Uniform Justice

by Donna Leon

  Brunetti stopped himself from remarking that it was what they could

  expect from a public which viewed authority and all who attempted to

  impose it as adversaries. He had read enough to know that there were

  countries whose citizens did not perceive their government as an

  inimical force, where they believed, instead, that the government

  existed to serve their needs and respond to their wishes. How would he

  react if someone he knew were to maintain this to be true here, in this

  city, in this country? Religious mania would be less convincing proof

  of mental imbalance.

  Vianello and Pucetti were to go back that afternoon and question the

  rest of the boys and the remaining faculty. Leaving it at that,

  Brunetti told them he would be up in his office, and left.

  Curiosity and the desire to see Signorina Elettra and learn what she

  had managed to discover led him off the stairs at her floor and into

  her small office. Here he had the sensation that he had stepped into a

  jungle or a forest: four tall trees with enormous leaves, broad, dark

  green and shiny, stood in terra cotta pots against the back wall. With

  their darkness as a backdrop, Signorina Elettra, today dressed in

  colours usually seen only on Buddhist monks, sat at her desk. The

  total effect was of an enormous piece of exotic fruit exposed in front

  of the tree from which it had fallen.

  "Lemons?" he asked.

  "Yes/

  "Where did you get them?"

  "A friend of mine just directed Lulu at the opera. He had them sent

  over after the last performance."

  "Lulu?"

  She smiled. "The very same."

  "I don't remember lemons in Lulu," he said, puzzled, but willing, as

  ever, to be graced with illumination.

  "He set the opera in Sicily," she explained.

  "Ah," Brunetti whispered, trying to remember the plot. The music,

  mercifully, was gone. At a loss for what else to say, he asked, "Did

  you go and see it?"

  She took so long to answer that, at first, he thought he had somehow

  offended her with the question. Finally, she said, "No, sir. My

  standards are very low, of course, but I do draw the line at going to

  the opera in a tent. In a parking lot."

  Brunetti, whose aesthetic principles were entrenched well behind that

  same line, nodded and asked, "Have you been able to find out anything

  about Moro?"

  Her smile was fainter, but it was still recognizably a smile. "Some

  things have come in. I'm waiting for a friend in Siena to tell me more

  about the wife Federica."

  "What about her?" Brunetti asked.

  "She was involved in an accident there."

  "What kind of accident?"

  "Hunting."

  "Hunting? A woman in a hunting accident?" he asked, his disbelief

  audible.

  She raised her eyebrows as if to suggest that anything at all was

  possible in a world where Lulu was set in Sicily, but instead said, "I

  shall pass over the glaring sexism in that remark, Commissario." She

  paused a didactic moment, then continued, "It happened a couple of

  years ago. She was staying with friends in the countryside near Siena.

  One afternoon, while she was out for a walk, she was shot in the leg.

  Luckily, she was found before she bled to death and taken to the

  hospital."

  "Was the hunter ever found?"

  "No, but it was hunting season so they assumed that a hunter had heard

  her and thought she was an animal and shot at the noise without seeing

  what it was."

  "And didn't bother to come and see what he had shot?" an indignant

  Brunetti asked. He added another question. "Or when he saw what he

  had shot, he didn't help her or call for help?"

  "It's what they do," she said, her voice matching his own in

  indignation. "You read the papers, don't you, every year when the

  season opens, about the way three or four of them get shot on the first

  day? It goes on all during hunting season. It's not only the ones who

  stumble over their own guns and blow their brains out." Brunetti

  thought her tone was devoid of anything approaching sympathy as she

  said this. They shoot one another, too," she went on, 'and get left to

  bleed to death because no one wants to run the risk of being arrested

  for having shot someone."

  He started to speak, but she cut him off and added, "As far as I'm

  concerned, it can't happen often enough."

  Brunetti waited for her to calm down and retract her words but then

  decided to leave the issue of her feelings toward

  hunters unexamined and asked, "Were the police called? When she was

  shot?"

  "I don't know. That's what I'm waiting for the police report."

  "Where is she now?" Brunetti asked.

  That's something else I'm trying to find out."

  "She's not with her husband?"

  "I don't know. I had a look at the files at the Comune, but she's not

  listed as resident at his address, even though they own the apartment

  jointly." So habituated had Brunetti become to her useful criminality

  that it did not for an instant trouble him that a person with greater

  sympathy for legal precision would translate her phrase, 'had a look

  at' as 'broke into'.

  There could certainly be many explanations for why Moro's wife was not

  registered as resident at his Dorsoduro address, though the most

  obvious interpretation was that she did not live with her husband. "Let

  me know when you get hold of the report on the shooting he said,

  wondering if this would launch her into further denunciation. Like

  most Venetians, Brunetti had no interest in hunting, judging it an

  endeavour that was expensive, inconvenient, and excessively loud.

  Further, experience as a policeman as well as his habit of reflecting

  upon human behaviour had too often suggested a frightening correlation

  between a man's interest in firearms and feelings of sexual

  inadequacy.

  "It could have been a warning," she said without preamble.

  The know," he answered, having thought this the instant she told him

  about the shooting. "But of what?"

  The scepticism that had seeped into Bmnetti's bones over the years

  forced him to suspect that Signora Moro's accident might have been

  something other than that. She must have cried out when she was shot,

  and the sound of a woman's scream would surely have brought any hunter

  running. Low as his opinion of hunters was, Brunetti could not believe

  that one of them would leave a woman lying on the ground, bleeding.

  That conviction led him to the consideration of what sort of person

  would be capable of doing so, which in its turn led him to consider

  what other sorts of violence such a person might be capable of.

  He added to these speculations the fact that Moro had served in

  Parliament for some time but had resigned about two years ago.

  Coincidence could link events either in kind or subject or time: the

  same sort of thing happened to different people or different things

  happened to the same person, or things happened at the same time. Moro

  had resigned from Parliament around the time his wife was injured.<
br />
  Ordinarily, this would hardly arouse suspicion, even in someone as

  instinctively mistrustful as Brunetti, were it not that the death of

  their son provided a point from which to begin a process of speculative

  triangulation around the ways in which the third event might be related

  to the other two.

  Brunetti thought of Parliament in the way most Italians thought of

  their mothers-in-law. Not due the loyalties created by ties of blood,

  a mother-in-law still demanded obedience and reverence while never

  behaving in a manner that would merit either. This alien presence,

  imposed upon a person's life by sheerest chance, made ever-increasing

  demands in return for the vain promise of domestic harmony. Resistance

  was futile, for opposition inevitably led to repercussions too devious

  to be foreseen.

  He lifted the phone and dialled his home number. When the machine

  answered after four rings, he hung up without speaking, bent down to

  his bottom drawer, and took out the phone book. He flipped it open to

  the Ps and kept turning pages until he found Perulli, Augusto. He

  tossed the book back into the drawer and dialled the number.

  After the third ring a man's voice answered. "Perulli."

  This is Brunetti. I need to speak to you."

  After a long pause, the man said, "I wondered when you'd call."

  "Yes," was Brunetti's only response.

  "I can see you in half an hour. For an hour. Then not until

  tomorrow

  "I'll come now Brunetti said.

  He kicked the drawer shut and left his office, then the Questura.

  Because he had half an hour, he chose to walk to Campo San Maurizio,

  and because he was early, he chose to stop and say hello to a friend in

  her workshop. But his mind was on things other than jewellery, so he

  did little more than exchange a kiss and promise to bring Paola to

  dinner some time soon; then he crossed the campo and headed up towards

  the Grand Canal.

  5"

  He had last been to the apartment six years ago, near the end of a long

  investigation of a trail of drug money that led from the noses of

  adolescents in New York to a discreet account in Geneva, a trail that

  paused long enough in Venice to invest in a couple of paintings meant

  to join the money in the vault of that eminently discreet bank. The

  money had made its way safely through the empyrean realms of

  cyberspace, but the paintings, made of less celestial matter, had been

  stopped at Geneva airport. One by Palma il Vecchio and the other by

  Marieschi and thus both part of the artistic heritage of the country,

  neither could be exported, at least not legally, from Italy.

  A mere four hours after the discovery of the paintings, Augusto Perulli

  had called the Cambinieri to report their theft. No proof could be

  found that Perulli had been informed of their discovery a possibility

  that would raise the unthinkable idea of police corruption and so it

  was decided that Brunetti, who had gone to school with Perulli and had

  remained on friendly terms with him for decades, should be sent to talk

  to him. That decision had not been taken until the day after the

  paintings were found, by which time the man who was transporting them

  had somehow been released from police custody, though the precise

  nature of the bureaucratic oversight permitting that error had never

  been explained to the satisfaction of the Italian police.

  When Brunetti finally did talk to his old schoolfriend, Perulli said

  that he had become aware of the paintings' disappearance only the day

  before but had no idea how it could have happened. When Brunetti asked

  how it could be that only two paintings had been taken, Perulli

  prevented all further questioning by giving Brunetti his word of honour

  that he knew nothing about it, and Brunetti believed him.

  Two years later, the man who had been detained with the paintings was

  again arrested by the Swiss, this time for trafficking in illegal

  aliens, and this time in Zurich. In the

  5i hope of making a deal with the police, he admitted that he had

  indeed been given those paintings by Perulli, and asked to take them

  across the border to their new owner, but by then Perulli had been

  elected to Parliament and was thus exempt from arrest or prosecution.

  "Ciao, Guido Perulli said when he opened the door to Brunetti,

  extending his hand.

  Brunetti was conscious of how theatrical was his own hesitation before

  he took Perulli's hand: Perulli was equally conscious of it. Neither

  pretended to be anything but wary of the other, and both were open in

  studying the other for signs of the years that had passed since their

  last meeting.

  "It's been a long time, hasn't it?" Perulli said, turning away and

  leading Brunetti into the apartment. Tall and slender, Perulli still

  moved with the grace and fluidity of the youth he had shared with

  Brunetti and their classmates. His hair was still thick, though longer

  than he had worn it in the past, his skin smooth and taut, rich with

  the afterglow of a summer spent in the sun. When was it that he had

  begun searching the faces of the acquaintances of his youth for the

  telltale signs of age? Brunetti wondered.

  The apartment was much as Brunetti remembered it: high ceilinged and

  well-proportioned, sofas and chairs inviting people to sit at their

  ease and speak openly, perhaps indiscreetly. Portraits of men and

  women from former eras hung on the walls: Perulli, he knew, spoke of

  them casually, suggesting that they were ancestors, when in reality his

  family had for generations lived in Castello and dealt in sausage and

  preserved meat.

  New were the ranks of silver-framed photos that stood on a not

  particularly distinguished copy of a sixteenth-century Florentine

  credenza. Brunetti paused to examine them and saw reflected in them

  the trajectory of Perulli's career: the young man with his friends; the

  university graduate posed with one of the leaders of the political

  party to which Perulli

  had then given allegiance; while the adult man stood arm in arm with a

  former mayor of the city, the Minister of the Interior, and the

  Patriarch of Venice. Behind them, in an even more elaborate frame,

  Perulli's face smiled from the cover of a news magazine that had since

  abandoned publication. This photo, and Perulli's need that people see

  it, filled Brunetti, against his will, with an enormous sadness.

  "Can I offer you something?" Perulli asked from the other side of the

  living room, standing in front of a leather sofa and clearly wanting to

  settle this before he sat down.

  "No, nothing," Brunetti said. "Thanks."

  Perulli sat, pulling fussily at both legs of his trousers to keep them

  from stretching at the knees, a gesture Brunetti had observed before,

  but only in the old. Did he sweep the bottom part of his overcoat

  aside before he sat down on the vaporetto?

  The don't suppose you want to pretend we're still friends?" Perulli

  asked.

  The don't want to pretend anything, Augusto," Brunetti said. The just

  want to as
k you a few questions, and I'd like you to give me honest

  answers."

  "Not like the last time?" Perulli asked with a grin he tried to make

  boyish but succeeded only in making sly. It caused Brunetti a moment's

  uncertainty: there was something different about Perulli's mouth, about

  the way he held it.

  "No, not like the last time," Brunetti said, surprised at how calm he

  sounded, calm but tired.

  "And if I can't answer them?"

  Then tell me so, and I'll go

  Perulli nodded, and then said, The didn't have any choice, you know,

  Guido."

  Brunetti acted as though the other hadn't spoken and asked, "Do you

  know Fernando Moro?"

  He watched Perulli react to the name with something stronger than mere

  recognition.

  "Yes."

  "How well do you know him?"

  "He's a couple of years older than we are, and my father was a friend

  of his, so I knew him well enough to say hello to on the street or

  maybe go and have a drink with, at least when we were younger. But

  certainly not well enough to call him a friend." Some sense warned

  Brunetti what was going to come next, so he was prepared to hear

  Perulli say, "Not like I know you and so did not respond.

  "Did you see him in Rome?"

  "Socially or professionally?"

  "Either."

  "Socially, no, but I might have run into him a few times at