by Donna Leon
He found an invitation to a conference in Palermo that would ‘enhance coordination between the community and the organizations dedicated to maintaining order in civil society’. He pushed his chair back and stared out the window, allowing the Cloud of Ironic Despair to descend upon his head. Did this mean he was invited to a meeting between the citizens of Palermo and the police, or did the people in charge down there have a sense of humour and it was really meant to be a meeting between local citizens and the Mafia, the only organization well enough led, sufficiently clear in its purposes, and free of infiltrators to go about the business of maintaining order in society so as best to suck from it what little life remained? His first impulse was that of the show-off, to forward the invitation to Vianello and ask if the second possibility were correct, but the habit of leaving no traces was second nature to him and he resisted the temptation.
Among the other emails was one from Pucetti: he was just leaving to accompany Signora Cavanella but wanted to tell Brunetti that his relative would gladly speak to him about that subject. He gave a telefonino number, nothing more. Using his own telefonino, Brunetti dialled the number.
‘Bianchini,’ a man’s voice answered on the third ring.
‘Good morning, Signor Bianchini, this is your cousin Roberto’s friend. He suggested I call you.’
‘Ah,’ the man answered, then said, showing he understood that there was no need to discuss the purpose of the call, ‘I thought we could meet for a coffee some time.’
Brunetti looked at his watch. ‘I have a very light schedule this morning,’ he said, not at all certain of this because he had not read the other emails, ‘so we could meet any time you like.’
‘As it happens, I’m free this morning as well. How about that bar near the Ponte dei Greci? I think you know it.’
‘Yes,’ Brunetti said neutrally.
‘Eleven?’
‘Good,’ Brunetti said and ended the call with a polite farewell.
Fast work from Pucetti in convincing his cousin to talk to him, Brunetti reflected. He sat for a few moments and thought back to the strange urgency with which Patta had explained the situation in San Barnaba. Patta cared about his family and his job and was unlikely to ask Brunetti for help unless one of the two was at risk. Or perhaps it was nothing more than Patta’s attempt to endear himself to the mayor, as a kind of deposit in the bank of favours.
Was it like this everywhere? Brunetti wondered. Was it all connected, and did power in one place seek automatically to ally itself with power in some other place? And did they protect themselves and one another and to hell with the rest?
Remembering that Rizzardi would have reported on the dead man’s teeth, he scrolled down the list of his messages, but there was no report from the pathologist. It had been two days since the autopsy, and the report should have been filed. ‘“Should have” doesn’t mean anything,’ he said aloud.
He wrote an email, telling Rizzardi the report had not arrived and asking the pathologist to make sure that information about the teeth was included. He was about to send it, when he thought of Rizzardi’s sensibility. He cancelled the last sentence and wrote, instead, that he was particularly interested in whatever had been found about the teeth, for this might end up being the only way to make a physical identification of the dead man. This one he sent. He remembered a friend of his who worked as a musical agent once used the term, ‘Diva Dienst’ to describe the manner in which he was forced to treat certain singers, male as well as female. It was a combination of deference, adulation, and dedication to anticipating their every whim. And here he was, a police commissario, engaged in ‘Doctor Dienst’.
Having read his email, he turned to the papers from his in-box. He was successful with the first three,
which he understood, initialled, and placed at the other side of his desk. But the fourth, a report on the increase in pickpocketing, breaking and entering, and mugging caused Brunetti, quite literally, to run his hands through his hair. It was at this point that Claudia Griffoni, the newest of the other commissari, knocked on his door and came in without waiting to be told to do so. Her elegant legs were today partially visible under a dark green woollen skirt, the rest of her covered by a long beige sweater with a high neck.
‘Hiding?’ she asked.
‘From reality,’ he admitted. He pointed to the papers. ‘I’m just reading about the 28 per cent increase in break-ins in the last six months.’
‘Reported break-ins,’ she corrected him, reminding him that he had to add to that whatever his own experience suggested might be the correct number of people who no longer bothered to report a crime.
‘They had a point, though, when they gave the amnesty,’ she said as she came across the room and sat in one of the chairs in front of his desk. ‘If the prisons are full, and the European Court of Human Rights is screaming at the government, then they have to let some out, if only to make room for the new ones.’
There was nothing he could say. Dockets so full that an appeal case in Venice would have to wait nine years to be heard. Drunk drivers on the mainland who exterminated entire families and were placed under house arrest. Mafia control of the country an ever-expanding curse and, not surprisingly, no government willing to examine the increasing symbiosis between Mafia and politicians.
‘Shall we talk about the weather?’ he asked.
She smiled, and it lightened his heart to see it. ‘I’d love to, but I’m afraid I have to speak about our Black Nemesis.’
‘What’s he done now?’
‘It’s not so much what Scarpa does, is it,’ she asked, ‘as what he makes sure will not be done?’
‘For example?’
‘Foa’s been invited by the Guardia Costiera to spend a week with them, starting the first of the month.’
‘To do what?’
‘To familiarize them with the coastline and the places where it’s possible for small boats to make a landing.’
‘What’s being landed?’
‘Cigarettes,’ she said. ‘But you know that.’
Brunetti nodded.
‘It seems now that they’re also landing people. Or so the Guardia Costiera believes.’
‘From where?’
‘Small boats come across from Albania and Croatia, but it looks like some larger ships are stopping off the coast and putting them on to smaller boats to be brought in.’
‘What kind of ships?’
‘Freighters, tankers. Some of them are so big, it’s easy for them to keep fifty people aboard.’
‘Without anyone noticing?’ he asked.
She smiled again. ‘You think the crew cares what happens? Most of them are illegal, anyway, so they’re probably willing to help people they think are in the same situation.’
‘And they asked for Foa?’
She nodded. ‘The commander did. Foa told me a lot of the men who are assigned here come from the South and don’t know the coastline at all. He’s Venetian, family’s been Venetian since the beginning,’ she said. ‘So he knows the coast like he knows the inside of his pocket and can show them where the likeliest landing places are.’
‘And Scarpa?’
‘He refused the request – refused it when it was made and refused it again when the Captain of the Guardia Costiera repeated it.’
‘Did he give any explanation?’
‘He said that Foa is an employee of the police, not of the Marina, so there is no legal protection for anything he might do if he pilots one of their boats.’
‘What does he expect him to do, run a pirate attack on the boat to Chioggia?’
‘The Lieutenant did not lower himself to discuss details: he was speaking of general principles.’ Disgust filling her voice, she added, ‘Scarpa wouldn’t recognize a principle if it sat down next to him on the vaporetto and hit him over the head.’
‘Not that he’d ever take a vaporetto,’ Brunetti said, and hearing himself say that, he understood everything. ‘It’s because Foa won’
t chauffeur him around, isn’t it?’
Griffoni smiled again. ‘Of course. He’s one of the few who stand up to him, won’t take him anywhere unless there’s written authorization from Patta.’
‘Nasty little shit, Scarpa,’ Brunetti said.
‘To say the least,’ she agreed. ‘Except that he’s not little.’
‘I was speaking in the moral sense, I suppose,’ Brunetti said. She nodded in understanding and agreement. ‘So he blocks Foa’s request?’ Brunetti asked. She nodded. ‘Is it important for him?’
‘It certainly can’t hurt him: collaboration with another service, specifically requested to aid them in . . .’ Here Griffoni allowed her voice to take on the metronomic rhythm of politicians . . . ‘the fight against illegal immigration.’
‘The treasurer of a political party steals thirteen million Euros, and the politicians are hysterical about illegal immigration,’ Brunetti said tiredly.
‘He offered to give five back,’ she said in the voice of careful honesty.
Brunetti pushed his chair at a slant and balanced it on its back legs. He latched his fingers together behind his head. ‘I was in a bar last week, and two people in front of me were talking about just that: the thirteen million. And one of them – she was a woman at least a decade older than I am – she put her coffee cup down on the saucer and said only one word. “Bombs”.’
He saw that he had caught Griffoni’s attention, but he kept his hands behind his head and stared at the ceiling as he spoke. ‘The woman with her asked what she meant, and she said that the only way to get rid of them was to bomb Montecitorio and kill them all.’
He lowered his head to see that she was paying attention. ‘The woman with her was the same age, carrying her shopping bag and on the way to Rialto. She looked surprised and said, “But that would damage the building, and it’s so beautiful.”
He took his hands from behind his head and let his chair fall to the ground. ‘So that, Claudia, is what the middle class thinks of our Parliament.’
She shrugged, as if to dismiss the woman’s comment or the importance Brunetti saw in it, but after a moment’s reflection said, ‘I like her concern for the building.’ Then, back to business, she asked, ‘What can we do about Foa?’
‘Patta’s asked me to do him a favour. If I can manage it, I’ll make the price of it that Foa be assigned to this.’
‘You don’t want to use it for yourself?’
‘You sound as if I’m a squirrel burying a nut for the winter,’ he said with a laugh.
His laughter proved contagious. When they stopped, Griffoni said, ‘We trade them back and forth: I do this for you; you do that for me.’
‘And we all have a list, accurate to the centesimo, stored away in our memories.’
‘Like the squirrels,’ she said, thanked him for his time, and left his office.
13
Though it was just quarter to eleven, Brunetti decided to go down to the bar and wait for Bianchini. He looked out the window and saw that it was still raining, so he took the umbrella. The bar was only down at the bridge, so he didn’t bother with his raincoat.
Inside, he said hello and exchanged a few words with Bambola, the tall Senegalese who ran the place most days. Brunetti studied the pastries and, seeing that there was only one of its kind left, told Bambola he’d like the apple and ricotta, but not until the man he was meeting there arrived. Bambola took a pair of metal tongs and placed the pastry on a small plate that he set to the left of the coffee machine. The door was pushed open and smacked against the wall. Two straw-hatted gondolieri, who worked at the boat station on the corner, came in and walked to the bar.
They were, unsurprisingly, loud and vulgar, in the middle of a conversation that consisted of boasts about their sexual conquests of clients. Bambola served them with a kind of exalted deference behind which they were unable to see a contempt so palpable as almost to scream its presence in the room. He never failed to call each of them, ‘Signore’, and insisted upon using the formal ‘Lei’ with them, though they called him, unasked, ‘tu’. Each man had a glass of white wine and a tramezzino and Brunetti was astonished when each of them paid for his own separately. The experience of life had taught him to believe there was a genetic peculiarity in Italian men that prevented them, ever, from letting someone else pay for his drink. But then he remembered that they were gondolieri and thus had an entirely different genetic structure. They remained at the bar, leaning back against it, from which position they could see down the canal to the gondola stop, and they continued their conversation, which he sensed was aimed, somehow, at Bambola.
He moved away from the bar, taking the newspaper with him. He sat at his usual table at the back and opened the paper, looked at the headlines, and thought about what Bianchini might have to tell him.
A man came in, very tall, thin, about Brunetti’s age but almost entirely bald. What hair remained was cut short and encircled the back of his head, as if he scorned any attempt to disguise his baldness. Brunetti saw the look he gave the gondolieri but they, eyes alert for business at the dock at the end of the canal, did not. He approached Bambola, nodded to him. The African made a graceful gesture towards Brunetti; the man nodded again in thanks and turned away.
‘One of them was a Black American, ass as big as a horse,’ Brunetti overheard. ‘But hot; this one was hot, the way the Blacks are.’
Bianchini stopped and stood perfectly still for a slow count of five, then turned back towards them. With a motion neither of the gondolieri missed, he unbuttoned his jacket and planted his feet solidly. ‘Excuse me,’ he said in a normal speaking voice, and then after a pause, ‘Signori.’ They turned to look at him, and Brunetti could read the astonishment in their faces.
‘I think it might be time you went back to your boats.’ His voice was very deep, calm, utterly devoid of emotion.
The taller of the two gondolieri lifted a foot as if to take a step towards the stranger, but his companion – older, wiser, quicker – placed a hand on his arm and swung him around until they were facing one another. Keeping his hand on his companion’s arm, he gave a small shake of his head and turned towards the door. He had to pull at the other’s arm, then he lowered his head and said something to him. The younger one turned his head to look at Bianchini and then followed his companion out of the bar.
Bianchini looked at the barman, who met his gaze with a smile. ‘Would you like your coffee now, Commissario?’ he called to Brunetti.
‘Yes, please,’ Brunetti said, face blank as though he had just dragged his attention away from the newspaper.
The man walked over to him, and Brunetti slipped his legs from under the table to stand. ‘Bianchini, Sandro,’ the man said as he extended his hand. His grasp was firm, but it was only a handshake, not a test of male dominance.
Bianchini was taller than Brunetti, though much thinner, wiry. The skin on his forehead showed the old scars of acne; his light beard was perhaps an attempt to disguise the same marks on his cheeks. His dark eyes were set deep below heavy brows, but his full-lipped mouth and easy smile countered any suggestion of roughness one might see in them.
‘Thank you for coming,’ Brunetti said and sat. Bianchini sat opposite.
Bambola was suddenly there. He set the plate and pastry before Brunetti and a coffee in front of each man. There were also two small glasses of water, which he put down silently before he went back to his place behind the bar.
‘My cousin said you were curious about the vigili,’ Bianchini said, wasting no time. Then, after a pause, ‘He’s a good man, Roberto.’
‘Yes, he is,’ Brunetti agreed. He poured an envelope of sugar into his coffee and swirled it around, then used his spoon to cut the pastry in half.
‘Did he tell you what it was about?’ Brunetti asked.
‘That mask shop in San Barnaba.’
Brunetti nodded. He picked up a piece of pastry with one of the napkins on the plate and took a bite. ‘Would you like the other ha
lf?’ he asked.
‘No, thanks,’ Bianchini said with an easy smile. ‘I can’t eat things like that.’ In response to Brunetti’s furrowed brow, he added, ‘Diabetes.’ Saying that, he took a tube of artificial sweetener from the inside pocket of his jacket and dropped two tiny white pills into his coffee.
Brunetti took a sip of coffee, then said, having decided this was not a man with whom one wasted time, ‘I’ve been told that the vigili are being paid to ignore the tables in front of the shop.’ Hearing himself say this filled Brunetti with sudden embarrassment. Was he, like Scarpa, Patta’s creature, obliged to do his bidding at every turn? ‘The licence holder is the fiancée of the mayor’s son, so there’s a possibility of scandal if this becomes public. The Vice-Questore wants to avoid that.’ He stopped speaking and finished his coffee. He no longer wanted the rest of the pastry and pushed the plate aside.
‘Is that all?’ Bianchini asked, making no attempt to disguise the surprise in his voice and on his face.
‘I think so. What I’m supposed to do is safeguard the mayor’s reputation.’
‘My, my, my,’ Bianchini said with a smile, ‘how very delicate our politicians are becoming. Next thing you know, they’ll be committing hara-kiri if they’re caught with their hands in the till.’
‘I think that’s only in Japan,’ Brunetti said drily, ‘and nowadays even they don’t do it as often as they should.’
‘Pity,’ Bianchini said, ‘I’ve always thought it was a fine example.’
‘It’s not “Made in Japan” any more,’ Brunetti said. ‘Now it’s “Made in China”, and standards have fallen.’
Again Bianchini couldn’t hide his surprise. ‘So you know about what’s going on?’ he asked.
Brunetti didn’t, at least not specifically to do with this subject, but that didn’t stop him from saying, ‘It’s hard not to know, isn’t it?’