Unto Us a Son Is Given (Commissario Brunetti #28)

by Donna Leon

He bent and kissed the older man on the temple and said, ‘I’ll give your love to Paola and the kids.’ ‘Thank you, Guido,’ il Conte said, his attention directed rigidly at the boats below them. Brunetti turned away and left his father-in-law there, watching the past.

What was it Paola always said? ‘Love trumps principle?’ Yes. Well, perhaps.

Had this obliged her to bring daffodils from the market? It could just as easily have been yellow tulips, he supposed, but they did not stand up straight and scream ‘SPRINGTIME’ the way the daffodils did.

‘Did they spend the whole dinner talking about cinema?’ ‘I’m afraid so. You would have screamed. I almost did.’ ‘Why? I thought you liked films.’ ‘I do. I just don’t like having to listen to people talk about them. Most people talk rubbish about film. Worse, it’s pretentious rubbish.’

‘You know I love risi e bisi.’

The news of the death of Gonzalo Rodríguez de Tejeda reached Brunetti on his telefonino at eleven-fifteen in the morning of the last day of Signorina Elettra’s vacation.

He recalled only the disgust felt by a character who thought another had been animated by the desire for profit. No baser motive could be imagined. And here we were, two thousand years later, and greed was the common denominator of human action.