CB18 About Face (2009) Read Free Page A

any of this.’ She took another sip, and set the glass down.
    Brunetti decided to risk it. Raising his right hand, he waved it in a small swirling circle that encompassed, should one be inclined so to interpret it, the table, the people at it, and, by extension, the palazzo and the city in which they sat. ‘Without politics,’ he said, ‘we wouldn’t have any of this.’
    Because of the difficulty her eyes had in widening, her surprise was registered in a gulp of laughter. This grew into a girlish peal of merriment that she attempted to stifle by putting one hand over her mouth, but still the helpless giggles emerged, and then they turned into a fit of coughing.
    Heads turned, and her husband withdrew his attention from the Conte to place a protective hand on her shoulder. Conversation stopped.
    She nodded, raised a hand and made a small waving gesture to signify that nothing was wrong, then took her napkin and wiped her eyes, still coughing. Soon enough the coughing stopped and she took a few deep breaths, then said to the table in general, ‘Sorry. Something went down the wrong way.’ She covered her husband’s hand with her own and gave it a reassuring squeeze, then said something to him that caused him to smile and turn back to his conversation with the Conte.
    She took a few small sips from her water glass, tasted the risotto, then put down her fork. As if there had been no interruption, she looked across to Brunetti and said, ‘It’s Cicero I like best on politics.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘Because he was such a good hater.’
    Brunetti forced himself to pay attention to what she said rather than to the unearthly mouth out of which the words emerged, and they were still discussing Cicero when the waiters took away their almost untouched plates of risotto.
    She moved on to the Roman writer’s loathing of Cataline and all he represented; she spoke of his rancorous hatred of Marc’Antonio; she made no attempt to disguise her joy that Cicero had finally won the consulship; and she surprised Brunetti when she spoke of his poetry with great familiarity.
    The servants were removing the plates from the next course, a vegetable loaf, when Signora Marinello’s husband turned to her and said something that Brunetti could not hear. She smiled and gave her attention to him, and she continued speaking to him until the dessert – a cream cake so rich as to atone fully for any lack of meat – was finished and the plates had been taken away. Brunetti, called back to the conventions of social intercourse, devoted his attention to the wife of Avvocato Rocchetto, who informed him of the latest scandals involving the administration of Teatro La Fenice.
    ‘. . . finally decided not to bother to renew our abbonamento . It’s all so terribly second-rate, and they will insist on doing all that wretched French and German rubbish,’ she said, almost quivering with disapproval. ‘It’s no different from a minor theatre in some tiny provincial French town,’ she concluded, sweeping the theatre to oblivion with a wave of her hand and taking French provincial life along with it. Brunetti reflected upon Jane Austen’s suggestion that a character ‘save his breath to cool his tea’, and thus resisted the temptation to observe that Teatro la Fenice was , after all, a minor theatre in a tiny provincial Italian town and so no great things should be expected of it.
    Coffee came, and then a waiter moved around the table pushing a wheeled tray covered with bottles of grappa and various digestive . Brunetti asked for a Domenis, which did not disappoint. He turned in Paola’s direction to ask her if she wanted a sip of his grappa, but she was listening to something Cataldo was saying to her father. She had her chin propped on her palm, the face of her watch towards Brunetti, and so he saw that it was well after midnight. Slowly, he slid his foot along the floor until it came up against something hard but not as solid as the leg of a chair.