CB14 Blood From A Stone (2005) Read Online Free PDF Page B

hand to take her left foot. ‘Your feet are cold,’ he said, then pulled a balding old afghan down from the back of the sofa and covered them.
    He took a sip large enough to complement the size of the glass and said, ‘All right, what is it?’
    ‘Chiara complained that you were late, and when I told her it was because someone had been killed, she said that it was only a vu cumprà .’ She kept her voice dispassionate, reportorial.
    ‘Only?’ he repeated.
    ‘Only.’
    Brunetti took another drink of wine, rested his head on the back of the sofa, and swirled the wine around in his mouth. ‘Hummm,’ he finally said. ‘Not nice at all, is it?’
    Though he couldn’t see Paola, he felt the sofa move as she nodded.
    ‘You think she heard it in school?’ he asked.
    ‘Where else? She’s too young to be a member of the Lega.’
    ‘So is it something her friends bring in from their parents, or is it something the teachers give them?’ he asked.
    ‘It could be either, I’m afraid,’ she said. ‘Or both.’
    ‘I suppose so,’ Brunetti agreed. ‘What did you do?’
    ‘I told her what she said was disgusting and that I’m ashamed she’s my daughter.’
    He turned, smiled, held his glass up and saluted her. ‘Always prone to moderation, aren’t you?’
    ‘What was I supposed to do, send her to some sort of sensitivity training class or give her a sermon on the brotherhood of man?’ Brunetti heard her rage and disgust rekindle as she went on, ‘It is disgusting, and I am ashamed of her.’
    Brunetti was pleased she did not bother to assert that their daughter had never heard such things in their home, that they were in no way responsible for this sort of distortion of mind. Heaven alone knew what was suggested by the conversations he and Paola had in front of the children; no one knew what they could have inferred over all those years. He liked to think he was a moderate person, brought up, like most Italians, without racial prejudice, but he was honest enough to accept that this belief was probably yet another national myth. It is easy to grow up without racial prejudice in a society in which there is only one race.
    His father hated Russians, and Brunetti had always thought he did so with good reason, if three years as a prisoner of war is a good reason. For his own part, he had an instinctive distrust of southerners, though it was a feeling that caused him no little discomfort. He was far lesstroubled by his own distrust of Albanians and of Slavs.
    But African blacks? That was an almost entirely unfamiliar category for him, and since he was completely ignorant about them, he doubted that he could have infected his children with his prejudices. More likely it was something, like head lice, that Chiara had picked up in school.
    ‘Do we sit here and castigate ourselves as negligent parents and then punish ourselves for that by not eating dinner?’ he finally asked.
    ‘I suppose we could,’ she said, her remark entirely devoid of humour.
    ‘I don’t like the idea of that,’ he said. ‘Either one or the other.’
    ‘All right,’ she finally said. ‘I’ve been sitting alone in here a long time, which takes care of the castigating, so I suppose we can at least eat dinner in peace.’
    ‘Good,’ he said, finishing his wine and leaning forward to take the bottle.
    As they ate, some tacit agreement having been made not to discuss Chiara’s remark further that evening, Brunetti told her what was said to have happened in Campo Santo Stefano: two men, though no one seemed to have paid much attention to them, appeared out of the darkness and slipped back into it after shooting the African at least five times. It was an execution, not a murder, and certainly there was nothing random about it. ‘He didn’t have a chance, poor devil,’ Brunetti said.
    ‘Who would want to do something like that? And to a vu cumprà ?’ Paola asked. ‘And why?’
    These were the questions that had accompanied Brunetti on