by Donna Leon
“Did he mention anything in particular?”
“No.”
“And after dinner, where did you go?”
“He drove me to the train station, and I came back to Venice.”
“Which train?”
She thought for a moment before answering. “It got in about ten-thirty, I think.”
“The one Trevisan took,” Brunetti said and saw the name register.
“The man who was killed last week?” she asked after a short pause.
“Yes.”
“Did you know him?” Brunetti asked.
“He was a client here. We handled his travel arrangements, for himself and for the people who worked for him.”
“Strange, isn’t it?” Brunetti asked.
“Isn’t what strange?”
“That two men you know should die in the same week.”
Her voice was cool, uninterested. “No, I don’t find it particularly strange, Commissario. Certainly, you don’t mean to suggest that there’s some sort of connection between the two.”
Instead of answering her question, he got to his feet. “Thank you for your time, Signora Ceroni,” he said, reaching across the desk to shake her hand.
She stood and came around the desk, moving gracefully. “It is I who should thank you for having taken the trouble to return my glasses to me.”
“It was our duty,” he said.
“Nonetheless, I thank you for taking the trouble.” She went with him to the door, opened it, and allowed him to pass in front of her to the outer office. The young woman still sat at the desk, and a long sheet of tickets hung suspended from the printer. Signora Ceroni walked with him to the front door of the agency. He opened it, turned and shook hands again, and then headed back up toward home. Signora Ceroni stood in front of the beach until he turned the corner and disappeared.
24
When he arrived back at the Questura, Brunetti stopped first in Signorina Elettra’s office and dictated the letter to Giorgio—he used the name as if thinking of an old friend—in which he apologized for what he called “clerical inaccuracies” on the part of the Questura. The letter would suffice, he hoped, for Giorgio’s fiancée and her family while at the same time remain sufficiently vague so as not to commit him to having actually done anything.
“He’ll be very glad to get this,” Signorina Elettra said, looking down at the page of shorthand notes on her desk.
“And the record of his arrest?” Brunetti asked.
She glanced up at him, eyes two limpid pools. “Arrest?” She took a sheaf of computer printout from beside her pad and passed it across to Brunetti. “Your letter ought to pay him back for this.”
“The numbers in Favero’s book?” he asked.
“The very same,” she said, unable to disguise her pride.
He smiled, her pleasure immediately contagious. “Have you looked at it?” he asked.
“Just briefly. He’s got names, addresses, and I think he’s managed to get the dates and times of all calls going through to all of those numbers from any phones in Venice or Padua.”
“How does he do it?” Brunetti asked, voice reverent with the awe he felt at Giorgio’s ability to pry information from SIP; the files of the secret services were easier to penetrate.
“He went to school in the United States for a year, to study computers, and while he was there, he joined a group of something called ‘ackers.’ He keeps in touch with them, and they trade information about how to do things like this.”
“Does he do this at work, using the SIP lines?” Brunetti asked, his awe and gratitude so strong as to erase the fact that what Giorgio was doing was probably illegal.
“Of course.”
“Bless him,” Brunetti said with all the fervor of a person whose phone bill for any given period never corresponded to the use given the phone.
“They’re all over the world, these ‘ackers,’” Signorina Elettra added, “and I don’t think there’s much that can be hidden from them. He told me he contacted people in Hungary and Cuba to do this. And someplace else. Do they have phones in Laos?”
He was no longer listening but was reading down through the long columns of times and dates, of places and names. Patta’s name, however, broke through. “… wants to see you.”
“Later,” he said and left her office, going back to his own, reading all the way. Inside, he closed the door and went over to stand in the light coming through the window. He stood there, poised like a Roman senator of the time of the Caesars, hands spread wide, slowly studying a long report from the far-flung cities of the Empire. This one did not deal with troop disposition or the shipment of spices and oil. Instead, it told only when two relatively inconspicuous Italians might have called and spoken to people in Bangkok, Santo Domingo, Belgrade, Manila, and a handful of other cities, but it was no less interesting for that. Penciled in the margin of the sheets were the locations of the public phone booths from which some of the calls had been made. Though some of the calls were made from the offices of both Trevisan or Favero, many more had been made from a public phone on the same street as Favero’s office in Padua and still more from another one located in a small calle that ran behind Trevisan’s office.
At the bottom, Brunetti read the names under which the phones were listed. Three, including the one in Belgrade, belonged to travel agencies, and the Manila number belonged to a company called Euro-Employ. At the name, all of the events since Trevisan’s death turned into shards of colored glass in an immense kaleidoscope seen only by Brunetti. And this single name was the final turn of the cylinder that jogged the separate pieces and forced them into a pattern. It was not yet complete, not yet fully in focus, but it was there, and Brunetti understood.
He pulled his address book from his desk drawer, rifling through the pages for the phone number of Roberto Linchianko, a lieutenant colonel in the Philippine military police, a man who had attended a two-week police seminar in Lyons three years before and with whom Brunetti had formed a friendship that had lasted since then, though their only communication had been by phone and fax.
His buzzer rang. He ignored it and picked up the phone, got an outside line, and dialed Linchianko’s home phone number, though he had no idea at all what time it was in Manila. Six hours ahead, as it turned out, which meant he caught Linchianko just as he was about to go to bed. Yes, he knew Euro-Employ. His disgust came down the wire, leaping across the oceans. Euro-Employ was only one of the many agencies engaged in the trade in young women, and it was hardly the worst. All of the papers the women signed before they went off to “work” in Europe were entirely legal. The fact that the papers were signed with the X of an illiterate or by a woman who didn’t speak the language of the contract in no way compromised their legality, though none of the women who managed to return to the Philippines thought or sought to bring a legal claim against the agency. In any case, so far as Linchianko knew, very few returned. As to how many were sent, he estimated that there were between fifty and a hundred a week, just from Euro-Employ, and named the agency that booked their tickets, a name already familiar to Brunetti from its presence on the list. Before he hung up, Linchianko promised to fax Brunetti the official police file on both Euro-Employ and the travel agency as well as the personal files he had kept for years on all of the employment agencies working in Manila.
Brunetti had no personal contacts in any of the other cities on the list from SIP, but what he had learned from Linchianko was more than enough to tell him what he would find there.
In all of his reading of Roman and Greek history, one of the things that had always puzzled Brunetti was the ease with which the ancients had accepted slavery. The rules of war were different then, he knew, as had been the economic basis of society, and so slaves were both available and necessary. Perhaps it was the possibility that it might happen to you, should your country lose a war, that made the idea acceptable—no more than a spin of the wheel of Fate could make you slave or master. But no one had s
poken against it, not Plato and not Socrates, or, if anyone had, what they had said and written had not survived.
And today, to the best of his knowledge, no one spoke against it, either, but today the silence was based on the belief that slavery had ceased to exist. He had listened to Paola voice her radical politics for decades, had grown almost deaf to her hurling about terms like “wage slave” and “economic chains,” but now those clichés rose up to haunt him, for what Linchianko had described to him could be given no other name but slavery.
The full flood of his interior rhetoric was cut off by the repeated buzz of the intercom on his desk.
“Yes, sir,” he said as he picked it up.
“I’d like to talk to you,” said a disgruntled Patta.
“I’ll be right down.”
Signorina Elettra was no longer at her desk when Brunetti went downstairs, so he went into Patta’s office with no idea of what to expect, not that the possibilities were ever more than a few; after all, how many manifestations could displeasure take?
Today, he was to learn that he was not the target of Patta’s dissatisfaction, only the means by which it was to be conveyed to the lower orders. “It’s that sergeant of yours,” Patta began after telling Brunetti to take a seat.
“Vianello?”
“Yes.”
“What do you think he’s done?” Brunetti asked, not conscious until after he had spoken of the skepticism implicit in his question.
Patta did not overlook it. “I think he’s been abusive to one of the patrolmen.”
“Riverre?” Brunetti asked.
“Then you’ve heard about it and done nothing?” Patta asked.
“No, I’ve heard nothing. But if there’s anyone who deserves abuse, it’s Riverre.”
Patta threw up his hands in a visible manifestation of his irritation. “I’ve had a complaint from one of the officers.”
“Lieutenant Scarpa?” Brunetti asked, unable to disguise his dislike for the Sicilian who had come up to Venice with his patron, the Vice-Questore, and who served as spy as much as assistant.
“It’s not important who made the complaint. What is important is that it was made.”
“Was it an official complaint?” Brunetti asked.
“That’s irrelevant,” Patta said with swift anger. With Patta, anything he didn’t want to hear was irrelevant, regardless of its truth. “I don’t want any trouble with the unions. They won’t put up with this sort of thing.”
Brunetti, disgusted with this latest example of Patta’s cowardice, came close to asking him if there were any threat before which he would not bow down, but he cautioned himself, yet once again, against the vengeance of fools and, instead, said, “I’ll speak to them.”
“Them?”
“Lieutenant Scarpa, Sergeant Vianello, and Officer Riverre.”
Patta came close, he could tell, to objecting to this, but then, no doubt realizing that the problem, even if not solved, was at least out of his hands, said instead, “And this Trevisan thing?”
“We’re working on it, sir.”
“Any progress?”
“Very little.” At least none he wanted to discuss with Patta.
“Well, take care of this problem with Vianello. Let me know what happens.” Patta turned his attention back to the papers in front of him, his equivalent of a polite dismissal.
Signorina Elettra was still not at her desk, so Brunetti went down to Vianello’s office, where he found the Sergeant reading that day’s Gazzettino.
“Scarpa?” Brunetti asked when he came in.
Vianello crumpled the pages of the newspaper together and pressed it down on the desk with an unverifiable remark about Lieutenant Scarpa’s mother.
“What happened?”
With one hand, Vianello began to smooth out the pages of his newspaper. “I was talking to Riverre, and Lieutenant Scarpa came in.”
“Talking to?”
Vianello shrugged. “Riverre knew what I meant, and he knew he should have given you that woman’s name sooner. I was telling him that when the lieutenant came in. He didn’t like the way I was talking to Riverre.”
“What were you saying?”
Vianello folded the paper closed and then in half, then pushed it to the side of his desk. “I called him an idiot.”
Brunetti, who knew Riverre was one, found nothing strange in this.
“What did he say?”
“Who, Riverre?”
“No, the lieutenant.”
“He said I could not speak to my subordinates that way.”
“Did he say anything else?”
Vianello didn’t answer.
“Did he say anything else, Sergeant?”
Still no answer.
“Did you say anything to him?”
Vianello’s voice was defensive. “I told him that the matter was between me and one of my officers, that it didn’t concern him.”
Brunetti knew that he didn’t have to waste time telling Vianello how foolish this was.
“And Riverre?” Brunetti asked.
“Oh, he’s come to me already and told me that, as far as he remembers our conversation, I was telling him a joke. About a Sicilian.” Vianello permitted himself a small smile here. “The lieutenant, as Riverre now remembers the incident, came in just as I was telling him the punch line, about how stupid the Sicilian was, and the lieutenant didn’t understand—we were speaking dialect—and thought I was talking to Riverre.”
“Well, that seems to take care of that,” Brunetti said, though he didn’t like the fact that Scarpa had taken his complaint to Patta. Vianello already had enough against him in that quarter, just by virtue of his so often working with Brunetti, and didn’t need the opposition of the lieutenant as well.
Abandoning the issue, and relieved that he now wouldn’t have to confront Scarpa, Brunetti asked, “Do you remember something about a truck that went off the road, up in Tarvisio, this fall?”
“Yes. Why?”
“Do you remember when it was?”
Vianello paused for a moment before he answered. “September twenty-sixth. Two days before my birthday. First time it’s ever snowed that early up there.”
Because it was Vianello, Brunetti didn’t have to ask him if he was sure of the date. He left the sergeant to return to his newspaper and went back to his office and to the computer sheets. A call had been made from Trevisan’s office to the number in Belgrade at nine in the morning, September twenty-sixth, a call that lasted three minutes. The following day, another call had been made to the same number, but this one came from the public phone in the calle behind Trevisan’s office. This one had lasted twelve minutes.
The truck went off the road; its shipment was destroyed. Surely, the purchaser would want to know if it had been his cargo scattered out there in the snow, and there would be no better way to find out than to call the shipper. Brunetti shivered involuntarily at the possibility that people might think of those girls as a shipment, their sudden deaths as a loss of cargo.
He paged ahead to the date of Trevisan’s death. Two calls had been made from the office on the day after Trevisan’s death, both to the Belgrade number. If the first calls had been made to report a loss of cargo, could these later calls mean that, with Trevisan’s death, the business passed to new hands?
25
Brunetti hunted through the papers that had accumulated on his desk during the last two days. He found that Lotto’s widow had, indeed, been interviewed and had said that she had spent the night of Lotto’s death in the civil hospital at the bedside of her mother, who was dying of cancer. Both of the ward sisters verified that she had been there all through the night. Vianello had interviewed her, and he had gone on, with his usual precision, to ask about the nights of both Trevisan’s and Favero’s deaths. She was in the hospital the first night, at home the second. Both nights, however, her sister from Turin was with her, and so Signora Lotto ceased to have a place in Brunetti’s imagination.
&n
bsp; Suddenly he found himself wondering if Chiara was still engaged in her harebrained attempt to get information from Francesca, and as he thought about it, he was overcome with something akin to disgust. He could allow himself the luxury of righteous indignation about men who used teenagers as whores, yet he had felt no equal repugnance at turning his own child into a spy. Until now.
His phone rang and he answered it with his name. It was Paola, voice wildly out of pitch, calling his name. In the background, he heard even wilder noises, high-voiced.
“What is it, Paola?”
“Guido, come home. Now. It’s Chiara,” Paola cried, voice raised to be heard over the wailing that came from somewhere else in the house.
“What’s happened? Is she all right?”
“I don’t know, Guido. She was in the living room, and then she began to scream. She’s in her room, and the door’s locked.” He could hear the panic in Paola’s voice, like an undercurrent that pulled at her, and then at him.
“Is she all right? Did she hurt herself?” he asked.
“I don’t know. But you can hear her. She’s hysterical, Guido. Please come home. Please. Now.”
“I’ll be there as soon as I can,” he said and put the phone down. He grabbed his coat and ran from his office, already calculating the fastest way to get home. Outside, there was no police launch tied up at the embarcadero in front of the Questura, so he turned to the left and started to run, coat flapping wide behind him. He turned the corner and started up the narrow calle, trying to decide whether to go across the Rialto Bridge or to take the public gondola. In front of him, three young boys walked arm in arm. As he approached them, he shouted out, “Attenti,” voice so loud as to remove all politeness from the call. The boys scattered to the sides and Brunetti hurled past them. By the time he got to Campo Santa Maria Formosa, he was winded and had to slow to a shambling trot. Near the Rialto, he got caught in foot traffic and found himself, at one point, shoving past a tourist by pushing her knapsack roughly out of the way. Behind him, he heard the girl call out in angry German, but Brunetti ran on.