Wilful behaviour cgb-11

by Donna Leon

  A little before twelve, just as he was beginning to think longingly of lunch, he heard a knock on his door. He called out, 'Avanti’ and looked up to see Alvise.

  'There's someone to see you, sir,' the officer said with a smile.

  'Who is it?'

  'Oh, should I have asked him who he was?' Alvise asked, honestly surprised that such a thing could be expected of him.

  'No, just show him in, Alvise,' Brunetti said neutrally. Alvise stepped back and waved his arm in obvious imitation of the white-gloved grace of traffic officers in Italian movies.

  The gesture led Brunetti to believe that no less a personage than the President of the Republic might be entering, so he pushed back his chair and started to get to his feet, if only to maintain the high level of civility Alvise had established. When he saw Marco Erizzo come in, Brunetti walked around his desk and took his old friend by the hand, then embraced him and patted him on the back.

  He stepped back and looked at the familiar face. 'Marco, how wonderful to see you. God, it's been ages. Where have you been?' It had been, how long, a year, perhaps even two, since they'd spoken, but Marco had not changed. His hair was still that rich chestnut brown, so thick as to cause his barber difficulty, and the laugh lines still radiated in happy abundance from around his eyes.

  'Where do you think I've been, Guido?' Marco asked, speaking Veneziano with the thick Giudecchino accent his classmates had mocked him for almost forty years ago, when he and Brunetti had been at elementary school together. 'Here, at home, at work.'

  'Are you well?' Brunetti asked, using the plural and thus including Erizzo's ex-wife and their two children as well as the woman he now lived with and their daughter.

  'Everyone's good, everyone's happy’ Marco said, an answer that had become his standard response. Everything was always fine, everyone was always happy. If so, then what had brought him to the Questura this fine October morning, when he certainly had more urgent things to do running the many shops and businesses he owned?

  Marco glanced down at his watch. Time for un'ombra?'

  For most Venetians, any time after eleven was time for un'ombra, so Brunetti didn't hesitate before assenting.

  On the way to the bar at the Ponte dei Greci, they talked about nothing and everything: their families, old friends, how stupid it was that they so seldom saw one another for longer than to say hello on the street before hurrying off to whatever it was that occupied their time and attention.

  Once inside, Brunetti walked towards the bar, but Marco put a hand on his elbow and pulled him to a bench at a booth in front of the window; Brunetti sat opposite him, sure he'd find out now what it was that had brought his friend to the Questura. Neither of them had bothered to order anything, but the barman, from long experience of Brunetti, brought them two small glasses of white wine and went back to the bar.

  'Cin tin,' they both said and took small sips. Marco nodded in appreciation. 'Better than what you get in most bars.' He took another small sip and set the glass down.

  Brunetti said nothing, knowing that this was the best technique to induce a reluctant witness to speak.

  'I won't waste our time, Guido’ Marco said in a different, more serious, voice. He took the short stem of his wine glass between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand and moved the glass in a small circle, a gesture instantly familiar to Brunetti. Ever since he'd been a small boy, Marco's hands had always betrayed his nervousness, whether it was by breaking the points of his pencils during exams or plucking at the top button of his shirt whenever he had to speak to a girl he liked. 'Are you guys like priests?' Marco asked, glancing up for an instant, then back at the glass.

  'Which guys?' Brunetti asked, honestly confused by the question.

  'Cops. Even if you're a commissario. I mean, if I tell you something, can it be like it used to be when we were kids and went to confession: the priest couldn't tell anyone?'

  Brunetti sipped at his wine to hide his smile. 'I'm not sure it's the same thing, Marco. They weren't allowed to tell, no matter what we told them, no matter how bad it was. But if you tell me about a crime, I'll probably have to do something about it.'

  'What sort of crime?' When Brunetti didn't answer, Marco went on, I mean, how big a crime would it have to be before you had to tell?'

  The urgency in Marco's voice showed this was not some sort of parlour game, and so Brunetti considered the question before he answered, ‘I can't say. That is, I can't give you a list of things I'd have to report. Anything serious or anything violent, I suppose.'

  'And if nothing's happened yet?' Marco asked.

  Brunetti was surprised by this question from Marco, a man who had always lived in the real, the concrete. It was very strange to hear him posing a hypothetical question; Brunetti wondered if he'd even ever heard Marco use a complex grammatical structure, so accustomed was he to his use of the simple declarative.

  'Marco’ he said, 'why don't you just trust me and tell me what it is and then let me think about how to handle it?'

  'It's not that I don't trust you, Guido. God knows I do; that’ s why I came to talk to you. If s just that I don't want to get you into any sort of trouble by telling you something you might not want to know about.' He looked in the direction of the bar, and Brunetti thought he was going to call for more wine, but then he looked back, and Brunetti realized Marco was checking to see if anyone could hear what they were saying. But the other men at the bar seemed busy with their own conversation.

  'All right, I'll tell you,' Marco said. 'And then you can decide what to do with it.'

  Brunetti was struck by how similar Marco's behaviour, even the rhythm of his speech, was to that of so many suspects he had questioned over the years. There always came a point where they gave in and stopped resisting their desire to make it clear just how it was or had been or what had driven them to do what they had done. He waited.

  'You know, well, maybe you don't know that I bought a new shop near Santa Fosca’ Marco began and paused for Brunetti to respond.

  'No, I didn't.' Brunetti knew better than to give anything but a simple answer. Never ask for more, never request clarification. Just let them talk until they run themselves out and have nothing else to say: that was when you began to ask questions.

  'If s that cheese shop that belonged to the balding guy who always wore" a hat. Nice guy; my mother used to go to his father when we lived over there. Anyway, last year they tripled his rent so he decided to retire, and I paid the buon' uscita and took over the lease.' He glanced at Brunetti to see that he was following. 'But because I want to sell masks and souvenirs, I've got to have show windows so people can see all the stuff. He just had that one on the right side where he had the provolone and scamorza, but there's one on the left, too, only his father closed it up, bricked it over, about forty years ago. But it's on the original plans, so it can be opened up again. And I need it. I need two windows so people can see all the junk and take a mask home to Dusseldorf.'

  Neither he nor Brunetti needed to comment upon the folly of this, nor on the fact that so much of what would be sold in his shop as 'original Venetian handcrafts' was made in third world countries where the closest the workers ever came to a canal was the one behind their houses that served as a sewer.

  'Anyway, I took over the lease and my architect drew up the plans. That is, he drew them up a long time ago, as soon as the guy agreed I could take over, but he couldn't present them in the Comune until the lease was in my name.' Again he looked at Brunetti. 'That was in March.' Marco raised his right hand in a fist, shot up his thumb, repeated 'March,' and then counted out the months. That's seven months, Guido. Seven months those bastards have made me wait. I'm paying the rent, my architect goes into the planning office once a week to ask where the permits are, and every time he goes, they tell him that the papers aren't ready or something has to be checked before I can be given the permissions.'

  Marco opened his fist and laid his hand flat on the table, then put the other be
side it, fingers splayed open. 'You know whaf s going on, don't you?' he asked.

  'Yes’ Brunetti said.

  'So last week I told my architect to ask them how much they wanted’ He looked across, as if curious to see if Brunetti would register surprise, perhaps shock, at what he was telling him, but Brunetti's face remained impassive.

  Thirty million’ Marco paused for a long time, but Brunetti said nothing. 'If I give them thirty million, then I'll have the permissions next week and the workers can go in and start the restorations’

  'And if you don't?' Brunetti asked.

  'God knows’ Marco said with a shake of his head. 'They can keep me waiting another seven months, I suppose’

  'Why haven't you paid them before this?' Brunetti asked.

  'My architect keeps saying it isn't necessary, that he knows the men on the planning commission and if s just a question of lots of requests before mine. And I've got problems with other things.' Brunetti thought for a moment that Marco would tell him about them, too, but all he said was, 'No, all you need to know about is this one’

  Brunetti remembered the time, a few years ago, when a chain of fast food restaurants had done extensive restorations in four separate locations, keeping their crews working day and night. Almost before anyone knew it, certainly before anyone had any idea that they were going to open, there they were, in business, the odour of their various beef products filling the air like summer in a Sumatran slaughterhouse.

  Have you decided to pay them?'

  1 don't have much of a choice, do I?' Marco asked tiredly. ‘I already spend more than a hundred million lire a year for a lawyer as it is, just keeping ahead of the lawsuits people bring against me in the other businesses and trying to resolve them. If I bring a civil suit against people who work for the city for wilfully preventing me from running my business or whatever crime my lawyer can think of to charge them with, it would just cost me more and drag on for years, and in the end nothing would happen anyway’

  'Why did you come to me, then?' Brunetti asked.

  ‘I wondered if there was anything you could do? I mean, if I marked the money or something.. ‘ Marco's voice petered out and he tightened his fists. 'It's really not the money, Guido. I'll make that back in a couple of months; so many people want to buy that junk. But I'm just sick to death of having to do business this way. I've got shops in Paris and Zurich, and none of this shit goes on there. You apply for building permission, they process your papers, and when they're ready they give you the permissions and you begin the work. No one's there, sucking at your tit’ His fist smashed down on the table. 'No wonder this place is such a mess’ His voice rose, suddenly high-pitched and sharp as, for a moment that frightened Brunetti, Marco seemed to lose all control. 'No one can run a business here. All these bastards want to do is suck us dry’ Again, his hand came smashing down on the table. The two men and the bartender looked over at them, but none of this was new in Italy, so they nodded in silent agreement and went back to their own conversation.

  Brunetti had no idea whether Marco's condemnation was of Venice in particular or Italy in general. It hardly mattered: he was right either way.

  'What are you going to do?' Brunetti asked.

  Implicit in his question, and both men knew it, was the acknowledgement that there was no way Brunetti could help. As a friend he could commiserate and share Marco's anger, but as a policeman he was impotent. The bribe would be paid in cash and so, as is the way with cash, it would leave no traces. If Marco made an official complaint against someone working in the planning commission, he might just as well close up his shops and go out of business, for he would never obtain another permit, no matter how minor, no matter how urgent.

  Marco smiled and shifted to the end of the bench. ‘I just wanted to let off steam, I guess. Or maybe I wanted to push your nose in it, Guido, since you work for them, sort of, and if that was the reason, then I'm sorry and I apologize’ His voice sounded normal, but Brunetti watched his fingers, this time folding the four corners of a paper napkin into neat triangles.

  Brunetti was surprised at how deeply he was offended that any friend of his should consider him as working for 'them'. But, if he didn't work for 'them', then whom did he work for?

  'No, I don't think that was why,' he finally said. 'Or at least I hope it wasn't. And I'm sorry, too, because there's nothing I can do. I could tell you to make una denuncia, but I might as well tell you to commit suicide, and I don't think I want to do that’ He wondered how Marco could continue to open new businesses if this was the sort of thing he met at every turn. He thought about that restless boy, the one with the big dreams, who had shared his school bench for three years in a row, and he remembered how Marco could never sit still for long, yet he always managed to find the patience to complete one task before rushing off to another. Maybe Marco was programmed like a bee and had no option but to work at something and fly off to something new as soon as he'd finished.

  'Well,' Marco began, slipping out of the bench and getting to his feet. He reached into his pocket, but Brunetti held up a monitory hand. Marco understood, took his hand out of his pocket and extended it to the still-sitting Brunetti.

  'Next time, mine?'

  'Of course’

  Marco glanced at his watch. ‘I’ve got to run, Guido. I've got a shipment of Murano glass’ he began, placing a light smile and heavy emphasis on Murano', 'coming in from the Czech Republic and I've got to be at the Customs to see it gets through without any trouble.'

  Before Brunetti could rise from the bench, Marco was gone, walking quickly, as he had always walked, off to some new project, some new scheme.

  3

  Though Brunetti and Paola listened, after dinner, to each other's account of the day, neither of them saw much of a connection between the two events; certainly neither of them connected the stories they'd heard to the idea of honour or its demands. Paola, in sympathy with Marco, said she'd always liked him, surprising Brunetti into saying, 'But I thought you didn't.'

  'Why's that?'

  ‘I suppose because he's so different from the sort of person you tend to like.' 'Specifically?'

  ‘I always thought you considered him something of a hustler.'

  'He is a hustler. That's precisely why I like him.' When she saw his confusion, she explained, 'Remember, I spend most of my professional life in the company of students or academics. The first are usually lazy, and the second are always self-satisfied. The first want to talk about their delicate sensibilities and wounded souls, some sudden injury to which has prevented them from completing what they were meant to do for class; and the second want to talk about how their last monograph on Calvino's use of the semicolon is going to change the entire course of modern literary criticism. So someone like Marco, who talks about tangible things, about making money and running a business, and who has never, once, in all these years, tried to impress me with what he knows or where he's been or burdened me with long stories of his suffering; someone like Marco's a glass of prosecco after a long afternoon spent drinking cold camomile tea.'

  'Cold camomile tea?' he inquired.

  She smiled. ‘I threw it in for the effect achieved by the contrast with the prosecco. If s a technique of artful exaggeration, akin to the reductio ad absurdum, that I've picked up from my colleagues.'

  'Who, I imagine, are not at all like prosecco.'

  She closed her eyes and put her head back in an attitude of exquisite pain, the sort usually observed in pictures of Saint Agatha. 'There are days when I'm tempted to steal your gun and take it with me.'

  'Who would you use it on, students or professors?'

  'Surely you're joking,' she said in feigned astonishment.

  'No, who?'

  'On my colleagues. The students, poor babies, they're just young and callow and will grow up, most of them, and turn into reasonably pleasant human beings. It's my colleagues I long to destroy, if only to put a stop to the endless litany of self-congratulation I have to li
sten to.'

  'All of them?' he asked, accustomed to hear her denounce particular people and thus surprised at her scope.

  She considered this, as if she knew there were six bullets in his gun and she was preparing a list. After a while she said, not without a certain disappointment, 'No, not all of them. Maybe five or six.'

  'But that’s still half of your department, isn't it?' Twelve on the books, but only nine teach.' 'What do the other three do?' 'Nothing. But if s called research.' 'How can that be?'

  'One of them is aggressive and probably gaga; Professoressa Bettin had what is described as a crisis of nerves and has been put on medical leave until further notice, which probably means until she retires; and the Vice-Chairman, Professore Delia Grazia, well, he's a special case.'

  'What does that mean?'

  'He's sixty-eight and should have retired three years ago, but he refuses to leave.' 'But he doesn't teach?' 'He can't be trusted with female students.' 'What?'

  'You heard me. He can't be trusted with female students. Or, for that matter,' she added after a reflective pause, 'with female faculty.'

  'What does he do?'

  'With the students it's a kind of dirty-minded subtext to everything he says during his tutorials, well, when he still used to have them. Or he'd read graphic descriptions of sex in his classes. But always from the classics, so no one could complain, or if they did, he'd take on an attitude of shocked disdain, as if he were the only protector of the Classical tradition.' She paused for him to respond, but when he didn't she went on: 'With the younger faculty members I've been told that he blocks their chance of promotion unless there's an exchange of sex. He's the Vice-Chairman of the department, so he gets to approve promotions or, in some cases, disapprove them.'

  ‘You said he's sixty-eight’ Brunetti said, not without a certain disgust.

  'Which, if you think about it, just gives you some idea of how long he's got away with it.' 'But no longer?'