by Donna Leon
‘What do you mean?’ asked Raffi.
‘To work hard, you have to have a job,’ Paola said, looking across the table at him and smiling. ‘Right?’ Raffi nodded. ‘And to pay taxes, you also have to have a job. Or run a business.’
‘Of course,’ Raffi said. ‘Any idiot knows that.’
‘And how does a person find a job?’ Before Raffi could answer, Paola forged ahead. ‘Without knowing someone or having a father who’s a lawyer or a notary who can give him a job as soon as he finishes his studies?’ Again, before her son could answer, she said, ‘Think about the older brothers and sisters of your friends in school. How many of them have found decent jobs? They’ve got all sorts of elegant degrees in I don’t know what sort of elegant subjects, and they sit at home and live off their parents.’ And before her son could accuse her of insensitivity, she added, ‘Not necessarily because they want to but because there are no jobs for them. If they’re lucky, they get some sort of temporary work, but as soon as their contract is up, they’re let go, and someone else is hired for six months.’
Good Lord, Brunetti thought, who sounded like the Marxist now? ‘So how are they to get jobs and pay their taxes?’ he inquired mildly.
Paola started to speak but apparently decided to abandon the topic. ‘I think it’s ready,’ she said. It was: Paola had seared off the skins of the peppers, leaving behind a sweetness and consistency reminiscent of the figs. The family, soothed by the pleasures of lunch, spent the rest of the meal in peaceful discussion of how to spend their time in the mountains.
After lunch, Brunetti sat on the sofa and leafed through Il Gazzettino, but even the lightness of its every word and phrase could not lift the vague uneasiness created by Paola’s obvious change of subject. Retreat was not a tactic to which she was much given.
She came in with coffee, handed him his cup, and sat in an easy chair across from him. She put her feet on the low table and took a sip. ‘If I ever say again, any time in my life, how nice it is to live on the top floor, under the roof, would you please stuff me in the oven and keep me there until I come to my senses?’
‘We could get air conditioning,’ he said, to provoke her.
‘And have Chiara move out?’ she asked. ‘She’s toxic on the subject. One of her friends’ fathers had it put in, and Chiara refuses to go to her house any more.’
‘You think we’ve created a fanatic?’ Brunetti asked.
Paola finished her coffee and set the cup and saucer on the table. After some time, she said, ‘If she’s got to be a fanatic, I’d rather it be the ecology than anything else.’
‘But don’t you think her response is a bit excessive?’ Brunetti asked.
Paola shrugged. ‘It is now, this year, in this historical period. But ten years from now, twenty, she might be proven right, and we’ll look back at the excess of our lives and see it as criminal.’ She closed her eyes and let her head fall against the back of the chair.
‘And then people will call her a prophet and not a fanatic?’
‘Who knows?’ Paola said, eyes closed. ‘They’re often the same thing.’
‘Why’d you change the subject?’ he asked.
‘About jobs and taxes?’ she asked.
He studied her face. She was more than twenty years older than when he had first met her, and yet he could see no difference. Blonde hair that had a will of its own, a nose that was perhaps too large for this era of female beauty, the cheekbones that had drawn his first kisses. He grunted by way of answer.
‘I didn’t want to talk about taxes,’ she said at last.
‘Why?’
‘Because I think we’re crazy to continue to pay them, and if I could, I’d stop.’
‘Is this excessive rhetoric?’ long experience prompted him to ask.
She opened her eyes and smiled across at him. ‘Probably. But I was surprised to realize a few days ago that some of the things the Lega says — those same things that had me wild with anger a decade ago — they’re beginning to make sense to me.’
‘We become our parents,’ Brunetti said, repeating something his mother had often said. ‘What things?’
‘That our tax money goes South and is never seen again. That the North works hard and pays its taxes and gets very little in return for it. That the Vatican tells us to be generous to immigrants but doesn’t take any in.’
‘You going to start talking about building a wall between the North and the South?’ he asked.
She let out a snort of laughter. ‘Of course not. I simply didn’t want to talk like this in front of the kids.’
‘You think they don’t know?’
‘Of course they know,’ she said. ‘But they know only from what we do or what their friends’ parents do.’
‘For example?’
‘That when we eat in a restaurant where the owner is a friend, we don’t get a ricevuta fiscale, so no tax is paid.’
Brunetti was always, and uncontrollably, defensive about any suggestion of frugality on his part and quickly jumped to his own defence. ‘I don’t do it to make them charge less. You know that.’
‘That’s just my point, Guido. That at least would make sense because it would save you money. But you do it out of principle, not greed, so that this disgusting government of ours won’t get at least that little bit of money to give to their friends or put in their own pockets.’
He nodded. That was exactly the point.
‘And that’s why I don’t want to talk about taxes in front of them. If they’re going to end up feeling that way about the government, then they have to discover it themselves: they shouldn’t learn it from us.’
‘Even if it is, as you say, a “disgusting” government?’
‘It’s not as bad as some,’ she temporized after a moment’s reflection.
‘I’m not sure that’s the most eloquent defence of our government I’ve ever heard,’ he said.
‘I’m not trying to defend it,’ she said angrily. ‘It’s disgusting, but at least it’s disgusting in a non-violent way. If that makes a difference.’
After some reflection, Brunetti said, ‘I suppose it does.’ He pushed himself to his feet, walked around the table and bent to kiss her and said he’d be back at the usual time for dinner.
10
On his way back to the Questura, again taking the vaporetto to avoid the sun, Brunetti considered what he and Paola had said to one another and what Paola had not said to the children at lunch. How many times had he heard people use the phrase, ‘Governo Ladro’? And how many times had he agreed in silence that the government was a thief? But in the last few years, as though some previous sense of restraint or shame had been overcome, there had been less attempt on the part of their rulers to pretend that they were anything less than what they were. One of his previous superiors, the Minister of Justice, had been accused of collusion with the Mafia, but all it had taken was a change of government for that story to have drifted out of the newspapers and, for all he knew, out of the halls of justice.
Brunetti was, by disposition and then by training, a listener: people sensed that first in him and in his company spoke easily and often entirely without reserve. In the last year, what he heard more and more in the voices of people — sometimes a woman standing next to him on the vaporetto or a man in a bar — was a mounting sense of disgust at the way they were ruled and at the people who ruled them. It didn’t matter if the people who spoke to him had voted for or against the politicians they reviled: they’d be happy to lock them all up in the local church and set it ablaze.
Underlying it all, and this is what troubled Brunetti, was a sense of despair. He was troubled by the helplessness which so many people felt and their failure to understand what had happened, as if aliens had taken over and imposed this system on them. Governments came and governments went, the Left came and then gave place to the Right, and nothing changed. Though politicians often talked of it and promised it, not one of them gave evidence of having any real desire to
change this system which worked so very much to their real purposes.
As the boat passed the Piazza, Brunetti saw the crowds, the queues snaking back from the entrance to the Basilica, even at three in the afternoon. What possessed people to stand in the open, under that sun, motionless? It was difficult for him to subtract his familiarity with the Basilica from his store of knowledge. He had been taken there countless times in his youth by his teachers and by his mother: the teachers took their students to show them the beauty, and his mother had taken him, he supposed, to show him the truth and power of her faith. He tried to wipe his mind clear of familiarity with the sweeping glory of the interior and wondered to what lengths he would go if he had but one chance in his lifetime to stand inside Basilica San Marco, and to do so he had to stand in a queue for an hour under the afternoon sun.
He turned to his right to consult the angel on the bell tower of San Giorgio, and together they decided. ‘I’d do it,’ Brunetti said and nodded in affirmation, much to the discomfiture of the two scantily clad girls who sat between him and the window of the boat.
He went directly to Signorina Elettra’s office, which was, as he expected to find it, even hotter than it had been the day before. Today it was her blouse that was yellow, but she still seemed entirely untouched by the heat.
‘Ah, Commissario,’ she said as he came in, ‘I’ve found your Signor Gorini.’
‘Speak, Muse,’ Brunetti said with a smile.
‘Signor Gorini, who is forty-four, according to the information on his carta d’identità,’ she began, sliding a sheet of paper towards him, ‘was born in Salerno where, from the age of eighteen to twenty-two, he was a seminarian with the Franciscan fathers.’
She looked up, pleased. Brunetti smiled in return, equally pleased.
‘Then, for a period of four years, there is no sign of him, until he reappeared in Aversa, working as a clinical psychologist.’ She glanced at Brunetti to see that he was following. He nodded encouragingly.
‘While he was living there, he married and had a son, Luigi, who is now sixteen.’ She flicked a speck of dust from the page before consulting it again.
‘After he had been in practice — though I think that word is notional — in Aversa for five years, he was discovered to have neither a licence nor a degree in psychology, nor, so far as the ULSS authorities could determine at the time, any training in psychology whatsoever.’
‘What happened to him?’
‘His practice was closed and he was fined three million lire. But the fine was never paid because Signor Gorini removed himself from Aversa.’
‘And the wife? And the son?’
‘It would seem neither of them ever heard from him again.’
‘Obviously, he was better suited to the cloistered life,’ Brunetti permitted himself to say.
‘Clearly,’ she agreed and shifted the paper aside to uncover another.
‘He next came to the attention of the authorities eight years ago, when it was discovered that the centre he was running in Rapallo, which specialized in helping integrate refugees from Eastern Europe into the workforce, was merely a kind of hostel where he allowed immigrants to live while they went out to work at jobs he found for them.’
‘And in exchange?’
‘In exchange, they gave him 60 per cent of their salaries, but they were at least given a place to live.’
‘Meals?’
‘Don’t be absurd, Dottore. He was also helping to introduce them to the experience of living in a capitalist society.’
‘Every man for himself,’ Brunetti said.
‘Dog eat dog,’ she replied, then added, ‘Though in this case one hopes that is not true. They could cook in this place where they lived.’
‘At least that,’ Brunetti said. ‘What happened?’
‘One of the women went to the Carabinieri. She was Romanian, so she could make herself understood. She told them what was going on, and they made a visit to the centre. But Signor Gorini was not to be found.’
‘Did he use his own name all this time?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Yes, he did,’ she said. ‘And apparently that was fine.’
‘Lucky for you that he did use it,’ he said, then, seeing her response, quickly added, ‘Though I’m sure it would have made no difference to you if he’d used another one. It just would have taken longer.’
‘Minimally,’ she said, and Brunetti believed her.
‘And since then?’ he asked.
‘There was no trace of him for a few years, and then five years ago he set up a practice as a homeopathic doctor, this time in Naples, but,’ and here she looked up and shook her head in open astonishment, ‘after two years someone checked his application file and discovered that he had never studied medicine.’
‘What happened?’
‘The practice was closed.’ That was all she said. Perhaps it was not a crime in Naples to practise medicine without a licence.
‘Two years ago,’ she continued, ‘he changed his residence to the address you gave me, but he is not the person in whose name the rental contract is written.’
‘Who is that?’
‘A woman named Elvira Montini.’
‘Who is?’
‘Who works as a lab technician at the Ospedale Civile.’
‘Maybe he’s gone straight,’ Brunetti suggested.
She raised her eyebrows at this idea but said nothing.
‘Have you found any indication of what he’s doing?’
‘For all I can find, he could be devoting himself to a life of contemplation and good works,’ she said.
‘Yet Vianello’s aunt seems to be taking large sums of money to him at that address,’ said a sceptical Brunetti. ‘To one of the people at that address, at any rate,’ he corrected. ‘That’s the only apartment that uses that entrance.’
‘So that’s what Vianello’s been so worried about,’ Signorina Elettra said, her concern and affection audible in every word.
‘Yes, for some time.’
He thought about his connections at the hospital and said, ‘I can ask Dottor Rizzardi. He must know the people in the lab.’
Her cough was so discreet as hardly to exist, but to Brunetti it was a clarion call. ‘You spoke to him, then?’
‘Yes, sir.’ Before he could ask, she explained, ‘I took the liberty of asking.’
‘Ah,’ escaped his lips. ‘And?’
‘And she is that one reliable person upon whom the entire enterprise depends,’ she answered, and Brunetti kept his eyes from meeting hers. ‘She’s been there for fifteen years, never married; if anything, is married to her work.’
Impulsively, to divert them both from any reflection upon how closely this description, save for the number of years, matched Signorina Elettra herself, Brunetti asked, ‘Then how explain the presence of Signor Gorini in her home?’
‘Indeed,’ she agreed, then continued, ‘I asked the doctor if there was anything else he could tell me about her, and I sensed a certain reluctance on his part. He sounded, if anything, protective of her.’
‘So what did you do?’
‘I lied, of course,’ she said with equanimity. ‘I told him my sister knew someone who worked in the lab with her — which is true — I even gave her name. It was someone Barbara went to medical school with but who didn’t finish. I said she had spoken very well of Signorina Montini but said she thought she’d changed in the last year or so.’
Before Brunetti could ask, she explained, ‘Any woman who has been living with a man like that has probably changed in the course of two years, and not for the better.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He said her work was still excellent, and then he changed the subject.’
‘I see,’ Brunetti said. ‘You want to ask your sister to talk to her classmate?’
Signorina Elettra gave a sharp shake of her head and lowered her eyes to her desk. ‘They don’t speak,’ was the only explanation she offered.
�
�What else?’ he asked, seeing that there were still some papers she had not uncovered.
‘He’s got an account at the UniCredit.’ She handed him a bank statement of the movements for the last six months in the account of Stefano Gorini. Brunetti studied it, looking for a pattern, but there was none. Sums, always cash and never in excess of five hundred Euros, moved in and out of the account each month. The current total was less than two thousand Euros.
‘Any suggestion of how he supports himself?’
She shook her head. ‘He could have generous friends, or he could be living off Signorina Montini, or he could, for all I know, be very lucky at roulette or cards. The money washes in and flows away, and there’s never a deposit or withdrawal large enough to cause the least curiosity.’
‘Credit card bills?’ Brunetti asked.
‘It would seem he doesn’t have one.’
‘Mirabile dictu,’ Brunetti said. ‘And this in the new millennium.’
‘But he might have a telefonino,’ Signorina Elettra said, and explained, ‘I won’t know until this afternoon, perhaps not until tomorrow.’
She read Brunetti’s surprise and said, by way of explanation, ‘Giorgio’s on vacation.’
‘So you have to ask someone else?’
Her expression showed her bewilderment at his failure to understand client loyalty. ‘No, he’ll try it from Newfoundland, but he’s not sure he can get it to me today: he said it might be complicated to patch into the Telecom system from there.’
‘I see,’ said Brunetti, who didn’t. ‘I’d like to think of a way to keep an eye on his house.’
‘I looked it up in Calli, Campi, e Campielli, sir, and it doesn’t look like it would be easy. You’d need people permanently in Campo dei Frari and in San Tomà, and even then you wouldn’t be sure whoever went into or came out of the calle had been to that address.’
‘Can you think of anyone here who lives around there?’ he asked.
‘Let me check,’ she said and turned to her computer. Brunetti assumed she was pulling up the personal files of the people who worked in the Questura. It was less than two minutes before she said, ‘No, sir. No one lives within two bridges of it.