by Donna Leon
'"Interested," Lieutenant?' Brunetti confined himself to asking.
Ignoring the question, Scarpa added, 'No one remembers seeing her at the train station that morning.'
‘I dare say that could also be said of most of the other seventy thousand people in the city’ Brunetti said wearily. 'Good morning, Lieutenant’
Inside his office, he found himself reflecting on Scarpa's behaviour. His deliberate obstructionism might be nothing more than a sign of his hatred of Brunetti and the people who worked with him, Signora Gismondi being nothing more than a tool. Not for the first time, Brunetti speculated on a further meaning, that Scarpa might be attempting to remove the focus of attention from some other person. The possibility still left him feeling faintly sick.
To distract himself from this idea, he read his way through the papers that had accumulated in his in-tray over the last few days, chief of which was a notice from the Ministero dell'Interno, spelling out the changes to law enforcement policies resultant upon, as the document would have it, the passage of recent laws by Parliament. He read it with interest, reread it with anger. When he finished it the second time, he set it down on the middle of his desk, gazed out the window, and said aloud in disgust, 'Why not just let them run the whole country?' His pronoun did not refer to the elected members of Parliament.
He busied himself with other papers that awaited his attention and successfully resisted the temptation to go downstairs to attempt to interfere with whatever was being done to Signora Gismondi. He knew that there was no way a case could be made against her and that she was nothing more than a pawn in a game even he did not fully understand, but he knew that any attempt to help her would work only to her disservice.
He passed a stupid hour, then another, before Vianello , knocked at his door. When the inspector entered, Brunetti's first glance told him something was wrong.
Vianello stood in front of Brunetti's desk, a sheaf of papers in his hand. 'It's my fault, sir,' Vianello said.
'What?' Brunetti asked.
'It was right there in front of me, and I never bothered to ask.'
'What are you talking about, Vianello?' Brunetti asked sharply. 'And sit down. Don't just stand there.'
Vianello appeared not to hear this and held up the papers. 'He worked in the contracts office,' he said, waving the papers for emphasis. 'It was his job to study the building plans submitted for any work that had to be done on the schools and see if they met the specific needs of the pupils and teachers in that particular school.' He pulled out one sheet of paper and set the others on Brunetti's desk. 'Look,' he said, holding it up. 'He had no power to approve the contracts, but he did have the power to recommend.' He added the sheet to the papers on Brunetti's desk and stepped back, as though he feared they might burst into flames. 'I was in there, talking about him, and I never bothered to ask what office it was.'
'Who, the son?'
'Yes. That's where he started. The father worked in the personnel office, and God knows no one's going to ask for a bribe there.'
'And the dates?'
Vianello picked up the papers and looked through them. 'The payments started after he had been there for four years.' He looked across at Brunetti. "That's more than enough time for him to have become familiar with the way things worked.'
'If that's how they worked.'
'Commissario,' Vianello said, an unwonted note of asperity in his voice, 'it's a city office, for God's sake. How else do you think things work?'
'Who was in charge of the office when the payments began?'
Without having to consult the papers, Vianello answered, 'Renato Fedi. He was named head of the department about three months before the accounts were opened.'
'And went on to bigger and better things,' Brunetti chimed in. But then asked, 'Who was in charge when Battestini started working there?'
'Piero De Pra was there when he started, but he's dead now. Luca Sardelli took over when De Pra died, but he lasted only two years himself before he was transferred to the Sanitation Department. Before it was privatized,' he added.
'Any idea why he was transferred?'
Vianello shrugged. ‘From the little I've heard about him, I'd guess he's one of those nonentities who just gets shifted around from office to office because he's made it his business to make friends with everyone, so no one has the courage to fire him. They just keep him around until they see a convenient spot to move him, and they get rid of him.'
Resisting the strong impulse to repeat his remark about the Questura, Brunetti contented himself with asking, instead, 'And he's at the Assessorato dello Sport now?'
'Yes.'
'Any idea what he does?' 'No.'
'Find out’ Brunetti said. Before Vianello could acknowledge the command, Brunetti asked, 'And Fedi?'
'He followed Sardelli, stayed there two years, and then left the civil service to take over his uncle's construction company. He's run it since then.'
'What sort of things do they do?' Brunetti asked.
'Yes’ Vianello answered. 'Restorations. Of schools, among other things.'
Brunetti cast his memory back to his conversation with Judge Galvani, trying to remember if there had been anything in the judge's reference to Fedi that he had overlooked, some tone, or a suggestion that he take a closer look at the man, but he could remember nothing. It occurred to him then that Galvani was not a friend and owed him no favours, so perhaps he would not have made the suggestion, even if there were reason to do so. He felt a moment's hot exasperation: why did it always have to be like this, with no one willing to do anything unless there were personal gain to be had from it or because some favour had to be repaid?
He drew his attention back to Vianello, who was saying,'.. . has grown steadily for the last five years'.
'I'm sorry, Vianello,' he said, ‘I was trunking about something else. What did you say?'
'That his uncle's company won a contract to restore two schools in Castello when Fedi was in charge of the school board, and that it's grown steadily since then, especially after he took over.'
'How do you know this?'
'We looked at the papers in his office and his tax returns for those years.'
For a moment, he was tempted to ask angrily if this meant Vianello and Signorina Elettra had somehow found the time that morning to go to Fedi's office and ask to please examine their client records and tax returns, and this without bothering to get an order from a judge. Instead, he said, 'Vianello, this has got to stop.'
'Yes, sir,' the inspector said perfunctorily, then added, 'My guess is that the tenders for the work that went to the uncle's company would have been evaluated by Battestini. He was working in that job then.'
With acute awareness of the hopeless irony of the question, Brunetti asked, 'Can you find out if he did examine them?'
Gracious in victory, Vianello did no more than nod. 'His signature or initials have got to be on the original bid if he was the person who checked it for the school board.' He forestalled Brunetti's next question by saying, 'No, sir, we don't have to go and look at the papers. There's a code on the offer, indicating who examined it and checked that it met the school's requirements, so all we have to do is find Fedi's bid and see who handled it.'
Ts there any way you can check the costs to see if they were...' Imagination failed Brunetti, and he left the sentence unfinished.
'The easiest way, I think, would be to check the other bids and compare what they offered in terms of cost and time. If Fedi's uncle's bid was much higher or provided less, then that would suggest we've found the explanation.'
From the enthusiasm with which he spoke, Brunetti had no doubt what Vianello thought the likely result would be. But Brunetti had spent many years in contemplation of the genius with which Italians robbed the state, and he doubted that someone as successful as Fedi, were he to have given this contract to his uncle by illegal means, would have been so artless as to have left an easy trail. 'Check to see about overruns, too, and w
hether they were ever questioned,' he suggested, displaying two decades of experience of the city administration.
Vianello got to his feet and left. Brunetti toyed for a moment with the idea of going downstairs to observe them at work - he knew better than to delude himself into thinking he could help in any way - but knew it would be better to leave them to it. Not only would it be faster that way, but it would also spare his conscience the need to contemplate the ever-expanding illegality of Signorina Elettra and Vianello's investigative techniques.
20
After more than an hour, Brunetti's impatience conquered his good sense, and he went downstairs. When he entered her office, expecting to find Signorina Elettra and Vianello peering at the computer, he was surprised to find them gone, though the blank screen still glowed with suspended life. Pacta's door was closed: in fact, Brunetti was suddenly aware that he had seen no sign of his superior for some days and wondered if Patta had indeed moved to Brussels and begun working for Interpol, and no one had noticed. Once he allowed this possibility to slip into his mind, Brunetti found himself helpless to avoid considering its consequences: which of the various time-servers poised on the slippery pole of promotion would be chosen to replace Patta?
The geographical inwardness of Venice was reflected in its social habits: the web of narrow colli connecting the six sestieri mirrored the connections and interstices linking its inhabitants to one another. Strada Nuova and Via XXII Marzo had the broad directness of the ties of family: anyone could follow them clearly. Calle Lunga San Barnaba and Barbaria de le Tole, straight still but far narrower and shorter, were in their way like the bonds between close friends: there was little chance of losing the way, but they didn't lead as far. The bulk of the calli that made movement possible in the city, however, were narrow and crooked, often leading to dead ends or to branches that took the unsuspecting in the opposite direction to the way they wanted to go: this was the way of protective deceit, these the paths that had to be followed by those without access to more direct ways of reaching a goal.
In the years he had been in Venice, Patta had been unable to find his way alone through the narrow calli, but he had at least learned to send Venetians ahead to lead him through the labyrinth of rancours and animosities that had been built up over the centuries, as well as around the obstacles and wrong turnings created in more recent times. No doubt any replacement sent by the central bureaucracy in Rome would be a foreigner - as anyone not born within earshot of the waters of the laguna was a foreigner - and would flail about hopelessly in pursuit of straight roads and direct ways of getting somewhere. Aghast at the realization,
Brunetti had to accept the fact that he did not want Patta to leave.
These reflections fell from him as the sound of Vianello's voice approached. The deep boom of his laugh was followed by the higher tones of Signorina Elettra's. Entering the office, they stopped when they saw Brunetti: the laughter ceased, and the smiles evaporated from their faces.
Providing no explanation for their absence, Signorina Elettra moved behind her computer and flicked it into life, then pressed a series of keys, after which two pages materialized on the screen, placed side by side. 'These are the bids from Fedi's uncle's company that were accepted while Fedi was in charge of the school board, sir’
He moved to stand beside her and saw at the top of both sheets the familiar letter heading of the city administration and below it thick paragraphs of dark type. She touched a key, and two more seemingly identical pages appeared. Another key made these vanish, replacing them with two more. Lacking the letterhead, these contained, on the left, a column of words or phrases and, opposite them, a matching column of numbers.
'That's the estimate, sir.'
He looked at the last page and read some of the words, ran his eyes to the right and saw what the objects or services would cost. At sea in ignorance, he had no idea what many of them were and no idea what any of them should cost.
'Have you compared this with the other bids?' he asked, looking away from the contract and back at Signorina Elettra.
'Yes.'
'And?'
'And his was cheaper,' she said with audible disappointment. 'Not only was it cheaper, but he guaranteed that the work would be done within the fixed period and offered to pay a penalty per day if it was not.'
Brunetti looked back at the screen, as if certain that closer examination of the words and the numbers would reveal to him whatever ruse Fedi had used to win the contract. But no matter how long he studied the pages, they refused to make sense to him. Finally he turned away from the screen and asked, 'And overruns?'
'None,' she said, tapping a few words into the computer and waiting while new documents appeared in place of the others. 'The entire project was finished on time,' she explained, pointing to what Brunetti assumed were the documents which proved this. 'What's more,' she went on, 'they were finished within the projected budget, and a civil engineer I phoned said the work was done well, far above the average quality of work performed for the city.' She saw how he reacted to this, so showed some reluctance in adding, 'The same is true of the two restorations they did to schools here in the city, sir.'
Brunetti looked from the screen to her face, to Vianello's face and then back at the screen. In the past he had often told himself to look at the evidence and not at what he wanted the evidence to be, yet here he was again, confronted with information which did not support what he wanted the truth to be, and his impulse was to assume that it did not really mean what it appeared to mean or to find other evidence that would discount it.
He saw it then, the trail he had insisted they follow, the trail that had not only led to this dead end but had taken the wrong turning from the very start. 'It's all wrong’ he said. 'What we've been doing, it's all wrong.'
He recalled the title of a book he had read some years ago and said it out loud: '"The March of Folly". That's what we've been doing: lumbering around after big game when what we should have been doing was thinking about the money.'
'And isn't that the money?' Vianello asked, pointing to the screen.
'I mean the money in the accounts’ Brunetti insisted. 'We've been looking at the total, not the money.'
Their expressions suggested they still didn't follow, and Vianello's indignant, 'To some of us, thirty thousand Euro is money’ confirmed it.
'Of course it's money’ Brunetti agreed, 'a lot of money, especially ten years ago. But it's the total we've been looking at, not the actual monthly payments. Someone with a good salary could have paid it and not missed it. Even if you were still single and lived at home, you could have paid it’ he surprised Vianello by saying.
Vianello began a blustering negative, but then he considered the conditions Brunetti had imposed, paused, and said, though grudgingly, 'Yes, if I still lived with my parents and had no interests, and never wanted to go out to dinner, and didn't care what I wore, then I suppose I could have done it’ Ungracious in defeat, he added, 'But it still wouldn't be easy. It was a lot of money.'
'But not enough to pay someone to keep quiet about the way a contract was approved for the complete restoration of these buildings’ Brunetti insisted. He jabbed his finger against the computer screen, where the final sum glowed in eerie enormity. 'A job as big as this one would have earned them millions of Euros. No blackmailer’ he said, finally naming the crime, 'would ask for so little, not with a contract this large at stake’
He looked at both of them, waiting to see signs that they agreed with his interpretation. Vianello's slow nod and Signorina Elettra's answering smile showed him that they did. 'We've’ he began, then corrected himself and confessed, 'no, I've been blinded into thinking it was a payment for something big, something important, like a contract. But what we're after here is something small, something mean and personal and private.'
'And probably nasty,' Vianello added.
Brunetti turned to Signorina Elettra. 'I've no idea what sort of information you can get about the peop
le who were working at the school board when the payments started’ he said, judging it superfluous to add that he no longer cared how she got it, "and I'm not sure what sort of person we're looking for. Avvocatessa Marieschi said Signora Battestini told her it was her son who took care of her old age’ he began, then, raising his eyes in a parody of belief, added, 'with the help of the Madonna.' Both of them smiled at that, and he went on, 'We're looking for someone who worked there and who could pay a hundred thousand lire a month.'
'Perhaps’ Vianello interrupted, 'they were so rich the money didn't matter to them.'
Signorina Elettra turned to him and said, ‘I don't think that's the sort of person who works at the school board, Ispettore.'
For a moment, Brunetti feared that Vianello would be offended by the apparent sarcasm of her remark, but he seemed not to be. In fact, after considering it, the inspector nodded and said, 'What's strange, if you think about it, is that the amount never changed. Salaries have gone up, everything's become more expensive, yet the payments never changed.'