So Shall You Reap

That settled, Brunetti went to the laboratory at the back of the ground floor, Bocchese’s den, where alembics and retorts were still to be found and mysteries deciphered and made plain. Bocchese was at his desk, along with the detritus of days, if not years. Papers, reports, surveys, drawings lay across his desk like leaves in October. There was no order, no plan, only apparent chaos, anti-design, mess. Yet Bocchese, by some system he nursed in his bosom and revealed to no one, could find in that clutter, with the accuracy of a heron spearing a fish, any paper requested of him.

Brunetti, no fan of television, did occasionally watch nature documentaries, and so he was familiar with the pose cobras took when they were preparing to attack. They somehow managed to raise their heads about thirty centimetres into the air and begin a graceful side-to-side motion that Brunetti always found quite hypnotizing, They flicked their tongues in an out, in and out, preparing to strike, while their intended prey froze and tried to figure out what to do. Long familiarity with his wife's tactics had somehow transferred portions of the genetic code of the mongoose into Brunetti, suggesting to him the correct motions that would remove him safely from the target area. "For one thing, it makes us sensitive to the fact that they might be at risk of blackmail." "I see," she said. "Anything else?" "Well, since most people have a bad opinion of the police, I'd like to tell you that many of us feel a certain sympathy for them." "I see," Paola said. As he watched, her tongue ceased to flicker and disappeared into her mouth, and she ceased her restless side-to-side motion, turning again into his wife, the treasure and joy of his life.

Given Loreti's position in society, the press had followed, panting. But they were to be disappointed by the police's failure to find any sign of what the English call "foul play," and so the investigation had been downsized to "missing person," whereupon the articles began to grow shorter and the pages on which they were printed further to the back of the newspapers. After a month or two, the articles followed the person into obscurity. Brunetti, who often saw things in a literary way, thought of this as a transposed simile. In the first days, the Loreti case was compared to some crime from the past. After a year, a new crime was compared to the Loreti disappearance. Over the years and generations, it had drifted into the distant past, Brunetti realized: from sensation to footnote.

Hussar could wear it on parade. No medals, although the cut and, when she got closer, cloth were such that it could easily support a few decorative diamonds on a neat diagonal across her chest – no one would find them out of place. Either it was high fashion or it had been stolen from the daughter-in-law of some Eastern European dictator who had spent her youth watching old war movies. Brunetti knew that if he were to compliment it, she would look down, flick at it with the back of her fingers, and ask, ‘You mean this?’ After she’d taken a seat, Brunetti asked, anyway, ‘Where’d you get the jacket?’ thinking that Chiara would run mad to have one like it. ‘What? This thing?’ Griffoni never disappointed him. ‘Yes.’ ‘It’s something a cousin of mine picked up in a thrift store.’ ‘Where?’ ‘Tashkent, I think,’ she said seriously. ‘Anyway, someplace where there had been a recent change of government.’ ‘Then it wasn’t Uzbekistan,’ Brunetti said neutrally, adding, ‘How may I help?

Young people longed to change the world, regardless of the cost to themselves or others.

Older people longed for the world not to change so there would be no cost to themselves.

She looked up, eyes bright. ‘On the first day, before things became intolerable, an overweight, middle-aged woman from Toulouse – a statistician – whom no one paid any attention to gave a very interesting talk on what she called ‘“triangulation”,’ she said, pronouncing the English word with a French accent.