He felt her pace grow slower; fearing a pause for further rhetorical flourishes, he kept moving, forcing her to keep up with him. ‘Because my father has the ichor of capitalism flowing in his veins, Guido. Because, for hundreds of years, to be a Falier has been to be a merchant, and to be a merchant is to make money.’

‘This,’ Brunetti observed, ‘from a professor of literature who maintains she has no interest in money.’

‘That’s because I’m the end of the line, Guido. I’m the last person in our family who will carry the name: our children have yours.’ Her steps slowed, as did her voice, but she did not stop. ‘My father has made money all his life, thus permitting me, and our children, the luxury of not having to take an interest in making it.’

Brunetti, who had played what must have been thousands of games of Monopoly with his children, was sure that the capitalist gene had run true to form in them and that they already had the interest, perhaps even the ichor itself.

‘And he thinks there’s money to be made there?’ Brunetti asked, and then quickly added, if only to prevent her from again demanding how he could ask such a question, ‘Safe money?’

She turned to him again. ‘Safe?’

‘Well,’ he said, hearing himself how silly that had sounded, ‘Clean money?’

‘At least you accept that there’s a difference,’ she said with the bite of her years of voting Communist.

He said nothing for a while. Suddenly he stopped and asked, ‘What was all that about, what did your mother call it, “dietary peculiarities”? And all that nonsense about what the kids wouldn’t eat?’

‘Cataldo’s wife is a vegetarian,’ Paola said. ‘And my mother didn’t want to call attention to her, so I decided that I should be the one to — as you police people say — “take the fall”.’ She squeezed his arm.