FICTION

PROCEDURA by Salvatore Mannuzzu, translated from the Italian by John Shepley (Turtle Bay Books: $20; 256 pp). Has there ever been a more reluctant investigator? A more cultured one? Salvatore Mannuzzu’s reticent but appealing Judge (that’s all he’s known by), face to face with a case he wants no part of, is acutely aware that “It’s worse to stir things up” with his muted but persistent dragnet, that “what is put back into circulation and rises again is the sadness that has taken so much time to settle.”

Yet there is a murder, and the Judge--a Roman magistrate exiled to a dreary provincial city in Sardinia--is tapped. Valerio Garau has taken cyanide, thinking it was a liver pill, while in the company of his lover, Dr. Lauretta Oppo Martinez. Valerio is charming, courteous, civilized; so is Lauretta. Both are beloved by the community. Valerio himself was a judge. So is Lauretta. So is her courtly if cuckolded husband. So are all the Judge’s superiors, who tacitly urge him against overzealousness in pursuit of a solution. Routine inquiries will do, then close the case quietly. Not that they’re shielding anyone in particular, just protecting their own. Judge not lest the judges be judged.

Mannuzzu, a poet/politician, tells a tale that is finely lugubrious. Valerio’s noble, eccentric, tragic family history is unearthed against a background of mournful Easter-week processions, and in the spell of a Bach cantata that spins malaise. Long after the files have gathered dust, the Judge privately runs the truth to ground. No matter: “Christmas was coming, and the goose must suffer.”