by Donna Leon
She did not acknowledge Brunetti, but her body changed, as if growing more attentive, the better to hear anything he might say. ‘Thanks for saying what you did,’ Brunetti said.
He saw her nod her head, but she did not turn around.
6
As he started down towards his office, Brunetti thought about how taking a look at one’s unconscious motives and prejudices was like walking barefoot in cloudy water: you never knew whether you were going to step on something disgusting or bang your toe into a rock. He’d always considered himself relatively free of prejudice and had even managed to temper some of his atavistic suspicion of Southerners. Well, some Southerners.
He’d also thought himself free of preconceived notions about gays, but Griffoni had shown that to be false. Was a preconceived notion the same thing as a prejudice? he wondered. Musing on this, he failed to see Lieutenant Scarpa turning into the corridor and didn’t notice him until he almost walked into him.
‘Good morning, Commissario,’ the Lieutenant said, raising a hand to suggest a salute. Only a centimetre or two taller than Brunetti, he weighed at least fifteen kilos less and thus seemed much taller than he was. Though he stood, he seemed to loom.
‘Good morning, Lieutenant,’ Brunetti said and started to move around him. The Lieutenant leaned, but did not step, to block Brunetti. ‘There was something I wanted to ask you, Commissario,’ he said.
‘Yes, Lieutenant?’ Brunetti asked.
‘It’s about the visit of the Questore of Palermo.’
‘Yes?’ Brunetti asked, forcing a smile onto his face.
‘The dinner. This evening. The Questore would like to know if you’ll be attending.’
Brunetti had been trying to find an excuse for days, and now he had one: Lodo’s dinner.
Before he could answer, Scarpa added, ‘He said he’d very much like to see you there.’
‘The Questore of Palermo?’ Brunetti asked. ‘I’ve never met him.’
‘No, Commissario: the Questore of Venice,’ Scarpa explained, speaking slowly as though he thought Brunetti might never have heard of, or met, his superior.
‘I’m flattered,’ Brunetti said, ‘but I have another commitment.’ For a moment, he toyed with the idea of adding that it would be helpful to have this chance to be reminded of what the Questore looked like, so infrequently was he present at the Questura, but he quelled his impulse towards sarcasm and gave the Lieutenant only a brief nod before walking away.
From behind, he heard Scarpa say, ‘Dottoressa Griffoni has said she’ll be there.’
Brunetti ignored the temptation to say she could take notes for him and went to his office. He refused to give Scarpa the satisfaction of seeing him close his door, went across to his desk and turned on his computer. The first thing he saw when he opened his official email was a red flag on an email from Ispettore Vianello, saying that a late-night search of the homes of three airport baggage handlers, the surveillance of whom had been handed back to the Venice Questura by the Prefetto, had revealed significant quantities of jewellery and a number of items of women’s clothing still in the original wrapping and bags. Some of the objects had been reported to the airport authorities after disappearing from suitcases in transit through the airport. All three of the men arrested had been brought in separately for questioning.
Brunetti heard a noise that only after a second did he realize was a low moaning coming from his own chest. The investigation of the baggage handlers was the Questura’s very own running gag, and he had refused to have anything more to do with it. He whispered to himself, ‘I will not. I will not. I will not get sucked into this again.’ Disturbed by a sound from the direction of the doorway, he glanced up and saw Vianello standing there, a sheaf of papers in his hand.
‘You will, you will, you will,’ the Inspector said, then grinned and added, ‘Unless you’re very careful.’
Brunetti waved him in and pointed to the chair on the other side of his desk. ‘We’ve been catching them at it for I don’t know how many years: we arrest them, sometimes they go to jail, more often they don’t, and almost all of them go back to the same job.’
‘Until we catch them at it again,’ Vianello offered.
‘Why don’t they move to another city?’ Brunetti asked. ‘Or find a different kind of job?’
‘Maybe they like what they do,’ Vianello suggested, leaving it to Brunetti to understand the full meaning of his sentence.
‘That’s crazy.’
Vianello shrugged.
Calming himself, Brunetti asked, ‘You said I’ll get sucked into this. How?’
‘I’m sure Patta’s got something else he wants you to do, something he’d call a “special assignment”,’ Vianello began. ‘I don’t know what he’s up to, but Lieutenant Scarpa’s let drop some hints about the need to make people do what they’re told to do. That sort of thing, and there’s no one Scarpa would rather see being forced to do what they don’t want to do. He hates you.’
This came as no surprise to Brunetti. The hatred was mutual. ‘All right, Scarpa hates me. And Patta doesn’t like me,’ he said, as though he were about to begin reciting a litany.
‘That’s not true,’ Vianello interrupted. ‘Patta doesn’t dislike you: he just doesn’t trust you. That’s different. And he’s learned over the years that he needs you.’
‘For what?’ Brunetti asked.
‘You never object when he takes the credit for your success or for anyone else’s success,’ Vianello said. ‘He wants to have something to threaten you with so that, when something comes along that you don’t want to do, your only other option will be to resume going out to the airport.’ Vianello’s smile was an unpleasant thing to see. ‘He’ll let you choose which one you’d prefer to work on.’
No less familiar with the Vice-Questore’s behaviour than was Vianello, Brunetti was forced to see the truth of this. He pushed his chair back from the desk and got to his feet. For years, Il Gazzettino had praised the uncanny ability of the Vice-Questore to understand and thus outwit the criminal mind, a talent which Dottore Patta denied at every press conference he convened to show its results. Patta’s success had anchored him in place in Venice: each time he was scheduled to be relocated to another province, the mayor intervened personally to keep this wizard in place, and thus the Vice-Questore’s protective arms continued to spread wide over the city, not unlike those of the Madonna della Misericordia.
Brunetti walked to the window but saw nothing he liked. Personal success didn’t interest him, and praise embarrassed him. He’d played soccer as a boy and had come to love the honest competition of the game; perhaps his indignation at crime was nothing more than his distaste for those who broke the rules of fair play. The important thing was that they be stopped, not who managed to stop them.
‘Is there any case he wants to stick me with?’ he asked, still looking out the window.
‘No. Not at all. No politician’s been arrested for shoplifting; no rich doctor’s beaten up his wife; no bishop’s been caught in the sacristy with an altar boy.’
‘Nor girl, I hope,’ Brunetti said in an attempt to inject the possibility of variety into the lifestyle of the clergy.
Face serious, Vianello said, ‘All that’s certain is that he’ll be presented as the mind responsible for solving the case.’
‘And welcome to it, whatever it is,’ Brunetti concluded. ‘I don’t want to start going out to the airport every day to interview their superiors and colleagues.’
As if the idea had just occurred to him, Vianello said brightly, ‘Signorina Elettra could recycle – or I could do it while she’s away – some of the statements from the other investigations: there’s at least ten years of them.’ Then, as final evidence of the efficiency of his idea, he added, ‘Many of them would be from the same suspects.’ Met with stolid silence from Brunetti, he added, ‘You probably interviewed them, so we’d already have tapes of the interrogations.’
This finally prised a smile fro
m Brunetti, who raised a hand and said, ‘Remember, Lorenzo, I am not going back to the airport.’
‘Of course,’ Vianello said. Getting to his feet, he added, ‘You’ll probably end up trying to cover up something for a friend of the mayor.’
‘Given that choice, I’d prefer the airport,’ Brunetti said instantly. His only reward was Vianello’s snort of laughter as he turned to leave.
They tried to eat lunch on the terrace that day, but after five minutes, the cold won and Chiara gave up and carried her plate back to the kitchen. Brunetti gave in next, telling himself it was an act of solidarity with his daughter. Raffi joined the two of them a few minutes later and went directly to the pan containing what was left of the tagliatelle con peperoni gialli e piselli.
Paola came in just as Raffi was helping himself and said, making her voice as deep and rough as that of the bad guy in a Spaghetti Western, ‘You take any more of that, caro, and it’s the last meal you’ll ever eat in this town.’
Raffi, Brunetti could see, was holding his half-filled plate in his left hand, a serving spoon loaded with pasta in his right. Casually, as though he’d been planning to put the spoon back in the pan anyway, he turned and set it there, then placed the lid on it and returned to his place and began to eat his diminished second helping.
Paola picked up the pan and gave Chiara and Brunetti more pasta, then set the empty pan back on the stove.
‘Wasn’t there enough left, Mamma?’ Chiara asked, picking up her own plate and holding it out to her mother to offer her some.
‘No, thank you, Angel. I’ve had enough,’ Paola said. ‘Besides, there’s vitello tonnato,’ she continued, only to be stopped by Chiara’s horrified glance. ‘And zucchine ripiene for you,’ she said to forestall Chiara’s indignation.
When Brunetti saw his daughter’s mouth contract, he knew she was going to ignore the house rule that no one was to criticize the food choices of anyone else at the table. Brunetti, a carnivore who had never thought it seemly to comment on his vegetarian daughter’s fondness for eggs, confined himself to saying ‘Chiara’ in a soft voice.
‘All right,’ she said, setting her dish down in front of her. ‘But I don’t want to have to smell it. It’s disgusting.’
‘To some people, I’m sure it is,’ Paola said in an entirely moderate voice. ‘But I love it, and since I cooked it in my own home, I get to eat it here.’
‘Isn’t it my home, too?’ Chiara asked in her adult voice.
‘Yes, it is. Of course,’ Paola said. ‘But people who live together have to put up with one another and what they do.’
‘And what they eat?’ Chiara asked with the confidence of someone who expected ‘no’ as the only possible answer.
‘And with their music,’ Paola said with tie-breaking certainty.
Raffi bowed his head over his plate and put his right hand – Chiara sat on his right – to his forehead, hiding his face and thus his smile.
Brunetti watched Chiara decide how to act, whether to be an injured victim of injustice or a person who accepts defeat with grace.
She shoved her remaining pasta around on her plate, set her fork down and took a drink of water, then used the back of her fork to wipe up the rest of the sauce.
7
Brunetti went back to his office but found himself thinking about the lunchtime discussion of eating habits. Chiara had, it seemed, adopted the entire planet and now felt it her obligation to do everything she could to protect it. Thus the glass bottles of mineral water, all of them carried up five flights of stairs with the constancy and determination of ants.
Brunetti had called in decades of favours done for almost everyone in their building and had won the approval of the other residents (with the single exception of the pair of French lawyers on the second floor, who had refused him permission – a decision Brunetti chose to ignore) to leave plastic cases of glass bottles of mineral water in the crawl space beneath the main staircase. Because there was no door, the bottles were accessible to everyone in the building, although instead of stealing them – as Brunetti had thought possible – those on the upper floors carried one or two bottles each time they went upstairs and left them on their landings for the next passing Brunetti to pick up and carry the remaining distance.
In return, Chiara – and sometimes Raffi – carried down the plastic and paper garbage of three elderly couples and left it inside the front door for the spazzini to remove each morning.
How different the Venice in which his children lived. He remembered his mother’s stories about when she was a girl and they burned everything in ‘la cucina economica’, that workhorse of a stove that heated the apartment, boiled the water both for cooking and bathing, and cooked the meals, its fuel any spare paper or wood and coal that was delivered to the house. No one had talked about pollution then, only about the fine grains of coal dust that were everywhere, the cost one paid for heat. What would she think of the current fetid air of winter and early spring, of the constant assault on every embankment from the motorized boats that passed, of the tons of plastic tossed into the garbage every day? What, in fact, would his youthful mother have known of plastic?
He hauled his mind back to the issue of meat and to Chiara’s decision no longer to eat it. In the past, she had made no objection to their eating it, so long as she was given something else. But meat and fish together had been too much for her. For the first time in his life, Brunetti thought about meat, what it was, where it came from, what it did for the beings in which it … here, he found himself unable to find a comfortable verb. Did the meat and flesh ‘live’ in their hosts or did they only work or function there?
He tried to recall when he and Raffi and Paola had stopped joking with Chiara about her environmental ideas and ideals. There had been no decisive action or remark, no illumination on the road to Damascus, only the dawning realization of how right she was. He was called back from this aimless musing by a noise at the door. When he looked over, he saw Signora Elettra. Perhaps because she had been at her computer much of the day, she had turned back the sleeves of her blouse, exposing the same yellow lining of the cuffs. Brunetti wondered how a detail as small as this could give such disproportionate delight.
‘Yes, Signorina?’ he asked.
She raised the manila folder in her hand and approached his desk. Smiling, she placed it in front of him.
‘Interesting?’ he asked, sliding it towards him.
‘In part,’ she answered, that apparently being the only introduction she was prepared to give. She gestured towards the folder. ‘There are a few things I couldn’t find.’ Seeing his surprise, she quickly added, ‘I’ve contacted friends who might be able to help me, but not before tomorrow.’
For a moment, Brunetti thought she might apologize for the slowness of her associates. Instead, she looked at her watch and said, ‘There’s nothing more I can do until they answer me, so I thought I might leave now.’
‘And the Vice-Questore?’ Brunetti inquired, familiar with the fact that what little work Patta did usually got done in the late afternoon.
‘He’s gone home already, Dottore. Before he left, he said there was something he wanted to talk over with you but that it could wait until tomorrow.’
He gave her a steady look, but she shrugged her shoulders by way of answer, leaving it to Brunetti to fathom what Vice-Questore Patta might have in mind for him.
‘Thank you for this,’ he said, wished her a pleasant evening, and reached to open the folder.
Time passed. Someone poised on the roof of the building on the other side of the canal would have seen within the office across from him a robust man seated at his desk, slowly making his way through the pages that lay in front of him, just to the left of the keyboard of his computer. Occasionally, the man shifted his eyes from the document to the window, after which he folded his arms and sat for varying periods of time. His gaze was such that he would not have noticed the person on the opposite roof.
Other times
, the man turned from the document to his computer, punched things into the keyboard and gazed at the screen, glanced out of the window, then back to the screen. Every so often, the man looked back at the papers on his desk; now and then he made a note on one or more of them, only to return his attention to the screen.
Once, he got up and came over to the window, but his attention was never directed at the roof opposite. If anything, it was directed at the long open view above the roof. Occasionally, standing there, the man stuffed his hands in the pockets of his trousers and raised and lowered himself on his toes before removing his hands and returning to the desk.
Some time later, as he was gazing at the papers, the man started as at a thunderclap and smacked his hands on his breast, a gesture that would alarm any observer. But then he slipped his right hand inside his jacket, removed his phone, and put it to his ear. He listened for some time, spoke for some time, listened again, tried to speak but stopped, listened some more, said a few words, pressed the surface of the phone, and replaced it in his jacket pocket.
He appeared to say something to himself and then turned to his computer again. His attention remained on the screen for a long time, while he ran his right forefinger down the margin as he read, now and again pausing to glance away at the far wall.
He returned his attention to the printed document until he turned the last page and placed his left palm on top of it, as though he wanted to transmit some message to it, or perhaps wanted it to transmit its essence to him. After a long time, he gathered up the papers and tapped their bottoms against the desk to order them into a neat pile. He slipped them into the middle of his folded copy of Il Fatto Quotidiano and shoved it to the other side of the desk. He leaned closer to the screen, rubbed at his eyes and then his face and sat like that for a few moments. He covered the computer’s mouse with his right hand and moved it around, then removed his hand. As he did, the light from the screen disappeared, making him invisible in the now-darkened office.
