'And you're carrying it around.'

Vianello took a sip of coffee, swirled the cup twice, and finished it. He set it on the saucer and said, 'I'm carrying it around, but I'm also carrying around the receipt for the hotel in Umbria we've reserved for the first two weeks in November.'

'Can you cancel the reservation?' Brunetti asked.

Vianello shrugged. 'I suppose I can. Nadia went to school with the owner, and he knows how crazy my schedule can be. But I wanted the kids to see it.'

'Any particular reason?' Brunetti asked.

'Because it's a working farm. Not one of those places where they keep a donkey in a field and sell you apples to give to it,' Vianello said with contempt. 'They've got cows and sheep and chickens, all those animals my kids think live inside the television.'

'Come on, Lorenzo,' Brunetti said with a smile, 'they're a little too old for that.'

Vianello smiled, 'I know. But the animals might as well be on TV. How are city kids supposed to know what an animal is and what it does or what it's like to work the land?'

'You think that's important?' Brunetti asked.

'Of course it's important,' Vianello said, perhaps too fiercely. 'You know it is. Everyone's always telling us we should respect nature, but if kids never see it, how are they going to respect it? All they get are some crazy

ideas that television gives them.'

'That's television's job, I think,' Brunetti observed.

'What is?'

'Giving people crazy ideas,' he said, then asked, 'What are you going to do?' He knew Vianello's wife and was surprised that she'd had an idea like this. 'Are you sure Nadia really wants to go to the Seychelles?'

Vianello asked Sergio for a glass of tap water and did not speak until the barman set it in front of him, when he said, 'She got the brochure and said that it would be wonderful to get away from the cold.' He drank the water, set the glass back down. 'Doesn't that sound like she wants to go?' He did not look at Brunetti as he asked this.

'Are you going to tell me the real reason?' Brunetti surprised Vianello, and perhaps himself, by asking. 'Why you don't want to go?' Before Vianello could protest, Brunetti said, 'I know, I know, the kids need to be exposed to nature.'

Vianello picked up his glass and was surprised to find it empty. He put two Euros on the counter and turned towards the door.

Outside, they fell into step and started back to the Questura. Brunetti, content to have asked his question, waited for his friend to speak. A boat puttered past them, a mottled brown dog standing at the front, barking with the joy of the boat's forward motion.

'We shouldn't do things like that,' Vianello finally said.

'Like what?'

'Travel those distances,' Vianello said. 'Just to go and lie in the sand and look at the sea, I mean.' The barking diminished, and Vianello went on. 'If you're a neurosurgeon and you have to go somewhere to save a life, then get on a plane and fly. But not to lie on the beach. It's not right.' Then, happy to think of further justification, Vianello added, 'Besides, the sun's bad for you.'

They walked a few more steps. 'Right in an ecological sense?' asked Brunetti, unable to resist the impulse to take a poke at Vianello's growing enthusiasm.

Eventually Vianello said, 'Yes.'

Brunetti slowed down and then stopped. He rested his forearms on the metal railing beside the canal and turned back towards the leaning tower of the Greek church. Another boat entered the canal from the right, passed them, then the Questura, and went on its way.

Brunetti stood there, watching the boat approach the far turn and thinking about Vianello's use of the word 'right'. It was a smallish boat, and there was no appearance of cargo in it, so the man might well be going down to Castello to meet his friends for a drink and a game of cards. Like all motors, however small, this one would leave a slick of oil on the water, adding to the pollution and thus to the eventual death of the laguna. So, under Vianello's system of judgement, would the man's trip be condemned as not 'right', or was there a factor of quantity to be considered? Or, as Vianello had stated, necessity? How much could we do before it became wrong?

The priests, he remembered, had taught him and his friends that gluttony was one of the cardinal sins, but Brunetti had never known what gluttony was. More accurately, though he had grasped that it meant eating too much, he had never understood where 'too much' began. How could wanting a second helping of his mother's sarde in saor be wrong? Which sardine would push him over the edge from pleasure to sin? It was this perplexity that had led the young Brunetti to the realization of how strongly the priests associated pleasure with sin, and that had put an end to that.

'Well?' Vianello asked when the boat had disappeared and Brunetti had still not spoken.

'I think you should go to Umbria.'

'And my reason for wanting to go there?' Vianello asked.

'It's a perfectly legitimate one,' Brunetti answered and, pushing himself back from the railing, headed towards the Questura.

Vianello hung back; not hearing his footsteps, Brunetti stopped, turned to him and raised his chin interrogatively.

'You think it's legitimate or you agree with me?' Vianello asked.

'I think it's legitimate and I agree with you,' Brunetti said, walked back to Vianello, and clapped him on the shoulder. 'I don't know what good it's going to do for the planet or for the universe . . .' he said and his voice trailed away.

'But?' Vianello asked.

'But if you don't go, then you avoid doing something that's harmful, and that's a good thing.'

Vianello smiled and said, 'I didn't think of it that way. All I knew was that it wasn't right.' After a moment, he added, 'Besides, I've always wanted to learn how to milk a cow.'

That stopped Brunetti in his tracks. He took a close look at Vianello to see if he was joking. Finally he said, 'You're serious, aren't you?'

'Of course,' Vianello answered.

Turning back towards the Questura, Brunetti said over his shoulder, 'You paid for the coffee, so I won't tell Signorina Elettra you said that.'

4.

Since he would be passing her office, Brunetti decided to save Signorina Elettra the trip to his; besides, he was curious to learn whatever she might know about the reasons behind Patta's request. Good as his word, he decided to say nothing to her about Vianello's bucolic desires. The relaxed smile she gave him as he went in told Brunetti that the Vice-Questore had gone off on crusade against wrongdoing in some other location.

'What have you managed to find about the mayor's son?' Brunetti asked, having no doubt that she had been in pursuit of that information.

She pushed back a vagrant curl and turned her screen towards him. 'As you can see,' she said, pointing to the printed form he saw there, 'it took him eight years to finish university and another three before he passed the state exams.'

'And now?' Brunetti asked.

'He works in the law office of a friend of his father's.'

She scrolled down to another document and pointed to the screen. 'He also has a job as a regional counsellor.'

'Doing what?' Brunetti asked, then, remembering that he was talking about a political position, changed it to, 'Meant to be doing what?'

'He has been appointed to serve as liaison between students and the regional department of sport.' Her delivery was as neutral as Medecins sans Frontieres.

'What does that mean?' Brunetti asked with curiosity he did not have to feign.

She typed in a few words and hit the ENTER key: a new document appeared on the screen. The young man's name was at the top and, below it, a row of figures. 'And this is?' Brunetti asked.

'It's the payment that was made to his bank account by the regional treasury last month,' she said. She turned the screen further in Brunetti's direction.

The young man's base salary was four thousand four hundred Euros a month; added to this was a fixed sum of nine hundred Euros for office expenses and one thousand nine hundred for a secretary.

'Dare I ask the name of his secretary?' Brunetti asked.

'Lucia Ravagni,' Signorina Elettra answered.

'Is she by any chance the part owner of a shop in Campo San Barnaba?' he asked, almost as if a voice had whispered the necessary question into his ear.

'Yes.'

'If he's a lawyer and she's running a shop, when is it that they find time to work as a regional counsellor and a secretary? And where?' Brunetti asked.

'There's an office assigned to them in the Uffici Regionali.'

'"Assigned?"'

'A friend of mine who works in one of the offices on the second floor their offices are on the first says they are seldom in evidence.'

'No doubt keeping a careful eye on sporting events,' Brunetti suggested.

'Or students,' she added in the bright tone she used in response to life's many absurdities. But then Signorina Elettra's voice grew serious and she asked, 'Why do we tolerate this? Why do we let them appoint their friends and their wives and their children and not go after them with clubs?'

Brunetti, as he did with increasing frequency, chose to treat her outburst seriously. 'I think it's because we're a tolerant people and understand human weakness. And because, for most of us, the only people we trust fully are members of our families, so we understand when other people do, as well.'

'Do you trust yours?' she asked in an uncharacteristic display of curiosity.

'Yes.'

'Everyone in it?'

'More than I would the state, or most of its representatives, yes,' Brunetti said and then, to extricate himself perhaps both of them from the unwonted intimacy of the conversation, said, 'I'd like you to find out anything else you can about them.'

'I've asked some people,' was her answer.

Very conscious of the fact that, as a civilian employee, Signorina Elettra had no official role in the work of the police and had taken no oath to the state, and thus should in no way be made privy to the investigations of the police, Brunetti said, 'The mayor wants Patta to be sure that nothing is made public about the bribes her partner has been paying the vigili.'

She hit a key, and the screen grew dark. Idly, she turned it towards her but kept her eyes on Brunetti. 'I wonder what's going on.'

'Indeed,' Brunetti said.

As if surprised by her own realization, she said, 'There's something of the purity of a syllogism in my eagerness to work on this.'

'Meaning?'

'I want bad things to happen to politicians. The mayor is a politician. Therefore, I want bad things to happen to the mayor.'

Her smile positively glowed. 'It leaves me little choice, does it?' she asked.

'As a syllogism, there is no flaw in it,' Brunetti said, logic having been one of his heart's delights at university. Then, soberly, 'But it deals with emotions, not really with facts, doesn't it, so I'm not sure that it is within the mandate of the syllogism. At least as a means of proof.'

Her look was sober when she said, 'There is no error of fact, Dottore: not in the first premise, and not in the second, and certainly not in the conclusion.' Then, lightly, 'I'll let you know whatever I find.'

It made no sense. It made no sense. It made no sense. Brunetti repeated this to himself as he climbed the steps to his office. Then, for the last flight: no sense, no sense, no sense. What did the mayor have in mind when

he asked Patta to see if things could be kept quiet? The more people who were told to keep something quiet, the greater the certainty that it would become public information. Or was the mayor, like so many of his colleagues, convinced that he was somehow above the normal rules that governed human behaviour? Why else would politicians continue to speak so openly of their crimes and misdemeanours on telefonini that even they must know were open to the ears of many of the forces of order? Why continue to discuss bribes with the men who paid them? Why give thousands of Euros to prostitutes and, when caught, claim it was a payment made to keep them from falling into prostitution? How stupid they must believe us to be; what contemptible sheep we are to them.

Surely, not all politicians could be like this. Were this the case, Brunetti realized, the only options open to a decent person would be emigration, or suicide.

His phone was ringing when he entered his office. Believing it might be Patta, suddenly returned to the Questura, he answered with his name.

'You know the boy who doesn't talk?' Paola asked. 'At the dry cleaner's?'

His mind still on politicians and Patta, Brunetti could think of nothing more than, 'What?'

'The boy who worked in the dry cleaner's. The deaf one.' He could tell from her voice that Paola was troubled, but it took him a moment to recall the boy, who sometimes used to be seen in the back room of the shop, folding things or standing idly, head moving back and forth as his eyes followed the motions of the iron that imposed order on shirts and dresses. Brunetti's memory of him was hazy, save for the folding and for the odd, arrhythmic way the boy moved.

'Yes,' he finally said. 'Why?'

'He's dead,' Paola said, sounding saddened by the news. But then she said, 'At least that's the rumour in the neighbourhood.'

'What happened?' Brunetti asked, wondering what sort of accident could have befallen him and how his deafness might have contributed to it. Many of the delivery men who pushed their wheeled metal carts around the city cried ahead to warn people to get out of the way: because he could not hear, the boy might have been run over, crushed, anything. Or knocked down the steps of a bridge or into the water.

'A man at the bar where I was having coffee said he saw an ambulance in front of a house this morning, and when they came out they were carrying one of those plastic boxes. He knew that's where he lived the deaf boy so he asked the men if that's who it was. All they told him was that it was someone from the first floor, a man.' She paused, then asked, 'They carry dead people in those, don't they?'