Beastly Things (8 page)

‘Cadorna,’ he said, naming the supreme commander of that benighted campaign.

‘We were told he was a hero,’ Raffi said.

Brunetti closed his eyes for a moment.

‘At least that’s what we were told in
liceo
, that he held off the attack of the Austrian invader.’

It was with some effort that Brunetti quelled the impulse to ask if the same teachers praised the brave Italian troops who had quelled the invading Ethiopians or the invading Libyans. He contented himself with saying only, ‘Italy declared war on Austria.’

‘Why?’ Raffi demanded, looking as though he could not believe this.

‘Why do countries ever declare war?’ Paola broke in to ask. ‘To get land, to grab natural resources, to maintain their power.’ It came to Brunetti to wonder why there was such fuss when parents explained the mechanism of sex to their children. Wasn’t it far more dangerous for parents to explain to them the mechanism of power?

He intervened. ‘You’re talking about aggressive war, I assume. Not like Poland, the last time?’

‘Of course not,’ Paola agreed. ‘Or Belgium, or Holland, or France. They were invaded and they fought back.’ Looking at the children, she said, ‘And your father’s right: we did declare war on Austria.’

‘But why?’ Raffi repeated.

‘I’ve always assumed from what I read that it was to get back land the Austrians had taken, or been given, in the past,’ Paola answered.

‘But how do you know who it belongs to?’ Chiara asked.

Seeing that their plates were empty – Raffi having managed to clean his during some lightning pause in the conversation – Paola held up her hands in the manner of a soccer umpire calling ‘Time’. ‘I want to beg the
indulgence
of everyone here,’ she said, meeting their eyes one by one. ‘I spent my morning in the apparently futile attempt to defend the idea that some books are better than others, so I cannot bear a second serious discussion, certainly not at this table, not while I’m eating my lunch. And so I suggest we change the topic to something frivolous and stupid like liposuction or break dancing.’

Raffi started to protest, but Paola cut him off by saying, ‘There are calamari
in umido
with peas to follow – and finocchio al forno for Chiara – and then there is a crostata di fragole, but it will be given only to those who are subject to my will.’

Brunetti watched Raffi consider his options. His mother always made more finocchio than one person could eat, and this was the best season for fragole. ‘My only joy in life,’ he said, picking up his plate and preparing to take it to the sink, ‘is to live in abject subservience to the will of my parents.’

Paola turned to Brunetti. ‘Guido, you read all those Romans: which goddess was it who gave birth to a snake?’

‘None of them, I fear.’

‘Left it to us humans, then.’

10

FOR ALL BRUNETTI
managed to achieve at the Questura that afternoon, he might as well have stayed at home for the rest of the day. Foa, he learned at four, had been chosen to accompany the Questore and a delegation from Parliament on a tour of the MOSE project – that money-guzzler that would, or would not, save the city from
acqua alta
– and then to dinner in Pellestrina. ‘This is why no one’s ever in Rome to vote,’ Brunetti muttered to himself when he hung up from receiving this news. He knew he could easily call the office of the Magistrate of the Waters and ask the question about the tides, but he preferred to keep within the confines of the Questura any precise information about the nature of the investigation.

He spoke briefly with Patta, who said that he, in the absence of the Questore, had spoken to the press and given the usual assurances that there was every expectation of a speedy arrest in the case and that they were following various leads. Things had been slow for the last month
– few
major crimes in the region – so the famished press was bound to fall upon this one. And how refreshing readers would find it to have a male victim for a change; it had been open season on women since the beginning of the year: one a day had been murdered in Italy, usually by the ex boyfriend or husband, the killer – according to the press – always driven by a ‘
raptus di gelosia
’, which excuse was sure to appear as the main pillar of the subsequent defence. If Brunetti ever lost his temper with Scarpa and did him a deliberate injury, he would surely plead a
raptus di gelosia
, though he was hard pressed to think of a reason why he would feel jealous of the Lieutenant.

Pucetti called after six to say he had had a technical problem but had just managed to isolate some still photos from the first video and was sure to have the prints within an hour or so. Brunetti told him that the following morning would do.

He resisted the urge to call Signorina Elettra and ask what success she had had with her friend in the health office, sure that she would let him know as soon as she learned anything, but no less impatient for that.

Becalmed, Brunetti flicked on his computer and tapped in
mucche
, wondering what Vianello and Signorina Elettra found so objectionable in those poor beasts. His family was Venetian as far back as anyone could remember, and then well beyond, so there was no atavistic memory of a great-great somebody who had kept a cow in the barn behind the house and thus no explanation for the sympathy Brunetti felt for them. He had never milked one; to the best of his memory had never done more than touch the noses of friendly cattle safely behind fences when they went walking in the mountains. Paola, even more fully urban than he, admitted that they frightened her, but Brunetti had never been able to understand this. They
were
, he believed, perfect milk machines: grass went in one end and milk came out the other: it was ever so.

He chose an article at random from those listed and began to read. After an hour, a shaken Brunetti turned off the computer, made a steeple of his palms and pressed his lips against it. So that was it, and that was why intermittently vegetarian Chiara, though she would occasionally backslide when in the presence of a roast chicken, adamantly refused to eat beef. And Vianello and Signorina Elettra. He wondered how it was that he had not known all of this. Surely everything he had just read was public knowledge; to some people it was common knowledge.

He considered himself a broadly read man, and yet much of this he had not known. The destruction of the rain forest to clear it for cattle: of course, he knew about that. Mad Cow and Foot and Mouth: he was familiar with them, as well, with their coming and their going. Only it seemed they were not gone, not really.

Brunetti’s ignorance had evaporated as he read the long account of a South American rancher who had attended an animal husbandry programme at a university in the United States. He painted a picture of animals that were born sick, kept alive only by massive doses of antibiotics, made productive by equal doses of hormones, and who died still sick. The writer ended the article by stating that he would never eat beef unless it was one of his own animals and he had overseen its raising and slaughter. Like Paola, who had heard too much that day about books, Brunetti suddenly decided he had read too much about beef. Soon before seven, he left his office, went downstairs and wrote a note for Foa, asking about the tides, and left the Questura; he started towards home, passing eventually through no-longer-crowded Campo
Santa
Maria Formosa. Campo San Bortolo was busy, but he had no trouble crossing it, nor were there many people on the bridge.

He arrived in an empty apartment before seven-thirty, took off his jacket and shoes, went down to the bedroom and retrieved his copy of the plays of Aeschylus – he didn’t know what force had driven him back to read them again – and sprawled himself on the sofa in Paola’s study, eager to read a book in which there was no risk of sentimentality – only bleak human truth – and eager to tell Paola about the cows.

Agamemnon was in the midst of greeting his wife after his decades-long absence by telling her that her speech of welcome, like his absence, had been much prolonged, and the hair on the back of Brunetti’s neck had begun to rise at the man’s folly, when he heard Paola’s key in the lock. What would she do, he wondered, if he were to betray her, shame her, and bring a new lover into their home? Less than Clytemnestra did, he suspected, and without physical violence. But he had no doubt that she would do her best to destroy him with words and with the power of her family, and he was sure she would leave him with nothing.

He heard her set down some shopping bags by the door. While hanging up her jacket, she would see his. He called her name, and she called back that she’d be there in a minute. Then he heard the rustle of the plastic bags and her footsteps retreating towards the kitchen.

She wouldn’t do it for jealousy, he knew, but from injured pride and a sense of honour betrayed. Her father, with a phone call, would see that he was quietly transferred to some stagnant, Mafia-infested village in Sicily; she’d have every sign of him out of the apartment in a day. Even his books. And she’d never speak his name again; perhaps
with
the children, though they’d know enough not to name him or ask about him. Why did knowing this make him so happy?

She was back, carrying two glasses of prosecco. He had been so preoccupied with their separation and her revenge that he had not heard the pop of the cork, though it was a sound that had the beauty of music for Brunetti.

Paola handed him a glass and tapped his knee until he pulled his feet up and made room for her. He sipped. ‘This is the champagne,’ he said.

‘I know,’ she said, sipping in her turn. ‘I felt I deserved a reward.’

‘What for?’

‘Suffering fools.’

‘Gladly?’

She gave a snort of contempt. ‘Listening to their nonsense and pretending to pay attention to it or pretending to think their idiotic ideas are worthy of discussion.’

‘The thing about good books?’

She pushed her hair back with one hand, scratched idly at the base of her skull. In profile, she was the same woman he had met and loved decades ago. The blonde hair was touched with white, but it was hard to see unless one were very close. Nose, chin, line of the mouth: they were all the same. Seen from the front, he knew, there were creases around her eyes and at the corners of her mouth, but she could still cause heads to turn on the street or at a dinner party.

She took a deep swallow and flopped against the back of the sofa, careful not to spill any wine. ‘I don’t know why I bother to keep teaching,’ she said, and Brunetti did not remark that it was because she loved it. ‘I could stop. We own the house, and you make enough to support us both.’ And if things got rough, he did not say, they could
always
pawn the Canaletto in the kitchen. Let her talk, let her get rid of it.

‘What would you do, lie on the sofa all day in your pyjamas and read?’ he asked.

She patted his knee with her free hand. ‘You pretty much prevent my taking up residence on the sofa, don’t you?’

‘But what
would
you do?’ he asked, suddenly serious.

She took another sip, then said, ‘That’s the problem, of course. If
you
quit, you could always be a security guard and walk around all night sticking little pieces of paper into the doorways of houses and stores to show you’d been there. But no one’s going to ask me to come and talk to them about the English novel, are they?’

‘Probably not,’ he agreed.

‘Might as well live,’ she confused him by saying, but he was so eager to talk about the cows that he did not ask her to explain what she had said.

‘How much do you know about cows?’ he asked.

‘Oh, my God. Not another one,’ she said and sank down on the sofa, her hand pressed to her eyes.

11

‘WHAT DO YOU
mean, “Another one”?’ he asked, though what he really wanted to know was whom she included among them.

‘As I have told you at least twelve thousand times in the last decades: don’t be smart with me, Guido Brunetti,’ she said with exaggerated severity. ‘You know exactly who they are: Chiara, Signorina Elettra, and Vianello. And from what you’ve said, I suspect those last two will soon have the Questura declared a no-meat zone.’

After what he had read that afternoon, Brunetti thought this might not be such a bad thing. ‘They’re just the lunatic fringe, though other people there are beginning to think about it, too,’ he offered.

‘If you ever set foot in a supermarket and saw what people are buying, you wouldn’t say that, believe me.’

The few times he had had that experience, Brunetti had – he confessed to himself – been fascinated by what he saw people buying, given the probability that they
intended
to eat those things. So rarely did he shop for groceries that Brunetti had been uncertain as to the nature of some of the products he saw and could not work out whether they were meant for consumption or for some other domestic purpose; scouring sinks, perhaps.

He remembered, as a boy, being sent to the store to get, for example, a half-kilo of limon beans. He had come home carrying them in the cylinder of newspaper in which the shopkeeper had wrapped them. But now they came in a clear plastic package bound with a bow of golden ribbon, and it was impossible to buy less than a kilo. His mother had lit the fire in the kitchen with the newspaper: the plastic and the bow went into the garbage after their fifteen minutes of freedom from the shelves.

‘We don’t eat as much meat as we used to,’ he said.

‘That’s only because Chiara’s too young to leave home.’

‘Is that what she’d do?’

‘Or stop eating,’ Paola declared.

‘She’s really that convinced?’

‘Yes.’

‘How about you?’ he asked. It was Paola, after all, who decided what they would eat every day.

She finished her champagne and twirled the glass between her palms, as though hoping to start a fire with it.

‘I like it less and less,’ she finally said.

‘Because of how it tastes or because of what you read about it?’