by Donna Leon
Had he been dreaming of something? Where had the wind come from? Where had his sleeping self been? He had nothing more than a vague memory of having been in a dimly lit room. He studied the light, uncertain whether he would be able to return to sleep.
He thought of Dottor Donato and the many things they did not know about him: family, habits, friends, business history. From nowhere came the realization that he had the same absence of information about Gasparini. He was a man with a problematic son and was now a figure attached to machines and lying inert in a hospital bed. Like Donato, he surely must have a past that might help explain his present.
The same could easily be said of Dottoressa Ruberti.
He started to make a list of what he would ask Signorina Elettra to examine but soon gave up at the awareness that she had become so adept at the hunt that she was now the person who best knew what to look for, and where. He began, nevertheless, to list the things he wanted to know: family, possible previous contact with the police, financial status, other … the ideas loosened in his mind, and Brunetti soon drifted off, carried on far more gentle winds than those imagined ones that had torn him from sleep.
He went directly to Signorina Elettra’s office when he arrived at the Questura, not at all sure what the mood would be after their last, awkward, meeting. That was left unsettled because she was on the phone when he entered. The first thing he noted was a vase of flowers on her desk: he had no idea what they were – surely not tulips or roses – dark, almost purple; he could not remember seeing flowers so sombre, as if they believed that brightening a room was not part of their mission.
She sat behind them, partially obscured. Seeing him, she raised a hand in greeting, then used it to point repeatedly to the door to Patta’s office, and said into the receiver, ‘He’s just come in, Dottore. Do you have time to see him now?’ During the brief pause while she waited for Vice-Questore Patta’s answer, she raised one hand and gave a shrug, to suggest she had no idea what her superior wanted from Brunetti.
‘Good, I’ll ask him to go in.’ She replaced the receiver and pointed to the door.
He took two steps, paused and turned back to her. ‘I know you’ve already had a look at Dottor Donato, but could you take another look at his private life: same with Gasparini and Dottoressa Ruberti?’ Before she could answer, Brunetti went to the door and entered without knocking.
The Vice-Questore was bent over behind his desk; visible only were his shoulders and part of his back. As Brunetti watched, his back moved up and down, each time just a few centimetres. ‘Is something wrong, Vice-Questore?’ Brunetti asked, moving quickly towards his superior’s desk.
Suddenly, like a marionette popping from a box, the rest of Patta appeared, facing Brunetti, who had stopped just short of his desk. ‘Just tying my shoe,’ Patta explained, his face flushed by having risen up so quickly.
When Brunetti failed to answer, Patta said, ‘Have a seat, Commissario. There’s something I’d like to inform you about.’
Brunetti did as he was told, crossed his legs, and placed his hands on the arms of the chair. He set his face in what he tried to make an easy, interested smile and waited.
‘It’s about the baggage handlers at the airport,’ Patta said.
Brunetti applied psychic botox to his smile and nodded while turning his attention to Sant’Antonio, patron saint of lost things and lost causes. Dear Sant’Antonio, lift this weight from my shoulders, and I shall give you my gratitude and thanks for ever and ever, amen. His mother had taught him, when he was still a boy, that it was vulgar and offensive to try to bargain with the saints, to offer them prayers or good works in exchange for favours. ‘Just tell them you will thank them and be grateful to them,’ she had told him, and then explained, ‘After all, they’re in Heaven. Could they want anything more?’
This, even to a child, had seemed eminently sensible, and he had never wavered from her teaching. Brunetti thus had a number of saints he more or less kept on call, invoking their aid when in need of it, always grateful to them for their help and vociferous in giving them his thanks.
‘Ah, yes, the baggage handlers,’ Brunetti said, as though he found the topic mildly interesting.
‘It’s been years that we’ve been playing cat and mouse with them,’ Patta began. Brunetti nodded. He’d spent days, weeks, months investigating them, overseeing the planting of micro-cameras in various parts of the airport, arresting them, taking them in for questioning, confronting them with the videos of their pilfering of the suitcases entrusted to their care. And was one of them in prison? Had one of them ever been fired?
‘And I’m tired of it,’ Patta, who had occasionally had to approve the attempts to gather conclusive evidence against them, said wearily.
As were they all, Brunetti longed to say. Instead, he adjusted his face to display curiosity. Patta either did not register or chose to ignore his expression, so Brunetti asked, ‘And so, Vice-Questore?’
‘We’ve wasted enough time on this and I’ve decided to put an end to it,’ Patta said in his most authoritarian voice. Brunetti was curious about how the Vice-Questore planned to accomplish this. Forbid them entry to the airport? Arrest them all? Build a wall?
‘The airport is not in Venice,’ Patta declared. ‘It is in Tessera,’ he added. Then, making it evident that he was irritated by incompetence but not such a bad sport that he would make an issue of it, he added, ‘No one seems to have noticed that before I did.’ He paused to allow Brunetti to become aware of his own partial responsibility for this legal oversight and then continued. ‘I spoke with the city’s lawyers today and told them that, because Tessera is a part of Mestre and not of Venice, it is therefore within their jurisdiction, not ours, and thus the police of Mestre are responsible for law enforcement at the airport, and we are not.’
‘What answer did they give you, Signore?’
‘They will look into the legal background of the matter, but until then …’ Patta said and, deliberately teasing, let his voice drift off and made an airily dismissive gesture with his hand.
‘Until then, sir?’ Brunetti, who could not bear the suspense, inquired.
‘Until then, there will be no police interference with or surveillance of the baggage handlers,’ Patta said, as if he’d arranged the arrest of the entire leadership of the Sacra Corona Unita and farther attention was redundant.
‘None at all?’ Brunetti asked.
‘None. I’ve ordered our patrols there stopped and informed my colleague in Mestre of this fact.’ He aimed a smile at Brunetti and said, ‘I wanted you to know this so that you will not question the new schedules.’
‘And your colleague in Mestre, Vice-Questore?’
Another smile radiated out from Patta’s face. ‘He’s refused to assume any responsibility and will not order his men to patrol.’
Brunetti, thinking of his conversation with Griffoni about the complicity of the pharmacists who remained silent, said, ‘That was a very wise decision, Dottore.’ He smiled and asked, ‘Will that be all, Signore?’
At Patta’s nod, he got to his feet and left the office.
Signorina Elettra glanced at him as he emerged into her office. Brunetti studied her face and saw in it traces of its usual warmth, noticed as well that the dark flowers had been exiled to the windowsill.
‘The Vice-Questore has told me that there will be no more investigations of the baggage handlers.’
‘Yes,’ she said, all but glowing. ‘I know.’
Well, well, well, Brunetti thought. Signorina Elettra was much given to elliptical remarks, and so ordinarily he would have thought she meant that gossip had wafted this news towards her. But there was nothing in her remark but granite-hard fact: she had heard because of the listening device she had planted in Patta’s office.
‘You seem pleased,’ Brunetti said. ‘If I might observe.’
‘Oh, I am pleased. Very,’ she said, idly touching the top button of her blouse.
‘Might I inquire why
?’
‘Because this path was suggested to him – very strongly suggested to him – by Lieutenant Scarpa, who was the one who told him about the separate jurisdictions of the cities. Quite authoritatively, if I might say so.’ As she’d said the Lieutenant’s name, Brunetti was reminded of a remark made by Creon: ‘Once an enemy, never a friend, even after death.’
But then Signorina Elettra smiled, and had they been standing in a field of flowers, the bees most surely would have come to sip honey from her lips.
‘May I farther inquire where he obtained his information?’
Her smile broadened, and Brunetti was forced to turn away for fear of insulin shock.
‘I’d heard him discussing the subject with the Vice-Questore, and the Lieutenant said he’d take it upon himself to find out what the territorial division was.’ She paused and leaned to the side to flick a speck of invisibility from her desk.
‘He was free, of course, to find this information himself, but he told me … he told me to find it. And so I did.’
‘It was really made, this division of jurisdiction?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Of course,’ she answered. ‘In 1938.’
After a long pause, Brunetti asked, ‘And since then?’
‘I’ve no idea, Commissario. The Lieutenant told me to find any record of the administrative decision that separated the two cities, and that’s what I found.’
‘And so, when all police oversight ceases, with the inevitable result, the Lieutenant will be discovered to have cited a regulation from almost a hundred years ago?’
‘Precisely.’
‘Presumably, this will not work to the Lieutenant’s advantage,’ Brunetti offered.
‘I’m afraid not,’ she answered with a smile that hinted at, but did not reveal, the size of her teeth.
Brunetti stood for some time, so struck by her cunning as to be deprived of the power of coherent speech. Finally he freed himself from the spell and said, ‘I’ll be in my office.’
She nodded and returned her attention to her computer.
It was not until the afternoon that he saw Signorina Elettra again. She knocked on the door of his office about five, and when she came in, he saw that she carried some papers.
‘The Three Musketeers?’ he asked.
‘Sì, Signore,’ she answered.
‘Anything interesting?’
‘Oh, I prefer you to make that judgement yourself, Commissario.’ She came across the room and laid the papers on his desk.
As she did, he said, ‘Could you send copies to Commissario Griffoni and Ispettore Vianello?’
‘Of course, Signore,’ she said and left him to consider the documents.
There were three small piles of paper, each clipped together, the name ‘Donato’ at the top of one, ‘Gasparini’ another, ‘Ruberti’ on the third.
He opened the first and learned that Girolamo Donato had been born in Venice sixty-three years before. His family had owned and run the same pharmacy at San Leonardo for three generations. He had studied farmacia at the University of Padova and gone to work in the family business when he was twenty-five. During his career, he had once been elected the President of the Ordine dei Farmacisti della Provincia di Venezia. A son and daughter, both pharmacists, worked with him, as did two young women who helped with sales and the general upkeep of the shop and stock.
The family lived in three separate apartments in a large building on the Fondamenta della Misericordia. His son and daughter-in-law had two sons, five and three; his daughter, in her early thirties, was unmarried.
Brunetti glanced up from the page, amazed that a family could be so apparently normal. They studied, worked, got married, had children, and worked. He glanced at the next page, which showed that Donato had given both his son and his daughter their apartments. After salaries, expenses, insurance, and taxes, the pharmacy earned approximately 150,000 Euros a year. Brunetti was surprised at the sum, had thought it would be much greater. After all, a pharmacist worked far more than eight hours a day, had to stay open on weekends and holidays according to a strict rota, which also demanded frequent all-night openings.
He set the first report aside and looked at the papers about Gasparini. He, too, had been born in Venice, a bit more than a decade after Donato. He had studied Economy and Commerce at Ca’ Foscari and started working in Treviso immediately after graduation. He had, in the course of eighteen years of work, changed jobs four times; he had been at his current job in Verona for three years and was now the assistant to the chief accountant. Brunetti went back and looked at the names of the companies for which he had worked and tried to understand what they might reveal about the possible nature of his job. ‘Textiles’, ‘Leather’. All well and good. ‘Holdings’, ‘Enterprises’. Anything at all.
Brunetti made a list of the cities where Gasparini had worked over the years and saw that he had never remained in the same city for two successive jobs. He had moved from Treviso to Conegliano, to Padova and then to Pordenone, and was now in Verona. Brunetti tried to imagine what it must have been like for them, both for the children and for the marriage, to uproot themselves and move to a new city or to become one of the families in which the father makes his ghostly appearance after the children are in bed, only to leave before they are awake.
As if Signorina Elettra had read his mind, farther information from the Ufficio Anagrafe followed in the next paragraph: during the previous twenty years, both Gasparini and his wife had maintained the same legal address, and the children had been in regular attendance at the Albertini for the last four years.
Brunetti paged back and took a more careful look at the financial details of Gasparini’s life. The salaries listed for each position he’d had were no more than average. If his wife were making the same salary as Paola, they could probably not afford to send their children to the Albertini.
An explanation sprang unsummoned to Brunetti’s mind: fiscal misconduct of some sort, followed by dismissal. No sooner thought than discarded: Gasparini was unlikely to have managed that repeatedly without having been caught at it. Brunetti tried to think of some other reason for such a strange work history, common perhaps in other countries but not here, where many men stayed at the same job for decades, if not for their entire careers. What about blackmail? Who better than the accountant would know what the real finances of a company were? If officers of the Guardia di Finanza could be arrested for not reporting fiscal illegalities in return for money, how much easier for an accountant to plan, and then profit from, the same irregularities.
The next page revealed that his third company had, two months after Gasparini left his employ, been raided by the Guardia di Finanza, and its computers and records sequestered. It had taken the investigators very little time to discover parallel systems of bookkeeping that recorded the true, not only the purported, profits and losses of the company.
Brunetti looked up from the page and all but saw it written: work in a company long enough to discover if they were keeping a second set of books, or even devise the system that created them; then help keep those same books long enough to understand how the system worked; and then demand payment not to reveal it. If they paid, then take the money and change jobs; if they did not pay, find a new job and, once there, call the Guardia di Finanza.
Of course there could be some other explanation, but this one made sense, at least to someone with the professional inclination to treat all human behaviour with suspicion and the presumption of guilt.
He pulled the third pile towards him and started to read through it. Average student, medical diploma from the University of Padova in 1987, where Dottoressa Ruberti remained as an intern for four years, after which she joined two other doctors in a joint practice in Abano Terme. She left the practice after six years and returned to Venice to open her own private practice with offices in Dorsoduro and Castello.
Married, divorced, one son with severe physical disabilities who lived in a facility for the handicapped. Neve
r arrested, no driving infractions, owner of both her apartment and the ground-floor space in Dorsoduro where her office was located. She rented the one in Castello.
The report, sparse as it was, ended there.
27
Though it was late in the afternoon, he phoned both Griffoni and Vianello and asked them to come to his office because he wanted to talk to them about the information they’d all received from Signorina Elettra.
He leaned back in his chair and folded his arms and studied the sky visible from his window, sombre and sad and grey with the approach of bad weather. Life would retreat inside for months, the lack of sun would lead to grumpiness, and people would long to flee to the sun to go swimming or to the mountains to ski. He loathed skiing because, like polo, it required an enormous amount of equipment. Truth to tell, Brunetti loathed most sports, save for football, which his father had adored and taught him to love and which had the redeeming virtue of requiring only a ball to kick around. Although he believed the sport was corrupt to its very core, millions made or lost by betting on games whose outcomes were preordained, he could not stop himself from being thrilled by those same preordained moves. He recalled a day when his father had taken him to see a game between Inter and …
His brief reverie was broken by the arrival of Vianello, who came in without bothering to knock, and quickly after that, Griffoni, who walked in through the door Vianello had left open. They sat in front of him, each with a folder and pen, both obviously eager to hear what he had to say.
‘I’d like to take a look at what Signorina Elettra found about the number of times Signor Gasparini changed jobs.’ The other two pulled out their copies, and when they stopped turning pages, Brunetti asked, ‘What do you make of the fact that he’s changed jobs so often?’
Griffoni looked up, confused by the question, but Vianello said, ‘It’s unusual, isn’t it, to move around like that?’