She let out a snort of laughter. ‘Of course not. I simply didn’t want to talk like this in front of the kids.’
‘You think they don’t know?’
‘Of course they know,’ she said. ‘But they know only from what we do or what their friends’ parents do.’
‘For example?’
‘That when we eat in a restaurant where the owner is a friend, we don’t get a ricevuta fiscale, so no tax is paid.’
Brunetti was always, and uncontrollably, defensive about any suggestion of frugality on his part and quickly jumped to his own defence. ‘I don’t do it to make them charge less. You know that.’
‘That’s just my point, Guido. That at least would make sense because it would save you money. But you do it out of principle, not greed, so that this disgusting government of ours won’t get at least that little bit of money to give to their friends or put in their own pockets.’
He nodded. That was exactly the point.
‘And that’s why I don’t want to talk about taxes in front of them. If they’re going to end up feeling that way about the government, then they have to discover it themselves: they shouldn’t learn it from us.’
‘Even if it is, as you say, a “disgusting” government?’
‘It’s not as bad as some,’ she temporized after a moment’s reflection.
‘I’m not sure that’s the most eloquent defence of our government I’ve ever heard,’ he said.
‘I’m not trying to defend it,’ she said angrily. ‘It’s disgusting, but at least it’s disgusting in a non-violent way. If that makes a difference.’
After some reflection, Brunetti said, ‘I suppose it does.’ He pushed himself to his feet, walked around the table and bent to kiss her and said he’d be back at the usual time for dinner.
10
On his way back to the Questura, again taking the vaporetto to avoid the sun, Brunetti considered what he and Paola had said to one another and what Paola had not said to the children at lunch. How many times had he heard people use the phrase, ‘Governo Ladro’? And how many times had he agreed in silence that the government was a thief? But in the last few years, as though some previous sense of restraint or shame had been overcome, there had been less attempt on the part of their rulers to pretend that they were anything less than what they were. One of his previous superiors, the Minister of Justice, had been accused of collusion with the Mafia, but all it had taken was a change of government for that story to have drifted out of the newspapers and, for all he knew, out of the halls of justice.
Brunetti was, by disposition and then by training, a listener: people sensed that first in him and in his company spoke easily and often entirely without reserve. In the last year, what he heard more and more in the voices of people – sometimes a woman standing next to him on the vaporetto or a man in a bar – was a mounting sense of disgust at the way they were ruled and at the people who ruled them. It didn’t matter if the people who spoke to him had voted for or against the politicians they reviled: they’d be happy to lock them all up in the local church and set it ablaze.
Underlying it all, and this is what troubled Brunetti, was a sense of despair. He was troubled by the helplessness which so many people felt and their failure to understand what had happened, as if aliens had taken over and imposed this system on them. Governments came and governments went, the Left came and then gave place to the Right, and nothing changed. Though politicians often talked of it and promised it, not one of them gave evidence of having any real desire to change this system which worked so very much to their real purposes.
As the boat passed the Piazza, Brunetti saw the crowds, the queues snaking back from the entrance to the Basilica, even at three in the afternoon. What possessed people to stand in the open, under that sun, motionless? It was difficult for him to subtract his familiarity with the Basilica from his store of knowledge. He had been taken there countless times in his youth by his teachers and by his mother: the teachers took their students to show them the beauty, and his mother had taken him, he supposed, to show him the truth