by Donna Leon
‘That one in the Correr, of the courtesans with their little dogs.’ He knew it, though he could never remember who had painted it. They sat, as absent and bored as Signorina Elettra had seemed when he came in, looking away to the side, as if uninterested in the thought that life was about to happen to them.
‘What about it?’
‘I’ve never been sure if they were courtesans or just wealthy women of those times, so bored with having everything and with nothing at all to do every day that all they could do was sit and stare.’
‘What makes you think of that?’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she answered with a shrug.
‘Are you bored with this?’ he asked, encompassing the office and all it signified with a wave of his hand and hoping her answer would be no.
She turned her head and looked up at him. ‘Are you joking, Commissario?’
‘No, not at all. Why do you ask?’
She studied his face for a long time before saying, ‘I’m not at all bored with it. Quite the opposite.’ Brunetti was not surprised in the least at how glad he was to hear this. After a moment’s pause, she added, ‘Though I’m never quite sure just what my position is here.’
Brunetti had no idea what she meant by that. Her official title was Secretary to the Vice-Questore. She was also meant to be of part-time secretarial help to Brunetti and another commissario, but she had never written a letter or a memo for either of them. ‘I suppose you mean your real position, as opposed to your official position,’ he suggested.
‘Yes, of course.’
Brunetti’s hand, the one holding the reports, had fallen to his side during all this. He raised it in front of him, held it a bit towards her and said, ‘I think you are our eyes and our nose, and the living spirit of our curiosity, Signorina.’
Her head rose from her hand and she graced him with one of her radiant smiles. ‘How nice it would be to read that in a job description, Commissario.’
‘I think it would be best,’ Brunetti said, shaking the folder in the general direction of Patta’s office, ‘if we left your job description alone, as written.’
‘Ah,’ was all she said, but the smile grew even warmer.
‘And didn’t worry about what to call the help you give us.’
Signorina Elettra leaned forward and reached for the folder. Brunetti handed it to her. ‘I was wondering if it would be possible to check and see if this method of killing has been used before and, if so, by whom and on whom?’
‘The garotte?’
‘Yes.’
She shook her head in little angry movements. ‘If I hadn’t been so busy feeling sorry for myself, I would have thought of that,’ she said. Then, quickly, ‘All of Europe or only Italy, and how far back?’
‘Start with Italy and if you don’t come up with anything spread out, beginning with the south.’ It seemed to Brunetti a Mediterranean way of killing a person. ‘Go back five years. Then ten if you don’t find anything.’
She turned and flicked her computer to life, and Brunetti was struck by how completely an extension of her mind he had come to believe it. He smiled and left her office, leaving her to it, wondering if this was more sexist behaviour on his part, or if it degraded her in some way for him to think of her as being somehow part of a computer. On the steps, he found himself laughing, as it were, out loud, aware of what life with a zealot could do to a man and happy to realize he didn’t care.
Vianello was standing outside his office when he got back, obviously waiting for him. ‘Come in, Sergeant. What is it?’
The sergeant followed Brunetti into the room, Iacovantuono, sir.’ When Brunetti didn’t respond, Vianello went on, ‘The people in Treviso have been asking around.’
‘Asking around about what?’ Brunetti enquired and waved the other man to a chair.
‘About his friends.’
‘And his wife?’ Brunetti asked. There could be no other reason for Vianello’s visit.
Vianello nodded.
‘And?’
‘It seems that woman who called was right, sir, though they still haven’t located her. They fought.’ He sat quietly and listened. Vianello continued, ‘One woman who lives in the next building said that he beat her, that she was in the hospital once.’
‘And was she?’
‘Yes. She fell down in the bathroom, or at least that’s what she said.’ Both of them had heard many women say that.
‘Did they check the times?’ he asked, knowing he didn’t have to explain further.
‘The man found her on the stairs at twenty to twelve, Iacovantuono arrived at work a little after eleven.’ Before Brunetti could say anything, Vianello continued, ‘No, no one knows how long she was lying there.’
‘Who’s been asking?’
‘That one we spoke to when we were up there the first time, Negri. When I told him about the phone call we had, he said he’d already begun talking to the neighbours. It’s routine for them, too. I told him we thought the call was false.’
‘And?’
Vianello shrugged. ‘No one saw him leave for work. No one knows exactly when he arrived. No one knows how long she was lying there.’
Though so many things had happened since he’d last seen him, Brunetti still had a clear memory of the face of the pizzaiolo, his eyes dark with grief. ‘There’s nothing we can do,’ he finally told Vianello.
‘I know. But I thought you’d like to be put in the picture.’
Brunetti nodded his thanks, and Vianello went back down to the officers’ room.
Half an hour later, Signorina Elettra knocked on his door. She came in, holding a few sheets of paper in her right hand.
‘Is that what I think it is?’ he asked.
She nodded. ‘There have been three murders similar to this in the last six years. Two were Mafia hits, or appear to have been.’ She came over to his desk and placed the first two papers side by side in front of him and pointed to the two names. ‘One in Palermo and one in Reggio Calabria.’
Brunetti read the names and the dates. One man had been found on the beach, another in his car. Both had been strangled with a thin piece of what was probably plastic-coated wire: no threads or fibres were found around the neck of either victim.
She put another piece of paper beside the other two. Davide Narduzzi had been killed in Padova a year ago and a Moroccan street vendor had been accused of the crime. He had disappeared, however, before he could be arrested. Brunetti read the details: it looked as if Narduzzi had been taken from the back and strangled before he could react. The same description fitted the two other murders. And that of Mitri.
‘The Moroccan?’
‘No trace.’
‘Why is this name familiar?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Narduzzi?’
‘Yes.’
Signorina Elettra placed the last piece of paper in front of Brunetti. ‘“Drugs, armed robbery, assault, association with the Mafia, and suspicion of blackmail,”‘ she read from the list of the accusations that had been brought against Narduzzi during his brief life. ‘Think of the sort of friends a man like this would have. No wonder the Moroccan disappeared.’
Brunetti had been reading quickly to the bottom of the page. ‘If he ever existed.’
‘What?’
‘Look at that,’ he said, pointing to one of the names on the list. Two years before, Narduzzi had been involved in a fight with Ruggiero Palmieri, a supposed member of one of the most violent criminal clans in northern Italy. Palmieri had ended up in the hospital, but had refused to press charges. Brunetti knew enough about men like this to be aware that such a matter would be settled privately.
‘Palmieri?’ Signorina Elettra asked. ‘It’s a name I don’t know.’
‘Just as well. He’s never worked - if that’s the right word - here. Thank God.’
‘You know him?’
‘I met him once, years ago. Bad. A bad man.’
‘Would he do this?’ she asked, tapping a finger on the other two paper
s.
‘I think that’s his job, eliminating people,’ Brunetti answered.
‘Then why would this other one, Narduzzi, cause trouble with him?’
Brunetti shook his head. ‘I have no idea.’ He read through the three brief reports again, then got to his feet. ‘Let’s see what you can find out about Palmieri,’ he said and went down to her office with her.
It wasn’t very much, unfortunately. Palmieri had gone into hiding a year ago, after being identified as one of three men involved in the robbery of an armoured car. Two guards had been wounded, but the thieves had not succeeded in getting the more than eight billion lire being transported in the truck.
Reading between the lines, Brunetti could see that no great expenditure of police energy or resource would have been made to find Palmieri: no one had been killed, nothing had been taken. But now they were dealing with murder.
Brunetti thanked Signorina Elettra and went down to Vianello’s office. The sergeant sat with his head lowered over a stack of papers, his forehead resting on his two cupped palms. No one else was in the room, so Brunetti watched him for a while, then approached the desk. Vianello heard him and looked up.
‘I think I’d like to call in some favours,’ Brunetti said with no introduction.
‘From whom?’
‘People in Padova.’
‘Good people or bad people?’
‘Both. How many do we know?’
If Vianello was flattered to be included in the plural, he gave no sign of it. He thought for a while and finally answered, ‘A couple. Of both sorts. What are we going to ask them?’
‘I’d like to know about Ruggiero Palmieri.’ He saw the name register with Vianello and watched as he began to search for the names of anyone, good or bad, who might be able to tell them something about him.
‘What sort of information do you want?’ Vianello asked.
‘I’d like to know where he was when these men died,’ said Brunetti, putting the papers Signorina Elettra had given him on Vianello’s desk. ‘And I’d like to know where he was the night Mitri was murdered.’
Vianello raised his chin in inquiry and Brunetti explained, ‘I’ve heard that he’s a paid killer. He had trouble with someone named Narduzzi a few years ago.’ Vianello nodded to show that he recognized the name.
‘Remember what happened to him?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Dead. But I forget how.’
‘Strangled, perhaps with an electrical cord.’
‘And these two?’ Vianello asked, nodding down at the documentation.
‘The same.’
Vianello put the papers on top of the ones on his own desk and read through them carefully. ‘I never heard of either one of these. The Narduzzi murder was about a year ago, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes. In Padova.’ The police there had probably been glad to see the last of Narduzzi. Certainly the investigation had never stretched as far as Venice. ‘Can you think of anyone who might know something?’
‘There’s that man you worked with, the one from Padova.’
‘Delia Corte,’ Brunetti supplied. ‘I’d already thought of him. He probably knows some bad people he can ask. But I wondered if you knew anyone.’
‘Two,’ Vianello stated, offering no explanation.
‘All right. Ask them.’
‘What can I offer them in return, Commissario?’
Brunetti had to think about this for a while and consider both the favours he might be able to ask of other policemen and the ones he could safely extend himself. Finally he said, ‘I’ll owe them a favour and if anything happens to them in Padova, so will della Corte.’
‘It’s not a great deal,’ Vianello said, honestly sceptical.
It’s the best they’re going to get.’
* * * *
20
The next hour was filled with phone calls to and from Padova as Brunetti contacted police and Carabinieri and engaged in the delicate business of calling in some of the favours he had accumulated during his years in the police. Most of these calls were made from his office to other offices. Delia Corte agreed to ask around in Padova and said he’d be willing to match Brunetti’s offer of a favour in return for any help they were given. After he was finished with these, he left the Questura, walked out to a bank of public telephones on the Riva degli Schiavoni, and from there used up a small stack of fifteen-thousand-lire telephone cards ringing the telefonini of various petty and not so petty criminals with whom he had dealt in the past.
He knew, as did all Italians, that many of these calls could be, perhaps were even now being, intercepted and recorded by various agencies of the State, so he never gave his name and always spoke in the most oblique way, saying only that a certain person in Venice was interested in the whereabouts of Ruggiero Palmieri but no, most decidedly no, he did not want to make contact, nor did he want Signor Palmieri to learn that questions were being asked about him. His sixth call, to a drug dealer whose son Brunetti had not arrested after being attacked by the boy the day after his father’s last conviction some years ago, said he would see what he could do.
‘And Luigino?’ Brunetti asked to show that there were no hard feelings.
‘I’ve sent him to America. To study business,’ the father said before he hung up. That probably meant Brunetti would have to arrest him the next time he met him. Or perhaps, empowered by his degree in business management from some prestigious American university, he would rise to great heights in the organization and thus pass into realms where he would hardly be likely to be subject to arrest by a humble commissario di polizia from Venice.
Using the last of his phone cards and reading her number from a piece of paper, Brunetti called Mitri’s widow and, as he had on the day after Mitri’s death, listened to a recorded message saying that the family, burdened with grief, was accepting no messages. He switched the phone to the other ear and searched in his pocket until he found a piece of paper with Mitri’s brother’s number, but there, too, he heard only a message. On a whim, he decided to pass by Mitri’s apartment and see if anyone else from the family was there.
He took the 82 to San Marcuola and easily found his way to the building. He rang the bell and soon heard a man’s voice on the intercom, asking who he was. He said he was from the police, gave his rank but not his name, heard nothing for a moment, then was told to come in. The salt was still busy with its corrosive work, and paint and plaster lay in small piles on the stairs as before.
At the top a man in a dark suit stood just inside the open door. He was tall and very thin, with a narrow face and short dark hair just going grey at the temples. When he saw Brunetti, he stepped back to allow him to enter and extended his hand. ‘I’m Sandro Bonaventura,’ he said, ‘Paolo’s brother-in-law.’ Like his sister, he chose to speak Italian, not Veneziano, though the underlying accent was audible.
Brunetti shook hands and, still not giving his name, entered the apartment. Bonaventura led him into a large room at the end of the short corridor. He noticed that the floor in this room was covered with what looked like the original oak boards, not parquet, and the curtains in front of the double windows appeared to be genuine Fortuny cloth.
Bonaventura motioned to a chair and, when Brunetti was seated, sat opposite him. ‘My sister isn’t here,’ he began. ‘She and her granddaughter have gone to stay a few days with my wife.’
‘I had hoped to speak to her,’ Brunetti said. ‘Have you any idea when she’ll be back?’
Bonaventura shook his head. ‘She and my wife are very close, as close as sisters, so we asked her to come and stay with us when . . . when this happened.’ He looked down at his hands and shook his head slowly, then up again and met Brunetti’s eyes. ‘I can’t believe it happened, not to Paolo. There was no reason, none at all.’
‘There very often isn’t any reason, if a person comes in on a robber and he panics ...’
‘You think it was a robbery? What about the note?’ Bonaventura asked.
Brunett
i paused before he answered, ‘It could be that the robber chose him because of the publicity caused by the travel agency. He could have had the note with him, planned to leave it there after the robbery.’
‘But why bother?’
Brunetti had no idea at all and found the suggestion ridiculous. ‘To divert us from looking for a professional thief,’ he invented.
‘That’s impossible,’ Bonaventura said. ‘Paolo was killed by some fanatic who thought he was responsible for something he had no idea was going on. My sister’s life has been ruined. It’s just crazy. Don’t talk to me about thieves who come equipped with notes and don’t waste your time going around looking for them. You should be looking for the crazy person who did this.’
