Part 4 (1/2)

He took a very deep breath. Seeing that, Chiara slid to the edge of the bed and fished for her shoes with her toes. 'How many bottles do you want?' she asked truculently. 'Three.'

She bent down and tied her shoes. Brunetti reached out a hand and caressed her head, but she pulled herself to one side to avoid him. When her shoes were tied, she stood and s.n.a.t.c.hed her jacket up from the floor. She walked past him, saying nothing, and started down the hall. 'Ask your mother for the money,' he called to her and went down the hall to the bathroom. While he was was.h.i.+ng his hands, he heard the front door slam.

Back in the kitchen, Paola was busy setting the table, but only for three. 'Where's Raffi?' Brunetti asked.

'He's got an oral exam this afternoon, so he's spending the day in the library'

'What's he going to eat?'

'He'll get some sandwiches somewhere.'

'If he's got an exam, he should have a good meal first.'

She looked across the room at him and shook her head.

'What?' he asked. 'Nothing.'

'No, tell me. What are you shaking your head for?'

'I wonder, at times, how it was I married such an ordinary man.'

'Ordinary?' Of all the insults Paola had hurled at him over the years, this one somehow seemed the worst. 'Ordinary?' he repeated.

She hesitated for a moment, then launched herself into an explanation. 'First you try to blackmail your daughter into going out to buy wine she doesn't drink, and then you worry that your son doesn't eat. Not that he doesn't study, but that he doesn't eat.'

'What should I worry about if not that?'

'That he doesn't study,' Paola shot back.

'He hasn't done anything but study for the last year, that and moon about the house, thinking about Sara.'

'What's Sara got to do with it?'

What did any of this, Brunetti wondered, have to do with it.

'What did Chiara say?' he asked.

'That she offered to go if you'd go with her, but you refused.'

'If I had wanted to go, I would have gone myself.'

'You're always saying you don't have enough time to spend with the children, and when you get the chance, you don't want to.'

'Going to a bar to buy a bottle of wine isn't exactly how I want to spend time with my children.'

'What is, sitting around the table and explaining to them the way money gives people power?'

'Paola,' he said, enunciating all three of the syllables slowly, 'I have no idea what any of this is about, but I'm fairly sure it doesn't have anything to do with sending Chiara to the store.'

She shrugged and turned back to the large pot that was boiling on the stove.

'What is it, Paola?' he asked, staying where he was but reaching out to her with his voice.

She shrugged again.

Tell me, Paola. Please.'

She kept her back to him and spoke in a soft voice. 'I'm beginning to feel old, Guido. Raffi's got a girlfriend, and Chiara's almost a woman. I'll be fifty soon.' He marvelled at her maths but said nothing. 'I know it's stupid, but I find it depressing, as if my life were all used up, the best part gone.' Good Lord, and she called him ordinary?

He waited, but it seemed she had finished.

She took the lid off the pot and was, for a moment, enveloped in the cloud of steam that spilled up from it. She took a long wooden spoon and stirred at whatever was in the pot, managing to look anything but witchlike as she did it. Brunetti tried, with very little success, to strip his mind clear of the love and familiarity of more than twenty years and look at her objectively. He saw a tall, slender woman in her early forties with tawny blonde hair that spilled down to her shoulders. She turned and shot him a glance, and he saw the long nose and dark eyes, the broad mouth which had, for decades, delighted him.

'Does that mean I get to trade you in?' he risked.

She fought the smile for an instant but then gave in to it.

'Am I being a fool?' she asked.

He was about to tell her that, if she was, it was no more than he was accustomed to when the door burst open and Chiara launched herself back into the apartment 'Papa,' she shouted from down the hall, 'you didn't tell me.'

'Tell you what, Chiara?'

'About Francesca's father. That somebody killed him'

'You know her?' Brunetti asked.

She came down the hall, cloth bag hanging from one hand. Obviously, curiosity about the murder had driven her anger with Brunetti from her mind. 'Sure. We went to school together. Are you going to look for whoever did it?'

'I'm going to help,' he said, unwilling to open himself to what he knew would turn into unrelenting questioning. 'Did you know her very well?'

'Oh, no,' she said, surprising him by not claiming to have been her best friend and, as such, somehow privy to whatever he might learn. 'She hung around with that Pedrocci girl, you know, the one who had all those cats at home. She smelled, so no one would be her friend. Except Francesca.'

'Did Francesca have other friends?' Paola asked, interested herself now and hence willingly complicit in her husband's attempt to pry information from then-own child. 'I don't think I ever met her.'

'Oh, no, she never came back here with me. Anyone who wanted to play with her had to go back to her house. Her mamma insisted on that.'

'Did the girl with all the cats go?'

'Oh, yes. Her father's a judge, so Signora Trevisan didn't mind that she smelled.' Brunetti was struck by how clearly Chiara saw the world. He had no idea in which direction Chiara would travel, but he had no doubt that she would go far.

'What's she like, Signora Trevisan?' Paola asked and then shot a glance toward Brunetti, who nodded. It had been gracefully done. He pulled out a chair and silently took a place at the table.

'Mamma, why don't you let Papa ask these questions since he's the one who wants to know about her?' Without waiting for her mother's lie, Chiara walked across the kitchen and folded herself into Brunetti's lap, placing the now forgotten, or forgiven, bottles on the table in front of them. 'What do you want to know about her, Papa?' Well, at least she hadn't called him Commissario.