Death at La Fenice

His clothing marked him as Italian. The cadence of his speech announced that he was Venetian. His eyes were all policeman.

Though everyone in the bar knew who he was, no one asked him about the death, though one old man did rustle his newspaper suggestively.

For reasons he had never understood, she read a different newspaper each morning, spanning the political spectrum from right to left, and languages from French to English. Years ago, when he had first met her and understood her even less, he had asked about this. Her response, he came to realize only years later, made perfect sense: ‘I want to see how many different ways the same lies can be told.’ Nothing he had read in the ensuing years had come close to suggesting that her approach was wrong.

Where does American money come from? Steel. Railways. You know how it is over there. It doesn’t matter if you murder or rob to get it. The trick is in keeping it for a hundred years, and then you’re aristocrats.’ ‘Is that so different from here?’ Brunetti asked. ‘Of course,’ Padovani explained, smiling. ‘Here we have to keep it five hundred years before we’re aristocrats. And there’s another difference. In Italy, you have to be well-dressed. In America, it’s difficult to tell which are the millionaires and which are the servants.

I’ve always liked it about the Greeks that they kept the violence off the stage.

Helmut thought himself above common morality. Or perhaps he thought he’d managed to create his own, different from ours, better.

And that, Brunetti realized, was beginning to interest him a great deal, for the answer to his death must lie there, as it always did. Santore

when children loved you, you knew everything, and when they were angry with you, you knew nothing?

the warmth and smell he associated with