‘The Polizia di Stato.’
‘And who employs them?’
‘The Ministry of the Interior.’
‘And who employs them?’
‘Are we going to go up the food chain until we get to the head of government?’ Brunetti inquired.
‘We are already there, I suspect,’ she answered.
Neither of them said anything for some time: silence percolated towards recrimination. Paola took a step closer to it by saying, ‘You work for this government, and you dare to criticize my father for investing in China?’
Brunetti took a short breath and started to speak, but at that moment Chiara and Raffi burst into the apartment. There was a great deal of noise and enough stomping and banging to force Paola to her feet and out into the corridor, where the children were stamping snow from their shoes and shaking more of it from their coats.
‘The horror movie festival?’ Paola asked.
‘Terr — i — ble,’ Chiara said. ‘They begin with Godzilla, which is about a hundred years old and has the most awful special effects you ever saw in your life.’
Raffi broke in to say, ‘Did we miss dinner?’
‘No,’ Paola said with patent relief, ‘I was just going to start making something. Twenty minutes?’ she asked.
The children nodded, stamped about a bit more, remembered to put their shoes outside the door, and went to their rooms. Paola went down to the kitchen.
It was purely by chance that Paola prepared insalata di polipi for antipasto that evening, but Brunetti could not help seeing the elusive, self-defensive habits of those timid sea creatures reflected in the caution with which his children treated their silent mother once they sat at the table and read the expression on her face. Like the tentative manner in which an octopus stretched out a tendril to touch and examine what it saw, the better to assess its possible menace, the children, significantly more verbal than the octopi, used language to sense peril. Thus Brunetti was compelled to listen to the patently false enthusiasm of their joint request to be allowed to do the dishes that evening and to the general docility of their response to Paola’s pro forma questions about school.
After her outburst before dinner, Paola remained calm throughout the meal, limiting her conversation to asking who would like more of the lasagne that had indeed been waiting for Brunetti in the oven. Brunetti noticed that the children’s caution extended to their eating: both of them had to be asked twice before they would accept another helping, and Chiara refrained from setting her uneaten peas to the side of her plate, a habit that always annoyed her mother. Luckily, the baked apples with crème managed to elevate everyone’s mood, and by the time Brunetti drank his coffee, some semblance of tranquillity had been restored.
Having no interest in grappa, Brunetti went into their bedroom to get his copy of Cicero’s legal cases, which his original conversation with Franca Marinello had encouraged him to begin rereading. He hunted for, and found, his copy of Ovid’s minor works, unopened for decades: if he finished with Cicero, he could begin her other recommendation.
When he came back to the living room, Paola was just sitting down in the easy chair she preferred. He stopped at her side long enough to tilt her still-closed book so that he could see the title on the cover. ‘Still faithful to the Master, I see?’ he asked.
‘I shall never abandon Mr James,’ she vowed and opened the book. Brunetti’s breathing grew easier. Luckily, they were a family where no one held grudges, and so it seemed that there was to be no resumption of hostilities.
He sat, then lay, on the sofa. After some time enmeshed in the defence of Sextus Roscius, he allowed the book to fall to his stomach and, turning his head at an awkward angle to see Paola, said, ‘You know, it’s strange that the Romans were so reluctant to put people in prison.’
‘Even if they were guilty?’
‘Especially if they were guilty.’
She looked up from her own book, interested, ‘What did they do instead?’
‘They let them run away if they were convicted. There was a grace period before they were sentenced, and most of them took the opportunity to go into exile.’
‘Like Craxi?’
‘Exactly.’
‘Do other countries have as many convicted men in their governments as we do?’ Paola inquired.
‘The Indians are said to have a fair number,’ Brunetti answered and returned to his reading.
After some time, when Paola heard him chuckle, then laugh out loud, she looked up and said, ‘I admit that the Master has made me smile upon occasion, but he has never made me laugh outright.’
‘Then listen to this,’ Brunetti said, turning his eyes back to the passage he had just been reading. ‘“The philosophers declare, very aptly, that even a mere facial expression can be a breach of filial duty.”’
‘Should we copy that out and put it on the refrigerator?’ she asked.
‘One moment,’ Brunetti said, flipping back towards the front of the book. ‘I’ve got a better one here, somewhere,’ he said, turning pages quickly.
‘For the refrigerator?’ she asked.
‘No,’ Brunetti said, pausing in his search for the passage. ‘I think we should put this one above all public buildings in the country; carved into stone, perhaps.’
Paola made a turning gesture with her hand, encouraging him to hurry up.
A few moments passed as he riffled back and forth, and then he found it. He lay back and held the book out at arm’s length. He turned his head to her and said, ‘Cicero says this is the duty of the good consul, but I think we can extend that to all politicians.’ She nodded and Brunetti turned back to the book. In a declamatory voice he read out, ‘“He must protect the lives and interests of the people, appeal to his fellow citizens’ patriotic interests, and, in general, set the welfare of the community above his own.”’
Paola remained silent, considering what he had just read to her. Then she closed her book and tossed it on the table in front of her. ‘And I thought my book was a work of fiction.’
19
They woke to snow. A certain slant of light told Brunetti what had happened even before his eyes were fully opened or he was really awake. He looked towards the windows and saw a thin ridge of snow balanced on the railing of the terrace and, beyond it, white-roofed houses and a sky so blue it hurt his eyes. Not even the merest whisper of a cloud could be seen, as if all of them had been ironed in the night and thrown out flat over the city. He lay and looked and tried to remember the last time it had snowed like this, snowed and stayed and not been washed away immediately by the rain.
He had to know how deep it was. In his enthusiasm, he turned to tell Paola, but the sight of that thin ridge of white lying motionless beside him gave him pause, and he contented himself with getting out of bed and going over to the window. The bell tower of San Polo was covered, and, beyond it, that of the Frari. He went down the hall to Paola’s study, and from there he could see the bell tower of San Marco, its golden angel glistening in the reflected light. From some distant place, he heard the tolling of a bell, but the reverberation was transformed by the snow covering everything, and he had no idea which church it was or from what direction it was coming.
He went back into the bedroom and over to the window again. Already there were tiny trails of a triple-toed bird’s prints in the snow on the terrace. One of them went right to the edge and disappeared, as if the bird had been unable to resist the temptation to hurl himself into the midst of all of that whiteness. Without thinking, he opened the tall door and bent down to touch it, to feel whether it was the solid wet kind that was good for making snowballs or the dryer kind that fluffed up if you kicked your feet ahead of you when you walked.