The Waters of Eternal Youth

by Donna Leon

  ‘Is that Cavanis’?’ Brunetti said before he could stop himself.

  ‘No,’ Bocchese answered, then added, ‘You can have his phone now.’

  Feeling some satisfaction at being able to tell him, Brunetti said, ‘We’ve already got the numbers he called.’

  The technician nodded in approval and said, ‘She’s good,’ then picked up a small screwdriver and placed the tip inside the exposed viscera of the phone. He turned it, removed it, put the tip back inside and turned it again. The phone rang, a normal ring like the one made by most landlines. The technician pushed a key, and the noise stopped.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Fixing the ring signal,’ Bocchese said.

  ‘Isn’t there an easier way to do that?’ Brunetti, a techno Neanderthal, asked.

  ‘Yes. But I dropped it and it wouldn’t work. So the only thing to do was fix it by ­re-­establishing the contacts.’

  ‘I see,’ Brunetti said, quite as if he understood what Bocchese meant. He counted six long beats before he said, ‘Have you finished with the things from Cavanis’ apartment?’

  ‘About an hour ago,’ Bocchese said, tapping a number into the keyboard of his phone.

  An instant later, Brunetti’s phone rang, and he reached into his pocket to answer it but removed his hand when he saw Bocchese’s face.

  ‘Very funny. Very funny,’ Brunetti said in a sour voice, unwilling to reveal his amusement at Bocchese’s trick. ‘Can I have a look?’

  Bocchese pointed with his chin towards a table at the back of the lab, its surface covered with many small items. ‘Be my guest,’ he said, slipping the back cover of his telefonino back on, and starting to insert the tiny screws that held the front in place.

  Brunetti walked over to the table and circled it, looking down at the objects exposed on the surface. He recognized some of them. There was a toothbrush, bristles tormented to all four sides, a tube of toothpaste that had been squeezed so tightly that Brunetti would not have been surprised to hear it weep. The meagre contents of the medicine cabinet were laid out in a paltry line. He recognized the bar of kitchen soap. Further along were pieces of orange peel and a plastic container that had once held food that itself had contained an inordinate amount of tomato sauce. Next to this was a can that had once held tuna fish and two empty ­two-­litre wine bottles.

  Flattened on the table were four pieces of paper and two plastic phonecards, both the worse for wear and no doubt discarded because the time on them had been used up. ‘All right to touch these things?’ Brunetti called over to the technician, who was now talking on his phone. Bocchese nodded and waved his hand, concentrating on his conversation.

  Brunetti took out his notebook and set it on the table next to the cards and carefully copied out the long serial number on each card. Big Brother was not only watching us, he reflected; he was also able to trace any call that had been made using these cards.

  He turned his attention to the scraps of paper. One was a flyer announcing the appointment of a new pastor to the parish of San Zan Degolà. Another was a wadded tissue which the technicians had decided not to open, and two more were receipts from shops.

  Brunetti turned the receipts over; on the back of the second one he saw the familiar 52, the initial digits of a local phone number, followed by five more. He pulled out his phone and dialled the number.

  ‘Soprintendenza di Belle Arti,’ a woman’s voice answered after six rings. Brunetti ended the call without bothering to speak. So Cavanis had dialled the number he had written down, but why call the Belle Arti? Anyone’s guess. Only a fool – or a drunk – would call a city office at eleven at night. Or, for that matter, his cynic’s voice added, at eleven in the morning. He thanked Bocchese and said he’d come back to see him if anything ever went wrong with his own phone.

  ‘Most people just throw them away,’ the technician said with audible disapproval.

  Brunetti nodded and went up to Signorina Elettra’s office. She was not there, so he carefully copied the numbers of the phonecards on a sheet of paper and wrote a note asking her to find the numbers called using both. When he got back to his office, he took out his phone and dialled the number for dalla Lana that Vianello had given him. Because dalla Lana was a teacher, Brunetti was prepared to leave a message, but dalla Lana answered with his name.

  ‘Signor dalla Lana, this is Commissario Brunetti. There’s one thing I forgot to ask you.’

  ‘What’s that?’ dalla Lana asked in a tired, patient voice.

  ‘Did your friend say anything recently about the Soprintendenza di Belle Arti?’

  ‘I don’t understand your question, Commissario,’ dalla Lana said, sounding confused. ‘What could Pietro have had to do with them?’

  ‘He had their phone number in his home, and he called it after he spoke to you the other night.’

  ‘Saturday?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What would he want with them?’ dalla Lana asked. ‘At that hour?’

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ Brunetti admitted. ‘You’re sure he never mentioned them to you?’

  ‘No. Never.’ Then, after a moment, dalla Lana added, ‘He was very drunk when I spoke to him, Commissario, not really coherent.’ Dalla Lana was simply stating a fact and making no attempt to draw conclusions from that.

  ‘Do you know who his other friends were?’ Brunetti asked, adding, ‘I should have asked you that earlier.’

  ‘There are the men at the bar,’ dalla Lana said after a pause, ‘but I’m not sure they were really friends. I don’t think Pietro saw them anywhere else. And I never met any other friends; I don’t know if he had any.’

  What did Cavanis do all day? Brunetti asked himself. He visited a bar a few times, watched television, and drank. Is this what’s left of life after retirement? Six hundred euros a month didn’t permit much else, he had to remember. But still.

  ‘Did he ever mention an incident in Campo San Boldo, when he saved a girl’s life?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘Yes, he told me about it when it happened, but he said it wasn’t important. He said he dived in and pulled her out without thinking about it.’ There was a long silence. ‘In fact, he laughed about it, said he was so drunk when it happened that he was lucky he didn’t drown himself.’

  ‘Is that all he remembered?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘As far as I know, yes. It’s all he ever told me about it, at any rate.’

  ‘Thank you, Signor dalla Lana,’ Brunetti said and then, hoping that hearing a compliment for his friend would somehow comfort him, added, ‘It was a very brave thing for him to do.’

  ‘Yes,’ dalla Lana said and broke the connection.

  If Cavanis had told his best friend no more than this about the incident at San Boldo, that would be the end of that. Or it would be, were it not that Cavanis had also said he’d remembered something that was going to make him a lot of money and shortly afterwards had been found lying dead on the floor of his apartment, a knife driven into his neck.

  Brunetti found himself thinking of Dante’s belief that heresy was a form of intellectual stubbornness, the refusal to abandon a mistaken idea. In Dante’s case, this path led to eternal damnation; in his own case, Brunetti reflected, intellectual stubbornness might well be leading him deep into the Dark Wood of Error. Saving part of Manuela from the waters of the canal was hardly the only thing Cavanis had done in his life; it need not have been the cause of his death. Drunks are reckless, thoughtless, rash. They drive off the road or into walls, they start fights they know they cannot win, and they say things that cannot be forgiven or forgotten. They menace and they brag, and very often they push people too hard or too far. Nothing linked his murder to the incident with Manuela ­Lando-­Continui. Nothing linked his murder to anything save Brunetti’s own suspicions. This was real life, random and messy and uncontrolled.

  His phone ran
g. He answered with his name.

  ‘Get down here,’ came the unconfoundable voice of his superior.

  ‘Sì, Dottore,’ Brunetti said and got to his feet.

  Signorina Elettra was still not at her desk, thus he went into the lion’s den with no advance warning and no way to prepare his excuses and prevarications. Even before Brunetti was halfway across the room, Patta demanded, ‘Did you put her up to this?’

  Patta’s wife? Signorina Elettra? Contessa ­Lando-­Continui? Brunetti kept his face motionless.

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about, ­Vice-­Questore,’ Brunetti said, for once telling Patta the simple truth.

  ‘This email,’ Patta said, slamming his palm down on some sheets of paper at the centre of his desk. ‘From the Assistant to the Minister of the Interior, for God’s sake. Do you know what this can do to my career?’

  ‘I must repeat, ­Vice-­Questore, that I know nothing about any email sent to you.’ He looked Patta in the eye when he said this, hoping that the tactic he used when he lied to his superior would prove equally effective when he told the truth.

  ‘Don’t lie to me, Brunetti,’ Patta said.

  ‘I’m not lying, Dottore,’ Brunetti answered. ‘I know nothing about that,’ he said, daring to point at the papers in front of his superior.

  ‘Read it before you say that, Brunetti,’ Patta said in an ugly voice, slamming his palm flat on the papers again and shoving them in Brunetti’s direction.

  Once Patta had removed his hand, Brunetti picked up the papers and held them at the correct distance. The cover page bore the letterhead of the Ministry of the Interior. Brunetti reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and took out his glasses. ­One-­handedly he shook them open and put them on. The address jumped into clear focus, as did the text.

  Worthy Dottor Patta,

  Please note that the Ministry has been informed of – and is about to initiate an investigation of – certain grave irregularities in a number of ongoing investigations currently being conducted by the Questura di Venezia. These irregularities include – but are not limited to:

  1.The unauthorized investigation into the bank records of private citizens and certain public and private organizations.

  2.Similarly unauthorized searches of public documents and records.

  3.Acquisition and perusal of state documents or reserved information by unauthorized persons or civilian employees.

  4.Similar behaviour regarding the reserved medical records of certain individuals.

  5.A persistent and deliberate attempt to disguise these actions.

  The Ministry expects, by the 14th of the current month, a full and detailed report of any facts bearing upon these irregularities and a list of the persons responsible for these violations as well as an accurate account of the precise nature of their involvement in each.

  Attached please find a list of the statute numbers, as well as dates of passage, of the laws being violated by these activities.

  The email was signed – there was no polite closing phrase – by someone named Eugenia Viscardi, whose title was ‘Assistant to the Minister’ and whose illegible signature was placed above her printed name.

  Brunetti finished reading, barely glanced at the second page, which contained the relevant numbers of the statutes involved as well as their dates of enactment. He removed his glasses and slipped them back into his pocket. With a gesture that showed just how difficult it was for him to disguise his contempt, Brunetti let the papers fall back on Patta’s desk.

  ‘And you believed this, Dottore?’ Brunetti asked, making his astonishment audible. ‘This?’ he repeated, waving a hand at the papers that now lay supine on his superior’s desk.

  ‘Of course I believed it,’ Patta all but shouted. ‘And I believe it. It’s from the Ministry of the Interior, for God’s sake.’

  ‘Is it?’ Brunetti asked lightly, having decided that this scene would be better played as farce than as tragedy. ‘Why do you believe that?’

  Patta reached over and pulled the papers to him. He lifted them, checked the address of the sender and pounded his forefinger repeatedly upon the letterhead above it: Ministry of the Interior, sure enough.

  ‘Well, that’s a credit to the person who sent it, I suppose,’ Brunetti said. Should he play this as a scene from Oscar Wilde or from Pirandello? Then, in a much firmer voice, he said, ‘May I suggest that, to save ourselves time and effort, and possibly embarrassment, we do one simple thing?’

  Caught off balance, Patta asked, ‘What?’

  ‘See if there is a Eugenia Viscardi working in the office of the Minister of the Interior.’

  ‘Don’t be an idiot, Brunetti. Of course there is.’ For emphasis, Patta gave the papers another tap, this time with the back of his fingers. ‘She signed this.’

  ‘Someone signed it, Dottore: I don’t question that for a moment. But whether that person is Eugenia Viscardi and whether a woman named Eugenia Viscardi works for the Minister of the Interior, those are different matters entirely.’

  ‘That’s impossible,’ Patta said in an unnecessarily loud voice.

  ‘Then shall we find out?’ Brunetti offered.

  ‘How?’

  ‘By asking the person I fear you believe responsible for these excesses to check to see if this woman actually works there.’

  ‘Signorina Elettra?’ Patta asked in a softer voice.

  ‘Yes. For her it’s as simple as . . .’ The simile failed Brunetti and forced him to change to, ‘It’s very simple for her.’

  Unwilling to be a witness to Patta’s uncertainty, Brunetti looked out of the window and noticed that the leaves had begun to drop from the vines that had overgrown the wall surrounding the garden on the other side of the canal.

  ‘Why don’t you believe it?’ Patta asked in what passed, with him, for a reasonable voice.

  ‘The vagueness of the accusations, for one thing,’ Brunetti answered. ‘And the failure to name a single person directly. It’s a blanket accusation against the entire Questura. And what’s the value of a signature that’s only scanned and sent? What legal value or credibility does it have?’

  Patta pulled the email back towards himself and read through it again. He sighed and read it all a second time, his finger following the lines of the five specific accusations.

  He looked at Brunetti and said, ‘Sit down, Commissario.’ When Brunetti was seated, Patta said, ‘There seemed to be something wrong with it on first reading. A certain . . . lack of clarity, especially in the accusations made. And, of course, the tenuous signature.’ Brunetti noticed the shift to the passive voice. Signora Viscardi, Assistant to the Minister of the Interior, whose signature was now tenuous, was no longer credited with having made the accusations. Instead, they had been made, requiring no need to attribute the making of them to a specific person. The gears of a Maserati could not be shifted more easily.

  Brunetti sat and watched his superior in deferential silence, wondering how long it would take before the ­U-­turn was complete and the ­Vice-­Questore would reveal that he had smelled a rat from the beginning.

  ‘I smelled a rat from the beginning, you know,’ Patta said. ‘I’m glad to see that you share my suspicions.’ He smiled at Brunetti as at a valued colleague. He pushed himself back in his chair and folded his arms across his chest. ‘Any suggestions?’

  ‘Something like this really leaves us only one thing to do, don’t you think, Signore?’

  Patta nodded sagely but said nothing.

  ‘Once Signorina Elettra checks to see whether this Viscardi woman exists, that is,’ Brunetti said, waving towards the papers that lay between them, as if Signora Viscardi were lying there herself, already half exposed to their exacting vision. ‘If she does not, then you two can decide how best to respond to this attack.’ He was careful to use the plural an
d keep himself free from any involvement in that decision.

  ‘Exactly,’ Patta confirmed. The ­Vice-­Questore picked up his phone and pressed in some numbers. Both of them could hear the phone ringing in the outer office. One, two and then Patta said, ‘Signorina, could you step in here for a moment?’

  23

  Signorina Elettra, whose reaction to the email was even more sceptical than Brunetti’s – and whose comments more acerbic – managed to dispel the ­Vice-­Questore’s fears in very little time. When a ­now-­scandalized Patta demanded to know who might have done such a thing as to send him a false threat, she had no suggestions to offer. She did say, however, that she might be able to discover the real source within a few days. Patta was pleased with this, as he always was when another person offered to do something for him.

  She and Brunetti left their superior’s office together, buoyed up by his pleasant farewells. Once the door was closed, Signorina Elettra told Brunetti that her friend Giorgio was out of contact temporarily, so it would be a few days before she would have the information about the calls made from the phonecards. Before he had time to ask why she did not, for once, use official channels to seek this information, she explained that the normal procedure took a minimum of ten days.

  The investigation of Cavanis’ death thus slowed down: the fingerprints and DNA left on the murder weapon found no match in police records; no one in the neighbourhood remembered having seen anything unusual near Cavanis’ building on the day of the murder; the few men who knew him had heard only vague rumours – passed on from the barman – about his expected turn in fortune.

  During this period, a young tourist fell to his death from the altana of the apartment he and his girlfriend were renting soon after they were involved in an argument in a restaurant. Police attention was diverted for a few days until it was determined that the argument had been between the two of them and a young Italian who had been too forward in his behaviour towards the young woman; further, the girl had been across the street in a café when her boyfriend fell. Their presence in the apartment, it turned out, had not been registered with the appropriate city office, a violation which led to an investigation of the owners of the apartment, a ­well-­known pharmacist and his wife, who worked in the Land Registry Office.