A Question of Belief cb-19

by Donna Leon

  A grey cat came across the grass and jumped up beside him. He put out a hand, and the cat pressed its head against it. He rubbed it behind the ears, and the cat flopped against him. For a few minutes, he rubbed the cat’s ears until it surprised him by falling asleep. Brunetti moved it gently aside, said, ‘I told you not to wear your fur’, and started back towards the Questura.

  Signorina Elettra seemed pleased to see him, but did not smile. ‘I’m sorry your vacation was cut short, Commissario,’ she said as he came in.

  ‘So am I. My family is draped in sweaters and lighting a fire at night.’

  ‘You went to Alto Adige, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes, but I didn’t make it past Bolzano.’

  She shook her head at the shame of this, then asked, ‘What may I do for you?’

  ‘Did you find the names of the people involved in the cases in those papers?’ he asked.

  ‘Not until this morning, I’m afraid,’ she said, pointing to some papers on her desk. Brunetti recognized the court documents he had been sent. ‘I was going to bring them up later.’

  Brunetti glanced at his watch and saw that it was not yet eleven. ‘Then good thing I came here.’

  She slid the papers towards him. ‘Two of the cases involve Signor Puntera,’ she said, pointing to the ones he had circled in pencil and red pen.

  ‘Signor Puntera,’ Brunetti said. ‘How very interesting.’ He nodded for her to proceed.

  ‘The first is a claim on the part of the family of a young man who was injured in an accident in one of Signor Puntera’s warehouses.’

  ‘Here?’

  ‘Yes. He’s still got two warehouses, over near the Ghetto. They’re used to store supplies for one of his companies that does building restoration.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘This young man — it was only his third day on the job, poor devil — was carrying bags of dry cement out to a boat in the canal behind the warehouse. Another worker was in the boat, stacking them. When the first one didn’t come back for some time, the man in the boat went to look for him and found him on the floor, well, found his feet. He’d been buried under a landslide of bags of cement.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Who knows?’ she asked rhetorically. ‘No one saw. The defence claims he must have yanked one out from the bottom of the pile or that he hadn’t stacked them correctly in the first place. There was one of those little tractors in the warehouse, loading pallets of bags of sand, and the plaintiff’s lawyer says the driver must have dislodged something from the other side of the pile. The driver denies it and says he was on the other side of the warehouse all morning.’

  ‘What happened to him?’

  ‘He fell on his face and was buried under the bags. Some of them opened, and sand poured around him. He broke a leg and an arm, but the lack of oxygen was much worse.’

  ‘How bad is he?’

  ‘His lawyer says he’s like a child.’

  ‘Maria Vergine,’ Brunetti whispered, feeling the boy’s astonishment, his terror, his awful sense of being buried.

  ‘His lawyer,’ Brunetti repeated. ‘Who brought the case?’

  ‘His parents. He’s going to need lifetime care, and they don’t want him to be in a state hospital.’ Brunetti nodded: no parent would want this for a child. Or for themselves. Or for the man next door.

  ‘What else?’

  ‘His lawyer told me that, at the beginning, Puntera made the family a private offer if they’d withdraw the case. They refused, and so it went to court, but things have gone wrong with the case from the beginning. Things like delays and postponements.’

  ‘I see,’ Brunetti said. He looked at the paper and saw that the accident had taken place more than four years before. ‘And until it’s settled in court, where is he?’

  ‘He’s in the hospital in Mestre, but his family takes him home on weekends.’

  ‘What will happen?’ Brunetti asked, though there was no reason she should know.

  She shrugged. ‘Sooner or later, they’ll accept his offer. There’s no way of knowing when this will be settled — civil cases are backed up for eight years as it is — so eventually they’ll give in. People like this can’t go on paying for lawyers for years.’

  ‘And the boy?’

  ‘The lawyer says it will be a mercy for them all if he dies, a mercy for him, too.’

  Brunetti let some time pass, then asked, ‘And the other case?’

  ‘The warehouses again. He doesn’t own them: he rents them. And the landlord wants him out and the space back so that he can turn them into apartments.’

  ‘Quickly,’ Brunetti begged the surrounding air, ‘please, someone tell me a story I’ve never heard in Venice before.’

  Ignoring him, she went on, ‘So the longer the case is delayed, the longer he can continue to use the warehouses.’

  ‘How long has this case been going on?’

  ‘Three years. At one time, he had his workers go down and protest about the eviction in front of Cà Farsetti, right in front of the entrance the mayor generally uses.’

  ‘And His Honour? What tactic did he employ with them?’

  ‘Do you mean how did he appease the workers while making it clear that his sympathies were entirely with their employers?’

  Brunetti held up his hands in awe, as if the Cumaen Sibyl herself had spoken. ‘Never have I heard the man’s political philosophy so accurately expressed.’

  ‘This time our dear mayor avoided the situation,’ Signorina Elettra explained. ‘Someone must have told him there were only five workers outside: hardly worth his trouble.’

  ‘What did he do?’

  ‘He used the side entrance.’

  ‘More proof of his genius,’ Brunetti said. ‘And the case?’

  ‘It would seem that Puntera has found a larger place in Marghera and will transfer everything there next year.’

  ‘And until then?’

  ‘The case will probably drag its way through the courts,’ she said, as though this were the most natural thing in the world.

  Out of curiosity, he said, ‘There were other cases listed on those papers. Did you find out anything about them?’

  ‘No, Dottore. I haven’t had the time,’ she said.

  ‘Let them go for now,’ Brunetti decided. ‘If you speak to your friend at the Tribunale again, would you try to find out if he knows anything about Fontana’s private life?’

  ‘From the little I saw of him in the café the other day,’ she said in a serious voice, ‘I’d be surprised if he had one.’

  ‘Perhaps secret is a better word to use than private,’ Brunetti said. She glanced up but said nothing, and so he continued, ‘Rizzardi found evidence to suggest he was gay.’

  He watched the surprise register, and then he saw her go through the same process of reassessment as she cast her memory back to her brief meeting with Fontana. ‘ “Oh, thou who hast eyes and sees not,” ’ she said, lowering her face into her hands and shaking her head. ‘Of course, of course.’

  Brunetti remained silent to allow her to run through all the possibilities. When she raised her head, he asked, ‘This being the case, what do you make now of his adoration of Judge Coltellini?’

  Instead of answering him, she cupped her chin in her palm and pressed her fingers against her lower lip, a habit she had when she wanted to drift off into thought. He left her to it and moved over to her window, but the air was dead there, as well.

  ‘Either she knew something about him and wasn’t telling anyone, or she had done him a favour and he wanted to pay her back in some way,’ he heard her say from behind him. He said nothing, hoping she would continue.

  ‘It seemed like some exaggerated form of gratitude,’ she added.

  ‘Could it have been mixed up with the fact that she was a judge?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘Perhaps. He sounded like a person who had come from a simple background. So it might have been that the friendship — though I’m not
sure that’s the right word for it — with a judge was a sort of social promotion or proof of his status.’ After a pause, she added, ‘Something his mother would like.’

  ‘Do people still think this way?’ Brunetti asked, turning towards her.

  ‘Many people think of little else, I’d say,’ came her quick response.

  Brunetti remembered that he still had to ask Vianello if he had had any success in finding relatives on the Fontana side of the dead man’s family. Before leaving Signorina Elettra’s office, though, he said, ‘I’d like you to see if there’s any sort of link between Judge Coltellini and Puntera.’

  She looked at him with something close to admiration. ‘Ah, yes, I should have thought of that. The rent. Of course.’

  He turned to leave but recalled that he had to find a way for his mother-in-law to contact Gorini. ‘I’d also like you to find out how people go about discovering Signor Gorini’s services — whatever they may be — in the first place.’

  She made a gracious waving gesture that ended with both hands indicating her computer screen, as if that would explain it all.

  Brunetti was uncertain how useful this suggestion would be to his mother-in-law; nevertheless, he thanked her and went back to his office.

  19

  This computer stuff appeared to be catching: Brunetti found Vianello in front of the screen in the squad room, watching a man lay out cards on a table in front of him. Vianello’s chair was pushed back; his arms were folded, his feet propped up on an open drawer. Slightly behind him stood Zucchero, arms similarly folded, no less intent on the screen. Brunetti came in quietly and stood next to Vianello.

  The man on the screen continued to stare at the cards on the table in front of him, showing only the top of his head and a pair of thick shoulders and round torso to the camera. He rubbed at his chin like a farmer studying the barometer, unsure of what to make of it. ‘You say this man has promised to marry you?’ he suddenly asked, his attention still on the cards.

  A woman’s voice said from somewhere behind or above or below him, ‘Yes, he did. Many times.’

  ‘But he’s never named a date?’ The man’s voice could not possibly have been more neutral.

  After a long hesitation, the woman answered, ‘No.’

  The man raised his left hand and, with a delicate motion of a finger, shifted one of the cards a bit to the left. He raised his head and, for the first time, Brunetti saw his face. It was round, almost perfectly so, as though eyes and a nose and a mouth had been painted on a soccer ball, and then hair pasted across the forehead to make it look like a human head. Not only his head but his eyes were round, topped by thick eyebrows that were themselves perfect half-circles: the total effect was one of unvarnished innocence, as though this man had somehow just been born, perhaps just inside the entrance to the television studio, and the only thing he knew in life was how to turn over cards and stare out at his viewers, trying to help them understand what he read there.

  Speaking now directly to that woman who was somewhere watching and heeding him, he asked, ‘Has he ever spoken specifically about when he intends to marry you?’

  This time she took even longer to answer, and when she did, she began with an ‘Ummmm’ that was prolonged through the space of two normal breaths. Then she said, ‘He has to take care of some things first.’ Brunetti had heard evasion from people he had arrested, had listened to deliberate attempts to derail a line of questioning, had heard such things from masters. The woman was an amateur, her tactic so obvious as to cause laughter, were it not that she sounded so stricken when she spoke, as though she knew no one would believe her but could still not stop herself from trying to hide the obvious.

  ‘What things?’ the man asked, his gaze straight into the camera and, one felt, straight into the woman’s lying mouth and the man’s lying heart.

  ‘His separation,’ she said, her voice growing slower and softer with each syllable she pronounced.

  ‘ “His separation,” ’ the round-faced man repeated, each syllable a slow, heavy footstep towards truth.

  ‘It’s not final,’ she said. She tried to declare, but she could only implore.

  The dialogue had taken place at such a slow pace that the lightning speed with which the man asked, ‘Has he even asked for a separation?’ startled Brunetti as it brought a gasp from the woman.

  The sounds of her breathing filled the studio, filled the ears of the round-faced man, filled the airwaves. ‘What do the cards say?’ she asked, her voice close to a whimper.

  Until now the man had sat so quietly that when he raised his hand to show the camera, and the woman, the cards that remained in his hand, the movement took Brunetti by surprise. ‘Do you really want to know what the cards have to tell you, Signora?’ he asked, voice far less sympathetic now.

  When she finally answered, she said, ‘Yes. Yes. I have to know.’ After that came the continued sound of her pained breathing.

  ‘All right, Signora, but remember: I asked you if you wanted to know.’ His voice held the solemnity of a doctor asking a patient if they wanted to know the results of the laboratory tests.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ she repeated, all but pleading.

  ‘Va bene,’ he said and brought his hands together. Slowly, his right hand took the top card and slid it from the pack. The camera shifted around him, rose, and now showed, not his round face, but the top of the cards from above and behind him. He moved the card to the right, held it motionless for a few seconds, and then slowly turned it over: The Joker.

  ‘The Deceiver, Signora,’ the man said. His voice fell upon her: dead level, no emotion, no judgement. No mercy.

  Vianello’s feet fell to the floor, making Brunetti jump. ‘God, he’s a clever devil, isn’t he?’ the Inspector said, reaching forward to clear the screen.

  It was the suddenness of Vianello’s action that made Brunetti realize how enchanted — quite literally — he had been by the interchange between the two people. The weak, self-deceiving human heart had been exposed with clinical dispassion by a man who, in the process, displayed himself as an expert at seeing into its mysteries. An unreflecting viewer would surely conclude that this was a man in whose hands lay the answers to those questions they barely dared to ask themselves.

  Yet what had he done? Listened to the audible hesitation and uncertainty in the woman’s voice, listened to the evasions and justifications: he could have read bottle caps as well as the tarot card to have discovered the Deceiver.

  Brunetti said it out loud: ‘The Deceiver.’

  Vianello answered with a loud guffaw. ‘My mother could have told her the same thing, standing behind her in the queue at the supermarket and listening to her tell someone her story.’

  Zucchero started to speak, then hesitated. Brunetti waved his hand, and the young man continued. ‘But the cards help, Ispettore. They make it seem like the answer is coming from some other, mystical, place, not from common sense.’

  Brunetti had had a few moments to think about parallels, and so, abandoning the comparison with bottle caps, he said, ‘It’s what the augurs did: they’d cut open an animal and read what was in there, but they were always careful to speak in ambiguous language. So after whatever was going to happen had happened, they could make some sort of retrospective interpretation that made it sound as if they had been right.’

  ‘ “The Deceiver,” ’ Vianello repeated, no less contemptuously. ‘And that poor woman is paying a Euro a minute to listen to him.’ He looked at his watch and said, ‘We were looking at it for eight minutes, more or less.’ He hit a few keys and the screen came back to life. ‘Let’s see if he’s still got her on the hook.’

  But the round-faced man had moved on to different game, for this time the voice they heard when he reappeared in front of them was a man’s. ‘. . think it’s a wise thing, but he’s my brother-in-law, and my wife wants me to do it’.

  ‘Is there a way you can turn off the sound?’ Brunetti asked.

  Vianello’s hea
d whipped round. ‘What?’

  ‘Turn off the sound,’ Brunetti repeated.

  Vianello leaned forward and turned the sound down, and then off completely, leaving them looking at the round face as it, in turn, divided its attention between the cards and the camera. A few minutes passed in silence until Brunetti said, ‘I always do this on planes, if there’s a film. I don’t take the headset; if you don’t, you see how pre-planned their gestures and reactions are: the actors in movies never behave the way people at the next table in a restaurant do. Or people walking down the street. It’s never natural.’

  The three men continued to watch the screen. Brunetti’s observation might just as easily have been prophecy, for the gestures of the round-faced man now seemed prepared and studied. The attention he paid to the cards as he turned them over never wavered; the concentration with which he stared at the camera when he was, presumably, listening to his caller never wavered: his stare was so intense that he might as well have been observing a public execution.

  As they watched, he moved his hands together and slid off another card, and the cameras moved up and behind him as they had the last time. With slowness meant to tantalize, he turned the card over and laid it beside two others. Its face was meaningless to the three men watching his performance, but Brunetti had seen enough by now to risk saying, ‘When the cameras show his face, he’ll look like Oedipus recognizing his mother.’