Uniform Justice Read online

  "Is that what you think Raffi will do?" he asked.

  "If I have any say," she began, causing Brunetti to wonder when she had

  not, 'he won't do military service. It would be better for him to go

  to Australia and spend eighteen months hitchhiking around the country

  and working as a dishwasher. He'd certainly learn more by doing that,

  or by opting to do his service as a volunteer in a hospital,

  instead."

  "You'd actually let him go off to Australia by himself? For eighteen

  months? To wash dishes?"

  Paola looked at him and, at the expression of real astonishment she

  read on his face, she smiled. "What do you think I am, Guido, the

  mother of the Gracchi, that I must forever hold my children to my bosom

  as though they were

  my only jewels? Tt wouldn't be easy to see him go, no, not at all, but

  I think it would do him a world of good to go off and be independent."

  When Brunetti remained silent, she said, "At least it would teach him

  how to make his own bed."

  "He does that already a literal-minded Brunetti answered.

  "I mean in the larger sense," Paola explained. "It would give him some

  idea that life is not only this tiny city with its tiny prejudices, and

  it might give him some idea that work is what you do if you want

  something."

  "As opposed to asking your parents?"

  "Exactly. Or your grandparents."

  It was rare for Brunetti to hear Paola make a criticism, however

  veiled, of her parents, and so he was curious to follow this up. "Was

  it too easy for you? Growing up, I mean."

  "No more than it was too hard for you, my dear."

  Not at all sure what she meant by that, Brunetti was about to ask, when

  the door to the apartment flew open and Chiara and Raffi catapulted

  into the corridor. He and Paola exchanged a glance, and then a smile,

  and then it was time to eat.

  no

  As often happened, Brunetti was immeasurably cheered by having lunch at

  home in the company of his family. He was never certain if his

  response was different from that of an animal returned to its den:

  safe, warmed by the heat of the bodies of its young, slavering over the

  fresh kill it had dragged home. Whatever the cause, the experience

  gave him fresh heart and sent him back to work feeling restored and

  eager to resume the hunt.

  The imagery of violence dropped away from him when he entered Signorina

  Elettra's office and found her at her desk, head bowed over some papers

  on her desk, chin propped in one hand, utterly relaxed and comfortable.

  "I'm not interrupting you, am I?" he asked, seeing the seal of the

  Ministry of the Interior on the documents and below it the red stripe

  indicating that the material it contained was classified.

  "No, not at all, Commissario/ she said, casually slipping the papers

  inside a file and thus arousing Brunetti's interest.

  "Could you do something for me?" he asked, his eyes on

  hers; he was careful to avoid lowering them to the label on the front

  of the file.

  "Of course, sir she said, slipping the file into her top drawer and

  pulling a notepad over in front of her. "What is it?" she asked, pen

  in hand, smile bright.

  "In the files for the Academy, is there anything about a girl who had

  been raped?"

  Her pen clattered to the desk, and the smile disappeared from her lips.

  Her entire body pulled back from him in surprise, but she said

  nothing.

  "Are you all right, Signorina?" he asked, with concern.

  She looked down at the pen, picked it up, made quite a business of

  replacing the cap and removing it again, then looked up at him and

  smiled. "Of course, sir." She looked at the pad, pulled it closer to

  her, and poised her pen over it. "What was her name, sir? And when

  did it happen?"

  "I don't know," Brunetti began. "That is, I'm not even sure it

  happened. It must have been about eight years ago; I think it was when

  I was at a police seminar in London. It happened at the San Martino.

  The original report was that the girl had been raped, I think by more

  than one of them. But then no charges were pressed, and the story

  disappeared."

  "Then what is it you'd like me to look for, sir?"

  "I'm not sure," Brunetti answered. "Any sign of something that might

  have happened, who the girl was, why the story disappeared. Anything

  at all you can find out about it."

  She seemed to be a long time writing all of this down, but he waited

  until she was finished. Pen still in her hand, she asked, "If charges

  weren't pressed, then it's not likely we'll have anything here, is

  it?"

  "No, it isn't. But I'm hoping that there might be some report of the

  original complaint."

  "And if there isn't?"

  Brunetti was puzzled to find her so hesitant about

  following up an investigation. Then perhaps the newspapers. Once you

  have the date, that is he said.

  Till have a look at your personnel file, sir, and find the dates when

  you were in London/ she said, then looked up from her notebook, face

  serene.

  "Yes, yes he said, then, lamely, Till be in my office

  As he went upstairs, he reconsidered what Paola had said about the

  military, trying to figure out why he couldn't bring himself to condemn

  them as universally or as strongly as she did. Part of it, he knew,

  was because of his own experience under arms, however brief it had

  been, and the lingering fondness he felt for that period of unexamined

  comradeship. Perhaps it was nothing more elevated than the instinct of

  the pack, gathered round the kill, retelling stories of that day's hunt

  while great gobbets of fat dripped into the fire. But if memory was to

  be trusted, his loyalty had been to his immediate group of friends and

  not to some abstract ideal of corps or regiment.

  His reading in history had given him many examples of soldiers who died

  in proud defence of the regimental flag or while performing remarkable

  acts of heroism to save the perceived honour of the group, but these

  actions had always seemed wasteful and faintly stupid to Brunetti.

  Certainly, reading accounts of the actual events or even the words of

  the decorations bestowed, too often posthumously, upon these brave

  young men, Brunetti had felt his heart stir in response to the nobility

  of their behaviour, but the antiphon of pragmatic good sense had always

  rung out in the background, reminding him that, in the end, these were

  boys who threw their lives away in order to protect what was nothing

  more than a piece of cloth. Bold, certainly, and brave, but also

  foolish to the point of idiocy.

  He found his desk covered with reports of one sort or another, the

  detritus of several days' lack of attention. He wrapped himself in the

  cloak of duty and, for the next two

  hours, engaged himself in behaviour as futile as any he thought to

  criticize on the part of those valiant young men. As he read through

  accounts of arrests for burglary, pick pocketing, and the various types

  of fraud currently practised on the
streets of the city, he was struck

  by how often the names of the people arrested were foreign and by how

  often their age exempted them from punishment. These facts left him

  untroubled: it was the thought that each of these arrests guaranteed

  another vote for the Right that disturbed him. Years ago, he had read

  a short story, he thought by some American, which ended with the

  revelation of an endless chain of sinners marching towards heaven along

  a broad arc in the sky. He sometimes thought the same chain of sinners

  marched slowly through the skies of Italian politics, though hardly

  toward paradise.

  Stupefied by the boredom of the task, he heard his name called from the

  door and looked up to see Pucetti.

  "Yes, Pucetti?" he said, beckoning the young officer into his office.

  "Have a seat." Glad of the excuse to set the papers aside, he turned

  his attention to the young policeman. "What is it?" he asked, struck

  by how young he looked in his crisp uniform, far too young to have any

  right to carry the gun at his side, far too innocent to have any idea

  of how to use it.

  "It's about the Moro boy, sir," Pucetti said. "I came to see you

  yesterday, sir, but you weren't here."

  It was close to a reproach, something Brunetti was not used to hearing

  from Pucetti. Resentment flared in Brunetti that the young officer

  should dare to take this tone with him. He fought down the impulse to

  explain to Pucetti that he had decided there was no need for haste. If

  it was generally believed the police were treating Moro's death as

  suicide, people might be more willing to speak about the boy openly;

  besides, he had no need to justify his decisions to this boy. He

  waited longer than he usually would, then asked simply, What about

  him?"

  "You remember the time we were there, talking to the cadets?" Pucetti

  asked, and Brunetti was tempted to ask it the younger man thought he

  had arrived at an age where his memory needed to be prodded in order to

  function.

  "Yes," Brunetti limited himself to saying.

  "It's very strange, sir. When we went back to talk to them again, it

  was as if some of them didn't even know he had been in the same school

  with them. Most of the ones I talked to told me they didn't know him

  very well. I spoke to the boy who found him, Pellegrini, but he didn't

  know anything. He was drunk the night before, said he went to bed

  about midnight." Even before Brunetti could ask, Pucetti supplied the

  information: "Yes, he'd been at a party at a friend's house, in

  Dorsoduro. I asked him how he'd got in, and he said he had a key to

  the port one He said he paid the portiere twenty Euros for it, and the

  way he said it, it sounded like anyone who wants one can buy one." He

  waited to see if Brunetti had any questions about this, but then

  continued, "I asked his roommate, and he said it was true, that

  Pellegrini woke him up when he came in. Pellegrini said he got up

  about six to get some water and that's when he saw Moro."

  "He wasn't the one who called, though, was he?"

  "Called us, you mean, sir?"

  "Yes."

  "No. It was one of the janitors. He said he'd just got there for work

  and heard a commotion in the bathroom, and when he saw what had

  happened, he called."

  "More than an hour after Pellegrini found the body," Brunetti said

  aloud.

  When Pucetti made no response, Brunetti said, "What else? Go on. What

  did they say about Moro?"

  "It's in here, sir," he said, placing a file on Brunetti's desk. He

  paused, weighing what to say next. "I know this sounds strange, sir,

  but it seemed like most of them really didn't care about it. Not the

  way we would, or a person would, if

  "5

  something like this happened to someone you knew, or you worked with."

  He gave this some more thought and added, "It was creepy, sort of, the

  way they talked as if they didn't know him. But they all live there

  together, and take classes together. How could they not know him?"

  Hearing his voice rise, Pucetti forced himself to calm down. "Anyway,

  one of them told me that he'd had a class with Moro a couple of days

  before, and they'd studied together that night and the following day.

  Getting ready for an exam."

  "When was the exam?"

  "The day after."

  "The day after what? That he died?"

  "Yes, sir."

  Brunetti's conclusion was instant, but he asked Pucetti, "How does that

  seem to you?"

  It was obvious that the young officer had prepared himself for the

  question, for his answer was immediate. "People kill themselves, well,

  at least it seems to me, that they'd do it after an exam, at least

  they'd wait to see how badly they'd done in it, and then maybe they'd

  do it. At least that's what I'd do he said, then added, 'not that I'd

  kill myself over a stupid exam."

  "What would you kill yourself over?" Brunetti asked.

  Owl-like, Pucetti stared across at his commander. "Oh, I don't think

  over anything, sir. Would you?"

  Brunetti shook the idea away. "No, I don't think so. But I suppose

  you never know." He had friends who were killing themselves with

  stress or cigarettes or alcohol, and some of his friends had children

  who were killing themselves with drugs, but he could think of no one he

  knew, at least not in this instant, whom he thought capable of suicide.

  But perhaps that's why suicide fell like lightning: it was always the

  most unexpected people who did it.

  His attention swung back to Pucetti only at the end of what he was

  saying."... about going skiing this winter."

  The Moro boy?" Brunetti asked to disguise the fact that his attention

  had drifted away.

  "Yes, sir. And this kid said Moro was looking forward to it, really

  loved to ski." He paused to see if his superior would comment, but

  when he did not, Pucetti went on, "He seemed upset, sir."

  "Who? This boy?"

  "Yes."

  "Why?"

  Pucetti gave him a startled glance, puzzled that Brunetti hadn't

  figured this out yet. "Because if he didn't kill himself, then someone

  else did."

  At the look of pleased satisfaction on Brunetti's face as he heard him

  explain this, Pucetti began to suspect, not without a twinge of

  embarrassment, that perhaps his superior had figured it out.

  In the days that followed, Brunetti's thoughts were distracted from the

  Moro family and its griefs and directed towards the Casino. The

  police, this time, were not asked to investigate the frequent and

  refined forms of peculation practised by guests and croupiers, but the

  accusations brought against the casino's administration for having

  enriched itself at public expense. Brunetti was one of the few

  Venetians who bothered to remember that the Casino belonged to the

  city; hence he realized that any theft or embezzlement of Casino

  earnings came directly from the funds earmarked for the aid of orphans

  and widows. That people who spent their lives among gamblers and

  card-sharks should steal was no surp
rise to Brunetti: it was only their

  boldness that occasionally astonished him, for it seemed that all of

  the ancillary services offered by the Casino banquets, private parties,

  even the bars had quietly been turned over to a company that turned out

  to be run by the brother of the director.

  Since detectives had to be brought in from other cities so as

  not to be detected as they presented themselves at the Casino in the

  role of gamblers, and employees had to be found who would be willing to

  testify against their employers and colleagues, the investigation had

  so far been a slow and complicated one. Brunetti found himself

  involved in it at the expense of other cases, including that of Ernesto

  Moro, where the evidence continued to pile up in support of a judgment

  of suicide: the crime lab's report on the shower stall and the boy's

  room contained nothing that could be used to justify suspicions about

  his death, and none of the statements of students or teachers suggested

  anything at variance with the view that it was suicide. Brunetti,

  though unpersuaded by the absence of credible evidence in support of

  his own view, recalled occasions in the past when his impatience had

  proven harmful to investigations. Patience, then, patience and calm

  would be his watchwords.

  The magistrate appointed to the investigation of the Casino was on the

  point of issuing warrants for the arrest of the entire directorate when

  the mayor's office put out a statement announcing the transfer of the