12. Uniform Justice by Donna Leon

Author:Donna Leon [Leon, Donna]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Mystery & Detective, General, Romance, Suspense, Fiction, Police Procedural, Police, Brunetti; Guido (Fictitious Character), Venice (Italy), Italy, Military Education, Military Cadets
ISBN: 9780143117070
Google: iLWHcHy-qOIC
Amazon: 0142004227
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: 2003-01-01T18:30:00+00:00

15

Outside, he reached for his telefonino, only to realize he’d left it in the office or at home in another jacket. He resisted the siren song whispering to him that it was futile to call Signora Moro this late in the afternoon, that she wouldn’t talk to him. He resisted it, at any rate, long enough to make two unsuccessful attempts to call her from public phones. The first, one of the new, aerodynamic silver phones that had replaced the reliable ugly orange ones, refused to accept his plastic phone card, and the second rejected his attempts with a repeated mechanical bleat in place of a dialling tone. He yanked the card from the phone, slipped it back in his wallet and, feeling justified that he had at least made the effort, decided to go back to the Questura for what little remained of the working day.

As he stood in the gondola traghetto that ran between the Salute and San Marco, his Venetian knees adjusted automatically to the thrust and counter-thrust between the strokes of the gondolieri’s oars and the waves of the incoming tide. He looked ahead as they made their slow passage across the Canal Grande, struck by just how jaded a person could become: ahead of him lay Palazzo Ducale, and behind it popped up the gleaming domes of the Basilica di San Marco: Brunetti stared as though they were nothing more than the painted backdrop in a dull, provincial production of Otello. How had he got to the point where he could look on such beauty and not be shaken? Accompanied by the dull squeal of the oars, he followed this train of thought and asked himself how, equally, he could sit across from Paola at a meal and not want to run his hands across her breasts or how he could see his children sitting side by side on the sofa, doing something stupid like watching television, and not feel his bowels churn with terror at the many dangers that would beset their lives.

The gondola glided in to the landing, and he stepped up on to the dock, telling himself to leave his stupid preoccupations in the boat. Long experience had taught him that his sense of wonder was still intact and would return, bringing back with it an almost painful awareness of the beauty that surrounded him at every turn.

A beautiful woman of his acquaintance had, years ago, attempted to convince him that her beauty was in some ways a curse because it was all that anyone cared about, to the almost total exclusion of any other quality she might possess. At the time, he had dismissed it as an attempt to win compliments, which he was more than willing to give, but now perhaps he understood what she meant, at least in relation to the city. No one really cared what happened to her – how else explain her successive recent governments? – just so long as they could profit from and be seen in the reflection of her beauty, at least for as long as that beauty lasted.

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