A Question of Belief

19

This computer stuff appeared to be catching: Brunetti found Vianello in front of the screen in the squad room, watching a man lay out cards on a table in front of him. Vianello’s chair was pushed back; his arms were folded, his feet propped up on an open drawer. Slightly behind him stood Zucchero, arms similarly folded, no less intent on the screen. Brunetti came in quietly and stood next to Vianello.

The man on the screen continued to stare at the cards on the table in front of him, showing only the top of his head and a pair of thick shoulders and round torso to the camera. He rubbed at his chin like a farmer studying the barometer, unsure of what to make of it. ‘You say this man has promised to marry you?’ he suddenly asked, his attention still on the cards.

A woman’s voice said from somewhere behind or above or below him, ‘Yes, he did. Many times.’

‘But he’s never named a date?’ The man’s voice could not possibly have been more neutral.

After a long hesitation, the woman answered, ‘No.’

The man raised his left hand and, with a delicate motion of a finger, shifted one of the cards a bit to the left. He raised his head and, for the first time, Brunetti saw his face. It was round, almost perfectly so, as though eyes and a nose and a mouth had been painted on a soccer ball, and then hair pasted across the forehead to make it look like a human head. Not only his head but his eyes were round, topped by thick eyebrows that were themselves perfect half-circles: the total effect was one of unvarnished innocence, as though this man had somehow just been born, perhaps just inside the entrance to the television studio, and the only thing he knew in life was how to turn over cards and stare out at his viewers, trying to help them understand what he read there.

Speaking now directly to that woman who was somewhere watching and heeding him, he asked, ‘Has he ever spoken specifically about when he intends to marry you?’

This time she took even longer to answer, and when she did, she began with an ‘Ummmm’ that was prolonged through the space of two normal breaths. Then she said, ‘He has to take care of some things first.’ Brunetti had heard evasion from people he had arrested, had listened to deliberate attempts to derail a line of questioning, had heard such things from masters. The woman was an amateur, her tactic so obvious as to cause laughter, were it not that she sounded so stricken when she spoke, as though she knew no one would believe her but could still not stop herself from trying to hide the obvious.

‘What things?’ the man asked, his gaze straight into the camera and, one felt, straight into the woman’s lying mouth and the man’s lying heart.

‘His separation,’ she said, her voice growing slower and softer with each syllable she pronounced.

‘ “His separation,” ’ the round-faced man repeated, each syllable a slow, heavy footstep towards truth.

‘It’s not final,’ she said. She tried to declare, but she could only implore.

The dialogue had taken place at such a slow pace that the lightning speed with which the man asked, ‘Has he even asked for a separation?’ startled Brunetti as it brought a gasp from the woman.

The sounds of her breathing filled the studio, filled the ears of the round-faced man, filled the airwaves. ‘What do the cards say?’ she asked, her voice close to a whimper.

Until now the man had sat so quietly that when he raised his hand to show the camera, and the woman, the cards that remained in his hand, the movement took Brunetti by surprise. ‘Do you really want to know what the cards have to tell you, Signora?’ he asked, voice far less sympathetic now.

When she finally answered, she said, ‘Yes. Yes. I have to know.’ After that came the continued sound of her pained breathing.

‘All right, Signora, but remember: I asked you if you wanted to know.’ His voice held the solemnity of a doctor asking a patient if they wanted to know the results of the laboratory tests.

‘Yes, yes,’ she repeated, all but pleading.

‘Va bene,’ he said and brought his hands together. Slowly, his right hand took the top card and slid it from the pack. The camera shifted around him, rose, and now showed, not his round face, but the top of the cards from above and behind him. He moved the card to the right, held it motionless for a few seconds, and then slowly turned it over: The Joker.

‘The Deceiver, Signora,’ the man said. His voice fell upon her: dead level, no emotion, no judgement. No mercy.

Vianello’s feet fell to the floor, making Brunetti jump. ‘God, he’s a clever devil, isn’t he?’ the Inspector said, reaching forward to clear the screen.

It was the suddenness of Vianello’s action that made Brunetti realize how enchanted — quite literally — he had been by the interchange between the two people. The weak, self-deceiving human heart had been exposed with clinical dispassion by a man who, in the process, displayed himself as an expert at seeing into its mysteries. An unreflecting viewer would surely conclude that this was a man in whose hands lay the answers to those questions they barely dared to ask themselves.

Yet what had he done? Listened to the audible hesitation and uncertainty in the woman’s voice, listened to the evasions and justifications: he could have read bottle caps as well as the tarot card to have discovered the Deceiver.

Brunetti said it out loud: ‘The Deceiver.’

Vianello answered with a loud guffaw. ‘My mother could have told her the same thing, standing behind her in the queue at the supermarket and listening to her tell someone her story.’

Zucchero started to speak, then hesitated. Brunetti waved his hand, and the young man continued. ‘But the cards help, Ispettore. They make it seem like the answer is coming from some other, mystical, place, not from common sense.’

Brunetti had had a few moments to think about parallels, and so, abandoning the comparison with bottle caps, he said, ‘It’s what the augurs did: they’d cut open an animal and read what was in there, but they were always careful to speak in ambiguous language. So after whatever was going to happen had happened, they could make some sort of retrospective interpretation that made it sound as if they had been right.’

‘ “The Deceiver,” ’ Vianello repeated, no less contemptuously. ‘And that poor woman is paying a Euro a minute to listen to him.’ He looked at his watch and said, ‘We were looking at it for eight minutes, more or less.’ He hit a few keys and the screen came back to life. ‘Let’s see if he’s still got her on the hook.’

But the round-faced man had moved on to different game, for this time the voice they heard when he reappeared in front of them was a man’s. ‘. . think it’s a wise thing, but he’s my brother-in-law, and my wife wants me to do it’.

‘Is there a way you can turn off the sound?’ Brunetti asked.

Vianello’s head whipped round. ‘What?’

‘Turn off the sound,’ Brunetti repeated.

Vianello leaned forward and turned the sound down, and then off completely, leaving them looking at the round face as it, in turn, divided its attention between the cards and the camera. A few minutes passed in silence until Brunetti said, ‘I always do this on planes, if there’s a film. I don’t take the headset; if you don’t, you see how pre-planned their gestures and reactions are: the actors in movies never behave the way people at the next table in a restaurant do. Or people walking down the street. It’s never natural.’

The three men continued to watch the screen. Brunetti’s observation might just as easily have been prophecy, for the gestures of the round-faced man now seemed prepared and studied. The attention he paid to the cards as he turned them over never wavered; the concentration with which he stared at the camera when he was, presumably, listening to his caller never wavered: his stare was so intense that he might as well have been observing a public execution.

As they watched, he moved his hands together and slid off another card, and the cameras moved up and behind him as they had the last time. With slowness meant to tantalize, he turned the card over and laid it beside two others. Its face was meaningless to the three men watching his performance, but Brunetti had seen enough by now to risk saying, ‘When the cameras show his face, he’ll look like Oedipus recognizing his mother.’

And so it proved to be. The camera cut to the man’s face, where astonishment was painted with the equivalent of acrylic colours. Vianello’s hand moved towards the mouse, but Brunetti put a restraining hand on his shoulder and said, ‘No, give him another minute.’

They did exactly this, during which time the round face went from shock to distress. He said a few things, shook his head minimally, then closed his eyes for a long time. ‘He’s washing his hands of the man’s decision,’ Zucchero observed.

Vianello could resist no longer and raised the level of sound. ‘. . nothing I can do to help. I can only show you what the cards say. What you choose to do as a result is your choice, and I can only advise you to give it enough thought.’ He bowed his head like a priest about to sprinkle holy water on a coffin. Silence, and then the sound of a phone being replaced on the receiver.

‘Very good, that last touch,’ Vianello said with admiration he did nothing to hide. The screen changed and displayed a list of phone numbers while a woman’s voice explained that professional counsellors were prepared to answer your call twenty-four hours a day. There were experts with decades of experience in reading the cards, in reading horoscopes, and in the interpretation of dreams. The screen displayed, in a red field at the bottom of the screen, the prices of the various calls.

‘Isn’t there any way to stop them?’ asked Zucchero, and Brunetti took heart from how scandalized the young man sounded.

‘The Guardia di Finanza keeps an eye on them. But so long as they don’t break any laws, there’s nothing that can be done about them,’ Brunetti explained.

‘Vanna Marchi?’ the young officer asked, naming the famous television celebrity who had recently been arrested and convicted.

‘She went too far,’ Vianello said. Then, with a wave at the screen, he said, ‘Far as I can tell, this guy is talking sense.’ Before Brunetti could object, the Inspector explained, ‘I’ve watched him a few times, and all he does is tell people what any level-headed person would tell them.’

‘For one Euro a minute?’ Brunetti asked.

‘It’s still cheaper than a psychiatrist,’ Zucchero observed.

‘Ah, psychiatrists,’ Vianello said as one would say while knocking down a house of cards.

It occurred to Brunetti to tell Vianello that much the same could be said about the man his aunt appeared to be involved with, but he knew that this would only invite trouble. Instead, he asked Zucchero, ‘You speak to the people in the neighbourhood?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And?’

‘One man, who lives a few houses down, said he heard something. He thinks it might have been a little after eleven but he’s not sure. He was sitting in his courtyard to get away from the heat, and he heard some noise — he said it could have been angry voices — but he said he really didn’t pay much attention to it.’

‘Coming from where?’

‘He didn’t know, sir. He said there are bars on the other side of the canal, and he thought the noise might have come from there. Or from someone’s television.’

‘Was he sure of the time?’

‘He said he was, said he’d turned off the television and gone down to the courtyard.’

‘What about Alvise? Did he give you that list?’

‘Yes, sir,’ the young officer said, swinging round and going over to the desk he shared with another officer. He brought back a sheet of paper and handed it to Brunetti. ‘It’s a list of the people who live there, sir. Alvise told me he thought it would be better if the Lieutenant spoke to the people who lived there, and when anyone in the courtyard said they didn’t live there, he didn’t bother to ask their names.’

In response to Brunetti’s gaze, Zucchero said, ‘Alvise didn’t close the door to the courtyard when he went in, it seems.’ There was no trace of inflection in his voice.

Brunetti allowed himself to let a soft ‘Ah’ escape from his lips.

‘Then I think you and I should go over and talk to the people who live there,’ he said to Vianello. When the Inspector did not answer immediately, Brunetti added, ‘Unless you’re waiting to call in and get your horoscope read’, but he said it with a laugh. Vianello closed down the screen and got to his feet.