oil,’ Brunetti muttered, though no less grateful to his cousin for the offer. And so the Brunettis were to go to the mountains for two weeks; thinking of it, Brunetti’s spirit flooded with relief at the mere thought of sleeping under a quilt and having to wear a sweater in the evening.
Vianello and his family had rented a house on the beach in Croatia, where he planned to do nothing but swim and fish until the end of the month. While they were both away, their unofficial investigation into Stefano Gorini would go on vacation, as well.
Brunetti spent the first part of the morning using the computer in the officer’s squad room to check the trains to Bolzano and to consult the various tourist sites in Alto Adige. Then he went back to his own office and called a few colleagues to see if they had ever come into contact with Stefano Gorini. He had more success with the train schedule.
A bit after twelve-thirty, he dialled his home number. Paola answered on the third ring, saying, ‘If you can get here in fifteen minutes, there’s prosciutto and figs and then pasta with fresh peppers and shrimp.’
‘Twenty,’ he said and hung up.
To walk it that quickly on a hot day, he feared, would kill him, so he went out to the riva and was lucky enough to step directly on to a Number Two. At San Tomà he caught a Number One that pulled up after two minutes, and got off at San Silvestro. It had taken longer than it would by foot, but he had been spared crossing the city in the middle of the day.
Inside the apartment, Paola and the kids sat at the table in the kitchen: the terrace was a broiler during the day and could be used only after sunset. Brunetti hung up his jacket, wondering if he should wring it out first, and took his place at the table.
He glanced at the faces and wondered if the apathy he saw there was the result of his behaviour about their vacation or merely the heat. ‘How’d you spend your morning?’ he asked Chiara.
‘I went over to Livia’s and tried on some of the new things she got to go back to school,’ Chiara answered, carefully trimming the fat from her prosciutto and passing it silently to Raffi’s plate, she apparently having decided that vegetarians can eat the ham but not the fat.
‘Autumn things? Already?’ Paola asked, putting a plate of prosciutto and black figs in front of Brunetti. She rested her hand on his shoulder when she leaned down with the plate, allowing Brunetti to believe that at least one member of the family looked forward to the vacation.
‘Yes,’ Chiara said, mouth full of fig. ‘When we were in Milano to visit her sister last week – Marisa: she’s at Bocconi – they took me shopping with them. The stuff there is much better than what you find here. Here it’s all for teenies or old ladies.’
His daughter had gone to Milano, Brunetti reflected, site of the Brera Gallery, site of Leonardo’s Cenacolo, site of the greatest Gothic cathedral in Italy, and she had gone shopping. ‘Did you find anything you liked?’ he asked and ate half a fig. His daughter was perhaps a philistine, but the fig was sweet perfection.
‘No, Papà, I didn’t,’ she said in the descending measures of tragedy. ‘Everything’s crazy expensive.’ She trimmed another piece of prosciutto and used the point of her knife to transfer the fat to Raffi, who was busy with his lunch and apparently uninterested in tales of shopping.
‘I had my own money, but Mamma would have gone crazy if I’d spent two hundred Euros on a pair of jeans.’
Paola glanced up from her antipasto. ‘No, I wouldn’t have gone crazy, but I would have sent you to a work camp for the rest of the summer.’
‘How are we supposed to get out of the financial crisis if no one spends any money?’ Chiara demanded, sure proof that she had spent a day in the company of a student at Italy’s best business school.
‘By working hard and paying our taxes,’ Raffi said, thus putting an end to any lingering doubts Brunetti might have had that his son’s flirtation with Marxism was at an end.
‘Would that it were that easy,’ Paola said.
‘What do you mean?’ asked Raffi.
‘To work hard, you have to have a job,’ Paola said, looking across the table at him and smiling. ‘Right?’ Raffi nodded. ‘And