A Question of Belief - By Donna Leon Page 0,54

him: if you eliminate sex, sex, sex, you are left with money, money, money.

A grey cat came across the grass and jumped up beside him. He put out a hand, and the cat pressed its head against it. He rubbed it behind the ears, and the cat flopped against him. For a few minutes, he rubbed the cat’s ears until it surprised him by falling asleep. Brunetti moved it gently aside, said, ‘I told you not to wear your fur’, and started back towards the Questura.

Signorina Elettra seemed pleased to see him, but did not smile. ‘I’m sorry your vacation was cut short, Commissario,’ she said as he came in.

‘So am I. My family is draped in sweaters and lighting a fire at night.’

‘You went to Alto Adige, didn’t you?’

‘Yes, but I didn’t make it past Bolzano.’

She shook her head at the shame of this, then asked, ‘What may I do for you?’

‘Did you find the names of the people involved in the cases in those papers?’ he asked.

‘Not until this morning, I’m afraid,’ she said, pointing to some papers on her desk. Brunetti recognized the court documents he had been sent. ‘I was going to bring them up later.’

Brunetti glanced at his watch and saw that it was not yet eleven. ‘Then good thing I came here.’

She slid the papers towards him. ‘Two of the cases involve Signor Puntera,’ she said, pointing to the ones he had circled in pencil and red pen.

‘Signor Puntera,’ Brunetti said. ‘How very interesting.’ He nodded for her to proceed.

‘The first is a claim on the part of the family of a young man who was injured in an accident in one of Signor Puntera’s warehouses.’

‘Here?’

‘Yes. He’s still got two warehouses, over near the Ghetto. They’re used to store supplies for one of his companies that does building restoration.’

‘What happened?’

‘This young man – it was only his third day on the job, poor devil – was carrying bags of dry cement out to a boat in the canal behind the warehouse. Another worker was in the boat, stacking them. When the first one didn’t come back for some time, the man in the boat went to look for him and found him on the floor, well, found his feet. He’d been buried under a landslide of bags of cement.’

‘What happened?’

‘Who knows?’ she asked rhetorically. ‘No one saw. The defence claims he must have yanked one out from the bottom of the pile or that he hadn’t stacked them correctly in the first place. There was one of those little tractors in the warehouse, loading pallets of bags of sand, and the plaintiff’s lawyer says the driver must have dislodged something from the other side of the pile. The driver denies it and says he was on the other side of the warehouse all morning.’

‘What happened to him?’

‘He fell on his face and was buried under the bags. Some of them opened, and sand poured around him. He broke a leg and an arm, but the lack of oxygen was much worse.’

‘How bad is he?’

‘His lawyer says he’s like a child.’

‘Maria Vergine,’ Brunetti whispered, feeling the boy’s astonishment, his terror, his awful sense of being buried.

‘His lawyer,’ Brunetti repeated. ‘Who brought the case?’

‘His parents. He’s going to need lifetime care, and they don’t want him to be in a state hospital.’ Brunetti nodded: no parent would want this for a child. Or for themselves. Or for the man next door.

‘What else?’

‘His lawyer told me that, at the beginning, Puntera made the family a private offer if they’d withdraw the case. They refused, and so it went to court, but things have gone wrong with the case from the beginning. Things like delays and postponements.’

‘I see,’ Brunetti said. He looked at the paper and saw that the accident had taken place more than four years before. ‘And until it’s settled in court, where is he?’

‘He’s in the hospital in Mestre, but his family takes him home on weekends.’

‘What will happen?’ Brunetti asked, though there was no reason she should know.

She shrugged. ‘Sooner or later, they’ll accept his offer. There’s no way of knowing when this will be settled – civil cases are backed up for eight years as it is – so eventually they’ll give in. People like this can’t go on paying for lawyers for years.’

‘And the boy?’

‘The lawyer says it will be a mercy for them all if he dies, a mercy for him, too.’

Brunetti let some time pass, then asked, ‘And the other

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