The other officers had little better to offer, though few of them had spent more than fifty euros. Brunetti was left uncomfortable at the thought that betrayal could be had for so little.
He went downstairs and into Signorina Elettra’s tiny office. He found her with both hands raised and motionless over the keyboard of her computer, a pianist about to begin the final movement of a sonata. The pause as she decided the precise attack extended as he watched. She read whatever was written on the screen, then her eyes moved up to study his face with no sign that she recognized him. Finally she lowered her hands, sat back and folded her arms across her chest.
He approached her desk. ‘Problems?’ he asked when she continued to ignore him.
She looked up but did not smile. Her right hand rose for a moment to place a contemplative forefinger on her lips, then returned to the keys and tapped at a few of them. She waited, tapped in further information, then sat back and studied the screen.
She remained motionless for so long that Brunetti was forced to escalate and asked, ‘Is it serious?’
She regarded the computer screen with unwonted wariness, as though it had just given a menacing growl. Then she propped her elbows on the desk and lowered her chin into her hands. Finally, she answered him. ‘Perhaps.’
‘Which means what?’
‘I read the Vice-Questore’s email this morning and found one with an attachment. The name of the sender was familiar, but the address was new. So I didn’t open the attachment.’
She stopped here. Since Brunetti had no idea what any of this could mean, he limited himself to saying, ‘Strange,’ which is what he thought she wanted him to say.
‘Indeed.’
‘What did you do instead?’
‘What anyone would,’ she said, leaving him wondering. After a pause, she added, ‘I marked it and the attachment as read, hoping that would be the end of it.’
She looked at Brunetti, as if to test how much he understood, and his expression must have displayed at least part of the truth, for she added, ‘That’s how they can hack into your system: if you open an attachment.’
‘Where did it come from?’ Brunetti asked.
‘I’ve traced it back to an address in the Ministry of the Interior,’ she said.
Her answer left Brunetti without words. For heaven’s sake, they worked for the Ministry of the Interior. Why should the sender need to get into their system, which was the Ministry’s own system, where there was an internal record of every email or SMS they sent or received?
Signorina Elettra lapsed again into contemplation of her computer screen, and Brunetti lapsed into the contemplation of possibilities. That there would be official surveillance of their correspondence and phone conversations didn’t surprise him in the least: he had come to believe that everybody was listened to by at least one uninvited person. Perhaps the fact that so many people were busy spying rather than working explained why it was so much more difficult, today, to get anything done. Brunetti was conscious of the Unseen Listener when he spoke on the phone and the Unseen Reader when he sent an email. Surely things were slowed by the constant need to consider the uninvited participants who read what they wrote or listened to what they said.
Spying at this level would be given into the hands of experts to do, wouldn’t it? A secretary sitting in the office of a Vice-Questore di Polizia in a small city like Venice shouldn’t be able so easily to detect the attempt at detection, should she? Adept spies would be less clumsy.
‘Do you know which office?’
She glanced out of the window behind him. Finally she shook away the question and said, ‘It was a fake address.’
‘And the real one?’
‘I have no idea,’ she confessed. ‘I’ve sent everything along to a friend of mine and asked him to have a look.’
Because he did not want to know the identity of the assuredly non-authorized friend she had asked to investigate the attempted penetration of a Ministry of the Interior email address by a fraudulent Ministry of the Interior email address – Brunetti felt exhausted by the mere process of working this out – he declined to ask which friend she’d sent it to.
He had to think carefully about how to phrase any questions he might ask so as not to reveal his ignorance. ‘What would they be after?’
‘My first guess is that it’s someone who hopes we use our office computers for our private emails. Once they get in, they can look at anything.’ Did she shudder?
‘I don’t have a private email address,’ Brunetti said.
‘You don’t have a private email?’ she repeated, quite as if he’d told her he didn’t know how to use a knife and fork.
‘No,’ he answered, with the same pose of innocence with which he used to tell people he didn’t have a telefonino. ‘I use Paola’s, but for anything official, I use the one I was given here,’ he said, waving his hand to indicate the entire Questura. ‘I promised Paola I’d never use one of the computers here to check her account.’
‘I see.’