at the end of a blind calle near the prison. Brunetti had been there many times. In his youth, he had gone with his father and had listened while the two men spoke of their shared past, both as young men in Venice before the war and then as young soldiers in Greece and in Russia. Over the course of the years spanned by the friendship of the two men, Brunetti had come to know all their stories: the priest in Castello who told them it was a sin not to join the Fascist party, the woman in Thessaloniki who gave them a bottle of ouzo, the wild artillery captain who had tried to kidnap them into his unit and had been turned away only by the sight of a pistol. In all of their stories, the two men emerged victorious: but then the fact that they had survived the war at all was, all things considered, sufficient sign of victory.
After years of listening to their stories, Brunetti eventually realized that the hero of all of the adventures that took place before the war was his father: extroverted, generous, clever, a natural leader of the neighbourhood boys. After the war, however, command passed to the far less volatile Claudio: cautious, honest, reliable and, in his relationship with his friend, protective and loyal. Claudio had learned how to deflect the retelling of stories when they veered towards subjects that might bring on one of the elder Brunetti’s cataclysmic rages: he always turned the conversation away from politicians, officers, or equipment and back to their repeated triumphs in the search for food and amusement. How many of these stories were true? Brunetti had no idea, nor did he care. He loved them and had always loved hearing them because of the pictures they gave him, however out of sequence or distorted by the lens of the teller, of the man his father had been before the war had had its way with him.
Claudio opened the door soon after his first ring, and the first thing Brunetti thought was that the old man had forgotten to put his shoes on. They embraced, and Brunetti took the opportunity to look down the back of the old man’s legs, but there indeed were the heels of his shoes. He stepped back and took another look and saw that it was nothing more than the inevitable betrayal of age that had slipped in and stolen five or more centimetres from Claudio since the last time they met.
‘How good to see you, Guido,’ the old man said in the same deep voice that had been a beacon of calm to Brunetti during most of his youth. He led Brunetti into the apartment, saying, ‘Here, give me your coat.’ Brunetti set his briefcase on the floor and removed his coat, waiting as Claudio hung it up. It had been Claudio, he remembered, who had given him a thousand lire for his sixteenth birthday, a fortune then, money he had taken to the neighbourhood bar and spent in a single night on buying drinks for his friends. Such were the times that most of the money had been spent on Coca-Cola and limonata: after all, wine was available at home, so why celebrate with that?
Claudio led them down the corridor and into the room he always referred to as his office, though it was simply a room in an apartment with a large desk, three chairs, and an enormous safe as tall as a man. In all the years Brunetti had come here, the surface of the desk had always been empty. Only once, and that was six years ago when he had come to interview Claudio in his official capacity as a policeman, had anything appeared on the desk. Then it had been nothing more than the soft suede jeweller’s case that had been left by a pair of swindlers who had somehow substituted it for the one Claudio had himself filled with the stones they claimed they were going to buy.
The case was a classic, a well-prepared sting that had probably taken the pair more than a year to set up. They had studied Claudio’s behaviour, befriended members of his family, and in the process had learned enough about his private life and his business to persuade him that they were old clients of his father, who had run the business before leaving it to Claudio.
On the day of sale, they had come to this same office,