Drawing Conclusions

by Donna Leon

  ‘I need the information about the years 1988 and 1989. There’s nothing we can do until we have it.’

  ‘Go to hell with your 1988, and take 1989 with you,’ the old man said, pleased that he now had something specific to be angry about and pleased with his cleverness in expressing it.

  Brunetti allowed surprise, then indignation, to play across his face. Then he took a long look at this noisy old man, as if seeing or hearing him for the first time. He stood up straighter and took a step towards him; there was no menace in the movement; though the old man leaned back from him, he did not move from his position in front of the woman.

  Brunetti waved the notebook in the air between them. ‘See this, Signore? See this notebook? It’s got her entire work record, all those years. But not 1988 and 1989, so they haven’t been credited to her account.’ An exasperated Brunetti allowed himself to glance at the woman. ‘So she’s not being paid for them.’ He allowed himself to sound as if, given the way this man had treated him, he was almost pleased with the fact.

  ‘I asked her about those years,’ Brunetti said, looking in her direction with an annoyance he tried, and failed, to disguise. He’d come all this way to try to solve a problem, and first the woman was mute, and now the man told him to go to hell. ‘Like talking to a statue.’ He leaned forward, and this time the old man did take one step backwards. ‘And then I have to listen to you,’ Brunetti said with angry disgust.

  Brunetti drew a few deep breaths, as if enjoining himself to patience; but, like every bureaucrat, he had a point beyond which his patience was exhausted, and he had clearly passed it. ‘Try to help people, and all you get is abuse.’

  As he spoke, his voice angrier with every sentence, Brunetti kept his eyes on the old man. If Brunetti had stuck him with a pin, he could not have deflated more quickly. Strangely enough, this time the other parts of his face flushed red, while his cheeks and his nose turned an unhealthy white. He cast a glance at the woman to see if she had been following, and Brunetti could almost smell his fear that she had heard and understood what his meddling had provoked.

  The old man raised both hands in a placatory gesture towards Brunetti. ‘Signore, Signore,’ he said. All signs of aggression and anger had vanished. He pasted a thin smile on his face.

  ‘No,’ Brunetti said, snapping the notebook shut just under the other man’s nose and jamming it back in his pocket. ‘No. There’s no use wasting my time on the likes of you. No use ever trying to do anyone a favour.’ He forced his voice even louder and all but shouted, ‘You can wait for official notice, the way everyone else does.’

  He turned and walked quickly towards the door. The old man took one tentative step towards him, hands still raised, now in near-supplication. ‘But Signore, I didn’t understand. I didn’t mean … She needs …’ he almost bleated in the tone of a citizen who sees himself losing the chance to receive a payment from a government office and who knows he will now have to wait for the bureaucracy to volunteer to make the payment.

  Brunetti, enjoying his indignation, left the room and walked quickly down the corridor. He made his way to the front door and left the casa di cura without seeing either of the novices or any of the sisters.

  18

  Returned to the street and free of the role of irritated bureaucrat, Brunetti considered, and then regretted, the rashness of his behaviour. There had been no need for his charade, his heavy-handed impersonation, but something in him knew that the man should be prevented from suspecting that the authorities were taking an interest in the nursing home or any of the people in it, and so he had acted without thinking and given in to his impulse towards secrecy: should he ever have to deal with the old man in his official capacity as a representative of the law, the situation could be legally complicated by his original misrepresentation. He had seen cases destroyed by less.

  But what was he doing, even thinking in terms of a case? All he had was a choleric old man shouting at him and a woman of uncertain lucidity warning him of trouble to come. When was trouble not coming?

  The old man had foreseen trouble in the presence of an unknown visitor in her room and had been suspicious that Brunetti had been asking questions. Why should this concern him? Brunetti cast his memory back over the scene. He had explained that it was impossible to get any information from her, and the man’s anger had been dissipated only by the possibility that the woman would receive money.

  Brunetti seldom permitted himself the luxury of disliking the people he met in the course of his work. He formed first impressions, surely, sometimes very strong ones. They were often correct, but not always. Over the years, he had come to accept that the negative ones were more distorting than the positive ones: it was too easy to follow the dictates of dislike.

  But, of all the world, Brunetti most hated bullies. He hated them for the injustice of what they did and for their need to make others submit. Only once in his professional life had he lost control of himself, almost twenty years ago, during the questioning of a man who had kicked a prostitute to death. He had been captured because his three initials were embroidered on the linen handkerchief he had used to wipe the blood off his shoes and dropped not far from the woman’s body.

  Luckily, three officers had been detailed to question the man, an accountant who shared control of a string of girls with their pimp. When asked to identify the handkerchief, it did not escape the observation of any of the policemen that he wore an identical one in his breast pocket.

  As soon as he realized the meaning and the consequences of the handkerchiefs, he had said, man to man, just one of the boys, and oh, so eager to show what a tough boy he was, ‘She was just a whore. I shouldn’t have wasted a linen handkerchief on her.’ It was then that the younger, rawer Brunetti had jumped to his feet, already halfway across the table towards him. Wiser heads, and hands, had intervened, and Brunetti had been replanted solidly in his chair to wait out, silently, the interrogation.

  Times had been different then, and his attempt had had no legal consequences. In today’s legal climate, however, were the old man ever to be accused of a crime, the disclosure of Brunetti’s true profession would be milk and honey to a defence attorney.

  Mulling over all of this, Brunetti made his way back to the Questura. When he got there, he went directly to Signorina Elettra’s room, where he found her reading: not a magazine, as was her usual habit in quiet moments, but a book.

  She slipped a piece of paper between the pages and closed the book. ‘Light workload today?’ he enquired.

  ‘You might put it that way, Commissario,’ she said, placing the book to the side of her computer, the front cover facing downward.

  He approached her desk and said, ‘I met a woman today, one of the people that Signora Altavilla visited with at the casa di cura.’

  ‘And I’d like you to see what we can find out about her,’ she concluded, just as if she were channelling his thoughts, though she made no attempt to imitate his voice.

  ‘It’s that obvious?’ he asked, smiling.

  ‘You do get a certain predatory look,’ she said.

  ‘What else?’

  ‘You don’t usually limit yourself to that person, Signore, so I’m preparing myself to see what I can find, not only about her but about her husband and any children they might have.’

  ‘Sartori. I don’t know her first name, and I don’t know how long she’s been there. At least a few years, I’d guess. She has a husband who seems to have the default mechanism of anger. I don’t know his name, and I don’t know about children.’

  ‘Do you think she’s there as a private patient?’ Signorina Elettra asked, confusing him with the question.

  ‘I have no idea,’ he said. He thought back to the room, but it was just a room in an old people’s home. There had been no evidence of luxury, and he had not noticed any personal items. ‘Why? What difference would it make?’

  ‘If she’s there as a public patient, then I’d start first with the state records, but i
f she’s private, I’d have to access the records of the casa di cura.’ The mere sound of the word ‘access’ falling from the lips of Signorina Elettra induced in Brunetti a state analogous to that of a rabbit under the gaze of a boa constrictor.

  ‘Which is easier?’ he asked, refusing to add ‘to access’ and wise enough not to use ‘to get into’.

  ‘Ah, the casa di cura, certainly,’ she said, with the condescension of the heavyweight champion confronted by a nightclub bouncer.

  ‘The other?’ he asked, curious as always about the importance the state gave to the protection and accuracy of the information it possessed about its citizens.

  His question elicited a sigh and a weary shake of her head. She made a tisking sound and said, ‘With government offices, the problem’s not about getting into the system – in most cases, a high school student could do it – it’s about then being able to find the information.’

  ‘I’m not sure I understand the distinction,’ Brunetti admitted.

  She paused, considering what example would be simple enough for a person of his limited talents. ‘I suppose it’s like a burglary, Signore. Getting into the house is easy, especially when the door is left on the latch. But once you get inside, you discover that the people live in a complete mess, with dirty dishes in the bedroom and old shoes and newspapers in the kitchen.’ She saw his dawning understanding and went on. ‘And they’ve lived that way since the house was built, so all that’s happened as time passed and more things came into the house is that the mess has turned to complete chaos, and even finding the simplest thing – a teaspoon, for example – requires you to go through the whole house room by room, and search for it everywhere.’

  Not that he needed to know, but because her explanation forced him to be curious: ‘Is this the case in all public offices?’

  ‘Mercifully not, Commissario.’

  ‘Which are the best?’ he asked, unaware of the ambiguity of his question.

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘There’s no best; it’s only least bad.’ Seeing that she had not satisfied him, she said, ‘Finding out who has been given a passport is usually easy. And gun permits. Those records are quite orderly. But after that there’s a great deal of confusion, and there’s no hope of knowing who has a permesso di soggiorno or a work permit, or really understanding what the rules or criteria are for getting them.’

  Since those all fell under the Ministry for which Brunetti worked, the news came as little surprise. He could not resist the temptation and asked, ‘And the worst?’

  ‘I’m not really competent to judge,’ she said with admirably feigned modesty, ‘but the ones I find it most difficult to, well, to navigate – however easy it is to get to the point where I can – are those which authorize people to do things, or perhaps it’s better to say those agencies which are meant to protect us.’ In response to his furrowed brow, she said, ‘I mean those offices where they’re supposed to check that nurses have the right documents and that they really did study where they say they did. Or, for that fact, doctors and psychiatrists and dentists.’ She spoke with dispassion, the frustrated researcher reporting her findings. ‘There’s terrible negligence there. Getting into their system is easy, as I told you, but after that it’s all very difficult.’ Then, gracious and generous as ever, she added, ‘For them as well, I’m sure, poor things.’

  Brunetti’s family occasionally watched a television programme that made public some of the worst cases of governmental negligence. For reasons he did not understand, his children found it wonderfully funny, while he and Paola cringed at the nonchalance with which its nightly revelations were greeted when presented to the authorities who had failed to prevent or detect abuses. How many fake doctors had the programme discovered, how many fake healers? And how many of them had been stopped?

  Brunetti pulled himself away from these thoughts and said, ‘I’d be very grateful for anything you could find about either her or her husband.’

  ‘Of course, sir,’ she said, not unrelieved to have an end called to their discussion of her cyber-explorations and their resulting discoveries. ‘I’ll see what I can find.’ Then, efficiency itself, ‘How far back should I go?’

  ‘Until you find something interesting,’ he said, trying to sound as if he were joking but fearing he did not succeed.

  After this, Brunetti repaired to his office. Once at his desk, he was suddenly assailed by hunger, looked at his watch, and was surprised to see that it was well past three. He called home but no one answered: he hung up before the machine kicked in. Paola refused to carry a telefonino, and the kids, both probably already back at school, were not likely to be of any help. He could try her on her office phone, but she seldom answered it: her students knew where to find her, and any colleague who wanted to speak to her, as far as she was concerned, could walk down the hall to her office.

  He thought of calling home again and this time leaving a message, but nothing he could say would change the fact that he had once again failed to show up for lunch and had not thought to call. The kids would hear about something like this for days had either tried it.

  His phone rang, and he answered with his name.

  ‘This is Maddalena Orsoni,’ she said. ‘It turns out that I came back sooner than planned.’

  In most circumstances, Brunetti would offer some cliché about hoping this did not mean she had encountered any sort of difficulty, but she did not sound like the sort of woman to have much patience with cliché or sentiment, and so he said, ‘Would it be possible for us to meet now?’

  Neither of them, he noticed, made any reference to the subject that concerned them. He was a public official in pursuit of information, yet he instinctively avoided asking any specific questions on the phone. How convenient Venice made it to have a conversation, to meet on the street, as if by accident, and go for a coffee; how easy to walk across town to have a drink and a chat.

  ‘Yes,’ she finally answered.

  ‘A bar?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘I don’t know where you are,’ he said, adding, ‘but I’m at San Lorenzo. So choose a place that’s convenient for you; I’ll meet you there.’

  She took some time considering this and finally said, ‘There’s a bar just at the end of Barbaria delle Tole in Campo Santa Giustina, on the corner on the left as you come in from SS. Giovanni e Paolo. I can be there in ten minutes.’

  ‘I’ll see you there,’ he said and replaced the phone.

  19

  What an odd place to meet. Could any campo be more out of the way than Campo Santa Giustina? Only someone heading towards San Francesco della Vigna or to the Celestia boat stop would pass through it, or someone like Brunetti who often walked for the simple pleasure of seeing or re-seeing the city. He recalled coming here, years ago, in search of the person rumoured to be able to repair dolls. Chiara’s grandparents had given her a porcelain-headed girl in a hoop skirt for Christmas, but the doll had lost an eye. Brunetti no longer remembered whether he had managed to find the eye, but he did remember the taciturn grey-haired woman who ran the Doll Hospital, looking as much like a patient as did the dolls she kept in the window. He had passed through the campo since then but had never veered over to look in the window to check up on new patients.

  It took him only a short time to get there. Across the campo he recognized the dreary window of the second-hand clothing store. Like most Italians of his age, Brunetti disliked the idea of buying used clothing; indeed, used anything, unless it were, say, a painting. But who would be tempted, save by abject misery, to want anything in that window? Brunetti had not been to Bulgaria when it was still a Communist country, but he imagined its shop windows must have looked like this: dusty, sober, earth-coloured pleas that people pass by without looking.

  He went into the bar. A dark-haired woman was the only client, sitting at a table near the window. He approached and asked, ‘Signora Orsoni?’

  She looked at him without smiling or extending her hand. ‘Good afternoon
, Commissario,’ she said and nodded towards the seat opposite her.

  He pulled the chair away from the table and sat. Before he could say anything, the barman approached their table and they asked for coffee; then Brunetti changed his mind and asked for a glass of white wine and a panini.

  When the man moved away, they studied one another, each waiting for the other to speak. Brunetti saw a woman in her early fifties, with light eyes in surprising contrast to her dark hair and olive skin. She had made no attempt to colour the grey in her hair: that and the crow’s feet around her eyes spoke of a lack of concern with maintaining the appearance of youth.

  ‘I’m Maddalena Orsoni, Commissario. I set up Alba Libera, and I’ve run it since it began.’

  ‘How long ago was that?’ he asked, displaying no surprise at her refusal to engage in the usual social preliminaries to conversation.

  ‘Four years.’

  ‘May I ask why you started it?’

  ‘Because my brother-in-law killed my sister,’ she said. Though she must have given this same answer many times, Brunetti suspected she was curious about the effect of such brutal honesty. He acknowledged her statement, however, with only a nod, and she went on. ‘He was a violent man, but she loved him. He said he loved her. There was always a reason for his violence, of course: he’d had a hard day; something was wrong with dinner; he saw her looking at another man.’

  Hearing her recite this made him wonder how many times she had told this story, but it also reminded him of how often he had heard the same explanations given from men in justification of violence, rape, murder.

  The barman came and served them. Brunetti couldn’t bring himself to touch his toast, not while her words still echoed between them.

  ‘Go ahead and eat,’ she said, pouring some sugar into her cup. She stirred it slowly, watching it dissolve.

  Brunetti’s stomach, perhaps at the proximity to what was going to have to substitute for the lunch he had lost, growled. She smiled, finished her coffee and set the cup down. ‘Please. Eat.’