The Golden Egg (17 page)

When Brunetti returned to the Questura, the guard at the door told him that Dottor Patta wanted to see him in his office. This reminded Brunetti that he had, for the last three days, ignored his superior's request that he attend to the problem in San Barnaba. How trivial it had sounded when Patta told him about it, and how much more trivial it sounded now.

This fact, however, in no way affected Brunetti's determination: like any good actor, once he stepped on stage, he never broke role. Well, he told himself, seldom broke role.

Signorina Elettra was not at her desk, so Brunetti faced the meeting with no advance information. He knocked and obeyed Patta's shouted ‘
Avanti
.'

Even though he had resolved the matter with no effort whatsoever, Brunetti pasted a look composed of equal parts of contrition and industry upon his face as he entered. He had taken only two steps into the room before Patta got to his feet and came around his desk towards him. The Vice-Questore's hand was raised, but instead of shaking Brunetti's, Patta placed his hand on Brunetti's upper arm, as if to guide him to a chair. Brunetti set himself adrift in this current of apparent goodwill and allowed himself to be tugged towards his mooring point.

When Brunetti was safely docked, Patta went back to his own berth and smiled across the desk at his subordinate. ‘I'm glad you found time to come,' Patta said. Brunetti activated his sensors and swept Patta's tone for sarcasm. Finding none, he adjusted the settings and searched for irony, but there was none of that, either.

‘When Garzanti told me you wanted to see me, Dottore, I came right up.' Brunetti smiled, suggesting that the message was the thing he had most been waiting for in these recent days.

‘I wanted to talk to you about that situation I asked you to look into,' Patta said with a smile as broad as it was insincere.

‘Ah, yes,' Brunetti said, replacing his expression with one of industry and concern. ‘I've been very busy.' Then, with apparent reluctance, he was forced to add, ‘It wasn't easy, Vice-Questore.'

Patta's smile faded and his tanned face lightened a shade. He opened his mouth to speak, closed it and swallowed, licked his lips, and settled for putting the smile back in place.

Until he saw Patta's unease, Brunetti had been prepared to tell him he had, by Herculean efforts, resolved the problems facing the mayor's son. But now he began to calculate how he could get two for one and see that the Lieutenant neither took possession of Signorina Elettra's office nor prevented Foa from being seconded to the Guardia Costiera.

‘That is, Dottore,' Brunetti went on, ‘I finally managed to speak to the man in charge of the patrol for that area.'

Patta was all attention.

Brunetti put on his easiest smile. ‘Thank God he's a cousin of Foa's,' he began, then, seeing the flash of confusion in Patta's eyes, he said, ‘Well, it was Foa who took me over there in the launch, and – as I said – the man in charge of that area is his cousin, so he went in with me and introduced me.' Brunetti paused to give careful thought to something that must just have occurred to him and said, ‘I'm sure that helped.'

As if that were an irrelevant detail, he went on. ‘When I mentioned the shop to him, he told me that the men on patrol had noticed the way the tables were spreading out and had spoken to the owner about it. But so far there had been no written report.'

‘And the pilot? Foa? Was he there, too?'

‘I asked him to stay, sir. I thought it would make it easier if he was there.' Then, with relaxed, man-to-man candour, Brunetti added, ‘You know how clannish we Venetians can be.'

Patta gave this the consideration it deserved and finally asked, ‘What happened?'

Here, Brunetti looked away from Patta, as though embarrassed by his own remarks about Venetians or perhaps about what he was to say next. But he said it, anyway, ‘He asked me, sir, why he should help us by ignoring this – that is, help the police – when we're the people . . .' He paused and then said, ‘This is what he told me sir.' At Patta's nod, he went on. ‘When we refused to help one of our own.'

‘I don't understand what you're saying, Brunetti. Or trying to say.'

‘Well, sir, I was there with Foa, and this man is his cousin.'

‘How aren't we helping him?' Patta asked, making no attempt to disguise his exasperation.

‘It's about the request from the Guardia Costiera, sir,' Brunetti said.

After a moment, the lights came on in Patta's eyes. Off, then on. Brunetti didn't mind in the least; it might be good to let Patta see just how clannish these Venetians are.

‘What else do you want?' Patta asked in a level voice.

With equal lack of emphasis, Brunetti answered, ‘Lieutenant Scarpa might be persuaded to remain in his own office.'

Brunetti had to admire the fortitude with which his superior received this request. He did not grimace, nor did he blink. ‘I see,' Patta said. He looked down at the surface of his desk for a while, then across at Brunetti, and asked, ‘And there will be no more trouble in Campo San Barnaba?'

‘None, sir. And the tables can stay where they are.'

Again, his superior consulted the surface of his desk before meeting his eyes. ‘I'll speak to the Lieutenant,' he said. Then, ‘You can go now, Commissario.'

Brunetti got to his feet, nodded to his superior, and left the office.

Upstairs, Brunetti opened the online pages of
Il Fatto Quotidiano
, a newspaper which often delighted him by its manifest distrust of every political party, every politician, and every religious leader. And there he found it, a story announcing that the officers of the Guardia di Finanza had yesterday arrived at the City Hall of Venice and entered the office charged with the awarding of contracts and financial contributions to encourage start-up businesses and shops. Acting on an order from the magistrates in Mestre, they had carried away files, records, and computers. The newspaper reported that someone close to the investigation said that there had been reports of
the involvement of certain politicians in the awarding
of these grants and contracts to relatives and friends.

After he finished reading the story, Brunetti allowed himself a smile and addressed the computer directly. ‘If the mayor calls, please tell him I'm busy speaking to the magistrates in Mestre,' he said aloud in the imitation of Patta's voice which, over the years, he had honed to something approaching perfection.

‘Certainly, Vice-Questore. It's a message I'd be delighted to give him,' Signorina Elettra's voice responded, but when he looked towards the door he had forgotten to close, he saw not her, but Commissario Claudia Griffoni.

‘You manage the Venetian cadence very well, Claudia,' he said. ‘The nuances of his Sicilian accent have proven too much for me.'

Griffoni smiled and said something to him that, though it was virtually incomprehensible, with only a few words peeping out enough for him to grasp, was an exact imitation of Patta's voice speaking in his native dialect and thus far more accurate than his own imitation had been. She came across the room and sat in the chair in front of his desk. ‘He says he's from Palermo, but his accent is pure San Giuseppe Jato,' she said, with the same disapproval a lord would use should his butler attempt to play polo. As ever, she spoke in an Italian the purity of which he envied.

In the years she had worked at the Questura he had learned very little about her private life or background, but he had no doubt that she came from what his maternal grandmother had always referred to as
gente per bene
, with its strong suggestion that the people so defined were not only well intentioned but wealthy. Beyond this, she was intelligent and cooperative, and the few times they had worked together, he had been impressed by her seriousness and lack of interest in becoming the hero of the investigation, a weakness to which some of his other colleagues were prone. She was also possessed of physical courage, a quality Brunetti admired.

‘You know anything about the investigation?' he
asked.

‘You mean the mayor and the Guardia di Finanza?'

‘Yes.'

She shrugged. ‘They'll find certain irregularities in the bookkeeping, an enormous amount of money will not have been accounted for, and they will not be able to find it, people will say things and trade accusations, one of the accused will weep for the press, and for a few months the people in the office will be very cautious. And then things will go back to normal.'

Letting the subject of political corruption retreat for the moment, Brunetti gave in to his curiosity at her arrival and asked, ‘Can I help you with something?'

‘Not at all,' she answered with a quick shake of her head. ‘In fact, it's the opposite. I've come up because I'd like to try to help you with something.'

Brunetti lifted his chin in an interrogative gesture. He had no idea what she could mean. For months she had been dealing with a suspicious fire which had gutted a former factory that the owner planned to turn into
a luxury hotel. Though the official investigation had declared it an accident, doubts remained, especially after one of Griffoni's informants told her that the son of the expert who had written the report had been hired as manager of a hotel in the chain that was interested in transforming the factory.

How, he asked himself, could her investigation be of help to him? ‘Tell me more,' he said, turning from the computer screen to face her directly.

‘It's none of my business,' she said, suddenly sounding hesitant.

‘What isn't?'

‘Your friendship with Vianello.'

Where did that come from? he wondered, and what business of hers was his friendship with Vianello? To give himself time to think about how to respond, he turned back to the computer and closed all of the open windows, then pushed another key and watched the screen grow dark.

He turned back to her. ‘But you're choosing to make it your business?' he asked in a voice wiped clean of everything save mild curiosity.

She started to speak, but all she managed to produce was a hesitant vowel sound, perhaps ‘a', which
could have served for
allora
or
adesso
, or, for all he knew,
amico
.

‘He's helped me, you know,' she said. ‘With Scarpa. And with the others.'

‘Helped you how?' Brunetti asked. Then, because there could be no doubt of the universal desire to help against Lieutenant Scarpa, he added, ‘With the others, I mean.'

She studied his face for a long time, as if trying to make up her mind about something, or about him. ‘You mean you don't know? You've never noticed the way some people here talk to me?' she asked.

He thought of Signorina Elettra, and his impulse was to lie, and then he started to recall other things he might have noticed or sensed, references and undertones he had chosen not to interpret in a particular way.

Then, to goad him, ‘Or about me?'

Books often described how beautiful women became when they were angry: how wrong her face proved that to be. Her mouth was a tight line, her strong nose suddenly sharp and too big. And her eyes lacked all warmth, all willingness to understand.

‘Because you're Neapolitan, you mean?'

She made a puffing noise replete with disgust. ‘If it were only that,' she said. ‘I'm used to being thought of as a
terrone:
every cousin has to be a
Camorrista,
my brother has to be under house arrest; and every investigation I make has to be half-hearted, at best, since my only purpose is to be a spy and see that nothing is ever done to harm the Camorra.' Brunetti had been with her when shots were fired and a man killed, but he had never seen her like this. Her cool dispassion and sense of irony were gone, replaced by an anger he could feel as a force coming across his desk.

He frowned and then asked, ‘Do you think you're exaggerating?'

‘Of course I'm exaggerating,' she said sharply. But she paused long enough for some of the anger to melt from her face. ‘There's no way I can escape it up here. It's in the northern air.'

Confronted with his own hypocrisy and how it would colour anything he chose to say, Brunetti opted for silence. How could he tell this woman she was imagining things when his own distrust of southerners was as strongly rooted as his teeth? Like them, it had been formed in childhood, and he had been equally unconscious of the growth of both.

Had she sensed it in him, too? Brunetti no sooner concluded that, if she had, she would hardly have mentioned the subject to him, than he recalled just how subtle a person she was, and was again uncertain. How strange, prejudice: so comforting until someone noticed it.

He ran his hands over his face and back through his hair as a visual signal of wiping the slate free of a digression. ‘Where did Vianello go?' he asked.

‘Downstairs. I just spoke with him.'

Brunetti smiled and waved a hand to dismiss her
answer. ‘No. I mean where did the idea of my friend­ship
with him go?' Seeing the faint relief signalled by her more relaxed posture, he added, ‘We were distracted, I think.'

She blushed, she actually blushed, and with it her full beauty flowed back into possession of her, or she of it. ‘Sorry, Guido, but you really have no idea.' For a moment, he was afraid she was going to pick it up again, but she said no more.

‘Tell me,' he said.

‘You asked him to ask Nadia to do some work for you.' Before Brunetti could explain or avoid explanation, she said, ‘No, he didn't want to tell me. I could see something was bothering him, so I asked him, and I wouldn't let it go until he told me.' When she saw that Brunetti believed her, she went on. ‘All he told me was that you wanted her to ask some people about this man who died.'