Wilful Behaviour Read Online Free PDF Page A

further. ‘Did she say how long ago it happened?’
    ‘No, but if he was sent to San Servolo, then it had to be before the
Legge Basaglia
, and that was in the Seventies, wasn’t it?’ Paola said.
    Brunetti considered this. ‘Umm,’ he muttered. After a long silence, he said, ‘It’ll be hard, even if we learn his name.’
    ‘We don’t need to know his name, Guido,’ Paola insisted. ‘All the girl wants is a theoretical answer.’
    ‘Then the theoretical answer is that no other kind of answer is possible until I know what the crime was.’
    ‘Which means no answer is possible?’ Paola asked acerbically.
    ‘Paola,’ Brunetti said in much the same tone, ‘I’m not making this up. It’s like asking me to put a value on a painting or a print without letting me see it.’ Both of them, later, were to recall this comparison.
    ‘Then what am I supposed to tell her?’ Paola asked.
    ‘Tell her exactly what I’ve said. It’s what any lawyer of good conscience…’ he began, ignored Paola’s raised eyebrows at this most absurd of possibilities, and went on, ‘would tell her. What is it that schoolmaster in that book you’re always quoting says? “Facts, facts, facts”? Well, until I have the facts or anyone else has the facts, that’s the only answer she’s going to get.’
    Paola had been weighing the cost and consequences of further opposition and had decided they were hardly worth it. Guido was acting in good faith, and the fact that she didn’t much like his answer didn’t make it any less true. ‘Good, I’ll tell her,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’ Smiling, she added, ‘It makes me feel like that other Dickens character and makes me want to tell her that she’s saved five million lire in lawyer’s costs and should go right out and spend it on something else.’
    ‘You can always find whatever you’re looking for in a book, can’t you?’ he asked with a smile.
    Instead of a simple answer, something she seldom gave him, Paola said, ‘I think it was Shelley who said that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. I don’t have any idea if that’s true or not, but I do know that novelists are the unacknowledged gossip-mongers of the world. No matter what it is, they thought of it first.’
    He pushed back his chair and stood. ‘I’ll leave you to the contemplation of the splendours of literature.’
    He leaned down to kiss her head and waited for her to come up with another literary reference, but she did not. Instead, she reached behind with one hand and patted him on the back of his calf, then said, ‘Thank you, Guido. I’ll tell her.’

4
    BECAUSE THE REQUESTS for information came from what might be termed minor players in their lives, both Brunetti and Paola forgot about them or at least allowed them to slip to the back of their minds. A police department burdened with the increase in crime resulting from the flood of unregulated immigration from Eastern Europe would no more have concerned itself with the attempt to stamp out minor corruption in a city office than Paola would have turned from rereading
The Golden Bowl
to attend to those semicolons in Calvino.
    When Claudia did not show up for the next lecture, Paola realized that she felt almost relieved. She didn’t want to be the bringer of her husband’s news, nor did she want to grow more involved in the personal life or non-academic concerns of one of her students. She had, as had most professors, done so in the past, and it had always either led nowhere or ended badly. She had her own children, and their lives were more than enough to satisfy whatever nurturing instincts the current wisdom told her she must have.
    But the girl was present the following week. During the lecture, which dealt with the parallels between the heroines of James and those of Wharton, Claudia behaved as she always did: she took notes, asked no questions, and seemed impatient with the student questions that displayed ignorance or