Free Death in a Strange Country by Donna Leon

up to Brunetti’s building, he slipped the engine
into neutral, hovered for the briefest of instants beside the embankment, and
let Brunetti jump to shore. Even before Brunetti could turn to wave his thanks,
Monetti was gone, swinging around, back down the way he had come, blue light
flashing as he took himself home to dinner.
     
    Brunetti walked up the calle, legs tired with all the jumping on and off boats that he seemed to have
been doing all day, since the first boat had picked him up here more than
twelve hours ago. He opened the enormous door into the building and closed it
quietly behind him. The narrow stairway that hairpinned its way up to the top
of the building served as a perfect trumpet of sound, and they could, even four
floors above, hear it whenever it slammed. Four floors. The thought burdened
him.
     
    By the time he reached
the final turn in the staircase, he could smell the onions, and that did a
great deal to make the last flight easier. He glanced at his watch before he put
his key into the door. Nine-thirty. Chiara would still be awake, so he could at
least kiss her good night and ask her It’she had done her homework. If Raffaele
were there, he could hardly risk the first, and the second would be futile.
     
    ‘Ciao, Pap à ,’ Chiara called from the living
room. He put his jacket in the cupboard and went down the corridor to the
living room. Chiara lolled in an easy chair, looking up from a book that lay
open in her lap.
     
    As he walked into the
room, he automatically switched on the track lighting above her. ‘You want to
go blind?’ he asked, probably for the seven hundredth-time.
     
    ‘Oh, Papà, I can see
enough to read.’
     
    He bent over her and
kissed her on the cheek she held up to him. ‘What are you reading, Angel?’
     
    ‘It’s a book Mamma gave
me. It’s fabulous. It’s about this governess who goes to work for a man, and
they fall in love, but he’s got this crazy wife locked up in the attic, so he
can’t marry her, even though they’re really in love. I just got to the part
where there’s a fire. I hope she burns up.’
     
    ‘Who, Chiara?’ he asked. ‘The
governess or the wife?’
     
    ‘The wife, silly.’
     
    ‘Why?’
     
    ‘So Jane Eyre,’ she said,
making a hash of the name, ‘can marry Mister Rochester,’ to whose name she did
equal violence.
     
    He was about to ask
another question, but she had gone back to the fire, so he went into the
kitchen, where Paola was bent over the open door of the washing-machine.
     
    ‘Ciao, Guido,’ she said,
standing. ‘Dinner in ten minutes.’ She kissed him, turned back to the stove,
where onions were browning in a pool of oil.
     
    ‘I just had a literary
discussion with our daughter,’ he said. ‘She was explaining the plot of a great
classic of English literature to me. I think it might be better for her if we
forced her to watch the Brazilian soap operas on television. She’s in there,
rooting for the fire to kill Mrs Rochester.’
     
    ‘Oh, come on, Guido,
everyone roots for the fire when they read Jane Eyre.’ She stirred the
onions around in the pan and added, ‘Well, at least the first time they read
it. It isn’t until later that they realize what a cunning, self-righteous
little bitch Jane Eyre really is.’
     
    ‘Is that the kind of
thing you tell your students?’ he asked, opening a cabinet and pulling out a
bottle of Pinot Noir.
     
    The liver lay sliced and
waiting on a plate beside the frying pan. Paola slipped a slotted ladle under
it and flipped half into the pan, then stepped back to avoid the spitting oil.
She shrugged. Classes at the university had just resumed, and she obviously
didn’t want to think about students on her own time.
     
    Stirring, she asked, ‘What
was the captain-doctor like?’
     
    He pulled down two
glasses and poured wine into both. He leaned back against the worktop, handed
her one, sipped, answered, ‘Very young and very nervous.’ Seeing that Paola