by Donna Leon
‘What did your friend say about him?’
‘He wasn’t a friend. He was a patient. He was in analysis with me for three years.’
‘Sorry. What did he say about him?’
‘That he had acquired more than a little of her disease but that his greatest joy was in giving her money because it seemed to make her happy to get it. I always took that to mean that it stopped her nagging him, but I could be wrong. It might genuinely have made him happy to give it to her. There was little enough happiness in his life, otherwise.’
‘He died of AIDS, didn’t he?’
‘Yes, so did his friend.’
‘I’m sorry for that, too.’
‘You sound like you really mean it, Guido,’ Desideri said, but with no surprise.
‘I am. No one deserves that.’
‘All right. Give me the names.’
Brunetti read out the names of D’Alessandro and Nardi, and when Desideri said nothing, added those of Fedi and Sardelli.
For a long time, Desideri still said nothing, but the tension in his silence was so palpable that Brunetti held his breath. Finally Desideri asked, ‘And you think Paolo might have been blackmailing this person?’
‘The evidence we have suggests that he was,’ Brunetti temporized.
He heard the rasp as Desideri pulled in an enormous breath, then he heard only, ‘I can’t do this,’ and Desideri was gone.
Brunetti had a vague memory of hearing Paola once quote some English writer who said he would sooner betray his country than his friends. She had thought it a Jesuitical idea, and Brunetti was forced to agree, however expert the English were at making the vile sound noble. So one of the four was gay and was sufficiently a friend, or perhaps a patient, of Desideri that he could not give his name to the police, even in a murder investigation, perhaps because it was a murder investigation. The list had been narrowed, unless Vianello found someone else who was gay. Or, Brunetti reflected, unless there were some other reason for blackmail.
Twenty minutes later, Vianello came into Brunetti’s office, the list of names still in his hand. He took his usual place on the other side of the desk, slid the sheet on to it, and said, ‘Nothing.’
Brunetti’s question was in his glance.
‘One’s dead,’ he said, pointing to a name. ‘He retired the year after the payments started and died three years ago.’ He moved his finger down the list. ‘This one got religion and is living in some sort of commune or something, down near Bologna; has been for three years.’ He pushed the paper a few centimetres in Brunetti’s direction and sat back in the chair. ‘And of the two who are still there, one’s become the head of school inspections, Giorgio Costantini: he’s married and seems like a decent man.’
Brunetti named two former heads of government and remarked that the same two things might be said of them.
Spurred on to the defensive, Vianello said, ‘I’ve got a cousin who plays rugby with him at weekends. He says he’s all right, and I believe him.’
Brunetti let this pass without further observation. Instead, he asked, ‘And the other?’
‘He’s in a wheelchair.’
‘What?’
‘He’s the guy who got polio when he went to India. You read about him, didn’t you?’
The story rang a faint bell, though Brunetti had long forgotten the details. ‘Yes, I remember something. How long ago did it happen, about five years?’
‘Six. He got sick while he was there, and by the time they managed to diagnose it, it was too late to evacuate him, so he was treated there, and now he’s in a wheelchair.’ Vianello, in a tone that suggested he was still smarting from Brunetti’s refusal to believe his cousin’s assessment of Giorgio Costantini, said, ‘That might not be enough for you to exclude him, but I think a man might have other things to think about after landing in a wheelchair than continuing to pay blackmail.’ He paused again. ‘I could be wrong, of course.’
Brunetti gave Vianello a long glance but instead of rising to the bait, said, ‘I’m still hoping Lalli will tell me something.’
‘Betray a fellow gay?’ Vianello asked in a tone Brunetti didn’t like.
‘He has three grandchildren.’
‘Who?’
‘Lalli.’
Vianello shook his head at this, Brunetti couldn’t tell if in disbelief or disapproval.
‘He’s been my friend for a long time,’ Brunetti said with steady calm. ‘He’s a decent man.’
Vianello knew a reprimand when he heard it and chose not to respond.
Brunetti was about to say something, when Vianello glanced away from him. It could have been his refusal to concede the point of Lalli’s decency, or it could have been no more than his refusal to look at Brunetti, but whatever it was, Brunetti took it in his turn to be offended and was provoked into saying, ‘I think I’d like to talk to the one who’s not in a wheelchair. The rugby player.’
‘As you wish, sir,’ Vianello said. He got to his feet and, saying nothing else, left the office.
22
AS THE DOOR closed behind Vianello, Brunetti came to his senses. ‘Where’d all that come from?’ he muttered. Was this the way drunks woke up, he asked himself, or the intemperately wrathful? Did they experience this feeling of having watched from the sidelines as someone disguised as themselves spoke their way through a bad script? He reflected on his conversation with Vianello, trying to pinpoint the moment when a simple exchange of information between friends had spun out of control and turned into a testosterone-charged battle over territory between rivals. To make matters worse, the territory over which they had fought was nothing more than Brunetti’s refusal to accept an opinion because it had come from a man who chose to play rugby.
After he had sat at his desk for several minutes, his better self reached for the phone and called down to the officers’ room, where a nervous-sounding Pucetti, after a long hesitation, told him Vianello was not there. Brunetti put the phone down, thinking of Achilles, sulking in his tent.
His phone rang and, hoping it would be Vianello, he reached out quickly to answer it.
‘It’s me, sir,’ he heard Signorina Elettra say. ‘I’ve got her phone calls.’
‘How did you do that?’
‘They decided to keep his wife in another day, so Giorgio went into the office.’
‘Is there anything wrong?’ asked the uxorious Brunetti.
‘No, nothing. Her uncle is the primario there, and he thought it would be better if she stayed another day.’ He heard it in her voice, the attempt to soothe away his concern for a woman he had never met. ‘She’s fine.’
Signorina Elettra waited a moment in case he had further questions, and when he said nothing, then went on, ‘He found my email and checked her number. In the month before her death, she called the central number for the school board – it was the only call she made – and the next day she had a call from the same number. There was only one other call, from her niece. Nothing else.’
‘How many days did he check?’
‘The entire month up until she was killed.’
Neither of them commented on the fact that, in her eighty-fourth year, Signora Battestini, who had spent all of those years living in the city, had received only two phone calls in the course of a month. Brunetti recalled that there had been no books in the boxes stored in her attic: her life had been reduced to a chair placed in front of a television and a woman who spoke almost no Italian.
He recalled the boxes, how hurried his examination of them had been, and, thinking of this, he missed the next thing Signorina Elettra said to him. When he tuned back in, he heard her say, ‘. . . the day before she died’.
‘What?’ he asked. ‘I was miles away.’
‘The call that came from the school board was the day before she died.’
Her tone revealed her pride, but Brunetti could do little but thank her and hang up. While he had been speaking to her, an idea had slipped into his mind: the objects in Signora Bat
testini’s attic needed closer attention. Blackmail had not presented itself as a motive until after he had taken his hurried look through them, but now, with blackmail as an anchor, he might pause and take a more leisurely trawl through them. Even if he still didn’t know what he was looking for, he at least knew that there might be something to find.
He reached for the phone to call Vianello to ask if he would go along with him to the Battestini house, but then he remembered Vianello’s departure and his absence from the officers’ room. Pucetti, then. He called down and, giving no explanation, asked the young officer to meet him at the front entrance in five minutes, adding that they would need a launch.
The last time he had slipped into Signora Battestini’s home like a thief, and no one had seen him: this time he would arrive like the very personification of law itself, and no one would question him, or so he hoped.
Pucetti, who was waiting just outside the door to the Questura, had learned over the years not to salute Brunetti each time he saw him, but he had not yet learned to resist the impulse to stand up straighter. They climbed on to the launch, with Brunetti determined not to ask about Vianello. He told the pilot where to take them, then went down into the cabin: Pucetti chose to remain on deck.
No sooner was he seated than the long passage describing Achilles in his tent returned to Brunetti, and memory supplied the bombastic catalogue of the offences and slights the warrior insisted he had suffered. Achilles had suffered the slights of Agamemnon: Brunetti had been slighted by his Patroclus. Brunetti’s contemplation of Homer was interrupted by an expression Paola had picked up in her researches into American slang: ‘dissed’. She had explained that this was the past tense of the verb ‘to dis’, a term used by American Blacks to refer to ‘disrespect’ and denoting a wide range of behaviour which the speaker perceived as offensive.
Under his breath, Brunetti muttered, ‘Vianello dissed me.’ He gave a quick guffaw, and he went out on to the deck, his good spirits renewed.
The launch pulled up to the riva, and they were quickly in front of the building. Brunetti glanced up and saw that both the shutters and the windows of Signora Battestini’s apartment were open, though no televised sound poured out. He rang the bell and saw that her name had been replaced by Van Cleve.
A blonde head appeared at the window above him, and then a man’s head appeared beside the woman’s. Brunetti stepped back from the building and was about to call up to them to open the door, but apparently the sight of Pucetti’s uniform sufficed, for a moment later both heads disappeared, and the door to the building clicked open.
The man and the woman, equally blonde and equally pale skinned and eyed, stood at the door to the apartment. Looking at them, Brunetti could not stop himself from thinking of milk and cheese and pale skies perpetually filled with clouds. Their Italian was halting, but he managed to make it clear to them who he was and where he wanted to go.
‘No chiave,’ the man said, smiling, and showing his empty hands to reinforce the message. The woman imitated his gesture of helplessness.
‘Va bene. Non importa,’ Brunetti said, turning from them and starting up the stairs to the attic. Pucetti followed close behind. At the first turning, Brunetti looked back and saw the two of them still standing outside the door to what was now apparently their apartment, staring up at him, as curious as owls.
When he reached the top of the steps, Brunetti pulled out a twenty-centesemi coin, sure he could use it to unthread the already-loosened screws in the flange. But as he reached the door, he found that the flange was hanging at an angle, loose from the jamb. The two screws he had so carefully turned back in place were also loose, and the door stood open a few centimetres.
Brunetti put out a cautionary hand towards Pucetti, but he had already noticed and had moved to the right of the door, his hand reaching for his pistol. Both men froze, waiting for some sound from inside. They stood that way for minutes. Brunetti put his left foot in front of the bottom of the door and rested his full weight on it, thus blocking any attempt that might be made to push it open from the inside.
After another few minutes, Brunetti nodded at Pucetti, moved his foot, reached forward and pulled the door open. He went in first, calling out, ‘Police,’ and feeling just the least bit ridiculous as he heard himself say it.
The attic was empty, but even in the dim light they could see signs of the passage of the person who had been there before them. A trail of scattered objects told of curiosity turning to frustration and that in its turn transformed into anger, and then rage. The first boxes stood neatly unstacked near where Brunetti had left them, their flaps pulled open, contents set on the ground next to them. The next lay on their sides, their flaps ripped open. The third pile, where Brunetti had found the papers, had been pillaged: one box had been ripped in half, and a wide semicircle of papers arched over to the next pile. The last boxes, which had held her collection of religious kitsch, had suffered martyrdom: the bodies and limbs of saints lay strewed about in positions of impossible and ungodly promiscuity; one Jesus had lost his cross and stretched for it with open arms; a blue Madonna had lost her head in crashing against the back wall; another had lost her infant son.
Brunetti took it all in, turned to Pucetti, and said, ‘Call them and tell them to send the crime team. I want fingerprints taken of everything.’ He placed his right hand on Pucetti’s arm and pushed him towards the door: ‘Go down and wait for them,’ he said. Then, in violation of everything he had ever learned or taught about the need to preserve a crime scene from contamination, he added, ‘I want to have a look before they get here.’
Pucetti’s confusion was so strong as almost to be audible as well as visible, but he did as he was told, slipping past the attic door, careful not to touch it, and went downstairs.
Brunetti stood, studying the scene and considering the consequences of the discovery of his fingerprints on so many of the papers, boxes and documents that lay in front of him. He could, if he chose, explain their presence by maintaining that he had used this time to examine the evidence. He could, just as easily, say that he had come up to the attic and examined the contents of some of the boxes during a previous, unauthorized, visit to the apartment.
Brunetti took a step towards the boxes. In the gloom, he set his right foot on the glass ball containing the Nativity scene, slipped, and lost his footing. He landed on his other knee, landed on something that crumbled under his weight, pushing sharp fragments through the cloth of his trousers and into his skin. Stunned by the fall and the sudden pain, it took him a moment to raise himself to his feet. He looked first at his knee, where the first faint traces of blood were beginning to seep through the cloth, and then to the floor, to see what he had fallen on.
It was a third Madonna. His knee had caught her in the stomach, crushing all life out of her but sparing her head and legs. She looked up at him with a calm smile and all-forgiving eyes. Instinctively, he bent to help her, at least to put the top and bottom parts somewhere safe. He went down on his good knee, wincing at the pain this motion caused the other, and reached with both hands to pick up the fragments. Amidst the pieces of crushed plaster was a flattened roll of paper. Puzzled, Brunetti looked at the bottom of the Madonna’s feet and saw that there was a small oval opening closed with a cork, just like the bottom of a salt shaker. The paper had been rolled up into a tight cylinder and stuffed inside her.
He dropped the head and legs into the pocket of his jacket and stepped out into the hallway. He moved to the window at the end and, grasping the top left corner of the paper with the tips of his fingers, used the back of the fingernails of his right to unroll it, hoping to leave no fingerprints. But the paper kept rolling up, preventing him from seeing what was written on it.
He heard Pucetti on the stairs below him, calling out, ‘They’re on the way, sir.’ When Brunetti saw him appear at the head of the steps, he called the young officer over. Kneeling again, he spread the paper open with the tips of the fingers of both hands and
told Pucetti to put the very edge of his foot sideways on the top. When it was anchored to the ground, Brunetti used the tips of his little fingers to scroll it open again, anchoring the open sheet with his forefingers once it was done.
The single sheet of paper bore the letterhead of the Department of Economics at the University of Padova and was dated twelve years previously. It was addressed to the Department of Personnel of the School Board of the City of Venice and stated, after a polite greeting, that, ‘Unfortunately, there is no mention in the records of our department of a student named Mauro Rossi as having been awarded the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Economics; nor, in fact, do we have any record of a student of that name and with that birth date ever having enrolled in this faculty.’ The signature was illegible, although there was no mistaking the seal of the university.
Brunetti stared down at it, refusing to believe what it told him. He tried to recall the documents on the wall of Rossi’s office, among them the large, framed parchment which proclaimed him as a Doctor of Philosophy – Brunetti had not bothered to read the name of the faculty granting the degree.
The letter was addressed to the Director of the Personnel Department, but certainly directors did not open their own mail: that’s what clerks and assistants were for. They opened, read, and made official note of the letters which certified that the claims made in a curriculum vitae were true. They filed the letters of recommendation, the marks gained on competitive exams, made note of all the pieces of the paper puzzle that, when put together, gave a picture of someone worthy of professional rank and promotion in the civil service.
Or, he imagined, they might at times verify, perhaps according to some random system, some of the claims made on the hundreds, thousands of applications made for each civil service job. And upon discovering a false claim, they could make this deceit public and disqualify the person making it, perhaps banish them absolutely from the civil service system. Or they could, instead, use the information for their own purpose, their own gain.