Free CB14 Blood From A Stone (2005) by Donna Leon Page B

cavalier “only”, and that her listener is somehow obliged to let the remark pass unobserved? Or that to object to it is to “assault” the person who made it?’
    ‘Of course not,’ he said, trained by Paola herself to recognize and dismiss the argumentun ad absurdum. ‘I’m not saying that.’
    ‘Then what are you saying?’
    ‘That you might have been better advised to see where she got these ideas and try to reason with her.’
    ‘Rather than assaulting her, as you put it?’ she asked, beginning to show her anger.
    ‘Yes,’ he answered calmly.
    ‘I’m not in the habit of attempting to reason with racial prejudice,’ she said.
    ‘Then what do you want to do with it, beat it with a stick?’
    He saw her start to answer, then bite it back. She took a sip of her wine, then another, then set the glass down. ‘All right,’ she finally said. ‘Perhaps I was a little too severe with her. But it was so embarrassing, to hear her say those things and to think I might have been responsible, in some way, for her having said them.’
    ‘Are we talking about Chiara here, or about you?’ he surprised her by asking.
    She pursed her lips, glanced across at the window that looked off to the north, nodded in acknowledgement of the accuracy of his question, and said, ‘You’re right.’
    ‘I’m not interested in being right,’ Brunetti said.
    ‘What are you interested in, then?’
    ‘Living in peace in my own home.’
    ‘I suppose that’s pretty much all anyone wants,’ she said.
    ‘If only it were that simple, huh?’ he asked, got to his feet and leaned over to kiss her on the head, then went back to the Questura and to theinvestigation of the death of the man who was only a vu cumprà .
    The African’s death, or at least the cause of it, was catalogued in the print-out of the autopsy report that lay on Brunetti’s desk. The speed with which it had arrived surprised Brunetti, and he flipped to the back to see if Rizzardi had given a reason. His surprise grew when, instead of the pathologist’s name, he found a blank where the name of the responsible pathologist should have appeared. Deciding to waste no time in attempting to figure out why Rizzardi might have failed to fill this in, he began to read.
    The victim was estimated to have been in his late twenties, and although there was evidence he had been a heavy smoker, he was in excellent health, as were his organs. He was 1.82 metres tall and weighed 68 kilos. A set of his fingerprints had been forwarded to Lyon for possible identification.
    In total, five bullets had struck him, a number which corresponded to the number of sounds the Americans had heard. Either of two of them would have sufficed to kill him: one had severed his spine, and one had perforated the left ventricle of the heart. The remaining three had pounded into his torso; one had lodged in the liver, while two had simply buried themselves in his flesh without damaging any organs. The fact that all five shots had struck him spoke to Brunetti of proximity as much as marksmanship, for from what the Americans haddescribed, the killers had been little more than a metre from their victim. The angles of the paths of the bullets suggested that one man was taller than the other; the fact that the bullets had lacked the force to emerge from the body suggested that the guns were of low calibre. The bullets had been extracted and sent to the lab for analysis, though a layman’s guess was that the gun that fired them would turn out to be a .22, a weapon Brunetti knew was not unknown to paid killers.
    ‘Layman,’ Brunetti said aloud, setting the report to one side. Rizzardi, who had worked in Naples a decade ago, had probably seen more signs of violent death than anyone else in the city, so he would hardly have used such a term when writing an autopsy report.
    The report had arrived by email, which meant that the photos would be on view in Signorina Elettra’s computer. Brunetti, however, had no