Donna Leon - The Golden Egg

‘Because there has to be official proof that the dead person is who he is claimed to be or thought to be. She can say anyone is her son, and that dead man could be anyone. Until she can provide a document that proves he is who she says he is, the state will not accept her word.’ To prevent Pucetti from saying something he might later regret, Brunetti added, ‘Think about it for a minute. People can’t be buried before there’s certainty about who they are.’ He could think of examples to argue his point – the woman who throws herself off a bridge and whose body is found two hundred kilometres away; the unidentified body found in a field – but he thought it more important to state the principle: the unknown cannot be put underground, not before every effort has been made to find out who they are. It was atavistic, he realized, perhaps linked to magic and taboo. The dead deserve at least to be recognized, and the living deserve at least to know the people they have loved are dead, and not missing.

To Pucetti he said, ‘Take her to see Rizzardi.’

Vianello glanced at Pucetti, as if assessing whether to question Brunetti’s authority, or his decisions, in front of a uniformed officer. He must have decided that the young man was sufficiently discreet, for he said, ‘You’re treating it as though you don’t believe it was a natural death, Guido.’

That Vianello should say this in front of the younger man was an indication of his confidence in him, or so Brunetti chose to believe. ‘I think it is,’ he insisted. ‘He probably thought the pills were something to eat, something good because his mother kept them hidden from him.’

What troubled him was not the circumstances of the man’s death but the fact that he had managed to live for forty years without leaving any bureaucratic traces that he had lived at all. That mystery, and its sadness, nagged at Brunetti, but he did not want to give voice to this.

12

After dinner, Brunetti told Paola about his conversation with Signora Cavanella and her refusal to divulge any information about her son, and about the lies she had told both him and Pucetti to explain away the missing documents.

‘Why would she want to lie about her son?’ Paola asked. ‘It’s not as if she kept him locked up in the attic for forty years, is it?’ She sank deeper into the cushions of the ratty old sofa she kept in her study: she spent so much time in that spoon-like posture that he sometimes marvelled she could still stand upright and walk.

‘It suggests he isn’t her son at all,’ she said, but it was speculation, not inquiry.

‘I saw him only a few times, like you, but he resembled her,’ Brunetti told her.

‘I can’t place her,’ Paola said, closing her eyes and resting her head against the back of the sofa. ‘But I might not have noticed her. Sixtyish, badly dyed red hair, good legs, good skin, and still attractive. There are scores of women in this city who fit that description.’ Then, after a pause, ‘I wonder where she works.’

‘Why do you think she works?’

‘Because manna from heaven falls only in the Bible, Guido.’ He smiled, which encouraged her to continue. ‘It’s our new duty to work until we drop, remember? By the time you and I get there, they’ll have extended the age to eighty.’ She paused, then added, ‘No, I speak ill of our leaders. They’ll have pity on women and let us stop at seventy-eight.’

‘I still don’t understand why she’d behave so strangely,’ Brunetti said, accustomed to her sideswipes at the government, any government, and equally accustomed to ignoring them.

‘People are strange, as you never cease to tell me.’

He thought of his conversation that day with Vianello and his insistence that people were too much under the eye and observation, not only of the authorities, but of any business that could find a way to pry into their lives. At the thought of Vianello, Brunetti felt another twinge at the presumptuousness of his having suggested to his friend that Nadia be asked to investigate. ‘I don’t understand it,’ he said, patting Paola’s leg and getting to his feet. ‘I am taking to my bed with Lucretius.’

She gave him a long look, grinned, and said, ‘As your wife, I blanch at the thought that you are going to bed with a man who wants to explain to you The Nature of Things.’

He smiled back, reached out to her with one hand, and said, ‘Would you like to try, instead?’

She got to her feet.

The next morning, the rain that Foa had smelled in the air arrived, and Brunetti put on a raincoat and carried an umbrella when he left the house. He decided to take the Number One from San Silvestro to the Zattere, and stopped to pick up that day’s Gazzettino for the ride. On board, he noticed how few people were reading a newspaper; how few, in fact, were reading anything. Of course, that they were slowly passing the most beautiful sight in the world might have distracted them from the Gazzettino ’s cursory presentation and mistaken analysis of world events, but he still remained surprised at how few people read. He read, Paola read, the kids read, but he realized how seldom he talked about books or found a person who appeared to take a serious interest in them.

His mind opened to the castigation that was never far from it. Here he was again, assuming that what he thought was what other people must surely think; that his judgements must have universal validity. Lucretius knew that what is food to one man is bitter poison to another, a lesson life had been trying to teach Brunetti for

a generation.

As he tugged at this idea, studying the people who sat on the other side of the boat, his newspaper lay forgotten

on his lap, making Brunetti yet another of those who sat on the vaporetto, gazing about without apparent purpose.

He got off at San Zaccaria and made his wet way to the Questura. He went up to his office, shook the umbrella until it would have whimpered if it could, hung his coat on the outside of the cupboard, and stamped around until his feet no longer left wet prints on the floor.

He turned on his computer and checked his email, quite unconscious of how automatic this process had become in the last few years. It was no longer necessary for him to stop in Signorina Elettra’s office or in the squad room

to find out what was happening: most information waited for him in the computer. It was, however, information without nuance, without the unveiled scepticism with which Vianello greeted certain reports and without Signorina Elettra’s insights to set things straight.

He found an invitation to a conference in Palermo that would ‘enhance coordination between the community and the organizations dedicated to maintaining order in civil society’. He pushed his chair back and stared out the window, allowing the Cloud of Ironic Despair to descend upon his head. Did this mean he was invited to a meeting between the citizens of Palermo and the police, or did the people in charge down there have a sense of humour and it was really meant to be a meeting between local citizens and the Mafia, the only organization well enough led, sufficiently clear in its purposes, and free of infiltrators to go about the business of maintaining order in society so as best to suck from it what little life remained? His first impulse was that of the show-off, to forward the invitation to Vianello and ask if the second possibility were correct, but the habit of leaving no traces was second nature to him and he resisted the temptation.

Among the other emails was one from Pucetti: he was just leaving to accompany Signora Cavanella but wanted to tell Brunetti that his relative would gladly speak to him about that subject. He gave a telefonino number, nothing more. Using his own telefonino , Brunetti dialled the number.