After a long hesitation, the woman answered, ‘No.’
The man raised his left hand and, with a delicate motion of a finger, shifted one of the cards a bit to the left. He raised his head and, for the first time, Brunetti saw his face. It was round, almost perfectly so, as though eyes and a nose and a mouth had been painted on a soccer ball, and then hair pasted across the forehead to make it look like a human head. Not only his head but his eyes were round, topped by thick eyebrows that were themselves perfect half-circles: the total effect was one of unvarnished innocence, as though this man had somehow just been born, perhaps just inside the entrance to the television studio, and the only thing he knew in life was how to turn over cards and stare out at his viewers, trying to help them understand what he read there.
Speaking now directly to that woman who was somewhere watching and heeding him, he asked, ‘Has he ever spoken specifically about when he intends to marry you?’
This time she took even longer to answer, and when she did, she began with an ‘Ummmm’ that was prolonged through the space of two normal breaths. Then she said, ‘He has to take care of some things first.’ Brunetti had heard evasion from people he had arrested, had listened to deliberate attempts to derail a line of questioning, had heard such things from masters. The woman was an amateur, her tactic so obvious as to cause laughter, were it not that she sounded so stricken when she spoke, as though she knew no one would believe her but could still not stop herself from trying to hide the obvious.
‘What things?’ the man asked, his gaze straight into the camera and, one felt, straight into the woman’s lying mouth and the man’s lying heart.
‘His separation,’ she said, her voice growing slower and softer with each syllable she pronounced.
‘ “His separation,” ’ the round-faced man repeated, each syllable a slow, heavy footstep towards truth.
‘It’s not final,’ she said. She tried to declare, but she could only implore.
The dialogue had taken place at such a slow pace that the lightning speed with which the man asked, ‘Has he even asked for a separation?’ startled Brunetti as it brought a gasp from the woman.
The sounds of her breathing filled the studio, filled the ears of the round-faced man, filled the airwaves. ‘What do the cards say?’ she asked, her voice close to a whimper.
Until now the man had sat so quietly that when he raised his hand to show the camera, and the woman, the cards that remained in his hand, the movement took Brunetti by surprise. ‘Do you really want to know what the cards have to tell you, Signora?’ he asked, voice far less sympathetic now.
When she finally answered, she said, ‘Yes. Yes. I have to know.’ After that came the continued sound of her pained breathing.
‘All right, Signora, but remember: I asked you if you wanted to know.’ His voice held the solemnity of a doctor asking a patient if they wanted to know the results of the laboratory tests.
‘Yes, yes,’ she repeated, all but pleading.
‘Va bene,’ he said and brought his hands together. Slowly, his right hand took the top card and slid it from the pack. The camera shifted around him, rose, and now showed, not his round face, but the top of the cards from above and behind him. He moved the card to the right, held it motionless for a few seconds, and then slowly turned it over: The Joker.
‘The Deceiver, Signora,’ the man said. His voice fell upon her: dead level, no emotion, no judgement. No mercy.
Vianello’s feet fell to the floor, making Brunetti jump. ‘God, he’s a clever devil, isn’t he?’ the Inspector said, reaching forward to clear the screen.
It was the suddenness of Vianello’s action that made Brunetti realize how enchanted — quite literally — he had been by the interchange between the two people. The weak, self-deceiving human heart had been exposed with clinical dispassion by a man who, in the process, displayed himself as an expert at seeing into its mysteries. An unreflecting viewer would surely conclude that this was a man in whose hands lay the answers to those questions they barely dared to ask themselves.
Yet what had he done? Listened to the audible hesitation and uncertainty in the woman’s voice, listened to the evasions and justifications: he could have read bottle caps as well as the tarot card to have discovered the Deceiver.
Brunetti said it out loud: ‘The Deceiver.’
Vianello answered with a loud guffaw. ‘My mother could have told her the same thing, standing behind her in the queue at the supermarket and listening to her tell someone her story.’
Zucchero started to speak, then hesitated. Brunetti waved his hand, and the young man continued. ‘But the cards help, Ispettore. They make it seem like the answer is coming from some other, mystical, place, not from common sense.’
Brunetti had had a few moments to think about parallels, and so, abandoning the comparison with bottle caps, he said, ‘It’s what the augurs did: they’d cut open an animal and read what was in there, but they were always careful to speak in ambiguous language. So after whatever was going to happen had happened, they could make some sort of retrospective interpretation that made it sound as if they had been right.’
‘ “The Deceiver,” ’ Vianello repeated, no less contemptuously. ‘And that poor woman is paying a Euro a minute to listen to him.’ He looked at his watch and said, ‘We were looking at it for eight minutes, more or less.’ He hit a few keys and the screen came back to life. ‘Let’s see if he’s still got her on the hook.’
But the round-faced man had moved on to different game, for this time the voice they heard when he reappeared in front of them was a man’s. ‘. . think it’s a wise thing, but he’s my brother-in-law, and my wife wants me to do it’.
‘Is there a way you can turn off the sound?’ Brunetti asked.
Vianello’s head whipped round. ‘What?’
‘Turn off the sound,’ Brunetti repeated.
Vianello leaned forward and turned the sound down, and then off completely, leaving them looking at the round face as it, in turn, divided its attention between the cards and the camera. A few minutes passed in silence until Brunetti said, ‘I always do this on planes, if there’s a film. I don’t take the headset; if you don’t, you see how pre-planned their gestures and reactions are: the actors in movies never behave the way people at the next table in a restaurant do. Or people walking down the street. It’s never natural.’
The three men continued to watch the screen. Brunetti’s observation might just as easily have been prophecy, for the gestures of the round-faced man now seemed prepared and studied. The attention he paid to the cards as he turned them over never wavered; the concentration with which he stared at the camera when he was, presumably, listening to his caller never wavered: his stare was so intense that he might as well have been observing a public execution.
As they watched, he moved his hands together and slid off another card, and the cameras moved up and behind him as they had the last time. With slowness meant to tantalize, he turned the card over and laid it beside two others. Its face was meaningless to the three men watching his performance, but Brunetti had seen enough by now to risk saying, ‘When the cameras show his face, he’ll look like Oedipus recognizing his mother.’
And so it proved to be. The camera cut to the man’s face, where astonishment was painted with the equivalent of acrylic colours. Vianello’s hand moved towards the mouse, but Brunetti put a restraining hand on his shoulder and said, ‘No, give him another minute.’
They did exactly this, during which time the round face went from shock to distress. He said a few things, shook his head minimally, then closed his eyes for a long time. ‘He’s washing his hands of the man’s decision,’ Zucchero observed.