Free Through a Glass Darkly by Donna Leon Page B

behind her stomach. When she stopped, both of them heard what sounded like the yipping of apuppy from inside the apartment. She turned her head towards it, still speaking to Brunetti as she did so. ‘You better come in, then, so you can talk to me. Besides, I’ve got to keep an eye on them while Sonia does the shopping, isn’t it true?’
    As he gave her his name and shook her hand, it occurred to Brunetti to wonder how much of what she said would be comprehensible to a person from, say, Bologna. A number of the teeth on the top left side of her mouth were missing, so her speech was slurred, but it was the
Veneziano stretto
that was sure to defeat any ear not born within a hundred kilometres of the
laguna
. Yet how sweet it was to hear that dialect, so much like the one his grandmother had spoken all her life, never bothering to have anything to do with Italian, which she had always dismissed as a foreign language and not worthy of her attention.
    The woman, who might have been fifty as easily as sixty, led him into a meticulously clean living room at the end of which stood a bookcase out of which books pretty well did whatever they wanted to do – hung, leaned, fell, tilted. Facing the sofa where the woman must have been sitting was a small television with a hothouse cyclamen in a plastic pot on top of it. On the television, pastel-coloured cartoon creatures danced around silently, for the sound had been turned down or off.
    The sofa was draped with a plaid blanket and might once have been white, though it was nowthe colour of oatmeal. In the middle of the sofa sat a young boy, perhaps two years old. He was the source of the noise, a piping cry of wordless joy with which he kept time to the jumps and steps of the pastel creatures. At the approach of the adults, the little boy smiled at his grandmother and patted the place beside him.
    She plumped herself down next to him, grabbed him up and pulled him on to her lap. She bent and kissed the top of his head, provoking ecstatic wriggles. He turned away from the screen, hiked himself up on his feet, and planted a wet kiss on her nose. She looked up at Brunetti, smiled, then put her face up to the little boy’s. Then she buried her face in his neck and whispered, ‘
More, xe beo, xe propio beo
.’ She looked at Brunetti, face bright, and asked, ‘
E xe beo, me puteo
?’
    Brunetti grinned in agreement and praised the boy’s sun-like radiance, his obvious superiority to any child he’d ever seen, his remarkable resemblance to his grandmother. Her eyes narrowed momentarily, and she gave Brunetti a long, speculative glance.
    â€˜Mine are older now,’ he said, ‘but I still remember when they were his age. I used to invent some excuse to leave and go home from work just to be with them. I’d say I was going out to question someone, and I’d go home and play with my babies.’
    Her smile widened in approval. From the back of the apartment there came a muffled noise, the unmistakable cry of a baby, and Brunetti lookedat her in confusion. ‘It’s Emma,’ she said. She bounced the boy on her lap and added, ‘His twin sister.’ She sized up Brunetti with astute eyes and asked, ‘You think you could go and get her? He’ll cry if I leave him now, even for a minute.’
    Brunetti looked towards the back of the apartment.
    â€˜Just follow the noise,’ she said and went back to bouncing the boy on her lap.
    He did as he was told and went into a bedroom on the right side of the corridor, where he found two cribs that stood head to head. Bright-coloured mobiles floated from the ceiling, and a small zoo of stuffed animals stood behind the bars of the cribs. A little girl lay in one of them, beside her a furry elephant just as big as she. He walked over to her, saying, ‘Emma, how are you? Aren’t you a pretty girl? Come on, now, we’re going out to see your
nonna
, eh?’
    He bent