Brunetti moved them away from finance and asked, 'The husband? Did you find anything?'
'Nothing very interesting’ she said. 'He was born here, in 1925, and died at the Ospedale Civile in January of 1993. Lung cancer. For thirty-two years he worked in various city offices, lastly at the schools department -specifically, the personnel office, than which I can imagine no greater tedium. His son worked for the school board, too, until his death five years ago. They overlapped there for a few years.'
'Anything else?' Brunetti asked, amazed that a man could spend three decades and more working in the city bureaucracy and, at the end, have only these few facts to show for it.
'That's all I can find, sir. It's very difficult to find anything from more than ten years ago: they haven't got around to computerizing those records yet.'
'When will they?' Vianello asked.
Signorina Elettra's shrug was so strong that it caused the amber beads to click together as though they, too, wanted to tsk away the very idea.
12
Brunetti refused to see this as an impasse. Turning to Vianello, he said, 'There should still be people working in the office who would remember them. I'd like you to go over and see if there are and what they can remember.'
Vianello's expression showed how unlikely he thought this, but he voiced no objection.
Signorina Elettra said she still had work to do in her office and left the room with the inspector.
Brunetti, thinking it unfair to ask them to work on this while he sat at his desk, picked up the file and found the name of Signora Battestini's doctor. His call was transferred to the doctor's telefonino, and when he answered, the doctor told him that he could talk to Brunetti in his ambulatorio either before or after he saw his afternoon patients. Convinced that it would be wiser to speak to the doctor before he had spent two hours listening to and tending to his patients, Brunetti said that three-thirty would be fine, asked where the office was, and hung up. That done, he dialled the number of Signora Battestini's niece, but no one answered.
There was to be no weekly staff meeting that day, a fact explained by the weather. During summer months, the meetings, which Vice-Questore Patta had initiated some years ago, were often either suddenly cancelled or postponed and then eventually cancelled, depending upon the weather. Sun cancelled the meeting instantly, thus allowing the Vice-Questore to have a swim before lunch as well as in the late afternoon. On rainy days, the meetings were held, though a sudden improvement in the weather often led to their postponement, and one of the police launches would take the Vice-Questore across the Bacino to his undoubtedly well-earned relaxation. Thus the staff conference became another of the secrets of the Questura, like the door to a cabinet that had to be kicked at the bottom before it would open. Brunetti envisioned himself and his colleagues as not unlike augurs, whose impulse, before planning or accepting any engagement, was first to consult the heavens. Brunetti thought it much to their credit that they could so seamlessly adjust their schedules to the vagaries of the Vice-Questore's.
At home, where he took himself for lunch, he arrived just as the family was sitting down. Paola, he noticed, had the lean and hungry look she often had after a bad day at the university, though the children were far too concerned with sating their hunger to pay much attention.
There was, the setting of plates on the table suggested, to be no first course, but before he could protest at this omission, however mildly, Paola appeared, holding an immense bowl from which rose fumes so fragrant as to soothe his soul. Before his powers of prediction could name the dish, Chiara cried with undisguised glee, 'Oh, Mamma, you made the lamb stew.'
'Is there polenta?' Raffi asked, his voice poignant with hope.
When he saw the smile that spread over Paola's face at the sound of their avidity, Brunetti thought of baby birds and the way their chirping forced their parents to behave in genetically determined ways. Paola offered only token resistance to that instinct by saying, 'Just as there has been each of the six hundred times we've eaten this, Raffi, yes, there is polenta,' but Brunetti could hear that her heart was in the tone and not the words.
'Mamma’ Chiara offered, 'if there are fresh figs for dessert, I'll do the dishes.'
'You have the soul of a merchant,' Paola said, setting down the bowl and going back into the kitchen to get the polenta.
Indeed there were figs, and with them esse, the S-shaped biscuits that a friend of Paola's father still sent them from Burano. And after that, Brunetti had no choice but to repair to bed to sleep for an hour.
When he woke, dry-mouthed and sweating in the stifling heat, he was conscious of Paola beside him. Because she never slept in the afternoon, he knew before he opened his eyes that she would be lying with her head on the pillow, reading. He turned his head and was proven right.
Recognizing the book, he asked, 'Are you still reading the catechism?'
'Yes’ she said, not removing her eyes from the page. 'I'm reading a chapter a day, though it's not called a catechism any more.'
Rather than inquire as to its new title, Brunetti asked, instead, 'And where are you now?'
'On the Sacraments.'
By rote, the words swam up from his youth: 'Baptism, communion, confirmation, marriage, ordination, confession…' and then his voice trailed off. 'There's seven of them, aren't there?' he asked.
'Yes.'
'What's the seventh? I can't remember. It's just gone.' As happened every time he failed to remember something simple and ordinary, he had a moment's panic that this was the same beginning no one had wanted to recognize in his mother.
'Extreme unction’ Paola said, glancing aside at him. 'Perhaps the most subtle of them all.'
Brunetti failed to understand what she meant and asked, 'Why "subtle"?'
Think about it, Guido. Just at the time a person is approaching death, usually when it's generally agreed that there is little or no hope, the priest arrives.'
'Yes. Exactly. But I still don't understand why that's so subtle.'
'Think about it. In the past, the only people who could read and write were priests.'
Because he was hot and thirsty and because he usually woke up cranky if he slept in the afternoon, Brunetti said, 'Isn't that a bit of an exaggeration?'
'Yes, all right. It is. But priests could, and most people could not, at least not until the last century.'
‘I still don't see where you're going with all of this’ he said.
'Think eschatologically, Guido’ she enjoined, further confusing him.
‘I strive to do so every moment of every day’ he said, having forgotten the meaning of the word but already regretting that he'd snapped at her.
'Death, judgement, heaven and hell’ she said. "Those are the four last things. And at the point when people are about to encounter the first and know they cannot escape the second, they start to think about the third and the fourth. And there is the priest, all too ready to talk about the fires of hell and the joys of heaven, though I've always been of a mind that people are far more concerned with avoiding the former than with experiencing the latter.'
He lay still, beginning to suspect where this was going.
'So there he was, the local priest – who incidentally often happened to be the notary -and then he no doubt started to talk about the fires of hell that would consume a person in the flesh, unspeakable pain to be prolonged for all eternity.'
She could have been an actress, he thought, so powerfully was her voice a testament to belief in every word she spoke.