by Donna Leon
‘I think they are,’ Brunetti answered. ‘Paola does, too.’ He seldom admitted such a thing and so added immediately, driven by something close to superstition, ‘But neither of us is a reliable witness, I’m afraid.’ It was too early to ask about her children, although they might well be the reason she was there.
‘What faculty do you teach in, Professoressa?’ Brunetti asked instead, reassuring her again that Paola had not given him any information about her.
‘Architecture. I teach part time now because I work as a consultant in urban design. Mostly in Turkey, but in Romania and Hungary, too. I travel a lot.’
Silence fell. Brunetti sat and waited, the tactic he’d learned was most effective. The people who came to see him wanted to talk about something, and sooner or later, if they were left alone and not burdened with questions, they would.
After at least a minute had passed, Professoressa Crosera said, ‘My kids are good, too. But my son has … has changed.’ She leaned forward, and Brunetti thought she was going to reach for her bag and show him a photo of either the still-good daughter or the other child. But she was merely shifting around in her chair and soon grew still again.
‘I’m worried …’ she began, but her voice failed her after this word. She closed her eyes, put her hands to her mouth, and pushed her head up and down against them.
Brunetti turned away and stared out the window, the only decent thing to do. It had started to rain, a patchy, spitting rain that would irritate people and do the farmers no good at all. Though irredeemably urban, Brunetti never failed to think of the farmers when it rained – regardless of the season – wishing them good fortune, enriched soil, good crops. Over the years, the rain had destroyed his shoes, soaked through his raincoats, once ruined his ceiling, but still he welcomed it, approved of it, and took physical pleasure in watching it fall.
The rain grew heavier, and he wondered if Professoressa Crosera had left a coat with the porter downstairs. He had, he knew, two extra umbrellas in his armadio: easy enough to give her one when they were finished. But how could they finish when they had not even begun?
‘It’s about him,’ he heard her say. Brunetti saw that her eyes were still closed, although her hands were now folded in her lap.
A splatter against the windows pulled at his attention, and he returned to studying the rain.
‘I think I can talk now,’ she said in a calmer voice. ‘My son,’ she said, looking across at Brunetti, who had turned to her and met her glance, ‘is fifteen. He’s at the Albertini. They both are.’ Brunetti, had he not decided that his children should go to state schools, would surely have sent them there. Private, expensive, with a curriculum taught almost entirely in English, the Albertini, housed in a palazzo near Campo SS. Giovanni e Paolo, had a good reputation and deserved it: most graduates went on to university, many of them having won scholarships to study abroad.
‘It’s a very good school,’ Brunetti said.
It took some time for her to nod and confirm this.
‘How long have your children been there?’ Brunetti asked, not wanting to refer specifically to her son.
‘Sandro’s been there for two years. He’s in the second year of liceo.’
‘And your daughter?’ Brunetti inquired mildly, as though this question would naturally follow.
‘She’s in the fourth year.’
‘Are they doing well?’ Brunetti asked, as vague a question as he could make it.
‘Aurelia is,’ she answered instantly, as if responding to a benediction. ‘Sandro …’ she began, then let her voice trail off. After a moment, she seemed to force herself to finish the sentence. ‘… isn’t. Not any more.’
‘Doesn’t he study enough?’ Brunetti asked from sheer politeness, already considering what the reasons might be for her son’s failure to do well.
‘He doesn’t study,’ she said haltingly. ‘He did. When he began. But this year …’ Her hands sought and found the inflexible arms of the chair. Professoressa Crosera stared at Brunetti’s desk, as though reading there school reports about descending grades and deteriorating conduct.
‘Hummm,’ Brunetti murmured, the sort of concerned noise one made at bad news, any bad news. He wanted her to offer the information, not to have to pull it from her by force of crafty questioning. Brunetti continued to think of possible reasons, and drugs sprang instantly to mind, that first fruit of every parent’s nightmare cornucopia.
Recently, Brunetti had found himself unconsciously tightening the muscles of his hips when he walked down the stairs from their apartment. He’d not noticed the strain until he’d one day heard an almost groaning noise escape his lungs as he stepped off the last step and could relax his body. Much the same thing happened when he heard about teenagers veering into the perils of modern life: he tensed his spirit and tightened his mind against the entry of any thought involving his own children and forced himself to remain calm at the news that a teenager was behaving erratically.
‘Last year, Sandro was second in his class. But this term – even though it’s only been two months – he’s had bad reports from his teachers. It’s too early for grades, but he doesn’t bring books home, and I’ve never seen him doing any homework. Or reading.’
‘Ah,’ Brunetti said softly, forced to consider the contrast with his own kids, who brought friends home to study together or went to their homes to prepare for tests; happy with classes, excited at the thought of learning.
She crossed her legs again and then crossed them the other way. ‘My husband didn’t …’ she began and quickly changed it to, ‘Finally I decided I should come here to try to get some information.’
Brunetti, who thought she had come to give information, said nothing. Many people, he knew, considered it a betrayal to reveal anything to the police. How easy would it be for him, Brunetti asked himself, to reveal something about his own children to a stranger? The fact that Professoressa Crosera had come to the police – not to a doctor, the social services, even a priest – was suggestive of the sort of subject she was there to talk about.
‘What information is it you’d like to have, Professoressa?’
In a voice somehow shifted to a higher pitch, she asked, ‘I know it’s a crime to sell drugs, but is it a crime to use them?’
So that was it, he thought with no surprise and was relieved to be able to tell her, ‘No. Not to use them. The crime is to sell them, especially near a school or to young people.’ He saw the relief this gave her.
‘I wanted to make sure,’ she finally said. Thoughtful, she continued, ‘So if all you do is use them, you won’t have any trouble?’ At the sound of this absurdity, her face clouded. Hastily, she added, ‘With the authorities, I mean.’
‘So long as you’re not selling them, no,’ Brunetti answered, pretending not to have understood the ill-phrased question.
‘Do you think that’s a good law?’ she surprised Brunetti by asking.
Brunetti felt no obligation, and less desire, to comment on the justice of the law and so answered, ‘It’s not important what either of us thinks about the law.’
‘Then what is important?’
‘That innocent people be protected. That’s what laws are meant to do,’ he said. Brunetti, in his heart, didn’t believe this: laws, passed by the people in power, were meant to keep them in power. If they also protected innocent people, well and good, but that was nothing more than a welcome side effect.
‘I never thought of it that way,’ she said.
Brunetti, who never had and did not, permitted himself a shrug. ‘I suppose most people don’t think much about the purpose of the law.’
‘To punish people. That’s what I’ve always thought laws were meant to do.’ She reflected a moment and then smiled. ‘I think I prefer your interpretation, Commissario.’
Brunetti nodded but did not comment. Allowing his impatience to be heard, he said, ‘We were speaking about your son, Professoressa.’
4
The
brusqueness in Brunetti’s voice startled her. ‘Yes, yes. Of course,’ she said. She lowered her eyes to Brunetti’s desk and appeared to study it. Finally she said, ‘I think he’s taking drugs.’ She stopped, as if she’d done what she’d come to do and could leave now.
Brunetti realized he would have to give things a shove. ‘You think or you know?’
‘I know,’ she said, then immediately added, ‘That is, I think I know. The kids at the school talk, and one of them told Aurelia that Sandro was going to be in big trouble because of what he was doing.’
‘“Big trouble?”‘ Brunetti asked. And when she nodded, he continued, ‘Did he say it was because of drugs?’
Her surprise was evident. ‘What else could it be?’ When Brunetti didn’t answer, she explained, ‘His little sister is in Sandro’s class: she’s the one who told him.’ Voice suddenly growing insistent, she said, ‘That’s the only thing it could be. Drugs.’
‘How long ago did this happen?’
‘He told Aurelia about a week ago. She told me two days ago.’
‘Why did your daughter wait to tell you?’
‘She said she wanted to pay attention to him – Sandro – for a while before she said anything.’
‘And did she?’
Her look was sharp. Sounding defensive, she said, ‘She tried to talk to him, but he got angry and told her to mind her own business.’
Brunetti thought of his own children and how they occasionally spoke to one another. His scepticism must have been evident in his face, for she said, ‘He’s never talked to Aurelia like that before. She said he got really angry.’
‘What else have you noticed, Professoressa?’ he asked. ‘How has he changed?’
‘He’s moody, and he doesn’t like it if I ask him how he’s doing at school. He doesn’t come home for dinner sometimes, or he calls and says a friend’s invited him to stay and eat.’
‘Do you ever doubt that?’ Brunetti asked neutrally.
‘I’m not a policeman,’ she snapped, then looked across at Brunetti and said, ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.’ She stopped there and did not try to explain or excuse herself, and Brunetti liked her for that.
‘I’ve heard far worse,’ Brunetti said, then asked, ‘Has your husband noticed these changes?’
She nodded a few times, looked away, looked back, and said, ‘I told you I travel for work,’ and waited for Brunetti to acknowledge this.
He nodded and she went on, ‘I’m sometimes away for a few days at a time.’
‘And the children? Who takes care of them?’ Brunetti had no sooner said it than he realized it was none of his business.
‘They go and stay with my sister,’ she said.
Because he had already been too invasive with the other question, Brunetti asked nothing about her husband.
His thoughts must have been easy to read because she said, ‘My husband works in Verona and sometimes isn’t finished before the last train leaves. So he stays with friends, but not often.’
Had this been a normal interview and had Brunetti felt the need to pick at anything that caught his attention, he would have asked, ‘Friends?’ or, ‘How often?’ Instead, thinking of the man with the thick grey hair, he asked, ‘What does he do?’
‘He’s an accountant,’ she said and stopped. She gave Brunetti a quick glance and looked away, then added, as though it were part of the previous sentence, ‘He told me Sandro’s too thin and doesn’t pay attention to what’s said to him.’ She stopped and Brunetti was tempted to say that this was the nature of teenagers.
In the face of his silence, she continued, ‘If I mention drugs, my husband says it’s impossible that Sandro could be taking them.’ She pressed her lips together and stared at the floor.
Brunetti decided not to comment on this and asked, instead, ‘What else have you noticed, Professoressa?’
She turned to gaze out of the window, where it was now raining heavily. Propping her right elbow on the arm of her chair, she rested her forehead in her right hand then said, ‘He doesn’t talk much any more. It’s as though he were wearing a headset and listening to someone else, or music. I don’t know. If I ask him a question, he always asks me to repeat it, and then he takes a long time before he answers.’ She looked up at Brunetti and continued. ‘I don’t think he’s sleeping well, and he gets angry easily. He used to be very sweet-tempered.’
As she spoke, Brunetti decided that, although Professoressa Crosera was Paola’s colleague, or friend, she was not his, and so he had no obligation to spend much more time on this, a problem that could be better handled by the social services. Unwilling to confront her directly, he said, ‘If I’d described my son, three years ago, I would have said most of what you just did, except about the sleeping.’
Her surprise was legible on her face. She folded her hands in her lap, like a student called in to talk to the preside, aware that she had done something wrong but not sure just what.
Brunetti let some time pass then said, quite without thinking, ‘I’m afraid I still don’t understand why you’re here, Professoressa.’
This time, without hesitation, she said, ‘I thought the police would do something.’
‘Could you be clearer about that? What is it you’d like us to do?’
‘Find who’s selling him these drugs. And arrest them.’
Ah, how wonderful to be able to do that, Brunetti thought. Arrest them and keep them until they went for trial and then have the judges send them to prison, along with the people who worked with them or for them: all the little dealers who sat in the parks, waiting for school kids to come by and sit down next to them, or who met them at a disco or at the cinema or – surprise, surprise – just outside their schools.
Pity it didn’t work that way. The reality was quite other: arrest them, take them to the Questura and question them, perhaps threaten them, even though they all knew that was useless; write out a formal notice that they had been arrested. If they were foreign, tell them they had 48 hours to leave the country: and let them go. If they were Italian, say they were going to be investigated, and send them home.
‘Well, why don’t you do something about it?’ she asked in the face of his continuing silence.
Brunetti slid a notebook closer and picked up a pen. He wrote Professoressa Crosera’s name at the top, the names of her two children, and the name of their school beneath it, leaving an empty place to fill in her husband’s name later. He was tempted to slide it over to her and ask her to show him if anything there gave her an idea of whom to arrest, and on what charge? Instead, holding the pen poised above the notebook, he said, ‘If we talk to your daughter’s friend, either a lawyer or one of his parents would have to be in the room when we spoke to him. Do you want to give me his name?’
For the first time since she entered the room, perhaps for the first time since this had happened to her son, Professoressa Crosera was faced with the legal consequences of the situation in which she found herself. Once a whirlpool formed, even people sailing on calm and tranquil seas were at risk of being swept towards it and engulfed by it.
‘No,’ she said, now raising her voice. ‘I can’t do that to him.’ This time, she did not notice her implicit insult to the police.
Brunetti set the pen on the desk and folded his hands in front of him. ‘Do you know where your son is getting the drugs you think he’s taking, Professoressa Crosera, or what kind of drugs he’s using?’
Asked a question she was not prepared for, she evaded Brunetti’s glance and stared at her knees.
Brunetti hated what drugs did to people, hated their corroding influence on even the best of spirits, yet he lived with three people who believed that they should all be declared legal. Easy answers, easy answers, why did people always want easy answers?
Drugs changed everything. He’d had women offer themselves to him, men offer him their wives, even their daughters, if only he would not arrest them and put them in a place where they thought they cou
ld not find drugs. He’d once seen a woman still wearing her bridal gown dead of an overdose, and once he’d been called to an apartment where a three-year-old boy had died of starvation and neglect during the week-long heroin party his parents had treated themselves to with money stolen from all four of the dead child’s grandparents.
‘No,’ he heard her say. After another long pause and in a much different voice, she added, ‘If I asked him, he’d lie to me.’ Brunetti watched her accept this, and then she added, explaining it to herself as well as to him, ‘I don’t know how I know that, but it’s true.’ She put her hand to her forehead and sat in silence. He was again staring out the window when he heard her say, voice rough and almost inaudible, ‘He’s my baby, and I don’t know what to do.’
He turned back to her; the sight of the woman’s tears slipping under her fingers and dripping on to her jacket, where the wool quickly absorbed them, propelled Brunetti to his feet. He went over to the window and stared at the façade of the church. San Lorenzo: a martyr.
Brunetti’s father had died a long and terrible death from cancer in a hospital run by people who viewed human suffering as a fine way to pave the way to salvation and who had thus refused to give him painkillers in the last days of his life. Three days before his father’s death, Brunetti, by then already a commissario di polizia, had stolen a box of ampoules of morphine from the room where the police kept confiscated drugs and weapons and had administered them, at eight-hour intervals, to his dying father. After his father died, in peace and in the arms of his younger son, Brunetti had gone home and broken open the remaining ampoules and flushed all the morphine down the kitchen sink. He believed very little in an absolute sense, but he knew suffering was always wrong.
‘Can you do anything?’ she asked in her normal voice from the other side of the room.
She was again capable of speech, so Brunetti went back to his desk.
‘I can try to find out if drugs are being sold at his school and who’s selling them,’ Brunetti said. He couldn’t remember having heard any rumours about the Albertini, but to find out would at least be a place to begin.
