by Donna Leon
At the end of Via Garibaldi, the old woman walked on to the embarcadero and took a seat facing the water. The young couple stopped at the edicola, and the young man bought a copy of Men’s Health. A Number Two came from the left, and the old woman got to her feet. With no sign of haste, the young people swiped their iMOB cards and walked up into the waiting deck and on to the boat. As the boat was unmoored and starting to back away from the dock, Brunetti stepped on board just ahead of the gate the crewman was sliding closed.
The old woman sat in the cabin, in an aisle seat in the front row, closest to whatever air managed to sneak in from the open door. Pucetti had spread his magazine on the wooden counter behind the pilot’s cabin and was pointing to a grey linen jacket, asking his companion what she thought of it. His back was to the passenger cabin, but she was facing him, so she could see when the old woman got to her feet.
Brunetti came and stood alongside Pucetti. The young woman looked up at him and stood a bit straighter, but Pucetti, eyes still on the jacket, said, ‘I figured Vianello would call you, too, sir.’
‘Yes, he did.’
‘Do you want to continue the same way: we follow her and you follow us?’
‘Seems best,’ Brunetti said.
The boat pulled into the San Zaccharia stop, and Pucetti turned a few pages of the magazine, reaching out to draw his companion closer so that she could see something on the page. A few pages later, they passed under the Accademia Bridge, then San Samuele, and then Brunetti heard her say, ‘She’s getting up.’
Pucetti closed the magazine and leaned sideways to give the young woman a kiss on the side of her forehead. She bent her head close to his and said something, then they moved apart and got off at San Tomà, a few passengers behind the old woman with the brown leather bag and a few in front of the man in the blue cotton jacket.
At the end of the calle, the old woman turned right and then left into the campo. She crossed at a diagonal, heading to the right and into a narrow calle that led back towards the Frari. By unspoken agreement, they divided up, Brunetti taking the calle to the farther right to see that they did not lose track of her in this warren of narrow and suddenly turning calli.
As Brunetti was about to turn into Calle Passion, he saw the old woman ahead of him, stopped in front of a building on the right, hand raised to ring the bell. He kept on directly past the entrance to the calle, stopped and turned around, and when he came back, he saw what could have been a foot disappearing into a doorway. He turned into the calle and past the door, making a note of the number as he did.
As he emerged into Campo dei Frari, the young couple were just turning into the calle.
‘Number two thousand nine hundred and eighty-nine,’ Brunetti said casually. She looked at him as though he were one of those Internet magicians whose sites he had been consulting; Pucetti smiled and said, ‘I’ll tell my grandchildren about this, sir.’
Brunetti was uncertain whether the remark was meant to inflate or deflate his sense of accomplishment and thus said disparagingly, ‘I just happened to be the one who saw her.’ Pucetti nodded, while the young woman continued to stare at him.
‘Now what, sir?’
‘You two go and have a drink in the campo, and I’ll go into San Tomà and stand in front of the estate agency and look for a new apartment.’
‘Hot work, Commissario,’ the girl said with sympathy.
Brunetti nodded his thanks for the thought.
Luckily, he had remembered to bring his telefonino with him, so they agreed to keep in contact. He went back to the campo and put himself in front of the window of the estate agency. By this time of the afternoon, the sun was directly behind Brunetti and starting to burn its way slowly through his clothing. It was so intense that he turned first to expose one shoulder, then the other, like San Lorenzo on the grill.
The one advantage was that the angle of light turned the agency window into a giant mirror, in which he soon saw the approaching reflection of an old woman with a brown bag over her shoulder. But her hands no longer grasped the straps and the bag hung ignored at her side. She walked towards him while Brunetti studied the photo of a mansard apartment in Santa Croce, a mere half-million Euros for sixty square metres. ‘Lunacy,’ he whispered.
The woman turned to the right, then left into the calle going down to the embarcadero. Brunetti dialled Pucetti’s number, and when the officer answered, said, ‘She’s going back towards the boat stop. Why don’t you and your friend stop on the doorstep of two thousand nine hundred and eighty-nine for a long embrace?’
‘I’ll suggest it to her this very instant, sir,’ Pucetti said and hung up. Brunetti moved away from the window and into the calle leading towards Goldoni’s house, where he could at least stand in the shade. A few minutes later, Pucetti and the young woman appeared, no longer walking hand in hand.
‘S. Gorini, sir,’ Pucetti. ‘There’s only one name at that number.’
‘Shall we go back to the Questura, then?’ Brunetti suggested.
‘We’re still on duty, sir,’ Pucetti said.
‘I think we’ve all had enough of following people in this heat, officers,’ he said. Their relief was evident in the loosening of their bodies. He smiled at the girl for the first time and said, ‘So let’s see if you can follow a commissario di polizia back to the Questura without being noticed.’
8
Perhaps encouraged by the deference showed to his powers by the young woman, whose full name turned out to be Bettina Trevisoi, Brunetti decided to see what he could find out about S. Gorini by himself. The first thing he discovered, though he had to go only as far as the phone directory, was that the S stood for Stefano. But even with the full name, all Google provided was a wide variety of products and offers to introduce him to young girls. Because he had one of his own at home, Brunetti did not feel in need of another, and so he spurned the cyber-proposals, tempting as others might have found them.
Google having failed him, Brunetti was left to think of other places where reference to a person might be found. There must be a way to discover if he were renting the apartment or if he owned it: probably in some office of the Commune. If he owned it, then he might have a mortgage, and that might lead to his bank and thus provide an idea of his finances. There must be a way to find out if the city had granted him any licences or if he had a passport. Airline files might show if he travelled within Italy or to other countries, and how frequently. If he had any of the special cards offered by the railway, there would be a list of the train tickets he purchased. Copies of his phone bills, for both home phone and telefonino, would give an idea of who his friends and associates were. They would also show if he were running a commercial enterprise from that address. And credit card records often proved veritable mines of information.
He sat in front of the computer, these possibilities assaulting his imagination one after the other. He marvelled at how the most basic services of modern life exposed a person to easy scrutiny and how effectively they eliminated privacy.
But, more importantly, he marvelled at how incapable he was of finding even the first of these things. He knew all of this information must be hidden inside his computer, but he lacked the skills to discover it. He turned to Pucetti; Probationer Trevisoi stood by his side. ‘It’s a waste of time to try to check him out ourselves,’ Brunetti said, careful to use the plural.
He watched as Pucetti fought down the impulse to object. In the last years, the young officer had learned a great deal from Signorina Elettra about the ways to slip around the roadblocks on the information highway. Pucetti glanced at the young woman at his side, and Brunetti could almost hear the creaks in his masculinity as he forced himself to nod. ‘Maybe we better ask Signorina Elettra to have a look,’ Pucetti finally agreed.
Pleased by the young officer’s response and considering that Trevisoi was young, attractive and female, Brunetti stood and offered the chair to Pucetti. ‘Better to have two people taking a look,’ Brunetti said. Then
, to Trevisoi, he added, ‘Pucetti’s one of our information-retrieval experts.’
‘Information retrieval, sir?’ she said so innocently that Brunetti began to suspect there was perhaps more behind those dark eyes than he had originally believed.
‘Spying,’ he clarified. ‘Pucetti’s very good at it, but Signorina Elettra’s better.’
‘Signorina Elettra’s the best,’ Pucetti said as he flicked the screen back into life.
On his way to that person’s office, Brunetti decided to restrain himself from repeating Pucetti’s praise. When he entered, Signorina Elettra was just emerging from the office of her superior, Vice-Questore Giuseppe Patta. Today she wore a black T-shirt and a pair of loose black linen slacks and, below them, a pair of yellow Converse sneakers, sockless. She gave a welcoming smile. ‘Have a look,’ she said, moving to her chair and pointing to the screen of her computer. Perhaps as a concession to the heat, her hair was tied back from her face by a green ribbon.
He came to stand behind her and looked at the screen. On it he saw what looked like a page from a catalogue of computers, neat row after neat row and all of them, to Brunetti, looking identical. Were they, he wondered, finally going to order one for him to use in his office? There was no other reason she would bother to show him such things, was there? He was touched by her thoughtfulness.
‘Very nice,’ he said, in a noncommittal voice from which all trace of personal greed had been removed.
‘Yes, they are, aren’t they? Some of them are almost as good as mine.’ Pointing to one of the computers on the screen, she said something about numbers Brunetti could understand, like ‘2.33’ and ‘1333’, and words like ‘mega-hertz’ and ‘giga-bytes’, that he could not.
‘Now look at this,’ she said and scrolled down the screen to a list of prices that were keyed to the models shown above them. ‘See the price of that one?’ she asked, pointing to the third number.
‘One thousand, four hundred Euros,’ he read. She made a noise of assent, saying nothing, so he asked, ‘Is that a good price?’ He was complimented by the thought that the Ministry of Justice might be willing to spend that much on him, but modesty sealed his lips.
‘It’s a very good price,’ she said. She hit a few keys; the image disappeared from the screen and was replaced by a long list of names and numbers. ‘Now look at this,’ she said, pointing to one of the items on the list.
‘Is that the same computer?’ he asked when he read the model name and number.
‘Yes.’
Brunetti ran his eyes over to the number at the right. ‘Two thousand, two hundred?’ he asked. She nodded but did not comment.
‘Where did the first price come from?’
‘An on-line company in Germany. The computers come fully programmed in Italian, with an Italian keyboard.’
‘And the others?’ he asked.
‘The others have been ordered and paid for already,’ she said. ‘What I showed you is the purchase order.’
‘But that’s crazy,’ Brunetti said, unconsciously using the word and tone his mother habitually used to comment on the price of fish.
Saying nothing, Signorina Elettra scrolled back to the top of the list, where she arrived at the letterhead: ‘Ministro del Interno’.
‘They’re paying eight hundred Euros more?’ he asked, not sure whether to be astonished or outraged, or both.
She nodded.
‘How many did they buy?’
‘Four hundred.’
It took him only seconds. ‘That’s three hundred and twenty thousand Euros more,’ he said. She said nothing. ‘Haven’t these people ever heard about buying in quantity? Isn’t the price supposed to come down when you do?’
‘If the government is doing the buying, I think the rules are different, sir,’ she answered.
Brunetti took a step back from the computer and walked around to the front of her desk. ‘In a case like this, who’s doing the buying? Who specifically, that is?’
‘Some bureaucrat in Rome, I’d assume, sir.’
‘Does anyone check what he does? Compare prices or offers?’
‘Oh,’ she said with audible negligence, ‘I’m sure someone does.’
Time passed, during which Brunetti considered the possibilities. The fact that one person could order an item that cost eight hundred Euros more than an identical item did not mean that another person would object to the higher price, especially when it was government money that was being spent, and especially when only those two people were privy to the bidding process.
‘Isn’t anyone concerned about this?’ Brunetti heard himself asking.
‘Someone must be, Commissario,’ she answered. Then, with almost militant brightness, she asked, ‘What was it you wanted to see me about?’
He explained quickly about Vianello’s aunt and the withdrawals she had been making, then gave her the name and address of Stefano Gorini, asking her if she had time to find out something about him.
Signorina Elettra made a note of the name and address and asked, ‘Is this the aunt who’s married to the electrician?’
‘Ex-electrician,’ Brunetti corrected, then, ‘Yes.’
She gave him a sober glance and shook her head. ‘I think it’s like being a priest or a doctor,’ she said.
‘Excuse me?’
‘Being an electrician, sir. I think once you do it, you have a sort of moral obligation to keep on doing it.’ She gave him time to consider this, and when he made no comment, she said, ‘Nothing’s worse than darkness.’
From long experience as a resident of a city where many houses still had wires that had been installed fifty or sixty years ago, Brunetti grasped what she meant and had no choice but to say, ‘Yes. Nothing worse.’
His ready agreement seemed to cheer her, and she asked, ‘Is it urgent, sir?’
Given the fact that it probably wasn’t legal, either, Brunetti said, ‘No, not really.’
‘Then I’ll have a look tomorrow, sir.’
Before he left, he said, indicating her computer, ‘While you’re in there, could you see what you can find out about an usher at the Courthouse, Araldo Fontana?’ Brunetti did not give her the name of Judge Coltellini, not from compunction at sharing police information with a civilian employee – he had long since set aside the things of a child – but because he did not want to burden her with a third name, and Brusca’s apparent defence of the man had made Brunetti more curious about him.
But he could not stop himself from asking, ‘Where did you get that information about the computers, Signorina?’
‘Oh, it’s all in the public record, sir. You just have to know where to look.’
‘And so you sort of go trolling through the files by yourself to see what you can see?’
‘Yes,’ she said with a smile, ‘I suppose you could phrase it that way. “Trolling.” I quite like that.’
‘And you never know what you’re going to fish up, I suppose.’
‘Never,’ she said. Then, pointing to the paper where she had written the names he wanted her to check, she said, ‘Besides, it keeps me in training for interesting things like this.’
‘Isn’t the rest of your work interesting, Signorina?’ he asked.
‘No, I’m afraid much of it isn’t, Dottore.’ She propped her chin in her cupped palm and tightened her lips in a resigned grimace. ‘It’s hard when so many of the people I work for are so very dull.’
‘It’s a common enough plight, Signorina,’ Brunetti said and left the office.
9
By the time he reached his office the next day, Brunetti was resigned to the fact that he was not soon going to have his own computer, though he found it more difficult to resign himself to the temperature of his office when he arrived. The family had, the night before, discussed where they were to go for their yearly vacation, Brunetti apologizing that the uncertainty of work had kept him this long without knowing when he would be free. He had quickly squashed all discussion of going to the
seaside: not in August with millions of people in the water and on the roads and in the restaurants. ‘I will not go to Puglia, where it is forty degrees in the shade, and where the olive oil is all fake,’ he remembered saying at one point.
In retrospect, he accepted the possibility that he might have been too firm. In his defence of his own desires, he had been emboldened by the fact that Paola never much cared where they went: her only concern was what books she should take and whether wherever they went had a quiet place for her to lie in the shade and read.
Other men had wives who begged them to go out dancing, travel the world, stay up late and do irresponsible things. Brunetti had managed to marry a woman who looked forward to going to bed at ten o’clock with Henry James. Or, when driven by wild passions she was ashamed to reveal to her husband, with Henry James and his brother.
Like the president of a banana republic, Brunetti had offered democratic choice and then rammed his own proposal past all difference of opinion or opposition. A cousin of his had inherited a farmhouse in Alto Adige, above Glorenza, and had offered it to Brunetti while he and his family went to Puglia. ‘In the heat, eating fake olive oil,’ Brunetti muttered, though no less grateful to his cousin for the offer. And so the Brunettis were to go to the mountains for two weeks; thinking of it, Brunetti’s spirit flooded with relief at the mere thought of sleeping under a quilt and having to wear a sweater in the evening.
Vianello and his family had rented a house on the beach in Croatia, where he planned to do nothing but swim and fish until the end of the month. While they were both away, their unofficial investigation into Stefano Gorini would go on vacation, as well.
