Free Uniform Justice by Donna Leon Page B

that, thoughtful. At eighteen.’ She took a deep breath and smiled at him, so he knew that this story was going to have a happy ending.
    ‘Whenever we were together, he talked about politics, history, all those things I’d heard Barbara and my parents talk about for so long. Nothing he said sounded much like what they said. But he had dark-blue eyes, and he had a car at home, in Milano, a convertible.’ Again, she smiled at the memory of the girl she had been, and sighed.
    When she seemed reluctant to continue, he asked, ‘And did Barbara meet him?’
    ‘Oh yes, and they hated one another after three words. I’m sure he thought she was some sort of Communist cannibal, and she must have thought he was a Fascist pig.’ She smiled again at him.
    ‘And?’
    ‘One of them was right.’
    He laughed outright and asked, ‘How long did it take you to realize it?’
    ‘Oh, I suppose I knew it all along, but he did have those eyes. And there was that convertible.’ She laughed. ‘He carried a photo of it in his wallet.’
    At first, it was difficult for Brunetti to picture a Signorina Elettra capable of this folly, but after a moment’s reflection, he realized that it didn’t surprise him all that much.
    ‘What happened?’
    ‘Oh, once Barbara started on him, when we got home, it was as if – how do they describe it in the Bible? – as if “the scales fell from my eyes”? Well, it was something like that. All I had to do was stop looking at him and start listening to what he said and thinking about it, and I could see what a vicious creep he was.’
    ‘What sort of things?’
    ‘The same things people like him are always saying: the glory of the nation, the need to have strong values in the family, the heroism of men in war.’ She stopped here and shook her head again, like a person emerging from rubble. ‘It’s extraordinary, the sort of things a person can listen to without realizing what nonsense it is.’
    ‘Nonsense?’
    ‘Well, when the people who say it are still children, I suppose it’s nonsense. It’s when adults say it that it’s dangerous.’
    ‘What became of him?’
    ‘Oh, I don’t know. I imagine he graduated and went into the Army and ended up torturing prisoners in Somalia. He was that kind of person.’
    ‘Violent?’
    ‘No, not really, but very easily led. He had all of the core beliefs. You know the sort of things they say: honour and discipline and the need for order. I suppose he got it from his family. His father had been a general or something, so it’s all he’d ever been exposed to.’
    ‘Like you, only different?’ Brunetti asked, smiling. He knew her sister, and so he knew what the politics of the Zorzis were.
    ‘Exactly, only no one in my family has ever had a good word to say about discipline or the need for order.’ The pride with which she said this was unmistakable.
    He started to ask another question, but she got to her feet, as though suddenly conscious of how much she had revealed, and leaned forward to place the file on his desk. ‘That’s what’s come in, sir,’ she said with a briskness that was strangely dissonant with the easy familiarity of their conversation up to that point.
    ‘Thank you,’ he said.
    ‘It should all be clear, but if you need any explanation, call.’
    He noticed that she didn’t tell him to come down to her office or to ask her to come up to explain. The geographical limits of their formality had been re-established.
    ‘Certainly,’ he said, and then repeated, as she turned towards the door, ‘Thank you.’

9
    THE FOLDER CONTAINED photocopies of newspaper articles about Fernando Moro’s careers as doctor and politician. The first seemed to have led to the second: he had first caught the public eye about six years ago, when, as one of the inspectors commissioned to examine the quality of hospital care in the Veneto, he had submitted a report calling into question the statistics issued by the provincial government,