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accused. In the broad scale of things, Brunetti often reflected, these were not ruinous weaknesses.
    Signorina Elettra sat at her desk outside her superior’s office and smiled at Brunetti as he entered. ‘I thought I’d report to the Vice-Questore,’ he said.
    ‘He’ll be glad of the distraction,’ she said soberly. ‘His younger son just called to say he’s failed his exam.’
    ‘The less-bright one?’ Brunetti inquired, forcing himself not to refer to the boy as stupid, though he was.
    ‘Ah, Commissario, you force me to make a distinction that is beyond my powers,’ she said with a straight face and serious voice.
    Some years ago, Roberto Patta had more than once come close to being arrested, saved only by his father’s position. His involvement with the sale of drugs, however, had come to an end in an early morning car crash in which his fiancée had died, and only his father’s position had kept him from being tested for alcohol and drugs until almost a full day after the accident, when both tests proved negative. With her death, however, something seemed to have snapped inside the boy, and he had abandoned – according to the rumours that circulated in the Questura – both drink and drugs and devoted his limited energies to finishing his degree and becoming an accountant.
    It was a hopeless attempt. Brunetti knew it; Patta probably did, as well, yet the boy persisted, taking the same exams year after year, always failing them and determining each time to study harder and take them again, probably never pausing to consider that the state exams – should divine intervention confer his degree – would be even more difficult. Various officers whose children were in the same class as he repeated the stories about his dogged efforts, and over the course of years the common mind of the Questura had gone from considering him the spoiled child of a negligent father to the hard-working, if limited, son of a devoted parent. The mystery of it – fatherhood was always a mysterious thing to Brunetti – was Patta’s devotion to his two sons and his desire that they succeed in life by their own merits, an idea that had formed in him in response to the accident.
    ‘How long ago did he speak to him?’ Brunetti asked.
    ‘About an hour,’ she answered and then added in a different voice, ‘His father was busy talking on his
telefonino
so Roberto called me and asked me to put him through.’ She pulled her lips together in resignation. ‘He told me what had happened. He was crying.’
    ‘How old is he now, do you know?’
    ‘Twenty-six, I think.’
    ‘God, he’ll never make it, will he?’
    She shook away the very possibility. ‘Not unless someone can fix things for him with the examining committee.’
    ‘He won’t do it?’ Brunetti asked, indicating with his chin the door to Patta’s office. ‘He’s done it in the past.’
    ‘He won’t do it any more.’
    ‘But why?’
    ‘God knows. It would be easy enough. He’s certainly cultivated the right people in the last decade.’
    ‘Maybe they don’t know whose son he is,’ Brunetti suggested.
    ‘Perhaps,’ she answered, clearly not persuaded.
    ‘So it’s really true?’ Brunetti asked, marvelling at a parent who would not bend a rule to help his child.
    Brunetti crossed the room and knocked on Patta’s door.
    ‘
Avanti!
’ came the response, and Brunetti went in.
    Patta looked older than he had the day before. He was still a fine figure of a man: muscular, broad-shouldered, with a face that cried out to be immortalized in bronze or stone. But there were faint hollows under his cheekbones this morning, something Brunetti had never noticed before, and his skin looked taut and almost dusty.
    ‘Good morning, Vice-Questore,’ Brunetti said, approaching the desk.
    ‘Yes, what is it?’ Patta asked, as though a waiter had approached his table while he was deep in conversation.
    ‘I wanted to tell you about the man who was found over near the