by Donna Leon
‘Anyway,’ Bocchese said, as if in response to a signal from the men on the plaque that he hurry things up, ‘one day I was in a grocery store getting some things for my mother and I saw his mother, standing in one of the aisles, looking around her as if the fires of Hell were coming to get her. She saw me, but she didn’t answer when I said hello. Then all of a sudden the owner was there, screaming at her, “I saw you, I saw you take that rice”, and it was then I saw her hand was under her coat.
‘She looked like she was going to faint, poor thing, and then he was walking towards her, screaming, “Thief, thief, thief. Someone call the police.”
‘And I thought of Leonardo and the other kids, and what it would be like for them if their mother was arrested, too.’
‘So what did you do?’ Brunetti asked.
‘While the man was walking towards her, I went past her, to where he was, and reached up and grabbed a box of pasta, and I made sure I knocked some others off, so he’d look to see what was going on. When he saw me, he made a grab at me, but I ran around him and out of the store, and he forgot all about her and followed me. I moved just slowly enough that he would try to catch me, and when I’d led him two streets from the store, I really started to run and lost him.’
Bocchese looked back at the memory without smiling. ‘When he got back to the store, she was gone. I don’t know if he recognized her; he didn’t know me, that’s for sure.’
‘How’d Vallotto find out?’ Brunetti asked.
‘I suppose his mother told him,’ Bocchese said without much interest. ‘He never talked about it until years later, when I met him on the street, and he told me he’d heard I was getting married, and to come to him for the rings.
‘He must have seen my expression because he said, “I remember what you did for my mother. I’ll never cheat you, and I’ll help you if I can.”’ He looked at Brunetti and added, ‘And he has.’
‘How?’
‘Remember, about six years ago,’ Bocchese asked, ‘we found a diamond bracelet and some rings in the home of a suspect, and he said they were his mother’s?’
Brunetti nodded, although he had only the vaguest memory of the case.
Bocchese went on. ‘I took them to Leonardo and told him it was police business but would he help.’
‘And?’
‘And he told me the name of the family they’d been stolen from.’ Bocchese paused, but Brunetti could think of nothing to say.
‘What do you want me to do with this?’ Bocchese finally asked, waving towards the necklace.
‘Check it and the papers for prints, and, if you’ll send me some photos, I’ll have Signorina Elettra see what she can find out.’
‘Then what do I do with it?’ Bocchese asked.
‘You have a safe, don’t you?’ Brunetti asked.
‘I do,’ Bocchese said and slipped the paper and necklace back into the cloth bag.
His next stop was to see Signorina Elettra and ask whether she was still on strike and, if so, how Vice-Questore Patta and Lieutenant Scarpa were faring. He also wanted to know if she had learned anything about who had sent the yellow roses that had gone to the theatre and to Flavia’s apartment, and to ask her about the necklace. When he saw her at her desk, Brunetti decided not to bother to ask her about the flowers, so clear did her expression make it that she had had no success.
‘Nothing,’ she volunteered. ‘My friend in the bar by the theatre is on vacation. I tried the few florists that are left in town, but not one of them had had a sale that big. I tried Mestre, and Padova, but then I gave up.’ Had he ever heard her use that phrase before?
Before he could comment, she said, ‘I found a number of articles, in Italian and English, about fans and stalkers, but I’m afraid they don’t say anything common sense doesn’t tell us. The operatic ones are almost all women.’ She looked at him and smiled, saying, ‘Also, women for rock music, but men for jazz.’
He was reminded of a friend who had once owned a CD shop, in the era when people still bought CDs in shops, who had told him that the weirdest customers were people who liked organ music. ‘Most of them shop at night,’ his friend had said. ‘I think it’s the only time some of them ever leave their houses.’
‘As to Signora Petrelli,’ she went on, ‘I spent the morning chasing her through the gutter press: at the beginning, they loved her affair with that American woman, but they grew tired of it and it dropped off the front pages, then the back pages. The last time they mentioned her – they never take any interest in her singing – was because her husband took her to court to try to get his payments to her reduced.’
‘And?’ Brunetti asked.
‘She must have had the best lawyer in Spain draw up the settlement for the divorce. Public sympathy was with her at the time and the judge who held the hearing to review the case told him, in essence, to stop wasting the court’s time and pay his wife, or he’d go to jail.’
‘Did that last word have its usual sobering effect?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Exactly.’
‘You think he’s involved in this?’
She gave the question the consideration it deserved and answered, ‘I doubt it’, then quickly clarified, ‘not because he wouldn’t do it but because he’s intelligent enough to know he’d be the first suspect if anything happened to her. Besides which, he’s in Argentina.’
‘After the divorce, has the press paid much attention to her?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Only the press that’s interested in music. She’s won awards and been on the covers of magazines. But her private life seems not to interest them any more.’
‘Is that because of her age?’
‘Probably,’ Signorina Elettra conceded. ‘And the lives of pop stars are much more exciting.’
He nodded, having heard and overheard the conversation of his own children and seen the magazines they’d left lying about the house. ‘We were no different, my generation,’ he said.
‘Nor mine,’ she said and shrugged.
He was tempted to add, ‘Nor Nero’s’, but thought he’d spare her that.
‘The American?’ he finally asked.
‘Nothing about her for years other than the articles and books she’s written about Chinese art.’
‘No mention of where she is?’
‘Every reference I found placed her in China, though some of them said she had just arrived for a conference. No mention of where she arrived from.’
He frowned. Dead end. From the way Flavia had spoken, it had sounded like that’s what it was. ‘Pity,’ he said out loud. Signorina Elettra looked up in surprise.
19
‘What about Alvise?’ he asked.
Surprise vanished. ‘He’s been suspended.’
Brunetti interrupted her to ask, ‘Since when can that happen?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I’ve never heard that an officer can be suspended so easily, without an investigation or a hearing, yet we’ve all gone along, acting as if Scarpa has the authority to do this. But has he?’
She sat, open mouthed, looking at him as though he had suddenly started speaking to her in Hungarian. ‘It’s a procedure used to stop officers’ pay without actually bringing charges against them,’ she said as if a commissario, of all people, should be aware of the rulings of the Ministry of the Interior.
‘Who told you about it?’ Brunetti asked.
Again, she stared at him, a cardinal confronted with sin. ‘I think it’s common . . .’ she started to say, but then he saw illumination arrive. ‘Lieutenant Scarpa told me,’ she said, no longer a cardinal but now an Inquisitor who had just stumbled upon the distinct possibility of human heresy.
‘I see,’ Brunetti said coolly. Then, keeping his voice carefully level, he asked, ‘Had you thought of having a look in the regulations of the Ministry?’
She turned to her computer, saying under her breath, ‘I don’t want to believe this.’
Brunetti resisted the temptation to
stand behind her while she searched, certain that there was no way he could be of the least help to her, equally certain that he would not understand what she was doing. He went to the windowsill and, folding his arms, leaned back against it. Her nails clicked on the keys. He studied the laces in his shoes, noticing that they were a bit worn and should be replaced. Lieutenant Scarpa should be replaced, as well, though not because he was worn. Time clicked by.
‘It’s not possible,’ she said, eyes still on the screen. ‘No regulation exists. Even if you’re accused of a crime, you’re still paid and still considered a member of the force.’ She looked up, iron-jawed, from the screen. ‘He can’t do it. They can’t stop his pay.’
Brunetti remembered that he was not supposed to know that she had kept Alvise on the payroll. He returned his attention to his laces and considered consequences. Signorina Elettra had, for years, thrived in open violation of many laws, especially those regarding privacy. She had raided banks, broken into the files of ministries, had even gone trawling through the files of the Vatican. At times, she had gone too far and provoked flurries of alarm among the people who knew what she was doing, often the same people for whom she was doing it. But she had always managed to scamper free without leaving tracks.
Discretion seemed a luxury at this moment. The ship was sinking: he tossed discretion overboard. ‘Under whose name did you write to reinstate Alvise’s salary?’
Her face did not move. She put the first three fingers of her left hand to her lips and rubbed them. ‘This isn’t good,’ she said.
‘What did you do?’
‘I put in a request for authorization of payment for overtime to Alvise. I didn’t want to create suspicion by countermanding the order to stop his pay, so I merely moved his name to a different category and had him paid for extra shifts. Five of them in a week.’ She paused, then added, ‘I really believed Scarpa had the power to suspend him. I don’t know what was in my head that made me believe him.’
‘Who authorized those payments for the extra shifts?’ Brunetti asked, uninterested, as he often was with the children, in explanation or excuse.
‘That’s why it’s not good,’ she said. ‘You authorized them.’
‘Ah,’ Brunetti said, dragging out the sound to give his mind time to follow the consequences. He looked at her, but her eyes veered away from his. ‘The people in Rome have records of a man who worked eighty hours this week?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ she said, avoiding his eyes.
‘And if these numbers were called to their attention, what would they think was going on?’
Without hesitation, she answered, ‘They’d think that whoever was authorizing the hours for him would be dividing the extra money with him.’
Brunetti, were he working in Rome, would probably come to the same conclusion. Were he working anywhere, for that fact.
‘So Scarpa catches two pigeons with one bean. They get Alvise for making the false claim, and they get me for approving it, and who cares if I got the money from him or not? Why else would I do it?’
She would have figured this out, would probably now be inventing newspaper headlines: ‘Corruption Not Only in the South’. ‘Paid Double after Injuring a Worker’.
Signorina Elettra started counting something on her fingers.
‘What?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Counting how many days until we’re paid,’ she said.
‘Seven,’ Brunetti said, saving her the trouble. ‘Why?’
She looked at him but seemed not to see him. ‘I’m trying to think of how to fix this,’ she said at last.
‘I could have a mental breakdown, and then I’d never be blamed for anything,’ Brunetti suggested.
It was as if he had not spoken. She stared into the middle distance, then turned to her computer and tapped in a short string of words, saw what that produced and tapped in some others. Her eyes contracted as she read the second screen, and the third, then almost closed with concentration at the next.
Telling himself that his days at the Questura might well be numbered, Brunetti decided to spend these last ones as pleasantly as he could, and there were few things that gave him as much delight as watching Signorina Elettra enter the trance state that was the first stage of her passage to illegality. Look at her, he told himself: today she is disguised as a Captain of Industry, with a black wool waistcoat buttoned tight over a white cotton shirt, charcoal grey pinstripe trousers and a sober tie: if the gods had turned Patta into a woman, she would dress like this.
Time passed, and Brunetti continued to watch Signorina Elettra work. Or plot, or corrupt, obstruct, defy, pervert the course of justice – well, of the law, at any rate. Brunetti had no idea what she was doing, but he settled in to watch her success or failure as people did in the lobbies of the larger banks, entranced by the screens on which were posted prices of the major stocks at play at the Borsa in Milano. One had but to study their faces, rapt in contemplation of the god in the terminal, to read their fate: prices went up or down, and their hopes were dragged along with them.
Brunetti floated free of all sense of time. His only contact with the world was Signorina Elettra’s expression. He saw her defeated, then defiant, completely stunned, fearful, hopeful, worried, then terrified, and suddenly absolutely certain that she had found the way, the truth, and the light.
She took her eyes from the screen and opened them wide in surprise at seeing him there. ‘Have you been here long?’ she asked.
He glanced at his watch. ‘Half an hour,’ he said, then nodded towards her computer. ‘Found something?’
‘Ah, yes. There’s a back door to the overtime applications.’
‘Back door?’
‘It’s a way to get in and change the requests.’
‘What can you change?’
‘Everything,’ she answered. ‘Purpose, duration, uniformed work or not.’
‘Can you change the name of the superior officer authorizing it?’
‘I’ve just done that,’ she said and ran a self-satisfied palm down the front of her tie, just as he had seen Patta do.
‘Need I ask?’
‘Lieutenant Scarpa has requested that Officer Alvise liaise – I’ve always wanted to use that word – with the staff of the hospital so as to keep an eye on the victim of an attack. Because he especially wants Officer Alvise to take this assignment, he has authorized unlimited overtime.’
‘You have no shame, do you?’ Brunetti asked with a wide smile.
‘And less mercy,’ she answered, smiling in her turn.
Thinking it more discreet that they be silent in their celebration, Brunetti took his phone from his pocket and, trying to appear casual, held it up. ‘Bocchese’s sent me some photos of a necklace. I’d like you to see what you can find out about it.’
‘Is it stolen?’
‘I don’t know,’ Brunetti said, tapping his finger on the face of the phone until he had the photos there. ‘I’ll send them to you.’ He tapped an icon, tried to remember what Chiara had taught him to do, and went through the processes just as she had shown them to him. With a soft whoosh, the first photo slid out of his phone – or so he visualized it – and crossed the two-metre distance to Signorina Elettra’s computer. The others followed. He looked up, self-satisfied and trying to hide it, but Signorina Elettra was looking at the first photo, already displayed on her screen.
‘Maria Santissima,’ she whispered. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it.’
Brunetti read the message Bocchese had attached, saying that the setting was at least forty years old, and thus the stones were likely to be genuine.
‘Where’d he get it?’ she asked.
‘Signora Petrelli gave it to me. Someone left it in her dressing room.’
She moved closer to the screen. ‘Left it?’
‘That’s what she told me.’
‘You want to know where it comes from?’
‘Yes. If possible.’
‘If it was stolen, it might
well be: Interpol has a file of major pieces that are stolen.’ She raised a hand towards the stones but stopped herself from touching the screen, perhaps out of the same fear he had of leaving fingerprints on something so beautiful.
‘Is there any way you can check with jewellers?’ Brunetti asked.
She nodded, still looking at it. ‘Anyone who sold this would remember it, I’m sure.’ She removed her attention from the photo and said, ‘I have a list in here of jewellers where something as valuable as this might be sold. I’ll send the photo and ask if they bought or sold it within the last . . . ?’ She looked at Brunetti inquisitively.
‘I don’t think it’s necessary to specify,’ he answered. Brunetti, who had no special affinity with stones, would certainly not forget it; a jeweller, with a better idea of its worth and a finer sensibility for its beauty, would be even less likely to do so.
‘In this country or internationally?’
‘Everywhere, I think,’ Brunetti answered.
She nodded, then asked, ‘Anything else?’
‘You could tell me what will happen to the Lieutenant,’ he said mildly and smiled.
‘Ah,’ she said in response. ‘He’s bound to be well protected in Rome, so nothing is likely to happen to him.’
‘Protected by whom?’ Brunetti asked in the same mild tone, remembering that she’d said she wanted the Lieutenant’s head.
‘I refuse to speculate, Commissario,’ she said, then, turning towards a noise from behind him, added, ‘Perhaps you can ask the Vice-Questore about it, Dottore.’
With the gracious condescension to inferiors that so characterized his every interchange, Vice-Questore Patta gave his attention to his subordinates. He turned to Signorina Elettra and, his face softer, asked, ‘If you’re talking to him, does that mean you’re talking to me?’
‘Of course I’m talking to you, Dottore,’ she said amiably. ‘How could I not?’ Her voice could have been used to sell something: honey, washing powder.