Death in a Strange Country cgb-2

by Donna Leon

  Brunetti could see no better way. He realized how much he wanted to get on a train to Vicenza immediately, speak to the boy’s father, and begin to piece together the puzzle of how the picnic and the rash and that pencilled notation in the margin of the medical record had led to the murder of those two young people. He had some of the pieces; the boy’s father must have another one; sooner or later, by putting them together and examining them, switching them to new positions, he would be sure to see the pattern that now lay hidden.

  Seeing no other solution, he agreed to Ambrogiani’s suggestion that he wait for his call the following day. He opened the third book again, drew a piece of paper from his desk, and began to make a list of all of the companies which were suspected of hauling or shipping toxic wastes without the proper authorization and another of all of the companies which were named as having already been formally accused of illegal dumping. Most of them were located in the North and most of those in Lombardy, me manufacturing heart of the country.

  He checked the copyright of the book and saw that it had been printed only the year before, so the list was current. He turned to the back and saw a region-by-region map of the places where illegal dumping sites had been found. The provinces of Vicenza and Verona were heavily dotted, especially the region just north of both cities, leading up to the foothills of the Alps.

  He closed the book, folding the list carefully inside it. There was nothing more he could do until he spoke to the boy’s father, but still he burned with the desire to go there now, futile as he knew that desire to be.

  The intercom buzzed. ‘Brunetti,’ he said, picking it up.

  ‘Commissario,’ Patta’s voice said, ‘I’d like you to come down to my office right now.’

  For a fleeting instant, Brunetti wondered if Patta was having his phone tapped or a record kept of his calls and somehow knew that he was still in contact with the American base. Even this new information about the toxins, Brunetti knew, would not deflect the other man from his attempt to keep things quiet. And the instant he learned that Brunetti suspected that so lofty an institution as something that could be graced with the name of ‘company’ might be involved, Patta was sure to threaten to reprimand him officially if he persisted in his attempt to learn what had happened. If the forces of law were not to defer to the desires of business, then surely the Republic was imperilled.

  He went immediately down to Patta’s office, knocked, and was told to enter. Patta was poised at his desk, looking as though he had just come from a film audition. A successful one. As Brunetti entered, Patta was busy fitting one of his Russian cigarettes into his onyx holder, careful to hold both away from his desk, lest a particle of tobacco fall upon and somehow diminish the gleaming perfection of the Renaissance desk behind which he sat. The cigarette proving resistant, Patta kept Brunetti waiting in front of him until he had managed to fit it carefully within the gold circle of the holder. ‘Brunetti,’ he said, lighting the cigarette and taking a few cautious exploratory puffs, perhaps seeking to taste the effect of the gold, ‘I’ve had a very upsetting phone call.’

  ‘Not your wife, I hope, sir,’ Brunetti said in what he hoped was a meek voice.

  Patta rested the cigarette on the edge of his malachite ashtray, then grabbed quickly at it as the weight of the holder caused it to topple back onto the desk. He replaced it, this time resting it level, burning end and mouthpiece balanced on opposing sides of the round ashtray. As soon as he took his hand from it, the weight of the head of the holder pressed it down. The end of the cigarette slipped out, and both cigarette and holder fell, the holder with a rich clatter, into the bowl of the ashtray.

  Brunetti folded his hands behind him and looked out of the window, bouncing up and down a few times on the balls of his feet. When he looked back, the cigarette was extinguished, the holder gone.

  ‘Sit down, Brunetti.’

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ he said, ever-polite, taking his usual place in the chair in front of the desk,

  ‘I’ve had,’ Patta resumed, ‘a phone call.’ He paused just long enough to dare Brunetti to repeat his suggestion, then continued, ‘From Signor Viscardi, from Milan.’ When Brunetti asked nothing, he added, ‘He called to tell me that you are calling his good name into question.’ Brunetti did not jump to his own defence, so Patta was forced to explain. ‘He said that his insurance agent has received a phone call, from you, I might add, asking how he knew so quickly that certain things had been taken from the palazzo.’ Had Patta been in love with the most desirable woman in the world, he could not have whispered her name with more adoration than he devoted to that last word. ‘Further, Signor Viscardi has learned that Riccardo Fosco, a known leftist’ - and what did this mean, Brunetti wondered, in a country where the President of the Chamber of Deputies was a Communist? - ‘has been asking suggestive questions about Signor Viscardi’s financial position.’

  Patta paused here to give Brunetti an opportunity to jump to his own defence, but he said nothing. ‘Signor Viscardi,’ Patta continued, voice growing more indicative of the concern he felt, ‘did not volunteer this information; I had to ask him very specific questions about his treatment here. But he said that the policeman who questioned him, the second one, though I see no reason why it was necessary to send two, that this policeman seemed not to believe some of his answers. Understandably, Signor Viscardi, who is a well-respected businessman, and a fellow member of the Rotary International’ - it was not necessary here to specify who his fellow member was -’found this treatment upsetting, especially as it came so soon after his brutal treatment at the hands of the men who broke into his palace and made off with paintings and jewellery of great value. Are you listening, Brunetti?’ Patta suddenly asked.

  ‘Oh, yes, sir.’

  ‘Then why don’t you have anything to say?’

  ‘I was waiting to learn about the upsetting phone call, sir.’

  ‘Damn it,’ Patta shouted, slamming his hand down on the desk. ‘This was the upsetting call. Signor Viscardi is an important man, both here and in Milan. He has a great deal of political influence, and I won’t have him thinking, and saying, that he has been treated badly by the police of this city.’

  ‘I don’t understand how he has been badly treated, sir.’

  ‘You understand nothing, Brunetti,’ Patta said in tight-lipped anger. ‘You call the man’s insurance agent the same day the claim is made, as if you suspected there was something strange about the claim. And two separate policemen go to the hospital to question him and show him photos of people who had nothing to do with the crime.’

  ‘Did he tell you that?’

  ‘Yes, after we’d been speaking a while and I assured him that I had every confidence in him.’

  ‘What did he say, exactly, about the photo?’

  ‘That the second policeman had shown him a photo of a young criminal and had seemed not to believe him when he said he didn’t recognize the man.’

  ‘How did he know the man in the photo was a criminal?’

  ‘What?’

  Brunetti repeated himself. ‘How did he know that the photo of the man he was shown was the photo of a criminal? It could have been a photo of anyone, the policeman’s son, anyone.’

  ‘Commissario, who else would they show him a picture of if not of a criminal?’ When Brunetti didn’t answer, Patta repeated his exasperated sigh. ‘You’re being ridiculous, Brunetti.’ Brunetti started to speak but Patta cut him off. ‘And don’t try to stick up for your men when you know they’re in the wrong.’ At Patta’s insistence that the offending police were ‘his’, there slipped into Brunetti’s mind a vision of what it must be like when Patta and his wife tried to portion out responsibility for the failures and achievements of their two sons. ‘My’ son would win a prize at school, while ‘yours’ would be disrespectful to teachers or fail an exam.

  ‘Have you anything to say?’ Patta finally asked.

  ‘He couldn’t describe the men who attacked him, but he knew which pict
ures they were carrying.’

  Once again, Brunetti’s insistence did no more than display to Patta the poverty of the background from which he came. ‘Obviously, you’re not accustomed to living with precious objects, Brunetti. If a person lives for years with objects of great value, and here I mean aesthetic value, not just material price’ - his voice urged Brunetti to stretch his imagination to encompass the concept – ‘then they come to recognize them, just as they would members of their own family. So, even in a flashing moment, even under stress such as Signor Viscardi experienced, he would recognize those paintings, just as he would recognize his wife.’ From what Fosco had said, Brunetti suspected Viscardi would have less trouble recognizing the paintings.

  Patta leaned forward, paternally, and asked, ‘Are you capable of understanding any of this?’

  ‘I’ll understand a lot more when we speak to Ruffolo.’

  ‘Ruffolo? Who’s he?’

  ‘The young criminal in the photo.’

  Patta said no more than Brunetti’s name, but he said it so softly that it called for an explanation.

  ‘Two tourists were sitting on a bridge and saw three men leave the house with a suitcase. Both of them identified the photo of Ruffolo.’

  Because he had not bothered to read the report on the case, Patta didn’t ask why this information wasn’t contained in it. ‘He could have been hiding outside,’ he suggested.

  ‘That’s entirely possible,’ Brunetti agreed, though it was far more likely to him that Ruffolo had been inside, and not hiding.

  ‘And what about this Fosco person? What about his phone calls?’

  ‘All I know about Fosco is that he’s the Financial Editor of one of the most important magazines in the country. I called him to get an idea of how important Signor Viscardi was. So we’d know how to treat him.’ This so precisely mirrored Patta’s thinking that he was incapable of questioning Brunetti’s sincerity. Brunetti hardly thought it necessary to make an excuse for the seriousness with which the policemen had seen fit to question Viscardi. Instead, he said, ‘All we’ve got to do is get our hands on this Ruffolo, and everything will be straightened out. Signor Viscardi will get his paintings back, the insurance company will thank us, and I imagine the Gazzettino would run a story on the front page of the second section. After all, Signor Viscardi is a very important man, and the quicker this is settled, the better it will be for all of us.’ Suddenly Brunetti felt himself overwhelmed with a wave of disgust at having to do this, go through this stupid charade every time they spoke. He looked away, then back at his superior.

  Patta’s smile was as broad as it was genuine. Could it be that Brunetti was finally beginning to have some sense, to take some heed of political realities? If so, then Patta believed that the credit for this might not unjustly be laid at his own door. They were a headstrong people, these Venetians, clinging to their own ways, outdated ways. Lucky for them that his appointment as Vice-Questore had brought them some exposure to the larger, more modern world, the world of tomorrow. Brunetti was right. All they had to do was find this Ruffolo character, get the paintings back, and Viscardi would be firmly behind him.

  ‘Right,’ he said, speaking crisply, the way policemen in American films spoke, ‘let me know as soon as this Ruffolo is in custody. Do you need any more men assigned to this?’

  ‘No, sir,’ Brunetti said after a reflective pause. ‘I think we’ve got enough on it right now. It’s just a question of waiting until he makes a false step. That’s bound to happen soon enough.’

  Patta was completely uninterested in what it was or was not a question of. He wanted an arrest, the return of the paintings, and Viscardi’s support should he decide to run for city councillor. ‘Fine, let me know when you have something,’ he said, dismissing Brunetti with the tone, if not with the words. Patta reached for another cigarette and Brunetti, unwilling to wait and watch the ceremony, excused himself and went down to speak to Vianello.

  ‘Any word on Ruffolo?’Brunetti asked when he went into the office.

  ‘There is and there isn’t,’ Vianello answered, rising minimally from his chair in deference to his superior, then lowering himself back into it.

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Meaning that the word is that he’d like to talk.’

  ‘Where’d the word come from?’

  ‘From someone who knows someone who knows him.’

  ‘And who spoke to this someone?’

  ‘I did. It’s one of those kids out on Burano. You know, the ones who stole the fishing boat last year. Ever since we let them off on that, I’ve figured he’s owed me a favour, so I went out to talk to him yesterday. I remembered that he went to school with Ruffolo. And he called me back about an hour ago. No questions asked. He just said that this other person had talked to someone who saw Ruffolo, and he wants to talk to us.’

  ‘To anyone in particular?’

  ‘Not to you, I’d imagine, sir. After all, you’ve put him away twice.’

  ‘You want to do it, Vianello?’

  The other man shrugged. ‘Why not? I just don’t want it to be a lot of bother. He’s had nothing to do for the last two years but sit in jail and watch American police movies, so he’ll probably suggest that we meet at midnight in a boat on the laguna.’

  ‘Or in the cemetery at dawn, just when the vampires are flying back to nest.’

  ‘Why can’t he just make it a bar, so we can be comfortable and have a glass of wine?’

  ‘Well, wherever it is, go and meet him.’

  ‘Should I arrest him when he shows up?’

  ‘No, don’t try it. Just ask him what he wants to tell us, see what sort of deal he wants to make.’

  ‘Do you want me to have someone there to follow him?’

  ‘No. He’ll probably be expecting mat. And he’d panic if he thought he was being followed. Just see what he wants. If it isn’t too much, make a deal with him.’

  ‘You think he’s going to tell us about Viscardi?’

  ‘There’s no other reason for him to want to talk to us, is there?’

  ‘No, I suppose not.’

  When Brunetti turned to leave, Vianello asked, ‘What about the deal I make with him? Will we keep our part of it?’

  At this, Brunetti turned back and gave Vianello a long look. ‘Of course. If criminals can’t believe in an illegal deal with the police, what can they believe in?’

  * * * *

  19

  He heard nothing from Ambrogiani that afternoon, nor did Vianello manage to make contact with the boy on Burano. The next morning, no call had come in, nor had there been any by the time he got back from lunch. Vianello came in at about five to tell him that the boy had called and a meeting had been set up for Saturday afternoon, at Piazzale Roma. A car would come to meet Vianello, who was not to be in uniform, and would take him to where Ruffolo would talk to him. After he explained this to Brunetti, Vianello grinned and added, ‘Hollywood.’

  ‘It probably means they’ll have to steal a car to do it, too.’

  ‘And no chance of a drink, either, I suppose,’ said Vianello resignedly.

  ‘Pity they pulled down the Pullman Bar; at least that way you could have had one before you left.’

  ‘No such luck, I have to stand where the number five bus stops. They’ll pull up and I have to get in.’

  ‘How are they going to recognize you?’

  Did Vianello blush? ‘I have to be carrying a bouquet of red carnations.’

  At this, Brunetti could not restrain himself and exploded into laughter. ‘Red carnations? You? My God, I hope no one who knows you sees you, standing at a bus stop, leaving the city, with a bouquet of red carnations.’

  ‘I’ve told my wife. She doesn’t like it, not one bit, especially that I have to use my Saturday afternoon to do it. We were supposed to go out to dinner, and I won’t hear the end of this for months.’

  ‘Vianello, I’ll make a deal. Do this, we’ll even pay for the carnations, but you’ll have to
get a receipt, but do it and I’ll fix the duty rosters so that you get next Friday and Saturday off, all right?’ It seemed the least he could do for the man who was willing to take the risk of putting himself into the hands of known criminals and who, more courageously, was willing to take the risk of angering his wife.

  ‘It’s all right, sir, but I don’t like it.’

  ‘Look, you don’t have to do this, Vianello. We’re bound to get our hands on him sooner or later.’

  ‘That’s all right, sir. He’s never been stupid enough to do anything to one of us before. And I know him from the last time.’

  Vianello, Brunetti remembered, had two children and a third on the way. ‘If this works, you get the credit for it. It’ll help towards a promotion.’