could have served for allora or adesso, or, for all he knew, amico.

'He's helped me, you know,' she said. 'With Scarpa. And with the others.'

'Helped you how?' Brunetti asked. Then, because there could be no doubt of the universal desire to help against Lieutenant Scarpa, he added, 'With the others, I mean.'

She studied his face for a long time, as if trying to make up her mind about something, or about him. 'You mean you don't know? You've never noticed the way some people here talk to me?' she asked.

He thought of Signorina Elettra, and his impulse was to lie, and then he started to recall other things he might have noticed or sensed, references and undertones he had chosen not to interpret in a particular way.

Then, to goad him, 'Or about me?'

Books often described how beautiful women became when they were angry: how wrong her face proved that to be. Her mouth was a tight line, her strong nose suddenly sharp and too big. And her eyes lacked all warmth, all willingness to understand.

'Because you're Neapolitan, you mean?'

She made a puffing noise replete with disgust. 'If it were only that,' she said. 'I'm used to being thought of as a terrone: every cousin has to be a Camorrista, my brother has to be under house arrest; and every investigation I make has to be half-hearted, at best, since my only purpose is to be a spy and see that nothing is ever done to harm the Camorra.' Brunetti had been with her when shots were fired and a man killed, but he had never seen her like this. Her cool dispassion and sense of irony were gone, replaced by an anger he could feel as a force coming across his desk.

He frowned and then asked, 'Do you think you're exaggerating?'

'Of course I'm exaggerating,' she said sharply. But she paused long enough for some of the anger to melt from her face. 'There's no way I can escape it up here. It's in the northern air.'

Confronted with his own hypocrisy and how it would colour anything he chose to say, Brunetti opted for silence. How could he tell this woman she was imagining things when his own distrust of southerners was as strongly rooted as his teeth? Like them, it had been formed in childhood, and he had been equally unconscious of the growth of both.

Had she sensed it in him, too? Brunetti no sooner concluded that, if she had, she would hardly have mentioned the subject to him, than he recalled just how subtle a person she was, and was again uncertain. How strange, prejudice: so comforting until someone noticed it.

He ran his hands over his face and back through his hair as a visual signal of wiping the slate free of a digression. 'Where did Vianello go?' he asked.

'Downstairs. I just spoke with him.'

Brunetti smiled and waved a hand to dismiss her answer. 'No. I mean where did the idea of my friendship with him go?' Seeing the faint relief signalled by her more relaxed posture, he added, 'We were distracted, I think.'

She blushed, she actually blushed, and with it her full beauty flowed back into possession of her, or she of it. 'Sorry, Guido, but you really have no idea.' For a moment, he was afraid she was going to pick it up again, but she said no more.

'Tell me,' he said.

'You asked him to ask Nadia to do some work for you.' Before Brunetti could explain or avoid explanation, she said, 'No, he didn't want to tell me. I could see something was bothering him, so I asked him, and I wouldn't let it go until he told me.' When she saw that Brunetti believed her, she went on. 'All he told me was that you wanted her to ask some people about this man who died.'

'Davide Cavanella,' Brunetti supplied, still not liking the way her original description of his request had sounded.

'And he's afraid he offended you by refusing.'

'He told you, but he didn't tell me,' Brunetti said, hearing the petulance in his voice.

She smiled again. 'He said he doesn't want to let you down. Or hurt your feelings. He'd do anything for

you: you know that. But that applies to him, and not to his wife.'

'You make it sound like a conflict of loyalties,' he said, hoping to surprise her.

Ignoring his affronted tone, she said, 'Of course it is. Vianello has his wife and his children, and then he

has you.'

After she said this, Griffoni bent down to do something with her shoe, something Brunetti knew to be entirely unnecessary. He marvelled at the grace of women and at their charity.

When she sat up, she asked, 'Why don't we do it?' she asked.

'What?'

'Why don't we do it, the two of us? Go over there and ask people in shops, in bars about Signora Cavanella and her son. You can be the good cop and I can be the bad cop, if you like.'

'You know about the case?'

'I've read everything you've read: Rizzardi's report and the report from the ambulance squad that answered the original call, and yours about missing documents.'

She paused, then added, 'I've asked Signorina Elettra if there are any other documents.'

Brunetti didn't touch this. Instead, he said, 'I spoke to Davide's doctor. Well, to his mother's doctor, who treated him twice.' He folded his hands by interlacing the fingers and tapped on his desk a few times. 'But there was no sign of a medical record.'

'I don't want to say that's impossible,' she began, 'but it's hard to believe. There's got to be some sign of him. Somewhere.'

'There isn't,' Brunetti said, thinking of the drawings in the doctor's office but not considering them part of the official record.

'Then what do we do?' she asked.

'We play good cop and bad cop and go and talk to people and see if we can find some gossip.'

21.

As Foa took them over to San Polo, Brunetti told her about his conversation with the women in the dry cleaner's, his meeting with Ana Cavanella, and the apparent ease with which Pucetti had befriended her.

The wind had driven them into the cabin and they sat side by side on the back cushion, hands braced against the occasional thrust of the waves. 'He's a clever boy,' Griffoni said with a smile of approval. The noun sounded strange coming as it did from lips that could not be a decade older than the 'boy's'. As they passed San Giorgio, she turned to Brunetti and asked, in an entirely normal voice, 'Do you ever get tired of all this beauty?'

His gaze passed beyond her to the clouds scuttling behind the dome. 'Never.' The answer was automatic, unconsidered, true.

'I feel that way about Naples,' she said. Before he could react and perhaps reluctant to return to the subject, she asked, 'Have you met Pucetti's fiancee?'

'The Russian girl,' Brunetti answered. Then, to show that, although she might see him as just another man without interest in people's feelings, he still took the trouble to learn some things about them, added, 'She's a mathematician.'

'She was on the fast track to becoming a full professor in Moscow, and now she's teaching algebra to teenagers in Quarto d'Altino,' Griffoni said and gave the sort of shrug with which Neapolitans acknowledge the truth that life tosses us around like bags of potatoes at the market. Then, too casually, she said, 'I've had a look at her pension.'

'Whose?'

'Ana Cavanella's,' Griffoni answered. 'She worked for the Lembo family from the time she was fifteen until she was seventeen.'

Brunetti wondered where she had found that information but did not ask. Instead, he inquired, 'And then?'

'Then there's a gap when she did not work at least she did not declare an income for twelve years. And then she worked for a cleaning company until she retired two years ago.'

'Cleaning what?'

'Offices and shops. The company's in Mestre, but they do a lot of work here. She was legally employed: taxes, health contributions, pension.'

Brunetti saw that she had something else. 'Tell me,' he said. The boat rose up without warning and slapped down with a heavy thump, shaking them both. Brunetti pulled back the curtain and saw that wind was playing on the water, slashing at the white tops of the waves. There was another, lesser, thump and then things quietened down.

'I read about the Lembo family,' she said.

'What?'

'What was available online,' she began, then paused.

'And?'

'And I called some friends and asked about them.'

'Friends where?'

'Here. And in Rome.'

'What did you learn?'

'Probably no more than you did. A few people said the mother got what she deserved, but no one explained what they meant. Drugs, sex, and rock and roll for the oldest daughter.'

'Lucrezia,' Brunetti supplied.

She nodded and said, 'There's much less about the next one, Lavinia. It seems she's in Ireland.'

Brunetti nodded, then asked, 'You know that one of them died?' he asked.

'Yes. The baby.' She spoke the word in quotes. 'In Chile. In a swimming pool.'

'Strange place to die,' he said neutrally.

'If you're the one dying, any place must be strange.'

He made an assenting noise.

'What did you find out about Lavinia?' he asked, surprised by his own easy reference to this unknown woman.

'Only official things. School, university, jobs.'

'You can get into those files?' he blurted out, wondering where she could have learned to do that. Surely not from Signorina Elettra.

'Vianello checked for me,' she said. Then, tossing away the line, she added, 'He asked Signorina Elettra for some help with Ireland.'

The motion of the boat softened. He looked out again and saw that they had turned into Rio San Polo, where the wind effectively ceased. Foa pulled up to Campiello Sant'Agostin, slipped the engine into neutral, and jumped up on to the riva to moor the boat. Brunetti stepped up beside him, reached back and took Griffoni's hand to help her up. 'I don't know how long we'll be,' he told Foa. 'You might as well go back.'

'Do you mind if I stay, Commissario?' the pilot asked, looking, Brunetti thought, uncomfortable. 'My aunt lives over here, and I never come to see her much any more. So I thought that, being as I'm here . . .' The pilot's voice trailed off. Brunetti glanced at Griffoni, who shrugged and looked at the pavement: this was not her decision.

'How long has your aunt lived here?' Brunetti asked.

'For ever.'

'Ask her about Ana Cavanella, then, would you?' Brunetti said.

'Sure thing, Commissario,' Foa said, jumped back into the boat to retrieve the keys, then vaulted back on to the riva.

The two commissari took the bridge and started down towards Campo San Stin, where they went into the only bar. A man stood behind the zinc counter, propped over a newspaper: both looked as tired as the tramezzini in a glass case to his left. He glanced at them, then went back to his reading.

Brunetti asked for two coffees; the man turned away to make them. Reading upside down, Brunetti saw that the paper was three days old: he turned it towards them and paged through until he found the article about Davide Cavanella's death. When the man returned with the coffees, Brunetti pointed to the article and asked, 'You know him?'