CB19 A Question of Belief (2010) (11 page)

‘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.

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?’

‘Yes. Do you know her?’

‘No, but I used to work with her sister. At the bank. She was one of the assistant directors. Nice person.’

‘She ever have anything to say about her sister?’

‘Not that I can remember,’ Signorina Elettra said. ‘But I suppose I can ask her. I see her once in a while on the street, and occasionally we have a coffee.’

‘Does she know where you work?’

‘No. I told her I got a job at the Commune: that’s usually enough to kill anyone’s interest.’

‘From what the person I spoke to said, I gather that Fontana is interested in her sister.’

‘And she’s not in him?’

‘No.’

‘Sounds familiar,’ she said and turned to her computer.

‘That’s very much like her,’ Paola said that evening, stretched out on the sofa and listening to him tell her about his conversation with Signorina Elettra and her remarks about dishonesty and deceit: ‘that she thinks it’s more dishonest to deceive a woman. I thought the days of feminine solidarity were over.’

‘It wasn’t exactly feminine solidarity, so far as I could tell,’ Brunetti replied. ‘I think it’s simply that she believes dishonesty is in proportion to how much trust you’re betraying, not to the lie you actually tell. And, from what she said, men are more indiscreet, more prone to boasting, and in those circumstances she thinks she’s got the right to use anything they say.’

‘And women?’

‘She thinks they need to trust people more before they reveal things.’

‘Or perhaps what women reveal is usually weakness, but what men talk about is strength,’ Paola suggested. She looked at her bare feet and wiggled her toes.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Think about the dinners we’ve been to, or conversations you’ve had with groups of men alone. There’s usually some tale of conquest: a woman, a job, a contract, even a swimming race. So it’s more boasting than confession.’ When he looked sceptical, she said, ‘Tell me you’ve never listened to a man boast about how many women he’s had.’

After a moment’s reflection, Brunetti said, ‘Of course I have,’ sitting up a bit straighter as he said it.

‘Women, at least women my age, would not do that in front of women they don’t know.’

‘And in front of the ones they do know?’ asked an astonished Brunetti.

Ignoring him, she said, in a completely different tone, ‘But deceit does have its uses: without it, and without betrayal, there’d be no literature.’

‘I beg your pardon,’ Brunetti replied, not certain how talk of Signorina Elettra’s reflections on honesty had led them to the point of literature, however familiar that point was and however varied Paola’s wiles in getting them to it.

‘Think of it,’ she said, stretching an expansive arm towards him. ‘Gilgamesh is betrayed, so is Beowulf, so is Otello, someone leads the Persians around behind the Spartans . . .’

‘That’s history,’ Brunetti interrupted.

‘As you will,’ Paola conceded. ‘Then what about Ulysses? What is he if not the grand betrayer? And Billy Budd, and Anna Karenina, and Christ, and Isabel Archer: they’re all betrayed. Even Captain Ahab . . .’

‘By a
whale
?’

‘No, by his megalomania and his desire for revenge. You could say by his own weaknesses.’

‘Aren’t you stretching things a bit, Paola?’ he asked in a reasonable tone. Tired by a long day, his mind swirled off to the cases that weren’t cases, where he could proceed only unofficially and where he wasn’t even sure there was a crime. He had to consider two cases of what was probably human betrayal, and his wife wanted to talk about a whale.

She sobered instantly and turned to punch at the pillow lying against the arm of the sofa. ‘I was trying it out. To see if it might prove an interesting idea for an article.’

‘It’s wide of the field of Henry James, isn’t it?’ he asked, not absolutely certain that she had mentioned a James character in her list.

She grew even more sober. ‘I’ve been thinking that of late,’ she said.

‘Thinking what?’

‘That the world of Henry James is becoming very small for me.’

Brunetti got to his feet and looked at his watch: it was after eleven. ‘I think I’ll go to bed now,’ he said, too stunned to think of anything else to say.

The Ferragosto holiday seemed to expand each year, as people added days to either side of the official two-week period, in the hope of expanding their vacation as much as avoiding the traffic. The news, both radio and television, was filled with injunctions about safe driving and spoke of the twelve million cars – or fourteen, or fifteen – that were projected to be on the roads that weekend. One of the news reporters said that, if placed bumper to bumper, these cars would stretch in an unbroken line from Reggio Calabria to the Gotthard Pass. Brunetti, having no idea of the average length of an automobile, didn’t even bother to check the numbers. Though he had a licence, he was in truth a non-driver and was almost entirely without interest of any sort in automobiles. They were big or small, red or white or some other colour, and far too many young people died in them every year. He had decided to travel by train: even to discuss renting a car was to run the risk of one of Chiara’s ecological denunciations. They would go to Malles, where a car would meet their train and take them to his cousin’s house; there
was a bus that went up and down to Glorenza twice a day.

Preparing for their holiday, each of the family had begun to pack. Paola created a pile of books on the top of their dresser, whose composition changed each day in conformity with the books she thought she would select for the class in the British Novel she was to teach during the coming term. Brunetti studied the titles every night and thus became party to the ongoing struggle:
Vanity Fair
lost place to
Great Expectations
, a substitution Brunetti attributed to weight;
The Secret Agent
lasted three days but was replaced by
Heart of Darkness
, though the weight differential seemed minimal to Brunetti; a day later,
Barchester Towers
took over from
Middlemarch
, suggesting that the weight rule was back in force.
Pride and Prejudice
appeared the first evening and stayed the course.