She slumped back down over her book, Brunetti bent and kissed the top of her head and switched on the overhead light as he left the room. At the end of the corridor, he stopped in front of the door to Paola’s study. Talking to her seldom helped, but listening to her sometimes did. He knocked.
‘Avanti,’ she called out, and he pushed back the door. The first thing he noticed, even before he saw Paola standing at the glass door that led to the terrace, was the chaos on her desk. Papers, books, magazines spilled across its surface; some open, some closed, some used to mark pages in others. Only the self-deceived or the vision-impaired would ever call Paola either neat or orderly, but this mess was pushed out way beyond even her very tolerant limits. She turned from the door and noticed the way he stared at her desk. ‘I’ve been looking for something,’ she explained.
‘The person who killed Edwin Drood?’ he asked, referring to an article she had spent three months writing the previous year. ‘I thought you found him.’
‘Don’t joke, Guido,’ she said, in that voice she used when humour was as welcome as the old boyfriend of the bride. ‘I’ve spent most of the afternoon trying to hunt down a quotation.’
‘What do you need it for?’
‘A class. I want to begin with the quotation, and I need to tell them where it comes from, so I’ve got to locate the source.’
‘Who is it?’
‘The Master,’ she said, in English, and Brunetti watched her go all misty-eyed, the way she always did when she talked about Henry James. Did it make sense, he wondered, to be jealous? Jealous of a man who, it seemed to him from what Paola had said about him, not only couldn’t decide what his nationality was, but couldn’t seem to decide what sex he was, either?
For twenty years, this had gone on. The Master had gone on their honeymoon with them, was in the hospital when both of their children were born, seemed to tag along on every holiday they had ever taken. Stout, phlegmatic, possessed of a prose style that proved impenetrable to Brunetti, no matter how many times he tried to read him in either English or Italian, Henry James appeared to be the other man in Paola’s life.
‘What’s the quotation?’
‘He said it in response to someone who asked him, late in his life, what he had learned by all his experience.’
Brunetti knew what he was meant to do. He did it. ‘What did he say?’
‘ “Be kind and then be kind and then be kind,” ‘ she said in English.
The temptation proved too strong for Brunetti. ‘With or without commas?’
She shot him a grim look. Obviously not the day for jokes, especially about the Master. In an attempt to worm out from under the weight of that look, he said, ‘Seems a strange quotation to begin a literature class.’
She weighed whether to take his remark about the commas as still standing or to address herself to his next. Luckily, for he did want to eat dinner that night, she picked up the second. ‘We begin with Whitman and Dickinson tomorrow, and I’m hoping that the quotation will serve to pacify a few of the more horrible students in the class.’
‘Il piccolo marchesino?’ he asked, slighting, with the use of the diminutive, Vittorio, heir apparent to Marchese Francesco Bruscoli. Vittorio, it seemed, had been persuaded to terminate his attendance at the universities of Bologna, Padua and Ferrara, and had, six months ago, ended up at C à Foscari, attempting to take a degree in English, not because he had any interest in or enthusiasm for literature — indeed, for anything that resembled the written word — but simply because the English nannies who had raised him had made him fluent in that language.
‘He’s such a dirty-minded little pig,’ Paola said vehemently. ‘Really vicious.’
‘What’s he done now?’
‘Oh, Guido, it’s not what he does. It’s what he says, and the way he says it. Communists, abortion, gays. Any of those subjects just has to come up and he’s all over them, like slime, talking about how glorious it is that Communism’s been defeated in Europe, that abortion is a sin against God, and gays—’ She waved a hand towards the window, as if asking the roofs to understand. ‘My God, he thinks they should all be rounded up and put in concentration camps, and anyone with AIDS should be sequestered. There are times when I want to hit him,’ she said, with another wave of her hand but ending, she realized, weakly.
‘How do these subjects come up in a literature class, Paola?’
‘They rarely do,’ she admitted. ‘But I hear about him from some of the other professors.’ She turned to Brunetti and asked, ‘You don’t know him, do you?’
‘No, but I know his father.’
‘What’s he like?’
‘Pretty much the same. Charming, rich, handsome. And utterly vicious.’
‘That’s what’s so dangerous about him. He’s handsome and very rich, and many of the students would kill to be seen with a marchese, regardless, of what a little shit he is. So they ape him and repeat his opinions.’
‘But why are you so bothered about him now?’
‘Because tomorrow I begin with Whitman and Dickinson, I told you.’
Brunetti knew they were poets; had read the first and not liked him, found Dickinson difficult but, when he understood, wonderful. He shook his head from side to side, asking for an explanation.
‘Whitman was gay, and Dickinson probably was, too.’
‘And that sort of thing is not on il marchesino’s list of acceptable behaviour?’
‘To say the very least,’ replied Paola. ‘That’s why I want to begin with that quotation.’
‘You think something like that will make any difference?’
‘No, probably not,’ she admitted, sitting down in her chair and beginning to straighten out some of the mess on her desk.
Brunetti sat in the armchair against the wall and stretched his feet out in front of him. Paola continued closing books and placing magazines on neat piles. ‘I had a taste of the same today,’ he said.
She stopped what she was doing and looked across at him. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Someone who didn’t like gays.’ He paused and then added, ‘Patta.’
Paola closed her eyes for second, then asked, ‘What was it?’
‘Do you remember Dottoressa Lynch?’
‘The American? The one who’s in China?’
‘Yes to the first, and no to the second. She’s back here. I saw her today, in the hospital.’
‘What’s the matter?’ Paola asked with real concern, hands grown suddenly still over her books.
‘Someone beat her. Well, two men, really. They went to her place on Sunday, said they had come on business, and when she let them in, they beat her.’
‘How badly is she hurt?’
‘Not as badly as she could have been, thank God.’
‘What does that mean, Guido?’
‘She’s got a cracked jaw, and a few broken ribs, and some bad scrapes.’