"And both retired?"
"Yes, pretty much at the same time."
"Where's Filippi, do you know?" Brunetti asked.
"I think he lives in Verona. You want me to find out about him?"
"Yes."
"How much?"
"Whatever you can."
"And I suppose you'll pay me the same as you always do?" Avisani asked
with a laugh.
"You don't want to eat my wife's cooking?" Brunetti asked with fake
indignation, then, before Avisani could answer,
Brunetti said, "I don't want you to go to any trouble with this,
Beppe."
This time it was the journalist who laughed. "Guido, if I worried
about going to trouble, or, for that matter, getting into trouble, I
doubt I could do this job."
Thanks, Beppe," Brunetti said, and the warmth of the other man's
parting laugh told him that their friendship remained as strong as
ever.
He went downstairs, and though he tried to resist the siren lure of
Signorina Elettra and her computer, he failed. There was no light on
in her office, and the darkened screen of the computer suggested she
had not yet found what he had asked her to get. There was nothing else
for him to do, short of rifling through her desk, so he went home to
his family and his dinner.
The next morning he was at the Questura before eight, and when his
detour past Signorina Elettra's office showed that she was not yet in,
he continued to the officers' room, where he found Pucetti at a desk,
reading a magazine. The young man got to his feet when he saw
Brunetti. "Good morning, Commissario. I was hoping you'd come in
early."
"What have you got?" Brunetti asked. He was vaguely conscious of
motion behind him, and he saw its reflection on Pucetti's face, from
which the smile disappeared. "Only these forms, sir he said, reaching
across his desk to the one beside it and gathering up two stacks of
papers. "I think they need your signature," he said, his voice
neutral.
Imitating his tone, Brunetti said, "I've got to go down to see Bocchese
for a minute. Could you take them up and put them on my desk for
me?"
"Certainly, sir," Pucetti said, setting one stack, and then the second,
on top of his magazine and tapping them together to straighten the
edges. When he picked them up, the magazine had disappeared.
Brunetti turned towards the door and found it blocked by
Lieutenant Scarpa. "Good morning, Lieutenant/ Brunetti said neutrally.
"Is there something I can do for you?"
"No, sir the lieutenant answered. "I wanted to speak to Pucetti/
Brunetti's face lit up with grateful surprise. "Ah, thank you for
reminding me, Lieutenant: there's something I need to ask Pucetti
about." He turned to the young man. "You can wait for me in my
office, Officer. I won't be a minute with Bocchese." With a friendly
smile at the lieutenant, Brunetti said, "You know how Bocchese loves to
get an early start suggesting this was common knowledge at the
Questura, despite the well-known truth that Bocchese spent the first
hour of his day reading La Gazzetta del lo Sport and using his email
address at the Questura to place bets in three countries.
Silently, the lieutenant moved aside to let his superior pass.
Brunetti waited just outside the door until Pucetti joined him and then
closed the door of the office behind them.
"Oh, I suppose Bocchese can wait a few minutes Brunetti said
resignedly. When they got to his office, Brunetti closed the door
behind them and while he took off his overcoat and hung it in the
closet, said, What did you learn?"
Pucetti kept the papers tucked under, his arm and said, "I think
there's something wrong with the Ruffo boy, sir. I went over there
yesterday and hung around in the bar down the street from the school,
and when he came in I said hello. I offered him a coffee, but it
seemed to me he was nervous about talking to me."
"Or being seen talking to you Brunetti suggested. When Pucetti agreed,
Brunetti asked, "What makes you think there's something wrong with
him?"
"I think he's been in a fight." Not waiting for Brunetti to question
him, Pucetti went on. "Both of his hands were scraped, and the
knuckles of his right hand were swollen. When he saw me looking at
them, he tried to hide them behind his back."
"What else?"
"He moved differently, as though he were stiff."
"What did he tell you?" asked Brunetti as he sat down behind his
desk.
"He said he's had time to think about it and he realizes now that maybe
it was suicide, after all," Pucetti said.
Brunetti propped his elbows on his desk and rested his chin on his
folded hands. Silently, he waited to hear not only what Pucetti had
been told but what he thought of it.
In the face of his superior's silence, Pucetti ventured, "He doesn't
believe that, sir, at least I don't think he does."
"Why?"
"He sounded frightened, and he sounded as if he were repeating
something he'd had to memorize. I asked him why he thought it might
have been suicide, and he said it was because Moro had been acting
strangely in the last few weeks." Pucetti paused, then added, "Just
the opposite of what he told me the first time. It was as if he needed
some sign from me that I believed him."
"And did you give it to him?" Brunetti asked.
"Of course, sir. If that's what he needs to feel safe, and I think it
is, then it's better he have it."
"Why's that, Pucetti?"
"Because it will cause him to relax, and when he relaxes he'll be even
more frightened when we talk to him again."
"Here, do you mean?"
"Downstairs, yes. And with someone big in the room with us."
Brunetti looked up at the young man and smiled.
The obvious choice to serve the role of enforcer was Vianello, a man
who had perfected the art of disguising his essential good nature
behind expressions that could vary from displeased to savage. He was
not, however, to be given the chance to employ his repertory on Cadet
Ruffo, for when the
Inspector and Pucetti arrived at the San Martino Academy an hour later,
the cadet was not in his room, nor did the boys on his floor know where
to find him. It was the Comandante who brought illumination by telling
them, when their inquiries finally led them to his office, that Cadet
Ruffo had been granted leave to visit his family and was not expected
to return to the Academy for at least two weeks.
When asked, the Comandante remained vague as to the precise reason for
Cadet Ruffo's leave, saying something about 'family matters', as if
that should satisfy any curiosity on their part.
Vianello knew that the student list was in Signorina Elettra's
possession, a list that would surely provide the address of Ruffo's
parents, and so it was nothing more than interest in the Comandante's
response that prompted Vianello to ask him to provide it. He refused,
insisting that the addresses of the students constituted privileged
/> information. Then he announced that he had a meeting to attend and
asked them to leave.
After the two men returned to the Questura and reported this encounter
to Brunetti, he asked Pucetti, "What was your general impression of the
cadets?"
I'd like to say they were frightened, the way Ruffo was when I talked
to him the last time, but they weren't. In fact, they seemed angry
that I'd ask them anything, almost as if I didn't have a right to talk
to them." The young officer shrugged in confusion about how to make
all of this clear. "I mean, they're all seven or eight years younger
than I am, but they acted like they were speaking to a kid or someone
who was supposed to obey them." He looked perplexed.
"An enlisted man, for example?" Brunetti asked.
Not following, Pucetti asked, "Excuse me, sir?"
"As if they were speaking to an enlisted person? Is that how they
spoke to you?"
Pucetti nodded. "Yes, I think so, as if I was supposed to obey them
and not ask questions."
"But that doesn't tell us why they didn't want to talk Vianello
interrupted.
"There's usually only one reason for that Brunetti said.
Before Vianello could ask what he meant, Pucetti blurted out, "Because
they all know whatever Ruffo does, and they don't want us to talk to
him."
Once again, Brunetti graced the young man with an approving smile.
By three that afternoon, they were seated in an unmarked police car
parked a hundred metres from the entrance to the home listed for Cadet
Ruffo, a dairy farm on the outskirts of Dolo, a small town halfway
between Venice and Padova. The stone house, long and low and attached
at one end to a large barn, sat back from a poplar-lined road. A
gravel driveway led up to it from the road, but the recent rains had
reduced it to a narrow band of mud running between patches of dead
grass interspersed with mud-rimmed puddles. There were no trees within
sight, though stumps stood here and there in the fields, indicating
where they had been cut. It was difficult for Brunetti, stiff and cold
in the car, to think of a season different from this one, but he
wondered what the cattle would do without shade from the summer sun.
Then he remembered how seldom cows went to pasture on the farms of the
new Veneto: they generally stood in their stalls, reduced to motionless
cogs in the wheel of milk production.
It was cold; a raw wind was coming from the north. Every so often,
Vianello turned on the motor and put the heat on high, until it grew so
hot in the car that one or another of them was forced to open a
window.
After half an hour, Vianello said, The don't think it makes much sense
to sit here, waiting for him to show up. Why don't we just go and ask
if he's there or not?"
Pucetti, as befitted his inferior position, both in terms of rank and,
because he was in the back seat, geography, said nothing, leaving it to
Brunetti to respond.
Brunetti had been musing on the same question for some time, and
Vianello's outburst was enough to convince him. "You're right," he
said. "Let's go and see if he's there."
Vianello turned on the engine and put the car into gear. Slowly, the
wheels occasionally spinning in search of purchase, they drove through
the mud and gravel and towards the house. As they drew nearer, signs
of rustic life became more and more evident. An abandoned tyre, so
large it could have come only from a tractor, lay against the front of
a barn. To the left of the door of the house a row of rubber boots
stood in odd pairings of black and brown, tall and short. Two large
dogs emerged from around the side of the house and ran towards them,
low and silent and, because of that, frightening. They stopped two
metres short of the car, both on the passenger side, and stared, their
lips pulled back in suspicion, but still silent.
Brunetti could recognize only a few well-known breeds, and he thought
he saw some German Shepherd in these dogs, but there was little else he
could identify. "Well?" he asked Vianello.
Neither of the others said anything, so Brunetti pushed open his door
and put one foot on the ground, careful to choose a patch of dried
grass. The dogs did nothing. He put his other foot on the ground and
pushed himself out of the car. Still the dogs remained motionless. His
nostrils were assailed by the acidic smell of cow urine, and he noticed
that the puddles in front of what he thought to be the doors of the
barn were a dark, foaming brown.
He heard one car door open, then the other, and then Pucetti was
standing beside him. At the sight of two men standing side by side,
the dogs backed away a bit. Vianello came around the front of the car,
and the dogs backed away
even farther, until they stood just at the corner of the building.
Vianello suddenly stamped his right foot and took a long step towards
them, and they disappeared around the corner of the building, still
without having made a sound.
The men walked to the door, where an enormous iron ring served as a
knocker. Brunetti picked it up and let it drop against the metal
plaque nailed into the door, enjoying the weight of it in his hand as
well as the solid clang it created. When there was no response, he did
it again. After a moment, they heard a voice from inside call
something they could not distinguish.
The door was opened by a short, dark-haired woman in a shapeless grey
woollen dress over which she wore a thick green cardigan that had
obviously been knitted by hand, a clumsy hand. Shorter than they, she
stepped back from the door and put her head back to squint at them.
Brunetti noticed that there was a lopsided quality about her face: the
left eye angled up towards her temple, while the same side of her mouth
drooped. Her skin seemed baby soft and was without wrinkles, though
she must have been well into her forties.
"Si?" she finally inquired.
"Is this the home of Giuliano Ruffo?" Brunetti asked.
She might have been a speaker of some other language, so long did it
take her to translate his words into meaning. As Brunetti watched, he
thought he saw her mouth the word, "Giuliano', as if that would help
her answer the question.
"Momenta," the woman said, and the consonants caused her great
difficulty. She turned away, leaving it to them to close the door. Or
just as easily, Brunetti said to himself, walk off with everything in
the house or, if they preferred, kill everyone inside and drive away
undisturbed, even by the dogs.
The three men crowded into the hall and stood there, waiting for the
woman to return or for someone to arrive
better able to answer their questions. After a few minutes they heard
footsteps come towards them from the back of the house. The woman in
the green cardigan returned, and behind her was another woman, younger,
and wearing a sweater made from the same wool but by more skilful
hands. This woman's features and bearing, too, spoke of greater
refinement: dark eyes that instantly sought his, a sculpted mouth
poised to speak, and an air of concentrated attention left Brunetti
with a general impression of brightness and light.
"Si?" she said. Both her tone and her expression made the question
one that required not only an answer, but an explanation.
"I'm Commissario Guido Brunetti, Signora. I'd like to speak to
Giuliano Ruffo. Our records show that this is his home."
"What do you want to talk to him about?" the second woman asked.
"About the death of one of his fellow cadets."
During this exchange, the first woman stood to one side of Brunetti,
open mouthed, her face moving back and forth from one to the other as
he spoke to the younger woman, seeming to register only sound. Brunetti
saw her in profile, and noticed that the undamaged side of her face was
similar to that of the other woman's. Sisters, then, or perhaps
cousins.
"He's not here the younger woman said.
Brunetti had no patience for this. "Then he's in violation of his
leave from the Academy," he said, thinking this might perhaps be
true.
To hell with the Academy," she answered fiercely.
"All the more reason for him to talk to us, then," he countered.
"I told you, he's not here."