by Donna Leon
Brunetti nodded. ‘I think it is. Yes.’
Griffoni glanced at Vianello but said nothing.
With a vague gesture towards the folder, the Inspector said, ‘It could be that he’s not a very good accountant.’ It was audible to Brunetti that this was merely an introduction to what Vianello really wanted to say, which was, ‘Or that he’s indeed very good at it.’
‘Meaning?’ Griffoni asked.
‘Meaning that people don’t change jobs so often, especially not in these times, and especially not a man who’s married and has children.’
Vianello paused to look at her. ‘Not unless they have some reason to do so,’ he concluded, confirming Brunetti’s belief that Vianello, too, was aware of the dark corners of human possibility.
Neither of them said anything, so Vianello asked, ‘What about the visit of the Guardia di Finanza three months after he left the third place?’ He ruffled through the papers and gave the name of the company: ‘Poseidon Leather.’
‘Two,’ Brunetti said.
‘Excuse me?’ he asked.
‘It was two months.’
Griffoni turned in her chair and asked Brunetti, ‘Are you and Lorenzo jumping to a conclusion about this man that I don’t see?’
Though the question was addressed to them both, Vianello chose to answer it. ‘He didn’t change only his job: he changed city each time. Do you have an explanation for why he’d be willing to disrupt his family’s life so frequently?’ Vianello asked her in a voice that struck Brunetti as being more insistent than necessary.
‘What needs explanation?’ Griffoni asked sharply. ‘Why can’t he simply have changed jobs a number of times?’ Then, glancing at Brunetti in order to include him, she added, ‘You both seem to assume – with what I think is very little evidence – that he’s up to something.’
Brunetti and Vianello exchanged a look, which provoked Griffoni to say, ‘Oh, stop it, both of you. Am I the goose girl of the village who can’t see what the clever, experienced men can see with one glance?’
‘Claudia,’ Brunetti said, ‘We aren’t plotting anything. We’re all looking at the same information.’
‘What does that mean?’ she asked.
‘That we all read this,’ he began, holding up the folder, ‘and it seems we read it differently.’
Griffoni gave him a cool look. ‘And because two of you see it one way, that means you have to be right? If suspicion has company, it’s suddenly the truth?’
‘It might explain Gasparini’s interest in the coupons. He might have seen them as an opportunity,’ Brunetti said, glancing at Vianello, who nodded in agreement. ‘If it happened that, as an accountant, he had to prepare the real books a company keeps, as well as the ones they show to the Guardia di Finanza, then he’d be in a position to make use of that information for his own purposes.’ Brunetti looked at both of them; neither had bothered to question his use of the phrase, ‘real books’.
Griffoni was busy examining the papers in her hands, as though trying to translate them into some other language.
‘It would explain why he changed jobs,’ Brunetti continued. ‘And cities. Either he found that they were doing nothing illegal and left, or he found that they were and used his information to blackmail them, and then left.’
‘Then why would the Guardia di Finanza raid the leather company?’ Griffoni asked.
Vianello suggested, ‘Because they refused to pay him and fired him. What better proof could he offer of what he could do to an employer if they refused to pay him?’
‘Claudia,’ Brunetti began patiently, ‘I’m not trying to ram this down your throat; I’m merely asking you to consider it as a possible explanation for the way he kept changing jobs.’
‘How would he find another job?’ she asked. ‘Especially if he’s a blackmailer.’
‘They’d be eager to get rid of him, wouldn’t they?’ Vianello asked. ‘What better way to do that than by writing him a letter of recommendation praising him so highly they could slough him off to some other company?’
‘I think you’re both crazy,’ Griffoni said abruptly.
Both men stared at her, but Brunetti decided to attempt sweet reason. ‘Oh, come on, Claudia,’ he said. ‘Just because we disagree with you?’ Leaving her no time to protest, he continued, ‘The pharmacist is just another person for him to blackmail, like his former employers.’
‘I’m still waiting for evidence that it happened like that,’ she said.
Vianello interrupted to say, ‘Let’s talk about Dottor Donato for a moment.’ He held up the sheaf of papers. ‘He seems like a decent, honest man who’s worked hard all his life.’ Both of them heard the sharp emphasis he put on the word ‘seems’.
‘He worked out this scam with the coupons,’ he went on. ‘Signorina Elettra found the rules for pharmacists. They can add thirty-three per cent to the cost of medicines: no more. But with cosmetics, they can ask whatever they want. She found one pharmacy with a seventy per cent markup.’
Brunetti looked at Griffoni and said, ‘Think about what it does to his profits to sell cosmetics, instead of medicine.’ After a pause, he added, ‘Gasparini’s an accountant. No matter how confused his aunt’s story was, he’d see the advantage of the coupons in an instant.’
Vianello, in a far less combative tone, and careful to speak equally to Brunetti and Griffoni, added, ‘Signora Gasparini had almost a thousand Euros in coupons. She’s been accepting them for a long time and so has her friend, Signora Lamon. The person who profits from that is Donato.’
This time, Griffoni did not protest about what they said. Brunetti saw her abstracted gaze; he wondered whether she were trying to calculate Donato’s added monthly earnings.
Brunetti and Vianello shared a glance and lapsed into mutually agreed silence.
Speaking slowly, as if begrudging every word, Griffoni said, ‘All right: Donato would be better off if Gasparini didn’t talk about this.’ It was a long way from agreeing with them, but at least Griffoni was willing to accept the possibility. She went quiet again, and only after some time had elapsed, asked, ‘Has either of you thought what would happen if you had Matilde Gasparini speak to a magistrate or try to give a statement about what happened? Or what a good defence attorney would do to your parade of old women with Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s?’ She held up her thumb and then her other fingers as she counted out her objections. ‘You’ll have only the testimony – if you can call it that – of these addled old women. Or men. You have the coupons with Signora Gasparini’s name on them and her confused account of a twenty per cent increase. You have no evidence of any connection between Gasparini and Donato. You have a colleague of Donato’s who has repeated gossip about him. If you think this is enough to take to a magistrate, then good luck to you,’ she said.
Vianello looked sobered by what she said. ‘We’ve found no one else with a motive to attack him.’
‘No robbery,’ Brunetti reminded them.
Silence returned. Brunetti saw that the sky had darkened, and night was fast upon them. He heard a sudden gust of wind, and across the canal, leaves tumbled from the trees in the garden of the house with the fence. The wind banged the shutter of the last window on the right of the top floor back and forth, noisy witness to the increasing dilapidation of the building.
‘So?’ Vianello finally asked.
‘His wife would know,’ Griffoni said.
‘You sound sure of that,’ Vianello said.
‘Would your wife know?’ she shot right back.
Vianello laughed, and the situation deflated.
*
‘How dare you suggest that about Tullio?’ Professoressa Crosera shouted at them.
She’d agreed to let them come to her home the following morning, had welcomed him and Griffoni with cool politeness. Brunetti had decided a third person would be too much, and Vianello had made no objection when asked not to go with them. The Professoressa led them into the sitting room.
Her husband, she explained, in response to Brunetti’s question, was a quiet, serious man whose life centred on his family and his – here she had paused and looked across at them nervously – passion for cycling. He’d competed in the Giro d’Italia when he was still a student but realized that he lacked the stamina to be a professional. But still he rode, kept three bicycles in a garage in Mestre and spent at least one of the days he was home at the weekend, in all weathers, riding long distances and returning home exhausted and tranquil.
The thought of how normal this sounded made it difficult for Brunetti to go on to his next topic, his chequered work history. Nevertheless he had, with some trepidation, asked why her husband had changed jobs so often, and she’d said, showing the first overt signs of irritation, that it sounded as though they suspected he’d been fired for some incompetence or irregularity at his work.
‘That’s what we’d like to exclude, Signora,’ Brunetti said seriously. ‘Not incompetence, Signora. Irregularity.’
Brunetti had read, and often, that a person’s mouth fell open in surprise. This is exactly what happened, and then Professoressa Crosera sat immobile for some seconds before she demanded, ‘How dare you suggest that about Tullio?’ She seemed about to ask something else, but choked on her rage and had to stop, her hand to her mouth to stop her coughing, face red with fury.
Griffoni, who had sat quietly through Brunetti’s questioning, had winced with shame when he made his final suggestion. She sat immobile, face forward, not looking at either of them.
Professoressa Crosera closed her eyes and, in what in other circumstances would have been an act of conscious melodrama, placed a hand on her heart. Brunetti heard, for the first time, the ticking of a clock somewhere in the room.
It ticked more than a hundred times before Professoressa Crosera opened her eyes and looked at him. ‘I will tell you this once, and then I want you to get out of my house, both of you. You will not speak to me again, and I will not speak to you, not unless I am ordered to do so by an officer of the court.’ She hadn’t bothered to look at Griffoni.
She asked Brunetti, ‘Do you understand?’
‘Yes.’
‘My husband’s parents died of cancer, six years apart; their deaths were very ugly and very long. In each case,’ and here she paused and spoke with a tight, closed voice, ‘his employers were so pleased with him that they gave him leave of absence and allowed him to work from Venice. And in both cases, he realized he could no longer do his work well enough, and so he resigned from the positions to take care of his parents, and we lived on my salary.’
She looked at them to see that they were following her story. ‘He did this because that’s what seemed right for him to do, as did I. In the third case, he quit because the son of the owner asked him to do something illegal, and in the last, the company relocated to Shanghai, and he did not accept their offer to go and work there.’ She looked back and forth between them. Brunetti met her glance, but Griffoni did not.
‘And the Albertini? Who pays for that?’ Brunetti asked, playing his last card, but playing it, he knew, badly.
‘His aunt,’ she answered, this time her contempt palpable. ‘So you can put to rest your idea that he was embezzling from his employers, or whatever it is you think him capable of doing.’
She got to her feet and moved towards the door. Brunetti and Griffoni, each avoiding the other’s glance, followed her. Professoressa Crosera closed the door after them.
Brunetti explained all of this to Paola after dinner; she listened silently, sipping at the tisane they had decided to have instead of coffee and grappa. She sat on the sofa, her feet side by side on the floor in front of her, cup and saucer on her lap. Brunetti had chosen to sit in the chair opposite her and to drink from a mug.
‘You didn’t check with his employers first?’ she asked.
Refusing to answer, Brunetti shook his head.
After a time, Paola said, ‘I’m sorry for Elisa.’
‘I wanted to tell you,’ Brunetti said. ‘She might be …’
‘Yes, she might,’ Paola agreed. ‘I would.’ Then, after a moment, she asked, ‘What did you do?’
‘When?’
‘After she threw you out.’
‘I called Signorina Elettra and asked her to check on the dates of death of his parents and then call the places where he was employed at the time to confirm what she said.’
Paola’s chin snapped up and she stared at him. ‘You did this after not bothering to check it all before?’ Paola asked.
‘Yes,’ Brunetti said.
Paola thought about this for a long time but made no comment. Finally she asked, ‘And?’
‘She was telling the truth.’
‘Elisa usually does,’ Paola permitted herself to say. And then, ‘Now what?’
‘I want to speak to Dottor Donato.’
‘What do you want from him?’
‘I want to see how he reacts when I tell him Gasparini knew about the coupons.’
‘Why tell him you know?’
‘Because he’ll realize we’d see the connection with the attack on Gasparini.’
‘Have you considered that you might be as wrong about Donato as you were about Gasparini?’
‘He’s given the coupons to a number of people, so we’re at least not wrong about that,’ he said, hearing how relieved he was to be able to say it.
‘That’s considered small change in our world, Guido,’ she said and waved it away with her hand. ‘How much could he manage to make from them in a year?’
‘Would it be easier to believe he did it if he’d made more? Would it be worse?’
‘No, it wouldn’t, Guido, though the law certainly has degrees of culpability.’
‘You don’t approve?’
‘What he’s doing is dishonest, tricking these old people into spending a hundred Euros a month on cosmetics,’ she said, allowing no compromise. ‘Stealing and cheating have become so normal that we’re ready to dismiss anything that seems to be a small crime, as if it weren’t wrong. Isn’t there a law which says that if you’re sentenced to three years or less, you don’t have to bother to go to prison?’
Brunetti nodded. ‘More or less.’
She paused, but when he started to speak, she stopped him by saying, ‘Think of the Antigone you’re reading. Who’s right? Antigone? Creon? No one’s hurt by what she does, so should she be allowed to break the law? She says she’s obeying the law of the gods, doing what humanity knows is right, so can she break the law?’
Brunetti didn’t answer. He didn’t have an answer, nor did the play. The play asked questions and asked the reader to consider them, answer them if they dared. Paola went on: ‘If she insisted on burying two brothers, three, would she be braver or more noble? Or, for Creon, would her crime be two or three times worse?’
Brunetti put his hands up to signify that he didn’t know.
‘That’s why people like novels,’ Paola surprised him by saying. ‘In most novels, things get explained to them by a narrator. They get told why people did what they did. We’re accustomed to that voice, telling us what to think.’
‘You sound as though you don’t like it,’ Brunetti said.
‘I don’t. It’s too easy. And in the end, it’s so unlike life, so fake.’
‘Because?’
‘Life doesn’t have a narrator – it’s full of lies and half-truths – so we never know anything for sure, not really. I like that.’
‘So fiction really is fiction?’ Brunetti asked.
Paola looked across at him, open-mouthed in surprise. Then she put her head back and laughed until the tears came.
28
When he entered the Questura the following morning, the young officer at the door saluted him crisply and said, ‘Dottore, Signorina Elettra said she’d like to see you as soon as you came in.’
He thanked her and started up towards Signorina Elettra’s office, wondering what fresh information she’d managed to unearth s
ince yesterday afternoon. He had slept badly, asking himself over and over how his suspicion about Gasparini – which he saw now had been based on nothing more than desperation to find a reason he had been attacked – had so easily spiralled out of control. Had Vianello’s agreement spurred him on to behave so rashly? He’d read how much more aggressive men became when they were part of a group. Had he and Vianello become a group? Reluctantly, he conceded that their thoughts had formed a gang.
The first thing he noticed was that the sober flowers in Signorina Elettra’s office had been replaced by an immense bouquet of bold yellow ones. Zinnias? He never knew. They seemed pleased to be sitting in the light and looked as though they were planning to create some sort of commotion in the room.
Signorina Elettra, he noticed as he approached her desk, gave off the same energy as did the colour of the flowers. Her expression made it clear that trouble was brewing, but trouble for someone else.
‘And what have you discovered, Signorina?’ The tone in which Brunetti asked the question was as good as a signature on a peace treaty.
‘I saw Barbara last night,’ she answered.
‘I hope she’s well,’ Brunetti said. He knew Signorina Elettra’s sister and liked her.
‘Very, thank you,’ she answered politely. ‘I thought I’d ask her because she’s a doctor and might know something.’
‘About Dottoressa Ruberti?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Proust,’ Signorina Elettra said and smiled. ‘Barbara told me that’s her nickname among the other doctors.’
In the face of Brunetti’s evident incomprehension, she added, ‘Because she writes so much.’ When she saw that he still did not understand, Signorina Elettra said, ‘So many prescriptions.’
Of course, of course. ‘For old people?’ he asked.
‘So long as they have Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s, it seems,’ she specified. ‘She has a number of other, sometimes younger, patients who are depressed or bipolar. In both cases, she is said to have a predilection for prescribing new medicines and generally avoids the generics.’
