He pulled the chair away from the table and sat. Before he could say anything, the barman approached their table and they asked for coffee; then Brunetti changed his mind and asked for a glass of white wine and a panini.
When the man moved away, they studied one another, each waiting for the other to speak. Brunetti saw a woman in her early fifties, with light eyes in surprising contrast to her dark hair and olive skin. She had made no attempt to colour the grey in her hair: that and the crow’s feet around her eyes spoke of a lack of concern with maintaining the appearance of youth.
‘I’m Maddalena Orsoni, Commissario. I set up Alba Libera, and I’ve run it since it began.’
‘How long ago was that?’ he asked, displaying no surprise at her refusal to engage in the usual social preliminaries to conversation.
‘Four years.’
‘May I ask why you started it?’
‘Because my brother-in-law killed my sister,’ she said. Though she must have given this same answer many times, Brunetti suspected she was curious about the effect of such brutal honesty. He acknowledged her statement, however, with only a nod, and she went on. ‘He was a violent man, but she loved him. He said he loved her. There was always a reason for his violence, of course: he’d had a hard day; something was wrong with dinner; he saw her looking at another man.’
Hearing her recite this made him wonder how many times she had told this story, but it also reminded him of how often he had heard the same explanations given from men in justification of violence, rape, murder.
The barman came and served them. Brunetti couldn’t bring himself to touch his toast, not while her words still echoed between them.
‘Go ahead and eat,’ she said, pouring some sugar into her cup. She stirred it slowly, watching it dissolve.
Brunetti’s stomach, perhaps at the proximity to what was going to have to substitute for the lunch he had lost, growled. She smiled, finished her coffee and set the cup down. ‘Please. Eat.’
He tried to do as he was told: the toasting had done nothing to improve the taste of processed white bread, nor had the heat managed to melt the processed cheese or bestow taste upon the cooked ham. Cardboard would have been worse, he supposed. He put the panini back on his plate and took a sip of wine. That, at least, was tolerable.
‘She didn’t want to call the police,’ Signora Orsoni continued: Brunetti realized she had not finished telling the story of her sister. ‘And then she was afraid to call them. He broke her nose, and then her arm, and then she did call them.’ She looked at him, a level glance, appraising. ‘They did nothing.’ Brunetti asked for no explanation. ‘There was no place she could go.’ She caught his expression and said, ‘Or would go. I was living in Rome, and she never told me anything was wrong.’
‘Your family?’
‘There were only two old great-aunts left, and they knew nothing.’
‘Friends?’
‘She was six years younger, and we were never at the same school together. So we didn’t have any friends in common.’ She shrugged this away. ‘That’s the way it was. It’s not something women talk about, is it?’
‘No, it’s not,’ Brunetti said and drank more wine.
‘She was a lawyer,’ Signora Orsoni said, giving a lopsided smile, as if asking him to believe, please, that she wasn’t making this up, and who could believe that her sister could have been so stupid. ‘After she finally called the police – after her arm – they took him away, but the prison was full, so he was given house arrest.’ She paused to see what this representative of the legal system would have to say to that, but Brunetti remained silent.
‘So she moved out, and then she got a separation, and when that didn’t keep him away, she got an injunction against him. He had to stay at least a hundred and fifty metres from her.’ Orsoni caught the barman’s attention and asked for a glass of mineral water.
‘She wanted to move away – they were both still living in Mestre. She had left him the apartment when she moved out, but her job was there, and…’ Brunetti wondered how she would manage to say what she had to say, something he had heard many people say, after. ‘And I suppose she didn’t have any idea about him.’ The barman brought the water. She thanked him for it and drank half, then set the glass down.
‘One night he went to her new apartment with a gun, and he shot her when she opened the door. Then he shot her three more times, and then he shot himself in the head.’ Brunetti remembered the case: four, five years ago.
‘You came back?’
‘Do you mean then, when she was killed?’
‘Yes.’
‘Yes, I came back. And I decided to stay and do something new. If I could.’
‘Alba Libera?’ he asked.
Perhaps hearing scepticism in the way he pronounced the name, she said quickly, ‘Well, it is dawning liberty for most of these women.’ Brunetti nodded, and she went on. ‘It took me two years to set it up. I was already managing an NGO in Rome, so I was familiar with the system and knew how to get the permissions and money from the state.’
He liked the fact that she called it ‘money’ and did not bother with all the euphemisms people used. And now that she was talking about procedure and routine, the angry undertone had disappeared from her voice.
She went on. ‘She should have gone to another city: she could have found work. The law couldn’t protect her, but she didn’t want to believe that. There was no safe house, no place where she could go and live and be with people who would try to protect her.’
Brunetti knew well how little chance a person in danger had of getting any sort of protection from the state. The current government was doing everything in its power to eviscerate the existing witness protection programme: there were too many people saying embarrassing things in court about the Mafia. These witnesses provided information, at least, in return for safety: imagine the chance of protection being offered to a woman who had nothing to offer the state in return.
Perhaps she too heard the tinge of outrage creeping into her voice. ‘I think that’s enough explanation. At least you know why I started it. We have a number of houses, most of them out on terra ferma: here in the city, we have some people who will give a room to the women we send them and not ask questions.’
‘Are they safe here?’
‘Safer than where they come from. Much.’
‘Always? They don’t get found?’
‘It happens,’ she said, pushing her glass to one side without picking it up. ‘Last year, near Treviso, there was a case.’
Brunetti searched his memory but could come up with nothing. ‘What happened?’
‘Her boyfriend found out where she was – we never learned how he did or who told him – and came to the home where she was living and asked for her.’
‘What happened?’
Her face softened, as if to announce that there would be some lessening of misery in this story. ‘The old woman she was staying with – she’s almost ninety – said she didn’t really understand what he was talking about, she lived alone, but told him he looked like a nice boy, so she invited him in to have a coffee. She told me she left him alone in the living room while she went to the kitchen.’
She saw Brunetti’s fear for the old woman, and for the younger one, so she explained, ‘She’s a wily old thing, told me her parents had a Jewish friend live with them all during the war. That’s where she learned the rules she imposes.’ In response to Brunetti’s unspoken question, she said, ‘No items of any sort from their old lives, not even underwear. Everything they wear is kept in her closet and drawers, mixed in with her things. And every time they leave the apartment, no matter for what, they have to leave their room looking as though no one uses it.’
‘Just in case?’ Brunetti asked.