Twenty minutes later, Vianello came into Brunetti's office, the list of names still in his hand. He took his usual place on the other side of the desk, slid the sheet on to it, and said, 'Nothing’
Brunetti's question was in his glance.
'One's dead,' he said, pointing to a name. 'He retired the year after the payments started and died three years ago’ He moved his finger down the list. 'This one got religion and is living in some sort of commune or something, down near Bologna; has been for three years.' He pushed the paper a few centimetres in Brunetti's direction and sat back in the chair. 'And of the two who are still there, one's become the head of school inspections, Giorgio Costantini: he's married and seems like a decent man.'
Brunetti named two former heads of government and remarked that the same two things might be said of them.
Spurred on to the defensive, Vianello said, 'I've got a cousin who plays rugby with him at weekends. He says he's all right, and I believe him.'
Brunetti let this pass without further observation. Instead, he asked, 'And the other?' 'He's in a wheelchair.' 'What?'
'He's the guy who got polio when he went to India. You read about him, didn't you?'
The story rang a faint bell, though Brunetti had long forgotten the details. 'Yes, I remember something. How long ago did it happen, about five years?'
'Six. He got sick while he was there, and by the time they managed to diagnose it, it was too late to evacuate him, so he was treated there, and now he's in a wheelchair.' Vianello, in a tone that suggested he was still smarting from Brunetti's refusal to believe his cousin's assessment of Giorgio Costantini, said, "That might not be enough for you to exclude him, but I think a man might have other things to think about after landing in a wheelchair than continuing to pay blackmail.' He paused again. ‘I could be wrong, of course.'
Brunetti gave Vianello a long glance but instead of rising to the bait, said, 'I'm still hoping Lalli will tell me something.'
'Betray a fellow gay?' Vianello asked in a tone Brunetti didn't like.
'He has three grandchildren.'
'Who?'
'Lalli.'
Vianello shook his head at this, Brunetti couldn't tell if in disbelief or disapproval.
'He's been my friend for a long time,' Brunetti said with steady calm. 'He's a decent man.'
Vianello knew a reprimand when he heard it and chose not to respond.
Brunetti was about to say something, when Vianello glanced away from him. It could have been his refusal to concede the point of Lalli's decency, or it could have been no more than his refusal to look at Brunetti, but whatever it was, Brunetti took it in his turn to be offended and was provoked into saying, ‘I think I'd like to talk to the one who's not in a wheelchair. The rugby player’
'As you wish, sir,' Vianello said. He got to his feet and, saying nothing else, left the office.
22
As the door closed behind Vianello, Brunetti came to his senses. 'Where'd all that come from?' he muttered. Was this the way drunks woke up, he asked himself, or the intemperately wrathful? Did they experience this feeling of having watched from the sidelines as someone disguised as themselves spoke their way through a bad script? He reflected on his conversation with Vianello, trying to pinpoint the moment when a simple exchange of information between friends had spun out of control and turned into a testosterone-charged battle over territory between rivals. To make matters worse, the territory over which they had fought was nothing more than Brunetti's refusal to accept an opinion because it had come from a man who chose to play rugby.
After he had sat at his desk for several minutes, his better self reached for the phone and called down to the officers' room, where a nervous-sounding Pucetti, after a long hesitation, told him Vianello was not there. Brunetti put the phone down, thinking of Achilles, sulking in his tent.
His phone rang and, hoping it would be Vianello, he reached out quickly to answer it.
'It's me, sir,' he heard Signorina Elettra say. 'I've got her phone calls.'
'How did you do that?'
'They decided to keep his wife in another day, so Giorgio went into the office.'
'Is there anything wrong?' asked the uxorious Brunetti.
'No, nothing. Her uncle is the primario there, and he thought it would be better if she stayed another day.' He heard it in her voice, the attempt to soothe away his concern for a woman he had never met. 'She's fine.'
Signorina Elettra waited a moment in case he had further questions, and when he said nothing, then went on, 'He found my email and checked her number. In the month before her death, she called the central number for the school board – it was the only call she made -and the next day she had a call from the same number. There was only one other call, from her niece. Nothing else.'
'How many days did he check?'
The entire month up until she was killed.'
Neither of them commented on the fact that, in her eighty-fourth year, Signora Battestini, who had spent all of those years living in the city, had received only two phone calls in the course of a month. Brunetti recalled that there had been no books in the boxes stored in her attic: her life had been reduced to a chair placed in front of a television and a woman who spoke almost no Italian.
He recalled the boxes, how hurried his examination of them had been, and, thinking of this, he missed the next thing Signorina Elettra said to him. When he tuned back in, he heard her say,'… the day before she died'.
'What?' he asked. ‘I was miles away.'
'The call that came from the school board was the day before she died.'
Her tone revealed her pride, but Brunetti could do little but thank her and hang up. While he had been speaking to her, an idea had slipped into his mind: the objects in Signora Battestini's attic needed closer attention. Blackmail had not presented itself as a motive until after he had taken his hurried look through them, but now, with blackmail as an anchor, he might pause and take a more leisurely trawl through them. Even if he still didn't know what he was looking for, he at least knew that there might be something to find.
He reached for the phone to call Vianello to ask if he would go along with him to the Battestini house, but then he remembered
Vianello's departure and his absence from the officers' room. Pucetti, then. He called down and, giving no explanation, asked the young officer to meet him at the front entrance in five minutes, adding that they would need a launch.
The last time he had slipped into Signora Battestini's home like a thief, and no one had seen him: this time he would arrive like the very personification of law itself, and no one would question him, or so he hoped.
Pucetti, who was waiting just outside the door to the Questura, had learned over the years not to salute Brunetti each time he saw him, but he had not yet learned to resist the impulse to stand up straighter. They climbed on to the launch, with Brunetti determined not to ask about Vianello. He told the pilot where to take them, then went down into the cabin: Pucetti chose to remain on deck.
No sooner was he seated than the long passage describing Achilles in his tent returned to Brunetti, and memory supplied the bombastic catalogue of the offences and slights the warrior insisted he had suffered. Achilles had suffered the slights of Agamemnon: Brunetti had been slighted by his Patroclus. Brunetti's contemplation of Homer was interrupted by an expression Paola had picked up in her researches into American slang: 'dissed'. She had explained that this was the past tense of the verb 'to dis', a term used by American Blacks to refer to 'disrespect' and denoting a wide range of behaviour which the speaker perceived as offensive.