by Donna Leon
“The conviction, Signor Rondini?” Brunetti asked.
“Yes, because of that day on the beach.” He gave Brunetti a small smile of encouragement, prodding Brunetti to remember something he must have known about.
“I’m sorry, Signor Rondini, but I’m not familiar with the conviction. Could you tell me something more about it?”
Rondini’s smile disappeared, replaced by a pained, embarrassed look.
“Elettra didn’t tell you?”
“No, I’m afraid she hasn’t spoken to me about it.” When Rondini’s expression became even more grim at hearing this, Brunetti added, smiling, “Other than to explain to me what a great help you’ve been to us, of course. It’s because of your help that we’ve made the progress we have.” The fact that there was no real progress in the case didn’t make the remark necessarily a lie, not that this would have stopped Brunetti from saying it.
When Rondini didn’t say anything, Brunetti prodded him. “Perhaps you could tell me a little bit about it, and then I can see how I can help you.”
Rondini’s hands came together in his lap, the fingers of the right gently massaging those of the left. “As I said, it’s about the conviction.” He looked up, and Brunetti smiled, nodding his head encouragingly. “For indecent exposure,” Rondini added. Brunetti’s smile didn’t change; Rondini seemed encouraged by that.
“You see, Commissario, I was on the beach two summers ago, at the Alberoni.” Brunetti’s smile remained, even at the name of the beach out at the end of the Lido so popular with gays that it had come to be known as Sin Beach. The smile still didn’t change, but his eyes studied Rondini, and his hands, with sharpened attention.
“No, no, Commissario,” Rondini said with a shake of his head. “It’s not me. It’s my brother.” He stopped and shook his head again in mingled embarrassment and confusion. “I’m just making it worse.” Again he smiled, even more nervously, and sighed once. “Let me start again.” Brunetti greeted this idea with a nod. “My brother’s a journalist. That summer he was doing an article about the beach, and he asked me to go out there with him. He thought that that way we’d look like a couple and people would leave us alone. That is, leave us alone but talk to him.” Again, Rondini stopped and glanced down at his hands, now floundering about in his lap.
When he said nothing and gave no indication that he would speak again, Brunetti asked, “Is that where it happened?” When Rondini neither looked up nor answered, Brunetti prodded, “The incident?”
Rondini took a deep breath and started talking again. “I went for a swim, but then it began to get cold, so I decided to change back into my clothes. My brother was way down the beach, talking to someone, and I thought I was alone. Well, there was no one within about twenty meters of the blanket. So I sat down and took off my bathing suit, and just as I was pulling my trousers on, two policemen came up to me and told me to stand up. I tried to pull my trousers on, but one of the policemen stepped on them, so I couldn’t.” As he spoke, Rondini’s voice grew tighter. Brunetti couldn’t tell whether it was from embarrassment or anger.
One of Rondini’s hands moved up to his chin and began to rub absently at his beard. “So I tried to put my bathing suit back on, but the other one picked it up and held it.” Rondini stopped.
“Then what happened, Signor Rondini?”
“I stood up.”
“And?”
“And they wrote up a summons against me, accusing me of public indecency.”
“Did you explain to them?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“They didn’t believe me.”
“What about your brother? Did he come back?”
“No, it all happened in about five minutes. By the time he got back, they’d written out the summons and they were gone.”
“What did you do about it?”
“Nothing,” Rondini said and looked Brunetti in the eye. “My brother told me not to worry, that they had to inform me if they were going to do anything about it.”
“And did they?”
“No. Or at least I never heard anything. Then, two months later, a friend called and told me he’d seen my name in that day’s Gazzettino. There’d been some sort of legal process, but I was never notified. No fine, nothing. I never heard anything, not until they sent me a letter saying that I’d been convicted.”
Brunetti considered this for a moment, not finding it at all strange. A misdemeanor like this could very easily slip through the cracks of the justice system, and a man could find himself convicted without ever having been formally accused. What he did not understand was why Rondini was coming to him about it.
“Have you tried to get the decision changed?”
“Yes. But they told me that it was too late, that I had to do something about it before the proceedings. It wasn’t a trial or anything like that.” Brunetti nodded, familiar with this system of ruling on misdemeanors. “But it means I’ve been convicted of a crime.”
“A misdemeanor,” Brunetti corrected him.
“But still convicted,” Rondini insisted.
Brunetti tilted his head to one side and raised his eyebrows in a gesture that he hoped was both skeptical and dismissive. “I don’t think you have anything to worry about, Signor Rondini.”
“I’m getting married,” Rondini said, an answer which baffled Brunetti completely.
“I’m afraid I don’t follow you.”
Rondini’s voice grew tight as he said, “My fiancée. I don’t want her family to learn that I was convicted of indecent exposure on a homosexual beach.”
“Does she know about it?” Brunetti asked.
He saw Rondini begin to give one answer, then change it. “No. I didn’t know her when it happened, and since then there’s never been a time when it seemed right to tell her. Or a way. With my brother and my friends, it’s just a funny story now, but I don’t think she’d like it.” Rondini shrugged away any uneasiness he might have with this fact and added, “And her family would like it even less.”
“And you’ve come to me to see if I can do anything about it?”
“Yes. Elettra has talked about you a lot, said you were very powerful here at the Questura.” Rondini’s voice was rich with deference when he said this; worse, it was equally filled with hope.
Brunetti shrugged this compliment away. “What sort of thing did you have in mind?”
“I need two things,” Rondini began. “I’d like you to change my record,” he began, but as soon as he saw Brunetti begin to object, he added, “I’m sure you can do something as simple as that.”
“It means altering an official government document,” Brunetti said in a voice he hoped he managed to make sound severe.
“But Elettra says that’s …” Rondini began but stopped immediately.
Brunetti was afraid of how that sentence might have ended, so he said, “This might be something that sounds a great deal easier than it is.”
Rondini looked up at him then, his gaze bold, his objection evident but unspoken. “May I tell you the second thing?”
“Of course.”
“I need a letter explaining that the original complaint was mistaken and that I was absolved in court. In fact, it would help if the letter apologized for my trouble.”
He was tempted to dismiss the idea as impossible, but instead Brunetti asked, “Why do you need this?”
“For my fiancée. And for her family. If they should ever learn about it.”
“But if the record is changed, why would you need the letter?” Brunetti asked but immediately corrected himself, adding, “If the record can be changed, that is.”
“Don’t worry about the record, Dottore.” Rondini spoke with such absolute authority that Brunetti was forced to recall that he worked in the computer office of SIP, and then he remembered the small rectangular box on Signorina Elettra’s desk.
“And from whom should this letter come?”
“I’d like it to come from the Qu
estore,” Rondini began but quickly added, “but I know that’s impossible.” Brunetti noticed that, at the first sign that they had apparently struck a bargain and had only to dicker about the details, Rondini’s hands had ceased to move and lay quietly in his lap; he seemed even to relax in his chair.
“Would a letter from a commissario suffice?”
“Yes, I think so,” Rondini said.
“And what about canceling the report in our files?”
Rondini waved a hand. “A day. Two.”
Brunetti didn’t want to know which of them, Rondini or Elettra, would do it, so he didn’t ask. “Later in the week, I’ll run a check on your name and see if there’s a file on you.”
“There won’t be,” Rondini assured him, but there was no arrogance in the claim, nothing more than simple certainty.
“When I know that, I’ll write the letter.”
Rondini got to his feet. He extended his hand across Brunetti’s desk. As the two men shook hands, Rondini said, “If I can ever do you a favor, Commissario, anything at all, just remember where I work.” Brunetti saw him to the door and, when he was gone, went down to speak to Signorina Elettra.
“You spoke to him?” she asked when Brunetti came in.
Brunetti wasn’t sure whether or not to be offended by her assumption that he would so casually discuss the altering of official state documents and the writing of entirely fraudulent letters.
He opted for irony. “I’m surprised you bothered to have him speak to me at all. That you didn’t just take care of it all yourself.”
Her smile blossomed. “Well, of course, I thought of doing that, but I thought it would be helpful if you spoke to him.”
“Because of changing the records?” he asked.
“Oh, no, either Giorgio or I could do that in a minute,” she said in an entirely dismissive tone.
“But isn’t there some sort of secret password that prevents people from getting into our computer?”
She hesitated a moment before she answered. “There’s a password, yes, but it’s not very secret.”
“Who knows it?”
“I’ve no idea, but it would be very easy to find.”
“And use?”
“Probably.”
Brunetti chose not to follow that thought. “Then because of the letter?” he asked, assuming that she would know about Rondini’s request for one.
“Oh, no, Dottore. I could just as easily have written that for him. But I thought it would be good for him to meet you, to show him that you’re willing to help him with this.”
“In case we need more information from SIP?” he asked, irony abandoned.
“Exactly,” she said and smiled in real delight, for the Commissario had begun to understand how things worked.
19
All thoughts of Signor Rondini, however, were wiped from Brunetti’s mind by the news that pulled him, half-shaved, from the bathroom the next morning. Ubaldo Lotto, the brother of Carlo Trevisan’s widow, had been found shot dead in his car, parked on a side road that led off the state highway between Mestre and Mogliano Veneto. He appeared to have been shot three times, at close range, apparently by someone who was sitting beside him in the front seat of his car.
The body had been discovered at about five that morning by a local resident who, his car slowed by the heavy mud formed by the night’s rain and by the large car parked at the side of the narrow road, had not liked what he had seen when he passed: the driver slumped over the steering wheel, the motor of the car still running. He had stopped, walked back to peer inside, and then, seeing the blood pooled on the front seat, had called the police. When they arrived, the police cordoned off the area and began to search for traces of the killer or killers. There were signs that another car had been parked behind Lotto’s, but the heavy autumn rain had washed away all hope of taking an impression of the tire tracks. The first policeman to open the door gagged at the smell of blood, fecal matter, and some heavy scent he took to be the victim’s aftershave, all blended together and exaggerated by the heater of the car, which had run at its highest setting during the hours Lotto lay across the steering wheel in his death’s embrace. Carefully, the crime scene crew examined the area around the car and then, when it had been towed to the police garage in Mestre, pored over the vehicle to extract and label fibers, hairs, and any other particles of matter that might provide information about the person who had sat on the front seat beside Lotto when he died.
The car had already been towed when Brunetti and Vianello, driven in a car from the Mestre police, arrived at the scene of the killing. From the backseat, all they saw was a narrow country lane and trees that still dripped with water, even though the rain had stopped at dawn. At the police garage, they saw a maroon Lancia sedan, its front seat covered with stains that were slowly turning the same color as the car. And at the morgue they met the man who had been called to identify the body and who turned out to be Salvatore Martucci, the surviving partner of Trevisan’s law firm. A flash from Vianello’s eyes and a slight nod in Martucci’s direction told Brunetti that this was the same lawyer Vianello had spoken to, the one who had displayed so little grief in the aftermath of Trevisan’s murder.
Though thin and wiry, Martucci was taller than most Southerners, and his hair, which he wore shorter than was the current style, was reddish blond; this combination of qualities made him appear a throwback to the hordes of invading Normans who had swept across the island for generations and whose heritage could still be found, centuries later, in the piercing green eyes of many Sicilians as well as in the occasional French phrases that lingered in their dialect.
When Vianello and Brunetti got there, Martucci was just being led out of the room in which the bodies were kept. It struck them both that it would take very little for Martucci to look like a corpse himself: his eyes were ringed with flesh so dark it looked bruised and emphasized the terrible pallor of his complexion.
“Avvocato Martucci?” Brunetti began, stopping in front of him.
The lawyer looked at Brunetti, apparently without seeing him, then at Vianello, whom he seemed to notice, though he might have recognized no more than the familiar blue uniform.
“Yes?” he said.
“I’m Commissario Guido Brunetti. I’d like to ask you a few questions about Signor Lotto.”
“I don’t know anything,” Martucci answered. Though he spoke in a monotone, his Sicilian accent was still marked.
“I realize that this must be a very difficult time for you, Signor Martucci, but there are certain questions we must ask you.”
“I don’t know anything,” Martucci repeated.
“Signor Martucci,” Brunetti said, standing steady beside Vianello so as to block Martucci’s passage down the hallway, “I’m afraid that if you don’t speak to us, we’ll have no choice but to ask the same questions of Signora Trevisan.”
“What’s Franca got to do with this?” Martucci asked, head shooting up, eyes flashing back and forth between Brunetti and Vianello.
“The murdered man is her brother. Her husband died, in the same way, less than a week ago.”
Martucci looked away from them while he considered this. Brunetti was curious to see whether Martucci would question that similarity, insist that it meant nothing. But he simply said, “All right, what do you want to know?”
“Perhaps we could go into one of the offices,” Brunetti said, having already asked the coroner if he could use his deputy’s room.
Brunetti turned away and walked down the corridor, and Martucci fell into step behind him, followed by Vianello, who still had neither spoken nor acknowledged having already spoken to Martucci. Brunetti opened the door to the office and held it for Martucci. When the three men were seated, Brunetti said, “Perhaps you could tell us where you were last night, Signor Martucci.”
“I don’t see why that’s necessary,” Martucci answered in a voice more confused than resistant.
“We will want to know where everyone wh
o knew Signor Lotto was last night, Signor Martucci. Such information is, as you must know, necessary in any murder investigation.”
“I was at home,” Martucci answered.
“Was anyone with you?”
“No.”
“Are you married, Signor Martucci?”
“Yes. But I’m separated from my wife.”
“Do you live alone?”
“Yes.”
“Do you have children?”
“Yes. Two.”
“Do they live with you or with your wife?”
“I don’t see what any of this has to do with Lotto.”
“We are interested in you at the moment, Signor Martucci, not in Signor Lotto,” Brunetti answered. “Do your children live with your wife?”
“Yes, they do.”
“Is yours a legal separation, leading toward a divorce?”
“We’ve never discussed it.”
“Could you explain that a bit further for me, Signor Martucci?” Brunetti asked, though it was a common enough situation.
When he spoke, Martucci’s voice had the dead calm of truth. “Even though I’m a lawyer, the thought of going through a divorce terrifies me. My wife would oppose any attempt I might make to get one.”
“Yet you’ve never discussed it?”
“Never. I know my wife well enough to know what her answer would be. She would not consent, and there are no grounds on which I could divorce her. If I tried to do so against her will, she would take everything I own.”
“Are there grounds on which she might divorce you, Signor Martucci?” Brunetti asked. When Martucci gave no answer, Brunetti rephrased the question, turning to euphemism, “Are you seeing anyone, Signor Martucci?”
Martucci’s answer was immediate. “No.”
“I find that hard to believe,” Brunetti said with the smile of camaraderie.
“What does that mean?” Martucci said.
“You’re a handsome man, in the prime of life, a professional, clearly a successful man. Certainly there are many women who would find you attractive and would welcome your attentions.”
Martucci said nothing.
“No one?” Brunetti repeated.
