though, had she actually worked on the ship, her doctorate in oceanography would have qualified her for a position more exacting than that of hostess. As would the uniform she was wearing in Brunetti’s office, one of three she had had tailored to celebrate her promotion to commissario. She sat across from him, straight in her chair, long legs crossed. He studied the cut of the jacket, short and tight fitting, with hand-stitching along the lapels. The trousers, after a length that delighted Brunetti, were cut tight at the ankle.
‘Is it because he wasn’t given the case, so he wants to slow us all down and make it even harder to find the killer?’ Griffoni asked. ‘Or is it something personal between him and me that I don’t know about? Or does he just not like women? Or women police?’
‘Or women police who outrank him?’ Brunetti tossed into the pot, curious to see how she would react but also convinced that this was the reason for Scarpa’s constant attempts to undermine her authority.
‘Oh, sweet Jesus,’ she exclaimed, tilting her head back, as if to address the ceiling. ‘It’s not enough that I have to put up with this from killers and rapists. Now I’ve got to deal with it from the people I work with.’
Curious, Brunetti said, ‘I doubt it’s the first time.’ He wondered how Signorina Elettra would respond to the quality of tailoring on the uniform.
She returned her attention to Brunetti and said, ‘We all get a fair bit of it.’
‘What do you do when it happens?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Some of us try to flirt our way out of it. You’ve seen it, I’m sure. You ask them to come along to help defuse a domestic argument, and they act like you’ve asked them for a date.’
Brunetti had indeed seen some of this.
‘Or else we get tough and try to be more vulgar and violent than the men.’
Brunetti nodded in recognition. When she failed to provide a third category, Brunetti asked, ‘Or?’
‘Or we don’t let it make us crazy and just try to do our jobs.’
‘And if nothing works?’ he asked.
‘Well, I suppose we could shoot the bastards.’
Brunetti laughed out loud. In the time he had known her, he had never tried to suggest how she might deal with Scarpa: indeed, he was reluctant, ever, to give this kind of advice. He had learned over the years that most professional and social situations were pretty much like water on uneven ground: sooner or later, they would work themselves level. People, over time, generally decided who was the Alpha and who the Beta. Higher rank sometimes helped with the determination, but not always. In the end, he had little doubt that Commissario Griffoni would learn how to control Lieutenant Scarpa, but he was equally certain that the Lieutenant would find a way to make her pay for it.
‘He’s been here as long as the Vice-Questore, hasn’t he?’ she asked.
‘Yes. They came together.’
‘I suppose I shouldn’t say this, but I’ve always been suspicious of Sicilians,’ she said. Claudia Griffoni, like many upper-class Neapolitans, had been raised speaking Italian, rather than dialect, though she had picked it up from friends and at school and would occasionally use Neapolitan expressions. But they were always spoken within ironic quotation marks, set linguistically apart from the Italian that she spoke as elegantly as Brunetti had ever heard it spoken. Someone who did not know her would therefore believe that her suspicion of Southerners came from the mouth of a person from the North, certainly from someone who lived above Florence.
Brunetti was aware that she had offered him the remark as a test: if he agreed with her, she could place him in one category; if he disagreed, then she could put him in another. Because he belonged in neither – or in both – Brunetti chose to respond by asking, ‘Does this mean you’ll be joining the Lega next?’
This time it was she who laughed out loud. When she stopped, she asked, as if she had not noticed his refusal to take the bait, ‘Does he have any friends here?’
‘He was working for a time with Alvise on some sort of special European project, but the funds were cut before they did much of anything and before anyone could get an idea of what they were even supposed to be doing.’ Brunetti thought for a while before adding, ‘As to friends, I’m not sure. There’s very little that seems to be known about him. I