Doctored Evidence

by Donna Leon

  ‘And Deutsche Bank?’ Vianello asked.

  She shook her head in stern disapproval. ‘It was so easy you could have done it, Ispettore,’ she said by way of explanation and then added with even greater asperity, ‘I think it’s all this Europeanization: in the past, German banks were reliable; now it’s as if they go home in the afternoon and leave the door open. I tremble at the thought of what will happen to the Swiss if they join Europe.’

  Brunetti, unimpressed by her concern for the financial security of the continent, asked, ‘And?’

  ‘They were all opened the year before the husband died,’ she explained, ‘over a period of three days, each with an initial deposit of half a million lire. Ever since then, deposits of a hundred thousand lire were made every month into each account, except for the period right after the son died, when no deposits were made.’ She smiled at their response to this and went on. ‘But that was made up for when they began again after two months.’ She left them to consider all this for a moment before adding, ‘The last deposits – normal deposits, I suppose one could call them – were made at the beginning of July, bringing the total in the accounts, with interest, to almost thirty thousand Euros. But no deposits were made this month.’

  All three of them considered the meaning of this, but it was Brunetti who gave voice to it. ‘So the need for the payments died with her.’

  ‘So it would seem,’ agreed Signorina Elettra, and then added, ‘But the strange thing is that the money was never touched: it sat there, just gathering interest.’ She opened the file and, holding it so that both men could see the figures, said, ‘Those are the totals in the accounts. They were all in her name.’

  ‘What happened to them when she died?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘She died on a Friday; on Monday all of it was transferred to the Channel Islands,’ she said, and then added a suggestive, ‘and . . .’ that successfully captured the attention of both men before she continued, ‘though no name is given for the person authorizing the transfers, all of the banks have powers of attorney on file in the names of both Roberta Marieschi and Graziella Simionato.’

  ‘I asked Marieschi this morning how much money Signora Battestini had left, but all she mentioned was an account at the Uni Credit with about ten million lire.’

  ‘Taxes?’ Vianello gave voice to the obvious. By moving the accounts instantly out of the country and then trusting to general bureaucratic incompetence, it was not unlikely that the transfer would pass unobserved by the tax authorities, especially if they were in different banks.

  ‘And the niece?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘I’ve begun that,’ was all she answered.

  ‘It’s more than sixty million,’ Vianello said, like most people, still calculating in old lire.

  ‘A nice sum to be in the hands of a widow who lived in three rooms,’ Signorina Elettra commented, not that this needed to be said.

  ‘And a nice sum to slip past the hands of the taxman,’ Vianello added, not without audible admiration. Looking at Signorina Elettra, he asked, ‘But can that be done?’

  It was impossible for Brunetti to observe her tilted chin and expression of fierce concentration without wondering if there existed limits to her familiarity with the unlawful. Certainly years of employment in the national bank would be superb preparation, but he feared her craft had been raised to new heights by her years at the Questura.

  Like Santa Caterina returning from contemplation of the Divine Presence, Signorina Elettra left the world of theoretical malfeasance behind and came back to Brunetti and Vianello. ‘Yes,’ she declared, ‘if whoever did it counted on incompetence at the Finanza and played the odds that the transfer wouldn’t be noticed, then it would be easy enough, I think.’ Vianello and Brunetti began to calculate the odds of this until Signorina Elettra interrupted them by asking, ‘But why would she leave the money there and never touch it?’

  Brunetti, who had read Balzac’s descriptions of the cunning and avidity of peasants, had no doubts about this. ‘To watch it accumulate,’ he said. Vianello’s past did not include much in the way of French novels, but he had spent time in the countryside and instantly recognized the truth of this.

  ‘I was up in the attic, and I saw the things she kept,’ Brunetti said, remembering a pair of felt slippers so worn that not even Caritas would have dared to offer them to the poor and tea towels with tattered edges and worn-in stains. ‘She’d have enjoyed looking at the numbers and watching them grow, believe me.’

  ‘But where are the original records?’ Vianello asked.

  ‘Who packed up the apartment?’ countered Brunetti.

  ‘The niece inherited, so it would have been her job,’ Signorina Elettra supplied. ‘But it would be easy enough for the dead woman’s lawyer to go into the apartment before that and take them.’ Then, as an afterthought, she added, ‘Or her killer.’

  ‘Or they could have been what the killer was looking for,’ Vianello said. His face brightened and he suggested, ‘But we have the computer records if we ever want proof.’

  Like Lachesis and Atropos, turning their blind eyes to an errant Clotho, Brunetti and Signorina Elettra turned and stared at Vianello. ‘The government has seen to that, Ispettore,’ Signorina Elettra said with a voice that stopped just short of reproach, as though he were responsible for the law that stipulated that only original bank records, not photocopies and not computer records, could be introduced as evidence.

  Did Brunetti see the inspector blush? ‘I hadn’t thought,’ Vianello confessed, realizing instantly that the information would have legal weight only when and if bank officials produced the original records of accounts that had slept unobserved for more than a decade, until their mysterious flight to a tax haven so famous as surely to be known even to a lawyer in a sleepy provincial town such as Venice.

  Brunetti moved them away from finance and asked, ‘The husband? Did you find anything?’

  ‘Nothing very interesting,’ she said. ‘He was born here, in 1925, and died at the Ospedale Civile in January of 1993. Lung cancer. For thirty-two years he worked in various city offices, lastly at the schools department – specifically, the personnel office, than which I can imagine no greater tedium. His son worked for the school board, too, until his death five years ago. They overlapped there for a few years.’

  ‘Anything else?’ Brunetti asked, amazed that a man could spend three decades and more working in the city bureaucracy and, at the end, have only these few facts to show for it.

  ‘That’s all I can find, sir. It’s very difficult to find anything from more than ten years ago: they haven’t got around to computerizing those records yet.’

  ‘When will they?’ Vianello asked.

  Signorina Elettra’s shrug was so strong that it caused the amber beads to click together as though they, too, wanted to tsk away the very idea.

  12

  BRUNETTI REFUSED TO see this as an impasse. Turning to Vianello, he said, ‘There should still be people working in the office who would remember them. I’d like you to go over and see if there are and what they can remember.’

  Vianello’s expression showed how unlikely he thought this, but he voiced no objection.

  Signorina Elettra said she still had work to do in her office and left the room with the inspector.

  Brunetti, thinking it unfair to ask them to work on this while he sat at his desk, picked up the file and found the name of Signora Battestini’s doctor. His call was transferred to the doctor’s telefonino, and when he answered, the doctor told him that he could talk to Brunetti in his ambulatorio either before or after he saw his afternoon patients. Convinced that it would be wiser to speak to the doctor before he had spent two hours listening to and tending to his patients, Brunetti said that three-thirty would be fine, asked where the office was, and hung up. That done, he dialled the number of Signora Battestini’s niece, but no one answered.

  There was to be no weekly staff meeting that day, a fact explained by the weather. D
uring summer months, the meetings, which Vice-Questore Patta had initiated some years ago, were often either suddenly cancelled or postponed and then eventually cancelled, depending upon the weather. Sun cancelled the meeting instantly, thus allowing the Vice-Questore to have a swim before lunch as well as in the late afternoon. On rainy days, the meetings were held, though a sudden improvement in the weather often led to their postponement, and one of the police launches would take the Vice-Questore across the Bacino to his undoubtedly well-earned relaxation. Thus the staff conference became another of the secrets of the Questura, like the door to a cabinet that had to be kicked at the bottom before it would open. Brunetti envisioned himself and his colleagues as not unlike augurs, whose impulse, before planning or accepting any engagement, was first to consult the heavens. Brunetti thought it much to their credit that they could so seamlessly adjust their schedules to the vagaries of the Vice-Questore’s.

  At home, where he took himself for lunch, he arrived just as the family was sitting down. Paola, he noticed, had the lean and hungry look she often had after a bad day at the university, though the children were far too concerned with sating their hunger to pay much attention.

  There was, the setting of plates on the table suggested, to be no first course, but before he could protest at this omission, however mildly, Paola appeared, holding an immense bowl from which rose fumes so fragrant as to soothe his soul. Before his powers of prediction could name the dish, Chiara cried with undisguised glee, ‘Oh, Mamma, you made the lamb stew.’

  ‘Is there polenta?’ Raffi asked, his voice poignant with hope.

  When he saw the smile that spread over Paola’s face at the sound of their avidity, Brunetti thought of baby birds and the way their chirping forced their parents to behave in genetically determined ways. Paola offered only token resistance to that instinct by saying, ‘Just as there has been each of the six hundred times we’ve eaten this, Raffi, yes, there is polenta,’ but Brunetti could hear that her heart was in the tone and not the words.

  ‘Mamma,’ Chiara offered, ‘if there are fresh figs for dessert, I’ll do the dishes.’

  ‘You have the soul of a merchant,’ Paola said, setting down the bowl and going back into the kitchen to get the polenta.

  Indeed there were figs, and with them esse, the S-shaped biscuits that a friend of Paola’s father still sent them from Burano. And after that, Brunetti had no choice but to repair to bed to sleep for an hour.

  When he woke, dry-mouthed and sweating in the stifling heat, he was conscious of Paola beside him. Because she never slept in the afternoon, he knew before he opened his eyes that she would be lying with her head on the pillow, reading. He turned his head and was proven right.

  Recognizing the book, he asked, ‘Are you still reading the catechism?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, not removing her eyes from the page. ‘I’m reading a chapter a day, though it’s not called a catechism any more.’

  Rather than inquire as to its new title, Brunetti asked, instead, ‘And where are you now?’

  ‘On the Sacraments.’

  By rote, the words swam up from his youth: ‘Baptism, communion, confirmation, marriage, ordination, confession . . .’ and then his voice trailed off. ‘There’s seven of them, aren’t there?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What’s the seventh? I can’t remember. It’s just gone.’ As happened every time he failed to remember something simple and ordinary, he had a moment’s panic that this was the same beginning no one had wanted to recognize in his mother.

  ‘Extreme unction,’ Paola said, glancing aside at him. ‘Perhaps the most subtle of them all.’

  Brunetti failed to understand what she meant and asked, ‘Why “subtle”?’

  ‘Think about it, Guido. Just at the time a person is approaching death, usually when it’s generally agreed that there is little or no hope, the priest arrives.’

  ‘Yes. Exactly. But I still don’t understand why that’s so subtle.’

  ‘Think about it. In the past, the only people who could read and write were priests.’

  Because he was hot and thirsty and because he usually woke up cranky if he slept in the afternoon, Brunetti said, ‘Isn’t that a bit of an exaggeration?’

  ‘Yes, all right. It is. But priests could, and most people could not, at least not until the last century.’

  ‘I still don’t see where you’re going with all of this,’ he said.

  ‘Think eschatologically, Guido,’ she enjoined, further confusing him.

  ‘I strive to do so every moment of every day,’ he said, having forgotten the meaning of the word but already regretting that he’d snapped at her.

  ‘Death, judgement, heaven and hell,’ she said. ‘Those are the four last things. And at the point when people are about to encounter the first and know they cannot escape the second, they start to think about the third and the fourth. And there is the priest, all too ready to talk about the fires of hell and the joys of heaven, though I’ve always been of a mind that people are far more concerned with avoiding the former than with experiencing the latter.’

  He lay still, beginning to suspect where this was going.

  ‘So there he was, the local priest – who incidentally often happened to be the notary – and then he no doubt started to talk about the fires of hell that would consume a person in the flesh, unspeakable pain to be prolonged for all eternity.’

  She could have been an actress, he thought, so powerfully was her voice a testament to belief in every word she spoke.

  ‘But there exists a way for the good Christian to achieve forgiveness,’ switching to the present tense, she went on in her most syrupy voice, ‘to free themselves from the fires of hell. Yes, my son, you have but to open your heart to the love of Jesus, your purse to the needs of the poor. You have but to put your name or, if you cannot write, your mark on this paper, and in exchange for your generosity to Holy Mother Church, the gates of heaven themselves will swing open to receive you.’

  She let the book fall open on her chest and turned to face him. ‘So the last-minute will was signed, leaving this or that, or everything, to the Church.’ Her voice turned savage. ‘Of course they wanted to get in there when they were sick or dying or out of their minds. What better time to suck them dry?’

  She picked the book up again, turned a page, and said in an entirely conversational tone, ‘That’s why it is the most subtle.’

  ‘Do you say these things to Chiara?’ asked an appalled Brunetti.

  She turned to him again. ‘Of course not. Either she’ll realize these things when she’s older, or she won’t. Please don’t forget that I agreed never to interfere in the religious education of the children.’

  ‘And if she doesn’t realize these things?’ he asked, quotation marks of emphasis around the last three words and expecting Paola to say that she would then be disappointed in her daughter.

  ‘Then her life will probably be a lot more peaceful,’ Paola said and returned her attention to the catechism.

  Dottor Carlotti’s ambulatorio was on the ground floor of a house in Calle Stella, not far from Fondamente Nuove. Brunetti had found the address in his Calli, Canali, e Campielli and recognized it when he saw two women with small children in their arms standing outside the door to the building. Brunetti smiled at the mothers and rang the bell to the right of the door. A grey-haired man of middle age answered, asking, ‘Commissario Brunetti?’

  When Brunetti nodded, the doctor put out his hand and, half shaking, half pulling, brought Brunetti into the building. He pointed to the door to his office, then stepped outside the door and invited the two women in, explaining that he would be busy for a time and asking them to come into the waiting room where they could at least escape the heat. He led Brunetti through the room so quickly that all Brunetti was aware of was the usual glossy-covered magazines and furniture that looked as if it had been taken from some relative’s parlour.

  The office was a copy of all the do
ctors’ offices Brunetti had passed through in his life: the paper-covered examining table, the glass-topped counter holding packets of gauze-wrapped bandages, the desk covered with papers and files and boxes of medicine. The single difference from the offices of the doctors of his youth was the computer, which stood to the right of the desk.

  He was an invisible man, Dottor Carlotti: look at him once, indeed, look at him five times, and the memory would register nothing save brown eyes behind dark-framed glasses, dry hair of an indeterminate colour retreating from the forehead, and a mouth of average size.

  The doctor leaned back against his desk, arms folded, and waved Brunetti towards a chair. But then, as though he realized how unwelcoming his posture was, he went and sat behind his desk. He moved aside some papers, shifted a tube of something to the left, and folded his hands in front of him.

  ‘How may I help you, Commissario?’ the doctor asked.

  ‘By telling me about Maria Battestini,’ Brunetti began without introduction. ‘You found her, didn’t you, Dottore?’

  Carlotti looked at the surface of his desk, then across at Brunetti. ‘Yes. I ordinarily went to see her once a week.’

  When it seemed the doctor was going to say nothing more, Brunetti asked, ‘Was there an ongoing condition you were treating, Dottore?’

  ‘No, no, nothing like that. She was as healthy as I am, perhaps even more so. Except for her knees.’ Then he surprised Brunetti by saying, ‘But you probably know that already, if it was Rizzardi who did the autopsy. Probably know more about her health than I do.’

  ‘You know him?’

  ‘Not really. We belong to the same medical associations, so I’ve spoken to him at dinners or at meetings. But I know his reputation. That’s why I say you’d know more about her state of health than I do.’ His smile was shy for a man Brunetti guessed must be well into his forties.

  Brunetti said, ‘Yes, he did the autopsy, and he told me exactly what you’ve said, that she was extraordinarily healthy for a woman her age.’