Friends in High Places - [Commissario Brunetti 09]

by Donna Leon

  ‘I’m not sure I follow you, Stefania.’

  ‘It’s simple, Guido,’ Stefania chided him. ‘With all these papers being shifted from one office to another, being sent from one side of the city to another, it’s inevitable that some of them will be lost.’

  Brunetti found this both inventive and efficient. He stored it away as an explanation he might try to use for the nonexistence of the plans for his own house, should notice ever be given that he had to produce them. ‘And so,’ he continued for her, ‘if questions were ever asked about the placement of a wall or the presence of a window, the owner would just have to produce their own plans and . . .’

  Stefania cut him off: ‘Which would of course correspond perfectly with the actual structure of the house.’

  ‘And in the absence of the official plans, conveniently lost during the reorganization of the files,’ Brunetti began, to an accompanying murmur of approval from Stefania, pleased that he had begun to understand, ‘there would be no way for any city inspector or future buyer ever to be sure that the restorations that had in fact been made were different from the ones that had been requested and approved on the missing plans.’ He finished saying this and, as it were, stepped silently back in order to admire what he had discovered. Ever since he was a child, he’d often heard people say of Venice, ‘Tutto crolla, ma nulla crolla.’ And it certainly seemed true: more than a thousand years had passed since the first buildings rose on the swampy land, so surely many of them must be in danger of falling down, but nothing ever did fall down. They leaned, tilted, buckled, and curved, but he could not remember ever having heard of a building that had actually collapsed. Surely, he had seen abandoned buildings with roofs that had caved in, boarded-up houses with walls that had fallen in, but he’d never heard of a real collapse, of a building falling in on its inhabitants.

  ‘Whose idea was this?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Stefania said. ‘You never find out things like that.’

  ‘Do the people in the various offices know about this?’

  Instead of giving him a direct answer, she said, ‘Think about it, Guido. Somebody has to see that some of these papers disappear, that files are lost, for you can be sure that a lot of others will be lost just because of the usual incompetence. But someone would have to see that specific papers ceased to exist,’

  ‘Who would want that?’ he asked.

  ‘It would most likely be the people who own the houses where the illegal work was done, or it could be the people who were supposed to check the restorations and didn’t bother.’ She paused and then added, ‘Or who did check and were persuaded,’ she began, giving that last word ironic emphasis, ‘to approve what they saw, regardless of what was drawn on the plans.’

  ‘So who are they?’

  ‘The Building Commissions.’

  ‘How many are there?’

  ‘One for every sestiere, six of them.’

  Brunetti imagined the scope and breadth of such an undertaking, the number of people who would have to be involved. He asked, ‘Wouldn’t it just be easier for people to go ahead with the work and then pay a fine when it’s discovered that something doesn’t conform to the plans they submitted, rather than go to the trouble of bribing someone to see that the plans are destroyed? Or lost,’ he amended.

  ‘That’s the way people did it in the past, Guido. Now that we’re involved in all this Europe stuff, they make you pay the fine, but they also make you undo the work and do it again the right way. And the fines are terrible: I had a client who put up an illegalaltana, not even a big one, about two metres by three. But his neighbour reported him. Forty million lire, Guido. And he had to take it down, as well. In the old days, at least he’d have been able to leave it there. I tell you, this business of being involved in Europe is going to ruin us. Soon you won’t be able to find anyone brave enough to take a bribe.’

  Though he could hear the moral indignation in her voice, Brunetti was not sure he shared it. ‘Steffi, you’ve named a lot of people, but who do you think would be most likely to be able to arrange this?’

  ‘The people there, in the Ufficio Catasto,’ she answered instantly. ‘And if any thing’s going on, dal Carlo would have to know about it, and I’d guess he’d have his snout in the trough. After all, the plans have to pass through his office at one time or another, and it would be child’s play for him to destroy specific papers.’ Stefania thought for a moment and then asked, ‘Are you thinking of doing something like this, Guido, getting rid of the plans?’

  ‘I told you, there are no plans. That’s what put them on to me in the first place.’

  ‘But if there are no plans, then you can claim they were lost along with the others that are going to be lost.’

  ‘But how do I prove that my home exists, that it was really built?’ Even as he asked the question, he was overcome with the absurdity of all of this: how did one prove the existence of reality?

  Her response was immediate. ‘All you’ve got to do is find an architect who will make the plans for you,’ and before Brunetti could interrupt to ask the obvious question, she answered it for him, ‘and have him put a false date on them’.

  ‘Stefania, we’re talking about fifty years ago.’

  ‘Not really. All you’ve got to do is claim you made restorations a few years ago and then have plans drawn up to conform to the way the apartment is now, and put that date on them.’ Brunetti could think of no response to make to this, so she went on, ‘It’s simple, really. If you want, I can give you the name of an architect who will do it for you. Nothing easier, Guido.’

  She’d been so helpful that he didn’t want to offend her, so he said, ‘I’ll have to ask Paola about it.’

  ‘Of course,’ Stefania said. ‘What a fool I am. That’s the answer, isn’t it? I’m sure her father knows the people who could get this taken care of. Then you wouldn’t have to bother with getting an architect.’ She stopped: for her, the problem was solved.

  Brunetti was just getting ready to answer this, when Stefania broke in and said, ‘I’ve got a call coming in on the other line. Pray it’s a buyer. Ciao, Guido,’ and she was gone.

  He thought about their conversation for a while. Reality was there, malleable and obedient: all one had to do was wrest it this way, push it a bit that way, and make it conform to whatever vision one might have. Or if reality proved intractable, then one simply pulled up the big guns of power and money and opened fire. How simple, how easy.

  Brunetti realized that this line of thought led to places he would prefer not to go, and so he flipped open the phone book again and dialled the number of the Ufficio Catasto. The phone rang repeatedly but no one picked it up. He glanced at his watch, saw that it was almost four, and put the phone down, muttering to himself that he was a fool to expect to find anyone at work there in the afternoon.

  He hunched down in his chair and propped his feet on the open bottom drawer. Arms folded across his chest, he gave himself over to the reconsideration of Rossi’s visit. He’d seemed an honest man, but that appearance was common enough, especially among the dishonest. Why had he followed up on the official letter by going in person to Brunetti’s house? By the time he’d phoned, later, he’d learned Brunetti’s rank. For a moment, Brunetti considered the possibility that Rossi had originally come in search of the offer of a bribe, but he dismissed that: the man had been too patently honest.

  When he’d found out that the Signor Brunetti who couldn’t find the plans of his apartment was a high-placed policeman, had Rossi flicked his line into the moving current of gossip to see what he could pull up about Brunetti? No one would dare to move ahead in any delicate dealing without doing this; the secret was knowing whom to ask, just where to drop the hook so as to catch the necessary information. And had he, subsequent to whatever his sources had reported about Brunetti, decided to approach him with what he had discovered at the Ufficio Catasto?

  Illegal building permits and whatever could be earned in bribes from gr
anting them seemed a cheap item on the vast menu of corruption offered by public offices: Brunetti found it impossible to believe that anyone would risk much, certainly not his life, by threatening to expose some ingenious scheme to loot the public purse. The implementation of the computer project to centralize documents and thus lose those which time had made inconvenient would raise the stakes, but Brunetti doubted this would be enough to have cost Rossi his life.

  His reflections were interrupted by the arrival of Signorina Elettra, who came into his office without bothering to knock. ‘Am I interrupting you, sir?’ she asked.

  ‘No, not at all. I was just sitting here thinking about corruption.’

  ‘Public or private?’ she asked.

  ‘Public,’ he said, putting his feet under his desk and sitting up straight.

  ‘Like reading Proust,’ she said, deadpan. ‘You think you’re finished with it, but then you discover there’s another volume. Then another one after that.’

  He looked up, waiting for more, but all she said, laying some papers on his desk, was, ‘I’ve learned to share your suspicion of coincidence, sir, so I’d like you to take a look at the names of the owners of that building.’

  ‘The Volpatos?’ he asked, knowing somehow that it could be nothing else.

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘For how long?’

  She leaned over and pulled out the third page. ‘Four years. They bought it from a certain Mathilde Ponzi. The declared price is here,’ she said, pointing to a figure typed at the right side of the page.

  ‘Two hundred and fifty million lire?’ Brunetti said, his astonishment audible. ‘It’s four floors, must be at least a hundred fifty square metres to the floor.’

  ‘That’s only the declared price, sir,’ Signorina Elettra said.

  Everyone knew that, to avoid taxes, the price of a house declared on the bill of sale never reflected the actual price paid or, if it did, it did so unclearly, through a glass darkly: the real price would be anywhere from two to three times as much. Everyone, in fact, referred as a matter of course to the ‘real’ price and the ‘declared’ price, and only a fool, or a foreigner, would think they were the same.

  ‘I know that,’ Brunetti said. ‘But even if what they actually paid was three times as much, it’s still a bargain.’

  ‘If you look at their other real estate acquisitions,’ Signorina Elettra began, pronouncing that noun with a certain measure of asperity, ‘you’ll see that they have enjoyed similar good fortune in most of their dealings.’

  He turned back to the first page and read down through the information. Indeed, it did appear that the Volpatos had often managed to find houses that cost very little. Thoughtfully, Signorina Elettra had provided the number of square metres in each ‘acquisition’, and a quick calculation suggested to Brunetti that they had managed to pay an average declared price of less than a million lire a square metre. Even allowing for the variables created by inflation and factoring in the disparity between the declared price and the real price, they still ended up consistently paying far less than a third of the average price for real estate in the city.

  He glanced up at her. ‘Am I to assume that the other pages tell the same story?’ he asked.

  She nodded.

  ‘How many properties are there?’

  ‘More than forty, and I haven’t even begun to examine the other properties listed under the names of Volpatos who might turn out to be relatives.’

  ‘I see,’ he said, turning his attention back to the papers. On the last pages she had attached current bank statements for their individual accounts as well as a number of joint accounts. ‘How do you manage to do this,’ he began, but seeing the sudden change that came over her face at these words, he added, ‘so quickly?’

  ‘Friends,’ she answered, then added, ‘Shall I see what sort of information Telecom has to give us about the phone calls they’ve made?’

  Brunetti nodded, certain that she had already begun this process. She smiled and left the room; Brunetti returned his attention to the papers and the numbers. They were nothing short of staggering. He recalled the impression the Volpatos had made on him: that they were without education or social position or money. And yet they were people, from what these papers told him, of enormous wealth. If even only half the properties were rented - and people did not accumulate apartments in Venice to let them sit empty - then they must be receiving twenty or thirty million lire a month, as much as many people made in a year. Much of this wealth was safely deposited in four different banks, and even more was invested in government bonds. Brunetti understood little of the workings of the stock market in Milan, but he knew enough to recognize the names of the safest stocks, and the Volpatos had hundreds of millions invested in them.

  Those shabby people: he summoned them from memory and recalled the worn handle on her plastic handbag, the stitching on her husband’s left shoe that showed how often it had been repaired. Was this camouflage to protect them from the jealous eyes of the city or was it a form of avarice run mad? And where, in all of this, was he meant to fit the battered body of Franco Rossi, found fatally injured in front of a building owned by the Volpatos?

  * * * *

  19

  Brunetti spent the next hour contemplating greed, a vice for which Venetians had always had a natural propensity. La Serenissima was, from the beginning, a commercial enterprise, so the acquisition of wealth had ever been among the highest goals toward which a Venetian was trained to aspire. Unlike those profligate southerners, Romans and Florentines, who made money in order to toss it away, who delighted in hurling golden cups and plates into their rivers in order to make public display of their wealth, the Venetians had early on learned to acquire and maintain, to keep, to amass, and to hoard; they had also learned to keep their wealth hidden. Surely, the grand palazzi that lined the Canal Grande did not speak of hidden wealth; quite the contrary. But these were the Mocenigos, the Barbaros, families so lavishly blessed by the gods of lucre that any attempt to disguise their wealth would have been in vain. Their fame protected them from the disease of greed.

  Its symptoms were far more manifest in the minor families, the fat merchants who built their more modestpalazzi on the back canals, built them over their warehouses so that they could, like nesting birds, live in close physical contact with their wealth. There, they could warm their bosoms in the reflected glow of the spices and cloth brought back from the East, warm them in secret, with never an indication to their neighbours of just what lay behind the grilled barriers of their water doors.

  Through the centuries, this tendency to accumulate had filtered down and taken firm root in the general population. It was called many things - thrift, economy, prudence - Brunetti himself had been raised to value all of these. In its more exaggerated form, however, it became nothing more than relentless, pitiless avarice, a disease which ravaged not only the person who suffered from it, but all those who came in contact with the infected person.

  He remembered, as a young detective, being called to serve as a witness at the opening of the house of an old woman who had died one winter in the common ward of the hospital, her condition much aggravated by malnutrition and the sort of physical battering that came only from prolonged exposure to cold. Three of them had gone to the address given on her identity card, had broken the locks on the front door, all of them, and entered. There they found an apartment of more than two hundred square metres, squalid and stinking of cat, the rooms filled with boxes full of old newspapers, on top of which were piled plastic bags filled with rags and discarded clothing. One room contained nothing but bags of glass bottles of all types: wine bottles, milk bottles, small medicine bottles. Another contained a fifteenth-century Florentine wardrobe that was later valued at one hundred and twenty million lire.

  Though it was February, there was no heat: not that the heat was not turned on but that no heating system existed in the house. Two of them were detailed to search for papers that might help find
the old woman’s relatives. Brunetti, opening a drawer in her bedroom, found a bundle of fifty-thousand-lire notes tied with a piece of dirty string, while his colleague, searching in the living room, found a stack of postal bank books, each with more than fifty million lire on deposit.

  At that point, they’d left the house and sealed it, notified the Guardia di Finanza to come and sort it out. Later, Brunetti had learned that the old woman, who died without relatives or testament, had left more than four billion lire, left it, in lieu of surviving relatives, to the Italian state.

  Brunetti’s best friend had often said that he wanted death to take him just at the moment he laid his last lira down on a bar and said, ‘Prosecco for everyone.’ It had happened pretty much like that, and fate had given him forty years less than that old woman, but Brunetti knew that his had been the better life, and the better death.