A Venetian Reckoning (30 page)

'He’ll be very glad to get this,'
Signorina Elettra said, looking down at the page of shorthand notes on her
desk.

'And the record of his arrest?’
Brunetti asked.

She glanced up at him, eyes two
limpid pools. 'Arrest?’ She took a sheaf of computer print-out from beside her
pad and passed it across to Brunetti. 'Your letter ought to pay him back for
this.'

'The numbers in Favero's book?' he
asked.

The very same,' she said, unable to
disguise her pride.

He smiled, her pleasure immediately
contagious. 'Have you looked at it?’ he asked.

'Just briefly. He's got names,
addresses, and I think he's managed to get the dates and times of all calls
going through to all of those numbers from any phones in Venice or Padua.'

'How does he do it?' Brunetti asked,
voice reverent with the awe he felt at Giorgio s ability to pry information
from SIP; the files of the secret services were easier to penetrate.

'He went to school in the United
States for a year, to study computers, and while he was there, he joined a
group of something called “hackers". He keeps in touch with them, and they
trade information about how to do things like this.'

'Does he do this at work, using the
SIP lines?' Brunetti asked, his awe and gratitude so strong as to erase the
fact that what Giorgio did was probably illegal.

'Of course.’ .

'Bless him,' Brunetti said with all
the fervour of a person whose phone bill for any given period never
corresponded to the use given the phone.

"They're all over the world,
these "hackers",' Signorina Elettra added, 'and I don't think there's
much that can be hidden from them. He told me he contacted people in Hungary
and Cuba to do this. And someplace else. Do they have phones in Laos?'

He was no longer listening but was
reading down through the long columns of times and dates, of places and names.
Patta's name, however, broke through: '... wants to see you'.

'Later,' he said and left her office,
going back to his own, reading all the way. Inside, he closed the door and went
over to stand in the light coming through the window. He stood there, poised
like a Roman senator of the time of the Caesars, hands spread wide, slowly
studying a long report from the far-flung cities of the Empire. This one did
not deal with troop disposition or the shipment of spices and oil. Instead, it
told only when two relatively inconspicuous Italians might have called and
spoken to people in Bangkok, the Dominican Republic, Belgrade, Manila, and a
handful of other cities, but it was no less interesting for that. Pencilled in
the margin of the sheets were the locations of the public call boxes from which
some of the calls were made. Though some of the calls were made from the
offices of both Trevisan and Favero, many more were made from a public phone on
the same street as Favero s office in Padua and still more from another one
located in a small
calle
that
ran behind Trevisan's office.

At the bottom, Brunetti read the
names under which the phones were listed. Three, including the one in Belgrade,
belonged to travel agencies, and the Manila number belonged to a company named
Euro-Employ. At the name, all of the events since Trevisan's death turned into
shards of coloured glass in an immense kaleidoscope seen only by Brunetti. And
this single name was the final turn of the cylinder that jogged the separate
pieces and forced them into a pattern. It was not yet complete, not yet fully
in focus, but it was there, and Brunetti understood.

He pulled his address book from his
desk drawer, rifling through the pages for the phone number of Roberto
Linchianko, a lieutenant-colonel in the Philippine military police, a man who
had attended a two-week police seminar in Lyons three years ago and with whom
Brunetti had formed a friendship that had lasted since then, though their only
communication had been by phone and tax.

His buzzer rang. He ignored it and
picked up the phone, got an outside line, and dialled Linchianko's home phone
number, though he had no idea at all what time it was in Manila. Six hours
ahead, as it turned out, which meant he caught Linchianko just as he was about
to go to bed. Yes, he knew Euro-Employ. His disgust came down the wire, leaping
across the oceans. Euro-Employ was only one of the agencies engaged in the
trade of young women, and it was hardly the worst. All of the papers the women
signed before they went off to 'work’ in Europe were entirely legal. The fact
that the papers were signed by the 'X' of an illiterate or by a woman that
didn't speak the language of the contract in no way compromised their legality,
though none of the women who managed to return to the Philippines thought or
sought to bring a legal claim against the agency. In any case, so far as
Linchianko knew, very few returned. As to how many were sent, he estimated that
there were between fifty and a hundred a week, just from Euro-Employ, and named
the agency that booked their tickets, a name already familiar to Brunetti from
its presence on the list. Before he hung up, Linchianko promised to fax
Brunetti the official police file on both Euro-Employ and the travel agency as
well as the personnel files he had kept for years on all of the employment
agencies working in Manila.

Brunetd had no personal contacts in
any of the other cities on the list from SIP, but what he learned from Linchianko
was more than enough to tell him what he would find there.

In all of his reading of Roman and
Greek history, one of the things that had always puzzled Brunetti was the ease
with which the ancients had accepted slavery. The rules of war were different
then, he knew, as had been the economic basis of the society, and so slaves
were both available and necessary. Perhaps it was a possibility that it might
happen to you. should your country lose a war, that made the idea acceptable -
no more than a spin of the wheel of fate could make you a slave or master. But
no one had spoken against it, not Plato and not Socrates, or, if anyone had,
what they said and wrote had not survived.

And today, to the best of his
knowledge, no one spoke against it, either, but today the silence was based on
the belief that slavery had ceased to exist. He had listened to Paola voice her
radical politics for decades, had grown almost deaf to her hurling about terms
like 'wage slave' and 'economic chains', but now those cliches rose up to haunt
him, for what Linchianko had described to him could be given no other name but
slavery.

The full flood of his interior
rhetoric was cut off by the repeated buzz of the intercom on his desk. 'Yes,
sir,' he said as he picked it up. 'I'd like to talk to you,' said a disgrunded
Patta.

‘I’ll be right down.'

Signorina Elettra was no longer at
her desk when Brunetti went downstairs, so he went into Patta's office with no
idea of what to expect, not that the possibilities were ever more than a few:
after all, how many manifestations could displeasure take?

Today, he was to learn that he was
not the target of Patta's dissatisfaction, only the means by which it was to be
conveyed to the lower orders, its that sergeant of yours,' Patta began after
telling Brunetti to take a seat.

‘Vianello?'

‘Yes.'

‘What do you think he's done?'
Brunetti asked, not conscious until after he had spoken of the scepticism
implicit in his question.

Patta did not overlook it. ‘I think
he's been abusive to one of the patrolmen.’

‘Riverre?' Brunetti asked.

'Then you've heard about it and done
nothing?' Patta asked.

‘No, I've heard nothing. But if
there's anyone who deserves abuse, it's Riverre.’

Patta threw up his hands in a visible
manifestation of his irritation, ‘I've had a complaint from one of the
officers.'

'Lieutenant Scarpa?' Brunetti asked,
unable to disguise his dislike for the Sicilian who had come up to Venice with
his patron, the Vice-Questore, and who served as much as spy as assistant.

'It's not important who made the
complaint. What is important is that it was made.'

'Was it an official complaint?'
Brunetti asked

'That's irrelevant,' Patta said with
swift anger. With Patta, anything he didn't want to hear was irrelevant,
regardless of its truth. ‘I don't want any trouble with the unions. They won't
put up with this sort of thing.'

Brunetti, disgusted with this latest
example of Patta's cowardice, came close to asking him if there were any threat
before which he would not bow down, but he cautioned himself, yet once again,
against the rage of fools and, instead, said, 'I'll speak to them.'

'Them?'

'Lieutenant Scarpa, Sergeant
Vianello, and Officer Riverre.'

Patta came close, he could tell, to
objecting to this, but then, no doubt realizing that the problem, even if not
solved, was at least out of his hands, said instead, 'And this Trevisan thing?'

‘We're working on it, sir.'

'Any progress?'

'Very little.' At least none he
wanted to discuss with Patta.

'Well, take care of this problem with
Vianello. Let me know what happens.' Patta turned his attention back to the
papers in front of him, his equivalent of a polite dismissal.

Signorina Elettra was no longer at
her desk, so Brunetti went down to Vianello's office, where he found the
sergeant reading that day's
Gazzettino.

'Scarpa?' Brunetti asked when he came
in.

Vianello crumpled the pages of the
newspaper together and pressed it down on the desk with an unverifiable remark
about Lieutenant Scarpa's mother.

'What happened?'

With one hand, Vianello began to
smooth out the pages of his newspaper, ‘I was talking to Riverre, and
Lieutenant Scarpa came in.'

Talking to?'

Vianello shrugged. 'Riverre knew what
I meant, and he knew he should have given you that woman's name sooner. I was
telling him that when the lieutenant came in. He didn't like the way I was talking
to Riverre.'

'What were you saying?'

Vianello folded the paper closed and
then in half, then pushed it to the side of his desk, ‘I called him an idiot'

Brunetti, who knew Riverre was one,
round nothing strange in this. 'What did he say?' 'Who, Riverre?' 'No, the
lieutenant.'

'He said I could not speak to my
subordinates that way.'

'Did he say anything eke?’ Vianello
didn't answer. 'Did he say anything else, sergeant?' Still no answer.

'Did you say anything to him?'

Vianello's voice was defensive, ‘I
told him that the matter was between me and one of my officers, that it didn't
concern him.'

Brunetti knew he didn't have to waste
time telling Vianello how foolish this was.

'And Riverre?' Brunetti asked.

'Oh, he's come to me already and told
me that, as far as he remembers our conversation, I was telling him a joke.
About a Sicilian.' Vianello permitted himself a small smile here. 'The
lieutenant, as Riverre now remembers the incident, came in just as I was giving
the punch line, about how stupid the Sicilian was, and the lieutenant didn't
understand - we were speaking dialect - and thought I was talking to Riverre.'

'Well, that seems to take care of
that,' Brunetti said, though he didn't like the fact that Scarpa had taken his
complaint to Patta. Vianello already had enough against him in that quarter,
just by virtue of his so often working with Brunetti, and didn't need the
opposition of the lieutenant as well.

Abandoning the issue, Brunetti asked,
'Do you remember something about a truck that went off the road, up in
Tarvisio, this autumn?'

‘Yes. Why?'

'Do you remember when it was?'

Vianello paused for a moment before
he answered. 'September 26th. Two days before my birthday. First time it's ever
snowed that early up there.'

Because it was Vianello, Brunetti
didn't have to ask him if he was sure of the date. He left the sergeant to
return to his newspaper and went back to his office and to the computer sheets.
A call had been made from Trevisan's office to the number in Belgrade at nine
in the morning of 26 September, a call that lasted three minutes. The following
day, another'call had been made to the same number, but this one came from the
call box in the
calle
behind Trevisan's office. This one had lasted
twelve minutes.