She gave him a sober glance and shook her head. ‘I think it’s like being a priest or a doctor,’ she said.
‘Excuse me?’
‘Being an electrician, sir. I think once you do it, you have a sort of moral obligation to keep on doing it.’ She gave him time to consider this, and when he made no comment, she said, ‘Nothing’s worse than darkness.’
From long experience as a resident of a city where many houses still had wires that had been installed fifty or sixty years ago, Brunetti grasped what she meant and had no choice but to say, ‘Yes. Nothing worse.’
His ready agreement seemed to cheer her, and she asked, ‘Is it urgent, sir?’
Given the fact that it probably wasn’t legal, either, Brunetti said, ‘No, not really.’
‘Then I’ll have a look tomorrow, sir.’
Before he left, he said, indicating her computer, ‘While you’re in there, could you see what you can find out about an usher at the Courthouse, Araldo Fontana?’ Brunetti did not give her the name of Judge Coltellini, not from compunction at sharing police information with a civilian employee – he had long since set aside the things of a child – but because he did not want to burden her with a third name, and Brusca’s apparent defence of the man had made Brunetti more curious about him.
But he could not stop himself from asking, ‘Where did you get that information about the computers, Signorina?’
‘Oh, it’s all in the public record, sir. You just have to know where to look.’
‘And so you sort of go trolling through the files by yourself to see what you can see?’
‘Yes,’ she said with a smile, ‘I suppose you could phrase it that way. “Trolling.” I quite like that.’
‘And you never know what you’re going to fish up, I suppose.’
‘Never,’ she said. Then, pointing to the paper where she had written the names he wanted her to check, she said, ‘Besides, it keeps me in training for interesting things like this.’
‘Isn’t the rest of your work interesting, Signorina?’ he asked.
‘No, I’m afraid much of it isn’t, Dottore.’ She propped her chin in her cupped palm and tightened her lips in a resigned grimace. ‘It’s hard when so many of the people I work for are so very dull.’
‘It’s a common enough plight, Signorina,’ Brunetti said and left the office.
9
By the time he reached his office the next day, Brunetti was resigned to the fact that he was not soon going to have his own computer, though he found it more difficult to resign himself to the temperature of his office when he arrived. The family had, the night before, discussed where they were to go for their yearly vacation, Brunetti apologizing that the uncertainty of work had kept him this long without knowing when he would be free. He had quickly squashed all discussion of going to the seaside: not in August with millions of people in the water and on the roads and in the restaurants. ‘I will not go to Puglia, where it is forty degrees in the shade, and where the olive oil is all fake,’ he remembered saying at one point.
In retrospect, he accepted the possibility that he might have been too firm. In his defence of his own desires, he had been emboldened by the fact that Paola never much cared where they went: her only concern was what books she should take and whether wherever they went had a quiet place for her to lie in the shade and read.
Other men had wives who begged them to go out dancing, travel the world, stay up late and do irresponsible things. Brunetti had managed to marry a woman who looked forward to going to bed at ten o’clock with Henry James. Or, when driven by wild passions she was ashamed to reveal to her husband, with Henry James and his brother.
Like the president of a banana republic, Brunetti had offered democratic choice and then rammed his own proposal past all difference of opinion or opposition. A cousin of his had inherited a farmhouse in Alto Adige, above Glorenza, and had offered it to Brunetti while he and his family went to Puglia. ‘In the heat, eating fake olive