by Donna Leon
“Could you tell me if your husband had any particularly close friends or business associates?”
She looked up at this question, then as quickly down again at her hands. “Our closest friends are the Nogares, Mirto and Graziella. He’s an architect who lives in Campo Sant’ Angelo. They’re Francesca’s godparents. I don’t know about his business associates; you’ll have to ask Ubaldo.”
“Other friends, Signora?”
“Why do you need to know all this?” she said, her voice rising sharply.
“I’d like to learn more about your husband, Signora.”
“Why?” The question leaped from her, almost as if beyond her volition.
“Until I understand what sort of man he was, I can’t understand why this happened.”
“A robbery?” she asked, her voice just short of sarcasm.
“It wasn’t robbery, Signora. Whoever killed him intended to do it.”
“No one could have a reason to want to kill Carlo,” she insisted. Brunetti, having heard this same thing more times than he cared to remember, said nothing.
Suddenly Signora Trevisan got to her feet. “Do you have any more questions? If not, I would like to be with my daughter.”
Brunetti got up from the chair and put out his hand. “Again, Signora, I appreciate your having spoken to me. I realize what a painful time this must be for you and your family, and I hope you find the courage that will help you through it.” Even as he spoke the words, they sounded formulaic in his ears, the sort of thing that got said in the absence of perceived grief, which was the case here.
“Thank you, Commissario,” she said, giving his hand a quick shake and walking toward the door. She held it open for him, then walked along the corridor with him toward the front door of the apartment. There was no sign of the other members of the family.
At the door, Brunetti nodded to the widow as he left the apartment and heard the door close softly behind him as he started down the steps. It seemed strange to him that a woman could be married to a man for almost twenty years and know nothing about his business dealings. Stranger still when her own brother was his accountant. What did they discuss at family dinners, soccer? Everyone Brunetti knew hated lawyers. Brunetti hated lawyers. He could not, consequently, believe that a lawyer, let alone a famous and successful one, had no enemies. Tomorrow he could discuss this with Lotto and see if he proved to be any more forthcoming than his sister.
10
While Brunetti had been inside the Trevisan apartment, the sky had clouded over, and the shimmering warmth of the day had fled. He glanced at his watch and saw that it was not yet six, and so, if he chose, he could still go back to the Questura. Instead, he turned back toward the Accademia Bridge, crossed it, and headed up toward home. Halfway there, he stopped in a bar and asked for a small glass of white wine. He picked up one of the small pretzels on the bar, took a bite, but tossed the rest into an ashtray. The wine was as bad as the pretzel, so he left that, too, and continued toward home.
He tried to recall the expression on Francesca Trevisan’s face when she had so suddenly appeared at the door, but he could remember no more than eyes flashing wide at the sight of him there. The eyes had been dry and had registered nothing more than surprise; she resembled her mother in absence of grief as well as in feature. Had she been expecting someone else?
How would Chiara respond if he were to be killed? And Paola, would she so easily be capable of answering questions were a policeman to come ask her about their personal life? Surely, Paola would not be able to say, as had Signora Trevisan, that she knew nothing about her husband’s, her late husband’s, professional life. It snagged in Brunetti’s mind, this protestation of ignorance, and he couldn’t let it go, nor could he believe it.
When he let himself into the apartment, the radar of years told him that it was empty. He went down to the kitchen, where he found the table littered with newspapers and what seemed to be Chiara’s homework, papers covered with numbers and mathematical signs that made no sense at all to Brunetti. He picked up a sheet of paper and studied it, saw the neat, right-slanting hand of his youngest child in a long series of numbers and signs that he thought might be, if memory served, a quadratic equation. Was this calculus? Trigonometry? It had been so long ago, and Brunetti had been so unsuited to mathematics, that he could recall almost nothing of it, though surely he had gone through four years of it.
He put Chiara’s papers aside and turned his attention to the newspapers, where Trevisan’s murder competed for attention with yet another senator and yet another bribe. Years had passed since Judge Di Pietro had handed down the first formal accusation, and still villains ruled the land. All, or what seemed like all, of the major political figures who had ruled the country since Brunetti was a child had been named in accusation, named again on different charges, and had even begun to name one another, and yet not one of them had been tried and sentenced, though the coffers of the state had been sucked dry. They’d had their snouts in the public trough for decades, yet nothing seemed strong enough—not public rage, not an upwelling of national disgust—to sweep them from power. He turned a page and saw photos of the two worst, the hunchback and the balding pig, and he flipped the paper closed with tired loathing. Nothing would change. Brunetti knew not a little about these scandals, knew where a lot of money had gone and who was likely the next to be named, and the one thing he knew with absolute certainty was that nothing would change. Lampedusa had it right—things had to seem to change so that things could remain the same. There’d be elections, there’d be new faces and new promises, but all that would happen would be that different snouts would go into the trough, and new accounts would be opened in those discreet private banks across the border in Switzerland.
Brunetti knew this mood and almost feared it, this recurring certainty of the futility of everything he did. Why bother to put the boy who broke into a house in jail when the man who stole billions from the health system is named ambassador to the country to which he had been sending the money for years? And what justice imposed a fine on the person who failed to pay the tax on the radio in his car when the manufacturer of that same car could admit to having paid billions of lire to the directors of labor unions to see that they would prevent their members from asking for raises, could admit it and remain free? Why arrest anyone for murder, or why bother to look for the person who murdered Trevisan when the man who had for decades been the highest-ranking politician in the country stood accused of having ordered the murders of the few honest judges who had had the courage to investigate the Mafia?
This bleak reverie was interrupted by Chiara’s arrival. She slammed the apartment door and came in with a great deal of noise and a large pile of books. Brunetti watched as she went down to her room and emerged a few moments later without the books.
“Hello, angel,” he called down the hall. “Would you like something to eat?” When wouldn’t she, he asked himself.
“Ciao, Papà,” she called out and came down the hall, struggling to extricate herself from the sleeves of her coat and managing, instead, only to pull one of them completely inside out and trap her hand in it. As he watched, she tore her other hand free and reached to pull at the sleeve. He glanced away, and when he looked back, the coat lay in a heap on the floor, and Chiara was bending to pick it up.
She came into the kitchen and tilted her face up to him, expecting a kiss, which he gave her.
She went over and opened the refrigerator, stooped down to see into it, reached into the back and pulled out a paper-wrapped wedge of cheese. She stood, took a knife from a drawer, and cut herself a thick slice.
“Want some bread?” he asked, pulling a bag of rolls down from on top of the refrigerator. She nodded, and they did a trade, he getting a thick wedge of cheese in exchange for two of the rolls.
“Papà” she began, “how much do policemen get paid an hour?”
“I don’t know exactly, Chiara. They get a salary, but sometimes they have to work mo
re hours a week than people who work in offices do.”
“You mean if there’s a lot of crime, or if they have to follow someone?”
“Si.” He nodded toward the cheese, and she cut him another piece, handing it to him silently.
“Or if they spend time questioning people, suspects and things like that?” she asked, clearly not going to give this up.
“Si,” he repeated, wondering what she was getting at.
She finished her second roll and put her hand into the bag for another.
“Mamma’s going to kill you if you eat all the bread,” he said, a threat rendered almost sweet by years of repetition.
“But how much do you think it would work out to an hour, Papà?” she asked, ignoring him as she sliced the roll in two.
He decided to invent, knowing that whatever sum he named, he was going to end up being asked for it. “I’d say it isn’t more than about twenty thousand lire an hour.” Then, because he knew he was meant to, he asked, “Why?”
“Well, I knew you’d be interested to know about Francesca’s father, so I asked some questions about him today, and I thought that since I was doing the police’s work, they should pay me for my time.” It was only when he saw signs of venality in his children that Brunetti regretted Venice’s thousand-year-old trading heritage.
He didn’t answer her, so Chiara was forced to stop eating and look at him. “Well, what do you think?”
He gave it some thought and then answered, “I think it would depend on what you found out, Chiara. It’s not as if we’d be paying you a salary, regardless of what you did, as we do with the real police. You’d be a sort of private contractor, working freelance, and we’d pay you in relation to the value of what you brought us.”
She considered this for a moment and appeared to see the sense of it. “All right. I’ll tell you what I found out, and then you tell me how much you think it’s worth.”
Not without admiration, Brunetti noted the skill with which she had evaded the critical question of whether he would be willing to pay for the information in the first place and had simply arrived at the point where the deal was already cut and only details remained to be worked out. Well, all right.
“Tell me.”
All business now, Chiara finished the last of the third roll, wiped her hands on a kitchen towel, and sat at the table, hands folded in front of her. “I had to talk to four different people before I really learned anything,” she began, as serious as if she were giving testimony in court. Or on television.
“Who were they?”
“One was a girl at the school where Francesca is now, one was a teacher at my school, and a girl there, too, and the other was one of the girls we used to go to grammar school with.”
“You managed all of this today, Chiara?”
“Oh, sure. I had to take the afternoon off, to go see Luciana, and then go over to Francesca’s school to talk to that girl, but I talked to the teacher and the girl at my school before I left.”
“You took the afternoon off?” Brunetti asked, but merely out of curiosity.
“Sure, the kids do it all the time. All you have to do is give them a note from one of your parents, saying you’re sick or have to go somewhere, and no one ever asks questions.”
“Do you do this often, Chiara?”
“Oh, no, Papà, only when I have to.”
“Who wrote the note?”
“Oh, it was Mamma’s turn. Besides, her signature’s much easier to do than yours.” As she spoke, she picked up the pieces of homework lying on the table and arranged them into a neat stack, then placed them to the side and glanced up at him, eager to continue with important things.
He pulled out a chair and sat facing her. “And what did these people tell you, Chiara?”
“The first thing I learned was that Francesca had told this other girl the kidnapping story, too, and I think I remember that she told a bunch of us the same story when we were in grammar school, but that was five years ago.”
“How many years did you go to school with her, Chiara?”
“We did all of elementary school together. But then her family moved, and she went to the Vivaldi Middle School. I see her occasionally, but we weren’t friends or anything like that.”
“Was this girl she told the story to a good friend of hers?”
He watched Chiara draw her lips together at the question, and he said, “Perhaps you better tell me all this in your own way.” She smiled.
“This girl I spoke to at my school knew her from middle school, and she said that Francesca told her that her parents had warned her always to be very careful who she spoke to and never to go anywhere with someone she didn’t know. That’s pretty much the same thing she told us when we were at school with her.”
She glanced across at him, looking for approval, and he smiled at her, though this wasn’t much more than what she had told them at lunch.
“I already knew this, so I figured I’d better go talk to someone at the school where she is now. That’s why I had to take the afternoon off, so I’d be sure to find her.” He nodded. “This girl told me that Francesca has a boyfriend. No, Papà, a real one. They’re lovers and all.”
“Did she say who the boyfriend was?”
“No, she said Francesca wouldn’t ever tell her his name, but she said he was older, in his twenties. Francesca said she wanted to run away with him, but he wouldn’t do it, not till she was older.”
“Did the girl say why Francesca wanted to run away?”
“Well, not in so many words, but she had the feeling that it was her mother, that she and Francesca fought a lot, and that was why Francesca wanted to run away.”
“What about her father?”
“Oh, Francesca liked him a lot, said he was very good to her, only she never saw him much because he was always so busy.”
“Francesca has a brother, doesn’t she?”
“Yes, Claudio, but he’s away in school in Switzerland. That’s why I talked to the teacher. She used to teach in the middle school where he went, before he went to Switzerland, and I thought I could get her to tell me something about him.”
“And did you?”
“Oh, sure. I told her I was Francesca’s best friend and how worried Francesca was that Claudio was going to be upset about their father’s death, being in Switzerland and all. I said I knew him, too; I even let her believe I had a crush on him.” She paused here and shook her head. “Yuck, everybody, but everybody, says Claudio is a real creep, but she believed me.”
“What did you ask her?”
“I said Francesca wanted to know if the teacher could suggest how she should behave with Claudio.” When she saw Brunetti’s surprise, Chiara added, “Yes, I know it’s stupid, and no one would ever ask that, but you know how teachers are, always wanting to tell you what to do with your life and how you should behave.”
“Did the teacher believe you?”
“Of course,” Chiara responded seriously.
Half-joking, Brunetti said, “You must be a good liar.”
“I am. Very good. Mamma’s always believed it’s something we should learn to do well.” She didn’t bother to look at Brunetti when she said this and continued, “The teacher said that Francesca should bear in mind—that was her expression, ‘bear in mind’—that Claudio had always been fonder of his father than his mother, so this time would be very difficult for him.” She twisted up her face in disgust. “Big deal, huh? I went halfway across the city to get that. And it took her a half hour to tell me.”
“What did the other people tell you?”
“Luciana—I had to go all the way down to Castello to see her—she told me that Francesca really hates her mother, said that she was always pushing her father around, telling him what to do. She doesn’t like her uncle much, either, says he thinks he’s the boss of the family.”
“Pushing him around in what way?”
“She didn’t know. But that’s what Francesca told her, that he
r father always did what her mother said.” Before Brunetti could make a joke of this, Chiara added, “It’s not like with you and Mamma. She always tells you what to do, but you just agree with her and then do what you want to anyway.” She glanced up at the clock on the wall and asked, “Where do you think Mamma is? It’s almost seven. What’ll we do for dinner?” The second question, clearly, was the one with which Chiara was most concerned.
“Probably kept at the university, telling some student what to do with his life.” Before Chiara could decide whether to laugh or not, Brunetti suggested, “If that’s all the detecting you have to report to me, why don’t we start getting dinner ready? That way, Mamma can come home and find dinner ready for a change.”
“But how much is it worth?” Chiara wheedled.
Brunetti considered this for a moment. “I’d guess about thirty thousand,” he finally answered. Since it was to come out of his pocket, that’s all it would be, though the information she’d given him about Signora Trevisan’s pushing her husband around, should it prove true and should it apply to his professional life, might be worth inestimably more than that.
11
The following day, the Gazzettino carried a frontpage article about the suicide of Rino Favero, one of the most successful accountants in the Veneto region. Favero, it was reported, had chosen to drive his Rover into the two-car garage beneath his house, close the door of the garage, and leave the engine running, himself quietly stretched across the front seat. His wife, who had spent the night in the hospital at the side of her dying mother, found him when she returned home in the morning. It was rumored that Favero’s name was about to be revealed in the expanding scandal that was currently playing itself out in the corridors of the Ministry of Health. Though, by now, all of Italy was familiar with the accusation that the former Minister of Health had accepted immense bribes from various pharmaceutical companies and in return had allowed them to raise the prices of the medicines they manufactured, it was not common knowledge that Favero had been the accountant who handled the private finances of the president of the largest of these firms. Those who did know assumed that he had decided to imitate so many of the men named in this ever-spreading web of corruption, had chosen to preserve his honor by reinoving himself from accusation, guilt, and possible punishment. Few seemed to question the proposition that honor was preserved in this manner.