‘Santomauro?’ she asked. ‘Giancarlo Santomauro?’
‘The very one.’
‘How delicious,’ she said, voice rich with real delight. ‘I wish I’d never had to promise you I wouldn’t talk about what you tell me; this one is wonderful.’ And she repeated Santomauro’s name.
‘You don’t tell people, do you, Paola?’ he asked, though he knew he shouldn’t.
She started to shoot back an angry answer, but then she leaned over and put her hand on his knee. ‘No, Guido. I’ve never repeated anything. And never will.’
‘I’m sorry I asked,’ he said, looking down and sipping at his Campari soda.
‘Do you know his wife?’ she asked, veering back to the original topic.
‘I think I was introduced to her once, at a concert somewhere, a couple of years ago. But I don’t think I’d remember her if I saw her again. What’s she like?’
Paola sipped at her drink, then placed the glass on the top of the railing, something she was repeatedly forbidding the children to do. ‘Well,’ she began, considering how most acidly to answer the question. ‘If I were Signor, no, Avvocato Santomauro and I were given the choice between my tall, thin, impeccably well-dressed wife, she of the Margaret Thatcher coiffure, to make no mention of disposition, and a young boy, regardless of his height, hair or disposition, there is no doubt that my arms would reach out and embrace that boy.’
‘How do you know her?’ Brunetti asked, as ever ignoring the rhetoric and attending to the substance.
‘She’s a client of Biba’s,’ she said, naming a friend of hers who was a jeweller. ‘I’ve met her a few times in the shop, and then I met them at my parents’ place at one of those dinners you didn’t go to.’ Figuring that this was a way of getting back at him for having asked if she told people what he said to her, Brunetti let it pass.
‘What are they like together?’
‘She does all the talking, and he just stands around and glowers, as if there were nothing and no one within a radius of ten kilometres who could ever possibly measure up to his high standards. I always thought they were a pair of sanctimonious, self-important bigots. All I had to do was listen to her talk for five minutes, and I knew it: she’s like a minor character in a Dickens novel, one of the pious, malevolent ones. Because she did all the talking, I was never sure about him, had to go on instinct, but I’m very pleased to learn that I was right.’
‘Paola,’ he cautioned, ‘I have no reason to believe he was there for any other reason than to give Crespo legal advice.’
‘And he had to take his shoes off to do that?’ she asked with a snort of disbelief. ‘Guido, please come back to this century, all right? Avvocato Santomauro was there for one reason only, and it had nothing to do with his profession, not unless he has worked out a very interesting payment plan for Signor Crespo.’
Paola, he had learned over the course of more than two decades, had the tendency to Go Too Far. He was uncertain, even after all this time, whether this was a vice or a virtue, but there was no doubt that it was an irremovable part of her character. She even got a certain wild look in her eye when she was planning to Go Too Far, which look he saw there now. He had no idea what form it would take, but he knew it was coming.
‘Do you think he’s arranged the same payment plan for the Patriarch?’
In those same decades, he had also learned that the only way to deal with her tendency was to ignore her completely. ‘As I was saying,’ Brunetti continued, ‘the fact that he was in the apartment proves nothing.’
‘I hope you’re right, or I’d have to worry every time I saw him coming out of the Patriarchal Palace or the Basilica, wouldn’t I?’
He did no more than glance in her direction.
‘All right, Guido, he was there on business, legal business.’ She allowed a few moments to pass and then added, in a completely different voice, so as to alert him that she was now going to behave and treat this seriously, ‘But you said that Crespo recognized the man in the picture.’
‘I think he did, the first time, but by the time he looked up at me, he’d had a second to recover, so his expression was perfectly natural.’
‘Then the man in the picture could be anyone, couldn’t he? Another whore, even a client? Have you thought about that, Guido, that he might be a client who likes to dress up as a woman when he, well, when he goes to see these other men?’
In the sexual supermarket that was modern society, Brunetti knew, the man’s age made him far more likely to be a shopper than a seller. ‘That means we’d be looking for a man who used male prostitutes, rather than a man who was one,’ he said.
Paola took her drink, swirled it around a few times, and finished it. ‘Well, that would surely be a longer list. And, considering what you’ve just told me about l’Avvocato del Patriarcato, a far more interesting one.’
‘Is this another one of your conspiracy theories, Paola, that the city is filled with seemingly happily married men who can’t wait to sneak off into the bushes with one of these transvestites?’
‘For God’s sake, Guido, what do you men talk about when you’re together? Soccer? Politics? Don’t you ever hunker down and gossip?’
‘About what? The boys on Via Cappuccina?’ He put his glass down with unnecessary force and scratched at his ankle, where one of the night’s first mosquitoes had just bit him.
‘I guess it’s because you don’t have gay friends,’ she said equably.
‘We have lots of gay friends,’ he said, conscious of the fact that it was only in an argument with Paola that he could be forced to make that statement as a claim to honour.
‘Of course we have, but you don’t talk to them, Guido, really talk to them.’
‘What am I supposed to do, swap recipes or divulge my beauty secrets?’
She started to speak, stopped, gave him a long look, and then said, voice absolutely level, ‘I’m not sure if that remark is more offensive than stupid.’
He scratched at his ankle, thought about what they had both just said. ‘I suppose it was more stupid, but it was pretty offensive, too.’ She gave him a suspicious glance. ‘I’m sorry,’ he added. She smiled.
‘All right, tell me what I ought to know about this,’ he asked, scratching again at his ankle.
‘What I was trying to tell you was that some of the gays I know say that a lot of the men here are perfectly willing to have sex with them: family men, married men, doctors, lawyers, priests. I imagine there’s a great deal of exaggeration in what they tell me, and not a little vanity, but I also imagine there’s a great deal of truth, as well.’ He thought she was finished, but she added, ‘As a policeman, you’ve probably heard something about this, but I’d suspect that most men wouldn’t want to hear it. Or, if they hear it, not want to believe it.’ She seemed not to be including him in this list, but, of course, there was no way of being sure about that.
‘Who is your chief source of information in all of this?’ he asked.
‘Ettore and Basilio,’ she said, naming two of her colleagues at the university. ‘And some of Raffi’s friends have said the same thing.’
‘What?’
‘Two of Raffi’s friends at the liceo. Don’t look so surprised, Guido. They’re both seventeen.’
‘They’re both seventeen and what?’
‘And gay, Guido. Gay.’
‘Are they close friends?’ he asked before he could prevent himself.
Suddenly, Paola got to her feet. ‘I’m going to put the water on for the pasta. I think I might want to wait until after dinner to continue this discussion. That might give you some time to think about some of the things you’ve said and some of the assumptions you seem to be making.’ She picked up her glass, took his from his hand, and went back into the house, leaving him to think about his assumptions.