by Donna Leon
Years ago, Conte Falier had observed that he had never met anyone who could resist flattery. Brunetti had been younger then and had taken this as a comment on a technique of which the Conte approved, but as the years passed and he knew the man better, Brunetti realized that it was nothing more than another of the Conte’s merciless observations about the nature of human activity. ‘And Cataldo’s wife was working to impress you,’ he heard Paola’s voice again. If he eliminated all sympathy for the woman, how much of what she told him would he still believe? Was he to be seduced by the fact that she had read Ovid’s Fasti and he had not?
21
Brunetti called down to the squad room and asked for Vianello. The Ispettore was out of the office, but someone passed the phone to Pucetti. By now everyone knew that when Vianello was not present, Brunetti would want Pucetti. ‘Come up for a moment, would you?’ Brunetti asked.
It seemed only seconds after Brunetti replaced the phone that Pucetti was there, swinging around the door and into his office, fresh-cheeked, as though he had run, or flown, up the steps. ‘Yes, Commissario?’ he said, eager, all but straining at the leash that might get him out of the office or at least out of whatever it was he had been doing downstairs.
‘Gilda Landi,’ Brunetti said.
‘Yes, sir?’ Pucetti asked with no sign of surprise, only curiosity.
‘She is a civilian employee of the Carabinieri. Well, I assume she’s a civilian and I assume it’s the Carabinieri, but maybe not. Perhaps the Ministry of the Interior. I’d like you to see if you can find out where she works and, if possible, what she does.’ Pucetti raised a hand in a vestigial salute, and left.
Though there was no reason to do it, aside from the fact that he had spent so much of the morning thinking about another woman, Brunetti called Paola and said he could not come home for lunch. She asked no questions, a reaction which bothered Brunetti more than if she had complained. Alone, he left the Questura and walked down into Castello, where he had a bad meal in the worst sort of tourist trap and left feeling both cheated and somehow justified, as if he had paid for having been dishonest with Paola.
When he got back, he stopped in the officers’ squad room, but there was no sign of Pucetti. He went to Signorina Elettra’s office, where he found her at her computer, Pucetti standing behind her, eyes intent on the screen.
When Pucetti saw Brunetti come in, he said, ‘I had to ask her, sir. There was no way I could do that alone. There was one place where if I had. .’
Brunetti stopped him by holding up a hand. ‘Good. I should have told you to ask.’ Then, to Signorina Elettra, who had glanced at him, ‘I didn’t want to burden you with anything else. I had no idea it would be so. .’ He allowed his voice to trail off.
He smiled at them, and the idea came to him that they were, in a sense, his surrogate children at the Questura, Vianello their uncle. And what did that make Patta? The dotty grandfather and Scarpa the wicked stepbrother? He pulled himself back from these thoughts and asked, ‘Did you find her?’
Pucetti moved back, leaving the stage to Signorina Elettra.‘I started with the Ministry of the Interior,’ she said. ‘It’s easy to get into a certain level of their system.’ She was being calmly descriptive and made no attempt to show off by criticizing the laxity with which some agencies guarded their information. ‘After a time, I began to find some places were blocked off to me, and so I had to go back and find other means of access.’ Reading Brunetti’s expression, she said, ‘But the details of how I did it don’t matter, do they?’
Brunetti glanced at Pucetti and saw the look the younger man gave her when she said this. He had last seen that expression on the face of a drug addict when he had smacked a needle out of his hand and crushed it under his heel.
‘. . special squadron set up to examine the Camorra’s control of the garbage industry, and it turns out that Signorina Landi works for the Ministry of the Interior and has done so for some time.’
Suspecting that this was the least of what she had to say, he asked, ‘What else did you learn about her?’
‘She is a civilian, and she is also an industrial chemist with a degree from Bologna.’
‘And her job?’ Brunetti asked.
‘From the little I could see before the. . she does the chemical analysis of what the Carabinieri find or manage to sequester.’
‘What were you about to say?’ Brunetti asked.
She gave Brunetti a long look, then glanced aside at Pucetti before answering, ‘I found it before the connection was interrupted.’
With a start, Brunetti turned towards the door to Patta’s office; Signorina Elettra, seeing this, said, ‘Dottor Patta has a meeting in Padova this afternoon.’
Recalling her hesitation, Brunetti asked, ‘What does that mean to an ignorant person, that the connection was interrupted?’
She considered this briefly before answering him. ‘It means that they’ve got a warning system that shuts everything down the instant it detects an unauthorized access.’
‘Can they trace it?’
‘I doubt it,’ she said in a more confident voice. ‘And if they did, it would lead to a computer at the offices of a company owned by a member of parliament.’
‘Are you telling me the truth?’ he asked.
‘I try always to tell you the truth, Commissario,’ she said, not indignantly, but close.
‘Only try?’ he asked.
‘Only try,’ she answered.
Brunetti chose to let this lie, but he could not pass up the opportunity to take a bit of wind out of her sails. ‘Cataldo’s computer people reported an attempt to break into their system.’
That stopped her, but after a moment’s reflection she said, ‘That trail leads back to the same company.’
‘You seem remarkably nonchalant about this, Signorina,’ Brunetti observed.
‘No, I’m not, not really. I’m glad you told me about it, though: I won’t make the same mistakes again.’ And that, her tone signalled, was that.
‘Does this Signorina Landi work in the same unit as Guarino did?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Yes. From what I managed to see, there are four men and two women, plus Dottoressa Landi and another chemist. The unit’s based in Trieste, with another group working in Bologna. I don’t know the names of the others and found her only because I had a specific name to look for.’
Silence fell. Pucetti looked back and forth between them but said nothing.
‘Pucetti?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Do you know where he was killed, sir?’
‘Marghera,’ Signorina Elettra answered for him.
‘That’s where he was found, Signorina,’ Pucetti corrected in a deferential voice.
‘Other questions, Pucetti?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Who moved the body, and when will the autopsy be done, why was there so little in the newspaper, and what was he doing wherever it was he was killed?’ Pucetti said, not managing to keep his voice calm as he recited this list.
Brunetti saw the look, and then the smile, that Signorina Elettra gave the young officer when he finished. However interesting it would be to have the answers to that list of questions, Brunetti realized that the first one was, at least for the present, the most important: where had Guarino been killed?
He left these thoughts and turned to Signorina Elettra. ‘Would it be possible to contact this Dottoressa Landi?’
She did not respond immediately, leaving Brunetti to wonder if those same alarms would sound were she now to try to find something as simple as a phone number. She glanced at him and her eyes moved to distant focus as she planned some cyber manoeuvre he could never hope to understand.
‘It’s all right,’ she finally said.
‘Which means?’ Brunetti asked, sparing Pucetti the need to ask.
‘I’ll get you her number.’ She rose to her feet, Pucetti quick to pull back her chair. ‘I’ll call you when I have it, sir,’ she said, then added, ‘There’s no risk.’ Pucetti and B
runetti left the office.
Twenty minutes later, good as her word, she called with Signorina Landi’s telefonino number, but when he dialled it, the client was unavailable. There was no invitation to leave a message.
To distract himself, Brunetti pulled towards him the oldest pile of papers that had accumulated on his desk and began to read through them, forcing himself to concentrate. One of Vianello’s informers had recently told the Ispettore that he should pay attention to some of the shops in Calle della Mandola that had recently changed hands. If this was money laundering, as the informer suggested, then it was not his concern: let the Guardia di Finanza worry about money.
Besides, it was a street he seldom used, so it was difficult for him to cast his visual memory along it and register the changes of merchandise in the windows. The antique book store was still there, as were the pharmacy, and the optician. The other side of the street was more difficult, for it was there that changes had taken place. There were shops selling trendy olive oil and bottled sauces, glass, then the fruit vendor and the flower shop that was the first to put out lilacs in the spring. They could ask around, he supposed, but it was all rather like the question about Ranzato: were they meant to walk up and down the street, calling on the Camorra to come out of hiding?
He thought of an article he had read months before in one of Chiara’s animal magazines about some sort of toad that had been imported into Australia. Taken there to combat a pest or insect that was endangering the sugar cane crop, this toad — was it the cane toad? — had no natural predators and thus increased relentlessly as it spread north and south. Its poison, it was discovered only after its numbers had shot past control, was strong enough to kill dogs and cats. Cane toads could be stabbed, pierced, run over by cars and still not be killed. Only the crows, it seemed, had learned how to kill them by flipping them over and devouring their viscera.
Did he need a more perfect comparison with the Mafia? Brought back to life by the Americans after the war to control the perceived Communist menace, it had got out of control and, as with the cane toad, its expansion north and south could not be stopped. It could be pierced and stabbed, but it would spring back to life. ‘We need crows,’ Brunetti said out loud, looked up, and saw Vianello at the door.
‘It’s the autopsy report,’ Vianello said in an ordinary voice, as though he had not heard Brunetti speak. He handed Brunetti a manila envelope and, even before Brunetti nodded to him, took a seat in front of his desk.
Brunetti slit open the envelope and slid out the photos, surprised to see that they were no bigger than postcards. He put them on his desk and removed some sheets of paper, placing them to the side of the photos. He looked at Vianello, who had noticed how small the photos were.
‘Economy measure, I suppose,’ Vianello observed.
Brunetti tapped the edges straight on his desk and began to look through the crime-scene photos, passing them to Vianello after he had studied each one. Postcard size: indeed, what better postcards for the new Italy? His mind fled to the possibility of an entire new line of tourist posters and souvenirs: the squalid shack in which Provenzano had been arrested, the illegal hotel complexes inside national parks, the twelve-year-old Moldavian prostitutes at the sides of the road?
Or perhaps they could create a deck of playing cards. Bodies? Reduce the size of one of the photos of Guarino and they could begin a deck composed of the bodies found only in the last few years. Four suits: Palermo, Reggio Calabria, Naples, Catania. A joker? And who would that be, filling in wherever he was needed? He thought of the cabinet minister rumoured to be in their pocket — he would do nicely.
A light cough from Vianello put an end to Brunetti’s grim flight of fancy. Brunetti handed him another photo, and then another. Vianello took them with increasing interest, all but snatching at the last of them. When Brunetti looked across at his assistant, he saw that his face was grim with shock. ‘These are scene of crime photos?’ he asked, as if he needed Brunetti’s assurance to be able to believe it.
Brunetti nodded. ‘You were there?’ Vianello asked, though it was not really a question.
At Brunetti’s repeated nod, Vianello tossed the photos face up on to Brunetti’s desk. ‘Gesù Bambino, who are these clowns?’ Vianello stabbed an angry forefinger on to one of the photos, where the toes of three different pairs of shoes could be seen. ‘Whose feet are these?’ he demanded. ‘What are they doing so close to the body if it’s being photographed?’ He jabbed his finger on the imprints left by a pair of knees. ‘And whose are these?’
He shoved the photos around and found one taken from a distance of two metres, showing the two Carabinieri standing behind the body, apparently in conversation. ‘Both of them are smoking,’ Vianello said. ‘So whose cigarette butts are going to be in the evidence bags, for the love of God?’
The Ispettore lost all patience and pushed the photos back towards Brunetti. ‘If they’d wanted to contaminate the scene, they couldn’t have done a better job.’
Vianello pressed his lips together and retrieved the photos. He lined them up in a row, then switched them around so that they could be read, left to right, as the camera approached the body. The first showed a radius of two metres around the body, the second a radius of one. In both photos, Guarino’s outstretched right hand was clearly visible in the bottom left of the photo. In the first photo, his hand lay on a clear field of dark brown mud. In the fourth, a cigarette butt was visible about ten centimetres from his hand. Guarino’s head and chest filled the last photo, blood soaked into the collar and front of his shirt.
Vianello could not prevent himself from appealing to the gold standard. ‘Alvise couldn’t make a worse mess.’
Brunetti finally said, ‘I think that’s probably it: the Alvise factor. It’s simple human stupidity and error.’ Vianello started to say something, but Brunetti did not stop. ‘I know it would be more comfortable, somehow, to blame it on conspiracy, but I think it’s just the usual mess.’
Vianello considered this then shrugged, saying, ‘I’ve seen worse.’ After a time, he asked, ‘What does the report say?’
Brunetti opened the papers and started to read through them, passing each one to Vianello as he finished reading it. Death had indeed been instant, the bullet having ripped through Guarino’s brain before emerging from his jaw. The bullet had not been found. There followed some speculation about the calibre of the gun used in the crime, and it ended with the bland statement that the mud on Guarino’s lapels and knees was different in composition and bore higher traces of mercury, cadmium, radium, and arsenic than did the mud under his body.
‘“Higher?”’ Vianello asked as he handed the papers back to Brunetti. ‘God help us,’ Vianello said.
‘No one else will.’
The Inspector was reduced to raising his hands in a gesture of surrender. ‘What do we do now?’
‘There remains Signorina Landi,’ Brunetti answered, much to the Ispettore’s confusion.
22
They met the next day, he and Dottoressa Landi, at the train station of Casarsa, having agreed to split the distance between Venice and Trieste. He paused on the steps of the station, hit by the warmth of the sun. Much in the manner of a sunflower, he turned his face towards it and closed his eyes.
‘Commissario?’ a woman’s voice called from the row of cars parked in front of him. He opened his eyes and saw a short dark woman with black hair step from a car. He noticed first that her hair, cut as short as a boy’s, glistened wetly with gel, then that her body, even inside the padding of a grey down parka, was slim and youthful.
He walked down the steps and over to the car. ‘Dottoressa,’ he said formally, ‘I want to thank you for agreeing to meet me.’ She came barely to his shoulder and appeared to be in her thirties, though not by much. What makeup she wore had been carelessly applied, and she had already gnawed off most of her lipstick. It was a sunny day up here in Friuli, but her eyes were pulled tight by more than the sun. Regular features, normal
nose, a face made memorable because of the hair and the evidence of strain.
He took her hand. ‘I thought we might go somewhere and talk,’ she said. She had a pleasant voice a bit heavy on the aspirants. Tuscan, perhaps.
‘Certainly,’ Brunetti answered. ‘I don’t know this area at all well.’
‘I’m afraid there isn’t all that much to know,’ she said, getting back into the car. When both of them were buckled in, she started the engine, saying, ‘There’s a restaurant not far from here.’ With a shiver, she added, ‘It’s too cold to stay outside.’
‘Whatever you like,’ Brunetti answered.
They drove though the centre of town. Pasolini, Brunetti remembered, had come from here, had fled in disgrace, gone to Rome. As they drove down the narrow street, Brunetti thought how lucky Pasolini had been to have been driven out of all of this undistinguished orderliness. How to live in a place like this?
Beyond the town, they drove down a highway, each side lined with houses or businesses or commercial buildings of some sort. The trees were naked. How bleak the winter was up here, Brunetti thought. And then came the thought of how bleak the other seasons would be.
No expert, Brunetti could not judge how well she drove. They turned to the left or right, passed through roundabouts, switched to smaller roads. Within minutes he was completely lost, could not have pointed in the direction of the station had his life depended on it. They passed a small shopping centre with a large optician’s shop, then down another road lined with bare trees. And then to the left and into a parking lot.
Dottoressa Landi turned off the engine and got out of the car without saying anything. Indeed, she had not spoken since they set out, and Brunetti had remained just as quiet, busy watching her hands and what little scenery they passed.