by Donna Leon
Lieutenant, so I'm reassigning him."
Again, that motion of the lips. "And you have the approval of the
Vice-Questore, of course?"
"I hardly think a detail as insignificant as where a police officer is
assigned is of much interest to the Vice-Questore/ Brunetti answered.
"On the contrary, Commissario, I think the Vice-Questore is deeply
interested in anything that concerns the police in this city."
Tired of this, Brunetti asked, What does that mean?"
"Just what I said, sir. That the Vice-Questore will be interested to
learn about this." Like a tenor with register problems, Scarpa could
not control his voice as it wobbled between civility and menace.
"Meaning you intend to tell him about it?" Brunetti asked.
"Should the occasion arise," Scarpa answered blandly.
"Of course," Brunetti answered with equal blandness.
"Is that all I can do for you, Commissario?"
"Yes/ Brunetti said and left the office before giving in to the
temptation to say something else. Brunetti knew almost nothing about
Lieutenant Scarpa or what motivated him: money was probably a safe
guess. This thought called to mind a remark Anna Comnena had made
about Robert Guiscard: "Once a man has seized power, his love of money
displays exactly the same characteristics as gangrene, for gangrene,
once established in a body, never rests until it has invaded and
corrupted the whole of it."
An old woman lay injured in the hospital in Mestre, and
he had to concern himself with turf battles with Patta's I
creature and with the attempt to understand the lieutenant's motives.
He walked up the stairs, inwardly fuming about
Scarpa, but by the time he got back to his office he had f accepted the
fact that his real anger was directed at his own "
failure to foresee the attack on Moro's mother. It mattered I
little to Brunetti that this was entirely unrealistic; somehow, j he
should have realized the danger and done something to * '
protect her.
He called the hospital and, adopting the harsh, authoritarian voice he
had learned to use when dealing with mindless bureaucracies, announced
his rank and demanded to be connected to the ward where Signora Moro
was being treated. There was some delay in transferring the call, and
when the nurse on duty spoke to him, she was helpful and cooperative
and told him that the doctor had advised that Signora Moro be kept
until the next day, when she could go home. No, there was no serious
injury: she was being kept an extra day in consideration of her age
rather than her condition.
Braced by this comforting sign of humanity, Brunetti thanked her, ended
the call, and immediately called the police in Mogliano. The officer
in charge of the investigation told him that a woman had come into the
Questura that morning and admitted she had been driving the car that
struck Signora Moro. Panicking, she had driven away, but after a
sleepless night in which she had been the victim of both fear and
remorse, she had come to the police to confess.
When Brunetti asked the other officer if he believed the woman, he
received an astonished, "Of course', before the man said he had to get
back to work and hung up.
So Moro was right when he insisted that 'they' had had nothing to do
with the attack on his mother. Even that word, 'attack', Brunetti
realized, was entirely his own invention.
Why, then, Moro's rage at Brunetti for having suggested it? More
importantly, why his state of anguished despair last night, far out of
proportion for a man who had been told that his mother was not
seriously injured?
Awareness that he had done something else to merit Lieutenant Scarpa's
enmity should have troubled Brunetti, but he could not bring himself to
care: there were no degrees to implacable antipathy. He regretted only
that Pucetti might have to bear the brunt of Scarpa's anger, for the
lieutenant was not a man likely to aim a blow, at least not an open
one, at people above him. He wondered whether other people behaved
like this, deaf and blind to the real demands of their professions in
their heedless pursuit of success and personal power, though Paola had
long assured him that the various struggles that absorbed the
Department of English Literature at the university were far more savage
than anything described in Beowulf or the bloodier Shakespearean
tragedies. He knew that ambition was accepted as a natural human
trait, had for decades observed others striving to achieve what they
determined to be success. Much as he knew these desires were judged to
be perfectly normal, he remained puzzled by the passion and energy of
their endeavours. Paola had once observed that he had been born with
some
essential piece missing, for he seemed incapable of desiring anything
other than happiness. Her remark had troubled him until she explained
that it was one of the reasons she had married him.
Musing on this, he entered Signorina Elettra's office. When she looked
up, he said without introduction, "I'd like to learn about the people
at the Academy."
"What, precisely, would you like to know?"
He considered this, then finally said, "I think what I'd really like to
know is whether any of them is capable of killing that boy and, if so,
for what reason."
There could be many reasons," she answered, then added, "If, that is,
you want to believe that he was murdered."
"No, I don't want to believe that. But if he was, then I want to know
why."
"Are you curious about the boys or the teachers?"
"Either. Both."
"I doubt it could have been both."
"Why?" he asked.
"Because they'd probably have different motives."
"Such as?"
"I haven't explained myself well," she began, shaking her head. "I
think the teachers would do it for serious reasons, adult reasons."
"For instance?"
"Danger to their careers. Or to the school."
"And the boys?"
"Because he was a pain in the ass."
"Seems a pretty trivial reason to kill someone."
"Viewed from a different perspective, most reasons for killing people
are pretty trivial."
He was forced to agree. After a while he asked, "In what way could he
have been a pain in the ass?"
"God knows. I don't have any idea what bothers boys that age. Someone
who is too aggressive, or not aggressive
enough. Someone who is too smart and makes the others embarrassed. Or
shows off, or ..."
Brunetti cut her off. Those still seem like trivial reasons. Even for
teenagers."
Not the least offended, she said, That's the best I can come up with
Nodding at the keyboard, she said, "Let me take a look and see what I
can find."
"Where will you look?"
"Class lists and then members of their families. Faculty lists and
then the same. Then cross-check them with, well, with other things."
"Where did you get those lists?"
Her intake of breath was stylishly
long. "It's not that I have them,
sir, but that I can get them." She looked at him and waited for his
comment; outflanked, Brunetti thanked her and asked her to bring him
whatever information she could find as soon as she had it.
In his office, he set himself to attempting to recall anything he'd
heard or read, over the years, about the Academy. When nothing came,
he turned his reflections to the military at large, recalling that most
of the faculty were former officers of one branch or other.
A memory slipped in from somewhere, tantalizing him and refusing to
come into focus. Like a sharpshooter straining to see at night, he
addressed his attention, not to the target that wouldn't appear, but to
whatever stood beside or beyond it. Something about the military,
about young men in the military.
The memory materialized: an incident from some years before, when two
soldiers paratroopers, he thought had been directed to jump from a
helicopter somewhere in, he thought, former Yugoslavia. Not knowing
that the helicopter was hovering a hundred metres above the ground,
they had jumped to their death. Not knowing, and not having been told
by the other men in the helicopter, who
had known but were members of a military corps different from their
own. And with that memory came another one, of a young man found dead
at the bottom of a parachute jump, perhaps the victim of a nighttime
hazing prank gone wrong. To the best of his knowledge, neither case
had ever been resolved, no satisfactory explanation provided for the
completely unnecessary deaths of these three young men.
He recalled, as well, a morning at breakfast some years ago when Paola
looked up from the newspaper which contained an account of the
country's then-leader offering to send Italian troops to aid an ally in
some bellicose endeavour. "He's going to send troops," she said. "Is
that an offer or a threat, do you think?"
Only one of Brunetti's close friends had opted for a career in the
military, and they had lost touch over the last few years, so he did
not want to call him. What he would ask him, anyway, Brunetti had no
idea. If the Army were really as corrupt and incompetent as everyone
seemed to believe it was? No, hardly the question he could ask, at
least not of a serving general.
That left his friends in the press. He called one in Milano but when
the machine answered, he chose not to leave either his name or a
message. The same happened when he called another friend in Rome. The
third time, when he called Beppe Avisani, in Palermo, the phone was
answered on the second ring.
"Avisani."
"Ciao, Beppe. It's me, Guido."
"Ah, good to hear your voice," Avisani said, and for a few minutes they
exchanged the sort of information friends give and get when they
haven't spoken for some time, their voices perhaps made formal by a
shared awareness that they usually now spoke to one another only when
one of them needed information.
After everything that had to be said about families had been said,
Avisani asked, "What can I tell you?"
"I'm looking into the death of the Moro boy," Brunetti answered and
waited for the reporter to answer.
"Not suicide, then?" he asked, not bothering with polite pieties.
That's what I want to know," Brunetti answered.
Without hesitation, Avisani volunteered. "If it wasn't suicide, then
the obvious reason is the father, something to do with him."
"I'd got that far, Beppe," Brunetti said with an entire absence of
sarcasm.
"Of course, you would. Sorry."
"The report came out too long ago," Brunetti said, certain that a man
who had spent twenty years as a political reporter would follow his
thinking and also dismiss the report as a possible cause. "Do you know
what he worked on while he was in Parliament?"
There was a long pause as Avisani followed the trail of Brunetti's
question. "You're probably right," he said at last, then, "Can you
hold on a minute?"
"Of course. Why?"
T've got that stuff in a file somewhere."
"In the computer?" Brunetti asked.
"Where else?" the reporter asked with a laugh. "In a drawer?"
Brunetti laughed in return, as though he'd meant the question as a
joke.
"Just a minute Avisani said. Brunetti heard a click as the phone was
set down on a hard surface.
He looked out of the window as he waited, making no attempt to impose
order upon the information that tumbled around in his mind. He lost
track of time, though it was far more than a minute before Avisani was
back.
"Guido?" he asked, 'you still there?"
"Yes."
"I haven't got much on him. lie was there for three years, well, a bit
less than that, before he resigned, but he was kept pretty well out of
sight."
"Kept?"
The party he ran for chose him because he was famous at the time and
they knew they could win with him, but after he was elected and they
got an idea of what his real ideas were, they kept him as far out of
sight as they could."
Brunetti had seen it happen before as honest people were elected into a
system they hoped to reform, only to find themselves gradually absorbed
by it, like insects in a Venus' fly-trap. Because Avisani had seen far
more of it than he, Brunetti drew a pad towards him and said only, "I'd
like to know what committees he worked on." ,v
"Are you looking for what I think you are someone he might have
crossed?"
"Yes."
Avisani made a long noise that Brunetti thought was meant to be
speculative. "Let me give you what I have. There was a pension
committee for farmers," Avisani began, then dismissed it with a casual,
"Nothing there. They're all nonentities." And then, The one that
oversaw sending all that stuff to Albania."
"Was the Army involved in that?" Brunetti asked.
"No. I think it was done by private charities. Caritas, organizations
like that."
"What else?"
The Post Office."
Brunetti snorted.
"And military procurement," Avisani said with undisguised interest.
"What does that mean?"
There was a pause before he answered, "Probably examining the contracts
with the companies that supply the military."
"Examining or deciding?" Brunetti asked.
"Examining, I'd say. It was really only a subcommittee, which means
they'd have no more power than to make recommendations to the real
committee. You think that's it?" he asked.
"I'm not sure there is an "it"," Brunetti answered evasively, only now
forcing himself to recall that his friend was a member of the press.
With laboured patience, Avisani asked, "I'm asking as a curious friend,
Guido, not as a reporter."
Brunetti laughed in relief. "It's a better guess than the postmen.
They're not particularly violent."
"No, that's only in America," Avisani said.
Agreement's awkwardness fell between them, both of them aware of the
conflict
between their professions and their friendship. Finally
Avisani said, "You want me to follow up on this?"
At a loss as to how to phrase it, Brunetti said, "If you can do it
delicately."
"I'm still alive because I do things delicately, Guido," he said
without any attempt at humour, gave a farewell not distinguished by its
friendliness, and hung up.
Brunetti called down to Signorina Elettra, and when she answered, said,
"I'd like you to add one more thing to your .. ." he began, but was at
a loss for a name for what Signorina Elettra did. To your research,"
he said.
"Yes, sir?" she asked.
"Military procurement."
"Could you be a bit more precise?"
"Getting and spending," he began, and a line Paola was forever quoting
rushed towards him. He ignored it and continued, "For the military. It
was one of the committees Moro was on."
"Oh, my," she exclaimed. "However did that happen?"