Later, when they went into the living room to drink their coffee, Brunetti, profoundly happy that no one had asked him about Signora Altavilla, asked, ‘What do they do to those chickens?’
‘Not the one we ate, I hope you understand,’ Paola said.
‘So it wasn’t a lie?’
‘What wasn’t?’
‘That it was a bio chicken?’
‘No, of course not,’ Paola said, not indignant but perhaps ready to be, if provoked.
‘Why?’
‘Because the others are filled with hormones and chemicals and antibiotics and God knows what, and if I get cancer, I want it to be because I drank too much red wine or ate too much butter, not because I ate too much factory meat.’
‘You really believe that?’ he asked, curious, not sceptical.
‘The more I read,’ she began, turning on the sofa to face him, ‘the more I believe much of what we eat is contaminated in some way.’ Before he could comment, she said it for him. ‘Yes, Chiara’s a bit gone on the subject, but she’s right in principle.’
Brunetti closed his eyes and slid down on the sofa. ‘It’s exhausting, always worrying about these things,’ he said.
‘Yes, it is,’ Paola agreed. ‘But at least we live in the North, so we’re less at risk.’
‘“At risk”?’ he asked.
‘You read the articles, you know what they’ve been doing down there,’ she said. He glanced aside and saw her pick up her glasses and, apparently unwilling to talk about such things so soon after lunch, return her attention to the book she had brought from her study.
He sat up again and returned his attention to his own book, Tacitus’ Annals of Imperial Rome, a book he had not read for at least twenty years. And which he was now reading with the attention of a man a generation older than the one who had read it last. The savagery of much of what Tacitus described seemed fitted to the times in which Brunetti found himself living. Government sunk in corruption, power concentrated in the hands of one man, public taste and morals debased almost beyond recognition: how familiar it all sounded.
His eyes fell upon this sentence: ‘Fraudulence, attacked by repeated legislation, was ingeniously revived after each successive counter-measure.’ He replaced his bookmark and closed the book. He decided that he would not return to work that afternoon but would instead engage in an act of fraudulence and go for a long walk, perhaps in the company of his lady wife.
13
The next morning, Paola brought him coffee in bed and gave him that day’s edition of the Gazzettino, she equally persuaded of its lesser toxicity when confined to paper. Brunetti sipped at his coffee then set it on his night table, the better to free his hands for the reading of the paper. Sometime in the last years, even the Gazzettino had given in to the necessities of cost and was printed in the reduced size most newspapers now favoured. Even though the smaller-sized edition was easier to read in bed, Brunetti – just as he missed the typeface he had read for decades – missed the older, full-sized paper that demanded it be read with outstretched arms. He recalled the many times his reading of that invasive larger edition had provoked angry nudges and comments from the people sitting beside him on the vaporetto. But still he missed it, perhaps because its very size made the reading of it a quasi-public act: there was no way to limit its encroaching on the space of other people. This new version was too private an affair.
The story about Signora Altavilla’s death had all but disappeared from the papers. Elderly woman found dead of a probable heart attack: what sort of news was that? The best the editors could do was work it for some residual pathos: they mentioned her widowhood as well as the son and three grandchildren she left. He turned to the notices of mourning and found two, one from her son and family and one from the Alba Libera organization.
He read a few more articles and then, interest in the paper exhausted, got up, shaved and showered, and went into the kitchen, where he found Paola with La Repubblica spread on the table in front of her, chin propped in her palms.
Hearing him come in, she said, ‘I was never able to read Pravda, but I wonder if all other newspapers are simply variations on it.’
‘Probably,’ he said, going over to the sink to refill the coffee pot.
‘When I was studying in England,’ she went on, ‘I got accustomed to newspapers that had a part for news and a separate part for editorials.’ She saw she had his attention, so she picked up the paper from the bottom and flapped the pages, as if she were trying to shake crumbs off a tablecloth. ‘There’s no difference here. It’s all editorializing.’
‘The other one’s no better,’ he said. ‘And remember, La Repubblica has a good reputation.’
She shrugged this away and said, her disappointment real, ‘I’d expect better from it.’
‘That’s foolish,’ Brunetti said and put the coffee pot on the stove.
‘I know it is, but that doesn’t stop me from hoping.’ Then, folding the paper closed, she said, ‘The pan’s in the sink,’ leaving it to him to heat the milk for his coffee.
‘You find out anything about that woman’s death?’ she asked as the coffee began to plunk against the top of the pot.
‘Rizzardi says the physical cause was a heart attack,’ he said, knowing Paola would jump on his prevarication.
‘And La Repubblica has a good reputation,’ she said.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ he asked, though he suspected he knew.
‘In logic, the error is called the Appeal to Authority,’ she confused him by saying. ‘You tell me Rizzardi says it was a heart attack with the same voice you say it’s a good newspaper. You’re citing authorities, but you don’t believe them.’ She waited for him to comment, but when he did not, she added, ‘Something’s bothering you; my guess is it’s this woman’s death, and that means you probably don’t believe Rizzardi, or, more likely, he’s being more Jesuitical than usual, and you know it.’ She smiled at him and held out her cup for more coffee. ‘That’s what it’s supposed to mean.’
‘I see,’ he said, pouring more coffee for her, and then for himself. He added milk and spooned in some sugar, then came to sit opposite her. When he saw that he had her attention, he said, ‘There were what look like bruises on her throat and shoulders.’ He reached his hands towards her to show her what he meant.
‘Squeezing someone’s shoulder doesn’t cause them to have a heart attack,’ she said calmly, as if this were an entirely normal conversation to have over coffee and the morning paper.
‘It does if that person has a history of heart fibrillation and is taking propafenone.’
‘Which is what?’ Paola asked.
‘A medicine against it.’ He allowed her a few moments and then added, ‘So, if a person were taking that for heart trouble, being grabbed and roughed around might cause them to go into fibrillation, and that’s what Rizzardi thinks might have caused her death. But the vertebrae were injured.’ He realized he was slanting the argument, and so he said, ‘She fell and hit her head, as well. Against a radiator. That could have done it.’
‘Could have?’
He gave her a level glance and took a few sips of coffee. ‘The chicken or the egg,’ he could not stop himself from saying, then added reluctantly, ‘The fibrillation. The other is only a possibility, a speculation.’
‘Yours or his?’ she asked.
‘Both.’
Paola sipped at her cup in turn, then swirled the coffee around a few times and drank the last of it. ‘What does Patta say?’