by Donna Leon
“And do what?” Vianello asked, just as glad as Brunetti to avoid the other topic.
“Have a couple of drinks. Talk to people. See who uses the phone. Or answers it.”
“Someone who doesn’t look like a cop, you mean?”
Brunetti nodded.
“Pucetti?” Vianello suggested.
Brunetti shook his head. “Too young.”
“And probably too clean,” Vianello added immediately.
“You make it sound like a nice place, Pinetta’s.”
“It’s the kind of place where I’d prefer to be wearing my gun,” Vianello said. Then, after a moment’s reflection, he added, too casually, “Sounds like the place for Topa,” mentioning a sergeant who had retired six months before, after thirty years with the police. Topa’s real name was Romano, but no one had called him that for more than five decades, not since he was a child, small and round-bodied, looking just like the little baby mouse his nickname suggested. Even after he got his full growth and became so thick-chested that his uniform jackets had to be specially made, the name remained, wildly incongruous but no less unchangeable. No one ever laughed at Topa for having a nickname with a feminine ending. A number of people, during his thirty years of service, had tried to harm him, but no one had ever dared laugh at his nickname.
When Brunetti said nothing, Vianello glanced quickly up at him and then as quickly down. “I know how you feel about him, Commissario.” And then, before Brunetti had time to comment, “He wouldn’t even be working, at least not officially. He’d just be doing you a favor.”
“By going into Pinetta’s?”
Vianello nodded.
“I don’t like it,” Brunetti said.
Vianello continued, “He’d just be a retired man going into a bar for a drink, perhaps for a game of cards.” In the face of Brunetti’s continuing silence, Vianello added, “A retired policeman can go into a bar and have a game of cards if he wants to, can’t he?”
“That’s the thing I don’t know,” Brunetti said.
“What?”
“Whether he’d want to.” Neither of them, it was clear, wanted to mention or saw any sense in bringing up the reasons for Topas early retirement. A year ago, Topa had arrested the twenty-three-year-old son of a city counsellor for molesting an eight-year-old schoolgirl. The arrest took place late at night, at the young man’s home, and when the suspect arrived at the Questura, his left arm and his nose were broken. Topa insisted that the young man had attacked him in an attempt to escape; the young man maintained that Topa had stopped on the way to the Questura, pulled him into an alley, and beaten him.
The man at the desk when they arrived at the Questura that night tried, with no success, to describe the look that Topa gave the suspect when he began to tell this story. The young man never repeated it, and no official complaint was ever launched. But a week later word filtered down from Vice-Questore Patta’s office that it was time for the sergeant to retire, and he did, losing out on part of his pension by doing so. The young man was sentenced to two years of house arrest. Topa, who had one grandchild, a girl of seven, was never heard to speak of the arrest, his retirement, or the events surrounding it.
Refusing to acknowledge Brunetti’s glance, Vianello asked, “Should I call him?”
Brunetti hesitated for a moment and then said, with singular lack of good grace, “All right.”
Vianello knew better than to smile. “He’s not back from work until eight. I’ll call him then.”
“Work?” Brunetti asked, though he knew he shouldn’t. The law forbade retirees from working; if they did, they forfeited their pensions.
“Work,” Vianello repeated but said no more. He got to his feet. “Will there be anything else, sir?” Brunetti remembered that Topa had been Vianello’s partner for more than seven years and that the sergeant had wanted to quit when Topa was forced into retirement, persuaded away from that idea only by Brunetti’s fierce opposition. Topa had never seemed to Brunetti the sort of man over whom a high moral position could be taken.
“No, nothing else. On your way down, would you ask Signorina Elettra to get onto the people at SIP and see if she can get the list of Trevisan’s local calls from them?”
“Pinetta’s isn’t the sort of place an international lawyer would call,” Vianello said.
It didn’t sound like the sort of place a successful accountant would call, either, but Brunetti chose not to volunteer this. “The records will tell us,” he said blandly. Vianello waited, but when Brunetti said nothing further, he went down to his office, leaving Brunetti to speculate upon the reasons wealthy and successful men might have for making calls to public telephones, especially in a place as squalid as Pinetta’s.
13
Dinner that night for the three of them was enlivened, Brunetti could think of no kinder word, by a heated confrontation between Chiara and her mother, which blew up when Chiara told her father that, after school, she had gone back to do her math homework at the home of the girl who was Francesca Trevisan’s best friend.
Before Chiara could say any more than that, Paola slammed her hand down on the table. “I will not live in the same house with a spy,” she shouted at her daughter.
“I’m not a spy,” Chiara answered sharply. “I’m working for the police.” Then, turning to Brunetti, she asked, “Aren’t I, Papà?”
Ignoring her, Brunetti reached across the table and picked up the nearly empty bottle of Pinot Noir.
“Well, aren’t I?” Chiara insisted.
“It doesn’t matter,” her mother began, “if you’re working for the police or not. You can’t go around trying to get information from your friends.”
“But Papà’s always getting information from his friends. Does that mean he’s a spy?”
Brunetti sipped at his wine and peered across the top of his glass at his wife, curious as to how she would answer this.
Paola looked at him but spoke to Chiara. “It’s not that he gets information from his friends, it’s that when he does it, they know who he is and why he’s doing it.”
“Well, my friends know who I am, and they ought to be able to figure out why I’m doing it,” Chiara insisted, her cheeks slowly suffusing with red.
“It’s not the same thing, and you know it,” Paola answered.
Chiara muttered something which, to Brunetti, sounded like “Is so,” but her head was lowered over her empty plate, and so he wasn’t sure.
Paola turned to Brunetti. “Guido, would you please try to explain the difference to your daughter?” As ever, in the heat of argument, Paola, like some sort of negligent rodent, had sloughed off all claim to motherhood and abandoned the young thing to its father.
“Your mother’s right,” he said. “When I question people, they know I’m a policeman, and so they tell me things knowing that fact. And they know that they can be held liable for what they say, so that allows them the chance to be cautious, if they want to be.”
“But don’t you ever trick anyone?” Chiara asked. “Or try to?” she added before he could answer.
“I’m sure I’ve done both,” he admitted. “But remember, nothing that anyone says to you has any legal weight. They can always deny that they said it, and then it would just be your word against theirs.”
“But why would I lie?”
“Why would they?” Brunetti returned.
“Who cares if what people say is legally binding or not?” Paola asked, jumping back into the fray. “We’re not talking about what’s legally binding; we’re talking about betrayal. And, if the people at this table will permit me the use of the word,” she said, looking at the two of them in turn, “honor.”
Chiara, Brunetti observed, got one of those, “Oh, here she goes again” looks on her face and turned to him for moral support, but he gave her none.
“Honor?” Chiara asked.
“Yes, honor,” Paola said, suddenly calm, but no less dangerous for that. “You can’t get information from your friends
. You can’t take what they say and make use of it against them.”
Chiara interrupted her here. “But nothing Susanna said can be used against her.”
Paola closed her eyes for a moment, then picked up a piece of bread and began to crumble it into small pieces, something she often did when she was upset. “Chiara, it doesn’t matter what use ever gets made or doesn’t get made of anything she told you. What cannot be done,” she began and then repeated the entire phrase, “what cannot be done is to lead our friends on to say things to us when we are alone with them and then turn around and repeat that information or make some use of it that they didn’t know we had in mind when they were talking to us. That’s to betray a confidence.”
“You make it sound like a crime,” Chiara said.
“It’s worse than a crime,” Paola shot back. “It’s wrong.”
“And crime isn’t?” Brunetti asked from the sidelines.
She pounced. “Guido, unless I invented them, we had three plumbers in the house last week, for two days. Can you produce a ricevuto fiscale for that work? Do you have some proof that the money we paid them will be reported to the government and that taxes will be paid on it?” When he said nothing, she insisted, “Do you?” His silence continued. “That’s a crime, Guido, a crime, but I defy you or anyone in this stinking government of pigs and thieves we have to tell me that it’s wrong.”
He reached for the bottle, but it was empty.
“You want more?” Paola asked, and he knew she wasn’t talking about the wine. He didn’t particularly, but Paola was up on her soapbox now, and long experience told him that there was no getting her down until she had finished. He regretted only that he had finished the wine.
From the corner of his eye, he saw Chiara get out of her chair and go over to the cabinet. In a moment she was back with two small glasses and a bottle of grappa, which she slid silently across the table toward him. Her mother could call her whatever she pleased—traitor, spy, monster—to him, the child was an angel.
He saw Paola give Chiara a long look and was glad to see her eyes soften, however momentarily. He poured himself a small glass of grappa, sipped at it, and sighed.
Paola reached across the table and picked up the bottle. She poured herself some and took a sip. The truce held.
“Chiara,” Paola said, “I don’t mean to yell at you about this.”
“But you just did,” her ever-literal daughter replied.
“I know I did, and I’m sorry.” Paola took another sip. “You know I feel strongly about this.”
“You get it from those books, don’t you?” Chiara asked simply, managing to suggest that her mother’s career as a professor of English literature had somehow exerted a pernicious influence on her moral development.
Both of her parents sought sarcasm or disdain in her tone, but neither was there, nothing more than the desire for information.
“I suppose I do,” Paola admitted. “They knew about honor, the people who wrote those books, and it was important to them.” She paused here and considered what she had just said. “But it wasn’t important just to them, the writers; their whole society thought some things were important: honor, a person’s good name, one’s word.”
“I think those things are important, Mamma,” Chiara said, sounding, as she spoke, far younger than she was.
“I know you do. And I do, and Raffi does, and your father does too. But our world doesn’t, not anymore.”
“Is that why you like those books so much, Mamma?”
Paola smiled and, Brunetti thought, clambered down from her soapbox before she answered. “I suppose so, cara. Besides, knowing about them gives me a job at the university.”
Brunetti’s pragmatism had been butting itself against the various forms of Paola’s idealism for more than two decades, so he believed that she looked to “those books” for considerably more than a job.
“Do you have much homework tonight, Chiara?” Brunetti asked, knowing that he could ask her later, or tomorrow morning, to tell him whatever she had learned from Francesca’s friend. Seeing this as the dismissal it was, Chiara said that she had and went back to her own room to begin it, leaving her parents alone to continue to discuss, if they chose, honor.
“I didn’t know she’d take my offer so seriously, Paola, and go out and start asking people questions,” Brunetti said by way of explanation and, at least partly, apology
“I don’t mind her getting the information,” Paola said. “But I don’t like the way she got it.” She took another sip of her grappa. “Do you think she understood what I was trying to say?”
“I think she understands everything we say,” Brunetti answered. “I’m not sure she agrees with a lot of it, but she certainly understands.” Then, going back to what she had said earlier, he asked, “What other examples did you have of things that are criminal but not wrong?”
She rolled her small glass between her palms. “I think that’s too easy,” she said, “especially given the insane laws in this country. The harder one to figure out is the things that are wrong but not criminal.”
“Like what?” he asked.
“Like letting your children watch television,” she said with a laugh, apparently tired of the subject.
“No, tell me, Paola,” he said, interested now. “I’d like you to give me an example.”
Before she spoke, she pinged a fingernail against the glass bottle of mineral water that stood on the table. “I know you’re tired of hearing me say this, Guido, but I think plastic bottles are wrong, even though they’re certainly not criminal. Though,” she quickly added, “I think they will be within a few years. If we have any sense, that is.”
“I was hoping for a larger example,” Brunetti said.
She thought for a while and then answered. “If we were to have raised the children to believe that my family’s wealth gave them special privileges, that would be wrong.” It surprised Brunetti that Paola would use this example; over the years, she had seldom alluded to her parents’ wealth save, at those times when political discussion escalated into argument, to point to it as an example of social injustice.
They exchanged a look, but before Brunetti could say anything, Paola continued, “I’m not sure it’s all that much larger an issue, but I think if I were to speak slightingly of you, it would be wrong.”
“You always speak slightingly of me,” Brunetti said, forcing himself to smile.
“No, Guido, I speak slightingly to you. That’s different. I would never say any of those things about you.”
“Because that’s dishonorable?”
“Precisely,” she said, smiling.
“But it’s not dishonorable to say them to me?”
“Of course not, especially if they’re true. Because that’s between us, Guido, and that doesn’t belong, in any sense, to the world.”
He reached over and took back the grappa bottle. “It seems to me it’s getting harder and harder to tell the difference,” he said.
“Between what?”
“The criminal and the wrong.”
“Why do you think that is, Guido?”
“I’m not sure. Perhaps because, as you said before, we don’t believe in the old things anymore, and we haven’t found anything new, anything else, to believe in.”
She nodded, considering this.
“And all the old rules have been broken,” he continued. “For fifty years, ever since the end of the war, all we’ve ever been is lied to. By the government, the church, the political parties, by industry and business and the military.”
“And the police?” she asked.
“Yes,” he agreed with no hesitation whatsoever, “and the police.”
“But you want to stay with them?” she asked.
He shrugged and poured some more grappa. She waited. Finally he said, “Someone’s got to try.”
Paola leaned across the table and placed the palm of her hand against his cheek, tilting his face toward her. “If I ever tr
y to lecture you about honor again, Guido, hit me with a bottle, all right?”
He turned his head and kissed her palm. “Not until you let me buy some plastic ones.”
Two hours later, as Brunetti sat yawning over Procopius’s Secret History, the phone rang.
“Brunetti,” he answered and glanced down at his watch.
“Commissario, this is Alvise. He said to call you.”
“Who said to call me, Officer Alvise?” Brunetti asked, fishing a used vaporetto ticket from his pocket and sticking it in the page to keep his place. Calls with Alvise had a tendency to be either long or confusing. Or both.
“The sergeant, sir.”
“Which sergeant, Officer Alvise?” Brunetti closed his book and set it aside.
“Sergeant Topa, sir.”
Alert now, Brunetti asked, “Why did he tell you to call me?”
“Because he wants to talk to you.”
“Why didn’t he call me himself, Officer? My name is in the phone book.”
“Because he can’t, sir.”
“And why can’t he?”
“Because the rules say he can’t.”
“What rules?” Brunetti asked, his growing impatience audible in his tone.
“The rules down here, sir.”
“Down here, where, officer?”
“At the Questura, sir. I’m on night duty.”
“What is Sergeant Topa doing there, Officer?”
“He’s been arrested, sir. The Mestre boys picked him up, but then they found out who he was, well, found out what he was. Or what he used to be. I mean a sergeant. Then they sent him back here, but they told him he could come in by himself. They called to tell us he was coming, but they let him get here by himself.”
“So Sergeant Topa has arrested himself?”
Alvise considered this for a moment and then answered, “It would seem that way, sir. I don’t know how to fill out the report, where it says ‘arresting officer.’”
Brunetti held the phone away from his ear for a moment, then brought it back and asked, “What has he been arrested for?”
“He got into a fight, sir.”