Quietly in Their Sleep by Donna Leon

portraits from different centuries and in different styles, lined the walls of both sides of the corridor. Though he knew it was the way of portraits, Brunetti was struck by how unhappy most of these people looked, unhappy and something more; restless, perhaps, as though they believed their time would be better spent conquering the savage or converting the heathen, not posing for some vain, earthly memorial. The women seemed convinced they could do it by the mere example of blameless lives; the men appeared to place greater faith in the power of the sword.
     
    The man stopped in front of a door, knocked once, then opened it without waiting for a reply. He held it open and waited for Brunetti and Vianello to enter, then pulled the door silently closed behind them.
     
    A verse from Dante leaped to Brunetti’s mind:
     
    Oscura e profonda era e nebulosa
    Tanto che, per ficcar lo viso a fondo
    Io noti vi discernea alcuna cosa.
     
    So too was this room dark, as though by entering this place they, like Dante, had left behind the light of the world, the sun, and joy. Tall windows lined one wall of the room, all hidden behind velvet drapes of a particularly sober brown, something between sepia and dried blood. What light filtered in illuminated the leather backs of hundreds of very serious-looking volumes that lined the remaining walls from floor to ceiling. The floor was parquet, not thin strips of laminated wood laid down in sheets but the real thing, each cube carefully cut and positioned into place.
     
    In one corner of the room, sitting behind a massive desk covered with books and papers, Brunetti saw the top half of a large woman dressed in black. The severity of her dress and expression rendered the rest of the room suddenly cheerful.
     
    ‘What do you want?’ she asked, Vianello’s uniform, apparently, enough to obviate the need to ask who they were.
     
    From where he stood, Brunetti could get no clear idea of the woman’s age, though her voice —deep, resonant, and imperious — suggested maturity, if not advanced age itself. He took a few steps across the room until he was only a few metres from her desk. ‘Contessa?’ he began.
     
    ‘I asked you what you wanted,’ was her only response.
     
    Brunetti smiled. ‘I’ll try to take as little of your time as possible, Contessa. I know how very busy you are. My mother-in-law often speaks of your dedication to good works and of the stamina with which you so generously aid Holy Mother Church.’ He tried to make his pronunciation of that last sound reverent, no easy feat.
     
    ‘Who is your mother-in-law?’ she demanded, speaking as if she expected it to be her seamstress.
     
    Brunetti took careful aim and hit her right between her close-set eyes: ‘Contessa Falier.’
     
    ‘Donatella Falier?’ she asked, making a bad business of her attempt to hide her astonishment.
     
    Brunetti pretended not to have noticed it. ‘Yes. It was just last week, I think, that she was talking about your latest project.’
     
    ‘You mean the campaign to ban the sale of contraceptives in pharmacies?’ she asked, supplying Brunetti with the information he needed.
     
    ‘Yes,’ he said, nodded as if in full approval, and smiled.
     
    She rose from her chair and walked around the desk, her hand extended to him now that his humanity had been proven by his being related, if only by marriage, to one of the best-born women in the city. Standing, she revealed the full extent of the body that had been hidden by the desk. Taller than Brunetti, she outweighed him by twenty kilos. Her bulk, however, was not the heavy, compact flesh of the healthy fat person but the loose, jiggling suet of the perpetually immobile. Her chins rode one another down the front of her dress, itself little more than an immense tube of black wool that hung suspended from the immense buttress of her bosom. Brunetti did not sense that there had been much joy, nor even much pleasure, in the creation of all that