The Golden Egg

12





After dinner, Brunetti told Paola about his conversation with Signora Cavanella and her refusal to divulge any information about her son, and about the lies she had told both him and Pucetti to explain away the missing documents.

‘Why would she want to lie about her son?’ Paola asked. ‘It’s not as if she kept him locked up in the attic for forty years, is it?’ She sank deeper into the cushions of the ratty old sofa she kept in her study: she spent so much time in that spoon-like posture that he sometimes marvelled she could still stand upright and walk.

‘It suggests he isn’t her son at all,’ she said, but it was speculation, not inquiry.

‘I saw him only a few times, like you, but he resembled her,’ Brunetti told her.

‘I can’t place her,’ Paola said, closing her eyes and resting her head against the back of the sofa. ‘But I might not have noticed her. Sixtyish, badly dyed red hair, good legs, good skin, and still attractive. There are scores of women in this city who fit that description.’ Then, after a pause, ‘I wonder where she works.’

‘Why do you think she works?’

‘Because manna from heaven falls only in the Bible, Guido.’ He smiled, which encouraged her to continue. ‘It’s our new duty to work until we drop, remember? By the time you and I get there, they’ll have extended the age to eighty.’ She paused, then added, ‘No, I speak ill of our leaders. They’ll have pity on women and let us stop at seventy-eight.’

‘I still don’t understand why she’d behave so strangely,’ Brunetti said, accustomed to her sideswipes at the government, any government, and equally accustomed to ignoring them.

‘People are strange, as you never cease to tell me.’

He thought of his conversation that day with Vianello and his insistence that people were too much under the eye and observation, not only of the authorities, but of any business that could find a way to pry into their lives. At the thought of Vianello, Brunetti felt another twinge at the presumptuousness of his having suggested to his friend that Nadia be asked to investigate. ‘I don’t understand it,’ he said, patting Paola’s leg and getting to his feet. ‘I am taking to my bed with Lucretius.’

She gave him a long look, grinned, and said, ‘As your wife, I blanch at the thought that you are going to bed with a man who wants to explain to you The Nature of Things.’

He smiled back, reached out to her with one hand, and said, ‘Would you like to try, instead?’

She got to her feet.

The next morning, the rain that Foa had smelled in the air arrived, and Brunetti put on a raincoat and carried an umbrella when he left the house. He decided to take the Number One from San Silvestro to the Zattere, and stopped to pick up that day’s Gazzettino for the ride. On board, he noticed how few people were reading a newspaper; how few, in fact, were reading anything. Of course, that they were slowly passing the most beautiful sight in the world might have distracted them from the Gazzettino’s cursory presentation and mistaken analysis of world events, but he still remained surprised at how few people read. He read, Paola read, the kids read, but he realized how seldom he talked about books or found a person who appeared to take a serious interest in them.

His mind opened to the castigation that was never far from it. Here he was again, assuming that what he thought was what other people must surely think; that his judgements must have universal validity. Lucretius knew that what is food to one man is bitter poison to another, a lesson life had been trying to teach Brunetti for

a generation.

As he tugged at this idea, studying the people who sat on the other side of the boat, his newspaper lay forgotten

on his lap, making Brunetti yet another of those who sat on the vaporetto, gazing about without apparent purpose.

He got off at San Zaccaria and made his wet way to the Questura. He went up to his office, shook the umbrella until it would have whimpered if it could, hung his coat on the outside of the cupboard, and stamped around until his feet no longer left wet prints on the floor.

He turned on his computer and checked his email, quite unconscious of how automatic this process had become in the last few years. It was no longer necessary for him to stop in Signorina Elettra’s office or in the squad room

to find out what was happening: most information waited for him in the computer. It was, however, information without nuance, without the unveiled scepticism with which Vianello greeted certain reports and without Signorina Elettra’s insights to set things straight.

He found an invitation to a conference in Palermo that would ‘enhance coordination between the community and the organizations dedicated to maintaining order in civil society’. He pushed his chair back and stared out the window, allowing the Cloud of Ironic Despair to descend upon his head. Did this mean he was invited to a meeting between the citizens of Palermo and the police, or did the people in charge down there have a sense of humour and it was really meant to be a meeting between local citizens and the Mafia, the only organization well enough led, sufficiently clear in its purposes, and free of infiltrators to go about the business of maintaining order in society so as best to suck from it what little life remained? His first impulse was that of the show-off, to forward the invitation to Vianello and ask if the second possibility were correct, but the habit of leaving no traces was second nature to him and he resisted the temptation.

Among the other emails was one from Pucetti: he was just leaving to accompany Signora Cavanella but wanted to tell Brunetti that his relative would gladly speak to him about that subject. He gave a telefonino number, nothing more. Using his own telefonino, Brunetti dialled the number.

‘Bianchini,’ a man’s voice answered on the third ring.

‘Good morning, Signor Bianchini, this is your cousin Roberto’s friend. He suggested I call you.’

‘Ah,’ the man answered, then said, showing he understood that there was no need to discuss the purpose of the call, ‘I thought we could meet for a coffee some time.’

Brunetti looked at his watch. ‘I have a very light schedule this morning,’ he said, not at all certain of this because he had not read the other emails, ‘so we could meet any time you like.’

‘As it happens, I’m free this morning as well. How about that bar near the Ponte dei Greci? I think you know it.’

‘Yes,’ Brunetti said neutrally.

‘Eleven?’

‘Good,’ Brunetti said and ended the call with a polite farewell.

Fast work from Pucetti in convincing his cousin to talk to him, Brunetti reflected. He sat for a few moments and thought back to the strange urgency with which Patta had explained the situation in San Barnaba. Patta cared about his family and his job and was unlikely to ask Brunetti for help unless one of the two was at risk. Or perhaps it was nothing more than Patta’s attempt to endear himself to the mayor, as a kind of deposit in the bank of favours.

Was it like this everywhere? Brunetti wondered. Was it all connected, and did power in one place seek automatically to ally itself with power in some other place? And did they protect themselves and one another and to hell with the rest?

Remembering that Rizzardi would have reported on the dead man’s teeth, he scrolled down the list of his messages, but there was no report from the pathologist. It had been two days since the autopsy, and the report should have been filed. ‘“Should have” doesn’t mean anything,’ he said aloud.

He wrote an email, telling Rizzardi the report had not arrived and asking the pathologist to make sure that information about the teeth was included. He was about to send it, when he thought of Rizzardi’s sensibility. He cancelled the last sentence and wrote, instead, that he was particularly interested in whatever had been found about the teeth, for this might end up being the only way to make a physical identification of the dead man. This one he sent. He remembered a friend of his who worked as a musical agent once used the term, ‘Diva Dienst’ to describe the manner in which he was forced to treat certain singers, male as well as female. It was a combination of deference, adulation, and dedication to anticipating their every whim. And here he was, a police commissario, engaged in ‘Doctor Dienst’.

Having read his email, he turned to the papers from his in-box. He was successful with the first three,

which he understood, initialled, and placed at the other side of his desk. But the fourth, a report on the increase in pickpocketing, breaking and entering, and mugging caused Brunetti, quite literally, to run his hands through his hair. It was at this point that Claudia Griffoni, the newest of the other commissari, knocked on his door and came in without waiting to be told to do so. Her elegant legs were today partially visible under a dark green woollen skirt, the rest of her covered by a long beige sweater with a high neck.

‘Hiding?’ she asked.

‘From reality,’ he admitted. He pointed to the papers. ‘I’m just reading about the 28 per cent increase in break-ins in the last six months.’

‘Reported break-ins,’ she corrected him, reminding him that he had to add to that whatever his own experience suggested might be the correct number of people who no longer bothered to report a crime.

‘They had a point, though, when they gave the amnesty,’ she said as she came across the room and sat in one of the chairs in front of his desk. ‘If the prisons are full, and the European Court of Human Rights is screaming at the government, then they have to let some out, if only to make room for the new ones.’

There was nothing he could say. Dockets so full that an appeal case in Venice would have to wait nine years to be heard. Drunk drivers on the mainland who exterminated entire families and were placed under house arrest. Mafia control of the country an ever-expanding curse and, not surprisingly, no government willing to examine the increasing symbiosis between Mafia and politicians.

‘Shall we talk about the weather?’ he asked.

She smiled, and it lightened his heart to see it. ‘I’d love to, but I’m afraid I have to speak about our Black Nemesis.’

‘What’s he done now?’

‘It’s not so much what Scarpa does, is it,’ she asked, ‘as what he makes sure will not be done?’

‘For example?’

‘Foa’s been invited by the Guardia Costiera to spend a week with them, starting the first of the month.’

‘To do what?’

‘To familiarize them with the coastline and the places where it’s possible for small boats to make a landing.’

‘What’s being landed?’

‘Cigarettes,’ she said. ‘But you know that.’

Brunetti nodded.

‘It seems now that they’re also landing people. Or so the Guardia Costiera believes.’

‘From where?’

‘Small boats come across from Albania and Croatia, but it looks like some larger ships are stopping off the coast and putting them on to smaller boats to be brought in.’

‘What kind of ships?’

‘Freighters, tankers. Some of them are so big, it’s easy for them to keep fifty people aboard.’

‘Without anyone noticing?’ he asked.

She smiled again. ‘You think the crew cares what happens? Most of them are illegal, anyway, so they’re probably willing to help people they think are in the same situation.’

‘And they asked for Foa?’

She nodded. ‘The commander did. Foa told me a lot of the men who are assigned here come from the South and don’t know the coastline at all. He’s Venetian, family’s been Venetian since the beginning,’ she said. ‘So he knows the coast like he knows the inside of his pocket and can show them where the likeliest landing places are.’

‘And Scarpa?’

‘He refused the request – refused it when it was made and refused it again when the Captain of the Guardia Costiera repeated it.’

‘Did he give any explanation?’

‘He said that Foa is an employee of the police, not of the Marina, so there is no legal protection for anything he might do if he pilots one of their boats.’

‘What does he expect him to do, run a pirate attack on the boat to Chioggia?’

‘The Lieutenant did not lower himself to discuss details: he was speaking of general principles.’ Disgust filling her voice, she added, ‘Scarpa wouldn’t recognize a principle if it sat down next to him on the vaporetto and hit him over the head.’

‘Not that he’d ever take a vaporetto,’ Brunetti said, and hearing himself say that, he understood everything. ‘It’s because Foa won’t chauffeur him around, isn’t it?’

Griffoni smiled again. ‘Of course. He’s one of the few who stand up to him, won’t take him anywhere unless there’s written authorization from Patta.’

‘Nasty little shit, Scarpa,’ Brunetti said.

‘To say the least,’ she agreed. ‘Except that he’s not little.’

‘I was speaking in the moral sense, I suppose,’ Brunetti said. She nodded in understanding and agreement. ‘So he blocks Foa’s request?’ Brunetti asked. She nodded. ‘Is it important for him?’

‘It certainly can’t hurt him: collaboration with another service, specifically requested to aid them in . . .’ Here Griffoni allowed her voice to take on the metronomic rhythm of politicians . . . ‘the fight against illegal immigration.’

‘The treasurer of a political party steals thirteen million Euros, and the politicians are hysterical about illegal immigration,’ Brunetti said tiredly.

‘He offered to give five back,’ she said in the voice of careful honesty.

Brunetti pushed his chair at a slant and balanced it on its back legs. He latched his fingers together behind his head. ‘I was in a bar last week, and two people in front of me were talking about just that: the thirteen million. And one of them – she was a woman at least a decade older than I am – she put her coffee cup down on the saucer and said only one word. “Bombs”.’

He saw that he had caught Griffoni’s attention, but he kept his hands behind his head and stared at the ceiling as he spoke. ‘The woman with her asked what she meant, and she said that the only way to get rid of them was to bomb Montecitorio and kill them all.’

He lowered his head to see that she was paying attention. ‘The woman with her was the same age, carrying her shopping bag and on the way to Rialto. She looked surprised and said, “But that would damage the building, and it’s so beautiful.”

He took his hands from behind his head and let his chair fall to the ground. ‘So that, Claudia, is what the middle class thinks of our Parliament.’

She shrugged, as if to dismiss the woman’s comment or the importance Brunetti saw in it, but after a moment’s reflection said, ‘I like her concern for the building.’ Then, back to business, she asked, ‘What can we do about Foa?’

‘Patta’s asked me to do him a favour. If I can manage it, I’ll make the price of it that Foa be assigned to this.’

‘You don’t want to use it for yourself?’

‘You sound as if I’m a squirrel burying a nut for the winter,’ he said with a laugh.

His laughter proved contagious. When they stopped, Griffoni said, ‘We trade them back and forth: I do this for you; you do that for me.’

‘And we all have a list, accurate to the centesimo, stored away in our memories.’

‘Like the squirrels,’ she said, thanked him for his time, and left his office.