The Death of Faith by Donna Leon

asked.
     
    ‘Oh, no, I stopped going to confession years ago. But he does it to the young boys.’
     
    ‘And the girls,’ Chiara added in a very soft voice, so soft that Brunetti asked her nothing.
     
    ‘Is that all he does?’ Brunetti asked Raffi.
     
    ‘That’s all I know, Papà. I had him for religious instruction about four years ago, and the only thing he made us do then was memorize the book and recite it back to him. But he used to say nasty things to the girls.’ Turning to his sister, he asked, ‘He still do that?’
     
    She nodded.
     
    ‘Would anyone like another cutlet?’ Paola asked in an entirely normal voice. She got two shaken heads and a grunt and took that as sufficient response to remove the platter. There was no salad that day, and she had planned to serve only fruit for dessert. Instead, she opened a paper package on the counter and pulled out a heavy cake, laden with fresh fruit and filled with whipped cream, which she had intended to take back to the university that afternoon to offer to her colleagues after the monthly faculty meeting.
     
    ‘Chiara, dear, would you get plates?’ she asked while taking a broad silver knife from a drawer.
     
    The pieces she cut them, Brunetti noticed, were large enough to catapult the entire lot of them into insulin shock, but the sweetness of the cake, and then the coffee, and then the talk of the equal sweetness of the first real day of springtime were enough to restore some sort of tranquillity to the family. After it, Paola said she would do the dishes, and Brunetti decided to read the paper. Chiara disappeared into her room, and Raffi went off to study physics with his friend. Neither Brunetti nor Paola said anything further about the subject, but they both knew that they had not heard the last of Padre Luciano.
     
    * * * *
     
    Chapter Three
     
     
    Brunetti took his overcoat with him after lunch and walked back to the Questura with it draped over his shoulders, revelling in the softness of the day, comfortable and warm after the large meal. He forced himself to ignore the tightness of his suit, insisting to himself that it was no more than the unaccustomed warmth of the day that made him so sensitive to the weight of the heavy wool. Besides, everyone gained a kilo or two during the winter; probably did a person good: built up resistance to disease and things like that.
     
    As he started the descent from the Rialto Bridge, he saw a number eighty-two pulling up to the embarcadero on his right and, without thinking, ran to get it, which he managed to do just as it was starting to pull away from the dock and out into the centre of the Grand Canal. He moved to the right side of the boat but stayed outside on the deck, glad of the breeze and the light that danced up from the water. He watched Calle Tiepolo approaching on the right side and peered up the narrow calle, searching for the railing of his terrace, but they were past it too quickly for him to see it, and so he turned his attention back to the canal.
     
    Brunetti often wondered what it must have been like to live in the days of the Most Serene Republic, to have made this grand passage by means of the power of oars alone, to move in silence without motors or horns, a silence broken by nothing more than the shouted ‘ Ouie’ of boatmen and the slip of oars. So much had changed: today’s merchants kept in touch with one another with the odious ‘ telefonini’, not by means of slant-rigged galleons. The very air stank of the miasma of exhaust and pollution that drifted over from the mainland; no sea breeze seemed any longer able to sweep the city entirely clean. The one thing that the ages had left unchanged was the city’s thousand-year-old heritage of venality, and Brunetti always felt uncomfortable at his inability to decide whether he thought this good or bad.
     
    It had been his original intention to get off at San Samuele and take the long walk up toward San Marco, but the thought