Commissario Brunetti - 14 - Blood From a Stone by Donna Leon

Author:Donna Leon
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Mystery
ISBN: 9780871138873
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press
Published: 2005-03-15T10:20:33+00:00

15

Signorina Elettra’s arrival interrupted these reflections. She knocked and came in without waiting to be told to do so, approached his desk, and all but demanded, ‘What did he want?’ Then, as if aware of the effrontery of her question, she stepped back and added, ‘He seemed so eager to talk to you, I mean.’

An impulse Brunetti recognized as protective led him to answer, as calmly as though hers had been a normal question, ‘To ask about the murder of the black man.’

‘He was in a very strange mood,’ she volunteered, prodding for a more satisfactory answer.

Brunetti shrugged. ‘He’s always upset when there’s trouble. It reflects badly on the city.’

‘And that reflects badly on him,’ she completed.

‘Even if the victim isn’t one of us,’ Brunetti said, conscious as he spoke of how much he sounded like Chiara. Before Signorina Elettra’s universalist sympathies were offended, he explained, ‘A Venetian, I mean.’

She appeared to accept this and asked, ‘But why one of those poor devils? They never cause any trouble. All they want to do is stand there and sell their bags and try to have a chance at a decent life.’ She drew herself from these sentiments and asked, ‘Did he assign it to you?’

‘No, not specifically. But he didn’t say he wanted anyone else to handle it, so I assume I’m to continue.’ As he said these bland things, his mind kept attempting to follow the trail that led from Patta’s warning back to its source: if Patta had been threatened to warn Brunetti away, then those who continued the investigation would be in danger.

How had Patta phrased it? ‘We have to leave this alone’? How typical that was of him, to make the statement as though it were the result of long consideration and general assent. And ‘have to’, as if it were a truth universally acknowledged that the case was to be abandoned, the man’s murder forgotten or quietly assigned to the realm of forgetting, that overcrowded land.

A Patta who had never existed might have said, ‘I’m being threatened into silencing you, and the thought of losing my job or being hurt fills me with such fear that I will do whatever I can to corrupt the system of justice and stop you from doing your job, just to keep myself safe.’ This phantom Patta’s voice was so real that it all but blocked out Signorina Elettra’s speaking one. Brunetti blinked a few times and drew his attention back in time to hear her ask, ‘. . . still report to you?’

‘Yes, of course,’ he answered, as if he had heard the first half of her question. ‘I’ll go on as though I were in charge until I’m told otherwise.’

‘And then?’ she asked.

‘And then I’ll see who he puts in charge and either help that person or else continue to do things on my own.’ It was not necessary to name the person whose appointment would lead to the latter possibility: even in an organization that did not often hunger and thirst for justice’s sake, Lieutenant Scarpa’s contempt for it was noteworthy.

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