during which he feared he would be held responsible for the law or for what it permitted.

‘And if they can’t do anything about it, then what are we supposed to do, stop breathing?’ Chiara concluded, and Brunetti’s interest awoke at the sound of the same tone Paola used for her own most lyrical passages of denunciation and outrage.

Curious now to learn how the others would respond to her question, he moved closer to the door.

‘I’ve got to meet Gerolamo at two-thirty,’ Raffi interrupted in a voice that sounded frivolous in contrast to his sister’s. ‘So I’d really like to eat soon and get some of my calculus done before I leave.’

‘The whole world’s collapsing around us, and all you can think about is your stomach,’ a female voice declaimed.

‘Oh, come off it, Chiara,’ Raffi said. ‘This is just more of the same old stuff, like giving our pocket money to ave Christian babies when we were in elementary school.’

‘There will be no saving of Christian babies in this household,’ a magisterial Paola declared.

Luckily, both of the children laughed at this, and so Brunetti timed his entrance to follow. ‘Ah, peace and harmony at the table,’ he said, taking his place and turning to look at the pots on the stove across the room. He took a sip of wine, liked it, and took another sip, set the glass down. ‘It is a comfort and a joy to a man to return, after a hard day’s work, to the peaceful bosom of his loving family.’

‘It’s only half a day, so far, Papà ,’ Chiara said in her deepest referee’s voice, tapping at the crystal of her watch.

‘And know that he will never be contradicted,’ Brunetti forged on, ‘and that his every word will be considered a gem of knowledge, his every utterance respected for its wisdom.’

Chiara moved her plate aside, laid her head on the table, and covered it with her hands. ‘I was kidnapped as a baby and forced to live with lunatics.’

‘Only one,’ Paola said, approaching the table with a bowl of pasta. She spooned large helpings into Raffi’s dish and Brunetti’s, a smaller one into her own. By this time, Chiara was sitting upright, her dish back in place in front of her, and Paola filled it in turn with another large portion.

She set the bowl on the table in front of them, went to the stove and got the cover. The others waited for her. ‘ Mangia, mangia ,’ she said, approaching the table with the cheese.

They all waited until she was seated, and no one started eating until the cheese had been passed around.

Ruote : Brunetti loved ruote . And with the melanzane and ricotta in tomato sauce, they seemed the perfect pasta. ‘Why ruote ?’ he asked.

Paola seemed surprised. ‘Why what?’

‘Why do you use ruote with this sauce?’ Brunetti clarified, spearing one of the wheel-like pastas and holding it up to examine it more closely.

She looked at her plate, as if surprised to find that particular shape of pasta there. ‘Because. .’ Paola began, then prodded at the many-spoked pasta with the tip of her own fork. ‘Because. .’

She set her fork down and took a sip of wine. She glanced across at Brunetti and said, ‘I’ve no idea, but it’s what I’ve always used. It’s just that ruote are right for this sort of sauce.’ Then, with real concern, ‘Don’t you like them?’

‘Quite the opposite,’ he said. ‘They seem entirely right to me, but I don’t know why that is, and I wondered if you did.’

‘I suppose the truth is that Luciana always used ruote with tomato sauces that had little pieces in them.’ She speared a few and held them up. ‘I can’t think of a better explanation.’

‘May I have some more?’ Raffi asked, though the others at the table had eaten less than half of their portions. For him, the shape of any pasta was secondary to its quantity.

‘Of course,’ Paola said. ‘There’s plenty.’

As Raffi served himself, Brunetti asked, knowing he would probably regret doing so, ‘What were you saying when I came in, Chiara? Something about legal limits?’

‘The micropolveri ,’ Chiara said, continuing to eat. ‘The Professoressa talked about it at school today, that there are all these tiny little particles of rubber and chemical and God knows what, and they’re all trapped in the air, and we breathe them in.’

Brunetti nodded and served himself a bit more pasta.

‘So I read the paper when I got home, and it said. .’ she set down her fork and reached to the floor to retrieve the newspaper. It was folded open at the article, and Chiara’s eyes skimmed to the passage she meant. ‘Here it is,’ she said and read aloud: ‘. . blah, blah, blah, “the micropolveri have risen to a point fifty times the legal limit”.’

She dropped the paper back to the floor and looked across at her father. ‘That’s what I don’t understand: if the limit is a legal limit, then what happens when it’s fifty times as much?’

‘Or, for that matter, twice as much,’ Paola added.

Brunetti put his fork down and said, ‘That’s a problem for the Protezione Civile, I’d say.’

‘Can they arrest anyone?’ Chiara demanded.

‘I don’t think so, no,’ Brunetti said.

‘Make them pay a fine?’

‘Not that either, I think.’

‘Then what’s the purpose of having a legal limit, if you can’t do anything to people who break the law?’ Chiara demanded in an angry voice.

Brunetti had loved this child from the instant he learned of her existence, since the moment Paola told him she was expecting their second child. All of that love stood between Brunetti and the temptation to tell her that they lived in a country where nothing much ever happened to anyone who broke the law.