by Donna Leon
By the time he was shaved and dressed and back in the kitchen, Paola had changed into her pyjamas and dressing-gown, an old flannel tartan thing she’d worn for so long that they’d both forgotten where she had got it. She sat at the table, reading a magazine and dunking a brioche into a large cup of caffè latte, as though she’d just now got up from a long and restful night’s sleep.
‘Am I supposed to come in, kiss you on the cheek and say, “Buon giorno, cara, did you sleep well?”‘ he asked when he saw her, but there was no hint of sarcasm, either in his voice or in his intention. If anything, he hoped to distance them from the events of the night, though he well knew how impossible that was. Delay, then, the inevitable consequence of Paola’s actions, even if those consequences would be no more than their facing off verbally again, each doomed to the impossibility of accepting the other’s position.
She looked up, considered his words and smiled, suggesting that she, too, would be happy to wait. ‘Will you be home for lunch today?’ she asked, getting up to go to the stove and pour coffee into a wide-mouthed cup. She added heated milk and placed it on the table at his usual place.
As he sat, Brunetti thought how strange the situation was, how even stranger the fact that they both so readily accepted it. He’d read about the spontaneous Christmas truce that had broken out in the trenches on the Western Front during the Great War; Germans crossing over to light the cigarettes they’d just given to the Tommies; the British waving and smiling at the Huns. Massive bombardments had put an end to that: Brunetti saw no brighter possibility of a prolonged truce with his wife. But he’d enjoy it while he could, so he added sugar to his coffee, picked up a brioche and answered, ‘No, I’ve got to go up to Treviso to talk to one of the witnesses to the bank robbery in Campo San Luca last week.’
Because a bank robbery in Venice was such an unusual event, it served to divert them and Brunetti told Paola - even though everyone in the city was sure to have read about it in the paper - the little that was known: a young man with a gun had walked into a bank three days before, demanded money, walked out with it in one hand, the pistol in the other, and had calmly disappeared in the direction of Rialto. The camera hidden in the ceiling of the bank had provided the police with a fuzzy picture, but it had allowed the police to make a tentative identification of the brother of a local man said to have powerful connections to the Mafia. The robber had pulled a scarf up over his mouth and nose as he entered the bank, but he’d removed it as he left, providing a man on the way in with a clear view of his face.
The witness, a pizzaiolo from Treviso who had been going into the bank to make a mortgage payment, had had a good look at the robber and Brunetti hoped he would be able to pick him out from among the photos of suspects the police had assembled. That would be enough to make an arrest and it might be sufficient to win a conviction. So that was where Brunetti was headed that morning.
* * * *
From the back part of the apartment they heard the sound of an opening door and the unmistakable heavy tread of Raffi, sleep-sodden, on his way towards the bathroom and, they hoped, consciousness.
Brunetti took another brioche, surprised to find himself so hungry at this hour: breakfast was something for which normally he had little understanding and less sympathy. While they awaited further sounds of life from the back of the apartment, they kept themselves very busy with their coffee and their brioches.
Brunetti was just finishing when another door opened. A few moments later Chiara stumbled down the hallway and came into the kitchen, one hand prodding at her eyes, as if to help them with the complicated business of opening. Saying nothing, she shuffled barefoot across the kitchen and lowered herself into Brunetti’s lap. She wrapped one arm round his back and planted her head on his shoulder.
Brunetti put both arms round her and kissed the top of her head. ‘You going to school like this today?’ he asked in an entirely conversational voice, studying the pattern on her pyjamas. ‘Nice. I’m sure your classmates will like the look. Balloons. Very tasteful, balloons. Chic, I’d even say. A fashion statement every twelve-year-old will envy.’
Paola lowered her head and returned her attention to her magazine.
Chiara shifted around in his lap, then pushed herself away from him to look down at her pyjamas. Before she could say anything, Raffi came into the kitchen, bent down to kiss his mother and went to the stove to pour himself a cup of coffee from the six-cup moka express. He added hot milk, came back to the table, sat down and said, ‘I hope you don’t mind that I used your razor, Pap à .’
‘To do what?’ Chiara asked, ‘trim your fingernails? There’s certainly nothing growing on that face of yours that needs a razor.’ That said, she moved out of Raffi’s range and closer to Brunetti, who gave her a reproving squeeze through the thick flannel of her pyjamas.
Raffi leaned towards her across the table, but his heart wasn’t in it and he stopped his hand over the pile of brioches and picked one up. He dunked one end into the coffee and took an enormous bite. ‘How come there’s brioches?’ he wanted to know. When no one answered he turned to Brunetti and asked, ‘You go out?’
Brunetti nodded and took his arms from around Chiara. He slipped out from under her and got to his feet.
‘You get the papers, too?’ Raffi asked from around another mouthful of brioche.
‘No,’ Brunetti said, moving to the door.
‘How come?’
‘I forgot,’ he lied to his only son, went into the hall, put on his coat and left the apartment.
* * * *
Outside, he turned towards Rialto and the decades-long familiar route to the Questura. Most mornings he found delight in some small element of the walk: a particularly absurd headline on one of the national papers, some new misspelling on the front of the cheap sweat-shirts that filled the booths on both sides of the market, the first arrival of some longed-for fruit or vegetable. But this morning he saw little and noticed nothing as he made his way through the market, over the bridge and into the first of the narrow streets that would take him to the Questura and to work.
Much of the time it took him to walk to his office he spent thinking about Ruberti and Bellini, wondering if their personal loyalty to a superior who had treated them with a certain measure of humanity would prove sufficient motive for them to betray their oath of loyalty to the State. He assumed it would, but when he realized how suspiciously close this was to the scale of values that had animated Paola’s behaviour, he forced his mind away from them and, instead, contemplated the day’s immediate trial: the ninth of the ‘convocations du personnel’ which his immediate supervisor, Vice-Questore Giuseppe Patta, had instituted at the Questura after the recent training course he’d attended at Interpol headquarters in Lyon.
There, in Lyon, Patta had exposed himself to the elements of the various nations which now made up united Europe: champagne and truffles from France, Danish ham, English beer and some very old Spanish brandy. At the same time he had sampled the various managerial styles on offer by bureaucrats of the different nations. At the end of the course he’d returned to Italy, suitcases filled with smoked salmon and Irish butter, head bursting with new, progressive ideas about how to handle the people who worked for him. The first of these, and the only one so far to be revealed to the members of the Questura, was the now weekly ‘convocations du personnel’, an interminable meeting at which matters of surpassing triviality were presented to the entire staff, there to be discussed, dissected and ultimately disregarded by everyone present.
When the meetings had first begun two months ago, Brunetti had joined the majority in the opinion that they would not last more than a week or two, but here they were, after eight of them, with no end in sight. After the second Brunetti had started to bring his newspaper, but that had been stopped by Lieutenant Scarpa, Patta’s personal assistant, who had repeatedly asked if Brunetti were so little interested in what happened in the city that he would read a paper during the meetings. He had then tr
ied a book, but he could never find one small enough to hold in his cupped hands.
His salvation had come, as had often been the case in the last years, from Signorina Elettra. On the morning of the fifth meeting she had come into his office ten minutes before it was due to begin and asked Brunetti, with no explanation, for ten thousand lire.
He had handed it over and, in return, she’d given him twenty brass-centred five-hundred-lire coins. In response to his questioning look she’d handed him a small card, little bigger than the box that held compact discs.
He’d looked down at the card, seen that it was divided into twenty-five equally sized squares, each of which contained a word or phrase, printed in tiny letters. He’d had to hold it close to his eyes to read some of them: ‘Maximize’, ‘prioritize’, ‘outsource’, ‘liaison’, ‘interface’, ‘issue’ and a host of the newest, emptiest buzz-words to have slipped into the language in recent years.
‘What’s this?’ he’d asked.
‘Bingo,’ was Signorina Elettra’s simple answer. Before he could ask, she’d explained, ‘My mother used to play it. All you have to do is wait for someone to use one of the words on your card - all the cards are different - and when you hear it, you cover it with a coin. The first one to cover five words in a straight line wins.’
‘Wins what?’
‘The money of all the other players.’
‘What other players?’
‘You’ll see,’ was all she’d had time to say before they were summoned to the meeting.
And since that day the meetings had been tolerable, at least for those provided with the small cards. That first day there had been only Brunetti, Signorina Elettra and one of the other commissari, a woman just returned from maternity leave. Since then, however, the cards had appeared on the laps or within the notebooks of an ever expanding number of people and each week Brunetti felt as much interest in seeing who had a card as in actually winning the game. Each week, too, the words changed, usually in conformity with the changing patterns or enthusiasms of Patta’s speech: they sometimes reflected the Vice-Questore’s attempts at urbanity and ‘multiculturalism’ - a word which had also appeared - as well as his occasional attempt to use the vocabulary of languages he did not speak; hence, ‘voodoo economies’, ‘pyramid scheme’ and ‘Wirtschaftlicher Aufschwung’.
Brunetti arrived at the Questura half an hour before the meeting was scheduled to begin. Neither Ruberti nor Bellini was on duty when he got there, so it was a different officer who handed him the previous night’s crime log when he asked to see it. He glanced with every appearance of lack of interest at the pages: a burglary in Dorsoduro at the home of people away on vacation; a fight in a bar in Santa Marta between sailors from a Turkish freighter and two crewmen from a Greek cruise ship. Three of them had been taken to Pronto Soccorso at the Giustinian Hospital, one with a broken arm, but no charges had been pressed as both boats were to sail that afternoon. The window of a travel agency in Campo Martin had been shattered by a rock, but no one had been arrested, nor had there been any witnesses. And the all-night machine that sold prophylactics in front of a pharmacy in Cannaregio had been prised open, probably with a screwdriver and, according to the calculations of the owner of the pharmacy, seventeen thousand lire had been taken. And sixteen packages of prophylactics.
The meeting, when it finally convened, brought no surprises. At the beginning of the second hour, Vice-Questore Patta announced that, in order to assure that they were not being used to launder money, the various non-profit organizations in the city would have to be asked to allow their files to be ‘accessed’ by the computers of the police, at which point Signorina Elettra made a small motion with her right hand, looked across at Vianello, smiled and said, but very softly, ‘Bingo.’
‘Excuse me, Signorina?’ Vice-Questore Patta was aware that something had been going on for some time but ignorant of what it could be.
She looked at the Vice-Questore, repeated her smile and said, ‘Dingo, sir.’
‘Dingo?’ he enquired, peering at her over the tops of the half-glasses he affected for these meetings.
‘The animal protection people, sir, the ones who put the canisters in the shops to collect money to take care of strays. They’re a non-profit organization. So we should contact them as well.’
‘Indeed?’ Patta asked, not certain that this was what he had heard, or what he had expected.
‘I wouldn’t want anyone to forget them,’ she explained.
Patta turned his attention back to the papers in front of him and the meeting continued. Brunetti, chin propped on his hand, watched as six other people made small stacks of coins in front of themselves. Lieutenant Scarpa watched them carefully, but the cards, previously shielded by hands, notebooks and coffee cups, had all disappeared. Only the coins remained - and the meeting, which dragged itself tiredly along for yet another half-hour.
Just at the moment when insurrection - and most of the people in the room carried weapons - was about to break out, Patta removed his glasses and set them tiredly on the papers in front of him. ‘Has anyone anything else to say?’ he asked.
Anyone who might have spoken did not, no doubt deterred by the thought of all those weapons, so the meeting ended. Patta left, followed by Scarpa. Small piles of coins were slid down two sides of the table until they stood either in front of or directly across from Signorina Elettra. With a croupier’s grace she swept them all off the side of the table into one cupped hand and got to her feet, signalling that the meeting really was over.
Brunetti went back upstairs with her, strangely cheered by the sound of coins jingling in the pocket of the grey silk jacket she wore. ‘Accessed?’ he repeated, using the English word but making it, this time, sound like an English word.
‘It’s computer speak, sir,’ she said.
‘To access?’ he asked. ‘It’s a verb now?’
‘Yes, sir, I believe it is.’
‘But it didn’t use to be,’ Brunetti said, remembering when it had been a noun.
‘I think Americans are allowed to do that to their words, sir.’
‘Make them verbs? Or nouns? If they feel like it?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Ah,’ Brunetti breathed.
He nodded to her at the top of the first flight of stairs, and she went towards the front of the building and her small office, just outside Patta’s. Brunetti continued up to his own, thinking about the liberties some people thought they could take with language. Just like the liberties Paola thought she could take with the law.
Brunetti went into his office and closed the door. Everything, he realized when he tried to read the papers on his desk, would pull his thoughts back to Paola and the events of the early morning. There would be no resolution and they would not be free of it until they could talk about it, but the memory of what she had dared to do launched him into a state of anger so consuming that he knew he was still incapable of discussing it with her.
He looked out of the window, seeing nothing, and tried to discover the real reason for his rage. Her behaviour, had he failed to stamp out evidence of it, would have put his job and his career in jeopardy. Had it not been for Ruberti’s and Bellini’s presence and quiet complicity, the newspapers would soon have been full of the story. And there were many journalists -Brunetti busied himself for some minutes making a list of them - who would delight in telling the story of the criminal wife of the commissario. He rethought the phrase, turning it into a headline in capital letters.
But she had been stopped, at least for the present. He remembered taking her in his arms, recalled the current of raw fear running through her. Perhaps her exposure to real violence, even though it was no more than violence against property, would have been a sufficient gesture against injustice. And perhaps she would have time to realize that Brunetti’s career would be put at risk by her action. He glanced down at his watch and saw that he had just enough time to get to the station for the train to Treviso. At the thought o
f being able to deal with something as straightforward as a bank robbery, Brunetti felt himself filled with a sense of happy relief.
* * * *
5
During the journey back from Treviso late in the afternoon, Brunetti felt no sense of success, even though the witness had identified a photo of the man the police believed was the one who appeared on the video and said he would be willing to testify against him. Feeling he had to do it, Brunetti explained who the suspect was, as well as the possible dangers of identifying and testifying against him. Much to his surprise, Signor Iacovantuono, who worked as a cook in a pizzeria, hadn’t been worried about that, indeed, did not seem to be at all interested. He had seen a crime committed. He recognized photos of the man accused of it. And so to him it was his duty as a citizen to testify against the criminal, regardless of the risk to himself or his family. He had seemed, if anything, puzzled at Brunetti’s continued assurances that they would be provided with police protection.
