by Donna Leon
In this case, Patta walked over and placed the paper on his desk, then glanced at Brunetti and turned it upside down. He turned and leaned back against the desk, hands braced on either side of him. This left Brunetti in a kind of procedural limbo: he certainly could not sit down in the presence of his standing superior, and the thought that Patta might well launch himself to some other place in the room made him uncertain where to stand.
He took a few steps towards Patta, who today wore a slate grey suit so sleek of line as to render him both taller and more slender. Brunetti's eyes were drawn to a small gold pin - was it some sort of cross? - on Patta's lapel. Refusing to allow himself to be distracted, Brunetti said, ‘I went out there, as you asked me to, Vice-Questore.'
Patta nodded, a hint that his role today was as the silent, watchful guardian of public security.
'A maresciallo of the Carabinieri came along, as well as a woman from social services who works with the Rom.'
Patta nodded again, either to acknowledge that he was following Brunetti's account or in tribute to the political correctness of Brunetti's choice of noun.
'At first, the man who seems to be the leader didn't want to let us talk to the parents, but when we made it clear that we were going to stay until we did, he called the father and I told him about the child.' Silence from Patta. 'He asked how we could be sure of her identity, and I gave him the photos. He showed them to the mother. She was' - Brunetti had no idea how to describe the woman's agony to Patta - 'she was distraught.' Brunetti could think of nothing more to say. Those were the facts.
'I'm sorry,' Patta surprised him by saying.
'For what, sir?' Brunetti asked, wondering if perhaps some opportunity of publicity had presented itself in the afternoon and Patta now regretted not having gone out to the camp.
'For the woman's pain,' Patta said soberly. 'No one should lose a child.' With a sudden lightening of tone, he asked, 'And the other woman?'
'You mean the woman from the social services, sir?'
'No. The one whose house you went to. About the jewellery.'
'The child must have been in their home,' he answered. Seeing Patta start to speak, he added, 'How else can the ring and the watch be explained?' As soon as he said that, Brunetti realized he was sounding too involved, too interested, so he tempered his voice and said, 'Well, that is, it's difficult to think of some other way she might have got them.'
'But that doesn't mean much, does it?' Patta asked. ‘I mean, that's no reason to believe that anything happened to her while she was in there, that she did anything but trip and fall. Why, people are falling off roofs all the time’
Brunetti had heard of one case in the last ten years, but he knew better than to argue. Perhaps roofs were more dangerous in Patta's home town of Palermo. Most things were.
'They usually work in groups, sir,' Brunetti observed.
'I know, I know,' Patta answered, waving a hand in Brunetti's direction as though he were a particularly annoying fly. 'But that doesn't mean anything, either.'
As if he were indeed a fly, Brunetti's antennae began to pick up another strange buzz in this room, some other emanation coming at him from Patta, either from his eyes or his tone or the way the fingers of his right hand occasionally moved towards that sheet of paper, then suddenly skittered back to his side.
Brunetti made his face display the play of thought. ‘I suppose you're right, sir,' he finally said, careful to speak with acquiescent disappointment. 'But it might be useful to be able to talk to them.'
'To whom?'
'The other children.'
'Out of the question,' Patta said in an unrestrainedly loud voice. Then, as if sharing Brunetti's surprise at the volume with which he had spoken, the Vice-Questore continued more softly, 'That is, it's too complicated: you'd need an order from a judge from the minors' court, and you'd need someone from the social services to go along with you and be there while you talked to them, and you'd need a translator.' Patta spoke as though the matter had been settled, but then, after a careful pause, he added, 'Besides, you'd never be sure you'd got the right children in the first place.' He shook his head in contemplation of the impossibility of Brunetti's ever being able to achieve all of this.
‘I see what you mean, sir,' Brunetti said with a resigned shrug, lowering his voice and closing his heart to the temptations of irony or sarcasm. For he did indeed see what Patta meant: the prosperous middle class was involved here, so Patta had decided it would be best to avoid any examination of what might have happened on that roof.
And Brunetti, like a snail that brushes something rough with one of its feelers, opted to retreat into his shell. ‘I hadn't considered all of that, sir,' he admitted grudgingly. He waited to see if Patta would drive another nail into the coffin of possibility, and when he did not, Brunetti did it for him and said, 'And there's no chance that we could ever get these kids to testify, anyway, is there?'
'No, none,' Patta agreed. He shoved himself away from his desk and walked behind it to his chair. 'See if there's anything that can be done for the mother,' Patta said, and Brunetti rejoiced greatly in the request, for to learn what might be done for her, he would surely have to go and talk to her, would he not?
'I'll leave you to your work, sir,' Brunetti said.
Patta was already too busy to reply, and Brunetti left him there to get on with it.
Signorina Elettra looked up as he emerged from Patta's office. 'The Vice-Questore,' Brunetti said, having been careful to leave the door to the office open behind him, 'thinks there's no point in pursuing this.'
Glancing at the open door, she fed him his next line, 'And do you agree with him, Commissario?'
'Yes, I think I do. The poor girl fell from the roof and drowned’ He suddenly remembered that no disposition had been made for the girl's body. Now that Patta had effectively closed the investigation, she should be returned to her family, though in a case of accidental death, Brunetti had no idea whose responsibility that would be.
'Would you call Dottor Rizzardi and see when the body can be released?' he asked. For a moment, Brunetti considered accompanying the girl's body, but he was not prepared to do that. 'There's a woman at the social services, Dottoressa Pitteri -I can't remember her first name. She's been working with the Rom for some time, so she might have an idea of what... well, of what they might want to do.'
'With the girl, do you mean?' Signorina Elettra asked. 'Yes.'
'All right,' she said, then, 'I'll call her, Commissario, and let you know what happens.'
'Thank you,' he said and left her office.
23
As he climbed the steps to his office, Brunetti was suddenly overcome with a desire to turn around and leave the Questura and, as he had sometimes done as a schoolboy, take the vaporetto out to the Lido and go for a walk on the beach. Who would know? Worse, who would care? Patta was probably congratulating himself at his easy success in having protected the middle class from any embarrassing investigation, while Signorina Elettra was busy with the sombre task of finding a way to send the dead child back to her family.
He went up to his office and immediately dialled down to Signorina Elettra's office. When she answered, he said, 'When Patta came out of his office, he had a sheet of paper in his hand. Have you any idea what it was?'
'No, sir’ came her answer, as laconic as it could be.
'Do you think you might have a look?'
'One moment, and I'll ask Lieutenant Scarpa’ she said,
then he heard her asking, voice a bit fainter as she held the receiver away from her mouth, 'Lieutenant, do you know what's wrong with the photocopying machine on the third floor?' There was a long silence, and then he heard her add, voice even louder, as if she were now talking to someone at a greater distance, 'It seems there's a paper jam, Lieutenant. Would you mind having a look?'
There was a brief silence, into which Brunetti said, 'You shouldn't bait him, you know.'
‘I don't eat chocolates,' she answered s
harply. 'Baiting the Lieutenant provides the same pleasure, but there's no risk of getting fat.' It did not seem to Brunetti that Signorina Elettra ran much of a risk of that, and it was hardly his place to question anyone else's pleasures, but to go out of her way repeatedly to antagonize Patta's assistant seemed riskier behaviour than eating a chocolate truffle or two.
'I wash my hands of you,' he said, laughing as he did so. 'Though I must say I admire your courage.'
'He's a paper tiger, sir; they all are.'
'All who?'
'Men like him, who make a habit of being tough and silent and looming over your desk. They always want to make you think they're getting ready to tear you into little pieces and use tiny slivers of your bones to pick your flesh out of their teeth.' He wondered if this would be her assessment of the men at the Gypsy camp, but before he had even finished formulating the thought, she added, 'Don't worry about him, Commissario.'
‘I think it would be wiser not to antagonize him.'
A hard edge came into her voice and she said, 'If it ever came to a choice, the Vice-Questore would cut him loose in a moment.'
'Why?' Brunetti asked, honestly puzzled. Lieutenant Scarpa had been the faithful henchman of the Questore for more than a decade: a fellow Sicilian, a man who appeared to enjoy feasting on the scraps that fell from the table of power, he had always seemed, to Brunetti, utterly ruthless in his desire to aid Patta in his career.
'Because the Vice-Questore knows he can trust him,' she answered, confusing Brunetti utterly.
'I don't understand,' he confessed.
'He knows he can trust Scarpa, so he knows it would be safe to get rid of him, so long as he saw to it that he went to some better job. But he's not sure he can trust me, so he'd be afraid, ever, to try to get rid of me.' He hardly recognized her voice, so absent was its usual bantering tone.
But then she went on in her usual pleasant voice, 'And to answer your question, the only person who went into his office today, aside from you, was Lieutenant Scarpa. He was in with him for an hour this morning.'
'Ah,' Brunetti allowed himself to say, thanked her, and replaced the phone. He pulled a sheet of paper towards him and began to make a list of names. First the owner of the ring and watch. He knew Fornari's name was familiar: he stared at the far wall and tried to summon the memory. His wife had said he was in Russia, but the name of the country was no aid. What was it he sold? Kitchen appliances? No, ready-made units, and he was trying to export them there. Yes, that was it, right on the edge of memory: export, licences, Guardia di Finanza, factories. Something about money or some foreign company, but no, it wouldn't come, so Brunetti decided to leave it.
He wrote the wife's name, the daughter's, the son's, even the cleaning woman's. They were the only people likely to have been in the apartment the night the girl died. He added the words, 'Zingara', 'Rom', 'Sinti', 'Nomadi', to the bottom of the list, and then he pushed his chair back and resumed his contemplation of the far wall, and the likeness of the dead girl slipped into his memory.
The woman looked old enough to be the child's grandmother, yet that seamed, hollow-cheeked face was the face of the mother of an eleven-year-old child. All three children were younger than fourteen, and so could not be arrested. He had seen no children when he was there; stranger still, there had been no sign of children, no bikes or toys or dolls left lying about in the midst of all that litter. Italian children would be at school during the day; the absence of the Gypsy children, however, suggested that they were at work, or what passed as work for them.
Surely, the Fornari children should have been at school at that time of day. If the girl was sixteen, then she would be finishing middle school; the son might well have already started university. He picked up the phone and redialled Signorina Elettra's number. When she answered, he said, 'I've got another favour to ask. Do you have access to the files of the schools in the city?'
'Ah, the Department of Public Instruction,' she said. 'Child's play.'
'Good. The Fornari's daughter is called Ludovica -she's sixteen. She's got a brother who's eighteen, Matteo. I'd like you to see if there is anything worth knowing about them.'
He thought she might remark that this was a rather vague category, but all she did was ask, 'What are the parents' full names?'
'Giorgio Fornari and Orsola Vivarini.' 'Oh my, oh my,' she said when she heard the second name.
'Do you know her?' Brunetti asked.
'No, I don't. But I'd certainly like to meet the woman who got stuck with a name like Orsola but still named her daughter Ludovica.'
'My mother had a friend named Italia,' he said. 'And lots of Benitos, a Vittoria, even an Addis Ababa.'
'Different times,' she said. 'Or a different idea, to give a child a name that's really more a boast than a name.'
'Yes,' he said, thinking of the people with names like Tiffany and Denis and Sharon he'd arrested. 'My wife once said that if an American soap opera had a main character named Pig Shit, we'd have to prepare ourselves for an entire generation of them.'
'I think the Brazilians are more popular, sir,' she said.
'Excuse me?'
"The soap operas.'
'Of course,' he said and found he had nothing further to say.
'I'll see what I can find out about them,' she said. 'And I'll call this Dottoressa Pitteri.'
"Thank you, Signorina,' he said.
Brunetti knew he could run some sort of computer check on the name Giorgio Fornari, but the part of his memory in which the name was lodged was the same part where gossip and rumour found their home; so he knew that what he was looking for was the sort of information that was not to be found in newspapers or magazines or government reports. He tried to reconstruct the situation in which he had first heard Fornari's name. Something to do with money, and something to do with the Guardia di Finanza, for it was when reading a reference to the tax police in the paper some days ago that Fornari's name had sounded in the back of his memory.
A former classmate of his was now a captain in the Guardia di Finanza, and Brunetti still recalled with delight the afternoon - it must be three years ago - they had spent together in the laguna. The patrol boat, with what looked like action film turbines on both sides, had astonished Brunetti, accustomed as he was to the boats of the police and Carabinieri. He had spent the afternoon redefining the term, 'high speed', as the pilot took them through the Canale di San Nicolo and then straight ahead, as if he would not stop until they saw the islands off the coast of Croatia. Brunetti's friend had justified the trip as what he called 'liaison with other forces of order', but in the end, with the full complicity of the pilot, it had turned into a schoolboy outing - complete with hoots of glee and much back-slapping - and would not have stopped had the radio not received a call, asking their location.
Ignoring the call, the pilot had swooped the boat around and shot back towards the city, passing fishing boats as though they were tiny islands and then deliberately slamming and bumping across the wake of one of the cruise ships that was heading towards the city.
Struck by memory, Brunetti spoke the words aloud, 'The cruise ships.' Still looking at the wall, he allowed the story to trickle back into his memory. Giorgio Fornari was also a friend of Brunetti's captain friend and had once called to tell him about something he had heard from the owner of a shop on Via XXII Marzo who found himself caught in the middle of yet another inventive method of growing rich off the city.
It seemed, according to what Fornari had been told, that the passengers of these cruise ships were routinely warned that Venice was a city where it was not safe to shop or eat. Since most of the passengers were Americans, who knew themselves to be safe only when at home in front of their own television sets, they believed this and were relieved when the boat provided them with a list of 'safe' shops and restaurants where they were sure not to be cheated. Not only were the places guaranteed not to cheat them - and here the Captain had not been able to keep himself from laughing as he told Brunett
i -but these same establishments would provide a 10 per cent discount to ship's passengers: all they had to do was provide their passenger identification and ask.
With mounting glee, the Captain had gone on to explain that, always eager to cause more joy, the staff of the ships offered some sort of lottery to the passengers returning to the ships: if they submitted the receipts of their purchases or for their lunch, the number of chances they got in the lottery would be calculated in relation to how much they had spent.
'Everyone happy, everyone content with their discounts,' Brunetti remembered the Captain saying with a wolfish smile. And the next day members of the ship's crew made the rounds of the 'safe' shops and restaurants and collected their 10 per cent, a small enough consideration for the businesses to see that their names appeared on the safe list. If the shops tried to understate what the passengers had spent, why, did they not have the receipts that proved a higher total sum? Safe, indeed.
And Giorgio Fornari had asked the Captain if there were any way this could be stopped. The Captain, in the spirit of true friendship, had warned Fornari to keep his mouth shut and had told him to warn the owners of the shop to do the same. Brunetti recalled what the Captain had said, ‘I think he was offended because he thought it was wrong. Imagine that’
Brunetti knew this incident could hardly be used as a portrait of Fornari, but perhaps it could serve as a snapshot. Caught in a particular situation, he had reacted as an honest man. His friend had told him about Fornari's indignation that the city could be used like this by people - the owners of the ships being foreigners - who were neither Venetians nor Italians. It was then that the Captain had had to remind Fornari that a scam such as this could not continue, perhaps could not even be organized, without the tacit consent, perhaps even the involvement, of 'certain interests' in the city.
But by then they were pulling up to the dock at the end of the Giudecca, the boys' outing at an end, and the story of Giorgio Fornari's indignation at dishonesty had been filed in Brunetti's memory.