right hand took the top card and slid it from the pack. The camera shifted around him, rose, and now showed, not his round face, but the top of the cards from above and behind him. He moved the card to the right, held it motionless for a few seconds, and then slowly turned it over: The Joker.
‘The Deceiver, Signora,’ the man said. His voice fell upon her: dead level, no emotion, no judgement. No mercy.
Vianello’s feet fell to the floor, making Brunetti jump. ‘God, he’s a clever devil, isn’t he?’ the Inspector said, reaching forward to clear the screen.
It was the suddenness of Vianello’s action that made Brunetti realize how enchanted – quite literally – he had been by the interchange between the two people. The weak, self-deceiving human heart had been exposed with clinical dispassion by a man who, in the process, displayed himself as an expert at seeing into its mysteries. An unreflecting viewer would surely conclude that this was a man in whose hands lay the answers to those questions they barely dared to ask themselves.
Yet what had he done? Listened to the audible hesitation and uncertainty in the woman’s voice, listened to the evasions and justifications: he could have read bottle caps as well as the tarot card to have discovered the Deceiver.
Brunetti said it out loud: ‘The Deceiver.’
Vianello answered with a loud guffaw. ‘My mother could have told her the same thing, standing behind her in the queue at the supermarket and listening to her tell someone her story.’
Zucchero started to speak, then hesitated. Brunetti waved his hand, and the young man continued. ‘But the cards help, Ispettore. They make it seem like the answer is coming from some other, mystical, place, not from common sense.’
Brunetti had had a few moments to think about parallels, and so, abandoning the comparison with bottle caps, he said, ‘It’s what the augurs did: they’d cut open an animal and read what was in there, but they were always careful to speak in ambiguous language. So after whatever was going to happen had happened, they could make some sort of retrospective interpretation that made it sound as if they had been right.’
‘ “The Deceiver,” ’ Vianello repeated, no less contemptuously. ‘And that poor woman is paying a Euro a minute to listen to him.’ He looked at his watch and said, ‘We were looking at it for eight minutes, more or less.’ He hit a few keys and the screen came back to life. ‘Let’s see if he’s still got her on the hook.’
But the round-faced man had moved on to different game, for this time the voice they heard when he reappeared in front of them was a man’s. ‘. . . think it’s a wise thing, but he’s my brother-in-law, and my wife wants me to do it’.
‘Is there a way you can turn off the sound?’ Brunetti asked.
Vianello’s head whipped round. ‘What?’
‘Turn off the sound,’ Brunetti repeated.
Vianello leaned forward and turned the sound down, and then off completely, leaving them looking at the round face as it, in turn, divided its attention between the cards and the camera. A few minutes passed in silence until Brunetti said, ‘I always do this on planes, if there’s a film. I don’t take the headset; if you don’t, you see how pre-planned their gestures and reactions are: the actors in movies never behave the way people at the next table in a restaurant do. Or people walking down the street. It’s never natural.’
The three men continued to watch the screen. Brunetti’s observation might just as easily have been prophecy, for the gestures of the round-faced man now seemed prepared and studied. The attention he paid to the cards as he turned them over never wavered; the concentration with which he stared at the camera when he was, presumably, listening to his caller never wavered: his stare was so intense that he might as well have been observing a public execution.
As they watched, he moved his hands together and slid off another card, and the cameras moved up and behind him as they had the last time. With slowness meant to tantalize, he turned the card over and laid it beside two others. Its face was meaningless to the three men watching his performance, but Brunetti had seen enough by now to risk saying, ‘When the cameras show his face, he’ll look like Oedipus recognizing his mother.’
And so it proved to be. The camera cut to the man’s face,