A Venetian Reckoning (9 page)

'And at work? What were his relations
with his employees like? Peaceful? Friendly?'

She joined her hands together in her
lap and looked down at them. 'I think so. He certainly never mentioned having
trouble with any of his staff’. If he had, I'm sure he would have told me.'

'Is it true that the firm was
entirely his, that the other lawyers were all salaried employees?'

'Excuse me?' she asked, giving him a
puzzled glance. 'I'm afraid I don't understand the question.'

'Did your husband share the proceeds
of his law practice with the other lawyers or did they work for him, as
salaried employees?’

She looked up from her hands and
glanced across at Brunetti. 'I'm afraid I can't answer that question,

Dottor Brunetti. I know almost
nothing about Carlo's business. You'd have to speak to his accountant'

‘ And who is that signora?'

'Ubaldo.’

‘Your brother?'

'Yes.'

'I see,' Brunetti replied. After a
short pause, he continued, 'I'd like to ask you some questions about your
personal life, signora.'

'Our personal life?' she repeated, as
though she had never heard of such a thing. When he didn't answer this, she
nodded, signalling him to begin.

'Could you tell me how long you and
your husband were married?'

'Nineteen years.’

'How many children do you have,
signora?’ 'Two. Claudio is seventeen, and Francesca is fifteen.' 'Are they in
school in Venice, signora?’ 'She looked up at him sharply when he asked this.
'Why do you want to know that?'

'My own daughter, Chiara, is
fourteen, so perhaps they know one another,’ he answered and smiled to show
what an innocent question it had been.

'Claudio is in school in Switzerland,
but Francesca is here. With us. I mean,’ she corrected, rubbing a hand across
her forehead, 'with me.’

'Would you say yours was a happy
marriage, signora?’ 'Yes,’ she answered immediately, far faster than Brunetti
would have answered the same question, though he would have given the same
response. She did not however, elaborate.

'Could you tell me if your husband
had any particularly close friends or business associates?'

She looked up at this question, then
as quickly down again at her hands. 'Our closest friends are the Nogares, Mirto
and Graziella. He's an architect who lives in Campo Sant' Angelo. They're
Francesca's godparents. I don't know about his business associates: you'll have
to ask Ubaldo.'

'Other friends, signora?'

'Why do you need to know all this?'
she said, voice rising sharply.

'I'd like to learn more about your
husband, signora.'

'Why?' The question leaped from her,
almost as if beyond her volition.

'Until I understand what sort of man
he was, I can't understand why this happened.' .
⁴
A robbery?' she
asked, voice just short of sarcasm.

'It wasn't robbery, signora. Whoever
killed him intended to do it.'

'No one could have a reason to want
to kill Carlo,’ she insisted - Brunetti, having heard this same thing more
times than he cared to remember, said nothing.

Suddenly Signora Trevisan got to her
feet. 'Do you have any more questions? If not, I would like to be with my
daughter.'

Brunetti got up from the chair and
put out his hand. 'Again, signora, I appreciate your having spoken to me. I
realize what a painful time this must be for you and your family, and I hope
you find the courage that will help you through it.' Even as he spoke the
words, they sounded formulaic in his ears, the sort of thing that got said in
the absence of perceived grief, which was the case here.

'Thank you, commissario,’ she said,
giving his hand a quick shake and walking towards the door. She held it open
for him, then walked along the corridor with him towards the front door of the
apartment. There was no sign of the other members of the family.

At the door, Brunetti nodded to the
widow as he left the apartment and heard the door close softly behind him as he
started down the steps. It seemed strange to him that a woman could be married
to a man for almost twenty years and know nothing about his business dealings.
Stranger still, when her own brother was his accountant. What did they discuss
at family dinners - soccer? Everyone Brunetti knew hated lawyers. Brunetti
hated lawyers. He could not, consequently, believe that a lawyer, let alone a
famous and successful one, had no enemies. Tomorrow he could discuss this with
Lotto and see if he proved to be any more forthcoming than his sister.

10

While Brunetti had been inside the
Trevisan apartment, the sky had clouded over, and the shimmering warmth ' of
the day had fled. He glanced at his watch and saw that it was not yet six, and
so, if he chose, he could still go back to the Questura. Instead, he turned
back towards the Accademia Bridge, crossed it, and headed up towards home.
Halfway there, he stopped in a bar and asked for a small glass of white wine.
He picked up one of the small pretzels on the bar, took a bite, but tossed the
rest into an ashtray. The wine was as bad as the pretzel, so he left that, too,
and continued towards home.

He tried to recall the expression on
Francesca Trevisan's face when she had so suddenly appeared at the door, but he
could remember no more than eyes flashing wide at the sight of him there. The
eyes had been dry and had registered nothing more than surprise; she resembled
her mother in absence of grief, as well as in feature. Had she been expecting
someone else?

How would Chiara respond if he were to
be killed? And Paola, would she be so easily capable of answering questions,
were a policeman to come to ask about their personal life? Surely, Paola would
not be able to say, as had Signora Trevisan, that she knew nothing about her
husband's, her late husband's, professional fife. It snagged in Brunetti's
mind, this protestation of ignorance, and he couldn't let it go, nor could he
believe it.

When he let himself into the
apartment, the radar of years told him that it was empty. He went down to the
kitchen, where he found the table littered with newspapers and what seemed to
be Chiara's homework, papers covered with numbers and mathematical signs that
made no sense at all to Brunetti. He picked up a sheet of paper and studied it,
saw the neat, right-slanting hand of his younger child in a long series of
numbers and signs that he thought might be, if memory served, a quadratic
equation. Was this calculus? Trigonometry? It had been so long ago, and
Brunetti had been so unsuited to mathematics that he could recall almost
nothing of it, though surely he had gone through four years of it

He put the papers aside and turned
his attention to the newspapers, where Trevisan's murder competed for attention
with yet another senator and yet another bribe. Years had passed since Judge Di
Pietro handed down the first formal accusation, and still villains ruled the
land. All, or what seemed like all, of the major political figures who had
ruled the country since Brunetti was a child had been named in accusation,
named again on different charges, and had even begun to name one another, and
yet not one of them had been tried and sentenced, though the coffers of the
state had been sucked dry. They'd had their snouts in the public trough for
decades, yet nothing seemed strong enough - not public rage, not an upwelling
of national disgust - to sweep them from power. He turned a page and saw photos
of the two worst, the hunchback and the balding pig, and he nipped the paper
closed with tired loathing. Nothing would change. Brunetti knew not a little
about these scandals, knew where a lot of money had gone and who was likely
next to be named, and me one thing he knew with absolute certainty was that
nothing would change. Lampedusa had it right - things had to seem to change so
that things could remain the same. There'd be elections; there'd be new faces
and new promises, but all that would happen would be that different trotters
would go into the trough, and new accounts would be opened in those discreet
private banks across the border in Switzerland.

Brunetti knew this mood and almost
feared it, this recurring certainty of the futility of everything he did. Why
bother to put the boy who broke into a house in gaol when the man who stole
billions from the health system was named ambassador to the country to which he
had been sending the money for years? And what justice imposed a fine on the
person who failed to pay the tax on the radio in his car when the manufacturer
of that same car could admit to having paid billions of lire to the leaders of
trade unions to see that they would prevent their members asking for pay rises,
could admit it and remain free? Why arrest anyone for murder, or why bother to
look for the person who murdered Trevisan, when the man who had for decades been
the highest politician in the country stood accused of having ordered the
murders of the few honest judges who had the courage to investigate the Mafia?

This bleak reverie was interrupted by
Chiara's arrival. She slammed the apartment door and came in with a great deal
of noise and a large pile of books. Brunetti watched as she went down to her
room and emerged a few moments later without the books.

'Hello, angel,' he called down the
hall. 'Would you like something to eat?' When wouldn't she, he asked himself.

^‘
Ciao,
Papa
’
she called out and came down the hall, struggling to extricate herself from the
sleeves of her coat and managing, instead, only to pull one of them completely
inside out and trap her hand in it. As he watched, she tore her other hand free
and reached to pull at the sleeve. He glanced away and, when he looked back, the
coat lay in a heap on the floor, and Chiara was bending to pick it up.

She came into the kitchen and tilted
her face up to him, expecting a kiss, which he gave her.

She went over and opened the
refrigerator, stooped down to see into it, reached into the back and pulled out
a paper-wrapped wedge of cheese. She stood, took a knife from a drawer, and cut
herself a thick slice.

'Want some bread?' he asked, pulling
a bag of rolls down from the top of the refrigerator. She nodded, and they did
a trade, he getting a thick wedge of cheese in exchange for two of the rolls.

'Papa,' she began, 'how much do
policemen get paid an hour?'

'I don't know exactly, Chiara. They
get a salary, but sometimes they have to work more hours a week than people who
work in offices do.'

'You mean if there's a lot of crime,
or they have to follow someone?'

‘
Si
.' He nodded toward the
cheese, and she cut him another piece, handing it to him silently.

'Or if they spend time questioning
people, suspects and things like that?' she asked, clearly not going to give
this up.

'
Si
,' he repeated, wondering
what she was getting at.

She finished her second roll and put
her hand into the bag for another.

'Mamma's going to kill you if you eat
all the bread,' he said, a threat rendered almost sweet by years of repetition.

'But how much do you think it would
work out to an hour, Papa?' she asked, ignoring him, as she sliced the roll in
two.

He decided to invent, knowing that,
whatever sum he named, he was going to end up being asked for it 'I'd say it
isn't more than about 20,000 lire an hour.' Then, because he knew he was meant
to, he asked, 'Why?’

'Well, I knew you'd be interested to
know about Francesca's father, so I asked some questions about him today, and I
thought that, since I was doing the police's work, they should pay me for my time.'
It was only when he saw signs of venality in his children that Brunetti
regretted Venice's thousand-year-old trading heritage.

He didn't answer her, so Chiara was
forced to stop eating and look at him. 'Well, what do you think?'

He gave it some thought and then
answered, 'I think it would depend on what you found out, Chiara. It's not as
if we'd be paying you a salary, regardless of what you did, as we do with the
real police. You'd be a sort of private contractor, working freelance, and we'd
pay you in relation to the value of what you brought us.'

She considered this for a moment and
appeared to see the sense of it. 'All right I'll tell you what I found out, and
then you tell me how much you think it's worth.'