Free CB18 About Face (2009) by Donna Leon Page A

responsible, and then immediately repeated, ‘And what are we supposed to do until they do investigate, stop breathing?’
    Brunetti felt a surge of delight to hear his wife’s rhetorical devices echoed in his daughter’s voice, even that old warhorse of logic, the rhetorical question. Ah, she would cause a lot of trouble, this child, if only she could keep her passion and her sense of outrage.
    Some time later, Paola came into the living room with coffee. She handed him a cup, saying, ‘There’s sugar in it’, and sat down next to him. The second section of Il Gazzettino lay open on the table where Brunetti had set it down, and Paola inquired, with a nod in its direction, ‘What revelations does it bring us today?’
    ‘Two city administrators are under investigation for corruption,’ Brunetti said and sipped at his coffee.
    ‘They’ve chosen to ignore the rest of them, then?’ she asked. ‘I wonder why.’
    ‘The prisons are full.’
    ‘Ah.’ Paola finished her coffee. She set her cup down and said, ‘I’m glad you didn’t toss oil on the fires of Chiara’s enthusiasm.’
    ‘It didn’t sound to me,’ Brunetti replied, setting his own empty cup on the face of the Prime Minister, ‘as if she needed any encouragement.’ He sat back, thought about his daughter for a while, and said, ‘I’m glad she’s so angry.’
    ‘Me, too,’ Paola said, ‘though I suppose we’d better disguise our approval.’
    ‘You really think that’s necessary? After all, she probably got it from us.’
    ‘I know,’ Paola admitted, ‘but it’s still wiser not to let her know.’ She studied his face for a moment, then added, ‘Truth to tell, I’m surprised you approve; well, that you do so strongly.’
    She laid her hand on his thigh, patted it twice. ‘You let her rave on, and I could almost hear you ticking off the errors in logic she used.’
    ‘Your very own favourite, argumentum ad absurdum ,’ Brunetti said with unconcealed pride.
    Paola had a particularly idiotic smile on her face as she turned to him. ‘It is my heart’s delight, that one.’
    ‘You think we’re doing a good thing?’ Brunetti asked.
    ‘Doing what?’
    ‘Raising them to be so clever in argument?’
    Brunetti’s tone, light as he tried to make it, failed to disguise his real concern. ‘After all, if a person doesn’t know the rules of logic, it will sound as if they’re being sarcastic, and that’s not something people like.’
    ‘Especially when they hear it from a teenager,’ Paola added. After a moment, as if trying to ease his fears, she offered, ‘Very few people pay attention to what anyone else says during a discussion, anyway. So maybe we don’t have to worry.’
    They sat silent for some time until she said, ‘I spoke to my father today, and he told me he has three days to decide about this thing with Cataldo. He asked me if you’d managed to find out anything about him.’
    ‘No, I haven’t,’ Brunetti said, biting back the impulse to say it had been less than twenty-four hours since he had been asked to do it.
    ‘Do you want me to tell him that?’
    ‘No. I’ve already asked Signorina Elettra to see what she can find.’ Then, vaguely, knowing how many times he had used this excuse, ‘Something else came up. But she might have something by tomorrow.’ It took some time before he asked, ‘Does your mother say much about them?’
    ‘Either of them?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘I know that he was very eager to divorce his first wife.’ Her voice was a study in neutrality.
    ‘How long ago was that?’
    ‘More than ten years. He was over sixty.’ Brunetti hought Paola had finished, but after a pause that might have been deliberate, she continued, ‘and she was barely thirty.’
    ‘Ah,’ he contented himself with saying.
    Before he devised a way to ask about Franca Marinello, Paola said, reverting to the original subject, ‘My father doesn’t tell me about his business involvements, but he’s interested in