by Donna Leon
‘Why?’
He had no idea where this line of questioning had come from nor where it might lead them, but he sensed the seriousness with which she was pursuing it. ‘Because there are some people, still, who can be trusted absolutely. We have to believe that’s so.’
‘Why?’
‘Because if we don’t find at least someone we can trust absolutely, then, well, we’re made less by not having them. And by not having the experience of trusting them.’ He wasn’t exactly sure what he meant by this, or perhaps he was just doing a bad job of explaining what it was he did mean, but he knew he felt that he would be a lesser man if there were no one into whose hands he would put himself.
Before he could say or she could ask anything else, the phone rang. She answered it, ‘Yes, sir.’ She glanced at Brunetti, and this time she did smile. ‘Yes, he’s just come in, sir. I’ll send him in.’
Brunetti wasn’t sure if he were relieved or disappointed to have their conversation cut off like this, but he didn’t think he could linger to continue it, not once Vice-Questore Patta had been alerted to his arrival.
‘If I’m not out in fifteen minutes,’ he said, ‘call the police.’
She nodded and opened the magazine.
* * * *
Patta sat at his desk, seeming neither pleased nor displeased and looking, as he always did, so suited to a position of responsibility and authority that his promotion could have been the result of natural law. Seeing him, Brunetti realized how used he was to searching for signs of what was to come in Patta’s expression, like an augur examining the kidneys of a freshly slaughtered chicken. ‘Yes, sir,’ he said, taking the seat towards which Patta waved him.
‘What’s all this about a dead girl, Brunetti?’ Patta asked, short of a demand but somewhere past a question.
‘She was stabbed to death some time last night, sir. I’ll know more about the time after Dottor Rizzardi gives me his report.’
‘Did she have a boyfriend?’ Patta asked.
‘Not that either her landlady or her flatmate knew of,’ Brunetti replied calmly.
‘Have you excluded the possibility of robbery?’ Patta asked, surprising Brunetti by the suggestion that he did not want to attribute her death to the most obvious cause.
‘No, sir.’
‘What have you done?’ Patta asked, not forgetting to come down heavily on the second word.
Deciding that intentions and deeds were interchangeable, at least while he was speaking to his superior, Brunetti said: ‘I’ve got men questioning the neighbours, asking if they saw anything last night; Signorina Elettra is checking phone records for the girls’ apartment; I’ve already interviewed the girl she shared the apartment with, but she was still too shocked to be of much help; and we’ve begun asking her friends at the university what they know about her.’ Brunetti hoped he’d succeed in getting all of these things in train that afternoon.
‘Is that inspector of yours working on this with you?’ Patta asked.
Brunetti bit back a remark about the possible ownership of Lieutenant Scarpa and contented himself with a simple, ‘Yes, sir.’
‘Right, then, I want you to get this taken care of as quickly as possible. The Gazzettino is sure to splash it all over the front page; I just hope the nationals don’t pick it up. God knows, enough girls get themselves stabbed to death in other places and no one pays attention. But it’s still something of a sensation here, so I suppose we have to prepare ourselves for some bad publicity, at least until people forget about it.’ Sighing as if in resignation to yet another of the cares of office, Patta pulled some folders toward him and said, ‘That will be all, Commissario.’ Brunetti stood but found himself unable to leave. He stood so long that Patta finally looked up at him and said, ‘Yes, what is it?’
‘It’s nothing sir. All this bad publicity is a shame, though.’
‘Yes, it is, isn’t it?’ Patta agreed and turned his attention to the first folder. Brunetti devoted his to getting out of Patta’s office without opening his mouth.
He recalled, then, something he had seen with Paola, it must have been four years ago. They’d been at an exhibition of the paintings of the Colombian painter, Botero, she drawn to the wild exuberance of his portraits of fat, pie-faced men and women, all possessed of the same tiny rosebud mouth. In front of them was a teacher with a class of children who couldn’t have been more than eight or nine. As he and Paola came into the last room of the exhibition, they heard the teacher say, ‘Now,ragazzi, we’re going to leave, but there are a lot of people here who don’t want to be disturbed by our noise or talking. So what we’re all going to do,’ she went on, pointing to her own mouth, which she pursed up into a tight, tiny circle, ‘is make la bocca di Botero.’ Delighted, the children all placed single fingers on their lips and drew their mouths into tight imitations of those in the paintings as they tiptoed giggling from the room. Since then, whenever either he or Paola knew that to speak might be indiscreet, they invoked ‘la bocca di Botero’, and no doubt thus saved themselves a great deal of trouble, to make no mention of time and wasted energy.
Signorina Elettra had apparently finished the magazine, for he found her leafing through the papers in a file. ‘Signorina,’ he began, ‘I’ve a number of things I’d like you to do.’
‘Yes, sir?’ she said, closing the file and making no attempt to cover either the CONFIDENTIAL sticker that ran in bold red letters down the left side of the front cover nor Lieutenant Scarpa’s name, which appeared across the top.
‘A little light reading?’ he inquired.
‘Very,’ she said with audible disdain, pushing the file to the side of her desk. ‘What is it you’d like me to do, sir?’
‘Ask your friend at Telecom to see if he can get you a list of calls to and from their phone, and see if either she or Lucia Mazzotti - the flatmate - has a telefonino. And see what you can find out about Claudia: if she has a credit card or a bank account. Any financial information would help.’
‘Did you search her apartment?’ she interrupted to ask.
‘Not well, not then. But a team will take care of it this afternoon.’
‘Good, then I’ll have them bring me any papers they find.’
‘Yes. Good,’ he said.
‘Anything else?’ she asked.
‘No, not that I can think of now. We don’t know much yet. If you find anything interesting in the papers, follow it up.’ He read her expression and explained, ‘Letters from a boyfriend. If people write letters any more, that is.’ Even before she could ask, he said, ‘Yes, tell them to bring you her computer, as well.’
‘And you, sir?’ she asked.
Instead of answering, he looked at his watch, suddenly aware of how hungry he was. ‘I’m going to call my wife,’ he said. He turned away, saying, ‘Then I’ll be in my office, waiting for Rizzardi.’
The doctor didn’t call until well after five, by which time Brunetti was cranky from hunger and annoyed at sitting and waiting.
‘It’s me, Guido,’ Rizzardi said.
Speaking without impatience, Brunetti asked only, ‘And?’
‘Two of the stab wounds would have killed her: both of them nicked the heart. She would have died almost instantly.’
‘And the killer? Do you still think it was someone short?’
‘Well, not someone tall, certainly not as tall as you or I. Perhaps a bit taller than the girl herself. And right handed.’
‘Does this mean it could have been a woman?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Of course, though women usually don’t kill like this.’ After a moment’s reflection, the pathologist added, ‘Women don’t usually kill at all, do they?’
Brunetti grunted in agreement, wondering if Rizzardi’s remark could be interpreted as a compliment to the sex, and, if so, what that said about human nature. The doctor’s next remark called him back from these reflections. ‘I think she was a virgin.’
‘What?’ Brunetti asked.
‘You h
eard me, Guido. A virgin.’
There was silence as they considered this, then Brunetti asked, ‘Anything else?’
‘She didn’t smoke, appeared to be in excellent health.’ He paused here and Brunetti had an instant to hope that Rizzardi wouldn’t say it. But he did. ‘She could have lived another sixty years.’
‘Thanks, Ettore,’ Brunetti said and replaced the receiver.
Irritable once again, Brunetti felt he could relieve his feelings only by activity, so he walked down to the crime lab, where he asked to see the things brought in from Claudia Leonardo’s apartment.
‘Signorina Elettra has her address book,’ said Bocchese, the chief technician, placing a number of plastic bags on his desk. As Brunetti picked the bags up by the corners, Bocchese said dismissively, ‘You can touch anything you want. I’ve dusted the lot, but there’s only two sets of prints on everything, hers and her flatmate’s.’
Brunetti opened a large envelope which itself contained a number of papers and smaller envelopes. There were the usual things: gas and electric bills, an invitation to a gallery opening, phone bills, credit card receipts. Toward the back of the small packet of papers he found a bank statement, and he read down through the column of deposits. On the first of each month, ten million lire was deposited in Claudia’s account. He checked, and there was the same deposit every month since the beginning of the year. It took little skill in arithmetic to arrive at the annual total, a staggering amount to find in a student’s account. Yet it wasn’t in the account: her current balance was little more than three million lire, which meant that this young girl had, during the course of the last ten months, disposed of almost a hundred million lire.
He studied the statement: on the third of every month, money was transferred from Claudia’s account to that of Loredana Gallante, the landlady. The utilities were paid by direct debit. And, each month, with no particular pattern in the date or amount, large transfers in varying amounts were made, though they were listed only as ‘Foreign transfers’.
The monthly deposits were explained as ‘Transfer from foreign source’. Nothing more. He extracted the bank statement from the stack of papers and asked Bocchese, ‘Do I have to sign for this?’
‘I think you better, Commissario,’ Bocchese replied, opening a drawer and pulling out a thick ledger. He flipped it open, wrote something, then turned the book towards Brunetti. ‘Sign here, sir. With the date, as well, if you don’t mind.’ Neither of them commented on Bocchese’s continuing, but unsuccessful, attempts to have a photocopy machine assigned to his office.
Brunetti did as he was told, folded the bank statement and slipped it into his jacket pocket.
The banks were already closed, and when he went back to her office he saw that Signorina Elettra had already left. Her magazine was lying closed and face down on her desk, but Brunetti could not bring himself to flip it over to read the cover. He did, however, move around her desk and bend over to read the title on the spine. Vogue. He smiled, glad to see this small piece of evidence that Signorina Elettra was once again devoting to Vice-Questore Patta precisely the amount of attention she judged him to deserve.
* * * *
13
It wasn’t until next morning that Brunetti could begin to satisfy his curiosity about the flow of money into and out of Claudia Leonardo’s account. This was quickly handled by a phone call to the local office of the Banca di Perugia. For years, Brunetti had been intrigued to observe that, of all the people made nervous by a phone call from the police, bankers seemed to suffer the most. It led him to wonder what it was they got up to behind their broad desks or inside their thick-walled vaults. Before he could pursue this idea further, he was connected to the Director, who passed him along to one of the tellers, who asked for the account number. It took only a few minutes for her to explain that the transfers came in from a bank in Geneva and had been coming in on the first of every month since the account was opened three years ago, presumably when Claudia came to Venice to begin her studies.
Brunetti thanked her and asked that he be faxed copies of all statements for the last three years, which the teller said would arrive that same morning. Again, he hardly needed paper and pencil to calculate the sum: almost four hundred million lire, and now there remained less than three million in the account. How could a young girl spend over three hundred million lire in three years? He cast his memory back to the apartment, hunting for signs of great expenditure, but he recalled none. In fact, his guess would be that the flat was rented already furnished, for surely a woman of Signora Gallante’s generation would have bought the huge mahogany wardrobes he’d seen in both bedrooms. Rizzardi would have noticed and commented upon any sign of drug use, but what other than drugs could absorb such huge sums of money?
He called down to Bocchese, who told him the names of the officers who had searched the apartment, but when he spoke to them they said that neither girl’s clothing had seemed out of the ordinary in quality or quantity and thus could not explain the disappearance of so much money.
For a moment he was tempted to call Rizzardi and ask if he had checked the body for evidence of drug use but stopped himself by imagining what the doctor’s response would be. If he’d said nothing, then there was nothing.
He called Paola at home. ‘It’s me,’ he said unnecessarily.
‘And what can I do for me?’ she asked.
‘How would you spend three hundred and sixty million lire in three years?’ he asked.
‘My own or stolen?’ she asked, making it clear that she assumed this to be a work-related question.
‘What difference does that make?’
‘I’d spend stolen money differently.’
‘Why?’
‘Because it’s different; that’s all. I mean, it’s not as if I would have worked for it or struggled to earn it. It’s like money you find on the street or win on the lottery. You spend it much more easily, or at least I think you would.’
‘And how would you spend it?’
‘Is that a general “you”, as in “a person” or is it for me, personally?’
‘Both.’
‘For me, personally, I’d buy first editions of Henry James.’
Ignoring this reference to the person Brunetti had, over the course of years, come to view as the other man in his fife’s life, Brunetti asked, ‘And if you were just a person in general?’
‘That would depend on the person, I guess. The most obvious is drugs, but the fact that you’re calling me to ask for ideas suggest you’ve already excluded that possibility. Some people would buy expensive cars or designer clothes, or, oh, I don’t know, vacations.’
‘No, it was taken out month by month, seldom in one big lump,’ he said, remembering the pattern of deposit and withdrawal in Claudia’s account.
‘Expensive restaurants? Girls?’
‘It was Claudia Leonardo,’ he said soberly.
This stopped Paola for a moment, then she said, ‘She’d probably give it away.’
‘Do what?’
‘Give it away,’ Paola repeated.
‘Why do you say that?’
There was a long pause. ‘I really don’t know. I’ve got to admit that: I’ve no idea why I said it. I suppose it’s my reaction to things she said in class or wrote in her papers, just a general feeling that she had a social conscience, the way so few of them seem to these days.’
Brunetti’s reflections were cut off by Paola’s question: ‘Where did the money come from?’
‘A Swiss bank.’
‘I think it was Alice in Wonderland who was wont to say, “Curiouser and curiouser.’“ After another pause, Paola asked, ‘Is that how much - three hundred and sixty million in three years?’
‘Yes. Any more ideas?’
‘No. In a way, it’s difficult to think of her in terms of money or a great deal of money. She was so, oh, I don’t know, simple. No, that’s the wrong word. She had a complex mind, at least from what I knew of her. But one wou
ld just never, somehow, associate her with money.’
‘Why?’
‘She didn’t seem interested in it, not at all. In fact I remember noticing, when she’d comment on why characters in novels did things, that she was always slightly puzzled that people could be led to do things by greed, almost as if she didn’t understand it, or it didn’t make any human sense to her. So, no, she wouldn’t spend it on anything she wanted for herself.’
‘But that’s just books,’ he said.
‘I beg your pardon,’ Paola said, not calmly.
‘I mean, you said it was comments she’d make about characters in books. How can that show you what she’d behave like in real life?’
He heard her sigh, but her answer, when it came, showed no lack of patience or sympathy. ‘When we tell people about what’s happened to our family or our friends we can judge pretty accurately how decent they are by the way they respond, can’t we?’
