Drawing Conclusions (25 page)

The doctor remained silent for a long time, and then he said, sounding weak and hesitant, ‘I thought I should tell you. It might mean something.’ Brunetti thanked the doctor and hung up.

He sat and looked at the painting for some time, and then he finished his coffee, set the cup in the sink, and went to take a shower.

Forty minutes later, he emerged on to the embankment of San Lorenzo. He rested his elbows on the railing and watched the boats pass by, trying to think of how he might convince Patta to pursue more actively an official investigation into the death of Signora Altavilla. He imagined the statue of blindfolded Justice, in her hand the scales of her trade. On one side he put the words ‘only a possibility’ and on the other the publicity sure to accrue at the news that a woman had been killed in her home. After all these years, he was well aware of the workings of his superior’s mind and knew that the first obstacle would be the damage to the image of the city, second the damage to tourism.

‘And the effect on tourism?’ an outraged Patta demanded of him half an hour later, reversing the order of his concerns but still not managing to surprise Brunetti. The Vice-Questore had, by evident force of will, contained himself
until he finished listening to these latest ravings from his ever-insubordinate subordinate. ‘What are we supposed to tell these people? That they aren’t safe in their homes, but to have a good time anyway?’

Brunetti, well schooled in the rhetorical excesses and inconsistencies of his superior, forbore to point out that tourists, at least when they were in Venice, were not in their homes, however safe or unsafe they might be therein. He nodded in a manner he hoped would be considered sage.

Brunetti concentrated on meeting his superior’s gaze – Patta hated to have anyone’s attention stray from him, surely the first step on the road to disobedience – and gave every appearance that he was dealing with rational opposition. ‘Yes, I see your point, Vice-Questore,’ Brunetti said. ‘I just hope that Dottor Niccolini …’ he allowed his voice to trail away, as if his thoughts had been written on a blackboard and he was wiping them out.

‘What about him?’ Patta asked, eyes alert to everything he considered a nuance.

‘Nothing, sir,’ Brunetti said evasively, uncertain whether he should be bored or mortified by his own behaviour.

‘What about Dottor Niccolini?’ Patta said in a cold voice, exactly the one Brunetti had tried to provoke.

‘That’s just it, sir: he’s a doctor. That’s how he introduced himself at the hospital, and that’s how Rizzardi addressed him.’ This was pure fantasy on Brunetti’s part. But it might have been true, which sufficed.

‘And so?’

‘They asked him to identify his mother’s body,’ Brunetti added, trying to make it sound as if he were suggesting something to Patta that delicacy made difficult to say.

‘People just see the face,’ Patta asserted, but an instant later he compromised his certainty by asking, ‘don’t they?’

Brunetti nodded and said, ‘Of course,’ as though that were the end of it.

‘What does that mean?’ Patta demanded in a voice intended to be menacing but which Brunetti, familiar with the beast these many years, recognized as the voice of uncertainty.

Brunetti forced himself to look at his hands, carefully folded in his lap, and then directly into Patta’s eyes, always the best tactic for lying. ‘He would have been shown the marks, Vice-Questore,’ he said; then, before Patta could ask about that, he continued, ‘And because they thought he was a doctor, they would have explained them to him. Well, explained what they might be.’

Patta considered this. ‘You think Rizzardi would actually do that?’ he asked, unable to disguise his dissatisfaction that the
medico legale
might have told someone the truth.

‘He’d think it was correct because he was speaking to a colleague,’ Brunetti said.

‘But he’s only a veterinarian,’ Patta raged, speaking the noun with contempt and apparently forgetting not only his son’s relationship with his husky but the many times he had expressed his belief that vets’ professional skill exceeded that of the doctors at the Ospedale Civile.

Brunetti nodded but chose to say nothing. Instead, he sat quietly and observed Patta’s face as the consciousness behind it measured the odds and considered the possibilities. Niccolini was an unknown player: he worked outside the province of Venice, so he could have some political weight unknown to Patta. Veterinarians worked with farmers, and farmers were close to the Lega, and the Lega was a growing political force. Beyond this, for lack of fantasy, Brunetti’s imagination could not go in pursuit of Patta’s.

Finally Patta said, sounding not at all happy about the fact, ‘I’ll have to ask a magistrate to authorize something.’ A sudden thought crossed his handsome face; did the Vice-Questore actually pause to adjust his tie? ‘Yes, we’ve got to get to the bottom of this. Tell Signorina Elettra what you want me to ask him for. And I’ll see to it.’

It had been so flawless that Brunetti had not seen the change take place. He recalled the passage – he thought it was in the Twenty-Fifth Canto – where Dante sees the thieves transformed into lizards, lizards into thieves, the moment of transformation invisible until complete. One instant one thing, the next another. So too had Patta passed from the sustainer of peace at any compromise to the relentless seeker after justice, ready to mobilize the forces of order in the pursuit of truth. Like Dante’s sinners, he fell back to earth already in the guise of his opposite, then rose and walked away with nothing more than a glance over his shoulder.

‘I’ll go and speak to her about it now, shall I, sir?’ Brunetti suggested.

‘Yes,’ Patta encouraged. ‘She’ll know which magistrate is best. One of the young ones, I think.’

Brunetti got to his feet and wished his superior good morning.

Signorina Elettra appeared neither surprised nor pleased at her superior’s change of course. ‘There’s a nice young magistrate I can ask,’ she said with the calculating smile she might use when asking the butcher for a plump young chicken. ‘He hasn’t had much experience, so he’s likely to be open to … suggestion.’ This, Brunetti thought, was probably much the way the Old Man of the Mountain spoke of his apprentice assassins as he sent them about their tasks.

‘How old is he?’ Brunetti asked.

‘He can’t be thirty,’ she said, as though that number were a word she had heard in some other language and perhaps knew the meaning of. Then, in a far more serious voice, she asked, ‘What do you want him to ask for?’

‘Access to the records of the Ospedale Civile for the time Madame Reynard was a patient there; employee records for the same period, if such things exist; authorization to speak to Morandi and Signora Sartori; tax records for both of them
and all documents regarding the sale of Cuccetti’s wife’s house to Morandi; Reynard’s death certificate, and a look at the will to see how much she left him, as well as any other bequests.’ That sounded, to Brunetti, like more than enough to be getting on with.

She had been taking note of his requests, and when he finished, she looked at him and said, ‘I have some of this information already, but I can change the dates and make it look as if the request wasn’t made until the magistrate authorized it.’ She glanced at her notes and said, tapping at the list with the end of her pencil, ‘He probably doesn’t know yet how to ask for all of this, but I suspect I could make a few suggestions that might help him.’

‘Suggestions,’ Brunetti said in a dead level voice.

The look she gave him would have brought a lesser man to his knees. ‘Please, Commissario,’ was all she said, and then she picked up the phone.

Within minutes it was done, and the magistrate’s secretary, with whom Signorina Elettra spoke with easy familiarity, said the warrants would be delivered the next morning. Brunetti restrained himself from asking the name of the magistrate, certain that he would learn it from the signature when he saw the papers the next day. Well, he told himself as he considered the speed and efficiency with which her request had been granted: why should the judiciary be any different from any other public or private institution? Favours were granted to the person whose request was accompanied by a
raccomandazione
, and the more powerful the person who made the
raccomandazione
, or the closer the friendship between the assistants who saw to the details, the more quickly the request was granted. Need a hospital bed? Best to have a cousin who is a doctor in that hospital, or is married to one. A permit to restore a hotel? Problems with the Fine Arts Commission about a painting you want to move to your apartment in London? The right person had but to
speak the word to the right official or to someone to whom the official owed a favour, and all paths were made smooth.

Brunetti found himself, not for the first time, trapped in ambivalence. In this case, it worked to his advantage – and, he told himself, to the civic good – that Signorina Elettra had turned the judicial system of the city into her fief. But in places where persons of lesser … lesser probity… were in charge, the results might not be as salutary.

He left these thoughts, thanked her for her help, and went back to his office.

It was there, after an hour during which he read and initialled various documents and reports, that Signorina Elettra came to speak to him. ‘I’ve found the man of my dreams,’ she said as she came in, and said it in such a way as to lead Brunetti to understand that the man was the young magistrate.

‘I take it he availed himself of your experience with the peculiarities of the city.’

Her smile was calm, her nod an exercise in graciousness. ‘His secretary said a few kind words about me before she put me through to him.’

‘After which you induced him to overlook the dubious legality of some of the things you asked him to authorize?’

The phrase appeared to wound her; if nothing else, it spurred her into saying, ‘I’m not sure there any longer exists a legality in this country that is not dubious.’

‘Be that as it may, Signorina,’ Brunetti said, ‘I’m curious to know what you persuaded him to authorize.’

‘Everything,’ she said with unconcealed delight. ‘I think this young man might prove a gold mine for us.’

Brunetti thought of the warning written above the Gates of Hell and was for a moment tempted to dissociate himself from her further progress into a land, not of dubious, but of absent, legality, but hypocrisy was not among his vices. Also, he appreciated the fact that she had used the plural, and so he
smiled and said, ‘I tremble at the thought of what you might ask him to authorize.’

Failing to disguise her disappointment, she said, ‘I’d never compromise you in any of this, Dottore.’

‘Just yourself?’ he enquired, knowing the impossibility of this.

Her failure to answer forced him, finally, to confront the fact that she had for years been making requests that lay far beyond her mandate. But how to ask the question without making it sound like an accusation?

‘To whom will the responses to these requests be sent?’

‘To the Vice-Questore, of course,’ she said simply, and for a moment Brunetti had a vision of her as she would appear when saying this to a judge, saw her hair pulled tightly back, face completely unadorned by makeup, jewellery forgone; the modest way she was dressed, perhaps in a dark blue suit with a skirt of an unfashionable cut and length, sensible shoes. Would she risk wearing a pair of glasses? Her eyes would be modestly turned down in the face of the majesty of the law; her speech modest; no jokes, no sparring, no wit. He wondered, for the first time, if she had some sort of dreary second name she would pull out for an occasion like this: Clotilde, Olga, Luigia. And Patta – Brunetti had no choice but to use the American phrase – would take the fall.

‘You’d do that to him?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Please, Dottore,’ she said in an offended voice, ‘you must give me some credit for human affection, or weakness.’

As a matter of fact, Brunetti had reason to give her more than some credit for those things, and so he asked, deciding to speak bluntly, ‘But if anything went wrong, you’d let Patta hang for this?’

She managed to look genuinely shocked at his question, shocked and then disappointed that he could think of asking such a thing. ‘Ah,’ she said, letting the syllable run on for a long time, ‘I could never live with myself if I did that. Besides,
you have no idea of how long it would take me to train whoever was sent to replace him.’ At least, Brunetti thought, there was something other than rank hypocrisy on offer here.

With grudging voice, she said, ‘And I must confess that, over the years, I’ve become almost fond of him.’ Hearing her say it like this surprised Brunetti into accepting that he probably shared her feelings.

After leaving him with enough time to consider everything she had said, she added, with an easy smile, ‘Besides, all of the requests are sent in Lieutenant Scarpa’s name.’ Her use of the passive voice did not go unremarked by Brunetti.

It took him but a moment to realize the genius of it. ‘So it appears that the Lieutenant has been exceeding his professional powers all these years? Asking for information without an order from a magistrate,’ he mused, not thinking it necessary to comment on the trail of cyber-proof that was sure to have been left behind him.

‘He’s also been breaking into bank codes, pilfering information from Telecom, rifling through the classified files held on citizens in state offices, and stealing copies of people’s credit card statements,’ she said, scandalized by the magnitude of the Lieutenant’s perfidy.

‘I’m shocked,’ Brunetti said. And he was: what kind of mind could set up such an elaborate trap for the Lieutenant? ‘And all of these requests came directly from his email?’ he asked, wondering what labyrinth she had created to deal with the responses.

Her hesitation was minimal, her answer a smile as she said, ‘The Lieutenant believes he is the only person who has the password to his account.’ Her voice softened, but her look did not. ‘I didn’t want him to be troubled reading any replies, so they’re transferred automatically to one of the Vice-Questore’s accounts.’ The name ‘Giorgio’ slithered into Brunetti’s ear, Signorina Elettra’s frequently named friend, the cyber-genius of all cyber-geniuses, but discretion stood
on Brunetti’s tongue and he did not speak the name aloud, nor did he ask if the Vice-Questore knew of the existence of his account.