by Donna Leon
‘Is he supposed to be here?’ Brunetti asked. When Canale gave him an empty look, he explained, ‘Here on Via Cappuccina? Is this where you’d expect to see him?’
‘No, no. Not at all. That’s what’s so strange about it. Wherever it was I saw him, it didn’t have anything to do with all of this.’ He waved his hands in the air, as if seeking the answer there. ‘It’s like I saw one of my teachers here. Or the doctor. He’s not supposed to be here. It’s just a feeling, but it’s very strong,’ Then, seeking confirmation, he asked Brunetti, ‘Do you understand what I mean?’
‘Yes, I do. Perfectly. I once had a man stop me on the street in Rome and say hello to me. I knew I knew him, but I didn’t know why.’ Brunetti smiled, risking it. ‘I’d arrested him two years before. But in Naples.’
Luckily, both men laughed. Canale said, ‘May I keep the picture? Maybe it will come back to me if I can, you know, look at it every once in a while. Maybe that will surprise me into remembering.’
‘Certainly. I appreciate your help,’ Brunetti said.
It was Mazza’s turn to risk. ‘Was he very bad? When you found him?’ He brought his hands together in front of him, one clutching at the other.
Brunetti nodded.
‘Isn’t it enough they want to fuck us?’ Canale broke in. ‘Why do they want to kill us, too?’
Though the question was addressed to powers well beyond those for whom Brunetti worked, he still answered it. ‘I have no idea.’
* * * *
Chapter Eleven
The next day, Friday, Brunetti thought he had better make an appearance at the Venice Questura to see what paperwork and mail had accumulated for him. Furthermore, he admitted to Paola over coffee that morning, he wanted to see if there was anything new on ‘Il Caso Patta’.
‘Nothing in Gente orOggi,’ she contributed, naming the two most famous gossip magazines, then added, ‘though I’m not sure that Signora Patta rates the attention of either.’
‘Don’t let her hear you say that,’ Brunetti warned, laughing.
‘If I’m a lucky woman, Signora Patta will never hear me say anything.’ More amiably, she asked, ‘What do you think Patta will do?’
Brunetti finished his coffee and set his cup down before he answered. ‘I don’t think there’s very much he can do except wait for Burrasca to get tired of her or for her to get tired of Burrasca and come back.’
‘What’s he like, Burrasca?’ Paola didn’t waste time asking if the police had a file on Burrasca. As soon as anyone in Italy made enough money, someone would have a file.
‘From what I’ve heard, he’s a pig. He’s part of that Milano world of cocaine, cars with fast engines, and girls with slow brains.’
‘Well, he’s got half of one of them this time,’ Paola said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Signora Patta. She’s not a girl, but she’s certainly got a slow brain.’
‘Do you know her that well?’ Brunetti was never sure whom Paola knew. Or what.
‘No, I’m simply inferring it from the fact that she married Patta and stayed married to him. I imagine it would be difficult to put up with a pompous ass like that.’
‘But you put up with me,’ Brunetti said, smiling, in search of a compliment.
Her look was level. ‘You’re not pompous, Guido. At times you’re difficult, and sometimes you’re impossible, but you are not pompous.’ No compliments here.
He pushed himself back from the table, feeling that it was perhaps time to go to the Questura.
When he got to his office, he looked through the papers waiting for him on his desk, disappointed to find nothing about the dead man in Mestre. He was interrupted by a knock on the door. ‘Avanti,’ he called, thinking it might be Vianello with something from Mestre. Instead of the sergeant, a dark-haired young woman walked in, a sheaf of files in her right hand. She smiled across the room at him and approached his desk, looking down at the papers in her hand and paging through them.
‘Commissario Brunetti?’ she asked.
‘Yes.’
She pulled a few papers from one of the files and placed them on the desk in front of him. ‘The men downstairs said you might want to see these, Dottore.’
‘Thank you, Signorina,’ he said, pulling the papers across the desk towards him.
She remained standing in front of his desk, clearly waiting to be asked who she was, perhaps too shy to introduce herself He looked up, saw large brown eyes in an appealing full face and an explosion of bright lipstick. ‘And you are?’ he asked with a smile.
‘Elettra Zorzi, sir. I started work last week as secretary to Vice-Questore Patta.’ That would explain the new desk outside Patta’s office. Patta had been going on for months, insisting that he had too much paperwork to handle by himself. And so he had managed, like a particularly industrious truffle pig, to root around in the budget long enough to find the money for a secretary.
‘I’m very pleased to meet you, Signorina Zorzi,’ Brunetti said. The name rang familiarly in his ear.
‘I believe I’m to work for you, as well, Commissario,’ she said, smiling.
Not if he knew Patta, she wouldn’t. But still he said, ‘That would certainly be very nice,’ and glanced down at the papers she had placed on the desk.
He heard her move away and glanced up to follow her out of the door. A skirt, neither short nor long, and very, very nice legs. She turned at the door, saw him looking at her, and smiled again. He looked down at the papers. Who would name a child Elettra? How long ago? Twenty-five years? And Zorzi; he knew lots of Zorzis, but none of them was capable of naming a daughter Elettra. The door closed behind her, and he returned his attention to the papers, but there was little of interest in them; crime seemed to be on holiday in Venice.
He went down to Patta’s office but stopped in amazement when he entered the anteroom. For years, the room had held only a chipped porcelain umbrella stand and a desk covered with outdated copies of the sort of magazines generally found in dentists’ offices. Today, the magazines had vanished, replaced by a computer console attached to a printer that stood on a low metal table to the left of the desk. In front of the window, in place of the umbrella stand, stood a small table, this one of wood, and on it rested a glass vase holding an enormous bouquet of orange and yellow gladioli.
Either Patta had decided to give an interview to Architectural Digest, or the new secretary had decided that the opulence Patta believed fitting for his office should trickle out to where worked the lower orders. As if summoned by Brunetti’s thoughts, she came into the office.
‘It looks very nice,’ he said, smiling and gesturing around the small area with a wave of his hand.
She crossed the room and set an armful of folders on her desk, then turned to face him. ‘I’m glad you like it, Commissario. It would have been impossible to work in here the way it was. Those magazines,’ she added with a delicate shudder.
‘The flowers are beautiful. Are they to celebrate your arrival?’
‘Oh, no,’ she replied blandly. ‘I’ve given a permanent order to Fantin; they’ll deliver fresh flowers every Monday and Thursday from now on.’ Fantin: the most expensive florist in the city. Twice a week. A hundred times a year? She interrupted his calculations by explaining, ‘Since I’m also to prepare the Vice-Questore’s expense account, I thought I’d add them in as a necessary expense.’
‘And will Fantin bring flowers for the Vice-Questore’s office, as well?’
Her surprise seemed genuine. ‘Good heavens, no. I’m certain the Vice-Questore could afford them himself It wouldn’t be right to spend the taxpayers’ money like that.’ She walked around the desk and flipped on the computer. ‘Is there anything I can do for you, Commissario?’ she asked, the issue of the flowers, apparently, settled.
‘Not at the moment, Signorina,’ he said as she bent over the keys.
He knocked on Patta’s door and was told to enter. Though Patta sat where he always did, behind his desk,
little else was the same. The surface of the desk, usually clear of anything that might suggest work, was covered with folders, reports; even a crumpled newspaper lay to one side. It was not Patta’s usual L’Osservatore Romano, Brunetti noticed, but the just-short-of-scurrilous La Nuova, a paper whose large readership numbers seemed to rest on the joint proposition that people not only would do base and ignoble things but that they would also want to read about them. Even the air-conditioning, this one of the few offices to have it, seemed not to be working.
‘Sit down, Brunetti,’ the Vice-Questore commanded.
As if Brunetti’s glance were contagious, Patta looked at the papers on his desk and began to gather them up. He piled them one on top of the other, edges every which way, pushed them aside, and sat, his hand forgotten on top of them.
‘What’s happening in Mestre?’ he finally asked Brunetti.
‘We haven’t identified the victim yet, sir. His picture has been shown to many of the transvestites who work there, but none of them has been able to recognize him.’ Patta said nothing. ‘One of the men I questioned said that the man looked familiar, but he couldn’t give a definite identification, so it could mean anything. Or nothing. I think another one of the men I questioned, a man named Crespo, recognized him, but he insisted that he didn’t. I’d like to talk to him again, but there might be problems in doing that.’
‘Santomauro?’ Patta asked and, for the first time in the years they had worked together, succeeded in surprising Brunetti.
‘How do you know about Santomauro?’ Brunetti blurted out and then added, as if to correct his sharp tone, ‘sir.’
‘He’s called me three times,’ Patta said, and then added in a voice he made lower but which was definitely intended for Brunetti to hear, ‘the bastard.’
Immediately on his guard at Patta’s unwonted, and carefully planned, indiscretion, Brunetti, like a spider on its web, began to run his memory over the various strands that might connect these two men. Santomauro was a famous lawyer, his clients the businessmen and politicians of the entire Veneto region. That, if nothing else, would ordinarily have Patta grovelling at his feet. But then he remembered it: Holy Mother Church and Santomauro’s Lega della Moralità, the women’s branch of which was under the patronage and direction of none other than the absent Maria Lucrezia Patta. What sort of sermon about marriage, its sanctity, and its obligations had accompanied Santomauro’s phone calls to the Vice-Questore?
‘That’s right,’ Brunetti said, deciding to admit to half of what he knew, ‘he’s Crespo’s lawyer.’ If Patta chose to believe that a commissario of police found nothing strange in the fact that a lawyer of the stature of Giancarlo Santomauro was the lawyer of a transvestite whore, then it was best to allow him that belief. ‘What has he told you, sir?’
‘He said you harassed and terrified his client, that you were, to use his words, “unnecessarily brutal” in trying to force him to divulge information.’ Patta ran one hand down the side of his jaw, and Brunetti realized it looked as though the vice-questore had not shaved that day.
‘I told him, of course, that I would not listen to this sort of criticism of a commissario of police, that he could come in and file an official complaint if he wanted to.’ Ordinarily a complaint of this sort, from a man of Santomauro’s importance, would have Patta promising to have the offending officer disciplined, if not demoted and transferred to Palermo for three years. And Patta would usually have done this even before asking for details. Patta continued in his role as defender of the principle that all men are equal before the law. ‘I will not tolerate civilian interference with the workings of the agencies of the state.’ That, Brunetti was sure, could loosely be translated to read that Patta had a private axe to grind with Santomauro and would be a willing partner to any attempt to see the other man lose face.
‘Then do you think I ought to go ahead and question Crespo again, sir?’
No matter how great his immediate anger at Santomauro might be, it was too much to expect Patta to overcome the habit of decades and order a policeman to perform an action that opposed the will of a man with important political connections. ‘Do whatever you think is necessary, Brunetti.’
‘Is there anything else, sir?’
Patta didn’t answer, so Brunetti got to his feet. ‘There is one other thing, Commissario,’ Patta said before Brunetti had turned to walk away.
‘Yes, sir?’
‘You have friends in the publishing world, don’t you?’ Oh, good lord, was Patta going to ask him to help? Brunetti looked past his superior’s head and nodded vaguely. ‘I wonder if you would mind getting in touch with them.’ Brunetti cleared his throat and looked at his shoes. ‘I find myself in an embarrassing situation at the moment, Brunetti, and I would prefer that it go no further than it has already.’ Patta said no more than that.
‘I’ll do what I can, sir,’ Brunetti said lamely, thinking of his ‘friends in the publishing world’, two writers on financial affairs and one political columnist.
‘Good,’ Patta said and paused. ‘I’ve asked that new secretary to try to get some information on his taxes.’ It was not necessary for Patta to explain whose taxes he meant. ‘I’ve asked her to give you anything she finds.’ Brunetti was too surprised by this to do anything but nod.
Patta bent his head over the papers and Brunetti, reading this as a dismissal, left the office. Signorina Elettra was no longer at her desk, so Brunetti wrote a note and left it on her desk. ‘Could you see what your computer tells you about the dealings of Avvocato Giancarlo Santomauro?’
He went back upstairs to his office, conscious of the heat, which he felt expanding, seeking out every corner and crevice of the building, ignoring the thick walls and the marble floors, bringing thick humidity with it, the sort that caused sheets of paper to turn up at the corners and cling to any hand that touched them. His windows were open, and he went to stand by them, but they did no more than bring new heat and humidity into the room, and, now that the tide was at its lowest, the penetrating stench of corruption that always lurked beneath the water, even here, close to the broad expanse of open water in front of San Marco. He stood by the window, sweat soaking through his slacks and shirt to his belt, and he thought of the mountains above Bolzano and of the thick down comforters under which they slept during August nights.
He went to his desk and called down to the main office, told the officer who answered to ask Vianello to come up. A few minutes later, the older man came into the office. Usually tanned by this time of year to the ruddy brown of bresaola, the air-dried beef fillet that Chiara loved so much, Vianello was still his normal pale, winter self. Like most Italians of his age and background, Vianello had always believed himself immune to statistical probability. Other people died from smoking, other people’s cholesterol rose from eating rich food, and it was only they who died of heart attacks because of it. He had, every Monday for years, read the ‘Health’ section in the Corriere della Sera, even though he knew that all those horrors were consequent upon the behaviour of other people only.
This spring, however, five precancerous melanomas had been dug out from his back and shoulders, and he had been warned to stay out of the sun. Like Saul on the road to Damascus, Vianello had experienced conversion, and, like Paul, he had tried to spread his particular gospel. Vianello had not, however, counted on one of the qualities basic to the Italian character: omniscience. Everyone he spoke to knew more than he did about this issue, knew more about the ozone layer, about chlorofluorocarbons and their effects upon the atmosphere. What is more, all of them, and this to a man, knew that this talk of danger from the sun was just another bidonata, another swindle, another trick, though no one was quite certain just what this swindle was in aid of.
When Vianello, still filled with Pauline zeal, had attempted to argue from the scars on his back, he was told his particular case proved nothing, that all of the statistics were false; besides, it wouldn’t happen to them. And he had then come to realize th
at most remarkable of truths about Italians: no truth existed beyond personal experience, and all evidence that contradicted personal belief was to be dismissed. And so Vianello had, unlike Paul, abandoned his mission, and had, instead, bought a tube of Protection 30, which he wore on his face all year long.
‘Yes, Dottore?’ he asked when he came into the office. Vianello had left his tie and jacket downstairs and wore a short-sleeved white shirt and his dark blue uniform pants. He had lost weight since the birth of his third child last year and had told Brunetti that he was trying to lose more weight and get into better shape. A man in his late forties with a new baby, he explained, had to be careful, take better care of himself. In this heat and this humidity, with the memory of those down comforters fresh in his mind, Brunetti didn’t want to think about health in any way, not his own and not Vianello’s.
‘Have a seat, Vianello.’ The officer took his usual chair, and Brunetti went around to sit behind his desk.
