by Donna Leon
Rossi accompanied Brunetti to the office door. He leaned down a little to reach the handle and pulled open the door. He put out his hand, and Brunetti took it: two city officials, shaking hands after a few minutes of helpful cooperation. With repeated thanks for the doctor’s time, Brunetti pulled the door closed behind him and started back towards the stairway, wondering how it was that Dottore Rossi knew that Paolo Battestini, whom he said he did not know, was dead and that Flori Ghiorghiu had come to work for his mother only after that event.
It was after eight when he got home, but Paola had decided to delay dinner at least until half-past on the assumption that he would have called if he was going to be much later.
His sober mood was matched by that of the other three members of his family, at least when they first sat down. But by the time the kids had eaten two helpings of orecchiette with cubes of mozzarella di bufala and pomodorini, they were ready to cheer in delight as Paola broke open the salt crust within which she had baked a branzino, revealing the perfect white flesh.
‘What happens to the salt, Mamma?’ Chiara asked as she poured some olive oil on her own helping of fish.
‘I put it in the garbage.’
‘Is it true that the Indians used to put fish bones around corn to make it grow better?’ she asked, pushing them to one side of her plate.
‘Dot Indians or Feather Indians?’ Raffi asked.
‘Feather Indians, of course,’ Chiara answered, oblivious to the racist overtones of Raffi’s question. ‘You know corn didn’t grow in India.’
‘Raffi,’ Paola said, ‘will you take the garbage down tonight and put it in the entrance hall? I don’t want this fish stinking up the house.’
‘Sure. I told Giorgio and Luca I’d meet them at nine-thirty. I’ll take it down when I go.’
‘Did you put your things in the washing machine?’ she asked.
He rolled his eyes. ‘You think I’d try to get out of this place without doing it?’ He turned to his father and, in a voice that proclaimed male solidarity, said, ‘She’s got radar.’ Then he spelled the last word out, slowly, letter by letter, just to make clear the nature of the regime under which he lived.
‘Thanks,’ Paola said, certain of her powers and impervious to all reproach.
When Chiara offered to help with the dishes, Paola told her she’d do them herself because of the fish. Chiara took this as a reprieve rather than as an affront to her domestic skills and went to take advantage of Raffi’s absence to use the computer.
Brunetti got up as she was finishing the dishes and pulled the Moka out of the cabinet.
‘Coffee?’ Paola asked. She knew his habits well enough to know he usually had coffee after dinner only in restaurants.
‘Yes. I’m beat,’ he confessed.
‘Maybe it would be better just to go to bed early,’ she suggested.
‘I don’t know if I can sleep in this heat,’ he said.
‘Let me finish these,’ she offered, ‘and then we can go out and sit on the terrace for a while. Until you get sleepy.’
‘All right,’ he agreed, put the pot back and opened the next cabinet. ‘What’s good to drink in this heat?’ he asked, surveying the bottles that filled two shelves.
‘Sparkling mineral water.’
‘Very funny,’ Brunetti said. He reached deep into the cabinet for a bottle of Galliano way at the back. He rephrased his question. ‘What’s good to drink while sitting on the terrace, watching the sun fade in the west, while sitting beside the person you adore most in the universe and realizing that life has no greater joy to offer than the company of that person?’
Draping the dishtowel over the handle of the drawer where the knives and forks were kept, she gave him a long glance that ended in a quizzical grin. ‘Non-sparkling mineral water might be better for a man in your condition,’ she said and went out on the terrace to wait for him to join her.
He found himself afflicted, the next morning, with the lethargy that often came upon him when a case seemed to be going nowhere. Added to this was the penetrating heat that had already taken a grip on the day by the time he woke. Even the cup of coffee Paola brought him did nothing to lift the oppression of his spirits, nor did the long shower he permitted himself, taking advantage of the fact that both children had already left for the Alberoni, and thus there was no chance of their angry banging on the bathroom door should he use more water than their ecological sensibilities permitted. Two decades of habitual morning grumpiness had established Paola’s rights to that mood, so he knew there was little joy to be had in her conversation.
He left the apartment directly after his shower, faintly annoyed with the universe. As he walked towards Rialto, he decided to have another coffee at the bar on the next corner. He bought a paper and was reading the headlines as he walked in. He went to the counter and, eyes still on the paper, asked for a coffee and a brioche. He paid no real attention to the familiar sound of the coffee machine, the thud and the hiss, nor to the sound of the cup being set in front of him. But when he looked up, he saw that the woman who had been serving him coffee for decades was gone; that, or she had been transformed into a Chinese woman half her age. He looked at the cash register, and there was another Chinese, this one a man, standing behind it.
He had seen this happening for months, this gradual taking over of the bars of the city by Chinese owners and workers, but this was the first time it had occurred in one of the places he frequented. He resisted the impulse to ask where Signora Rosalba had gone, and her husband, and instead added two sugars to his coffee. He walked over to the plastic case but saw that the brioche were different from the fresh ones with mirtillo he had eaten for years; the tag on the case explained that they were manufactured and frozen in Milano. He finished his coffee, paid, and left.
It was still early enough for the boats not yet to be crowded with tourists, so he took the Number One from San Silvestro, standing on deck and reading the Gazzettino. This did little to alleviate his mood. Nor did the sight of Scarpa standing at the bottom of the stairs when he walked into the Questura.
Brunetti passed by him silently and started up the steps. From behind, he heard Scarpa call, ‘Commissario, if I might have a word . . .’
Brunetti turned and looked down on the uniformed man. ‘Yes, Lieutenant?’
‘I’m calling Signora Gismondi in for questioning again today. Since you seem so interested in her, I thought you might want to know.’
‘“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 thinking 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.’
‘Is 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 whether 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. Patta’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 calli 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.’