About Face

7
Back at the stables, things were reasonably quiet. Another of the commissari came in after four to complain about Lieutenant Scarpa, who was refusing to turn over some files relating to a two-year-old murder in San Leonardo. ‘I can’t figure out why he’s doing this,’ said Claudia Griffoni, who had been at the Questura only six months and thus was not yet fully acquainted with the Lieutenant and his ways.
Though she was Neapolitan, her appearance defied every racial stereotype: she was a tall, willowy blonde with blue eyes and skin so clear that she had to be careful of the sun. She could have posed on a poster for a Nordic cruise, though, had she actually worked on the ship, her doctorate in oceanography would have qualified her for a position more exacting than that of hostess. As would the uniform she was wearing in Brunetti’s office, one of three she had had tailored to celebrate her promotion to commissario. She sat across from him, straight in her chair, long legs crossed. He studied the cut of the jacket, short and tight fitting, with hand-stitching along the lapels. The trousers, after a length that delighted Brunetti, were cut tight at the ankle.
‘Is it because he wasn’t given the case, so he wants to slow us all down and make it even harder to find the killer?’ Griffoni asked. ‘Or is it something personal between him and me that I don’t know about? Or does he just not like women? Or women police?’
‘Or women police who outrank him?’ Brunetti tossed into the pot, curious to see how she would react but also convinced that this was the reason for Scarpa’s constant attempts to undermine her authority.
‘Oh, sweet Jesus,’ she exclaimed, tilting her head back, as if to address the ceiling. ‘It’s not enough that I have to put up with this from killers and rapists. Now I’ve got to deal with it from the people I work with.’
Curious, Brunetti said, ‘I doubt it’s the first time.’ He wondered how Signorina Elettra would respond to the quality of tailoring on the uniform.
She returned her attention to Brunetti and said, ‘We all get a fair bit of it.’
‘What do you do when it happens?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Some of us try to flirt our way out of it. You’ve seen it, I’m sure. You ask them to come along to help defuse a domestic argument, and they act like you’ve asked them for a date.’
Brunetti had indeed seen some of this.
‘Or else we get tough and try to be more vulgar and violent than the men.’
Brunetti nodded in recognition. When she failed to provide a third category, Brunetti asked, ‘Or?’
‘Or we don’t let it make us crazy and just try to do our jobs.’
‘And if nothing works?’ he asked.
‘Well, I suppose we could shoot the bastards.’
Brunetti laughed out loud. In the time he had known her, he had never tried to suggest how she might deal with Scarpa: indeed, he was reluctant, ever, to give this kind of advice. He had learned over the years that most professional and social situations were pretty much like water on uneven ground: sooner or later, they would work themselves level. People, over time, generally decided who was the Alpha and who the Beta. Higher rank sometimes helped with the determination, but not always. In the end, he had little doubt that Commissario Griffoni would learn how to control Lieutenant Scarpa, but he was equally certain that the Lieutenant would find a way to make her pay for it.
‘He’s been here as long as the Vice-Questore, hasn’t he?’ she asked.
‘Yes. They came together.’
‘I suppose I shouldn’t say this, but I’ve always been suspicious of Sicilians,’ she said. Claudia Griffoni, like many upper-class Neapolitans, had been raised speaking Italian, rather than dialect, though she had picked it up from friends and at school and would occasionally use Neapolitan expressions. But they were always spoken within ironic quotation marks, set linguistically apart from the Italian that she spoke as elegantly as Brunetti had ever heard it spoken. Someone who did not know her would therefore believe that her suspicion of Southerners came from the mouth of a person from the North, certainly from someone who lived above Florence.
Brunetti was aware that she had offered him the remark as a test: if he agreed with her, she could place him in one category; if he disagreed, then she could put him in another. Because he belonged in neither – or in both – Brunetti chose to respond by asking, ‘Does this mean you’ll be joining the Lega next?’
This time it was she who laughed out loud. When she stopped, she asked, as if she had not noticed his refusal to take the bait, ‘Does he have any friends here?’
‘He was working for a time with Alvise on some sort of special European project, but the funds were cut before they did much of anything and before anyone could get an idea of what they were even supposed to be doing.’ Brunetti thought for a while before adding, ‘As to friends, I’m not sure. There’s very little that seems to be known about him. I do know that he chooses not to socialize with anyone here.’
‘It’s not as if you Venetians were the most hospitable people in the world,’ she said, smiling to defuse the remark.
Brunetti was surprised into saying, far more defensively than intended, ‘Not everyone here is Venetian.’
‘I know, I know,’ she said, raising a hand in a placatory gesture. ‘Everyone’s very nice and very friendly, but it ends at the door, when we leave to go home.’
Had he not been a married man, Brunetti would have risen to the situation and invited her to dinner on the spot, but those days were gone, and Paola’s response to his behaviour with Franca Marinello was sufficiently fresh in his memory to keep him from inviting this very attractive woman anywhere.
Brunetti’s uncertainty was cut short by the arrival of Vianello. ‘Ah, there you are,’ he said, speaking to Brunetti but acknowledging the woman’s presence with a nod and a gesture that, in some other lifetime, might have been a salute.
He came halfway to Brunetti’s desk and stopped. ‘I saw Signorina Elettra when I came in,’ the Inspector said, ‘and she asked me to tell you she’s spoken to the doctors in San Marcuola and will be up soon to tell you about it.’ When Brunetti nodded his thanks, the Inspector added, ‘The men downstairs told me you’d spoken to them.’ His message delivered, Vianello planted his feet and folded his arms, giving every indication that he had no plans to leave his superior’s office until the meaning of his message had been revealed to him.
Griffoni’s curiosity was just as easily read, and it forced Brunetti to wave Vianello to a seat. ‘I had a Carabiniere here this morning,’ he began, and told them about Guarino’s visit, Ranzato’s murder, and the man who lived near San Marcuola.
The other officers sat quietly for some time until finally Griffoni said fiercely, ‘For God’s sake, don’t we have enough trouble with our own garbage? Now they’re bringing it in from other countries, too?’
Both men were stunned by her outburst: Griffoni was usually calm in the face of talk of criminal behaviour. The silence lengthened until she said in an entirely different voice, ‘Two cousins of mine died of cancer last year. One of them was three years younger than I am. Grazia lived less than a kilometre from the incinerator in Taranto.’
Brunetti said, voice careful, ‘I’m sorry.’
She raised a hand, then said, ‘I worked on it before I came up here. You can’t work in Naples and not know about garbage. It piles up in the streets, or we go chasing after illegal dumps: everywhere you look in the countryside around Naples, there’s garbage.’
Speaking directly to her, Vianello said, ‘I’ve read about Taranto. I’ve seen photos of the sheep in the fields.’
‘They die of cancer, too, it seems,’ Griffoni said in her usual voice. As Brunetti watched, she shook her head, glanced towards him, and asked, ‘Do we follow this, or does it belong to the Carabinieri?’
‘Officially, it does,’ Brunetti answered. ‘But if we’re looking for this man, then we’re involved, too.’
‘Does the Vice-Questore have to authorize it?’ Griffoni asked in a neutral voice.
Before Brunetti could answer, Signorina Elettra came into the office. She greeted Brunetti, smiled at Vianello, and nodded to Griffoni. Brunetti was put in mind of one of Dickens’s characters often mentioned by Paola who would assess a situation in terms of ‘where the wind was coming from’. The north, Brunetti suspected.
‘I’ve spoken to one of the doctors there, Commissario,’ she said with exaggerated formality. ‘But he can’t think of anyone. He said he’d ask his colleague when he comes in.’ How fortunate, he thought, that in all these years they had never abandoned using the formal Lei with one another: it served perfectly for this very cool exchange.
‘Thank you, Signorina. Let me know what he tells you, would you?’ Brunetti said.
She looked at the three of them in turn, then added, ‘Certainly, Commissario. I hope there’s nothing I’ve over-looked.’ She glanced at Commissario Griffoni, as if daring her to address herself to that possibility.
‘Thank you, Signorina,’ Brunetti said. He smiled, glanced down at the new calendar on his desk and listened for, and then to, the sound of her footsteps heading towards the door, and to the sound of its closing.
He looked up just late enough to avoid complicity in the glance that passed between Griffoni and Vianello. Griffoni got to her feet, saying, ‘I think I’ll go back to the airport.’ Before either could ask, she said, ‘The case, not the place.’
‘The baggage handlers?’ Brunetti, who had been in charge of the previous investigations, asked with a tired sigh.
‘Questioning the baggage handlers is like hearing Elvis’s Greatest Hits: you’ve listened to them all a thousand times, sung in different ways and sung by different people, and you never want to hear them again,’ she said tiredly. She went to the door, where she turned back to them and added, ‘But you know you will.’
When she was gone, Brunetti realized how the day, spent listening to people tell him things while he actually did very little, had tired him. He told Vianello that it was late and suggested they go home. Vianello, though he looked at his watch first, got to his feet and said it sounded like an excellent idea. When the Ispettore was gone, Brunetti decided to stop in the officers’ squad room to use the computer before he went home, just to see how much he could find on his own about Cataldo. The men were accustomed to these visits and saw to it that one of the younger officers stayed in the room while the Commissario was there. This time, however, things proved easy enough, and he soon had a number of links to newspaper and magazine articles.
Few of them told him more than had the Conte. In an old issue of Chi, he found a photo of Cataldo arm in arm with Franca Marinello before their marriage. They appeared to be on a terrace or balcony, posed with their backs to the sea: Cataldo was broad and serious in a light grey linen suit. She wore white slacks and a short-sleeved black T-shirt and looked very happy. The definition of the screen was enough to show Brunetti how lovely she had been: perhaps in her late-twenties, blonde, taller than her future husband. Her face looked – Brunetti had to think a moment before the right word came to him – it looked uncomplicated. Her smile was modest, her features regular, her eyes blue as the sea behind them. ‘Pretty girl,’ he said under his breath. He touched a key to move the article down to read further, and the screen went blank.
That did it: he had to have his own computer. He got up, told the nearest man that something was wrong with the machine, and went home.