A Noble Radiance by Donna Leon Page A

thought it the most
crime-free province in the country, but perhaps that was the Italy of memory.
Enough time had passed, so the Lorenzonis, if they had managed to borrow enough
money to pay the ransom, might be willing to say so now. And if they had, how
had they paid it, and when?
    Years of experience
warned him that he was assuming the boy's death without final proof; the same
years told him that final proof was unnecessary here. Intuition would suffice.
    His thoughts shifted
to his conversation with Count Orazio and his reluctance to accept the other
man's intuition. In the past, Paola had sometimes said that she felt old, that
the best of life was past, but Brunetti had always been able to lure her away
from such ideas. He didn't know anything about menopause: the very word embarrassed
him. But could this be a sign that something like that was happening? Weren't
there hot flashes? Strange cravings for food? - He realized that he wished it
would be something like that, something physical and, therefore, something for
which he was in no way responsible and about which he could do nothing. As a
schoolboy, he had been told by the priest who gave religious instruction that
it was necessary, before confession, to examine his conscience. There were, the
priest had explained, sins of omission and sins of commission, but even then
Brunettihad found it difficult to distinguish between the two. Now that he was
a man, the distinction was even more difficult to grasp.
    He found himself
thinking that he should take Paola flowers, take her out to dinner, ask her
about her work. But even as he considered such gestures, he realized how
transparently false they were, even to him. If he knew the source of her
unhappiness, he might have some idea of what to do.
    It wasn't anything at
home, where she was as consistently explosive as she'd always been. Work, then,
and from what Paola had been saying for years, he could not imagine an
intelligent person who would not be driven to despair by the Byzantine politics
of the university. But usually the situation there enraged her, and no one
embraced battle as joyously as did Paola. The Count had said she was unhappy.
    Brunetti's thoughts
went from Paola's happiness to his own, and he surprised himself by realizing
that it had never before occurred to him to wonder whether he was happy or not.
In love with his wife, proud of his children, capable of doing his job well,
why would he worry about happiness, and what more than these things could
happiness be comprised of? He dealt every day with people who believed they
weren't happy and who further believed that by committing some crime - theft,
murder, deceit, blackmail, even kidnapping - they would find the magic elixir
that would transform the perceived misery of their lives into that most desired
of states: happiness. Brunetti found himself too often forced to examine the
consequences of those crimes, and what he saw was often the destruction of all
happiness.
    Paola frequently
complained that no one at the university listened to her, indeed that few
people ever bothered to listen to what anyone else said, but Brunetti had never
included himself in that denunciation. But did he listen to her? When she
railed on about the plummeting quality of her students and the grasping
self-interest of her colleagues, was he attentive enough? No sooner had he
asked himself this, than the thought snaked into his mind: did she listen to
him when he complained about Patta or about the various incompetencies that
were part of his daily life? And surely the consequences Of what he observed
were far more serious than those of some student who didn't remember who wrote I Promessi Sposi or didn't know who Aristotle was.
    Suddenly disgusted
with the futility of all of this, he got up and went over to the window.
Bonsuan's boat was back at its moorings, but the pilot was nowhere in sight.
Brunetti knew that his refusal to recommend Lieutenant Scarpa for promotion had
cost