Brunetti smiled and waved it away with an easy smile. 'No, you're right,' Brunetti went on, 'there's nothing we can do, not really. The person who complains can bring a case, but that means that people from some department – I don't know what its name is, but it takes care of complaints about noise – have to go in to measure the decibels of the noise to see if it's really something called "aural aggression", but they don't work at night, or if they get called at night, they don't come until the next morning, by which time whatever it was has been turned down.' Like all policemen in the city, he was familiar with the situation, and like them, he knew it had no solution.
'Did you ever bring her anything else?' Brunetti went on.
'At Christmas, some cards; occasionally – but I mean only once or twice a year – a letter, as well as the letters about the noise. But, aside from them, only bills and the statements from the banks’ Before Brunetti could comment, Mario said, ‘It's pretty much like that for all old people. Their friends have died, and because they've always lived here, their family and friends are here, too, so there's never any reason to write. I bet some of the people I bring mail to are illiterate, anyway, and have their children take care of the bills for them. No, she wasn't much different from the other old people.'
'You pretended to think I thought you'd killed her,' Brunetti said as they drifted towards the door of the bar.
'No reason, really,' the postino said in response to Brunetti's unasked question, 'except that there were so many people who couldn't stand her.'
'But that's a stronger reaction than for her just not saying thank you,' Brunetti said.
‘I didn't like the way she treated the women who worked for her, especially the one who killed her’ he said. 'She treated them like slaves, really, seemed happy if she could make one of them cry; I saw her manage that more than once.' Mario stopped at the entrance to the sorting room and put out his hand. Brunetti thanked him for his help, shook his hand, and went downstairs and out towards Rialto. He was almost at the front entrance when he heard his name called from behind and, turning, saw Mario walking towards him, his leather bag pulling heavily on his left shoulder, the young woman with the red face close behind him.
'Commissario’ he said, coming up to Brunetti and reaching behind to take the young woman by the arm and all but pull her forward. 'This is Cinzia Foresti. She had that route before Nicolo did, up until about five years ago. I thought maybe you'd like to talk to her, too.'
The young woman gave a nervous half-smile, and her face, if possible, grew even redder.
'You delivered to Signora Battestini?' Brunetti asked.
'And to the son’ answered Mario. He patted the young woman on the shoulder and said, 'I've got to get to work’ then continued walking towards the front door.
'As your colleague told you, Signorina’ Brunetti said, 'I'm curious about the mail that was delivered to Signora Battestini.' Seeing that she was reluctant to talk, perhaps from shyness, perhaps from fear, he added, 'Particularly about the bank statements that came every month.'
'About them?' she asked with what seemed like nervous relief.
Brunetti smiled. 'Yes, and about the raccomandate that used to come from the neighbours.'
Suddenly she asked, 'Am I allowed to talk to you about this? I mean, the mail is supposed to be private.'
He pulled out his warrant card and held it out for her to examine. 'Yes, Signorina, it is, but in a case like this, where the person is dead, you may speak about it.' He didn't want to overplay his hand and suggest that she was obliged to; besides, he wasn't sure if he could force her to speak to him without a court order.
She chose to believe him. 'Yes, I took her the things from the banks, every month. And I was on that route for three years.'
'Did you deliver anything else?'
'To her? No, not really. Occasionally a letter or a card. And the bills.'
Prompted by her question, he asked, 'And to the son?'
She shot him a nervous glance but said nothing. Brunetti waited. Finally she said, 'Bills, mainly. And sometimes letters.' After a very long pause, she added, 'And magazines.'
Sensing her growing uneasiness, he asked, 'Was there anything unusual about the magazines, Signorina? Or about the letters?'
She glanced around the vast open hall, moved a bit to the left to take them farther away from a man who was making a telephone call from the pay phone near the entrance, and said, ‘I think they were about boys.'
This time there was no mistaking her nervousness: the blush set her face aflame.
'Boys? Do you mean little boys?'
She started to speak but then looked at her feet. From his greater height, he saw the top of her head shake in slow negation. He decided to wait for her to explain but then realized it would be easier for her to answer while she was not looking at him.
'Young boys, Signorina?'
This time her head nodded up and down in affirmation.
He wanted to be sure. 'Adolescents?' 'Yes.'
'May I ask how you know this, Signorina?'
At first he thought she wouldn't answer but finally she said, 'One day it rained, and my bag wasn't completely under my slicker, so when I got to the house their mail was wet: the things on the top, that is. When I pulled it out of the bag, the cover came off the magazine and it fell on to the ground. I picked it up, and when I did, it opened and I saw a photo of a boy.' She looked firmly at the ground between their feet, refusing to look at him when she spoke. ‘I have a little brother who was fourteen men, and that's what he looked like.' She stopped, and he knew there was no sense in asking her to describe the picture further.
'What did you do, Signorina?'
‘I put the magazine in the garbage. He never asked about it.'
'And the next month, when it came again?'
'I put that in the garbage, too, and the next one. And then they stopped coming, so I guess he knew what I was doing.'
'Was there only the one magazine, Signorina?'
'Yes, but there were envelopes, too. The kind with "Photo" on the outside, telling you not to bend them.'
'What did you do with them?'
'After I saw the magazine, I always bent them before I pushed them into the letterbox’ she said, anger mingled with pride.
He could think of no more questions, but she said, Then he died, and after a while the mail stopped coming.'
Brunetti put out his hand. She took it. He said, speaking as a policeman, 'Thank you for talking to me, Signorina’ and then couldn't help but add, ‘I understand.'
She smiled nervously, and again her face grew red.
At the Questura, he left a note on Vianello's desk, asking him to come up as soon as he got in. It was Wednesday, and Signorina Elettra seldom reached the office before noon on Wednesdays during the summer, a fact which the entire Questura had come to accept without " expression of curiosity or disapproval. During the summer, her skin grew no darker, so she was not on the beach; she sent no postcards, so she was not away from the city. No one had ever come across her in the city on Wednesday morning; had this happened, the entire Questura would certainly have heard. Perhaps she simply stayed at home and ironed her linen shirts, Brunetti decided.
His thoughts kept returning to Signora Battestini's son. Even though he knew the man's name was Paolo, Brunetti kept thinking of him as Signora Battestini's son. He had been forty when he died, had worked for a city office for more than a decade, yet everyone Brunetti spoke to referred to him as his mother's son, as if his only existence were through her or by means of her. Brunetti disliked psychobabble and the quick, easy solutions it tried to provide to complex human tangles, but here he thought he detected a pattern so obvious it had to be mistaken: take a domineering mother, put her in a closed and conservative society, and then add a father who liked to spend his time in the bar with the guys, having a drink, and homosexuality in the only son is not the most unlikely result. Instantly Brunetti thought of gay friends of his who had had mothers so passive as almost to be invisible, married to men capable of eating a lion for lunch, and he blushed almost as red as had the woman from the post office.