heaven’s sake. And she’s a judge. Besides, he’s got to be twenty years older than she is.’

‘Ah, Guido,’ Brusca said, leaning forward and tapping a single finger against Brunetti’s knee, ‘I never knew you had such a conventional mind. Guilty of class and age prejudice, all in one go. All you can think about is love, love, love. Or sex, sex, sex.’

‘What should I be thinking about, instead?’ Brunetti said, forcing himself to sound curious and not offended.

‘In the case of Fontana,’ Brusca relented, ‘perhaps you could think of love, love, love, at least from what I’ve heard. But in the case of Her Honour, you’d be better advised to think of money, money, money.’ Brusca sighed, then said in a sober voice, ‘I think a great number of people are more interested in money than in love. Or even in sex.’

However interesting the thought of pursuing this thesis, Brunetti was more interested in information, and so he asked, ‘And is Judge Coltellini among them?’

Jokes fled and Brusca’s voice and face grew bleak. ‘She comes from greedy people, Guido.’ Brusca paused and then added, as if revealing a mystery he had just resolved, ‘It’s strange. We think that love of music can run in families, or maybe the ability to paint. So why not greed?’ As Brunetti remained silent, he asked, ‘You ever think about that, Guido?’

‘Yes,’ answered Brunetti, who had.

‘Ah,’ Brusca allowed himself to say and then went on, abandoning the general for the specific, ‘Her grandfather was a greedy man, and her father is to this day. She learned it from them, came by it honestly, you might say. If her mother weren’t dead, I’d go so far as to say the judge would consider an offer to sell her if she could.’

‘Did you ever have trouble with her?’

‘No, not at all,’ Brusca said, looking genuinely surprised by the question. ‘As I told you, I just sit there in my tiny office at the Commune and I keep track of all of the employee records: when people get hired, how much they earn, when they retire. I do my job, and people talk to me and tell me things, and occasionally I have to make a phone call and ask a question. To clarify something. And sometimes the answers people give me prompt me to be surprised, and then they tell me more about it, or they tell me other things. And over the years they’ve come to think it’s my business to know about everything.’

‘And people trust you to take things like this,’ Brunetti said, ‘out of the Tribunale.’

Brusca nodded, but it was such a sober nod that Brunetti asked, ‘Because you are pure of heart and clean of limb?’

Brusca laughed and the mood of the room lightened. ‘No. Because the questions I ask are usually so routine and boring that it would never occur to anyone not to tell me the truth.’

‘That’s a technique I’d like to master,’ Brunetti said.

4

Their parting was amicable, if awkward, both avoiding the fact that Brusca had never explained why he had come to Brunetti or what he wanted him to do with the information he now had. Since Brusca had made it clear that Coltellini was a woman animated by the desire for money, it was easy to conclude that she was being paid by people whose cases were being delayed. But that it was easy did not make it true, nor did it make it provable in a court of law.

What was not clear to Brunetti was the reason for any involvement on the part of Fontana. Love, love, love did not seem sufficient motive to corrupt a man described as ‘decorous’, but then it never did, did it?

It was seldom, after all these years, that Brunetti could be moved to indignation by some new revelation of the skill with which his fellow citizens managed to slip around the edges of the law. In some instances – though he confessed this to no one – he felt grudging admiration for the ingenuity employed, especially when it entailed getting around a law which he judged to be unjust or a situation he thought outright insane. When traffic lights were deliberately programmed to change more quickly than dictated by law so that the police could divide the extra money paid in fines with the men setting the timing devices, who but a lunatic would think bribing a policeman a crime? When scores of indicted criminals sat in Parliament, who could believe