Uniform Justice by Donna Leon Read Free Book Online Page A

make his words.
    ‘I’ll see you later,’ he said, still unwilling to tell her what had happened. ‘Hug the kids for me,’ he said before he hung up.
    He sat at his desk for a few minutes, then drew some papers towards him and looked at them, reading through the words, understanding each one but not certain he understood what they intended to say. He set them aside, then pulled them back and read them again; this time the sentences made sense to him, though he could see no reason why anyone should find their messages important.
    He went to the window and studied the crane that stood constant guard over the church and the restoration that had yet to begin. He had read or been told once how much the equally motionless cranes that loomed over the empty shell of the opera house cost the city to maintain each day. Where did all the money go? he wondered. Who was it that reaped such enormous profits from so much inactivity? Idly, keeping his mind occupied with matters other than the death of young men, he began rough calculations. If the cranes cost five thousand Euros a day, it would cost the city almost two million Euros to keep them there a year, whether they worked or not. He stood for a long time, numbers moving around in his head in far greater activity than had been shown by any of those cranes for some time.
    Abruptly he turned away and went back to his desk. There was no one to call, so he left his office, went downstairs and out of the Questura. He walked to the bar at the foot of the bridge, where he had a
panino
and a glass of red wine and let the words of the day’s newspaper pass under his eyes.

6
    THOUGH HE PREVARICATED as much as he could, Brunetti still had no choice but eventually to return to the Questura. He stopped in the officers’ room to look for Vianello and found him there with Pucetti. The younger officer started to get to his feet, but Brunetti waved him back. There was only one other policeman in the room, sitting at a desk off to one side, talking on the phone.
    ‘Anything?’ he asked the two seated policemen.
    Pucetti glanced at Vianello, acknowledging his right to speak first.
    ‘I took him back,’ the Inspector began, ‘but he wouldn’t let me go in with him.’ He shrugged this away and asked, ‘You, sir?’
    ‘I spoke to Moro and to his cousin, who was there with him. She said the boy couldn’t have killed himself, seemed pretty insistent on it.’ Something kept Brunetti from telling the others how easy it had been for Moro to dismiss him.
    ‘His cousin, you said?’ Vianello interrupted, echoing his neutrality.
    ‘That’s what she told me.’ The habit of doubt, Brunetti reflected, the habit of seeking the lowest possible common moral denominator, had been bred into all of them. He wondered if there were some sort of psychological equation which correlated years of service with the police and an inability to believe in human goodness. And whether it was possible, or for how long it would be possible, to go back and forth between his professional world and his private world without introducing the contamination of the first to the second.
    His attention was recalled by Vianello, who had just finished saying something.
    ‘Excuse me?’ Brunetti said.
    ‘I asked if his wife was there,’ Vianello repeated.
    Brunetti shook his head. ‘I don’t know. No one else came in while I was there, but there’s no reason she would want to talk to me.’
    ‘Is there a wife?’ Pucetti asked, emphasizing the first word.
    Rather than admit that he didn’t know, Brunetti said, ‘I asked Signorina Elettra to see what she can find out about the family.’
    ‘There was something in the papers about them, I think,’ Vianello said. ‘Years ago.’ Brunetti and Pucetti waited for him to continue, but all the Inspector finally said was, ‘I don’t remember, but I think it was something about the wife.’
    ‘Whatever it is, she’ll find it,’ Pucetti declared.
    Years ago, Brunetti would