About Face

by Donna Leon

  ‘Married?’

  ‘No,’ Brunetti answered, then surprised himself by asking, ‘Are you?’

  Brunetti had moved ahead of the other officer, so he did not hear his answer. He turned back and said, ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Not really,’ Guarino said.

  Now, what in hell was that supposed to mean? Brunetti asked himself. ‘I’m afraid I don’t understand,’ he said politely.

  ‘We’re separated.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Inside Brunetti’s office he led his guest over to the window and showed him what view there was: the eternally about-to-be-renovated church and the completely restored rest home. ‘Where does the canal go?’ Guarino asked, leaning forward and looking to the right.

  ‘Down to Riva degli Schiavoni and the bacino.’

  ‘You mean the laguna?’

  ‘Well, the water that will take you out to the laguna.’

  ‘Sorry to sound like such a country bumpkin,’ Guarino said, ‘I know it’s a city, but it still doesn’t feel like one to me.’

  ‘No cars?’

  Guarino smiled and grew younger. ‘Well, it’s partly that. But the strangest thing is the silence.’ After a long moment, he saw that Brunetti was about to speak but added, ‘I know, I know, most people in cities hate the traffic and the smog, but the worst is the noise, believe me. It never stops, even late at night or early in the morning: there’s always a machine at work somewhere: a bus, or a car, a plane coming in to land, or a car alarm.’

  ‘Usually the worst we get,’ Brunetti said with an easy laugh, ‘is someone walking under your window and talking late at night.’

  ‘They would have to talk very loud to bother me,’ Guarino said and laughed.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I live on the seventh floor.’

  ‘Ah,’ was the only thing Brunetti could think of to say, so unusual to him was the reality of such a thing. In the abstract, he knew that people in cities lived in tall buildings, but it seemed inconceivable that they would hear any noise on the seventh floor.

  He waved Guarino to a chair and sat down himself. ‘What is it you want from the Vice-Questore?’ he asked, feeling that they had spent enough time on preliminaries. He pulled open his second drawer with his foot, then propped his crossed feet on it.

  The casual gesture seemed to relax Guarino, who went on. ‘A bit less than a year ago, our attention was called to a trucking company in Tessera, not far from the airport.’

  Brunetti was immediately alert: a month ago, the attention of the entire region had been called to a trucking company in Tessera.

  ‘We first got interested when the name of the company turned up in the course of another investigation,’ Guarino continued. This was a routine lie Brunetti himself had used countless times, but he let it pass unremarked.

  Guarino stretched out his legs and glanced back at the window, as if the view of the façade of the church would help him tell his story in the clearest way. ‘Once our attention had been called to this company, we went to talk to the owner. Been in the family for more than fifty years; inherited from his father. It turned out he’d been having problems: rising fuel costs, competition from foreign haulers, workers who went on strike whenever they didn’t get what they wanted, need for new trucks and equipment. The usual things.’

  Brunetti nodded. If this was the same trucking company in Tessera, then the ending had not been one of the usual things. With a candour and resignation that surprised Brunetti, Guarino said, ‘So he did what anyone would do: he started to cook the books.’ Almost with regret, he added, ‘But he wasn’t very good at it. He could drive and fix a truck and make out a schedule for pick-ups and deliveries, but he was not a bookkeeper, so the Guardia di Finanza smelled something wrong the first time they took a look at his records.’

  ‘Why did they investigate his records?’ Brunetti asked.

  Guarino raised his hand in a gesture that could mean anything.

  ‘Did they arrest him?’

  The Maggiore looked at his feet, then flicked a hand at his knee, wiping away a speck invisible to Brunetti. ‘It’s more complicated than that, I’m afraid.’ This seemed obvious to Brunetti: why else would Guarino be there, talking to him?

  Slowly, and with some reluctance, Guarino said, ‘The person who told us about him said he was transporting things we were interested in.’

  Brunetti cut him off by saying, ‘There are a lot of things being shipped around that we’re all interested in. Perhaps you could be more specific.’

  Ignoring Brunetti’s interruption, Guarino went on, ‘A friend of mine in the Guardia told me what they had found, and I went to talk to the owner.’ Guarino glanced at Brunetti and then away. ‘I offered him a deal.’

  ‘In return for not arresting him?’ Brunetti asked unnecessarily.

  Guarino’s look was as angry as it was sudden. ‘It’s done all the time. You know it.’ Brunetti watched the Maggiore decide to say what he would immediately regret saying. ‘I’m sure you do it.’ Guarino’s look softened at once.

  ‘Yes, we do,’ Brunetti said calmly, then added, to see how Guarino would react, ‘And it doesn’t always work out the way it’s planned.’

  ‘What do you know about this?’ the other man demanded.

  ‘Nothing more than what you’ve just told me, Maggiore.’ When Guarino said nothing, he asked, ‘And then what happened?’

  Guarino took another swipe at his knee, then forgot about it and left his hand there. ‘He was killed in a robbery,’ he finally said.

  The details began to seep into Brunetti’s memory. Because Tessera was closer to Mestre than to Venice, Mestre had been given the case. Patta had outdone himself in seeing that the Venice police did not get dragged into the investigation, claiming lack of manpower and jurisdictional uncertainty. Brunetti had spoken of it at the time to friends in the Mestre police, but they said it looked like a botched robbery with no leads.

  ‘He always went in early,’ Guarino continued, still not bothering to give the dead man’s name, an omission which irritated Brunetti. ‘At least an hour before the drivers and the other workers. They shot him. Three times.’ Guarino looked across at him. ‘You know about it, of course. It was in all the papers.’

  ‘Yes,’ Brunetti said, not mollified: Guarino had been a long time about it. ‘But I never read more than what was in the papers.’

  ‘Whoever did it,’ Guarino went on, ‘had already searched his office, or went through it after they killed him. They tried to open a wall safe – failed – went through his pockets and took whatever money he had on him. And his watch.’

  ‘So it looked like a robbery?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Suspects?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Family?’

  ‘Wife, two grown children.’

  ‘They involved with the company?’

  Guarino shook his head. ‘The son’s a doctor in Vicenza. The daughter’s an accountant and works in Rome. The wife’s a teacher, due to retire in a couple of years. With him gone, it all fell apart. The business didn’t survive him by a week.’ He saw Brunetti’s raised eyebrows. ‘I know it sounds incredible, in the age of the computer, but none of our people could find a list of orders, or routes, or pick-ups and deliveries, not even a list of drivers. He must have kept everything in his head. All of the records were a mess.’

  ‘So what did the widow do?’ Brunetti asked blandly.

  ‘She had no choice: she closed it down.’

  ‘Just like that?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘What else could she do?’ Guarino answered, almost as if he were pleading with Brunetti to have patience with the woman’s inexperience. ‘I told you, she’s a teacher. Elementary school. She didn’t have a clue. It was one of those one-man businesses we’re so good at running.’

  ‘Until that one man dies,’ Brunetti said ruefully.

  ‘Yes,’ Guarino said and sighed. ‘She wants to sell it, but no one’s intereste
d. The trucks are old, and now there aren’t any clients. The best she can hope for is that another company will buy up the trucks and she’ll be able to find someone to take over the lease for the garage, but she’ll still end up selling it all for nothing.’Guarino stopped speaking, almost as if he had given all the information he was prepared to give. He had not said a thing, Brunetti realized, about whatever might have passed between the two of them during the time they knew one another and, in a certain sense, worked together.

  ‘Am I correct in assuming,’ Brunetti asked, ‘that you discussed something other than the fact that he was cheating on his taxes?’ If not, then there was no reason for the man to be here, though he hardly had to point this out to Guarino.

  Guarino measured out a single word. ‘Yes.’

  ‘And that he gave you information about something other than his tax situation?’ Brunetti found his voice growing tight. For God’s sake, why couldn’t the man just tell him what was going on and ask him whatever he wanted? For surely he had not come here to chat about the lovely silence of the city nor the charms of Signora Landi.

  Guarino seemed content to say nothing further. Finally, making no attempt to disguise his irritation, Brunetti asked, ‘Perhaps you could stop wasting my time and explain why you’re here?’

  3

  It was obvious that Guarino had been waiting for Brunetti’s patience to expire, for his answer came without hesitation and quite calmly. ‘The police treated his death as a robbery that went bad and turned into murder.’ Before Brunetti could ask what the police made of the three shots, Guarino volunteered, ‘We suggested that approach. I don’t think they cared one way or the other. Doing it like that was probably easier for them.’

  And, reflected Brunetti, probably ensured the murder’s swift passage out of the news, but instead of remarking on that, he asked, ‘What do you think happened?’

  Again, that quick glance at the church, the flick at his knee, and then Guarino said, ‘I think whoever it was, one or more of them were waiting when he went in. There were no other signs of violence on his body.’

  Brunetti imagined the waiting men, their unsuspecting victim, and their interest in learning what he knew. ‘Do you think he told them anything?’

  Guarino’s glance was sharp, and he answered, ‘They could get it out of him without having to hurt him, you know.’ He paused, as if conjuring up the memory of the dead man, and added, with audible reluctance, ‘I was his contact, the person he talked to.’ This, Brunetti realized, explained Guarino’s edginess. The Carabiniere glanced away, as if uncomfortable at the memory of how easy it had been for him to make the murdered man talk. ‘He wouldn’t have been hard to frighten. If they had threatened his family, he would have told them whatever they wanted.’

  ‘And what would that have been?’

  ‘That he had been talking to us,’ Guarino said after only the faintest hesitation.

  ‘How did he get mixed up in this to begin with?’ Brunetti asked, fully aware that Guarino had not yet explained what it was the dead man had been involved with.

  Guarino made a small grimace. ‘That was what I asked him the first time I talked to him. He said that when the business started to go bad, he used up their savings, his and his wife’s, then he went to the bank to try to take out a loan. Well, another loan: he already had a large one.

  ‘They turned him down, of course,’ Guarino went on. ‘That’s when he began not registering jobs or payments, even if he was paid by cheque or bank transfer.’ He shook his head in silent criticism of such folly. ‘As I told you, he was an amateur. Once he started to do that, it was only a question of time until he got caught.’ With clear regret, as if reproaching the dead man for some minor offence, he said, ‘He should have known.’

  Absently, Guarino rubbed at his forehead and continued. ‘He said that he was frightened at the beginning. Because he knew he was no good at accounting. But he was desperate, and . . .’ Guarino left that unfinished, then resumed. ‘A few weeks later – this is what he told me – a man came to see him at his office. He said he’d heard he might be interested in working privately, not bothering with receipts, and if so he had some work to offer him.’ Brunetti said nothing, so Guarino continued. ‘The man he talked to,’ he said, ‘lives here.’ He watched for Brunetti’s reaction, then said, ‘That’s why I’m here.’

  ‘Who is he?’

  Guarino raised a hand, as if to push the question away. ‘We don’t know. He said the man never used a name and he never asked. There were bills of lading in case the trucks were stopped, but everything written on them was fake. He told me that. The destination, what was in the trucks.’

  ‘And what was in the trucks?’

  ‘That doesn’t matter. I’m here because he was murdered.’

  ‘Am I supposed to believe the two things aren’t related?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘No. But I’m asking you to help me find his killer. The other case doesn’t concern you.’

  ‘And neither does his murder,’ Brunetti said mildly. ‘My superior saw to that when it happened: he decided it was a territorial matter, and the case belonged to Mestre, which has administrative control over Tessera.’ Brunetti filled his voice with deliberate punctiliousness.

  Guarino got to his feet, but all he did was walk over to the window, as Brunetti did in moments of difficulty. He stared at the church, and Brunetti stared at the wall.

  Guarino came back to his chair and sat down again. ‘The only thing he ever said about this man was that he was young – about thirty – good looking, and dressed like he had money. I think “flashy” was the word he used.’

  Brunetti stopped himself from saying that most Italian men of thirty were good looking and dressed like they had money. He asked, instead, ‘How did he know he lives here?’ He was finding it difficult to disguise his mounting displeasure at Guarino’s reluctance to provide specific information.

  ‘Trust me. He lives here.’

  ‘I’m not sure they’re the same thing,’ Brunetti said.

  ‘What aren’t?’

  ‘Trusting you and trusting the information you’ve got.’

  The Maggiore considered this. ‘One time when this man was out in Tessera, he got a call on his telefonino just as they were going into the office. He went back into the corridor to talk to whoever it was, but he didn’t close the door. He was giving directions to someone, and he told them to take the Number One to San Marcuola and to call him when he got off, and he’d meet him there.’

  ‘He was sure about San Marcuola?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  Guarino glanced at Brunetti and smiled again. ‘I think we should stop sparring with one another now,’ he said. He sat up straighter and asked, ‘Shall we begin all over again, Guido?’ At Brunetti’s nod, he said, ‘My name is Filippo.’ He offered the name as if it were a peace offering, and Brunetti decided to accept it as such.

  ‘And the dead man’s name?’ asked a relentless Brunetti.

  Guarino did not hesitate. ‘Ranzato. Stefano Ranzato.’

  It took Guarino some time to explain in greater detail Ranzato’s descent from entrepreneur to tax evader to police spy. And from there to corpse. When he had finished, Brunetti asked, quite as though the Maggiore had not already refused to answer the question, ‘And what was in the trucks?’

  This, Brunetti realized, was the moment of truth. Either Guarino would tell him or he would not, and Brunetti was by now very curious which choice the other man would make.

  ‘He never knew,’ Guarino said, then seeing Brunetti’s expression, he added, ‘At least that’s what he told me. He was never told, and the drivers never said anything. He’d get a call, and then he’d send his trucks where he was told to send them. Everything in order: bills of lading. He said very often things seemed legitimate to him, shipping from a factory to a train or from a warehouse to Trieste or Genova. And he said at the beginning it was a lifesaver’ – Brunetti heard him stumble over that word –
‘for him because it was all off the books.’ Brunetti had the feeling that Guarino would be perfectly content to sit there for ever, talking about the dead man’s business.

  ‘None of this explains why you’re here, though, does it?’ Brunetti interrupted to ask. Instead of answering, Guarino said, ‘I think it’s a wild goose chase.’ ‘Try to be a little more specific, and then perhaps we’ll see about that,’ Brunetti suggested.

  Guarino, looking suddenly tired, said, ‘I work for Patta.’ Then he added, by way of explanation, ‘Sometimes I think everyone works for Patta. I didn’t know his name until today, when I met him, but I recognized him immediately. He’s my boss, and he’s most of the bosses I’ve ever had. Yours just happens to be called Patta.’

  ‘I’ve had a few who don’t have the same name,’ Brunetti said, but added, ‘just the same nature.’ Guarino’s answering smile helped both of them relax again.

  Relieved to see that Brunetti understood, Guarino went on, ‘Mine – my Patta, that is – sent me here to find the man who got the phone call at Ranzato’s office.’

  ‘So he expects you to go to San Marcuola and stand there and shout Ranzato’s name and see who looks guilty?’

  ‘No,’ Guarino answered without a smile. He scratched at his ear, and said, ‘None of the men in my squad is Venetian.’ In response to Brunetti’s startled look, he said, ‘Some of us have been working here for years, but it’s not the same as having been born here. You know that. We’ve checked the arrest records for anyone who lives near San Marcuola with a history of violence, but the only two men we’ve found are both in jail. So we need local help, the sort of information you have, or can get, and we can’t.’

  ‘You don’t know where to look for what you want to know,’ Brunetti said, stretching out a palm in front of him. ‘And I don’t know what was in those trucks,’ he continued, putting out the other. He moved them up and down in a balancing gesture.

  Guarino gave him a level glance and then said, ‘I’m not at liberty to discuss that.’

  Encouraged by this frankness, Brunetti changed course. ‘Did you speak to his family?’