by Donna Leon
‘Given his record,’ Signorina Elettra added, placing her hand on the papers to call their attention back to Gorini: ‘With or without Signorina Montini, it’s not likely that he’s living here in quiet retirement.’
‘And if he’s learned anything from past experiences,’ continued Brunetti, ‘he’ll avoid hiring employees or doing anything that would open him up to licensing rules or official certification of any sort. So why not become a fortune-teller?’
‘It’s not far off being a psychologist, is it?’ Signorina Elettra asked.
However comforting it is to have one’s prejudices confirmed, Brunetti still chose to remain silent.
When he looked at her again, Signorina Elettra had her chin cupped in her left hand, the right resting on the corner of her keyboard. ‘No,’ she said after what seemed a long consultation with the blank screen. ‘There’s really no way we can watch the house. And if the Vice-Questore found out what we were doing, there’d be trouble.’
‘Are you afraid of that?’ he asked.
A quiet puff of dismissal escaped her lips. ‘Not for me. Or you, for that matter. But he’d take it out on Vianello and on any officers involved in it, and Scarpa would join in. It’s not worth it.’
She sat up straight and hit a few keys. ‘Here, take a look at him.’
Brunetti moved behind her just as the photo of a man, in the classic pose of the newly-arrested, came up on the screen. ‘It’s from the time in Aversa, so it’s fifteen years old,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t find anything more recent.’
‘Didn’t he renew his carta d’identità?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Yes, but in Naples, five years ago: they’ve lost the file.’
‘Do you believe them?’ he asked, made suspicious only by the location, not by the event itself, which was common enough.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I asked someone I know, and I believe him. They didn’t scan the photo into the computer, and then they lost the paper file.’ She tapped the screen with her forefinger. ‘So all we’ve got is this.’
The expressionless face that looked out at them, even with the long sideburns and shaggy hair Gorini had worn when the photo was taken, was well proportioned and handsome; the dark eyes tilted up above prominent cheekbones, giving the face a definite Tartar look. The nose was long, skewed a bit to one side, and there was a thickening of the bone just before the bridge. The mouth was broad and well shaped. The combination of features, Brunetti had to admit, amounted to a look of powerful masculinity. He could find no memory of having seen an older version of Gorini in the city.
He pointed to the photo. ‘I’d like you to give copies of this to some to Scarpa’s bloodhounds — without telling the Lieutenant.’ He saw that she wanted to say something, and so added, ‘Tell them it’s an old photo of someone who lives in the city, and it’s just part of the training to see if they can spot him.’
She smiled as she said, ‘To deceive the Lieutenant — in however minor a way — is to know joy.’
11
Before he could leave her office, Signorina Elettra asked, ‘Are you still curious about Signor Fontana?’
Fontana? Fontana? What did that name have to do with Vianello’s aunt? Then it came back to him — that ‘decorous man’ — and he said, ‘Ah, yes. Certainly.’
‘As you told me, he’s an usher at the Tribunale, so it was very easy to find him. He’s worked there for thirty-five years, lives with his mother, never married. Never taken a day off sick. Only day he’s ever missed work was the day of his father’s funeral, thirty-four years ago.’
Brunetti stopped her there with an abruptly raised hand. ‘Never missed a day of work? Well, one day, for his father’s funeral. And you say this man is a civil servant?’
‘Yes,’ she answered. ‘Should I get you a chair, Commissario?’
‘Thank you, no,’ he said in a very quiet voice. He placed one hand flat on her desk and made a business of supporting himself with it, head cast down limply. ‘I’m sure if I just stand here quietly for a moment, I’ll be all right.’ After that moment had passed, he shook his head a few times and lifted his hand tentatively from her desk. ‘Pucetti said yesterday that he’d seen something he would tell his grandchildren about. I think the same thing has just happened to me. Absent only once in thirty-five years.’ He gazed at the far wall, as though he were watching a flaming hand write the numbers. Then, suddenly tired of foolery, he said, ‘What else?’
‘He and his mother rent an apartment up near San Leonardo. They lived in Castello until three years ago, when they moved into an apartment in a palazzo on the Misericordia.’
‘Very nice,’ Brunetti said, suddenly alert. ‘Does the mother work?’
‘No. Never.’
‘Be interesting to know how he pays the rent, wouldn’t it?’ Brunetti asked.
‘I doubt he’d have difficulty paying it,’ she surprised him by saying.
‘Why? Is the place small?’
‘No, quite the opposite. It’s a hundred and fifty square metres.’
‘Then how does he manage to pay for it?’
Her small, self-satisfied smile warned him to prepare for her next remark, but even Brunetti could not have imagined what was to come. ‘Because the rent’s only four hundred and fifty Euros,’ she said. From that, she progressed to arrant grandstanding and said, ‘Or so the monthly transfers from his bank account would suggest.’
‘For an apartment on the Misericordia? A hundred and fifty square metres?’
‘Perhaps now you have something else to tell your grandchildren, Dottore,’ she said with a smile.
His mind shot ahead, trying to find an explanation. Blackmail? A contract written with a falsely low rent so that Fontana could pay the rest in cash, letting the landlord avoid taxes? A relative?
‘Who does the payment go to?’ he asked.
‘Marco Puntera,’ she said, naming a businessman who had made a fortune in real estate in Milano and then moved back to his native Venice seven or eight years before.
A cat, Brunetti knew, could look at a king, but how on earth did an usher know a man as wealthy as Puntera was reported to be, and how was it that he was given an apartment with such a rent?
‘He owns lots of apartments, doesn’t he?’ Brunetti asked.
‘At least twelve, and all are rented out. And two palazzi on the Grand Canal,’ she said. ‘Also rented.’
‘At comparable rents?’ Brunetti asked.
‘I haven’t had time to check, sir. But I believe many of them are rented to foreigners.’ She paused, as if in search of the proper phrase. Finding it, she went on, ‘He is said to be an ornament to the Anglo-American community.’
‘But he’s neither Anglo nor American,’ said Brunetti quickly, having gone to elementary school with Puntera’s younger brother.
‘In the sense that he is involved in their social life, sir,’ she went on imperturbably. ‘Membership at the Cipriani pool; Christmas carols at the English Church; Fourth of July party; first-name basis with the owners of the best restaurants.’
To Brunetti, this sounded like one of the tortures Dante had overlooked. ‘And Fontana gets a deal on his rent from a man like this?’ he said, more in the sense of one repeating a wonder than asking a question about it.
‘So it would seem.’
‘Have you learned anything else?’ he asked.
‘I thought I’d speak to you first, Commissario, and see if you found their association as thought-provoking as I do.’
‘I find it fascinating,’ Brunetti said, always interested in the possibilities that arose from the various relationships formed among people in the city. The more unusual the couple, the more intriguing the possibilities often turned out to be.
‘Good,’ she said. ‘I thought you might.’ She paused, then said, ‘But taking a closer look might require me to call in some favours, so I wanted to see if you agreed before I began to ask questions.’
He looked at Signorina Elettra and asked, ‘Wh
at did you have in mind?’
Instead of answering, Signorina Elettra said, ‘I’m pleased you approve of the staffing schedule, Commissario. I’ll have it posted by the end of the day.’
‘Good, Signorina. I appreciate it,’ Brunetti replied seam-lessly and turned towards the door, then gave every evidence of being surprised to discover there Vice-Questore Giuseppe Patta and, to his right, Lieutenant Scarpa, his creature.
‘Ah, good morning, Vice-Questore,’ Brunetti said with a pleasant smile. Then, like Copernicus recognizing a lesser planet, ‘Lieutenant.’
Patta had reached the near-zenith of his summer colouring. Since May, he had been swimming daily in the pool of the Hotel Cipriani and had almost attained the colour of a horse chestnut. A few more weeks and he would have achieved that, but soon after, the days would begin to shorten and the sun’s rays would lose their ferocity. And by October the Vice-Questore would resemble a caffè macchiato into which, as the weeks progressed, more and more milk would be added until, by December, he would be blanched to cappuccino paleness. Unless he took the expedient of using the Christmas vacation to top up his colour in the Maldives or the Seychelles, Patta ran the risk of arriving at the portals of springtime a pale shadow of his summer self.
‘Signorina Elettra has just explained the new summer scheduling plan to me,’ Brunetti said with an affable smile and a complimentary nod in Scarpa’s direction. ‘I think it’s good to maximize the possibilities of force deployment with these innovations, sir.’ Patta smiled, but Scarpa gave Brunetti a savage look. ‘It shows creative organizational skills, really innovative planning if I might. .’ — and here he looked away, the very picture of admiring modesty — ‘venture to observe.’
‘I’m glad you think that way,’ said an expansive Patta. ‘I have to confess,’ and here it was Patta who draped himself in the cloth of modesty, ‘that the Lieutenant gave me the benefit of his hands-on experience with the men here.’
‘Teamwork, that’s the answer,’ said a positively beaming Brunetti.
Signorina Elettra used this moment to interrupt, ‘There was a call for you from the Cipriani while you were out, Vice-Questore. They said something about your lunch table for tomorrow and asked you to call.’
‘Thank you, Signorina,’ Patta said, moving towards his office door. ‘I’ll see to that now.’ He disappeared inside, answering a Higher Call, leaving the three of them in Signorina Elettra’s office.
Time passed. Signorina Elettra opened her drawer and pulled out that month’s Vogue. She opened it and spread it on her keyboard.
Brunetti took a step towards her, glanced at the pages and asked, ‘Do you really think those side vents in jackets are a good idea?’
‘I haven’t decided yet, Commissario. What does your wife think?’
‘Well, she’s always liked a jacket without vents: says it’s more flattering to the figure. That might be because she’s tall. But certainly that one is perfect,’ he said, leaning forward and pointing to a beige jacket at the centre of the left-hand page. ‘I’ll ask her again tonight and see if she has any further ideas on the subject.’
She turned to the Lieutenant but he, apparently having no strong opinion to offer about vents, chose that moment to leave her office, failing to close the door behind him.
‘A man without a sense of fashion is a man without a soul,’ Signorina Elettra said and turned a page.
12
There was no sign that Scarpa would return and the light for Patta’s phone was burning red, so Brunetti said, ‘You shouldn’t tempt me.’
‘I shouldn’t tempt myself,’ she said, closing the magazine and replacing it in her drawer. ‘But I can’t resist the urge to goad him.’
‘Did he really make out the schedule?’
‘Of course not,’ she snapped. ‘I did it in about ten minutes this morning. It was on my desk when Scarpa came in, and he asked me what it was. I didn’t say anything, but all he had to do was read the title at the top. So he picked it up and took it into Patta’s office with him, and the next thing I knew, Patta was out here with it in his hand, praising the Lieutenant’s initiative.’ She made an angry noise and slammed her drawer shut.
‘It was ever thus,’ Brunetti said.
‘That women do the work and men get the credit?’ she asked, still angry.
‘I’m afraid so.’
Brunetti noticed a stain of perspiration on the inside of the collar of her blouse. ‘Patta’s the only one who buys it, you know,’ he said by way of consolation.
She shrugged, took a deep breath, and then said, voice much calmer, ‘It’s probably better that Patta shouldn’t know how easy it is for me to do the work. So long as he — or his Lieutenant — continues to think he’s doing it all, then I can do what I want.’
‘Riverre said he thought things would be much better if you ran the place.’
‘Ah, the wisdom of fools,’ she said, but she smiled nevertheless.
Returning to business, Brunetti asked, ‘What are you going to do about Fontana?’ Translated, the question really meant: Who are you going to ask, and what is that going to cost us in terms of having to pay back favours?
‘There’s a clerk at the Tribunale I’ve known for years. I call into his office every so often when I’m over there, and occasionally we go out for a coffee, or he comes along when I buy flowers for the office. He’s asked me to dinner a few times, but I’ve always been busy. Or said I was.’ She looked at Brunetti and smiled. ‘I’ll wait until Tuesday and go over to the flower market. Then maybe I’ll stop on the way back and see if he’s free to go for a coffee.’
‘What’s wrong with him?’
‘Oh, nothing, not really. He’s honest and hard-working and quite good-looking.’ From her tone, one would think she was listing his handicaps.
‘And?’
‘And very dull. If I make a joke, I feel like I’m hitting a puppy. He looks at me with his big brown eyes, confused and hoping I won’t be angry with him because he can’t learn to do the trick.’
‘But he’s a clerk at the Tribunale?’
‘And I am but weak human flesh,’ she said with a long sigh, ‘and could never resist a bargain.’ Before he could ask, she went on, ‘And this is the best bargain around. I have a coffee with him, and the secrets of the Tribunale are at my disposal, should I choose to ask about them.’
‘Haven’t you?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Never before,’ she said. ‘I’ve always thought I’d keep him in reserve.’ She searched for the proper simile. ‘Like a squirrel burying a nut, in case it turns out to be a long, hard winter.’
‘To me, it sounds more like the wolf in “Cappuccetto Rosso”,’ Brunetti said, ‘dressed up as the Grandmother and just waiting for the right time to gobble her up.’
‘But I don’t want to gobble him up,’ she insisted. ‘I just want to ask him some questions.’
‘If Paris was worth a Mass,’ Brunetti observed, ‘then perhaps information about Fontana is worth a coffee.’
Primly, she said, ‘It’s not you who has to have it with him.’
‘I know,’ replied Brunetti, not at all certain how much of her tale was truth, how much art, not that one was ever sure of that with Signorina Elettra. To get her away from the subject, he asked, ‘And Signor Puntera?’
‘A friend of mine at the bank once worked as a consultant for him, I think. I’ll see if he’s still working in Venice and ask him what he knows.’
Brunetti could not remember, in all these years, that Signorina Elettra had ever used a female source. ‘Is it easier to get men to talk?’ he asked.
‘You mean, easier than getting women to talk?’
‘Yes.’
She tilted her head and looked at the closed door to Patta’s office. ‘I suppose it is. Women are much more discreet than men, at least when it comes to boasting. Or we boast about different things.’
‘Is that why you prefer to use men?’ he asked, not aware until after he had asked the
question of how crass it made her sound.
‘No,’ she answered calmly. ‘It would be more dishonest to get information from women this way.’
‘Dishonest?’ he repeated.
‘Of course it’s dishonest, what I do. I’m taking advantage of people’s innocence and betraying their trust. You want that not to be dishonest?’
‘Is it more dishonest than breaking into someone’s computer system?’ he asked, though he thought it was.
She gave him a puzzled glance, as if amazed that he could ask such an obvious question. ‘Of course it is, Dottore. Information systems are built to stop you from breaking in: people know you’re going to do it or try to do it. So in a sense, they’re warned, and they take precautions, or they should. But when people tell you things in confidence or trust you with information they think you’re not going to repeat, they have no defences.’ She reached forward and touched a few keys, but nothing changed on the screen.
‘So I’ll go and have a coffee with him and see what he can tell me about Araldo Fontana, model worker.’
‘For what it’s worth,’ Brunetti said, ‘my source was convinced that there’s nothing to tell about him. He said Fontana is a decorous man; he even seemed surprised that I should want to know anything about him.’
‘ “Decorous,” ’ she repeated, savouring the word. ‘How long has it been since I’ve heard that?’ she asked with a small smile.
‘Probably too long,’ Brunetti said. ‘It’s a nice thing to say about a person.’
‘Yes it is, isn’t it?’ Signorina Elettra agreed and then said nothing for a long time. ‘I suppose it could be said about my friend at the Tribunale.’
‘The clerk?’
‘Yes.’ Brunetti waited, but all she said was, ‘I’ll ask him about Fontana.’
‘See if he knows anything about a Judge Coltellini, if you can,’ Brunetti requested. He had hesitated before, but if Fontana was a dead end, perhaps she had best take a look at the other name that had appeared on the papers.
‘Luisa?’
