Friends In High Places

by Donna Leon

  ‘You said that. But why Franca?’

  He had no reason, save that she was the first person whose name had occurred to him. Besides, it had been some time since he’d seen her and he’d wanted to do so, nothing more than that. He stuffed his hands into his pockets and shifted his weight to his other foot. ‘No real reason,’ he finally said.

  She unlatched her fingers and went back to shelling the peas. ‘What did she tell you, and why is she afraid for Pietro?’

  ‘She mentioned, even showed me, two people.’ Before Paola could interrupt, he said, ‘We met in San Luca, and there was this couple there. They’re in their sixties, I’d say. She said they lent money.’

  ‘And Pietro?’

  ‘She said there might be a connection to the Mafia and money laundering, but she didn’t want to say anything more than that.’ He saw from Paola’s brief nod that she shared his opinion that the mere mention of the Mafia would be enough to make any parent fear for any child.

  ‘Not even to you?’ she asked.

  He shook his head. She glanced up at him, and he repeated the gesture.

  ‘Serious, then,’ Paola said.

  ‘I’d say so.’

  ‘Who are the people?’

  ‘Angelina and Massimo Volpato.’

  ‘You ever heard of them?’ she asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Who have you asked about them?’

  ‘No one. I just saw them twenty minutes ago, before I came home.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘Find out whatever I can about them.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘That depends on what I learn.’

  There was silence then Paola said, ‘I was thinking about you today, about your work.’ He waited. ‘It was when I was washing the windows, and that’s what made me think of you,’ she added, surprising him.

  ‘Why the windows?’

  ‘I was washing them, and then I did the mirror in the bathroom, and that’s when I thought of what you do.’

  He knew she’d continue, even if he said nothing, but he also knew she liked to be encouraged, so he asked, ‘And?’

  ‘When you clean a window,’ she said, eyes on his, ‘you have to open it and pull it toward you, and when you do that, the angle of the light that’s coming through it changes.’ She saw that he was following, so she continued, ‘So you get it clean. Or you think you do. But when you close the window, the light comes through from the original angle, and then you see that the outside’s still dirty, or that you missed a patch on the inside. That means you have to open it and clean it again. But you can never be sure it’s really clean until you close it again or until you move so that you see it from a different angle.’

  ‘And the mirror?’ he asked.

  She looked up at him and smiled. ‘You see a mirror only from one side. No light comes from behind, so when you clean it, it’s clean. There’s no trick of perception.’ She looked back down at her work.

  ‘And?’

  Still looking at the peas, perhaps to hide her disappointment in him, she explained, ‘That’s what your work’s like, or how you want it to be. You want to clean mirrors, want everything to be two-dimensional and easy to take care of. But every time you begin to take a look at something, it turns out to be like the windows: if you change perspective or you look at things from a new angle, everything changes.’

  Brunetti considered this for a long time and then added, hoping to lighten the mood, ‘But in both cases, I’ve always got to clean up the dirt.’

  Paola said, ‘You said that; I didn’t.’ When Brunetti made no response, she dropped the last peas into the bowl, and got to her feet. She walked to the counter and set the bowl down. ‘Whichever it is you do, I suppose you’d prefer to do it on a full stomach,’ she said.

  Stomach indeed full, he started to do it that afternoon, as soon as he got back to the Questura. He began, a better place than most, with Signorina Elettra.

  Smiling, she greeted his arrival, today dressed in something that looked tantalizingly nautical: navy blue skirt, a square-yoked silk blouse. He caught himself thinking that all she lacked was a little sailor hat until he saw a stiff white cylindrical cap sitting on the desk beside her computer.

  ‘Volpato,’ he said before she could ask him how he was. ‘Angelina and Massimo. They’re in their sixties.’

  She pulled forward a sheet of paper and began to write.

  ‘Living here?’

  ‘I think so, yes.’

  ‘Any idea where?’

  ‘No,’ he answered.

  ‘That’s easy enough to check,’ she said, making a note. ‘What else?’

  ‘I’d like financial records most of all: bank accounts, any investments they might have, property registered in their names, anything you can find.’ He paused while she wrote and then added, ‘And see if we have anything on them.’

  ‘Phone records?’ she asked.

  ‘No, not yet. Just the financial stuff.’

  ‘For when?’

  He looked down at her and smiled. ‘When do I always want everything?’

  She pushed back her cuff and glanced down at the heavy diver’s watch on her left wrist. ‘I should be able to get the information from the city offices this afternoon.’

  ‘The banks have closed already, so that can wait until tomorrow,’ he said.

  She smiled up at him. ‘The records never close,’ she said. ‘I should have everything in a few hours.’

  She reached down and pulled open a drawer, from which she took a pile of papers. ‘I’ve got these,’ she began but suddenly stopped and looked to her left, toward the door of her office.

  He sensed, rather than saw, a motion and turned to see Vice-Questore Patta, just now returned from lunch. ‘Signorina Elettra,’ he began, making no acknowledgement that he was aware of Brunetti standing in front of her desk.

  ‘Yes, Dottore?’ she asked.

  ‘I’d like you to come into my office to take a letter.’

  ‘Of course, Dottore,’ she said, placing the papers she had just taken from the drawer on the centre of her desk and tapping at them with the first finger of her left hand, a gesture which Brunetti’s body prevented Patta from seeing. She pulled open her front drawer and removed an old-fashioned stenographer’s pad. Did people still dictate letters, and did secretaries still sit, legs crossed like Joan Crawford’s, quickly taking words down in little squiggles and crosses? As Brunetti wondered about this, he realized that he had always left it to Signorina Elettra to decide how to phrase a letter, had relied on her to choose the correct rhetorical elaboration with which to disguise simple things or to smooth the way for requests which went beyond the strict limits of police power.

  Patta walked past him and opened the door to his office, and Brunetti had the distinct feeling that he was himself behaving in the manner of one of those timid forest animals, a lemur perhaps, which froze at the slightest sound, declaring itself invisible by virtue of its immobility and thus believing itself safe from any roving predator. Before he could speak to Signorina Elettra, he saw her get to her feet and follow Patta into his office, but not before glancing back at the papers on her desk. As she closed the door behind her, Brunetti observed no suggestion of timidity in her bearing.

  He leaned over her desk, pulled the papers toward him, and then quickly wrote a note, asking her to find the name of the owner of the building in front of which Rossi had been found.

  18

  ON THE WAY up to his office, he looked at the papers he’d taken from Signorina Elettra’s desk: a long print-out of all the numbers called from both Rossi’s home and from his office. In the margin, she had noted that Rossi’s name did not appear as a customer for any of the mobile telephone companies, which suggested that he had been calling on a phone issued by the Ufficio Catasto. Four of the calls made from his office were to the same number, one that had the Ferrara prefix and that Brunetti thought was the number of Gavini and Cappelli’s office. Wh
en he got to his desk, he checked it and proved his memory right. The calls had all been made in a period of less than two weeks, the last one the day before Cappelli was murdered. Nothing after that.

  Brunetti sat for a long time, wondering at the connection between the two dead men. He realized that he was now considering them the two murdered men.

  While he waited for Signorina Elettra, he considered many things: the location of Rossi’s office at the Ufficio Catasto and how much privacy it would have afforded him; the appointment of Magistrato Righetto to the investigation of Cappelli’s murder; the likelihood that a professional killer would mistake another man for his victim and why, after that crime, no further attempt was made on the supposed real victim. He thought about these and other things, and then he returned to the list of the people who might be able to provide him with information, but stopped when he realized he wasn’t at all sure what sort of information he wanted. Certainly he needed to know about the Volpatos, but he also needed to know more about financial trafficking in the city and the secret processes by which money flowed into and out of the hands of its citizens.

  Like most citizens, he knew that the records of sales and transfers of property titles were kept at the Ufficio Catasto. Beyond that, his understanding of just what it was they did was vague. He remembered Rossi’s enthusiasm that several offices were uniting their files in an attempt to save time and make information more simple to recover. He wished now that he had taken the trouble to ask Rossi more about this.

  He grabbed the phone book from his bottom drawer, flipped it open to the Bs, and hunted for a number. When he found it, he dialled and waited until a female voice answered, ‘Bucintoro Real Estate, good afternoon.’

  ‘Ciao, Stefania,’ he said.

  ‘What’s the matter, Guido?’ she asked, startling him with the question and making him wonder what had been audible in his voice.

  ‘I need some information,’ he answered just as directly.

  ‘Why else would you call me?’ she said without the flirtatiousness that usually filled her voice when she spoke to him.

  He chose to ignore both the silent criticism of her tone and the overt criticism of her question. ‘I need to know about the Ufficio Catasto.’

  ‘The what?’ she said in a loud, artificially confused voice.

  ‘Ufficio Catasto. I need to know what it is exactly they do, who works there, and who is to be trusted among them.’

  ‘That’s a big order,’ she said.

  ‘That’s why I called you.’

  Suddenly the flirtatiousness was back. ‘And I, sitting here every day, hoping you’ll call wanting something else.’

  ‘What, my treasure? Just name it,’ he offered in his Rodolfo Valentino voice. Stefania was joyously married and the mother of twins.

  ‘An apartment to buy, of course.’

  ‘I might have to do that,’ he said, voice suddenly serious.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’ve been told that our home is going to be condemned.’

  ‘What does that mean, condemned?’

  ‘That we might have to pull it down.’

  A second after he said this, he heard Stefania’s sharp peal of laughter, but he wasn’t sure if the target was the patent absurdity of the situation or her surprise that he might find this in any way unusual. After a few more small noises of mirth, she said, ‘You can’t be serious.’

  ‘That’s exactly how I feel about it. But I had someone from the Ufficio Catasto tell me exactly that. They couldn’t find any record either that it had been built or that permits to do so had ever been given, so they might decide it has to be pulled down.’

  ‘You must have misunderstood,’ she said.

  ‘He sounded serious.’

  ‘When did this happen?’

  ‘A few months ago.’

  ‘Have you heard anything else?’

  ‘No. That’s why I’m calling you.’

  ‘Why don’t you call them?’

  ‘I wanted to talk to you first, before I did.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To know what my rights are. And to know who they are, the people who make the decisions in the office.’

  Stefania didn’t respond, and so he asked, ‘Do you know them, the people who are in charge there?’

  ‘No more than anyone else in the business does.’

  ‘Who are they?’

  ‘The important one is Fabrizio dal Carlo; he’s the boss of the entire Ufficio.’ With dismissive scorn, she added, ‘An arrogant shit. He has an assistant, Esposito, but he’s a nonentity because dal Carlo keeps all the power in his own hands. And then there’s Signorina Dolfin, Loredana, whose existence, or at least so I’ve been told, is entirely based on two pillars: the first is not letting anyone forget that, even though she might be no more than a secretary in the Ufficio Catasto, she is a descendant of Doge Giovanni Dolfin,’ she said, then added, as if it mattered, ‘I forget his dates.’

  ‘He was Doge from 1356 to 1361, when he died of the plague,’ Brunetti supplied seamlessly. To prompt her back into speech, he asked, ‘And the second?’

  ‘Disguising her adoration of Fabrizio dal Carlo.’ She let that register and then added, ‘I’m told she’s much better at the first than the second. Dal Carlo makes her work like a dog, but that’s probably what she wants, though how anyone could feel anything toward him except contempt is a mystery to me.’

  ‘Is there anything there?’

  Stefania’s laugh exploded down the line. ‘God, no, she’s old enough to be his mother. Besides, he’s got a wife and at least one other woman, so there’d be little enough time for her anyway, even if she weren’t as ugly as sin.’ Steffi considered all of this for a moment and then added, ‘It’s pathetic, really. She’s given up years of her life being the loyal servant to this third-rate Romeo, probably hoping that he’ll some day realize how much she loves him and fall into a dead faint at the thought that it is a Dolfin who’s in love with him. God, what a waste: if it weren’t so sad, it would be funny.’

  ‘You make it sound as if all of this were common knowledge.’

  ‘It is. At least to anyone who works with them.’

  ‘Even that he has other women?’

  ‘Well, that’s meant to be a secret, I suppose.’

  ‘But isn’t?’

  ‘No. Nothing ever is, is it? Here, I mean.’

  ‘No, I suppose not,’ Brunetti admitted, giving silent thanks that this was so.

  ‘Anything else?’ he asked.

  ‘No, nothing that springs to mind. No more gossip. But I think you should call them and ask about this business with your apartment. From what I’ve heard, the whole idea of putting all the records together was just a smokescreen, anyway. It’ll never happen.’

  ‘A smokescreen for what?’

  ‘What I heard was that someone in the city administration decided that so much of the restoration done in the last couple of years was illegal – well, that a large part of the actual work done was so much at variance with the designs submitted in the original plans – that it would be better if the permits and the requests for them were made to disappear. That way, no one could ever check the plans against what was actually done. So they set up this project to join everything together.’

  ‘I’m not sure I follow you, Stefania.’

  ‘It’s simple, Guido,’ Stefania chided him. ‘With all these papers being shifted from one office to another, being sent from one side of the city to another, it’s inevitable that some of them will be lost.’

  Brunetti found this both inventive and efficient. He stored it away as an explanation he might try to use for the non-existence of the plans for his own house, should notice ever be given that he had to produce them. ‘And so,’ he continued for her, ‘if questions were ever asked about the placement of a wall or the presence of a window, the owner would just have to produce their own plans and . . .’

  Stefania cut him off: ‘Which would of course correspond perfec
tly with the actual structure of the house.’

  ‘And in the absence of the official plans, conveniently lost during the reorganization of the files,’ Brunetti began, to an accompanying murmur of approval from Stefania, pleased that he had begun to understand, ‘there would be no way for any city inspector or future buyer ever to be sure that the restorations that had in fact been made were different from the ones that had been requested and approved on the missing plans.’ He finished saying this and, as it were, stepped silently back in order to admire what he had discovered. Ever since he was a child, he’d often heard people say of Venice, ‘Tutto crolla, ma nulla crolla.’ And it certainly seemed true: more than a thousand years had passed since the first buildings rose on the swampy land, so surely many of them must be in danger of falling down, but nothing ever did fall down. They leaned, tilted, buckled, and curved, but he could not remember ever having heard of a building that had actually collapsed. Surely, he had seen abandoned buildings with roofs that had caved in, boarded-up houses with walls that had fallen in, but he’d never heard of a real collapse, of a building falling in on its inhabitants.

  ‘Whose idea was this?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Stefania said. ‘You never find out things like that.’

  ‘Do the people in the various offices know about this?’

  Instead of giving him a direct answer, she said, ‘Think about it, Guido. Somebody has to see that some of these papers disappear, that files are lost, for you can be sure that a lot of others will be lost just because of the usual incompetence. But someone would have to see that specific papers ceased to exist.’

  ‘Who would want that?’ he asked.

  ‘It would most likely be the people who own the houses where the illegal work was done, or it could be the people who were supposed to check the restorations and didn’t bother.’ She paused and then added, ‘Or who did check and were persuaded,’ she began, giving that last word ironic emphasis, ‘to approve what they saw, regardless of what was drawn on the plans.’

  ‘So who are they?’

  ‘The Building Commissions.’

  ‘How many are there?’

  ‘One for every sestiere, six of them.’