Drawing Conclusions

by Donna Leon

  ‘And so?’

  ‘They asked him to identify his mother’s body,’ Brunetti added, trying to make it sound as if he were suggesting something to Patta that delicacy made difficult to say.

  ‘People just see the face,’ Patta asserted, but an instant later he compromised his certainty by asking, ‘don’t they?’

  Brunetti nodded and said, ‘Of course,’ as though that were the end of it.

  ‘What does that mean?’ Patta demanded in a voice intended to be menacing but which Brunetti, familiar with the beast these many years, recognized as the voice of uncertainty.

  Brunetti forced himself to look at his hands, carefully folded in his lap, and then directly into Patta’s eyes, always the best tactic for lying. ‘He would have been shown the marks, Vice-Questore,’ he said; then, before Patta could ask about that, he continued, ‘And because they thought he was a doctor, they would have explained them to him. Well, explained what they might be.’

  Patta considered this. ‘You think Rizzardi would actually do that?’ he asked, unable to disguise his dissatisfaction that the medico legale might have told someone the truth.

  ‘He’d think it was correct because he was speaking to a colleague,’ Brunetti said.

  ‘But he’s only a veterinarian,’ Patta raged, speaking the noun with contempt and apparently forgetting not only his son’s relationship with his husky but the many times he had expressed his belief that vets’ professional skill exceeded that of the doctors at the Ospedale Civile.

  Brunetti nodded but chose to say nothing. Instead, he sat quietly and observed Patta’s face as the consciousness behind it measured the odds and considered the possibilities. Niccolini was an unknown player: he worked outside the province of Venice, so he could have some political weight unknown to Patta. Veterinarians worked with farmers, and farmers were close to the Lega, and the Lega was a growing political force. Beyond this, for lack of fantasy, Brunetti’s imagination could not go in pursuit of Patta’s.

  Finally Patta said, sounding not at all happy about the fact, ‘I’ll have to ask a magistrate to authorize something.’ A sudden thought crossed his handsome face; did the Vice-Questore actually pause to adjust his tie? ‘Yes, we’ve got to get to the bottom of this. Tell Signorina Elettra what you want me to ask him for. And I’ll see to it.’

  It had been so flawless that Brunetti had not seen the change take place. He recalled the passage – he thought it was in the Twenty-Fifth Canto – where Dante sees the thieves transformed into lizards, lizards into thieves, the moment of transformation invisible until complete. One instant one thing, the next another. So too had Patta passed from the sustainer of peace at any compromise to the relentless seeker after justice, ready to mobilize the forces of order in the pursuit of truth. Like Dante’s sinners, he fell back to earth already in the guise of his opposite, then rose and walked away with nothing more than a glance over his shoulder.

  ‘I’ll go and speak to her about it now, shall I, sir?’ Brunetti suggested.

  ‘Yes,’ Patta encouraged. ‘She’ll know which magistrate is best. One of the young ones, I think.’

  Brunetti got to his feet and wished his superior good morning.

  Signorina Elettra appeared neither surprised nor pleased at her superior’s change of course. ‘There’s a nice young magistrate I can ask,’ she said with the calculating smile she might use when asking the butcher for a plump young chicken. ‘He hasn’t had much experience, so he’s likely to be open to … suggestion.’ This, Brunetti thought, was probably much the way the Old Man of the Mountain spoke of his apprentice assassins as he sent them about their tasks.

  ‘How old is he?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘He can’t be thirty,’ she said, as though that number were a word she had heard in some other language and perhaps knew the meaning of. Then, in a far more serious voice, she asked, ‘What do you want him to ask for?’

  ‘Access to the records of the Ospedale Civile for the time Madame Reynard was a patient there; employee records for the same period, if such things exist; authorization to speak to Morandi and Signora Sartori; tax records for both of them and all documents regarding the sale of Cuccetti’s wife’s house to Morandi; Reynard’s death certificate, and a look at the will to see how much she left him, as well as any other bequests.’ That sounded, to Brunetti, like more than enough to be getting on with.

  She had been taking note of his requests, and when he finished, she looked at him and said, ‘I have some of this information already, but I can change the dates and make it look as if the request wasn’t made until the magistrate authorized it.’ She glanced at her notes and said, tapping at the list with the end of her pencil, ‘He probably doesn’t know yet how to ask for all of this, but I suspect I could make a few suggestions that might help him.’

  ‘Suggestions,’ Brunetti said in a dead level voice.

  The look she gave him would have brought a lesser man to his knees. ‘Please, Commissario,’ was all she said, and then she picked up the phone.

  Within minutes it was done, and the magistrate’s secretary, with whom Signorina Elettra spoke with easy familiarity, said the warrants would be delivered the next morning. Brunetti restrained himself from asking the name of the magistrate, certain that he would learn it from the signature when he saw the papers the next day. Well, he told himself as he considered the speed and efficiency with which her request had been granted: why should the judiciary be any different from any other public or private institution? Favours were granted to the person whose request was accompanied by a raccomandazione, and the more powerful the person who made the raccomandazione, or the closer the friendship between the assistants who saw to the details, the more quickly the request was granted. Need a hospital bed? Best to have a cousin who is a doctor in that hospital, or is married to one. A permit to restore a hotel? Problems with the Fine Arts Commission about a painting you want to move to your apartment in London? The right person had but to speak the word to the right official or to someone to whom the official owed a favour, and all paths were made smooth.

  Brunetti found himself, not for the first time, trapped in ambivalence. In this case, it worked to his advantage – and, he told himself, to the civic good – that Signorina Elettra had turned the judicial system of the city into her fief. But in places where persons of lesser … lesser probity… were in charge, the results might not be as salutary.

  He left these thoughts, thanked her for her help, and went back to his office.

  It was there, after an hour during which he read and initialled various documents and reports, that Signorina Elettra came to speak to him. ‘I’ve found the man of my dreams,’ she said as she came in, and said it in such a way as to lead Brunetti to understand that the man was the young magistrate.

  ‘I take it he availed himself of your experience with the peculiarities of the city.’

  Her smile was calm, her nod an exercise in graciousness. ‘His secretary said a few kind words about me before she put me through to him.’

  ‘After which you induced him to overlook the dubious legality of some of the things you asked him to authorize?’

  The phrase appeared to wound her; if nothing else, it spurred her into saying, ‘I’m not sure there any longer exists a legality in this country that is not dubious.’

  ‘Be that as it may, Signorina,’ Brunetti said, ‘I’m curious to know what you persuaded him to authorize.’

  ‘Everything,’ she said with unconcealed delight. ‘I think this young man might prove a gold mine for us.’

  Brunetti thought of the warning written above the Gates of Hell and was for a moment tempted to dissociate himself from her further progress into a land, not of dubious, but of absent, legality, but hypocrisy was not among his vices. Also, he appreciated the fact that she had used the plural, and so he smiled and said, ‘I tremble at the thought of what you might ask him to authorize.’

  Failing to disguise her disappointment, she said, ‘I’d never compro
mise you in any of this, Dottore.’

  ‘Just yourself?’ he enquired, knowing the impossibility of this.

  Her failure to answer forced him, finally, to confront the fact that she had for years been making requests that lay far beyond her mandate. But how to ask the question without making it sound like an accusation?

  ‘To whom will the responses to these requests be sent?’

  ‘To the Vice-Questore, of course,’ she said simply, and for a moment Brunetti had a vision of her as she would appear when saying this to a judge, saw her hair pulled tightly back, face completely unadorned by makeup, jewellery forgone; the modest way she was dressed, perhaps in a dark blue suit with a skirt of an unfashionable cut and length, sensible shoes. Would she risk wearing a pair of glasses? Her eyes would be modestly turned down in the face of the majesty of the law; her speech modest; no jokes, no sparring, no wit. He wondered, for the first time, if she had some sort of dreary second name she would pull out for an occasion like this: Clotilde, Olga, Luigia. And Patta – Brunetti had no choice but to use the American phrase – would take the fall.

  ‘You’d do that to him?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘Please, Dottore,’ she said in an offended voice, ‘you must give me some credit for human affection, or weakness.’

  As a matter of fact, Brunetti had reason to give her more than some credit for those things, and so he asked, deciding to speak bluntly, ‘But if anything went wrong, you’d let Patta hang for this?’

  She managed to look genuinely shocked at his question, shocked and then disappointed that he could think of asking such a thing. ‘Ah,’ she said, letting the syllable run on for a long time, ‘I could never live with myself if I did that. Besides, you have no idea of how long it would take me to train whoever was sent to replace him.’ At least, Brunetti thought, there was something other than rank hypocrisy on offer here.

  With grudging voice, she said, ‘And I must confess that, over the years, I’ve become almost fond of him.’ Hearing her say it like this surprised Brunetti into accepting that he probably shared her feelings.

  After leaving him with enough time to consider everything she had said, she added, with an easy smile, ‘Besides, all of the requests are sent in Lieutenant Scarpa’s name.’ Her use of the passive voice did not go unremarked by Brunetti.

  It took him but a moment to realize the genius of it. ‘So it appears that the Lieutenant has been exceeding his professional powers all these years? Asking for information without an order from a magistrate,’ he mused, not thinking it necessary to comment on the trail of cyber-proof that was sure to have been left behind him.

  ‘He’s also been breaking into bank codes, pilfering information from Telecom, rifling through the classified files held on citizens in state offices, and stealing copies of people’s credit card statements,’ she said, scandalized by the magnitude of the Lieutenant’s perfidy.

  ‘I’m shocked,’ Brunetti said. And he was: what kind of mind could set up such an elaborate trap for the Lieutenant? ‘And all of these requests came directly from his email?’ he asked, wondering what labyrinth she had created to deal with the responses.

  Her hesitation was minimal, her answer a smile as she said, ‘The Lieutenant believes he is the only person who has the password to his account.’ Her voice softened, but her look did not. ‘I didn’t want him to be troubled reading any replies, so they’re transferred automatically to one of the Vice-Questore’s accounts.’ The name ‘Giorgio’ slithered into Brunetti’s ear, Signorina Elettra’s frequently named friend, the cyber-genius of all cyber-geniuses, but discretion stood on Brunetti’s tongue and he did not speak the name aloud, nor did he ask if the Vice-Questore knew of the existence of his account.

  ‘Remarkable, that the Lieutenant would be so rash as to use his own address to get this information,’ Brunetti said, his thoughts turning to Riverre and Alvise and how very safe this information would make them.

  ‘He probably thinks he’s too clever to be caught,’ she suggested.

  ‘How very foolish of him,’ Brunetti said, recalling how often the Lieutenant had made a point of attempting to prove to Signorina Elettra his own superior cleverness. ‘He should have realized how dangerous it was,’ Brunetti began and, seeing her smile at the breadth of his understanding, added, ‘to have thought he could get away with anything.’

  ‘The Lieutenant does at times try my patience,’ she said. The coolness of her smile warmed his heart.

  24

  As though given wings by the novel experience of working within the limits of the law, Signorina Elettra obtained the missing information by noon the following day, when she came into his office. Though she perhaps attempted to imitate the bland expression of blindfolded Justice as she placed the papers on his desk, she failed to disguise her satisfaction at having so quickly succeeded in her task.

  ‘It’s so easy, it’s enough to make me think of changing my ways,’ she said, though Brunetti was quick to hear the lie.

  ‘I shall live in that single hope,’ he said mildly as he looked at the first paper, which was a copy of a document written in a spidery hand, signed with an indecipherable scribble at the bottom. Two other signatures stood below it.

  ‘You might want to look at the second paper, sir,’ she suggested. He did so and saw that it was the death certificate of Marie Reynard.

  In all these years, Brunetti had never decided whether Signorina Elettra preferred to explain things to him or have him discover them himself. To save time, he asked, ‘And I am looking for?’

  ‘The dates, sir.’

  He glanced back at the first sheet and saw that its date was four days before that on the death certificate. Pointing to it, he said, ‘So this is the famous will?’ No wonder it had caused so much trouble: only an expert could make out this script.

  ‘The third sheet is a transcript, sir. It was done by three different people, and they all produced roughly the same text.’

  ‘Roughly?’

  ‘Nothing that mattered. Or so the accompanying papers state.’

  He turned to the third page and read that, being of sound mind, Marie Reynard left her entire estate, comprising bank accounts, investment accounts, houses and their attached estates, apartments, patents, and all moveable property to Avvocato Benevento Cuccetti, and that this will precluded and superseded all previous wills and was an expression of her total desire and irrevocable decision.

  ‘Nice mixture of the poetic and the legal: “total desire and irrevocable decision”,’ Brunetti observed.

  ‘Nice mixture of fixed and moveable property, as well,’ Signorina Elettra added, nodding to the papers in his hand. Brunetti turned over the transcript and found a list of bank accounts, properties, and other possessions.

  ‘What else did you learn?’ he asked.

  ‘The apartment that was sold to Morandi is behind the Basilica, top floor, one hundred and eighty metres.’

  ‘If the owner was Cuccetti’s wife, then it can’t have been part of the Reynard estate.’

  ‘No, she’d owned it for more than ten years before she sold it to him.’

  ‘The declared price?’

  ‘One hundred and fifty thousand euros,’ she answered. Then before he could say anything, she added, ‘It’s probably worth more than ten times that today.’

  ‘And was worth at least three times that when he bought it,’ Brunetti commented neutrally. Then, more to the point, ‘It’s interesting that no one in the tax office questioned that price: it’s so obviously false.’

  She shrugged this away. A man as powerful and rich as Cuccetti had probably got away with much worse things during his life, and to whom should the tax office do a favour if not to Avvocato Cuccetti?

  Vianello appeared at the door. ‘Signorina, the Vice-Questore would like to speak to you.’

  None of the three of them wondered why Patta had not simply used the telephone. This way, all of them would take note, the Vice-Questore could send Vianello on an errand
upstairs, force Signorina Elettra to stop whatever she was doing and come to his office, and make clear to Brunetti who it was she worked for, and to whom her loyalty was meant to be given.

  She left and Vianello, unasked, came and sat in front of Brunetti’s desk.

  ‘I’ve had a look in the law books,’ Brunetti said, using his thumb to point to the bookcase behind him, which held volumes of both civil and criminal law. ‘And the statute of limitations expired years ago.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘Falsification of an official document. In this case, a will.’

  ‘I didn’t know that,’ Vianello said with heavy emphasis on the first word.

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘That if I didn’t know it, then it’s unlikely that someone like Morandi would know it, don’t you think?’

  ‘And that means?’

  Vianello crossed his legs and folded his arms, slumped down in the chair, and said, speaking so slowly that Brunetti could almost hear the Inspector fitting the pieces together as he spoke, ‘And that means that one way to put these things together is to assume that Signora Sartori said something to Signora Altavilla about whatever it was she and Morandi did. About the will, that is.’

  Brunetti interrupted him to ask, ‘That they knew it was false when they witnessed it?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Vianello said.

  ‘Madre Rosa referred to her “terrible honesty”. Something like that,’ Brunetti said, failing to recall the precise phrase, though its strangeness had struck him when she said it. ‘So if Signora Altavilla learned something from Signora Sartori, she might have been capable of confronting Morandi with it.’

  ‘Because she’d want him to confess?’ Vianello asked.

  Brunetti considered this for some time before he answered. ‘I thought about that. But to what purpose? The old woman’s dead, Cuccetti and his wife and son are dead. The estate’s disappeared: the Church has whatever was left.’ Then he added, with a shrug of incomprehension, ‘Maybe she believed it would save his reputation, or his conscience.’ After a moment, he added, ‘Or save his soul.’ Who knew, people believed even stranger things.