A Noble Radiance (6 page)

He pulled himself
back from this reverie and looked up at Signorina Elettra. 'Please thank him
for me,' Brunetti finally said.

'Oh, no, Dottore, I
think we should let him think we're the ones doing him a favour, giving him an
excuse to get in touch with Barbara again. I even told him I'd say something to
her about it, so he'd have an excuse to call her.'

'And why is that?'
Brunetti asked.

She seemed surprised
that Brunetti would not have seen it. 'In case we need him again. You never
know, do you, when we might want to make use of a television network?'
Remembering the last shambles of an election, when the owner of three of the
largest television networks had used them shamelessly to advance his campaign,
he waited for her comment. ‘I think it’s time the police, rather than the
others, made use of them’

Brunetti, always wary
of political discussions, thought it best to demur, and so pulled the copy of
the hie towards him and thanked her as she left.

The phone rang before
Brunetti could do anything more than think about making calls. When he
answered it, he heard the familiar voice of his brother.

'Ciao,
Guido,
come
stai!’

'Bene’
Brunetti answered, wondering why Sergio would call him at
the Questura. His mind, and then his heart, fled to his mother. 'What's wrong,
Sergio?'

'Nothing, nothing at
all. It's not about
Mamma
that I'm calling’ As it had
managed to do since their childhood, Sergio's voice calmed him, assured him
that all was well or soon would be. 'Well, not about her directly.'

Brunetti said
nothing.

'Guido, I know you've
gone to see
Mamma
the last two weekends. No, don't even say anything. I'm
going on Sunday. But I want to ask you if you'd go the next two’

'Of course,' Brunetti
said.

Sergio went on as
though he hadn't heard. 'If s important, Guido. I wouldn't ask unless it were.'

‘I know that, Sergio.
I'll go’ Having said that, Brunetti felt embarrassed to ask the reason.

Sergio continued. ‘I
got a letter today. Three weeks to get a letter here from Rome.
Puttana Eva,
I
would
walk
here from Rome in less time than that. They had the fax
number of the laboratory, but did they think to send a fax? No, the idiots sent
it through the mails’

From long experience,
Brunetti knew that Sergio had to be headed off once he got on to the subject of
any of the state's variously incompetent services. 'What was in the letter,
Sergio?'

'The invitation, of
course. That's why I'm calling you’

'For the conference
on Chernobyl?'

'Yes, they've asked
us to read our paper. Well, Battestini will read it, since his name is on it,
but he's asked me to explain my part of the research and to help answer
questions afterwards. I didn't know until I got the invitation that we'd go.
That's why I didn't call you until now, Guido.'

Sergio, a researcher
in a medical radiology lab, had been talking about this conference, it seemed,
for years, though it was really no more than months. The damages wrought by the
incompetencies of yet another state system could now no longer be hidden, and
this had given rise to endless conferences on the effects of the explosion and
subsequent fall-out, this latest one to be held in Rome next week. No one,
Brunetti thought in his more cynical moments, dared to suggest that no further
nuclear reactors be built or tests performed - here he silently cursed the
French - but all rushed to the endless conferences to engage in collective
hand-wringing and the exchange of terrible information.

'I'm glad you're
getting the chance to go, Sergio. Congratulations. Can Maria Grazia go with
you?'

‘I don't know yet.
She's almost finished with the place on the Giudecca, but someone's asked her
to make plans and give an estimate for a complete restoration in a four-floor
palazzo
over
in the Ghetto, and if she doesn't get them done by then, I doubt she'll be able
to come.'

'She trusts you to go
to Rome by yourself?' Brunetti asked, knowing, even as he asked it, how foolish
the question was. Similar in many things, i
fratelli
Brunetti
shared a common uxoriousness which was often a source of humour among their
friends.

'If she gets the
contract, I could go to the moon by myself, and she wouldn't even notice.'

'What's your paper
about?' Brunetti asked, knowing he was unlikely to understand the answer.

'Oh, it's technical
stuff, about fluctuations in red and white blood cell counts during the first
weeks after exposure to fall-out or intense radiation. There are some people in
Auckland we've been in touch with who are working on the same thing, and it
seems that their results are identical to ours. That's one of the reasons I
wanted to go to the conference - Battestini would have gone anyway, but this
way someone else pays for us, and we get to see them and talk to them and
compare results.'

'Good, I'm happy for
you. How long will you be gone?'

The conference lasts
six days, from Sunday until Friday, and then I might stay on in Rome for two
days more and not get back until Monday. Wait a minute; let me give you the
dates.' Brunetti heard the flipping of pages, and then Sergio's voice was back.
'From the eighth until the sixteenth. I should be back the morning of the
sixteenth. And, Guido, I'll go the next two Sundays.'

'Don't be silly,
Sergio. These things happen. I'll go while you're away, and then you go the
Sunday after you get back, and I’ll go the next one. You've done the same for
me’

‘I
just don't want you to think I don't want to go and see
her, Guido’

‘Let's not talk about
that, all right, Sergio?' Brunetti asked, surprised how painful he still found
the thought of his mother. He had tried for the last year, with singular lack
of success, to tell himself that his mother, that bright-spirited woman who had
raised them and loved them with unqualified devotion, had moved off to some
other place, where she waited, still quick-witted and eager to smile, for that
befuddled shell that was her body to come and join her so that they could drift
off together to a final peace.

1 don't like asking
you, Guido’ his brother repeated, reminding Brunetti as he did of how careful
Sergio had always been not to abuse his position as elder brother or the
authority that position invested him with.

Brunetti recalled a
term his American colleagues were in the habit of using, and he 'stonewalled'
his brother. 'Tell me about the kids, Sergio.'

Sergio laughed
outright at the way they'd fallen into the familiar pattern: his need to
justify everything; his younger brother's refusal to find that necessary.
'Marco's almost finished with his military service; he’ll be home for four days
at the end of the month. And Maria Luisa's speaking nothing but English so she’ll
be ready to go to the Courtauld in the autumn. Crazy, isn't it, Guido, that
she's got to go to England to study restoration?'

Paola, Brunetti's
wife, taught English Literature at the University of Ca Foscari. There was
little his brother could tell him about the insanity of the Italian university
system that Brunetti did not already know.

'Is her English good
enough?' he asked.

'Better be, huh? If
it isn't. I’ll send her to you and Paola for the summer.'

'And what are we
supposed to do, speak English all the time?'

'Yes.'

'Sorry, Sergio, we
never use it unless we don't want the kids to know what we're saying. Both of
them have taken so much of it in school that we can't even do that any more.'

'Try Latin,' Sergio
said with a laugh. 'You were always good at that.'

‘I'm afraid that was
a long time ago,' said Brunetti sadly.

Sergio, ever
sensitive to things he couldn't name, caught his brother's mood. 'I'll call you
before I leave, Guido.'

'Good,
stammi bene’
Brunetti
said.

'Ciao’
Sergio answered and was gone.

During his life,
Brunetti had often heard people begin sentences with, 'If it weren't for him .
; .' and he could not hear the words without substituting Sergio's name. When
Brunetti, always the acknowledged scholar of the family, was eighteen, it was
decided that there was not enough money to allow him to go to university and
delay the time when he could begin to contribute to the family's income. He
yearned to study the way some of his friends yearned for women, but he assented
to this family decision and began to look for work. It was Sergio, newly
engaged and newly employed in a medical laboratory as a technician, who agreed
to contribute more to the family if it would mean that his younger brother
would be allowed to study. Even then, Brunetti knew that it was the law he
wanted to study, less its current application than its history and the reasons
why it developed the way it had.

Because there was no
faculty of law at Ca Foscari, it meant that Brunetti would have to study at
Padova, the cost of his commuting adding to the responsibility Sergio agreed to
assume. Sergio's marriage was delayed for three years, during which time
Brunetti quickly rose to the top of his class and began to earn some money by
tutoring students younger than himself.

Had he not studied,
Brunetti would not have met Paola in the university library, and he would not
have become a policeman. He sometimes wondered if he would have become the
same man, if the things inside of him that he considered vital would have
developed in the same way, had he, perhaps, become an insurance salesman or a
city bureaucrat. Knowing idle speculation when he saw it, Brunetti reached for
the phone and pulled it towards him.

6

Just as Brunetti had
always thought it vulgar to ask Paola how many rooms there were in her family's
palazzo
and hence remained ignorant of that number, so too had he
no idea of the exact number of phone lines going into Palazzo Falier. He knew
three of the numbers: the more or less public one that was given out to all
friends and business associates; the one given only to members of the family;
and the Count's private number, which he had never found it necessary to use.

He called the first,
as this was hardly, an emergency or a matter of great privacy.

'Palazzo Falier,' a
male voice Brunetti had never heard responded on the third ring.

'Good morning. This
is Guido Brunetti. I'd like to speak to
...'
here he paused for an instant, uncertain whether to call the Count by his
title or to refer to him as his father-in-law.

'He's on the other
line, Doctor Brunetti. May I have him call you in
...'
It was the other man's turn to pause. 'The light's just
gone out. I’ll connect you.'

There followed a soft
click, after which Brunetti heard the deep baritone of his father-in-law's
voice, 'Falier.' Nothing  more.

'Good morning. It’s
Guido.'

The voice, as it had
done of late, softened. 'Ah, Guido, how are you? And how are the children?'

'We're all well. And
both of you?' He couldn't call her 'Donatella', and he wouldn't call her ‘The
Countess'.

'Both well, thank
you. What is it I can do for you?' The Count knew there could be no other
reason for Brunetti's call.

'I'd like to know
whatever you can tell me about the Lorenzoni family.'

During the ensuing
silence, Brunetti could all but hear the Count sorting through the decades of
information, scandal, and rumour which he possessed about most of the notables
of the city. 'Why is it you're interested in them, Guido?' the Count asked, and
then added, 'If you're at liberty to tell me’