by Donna Leon
‘I didn’t know,’ she said.
‘His nephew, the one who works on Murano, told me about it. A tumour.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ she said. ‘He was a nice man.’
‘Yes, he was. And he certainly gave us a good price.’
‘I think he fell in love with the newlyweds,’ she said, a smile of recollection crossing her face. ‘Especially newlyweds with a baby on the way.’
‘You think that affected the price?’ Brunetti asked.
‘I always thought it did,’ Paola said. ‘Very un-Venetian of him, but still a decent thing to do.’ She added quickly, ‘But not if we’ve got to tear it down.’
‘That’s more than a bit ridiculous, don’t you think?’ Brunetti asked.
‘You’ve been working for the city for twenty years, haven’t you? You ought to have learned that the fact that something is ridiculous makes no difference at all.’
Wryly, Brunetti was forced to agree. He remembered a fruit seller telling him that, if a customer touched the fruit or vegetables on display, the dealer was subject to a fine of half a million lire. Absurdity seemed no impediment to any ordinance the city thought fit to impose.
Paola slumped down in the chair and stretched her feet out on to the low table between them. ‘So what should I do, call my father?’
Brunetti had known the question would be asked, and he was glad it had come sooner, rather than later. Count Orazio Falier, one of the richest men in the city, could easily work this miracle with no more than a phone call or a remark made over dinner. ‘No. I think I’d like to take care of this myself,’ he said, emphasizing the last word.
At no time did it occur to him, as it did not occur to Paola, to approach the matter legally, to find out the names of the proper offices and officials and the proper steps to follow. Nor did it occur to either of them that there might be a clearly defined bureaucratic procedure by which they could resolve this problem. If such things did exist or could be discovered, Venetians ignored them, knowing that the only way to deal with problems like this was by means of conoscienze: acquaintances, friendships, contacts and debts built up over a lifetime of dealing with a system generally agreed, even by those in its employ, perhaps especially by those in its employ, to be inefficient to the point of uselessness, prone to the abuses resultant from centuries of bribery, and encumbered by a Byzantine instinct for secrecy and lethargy.
Ignoring his tone, she said, ‘I’m sure he could take care of it.’
Before giving himself time to consider, Brunetti asked, ‘Ah, where are the snows of yesteryear? Where the ideals of ’68?’
Instantly alert, Paola snapped out, ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
He considered her, head flung back, ready for anything, and he realized how intimidating she could be in the classroom. ‘It means that we both used to believe in the politics of the left and in social justice and things like equality under the law.’
‘And?’
‘And now our first impulse is to jump the queue.’
‘Say what you mean, Guido,’ she began. ‘Don’t talk about “our”, please, when I’m the one who made the suggestion.’ She paused for a moment, then added, ‘Your principles are safely intact.’
‘And that means?’ he asked, voice somewhere beyond sarcasm but still short of anger.
‘That mine aren’t. We’ve been fools and fooled for decades, all of us with our hopes for a better society and our idiotic faith that this disgusting political system and these disgusting politicians would somehow transform this country into a golden paradise, run by an endless succession of philosopher kings.’ Her eyes sought his and rested on them. ‘Well, I don’t believe it any more, none of it: I have no faith and I have no hope.’
Though he saw the real tiredness in her eyes when she said this, the resentment he could never suppress crept into his voice, and he asked, ‘And does that mean that any time there’s trouble, you turn to your father, with his money and his connections and the power he carries around in his pockets like the rest of us carry loose change, and ask him to take care of it for you?’
‘All I’m trying to do,’ she began with a sudden change in tone, as if she wanted to defuse things while there was still time, ‘is save us time and energy. If we try to do this the right way, we’ll set foot in the world of Kafka, and we’ll ruin our peace and our lives trying to find the correct papers, only to stumble up against another little bureaucrat like Signor Rossi who will tell us they aren’t the right papers and we have to find others, and others, until we both run screaming mad.’
Sensing that Brunetti had warmed to the change in her tone, she continued, ‘And so, yes, if I can spare us that by asking my father to help, then that’s what I would prefer to do, because I don’t have the patience or the energy to do it any other way.’
‘And if I tell you I would prefer to do this myself, without his help?’ Before she could answer, he added, ‘It’s our apartment, Paola, not his.’
‘Do you mean do this by yourself in a legal way or’ – and here even greater warmth came into her voice – ‘do it by using your own friends and connections?’
Brunetti smiled, a sure sign that peace had been restored, ‘Of course I’ll use them.’
‘Ah,’ she said, smiling too, ‘that’s entirely different.’ Her smile broadened and she turned her mind to tactics. ‘Who?’ she asked, all thought of her father swept from the room.
‘There’s Rallo, on the Fine Arts Commission.’
‘The one whose son sells drugs?’
‘Sold,’ Brunetti corrected.
‘What did you do?’
‘A favour,’ was Brunetti’s only explanation.
Paola accepted this and asked only, ‘But what’s the Fine Arts Commission got to do with it? Wasn’t this floor built after the war?’
‘That’s what Battistini told us. But the lower part of the building is listed as a monument, so it might be affected by whatever happens to this floor.’
‘Uh huh,’ Paola agreed. ‘Anyone else?’
‘There’s that cousin of Vianello’s, the architect, who works in the Comune, I think in the office where they issue building permits. I’ll get Vianello to ask him to see what he can find out.’
Both sat for a while, drawing up lists of favours they’d done in the past and that could be called in now. It was almost noon before they had compiled a list of possible allies and agreed on their probable usefulness. It was only then that Brunetti asked, ‘Did you get the moeche?’
Turning, as was her decades-long habit, to the invisible person who she pretended listened to her husband’s worst excesses, she asked, ‘Did you hear that? We are about to lose our home, and all he thinks about is soft-shelled crabs.’
Offended, Brunetti objected: ‘That’s not all I think about.’
‘What else, then?’
‘Risotto.’
The children, who came home for lunch, were told about the situation only after the last of the crabs had been sent to their reward. At first, they refused to treat it seriously. When their parents managed to persuade them that the apartment really was in jeopardy, they immediately began to plan the move to a new home.
‘Can we get a house with a garden so I can have a dog?’ Chiara asked. When she saw her parents’ faces, she amended this to, ‘Or a cat?’ Raffi displayed no interest in animals and opted, instead, for a second bathroom.
‘If we got one, you’d probably move into it and never come out again, trying to grow that silly moustache of yours,’ Chiara said – the family’s first public recognition of a light shadow that had been gradually making itself visible under her older brother’s nose for the last few weeks.
Feeling not unlike a blue-helmeted UN peacekeeper, Paola intervened. ‘I think that’s enough from the two of you. This isn’t a joke, and I don’t want to listen to you talk about it as though it were.’
The children looked at her, and then, like a pair of baby owls perched on a limb, w
atching to see which of two nearby predators would strike first, swivelled their heads to look at their father. ‘You heard what your mother said,’ Brunetti told them, a sure sign that things were serious.
‘We’ll do the dishes,’ offered Chiara in a conciliatory way, knowing full well that it was her turn, anyway.
Raffi pushed his chair back and got to his feet. He picked up his mother’s plate, then his father’s, then Chiara’s, stacked them on his own plate, and took them to the sink. More remarkably, he turned on the water and pushed up the sleeves of his sweater.
Like superstitious peasants in the presence of the numinous, Paola and Brunetti fled into the living room, but not before he had grabbed a bottle of grappa and two small glasses.
He poured the clear liquid out and handed a glass to Paola. ‘What are you going to do this afternoon?’ she asked after the first calming sip.
‘I’m going back to Persia,’ Brunetti answered. Kicking off his shoes, he lay back on the sofa.
‘Rather an excessive response to Signor Rossi’s news, I’d say.’ She took another sip. ‘This is that bottle we brought back from Belluno, isn’t it?’ They had a friend up there, who had worked with Brunetti for more than a decade but who had abandoned the police force after being wounded in a shootout and had gone back to take over his father’s farm. Every fall, he set up a still and made about fifty bottles of grappa, an entirely illegal operation. He gave the bottles to family and friends.
Brunetti took another sip and sighed.
‘Persia?’ she finally asked.
He set his glass on the low table and picked up the book he had abandoned on Signor Rossi’s arrival. ‘Xenophon,’ he explained, opening it to the marked page, back in that other part of his life.
‘They managed to save themselves, didn’t they, the Greeks? And get back home?’ she asked.
‘I haven’t got that far yet,’ Brunetti answered.
Paola’s voice took on a faint edge. ‘Guido, you’ve read Xenophon at least twice since we’ve been married. If you don’t know whether or not they got back, then you weren’t paying attention, or you’ve got the first symptoms of Alzheimer’s.’
‘I’m pretending I don’t know what happens so I’ll enjoy it more,’ he explained and put on his glasses. He opened the book, found his place, and began reading.
Paola stared across at him for quite a long time, poured herself another glass of grappa, and took it back with her to her study, abandoning her husband to the Persians.
4
AS HAPPENS WITH these things, nothing happened. That is, no further communication arrived from the Ufficio Catasto, and nothing further was heard from Signor Rossi. In the face of this silence, and perhaps moved by superstition, Brunetti made no attempt to speak to the friends who might have helped him clarify the legal status of his home. Early spring passed into mid-spring and that in its turn passed. The weather became warm, and the Brunettis began to spend more and more time on their terrace. On the fifteenth of April, they ate lunch there for the first time, though by dinnertime it was again too cold to think about eating outside. The days lengthened, but still nothing further was heard about the dubious legality of the Brunettis’ home. Like farmers living beneath a volcano, the instant the earth ceased to rumble, they went back to tilling their fields, hoping that the gods who governed these things had forgotten about them.
With the change in season, more and more tourists began to flood into the city. A large number of gypsies followed in their wake. The gypsies had been suspected of countless burglaries in the cities, but now they started to be accused of pickpocketing and minor street crimes, as well. Because these crimes were a bother to tourists, the principal source of the city’s revenue, and not merely to residents, Brunetti was assigned to see if something could be done about them. The pickpockets were too young to be prosecuted; they were repeatedly apprehended and taken to the Questura, where they were asked to identify themselves. When the few who carried papers turned out to be under age, they were cautioned and released. Many were back the next day; most were back within a week. Since the only viable options Brunetti could see were to change the law regarding juvenile offenders or expel them from the country, he found it difficult to write his report.
He was at his desk, devoting a great deal of thought to how best to avoid stating self-evident truths, when his phone rang. ‘Brunetti,’ he said and flipped over to the third page of the names of those arrested for petty theft in the last two months.
‘Commissario?’ a man’s voice asked.
‘Yes.’
‘This is Franco Rossi.’
The name was the most common one a Venetian could have, equivalent to ‘John Smith’, so it took Brunetti a moment to sort through the various places he could expect to find a Franco Rossi, and it was only then that he found himself in the Ufficio Catasto.
‘Ah, I’ve been hoping to hear from you, Signor Rossi,’ he lied easily. His real hope was that Signor Rossi had somehow disappeared, taking the Ufficio Catasto and its records along with him. ‘Is there some sort of news?’
‘About what?’
‘The apartment,’ Brunetti asked, wondering what other sort of news he might be expecting to hear from Signor Rossi.
‘No, nothing,’ Rossi answered. ‘The office has been given the report and will consider it.’
‘Have you any idea when that might be?’ Brunetti asked diffidently.
‘No. I’m sorry. There’s no way of telling when they’ll get around to it.’ Rossi’s voice was brisk, dismissive.
Brunetti was momentarily struck by how apt a slogan these words would be for most of the city offices he had dealt with, both as a civilian and as a policeman. ‘Did you want more information?’ he asked, remaining polite, conscious that he might, some time in the future, have need of Signor Rossi’s good will, even perhaps his material aid.
‘It’s about something else,’ Rossi said. ‘I mentioned your name to someone, and they told me where you worked.’
‘Yes, how can I help you?’
‘It’s about something here at the office,’ he said, then stopped and corrected himself, ‘well, not here because I’m not at the office. If you understand.’
‘Where are you, Signor Rossi?’
‘On the street. I’m using my telefonino. I didn’t want to call you from the office.’ The reception faded out and when Rossi’s voice came back, he was saying, ‘. . . because of what I wanted to tell you.’
If that was the case, Signor Rossi would have been well advised not to use his telefonino, a means of communication as open to the public as the newspaper.
‘Is what you have to tell me important, Signor Rossi?’
‘Yes, I think it is,’ Rossi said, his voice lower.
‘Then I think you’d better find a public phone and call me on that,’ Brunetti suggested.
‘What?’ Rossi asked uneasily.
‘Call me from a public phone, Signore. I’ll be right here and I’ll wait for your call.’
‘You mean this call isn’t safe?’ Rossi asked, and Brunetti heard the same tightness that had choked him off when he refused to move out on to the terrace of Brunetti’s apartment.
‘That’s an exaggeration,’ Brunetti said, trying to sound calm and reassuring. ‘But there will be no trouble if you make the call from a public phone, especially if you use my direct number.’ He gave the number to Rossi and then repeated it as, he thought, the young man wrote it down.
‘I’ve got to find some change or buy a phone card,’ Rossi said and then, after a brief pause, Brunetti thought he heard him hang up, but the voice drifted back, and Rossi seemed to say, ‘I’ll call you back.’
‘Good. I’ll be here,’ Brunetti started to say, but he heard the phone click before he could finish.
What had Signor Rossi discovered at the Ufficio Catasto? Payments made so that some incriminatingly accurate blueprint could be made to disappear from a file and another one, more inventive, could be put in its pl
ace? Bribes paid to a building inspector? The idea that a civil servant would be shocked by any of this, even more, that he would call the police, made Brunetti want to laugh out loud. What was wrong with them over at the Ufficio Catasto, that they would hire a man as innocent as this?
For the next few minutes, while Brunetti waited for Rossi to call him back, he attempted to work out what good might come to him were he to help Signor Rossi with whatever he had discovered. With a pang of conscience – though a very small one – Brunetti realized he had every intention of making use of Signor Rossi, knew that he would go out of his way to help the young man and give special attention to whatever problem he had, knowing that, in return, a debt would be chalked up to his own account. This way, if nothing else, any favour he asked in return would be charged against his account, not against Paola’s father’s.
He waited ten minutes, but the phone did not ring. When it did, half an hour later, it was Signorina Elettra, his superior’s secretary, asking if he wanted her to bring up the photos and list of articles of jewellery that had been found out on the mainland, in the caravan of one of the gypsy children who had been arrested two weeks ago. The mother insisted that the pieces were all hers, that they had been in the family for generations. Given the value of the jewellery, that seemed a most unlikely claim. One piece, Brunetti knew, had already been identified by a German journalist as stolen from her apartment more than a month ago.
He glanced at his watch and saw that it was after five. ‘No, Signorina, don’t bother. It can wait until tomorrow.’
‘All right, Commissario,’ she said. ‘You can pick them up when you come in.’ She paused and he heard the rustle of papers at the other end of the line. ‘If there’s nothing else, I’ll go home, then.’
‘The Vice-Questore?’ Brunetti asked, wondering how she dared leave more than an hour early.
‘He left before lunch,’ she answered, her voice neutral. ‘He said he was going to lunch with the Questore, and I think they were going back to the Questore’s office afterwards.’