Drawing Conclusions - Donna Leon [66]
When the man moved away, they studied one another, each waiting for the other to speak. Brunetti saw a woman in her early fifties, with light eyes in surprising contrast to her dark hair and olive skin. She had made no attempt to colour the grey in her hair: that and the crow’s feet around her eyes spoke of a lack of concern with maintaining the appearance of youth.
‘I’m Maddalena Orsoni, Commissario. I set up Alba Libera, and I’ve run it since it began.’
‘How long ago was that?’ he asked, displaying no surprise at her refusal to engage in the usual social preliminaries to conversation.
‘Four years.’
‘May I ask why you started it?’
‘Because my brother-in-law killed my sister,’ she said. Though she must have given this same answer many times, Brunetti suspected she was curious about the effect of such brutal honesty. He acknowledged her statement, however, with only a nod, and she went on. ‘He was a violent man, but she loved him. He said he loved her. There was always a reason for his violence, of course: he’d had a hard day; something was wrong with dinner; he saw her looking at another man.’
Hearing her recite this made him wonder how many times she had told this story, but it also reminded him of how often he had heard the same explanations given from men in justification of violence, rape, murder.
The barman came and served them. Brunetti couldn’t bring himself to touch his toast, not while her words still echoed between them.
‘Go ahead and eat,’ she said, pouring some sugar into her cup. She stirred it slowly, watching it dissolve.
Brunetti’s stomach, perhaps at the proximity to what was going to have to substitute for the lunch he had lost, growled. She smiled, finished her coffee and set the cup down. ‘Please. Eat.’
He tried to do as he was told: the toasting had done nothing to improve the taste of processed white bread, nor had the heat managed to melt the processed cheese or bestow taste upon the cooked ham. Cardboard would have been worse, he supposed. He put the panini back on his plate and took a sip of wine. That, at least, was tolerable.
‘She didn’t want to call the police,’ Signora Orsoni continued: Brunetti realized she had not finished telling the story of her sister. ‘And then she was afraid to call them. He broke her nose, and then her arm, and then she did call them.’ She looked at him, a level glance, appraising. ‘They did nothing.’ Brunetti asked for no explanation. ‘There was no place she could go.’ She caught his expression and said, ‘Or would go. I was living in Rome, and she never told me anything was wrong.’
‘Your family?’
‘There were only two old great-aunts left, and they knew nothing.’
‘Friends?’
‘She was six years younger, and we were never at the same school together. So we didn’t have any friends in common.’ She shrugged this away. ‘That’s the way it was. It’s not something women talk about, is it?’
‘No, it’s not,’ Brunetti said and drank more wine.
‘She was a lawyer,’ Signora Orsoni said, giving a lopsided smile, as if asking him to believe, please, that she wasn’t making this up, and who could believe that her sister could have been so stupid. ‘After she finally called the police – after her arm – they took him away, but the prison was full, so he was given house arrest.’ She paused to see what this representative of the legal system would have to say to that, but Brunetti remained silent.
‘So she moved out, and then she got a separation, and when that didn’t keep him away, she got an injunction against him. He had to stay at least a hundred and fifty metres from her.’ Orsoni caught the barman’s attention and asked for a glass of mineral water.
‘She wanted to move away – they were both still living in Mestre. She had left him the apartment when she moved out, but her job was there, and …’ Brunetti wondered how she would manage to say what she had to say, something he had heard many people say, after. ‘And I suppose she didn’t have any idea