Free CB18 About Face (2009) by Donna Leon

of them, went to the stove and got the cover. The others waited for her. ‘ Mangia , mangia ,’ she said, approaching the table with the cheese.
    They all waited until she was seated, and no one started eating until the cheese had been passed around.
    Ruote : Brunetti loved ruote . And with the melanzane and ricotta in tomato sauce, they seemed the perfect pasta. ‘Why ruote ?’ he asked.
    Paola seemed surprised. ‘Why what?’
    ‘Why do you use ruote with this sauce?’ Brunetti clarified, spearing one of the wheel-like pastas and holding it up to examine it more closely.
    She looked at her plate, as if surprised to find that particular shape of pasta there. ‘Because . . .’ Paola began, then prodded at the many-spoked pasta with the tip of her own fork. ‘Because . . .’
    She set her fork down and took a sip of wine. She glanced across at Brunetti and said, ‘I’ve no idea, but it’s what I’ve always used. It’s just that ruote are right for this sort of sauce.’ Then, with real concern, ‘Don’t you like them?’
    ‘Quite the opposite,’ he said. ‘They seem entirely right to me, but I don’t know why that is, and I wondered if you did.’
    ‘I suppose the truth is that Luciana always used ruote with tomato sauces that had little pieces in them.’ She speared a few and held them up. ‘I can’t think of a better explanation.’
    ‘May I have some more?’ Raffi asked, though the others at the table had eaten less than half of their portions. For him, the shape of any pasta was secondary to its quantity.
    ‘Of course,’ Paola said. ‘There’s plenty.’
    As Raffi served himself, Brunetti asked, knowing he would probably regret doing so, ‘What were you saying when I came in, Chiara? Something about legal limits?’
    ‘The micropolveri ,’ Chiara said, continuing to eat. ‘The Professoressa talked about it at school today, that there are all these tiny little particles of rubber and chemical and God knows what, and they’re all trapped in the air, and we breathe them in.’
    Brunetti nodded and served himself a bit more pasta.
    ‘So I read the paper when I got home, and it said . . .’ she set down her fork and reached to the floor to retrieve the newspaper. It was folded open at the article, and Chiara’s eyes skimmed to the passage she meant. ‘Here it is,’ she said and read aloud: ‘. . . blah, blah, blah, “the micropolveri have risen to a point fifty times the legal limit”.’
    She dropped the paper back to the floor and looked across at her father. ‘That’s what I don’t understand: if the limit is a legal limit, then what happens when it’s fifty times as much?’
    ‘Or, for that matter, twice as much,’ Paola added.
    Brunetti put his fork down and said, ‘That’s a problem for the Protezione Civile, I’d say.’
    ‘Can they arrest anyone?’ Chiara demanded.
    ‘I don’t think so, no,’ Brunetti said.
    ‘Make them pay a fine?’
    ‘Not that either, I think.’
    ‘Then what’s the purpose of having a legal limit, if you can’t do anything to people who break the law?’ Chiara demanded in an angry voice.
    Brunetti had loved this child from the instant he learned of her existence, since the moment Paola told him she was expecting their second child. All of that love stood between Brunetti and the temptation to tell her that they lived in a country where nothing much ever happened to anyone who broke the law.
    Instead, he said, ‘I suppose the Protezione Civile will file a formal denuncia , and someone will be asked to investigate.’ The same impulse that had silenced his previous comment helped him refrain from observing that it would prove impossible to find a single offender, not when most factories did what they wanted, and the engines of docked cruise ships poured out whatever they pleased for as long as they stayed.
    ‘But they’ve already investigated, or how else did they get those numbers?’ Chiara demanded, as if she held him