Drawing Conclusions - Donna Leon [15]
His thoughts had just moved to the continent-sized mass of garbage and plastic that was floating in the Pacific Ocean when the sound of bubbling coffee pulled him back to a more modest reality. He emptied the pot into his cup, spooned in sugar, and pulled a brioche from the bag. Cup in one hand, brioche in the other, he returned to the contemplation of the mountains.
This time it was the telephone that grabbed his attention. He walked into the living room and, mouth busy with his brioche, answered with his name.
‘Where are you, Brunetti?’ Patta shouted down the line.
When he had been younger and more prone to acts of prankish resistance, Brunetti would have answered that he was in his living room, but the years had taught him to interpret Patta-speak, so he recognized these words as a demand that he explain his absence from his office.
He swallowed the last of the brioche and said, ‘I’m sorry to be delayed, sir, but Rizzardi’s assistant said that the doctor was going to call me.’
‘Don’t you have a telefonino, for God’s sake?’ his superior demanded.
‘Of course, sir, but his assistant said the doctor might want me to go and talk to him at the hospital, so I’m waiting for his call before I leave home. If I get to the Questura and have to go back to the hospital, it will waste—’
Even as Brunetti became aware that he was talking too much, Patta interrupted him. ‘Stop lying to me, Brunetti.’
‘Sir,’ Brunetti said, careful to replicate the tone with which Chiara had answered Paola’s last comment on her choice of clothing.
‘Get down here. Now.’
‘Yes, sir,’ Brunetti said and replaced the phone.
Showered and shaved and much restored by having drunk the equivalent of three coffees, added to which was the sugar-high provided by two pastries, Brunetti left his apartment feeling strangely cheerful, a mood that was reflected everywhere in one of those glorious sunny days when autumn and nature unite to pull out all the stops and give people something to cheer about. Though his spirit begged him to walk, Brunetti went only as far as the Rialto stop, where he boarded a Number Two heading towards Lido. It would save only a few minutes, but the tone of Patta’s voice had encouraged speed.
He had not had time to buy a newspaper, so he contented himself with reading the headlines he saw around him. Another politician caught on video in the company of a Brazilian transsexual; further assurances by the Minister of the Economy that all was well and getting better and that the reports of factory closings and unemployed workers were calculated exaggerations, a deliberate attempt on the part of the Opposition to instil fear and mistrust in the people. Another unemployed worker had set himself ablaze in a city centre, this time Trieste.
He looked up from the headlines as they passed in front of the university. He saw nothing new there, either. How nice it would be if, one day, just as he was passing below the windows, Paola could fling one of them open and wave to him, perhaps call his name, shout out that she loved him absolutely and always would. He knew he would stand his ground and shout the same things back to her. The man next to him turned