Free The Golden Egg by Donna Leon Page A

woman he had seen ironing there for years. Her short hair was as well coloured as it was cut, the same blonde it might once have been. Surely more than sixty, her body had remained thin and agile, perhaps due to the bending and lifting her job required of her.
    â€˜God knows what his mother’s suffering,’ he heard the woman who was paying say just as he walked in.
    The woman to her left made a puffing noise, as if lifting a heavy weight, but said no more. The first woman turned towards her, and Brunetti watched her decide to say no more. She took her change, thanked the woman behind the counter, and picked up her parcel.
    As she reached the door, the owner said, ‘Next Tuesday, Signora.’
    Her parcel rustled as she opened the door, and then she was gone.
    When the door was closed, the second client said, ‘God knows
if
the mother’s suffering, I’d say.’ She was full-bodied and round-faced, with plump red cheeks: in a fairy tale, she’d be the good grandmother.
    As if she had not heard the remark, the owner said, ‘It was a green silk suit, wasn’t it? And your husband’s brown jacket?’
    The woman accepted the change of subject and asked, ‘How do you do it, Signora? How do you remember everything? I brought them here in April.’
    â€˜I like the suit,’ she answered. ‘And your husband’s
had that jacket for a long time.’ Before her client could interpret that as a criticism, she added, ‘You never see quality like that any more: it’ll last another ten years.’ She went to take the clothing from the racks at the back of the shop.
    The client smiled, placed a pink receipt on the counter, and opened her purse.
    The owner came back, folded the suit and the jacket, wrapped them in light blue paper, and taped the parcel neatly closed. She took the money from the woman and after a polite exchange of goodbyes, the woman left.
    Her comment remained in the space left by her departure. Before Brunetti could speak, the curtain was pulled fully open and Renata, whose name Brunetti had learned only some hours before, emerged.
    She nodded to him but spoke to her colleague. ‘I heard her. How could she say something like that? The poor boy isn’t buried yet, and she’s talking like that about his mother. She doesn’t deserve that.’
    â€˜People have always talked about her like that,’ her colleague answered with heavy resignation. ‘But with her son dead, you’d think they could stop it.’
    As though only mildly curious, Brunetti asked, ‘Like what?’
    The women exchanged a long look; in it Brunetti read the struggle between the desire to remain silent out of some sort of female solidarity and the urge to gossip.
    Renata opted for gossip by leaning forward and grasping the edges of the narrow counter. Bracing her weight on stiff arms, she settled in for the long haul.
    He saw the glance the owner gave her. Nothing at all was to be gained in getting involved in the affairs of other people. Authority existed only to cause trouble, to impale you on the thorns of bureaucracy, to make you lose time at work, and in the end to force you to hire a lawyer and spend years freeing yourself of the consequences of any revelation of information. The State was your Enemy.
    As if unaware of all of this, Brunetti addressed the owner directly. ‘Signora, at the moment all we know is that he died in his sleep. It looks as if it was an accidental death. I tried to speak to his mother, but she didn’t – or perhaps she couldn’t – answer me.’ When it seemed they had no questions, he shook his head to suggest confusion, or resignation in the face of things we could not understand. ‘I don’t know how to say this,’ he began, ignoring the look they exchanged and hoping to pull the conversation temporarily away from the mother, ‘but it’s always been our assumption – my