by Donna Leon
Yes, it was a mess and more than that. ‘That’s what I’m calling about.’ Brunetti paused, but the Count said nothing, so he went on. ‘Have you heard anything or has your lawyer heard anything?’ He broke off here for a moment, then continued. ‘I don’t even know if your lawyer is involved in this.’
‘No, not yet,’ the Count answered. ‘I’m waiting to see what the judge does. Also, I don’t know what Paola will want to do. Do you have any idea?’
‘We talked about it last night,’ Brunetti began and heard his father-in-law’s whispered, ‘Good.’
Brunetti continued, ‘She said she’d pay the fine and whatever it costs to replace the window.’
‘What about any other charges?’
‘I didn’t ask her about that. I thought it was enough to get her to agree to pay the fine and the damages, at least in principle. That way, if it’s more than just the window, she might go along and pay that, too.’
‘Yes, good. Good. That might work.’
Brunetti was irritated by the Count’s assumption that he and Brunetti were united in some plan to outwit or manipulate Paola. However good their motives might be and however strongly both of them might believe they were doing what was best for her, Brunetti didn’t like the Count’s casual assumption that Brunetti was willing to deceive his wife.
He didn’t want to continue with this. ‘That’s not why I called. I’d like you to tell me anything you might know about Mitri or about Awocato Zambino.’
‘Giuliano?’
‘Yes.’
‘Zambino’s straight as a die.’
‘He represented Manolo,’ Brunetti shot back, naming a Mafia killer Zambino had successfully defended three years before.
‘Manolo was kidnapped in France and brought back illegally for trial.’
Interpretations differed: Manolo had been in a small town just across the French border, living in a hotel, driving each night to Monaco to gamble in the Casino. A young woman he met at the baccarat table had suggested they drive back into Italy to her place for a drink. Manolo had been arrested as they crossed the border, by the woman herself, who was a colonel of the Carabinieri. Zambino had argued, successfully, that his client had been the victim of police entrapment and kidnapping.
Brunetti let it drop. ‘Has he ever worked for you?’ he asked the Count.
‘Once or twice. So I know. And I know from friends of mine for whom he’s handled things. He’s good. He’ll work like a ferret on a case to defend his client. But he’s straight.’ The Count paused for a long time, as if debating whether to trust Brunetti with the next piece of information, then added, ‘There was a rumour going around last year that he didn’t cheat on his taxes. I heard from someone that he declared an income of five hundred million lire or something like that.’
‘You think that’s what he earned?’
‘Yes, I do,’ the Count answered in a voice usually reserved for the recounting of miracles.
‘What do the other lawyers think of this?’
‘Well, you can figure that out, Guido. It makes things hard for all of them, if someone like Zambino declares such an income and the rest of them are saying they earned two hundred million, or even less. It can only cause suspicion about their tax declarations.’
‘That must be hard for them.’
‘Yes. He’s ...’ the Count began, but then his mind registered the tone as well as the words and he stopped. ‘About Mitri,’ he said with no preamble. ‘I think you might take a closer look at him. There could be something there.’
‘About what, the travel agencies?’
‘I don’t know. In fact, I don’t know anything at all about him except what a few people have said since he died. You know, the sort of things that get talked about when someone’s the victim of a violent crime.’
Brunetti did know. He’d heard rumours of that kind about people killed in the cross-fire during bank robberies and about the victims of kidnap murders. Always, there was someone to raise the question of why they were there at precisely that moment, to ask why it was they died instead of someone else and just what their involvement was with the criminals. Nothing could ever be, here in Italy, simply what it appeared. Always, no matter how innocent the circumstances, how blameless the victim, there was someone to raise the spectre of dietrologia and insist that there must be something behind it all, that everyone had his price or got his part and nothing was what it seemed. ‘What have you heard?’ he asked.
‘Nothing outright or specific. Everyone’s been very careful to express surprise at what happened. But there’s an undertone in what some of them say that suggests they feel differently about it or about him.’
‘Who?’
‘Guido,’ the Count said, his voice going a few degrees cooler, ‘if I knew, I wouldn’t tell you. But it so happens I don’t remember. It was really nothing any one person said, not so much that as an unspoken suggestion that what happened to him wasn’t a complete surprise. I can’t be any clearer than that.’
‘There was the note,’ Brunetti said. That could certainly have been enough to lead people to assume Mitri was somehow involved in the violence that had claimed his life.
‘Yes, I know.’ The Count paused for a moment, then added, ‘That might be enough to explain it. What do you think?’
‘Why do you ask?’
‘Because I don’t want my daughter to go through the rest of her life thinking that something she did led to a man’s murder.’
This was a hope in which Brunetti joined him with all his spirit.
‘What has she said about it?’ the Count asked.
‘She said last night that she was sorry about it, about starting it all.’
‘Do you think she did? Start it, that is?’
‘I don’t know,’ Brunetti admitted. ‘There are a lot of crazy people running around today.’
‘You’d have to be crazy to kill someone because he owned a travel agency that arranged tours.’
‘Sex-tours,’ Brunetti clarified.
‘Sex-tours. Tours to the pyramids,’ the Count fired back. ‘People don’t go around murdering others because of that, whichever it was.’
Brunetti stopped himself from responding that people normally didn’t go around throwing rocks through plate-glass windows, either. Instead, he said, ‘People do lots of things for crazy reasons, so I don’t think we can exclude it as a possibility.’
‘But do you believe it?’ the Count insisted and Brunetti could hear from the tension in his voice just how much it cost him to ask this of his son-in-law.
‘I told you, I don’t want to believe it,’ Brunetti said. ‘I’m not sure it’s the same thing, but it means I’m not prepared to believe it unless we can find very good reasons to do so.’
‘What would they be?’
‘A suspect.’ He was himself married to the only suspect and he knew she’d been sitting beside him at the time of the murder, so that left either a person who killed because of sex-tourism or someone who did it for some other reason. He was entirely willing to find either, just so long as he could find someone. ‘Will you let me know if you hear anything more definite?’ he asked. Before the Count could state conditions, he added, ‘You don’t have to tell me who said it, just tell me what he or she said.’
‘All right,’ the Count agreed. ‘And will you let me know how Paola is?’
‘You should call her. Take her out to lunch. Do something that will make her happy.’
‘Thanks, Guido. I will.’ Brunetti thought the Count had hung up without saying anything else, so long did the silence stretch out, but then the other man’s voice was back. ‘I hope you find whoever did this. And I’ll help you in any way I can.’
‘Thank you,’ Brunetti said.
This time the Count did cut the connection.
* * * *
Brunetti opened his drawer and took out the photocopy of the note that had been found with Mitri. Why the accusation of paedophilia? And who was accused, Mitri h
imself or Mitri as the owner of a travel agency that encouraged it? If the killer was crazy enough to write something like this, then go ahead and murder the man to whom the threats were addressed, would he be someone a man like Mitri would allow into his apartment at night? Though he knew it was an archaic prejudice, Brunetti was of the opinion that flagrantly crazy people usually gave every evidence of being just that. He had only to think of the ones he often saw near Palazzo Bold ù in the early morning to be reminded of this truth.
But this person had managed to get into Mitri’s apartment. Further, he - or she, Brunetti conceded, but he didn’t consider this a real possibility; another one of his prejudices - had managed sufficiently to soothe Mitri that he had allowed his visitor to get behind him and pull out the fatal cord or wire, or whatever it was. And he had come and gone unseen and unremarked: no one in the building - and they’d all been questioned - had seen anything at all strange that evening; most of them had been in their apartments all the time and had realized something was wrong only when Signora Mitri ran screaming into the hall in front of her door.
No, it didn’t sound to Brunetti like the behaviour of a madman, nor like that of a person who would write a note as unhinged as this one. Besides, he found it hard to reconcile the paradox that someone who was willing to take a stand against what they perceived as injustice - and here Paola slipped unsummoned into his mind as an example - would commit murder in order to correct that injustice.
He followed these ideas, discarding madmen and madwomen as he went, abandoning fanatics and zealots. That left him at the end asking the same question which was mooted in every murder investigation, cui bono? This made even more remote the possibility that Mitri’s death and the running of the travel agency were related. His demise changed nothing. The publicity would die down quickly. If anything, Signor Dorandi was bound to profit from it in the end, if only because the name of the agency would have been lodged in people’s minds by all the publicity surrounding the murder; and he certainly had made good use of the public forum provided by press coverage to profess his shock and horror at the very idea of sex-tourism.
Something else, then. Brunetti lowered his head and stared at the copy of the message formed by cut-out letters. Something else. ‘Sex or money,’ he said out loud and heard Signorina Elettra’s startled gasp. She had come in unnoticed and stood in front of his desk, a folder in her right hand.
He looked up at her and smiled.
‘I beg your pardon, Commissario?’
‘That’s why he was killed, Signorina. Sex or money.’
She understood instantly. ‘Always in good taste, those two,’ she said and placed the file on his desk. ‘This one is about the second.’
‘Whose?’
‘Both of theirs.’ A look of dissatisfaction crossed her face. ‘I can’t make any sense out of the numbers there, those for Dottor Mitri.’
‘In what way?’ Brunetti asked, knowing that if Signorina Elettra found numbers confusing there was little chance that he would have any idea what they meant.
‘He was very rich.’
Brunetti, who had been inside his home, nodded.
‘But the factories and businesses he owned don’t make very much money.’
This was a common enough phenomenon, Brunetti knew. To go by their tax returns, no one in Italy made enough to live on; they were a nation of paupers, scraping by only by turning collars, wearing shoes until they could be worn no more and, for all he knew, surviving on chaff and nettles. And yet the restaurants were full of well-dressed people, everyone seemed to have a new car, and the airports never ceased sending off planeloads of happy tourists. Go figure, as an American friend of his was much in the habit of saying.
‘I can’t imagine you’d be surprised by that,’ Brunetti said.
‘No, I’m not. We all cheat on our taxes. But I’ve studied all the records for his companies, and it looks like they’re correct. That is, none of them makes him much more than twenty million or so a year.’
‘For a total of what?’
‘About two hundred million a year.’
‘Profit?’
‘That’s what he declared,’ she answered. ‘After his taxes he was left with less than half of that.’
It was considerably more than Brunetti earned per year and hardly meant a life of poverty. ‘But why are you so sure?’ he asked.
‘Because I’ve also checked his credit card expenses.’ She nodded down at the folder. ‘And they are not the expenses of a man who earns that little.’
Not at all sure how to react to that dismissive ‘little’, Brunetti said, ‘How much did he spend?’ He waved her to a seat.
She tucked her long skirt under her and sat on the front of the chair, her spine not even flirting with its back, and waved her right hand in front of her. ‘I don’t remember the exact sum. More than fifty million, I think. So if you add to that the costs of running his home, just running his life, there’s no way to explain how he could have almost a billion lire in savings and stocks.’
‘Maybe he won the lottery,’ Brunetti suggested with a smile.
‘No one wins the lottery,’ Signorina Elettra answered without one.
‘Why would he keep so much money in the bank?’ Brunetti asked.
‘No one expects to die, I suppose. But he’s been moving it around. During the last year, quite a bit of it disappeared.’
‘Where?’
She shrugged. ‘To the places money disappears to, I suppose: Switzerland, Luxembourg, the Channel Islands.’
‘How much?’
‘About half a billion.’
Brunetti gazed down at the folder, but didn’t open it. He glanced up. ‘Can you find out?’
‘I haven’t really begun to look, Commissario. That is, I’ve begun, but I’ve just been glancing around, as it were. I haven’t really started to pry open drawers or rifle through his private papers.’
‘Do you think you could find time to do that?’
Brunetti could not remember the last time he had offered candy to a baby, but he had a vague memory of a smile much like the one Signorina Elettra gave him. ‘There’s nothing that would give me greater joy,’ she said, surprising him only by her rhetoric, not by her response. She got to her feet, eager to be off.
‘And Zambino?’
‘Nothing at all. I’ve never found anyone whose records are so clear and so ...’ She paused here, seeking the proper term. ‘So clear and so honest,’ she said, unable to restrain her wonder at the sound of the last word. ‘Never.’
‘Do you know anything about him?’
‘Personally?’ Brunetti nodded, but instead of answering she enquired, ‘Why do you want to know?’
‘No reason,’ he answered and then, made curious by her apparent reluctance, asked, ‘Do you?’
‘He’s a patient of Barbara’s.’
He considered this. He knew Signorina Elettra well enough to be aware that she would never reveal something she thought came under the seal of family, and her sister to realize she would always be bound by her oath as a doctor. He let it drop. ‘Professionally?’
‘Friends of mine have used him.’
‘As a lawyer?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why? I mean for what sort of cases?’
‘Remember when Lily was attacked?’ she asked.
Brunetti recalled the case, one that had reduced him to speechless rage. Three years ago, Lily Vitale, an architect, had been attacked on her way home from the opera, in what might have begun as a mugging, but which ended in a much more violent attack, when her face had been repeatedly punched and her nose broken. No attempt had been made to rob her; her bag was found, untouched, beside her by the people who came out from their homes in answer to her screams.
Her attacker was arrested that night and quickly identified as the same man who had attempted to rape at least three other women in the city. But he had never stolen anything and he was actually incapable of rape, so he was given thr
ee months of house arrest, but not before his mother and girlfriend had stepped forward at the trial to praise his virtue, loyalty, and integrity.
‘Lily brought a civil suit against him for damages. Zambino was her lawyer.’
Brunetti knew nothing of this. ‘And?’
‘She lost.’
‘Why?’
‘Because he never tried to rob her. All he did was break her nose, and the judge didn’t think that was as serious as stealing her purse. So he didn’t even award damages. He said that the house arrest was sufficient punishment.’