Donna Leon - Anonymous Venetian aka Dressed for Death

Surprised, Vianello asked, ‘You actually got Patta to ask for a court order? To make a bank give up papers?’

‘Yes,’ Brunetti said, managing neither to smile nor to preen.

‘This business must have upset him more than I thought. A court order.’ Vianello shook his head at the marvel of it.

‘And could you ask Signorina Elettra to come up here?’

‘Of course,’ Vianello said, getting to his feet. He held up the lists. ‘I’ll divide up the names and get to work.’ He walked over to the door, but before he left, he asked the same question Brunetti had been asking himself all morning, ‘How could they risk something like this? All it needs is one person, one leak, and the whole thing would come tumbling down.’

‘I have no idea; well, none that makes sense.’ To himself, he reflected that it might be no more than yet another manifestation of a kind of group madness, a frenzy of risk-taking that had abandoned all sane limits. In recent years, the country had been shaken by arrests and convictions for bribery at all levels, from industrialists and builders to cabinet ministers. Billions, tens of billions, hundreds of billions of lire had been paid out in bribes, and so Italians had come to believe that corruption was the normal business of government. Hence the behaviour of the Lega della Moralità and the men who ran it could be seen as absolutely normal in a country run mad with venality.

Brunetti shook himself free from this speculation, looked towards the door, and saw that Vianello was gone.

He was quickly replaced by Signorina Elettra, who came through the door that Vianello had left open. ‘You wanted to see me, Commissario?’

‘Yes, Signorina,’ he said, waving her to the seat beside his desk. ‘Vianello just went downstairs with the lists you gave me. It seems a number of the people on one of them are paying far more in rent than what the Lega is declaring, so I want to know if the people on the second list are really getting the money the Vega says it’s giving them.’

As he spoke, Signorina Elettra wrote quickly, head bent down over her notebook.

‘I’d like to ask you, if you aren’t busy with anything else – what is it you’re working on down in the Archives this week?’ he asked.

‘What?’ she asked and half rose to her feet. Her notebook fell to the floor, and she bent to pick it up. ‘I beg your pardon, Commissario,’ she said when she had the notebook open on her lap again. ‘In the Archives? I was trying to see if there was anything there about Avvocato Santomauro or perhaps Signor Mascari.’

‘And what luck have you had?’

‘None, unfortunately. Neither of them has ever been in trouble with the police. Absolutely nothing.’

‘No one in the building has any idea of the way things are filed down there, Signorina, but I’d like you to see what you can find about the people on those lists.’

‘On both, Dottore?’

She had prepared them, so she knew that they contained more than two hundred names. ‘Perhaps you could begin with the second one, the people who receive money. The list has their names and addresses, so you can check at the city hall and find out which of them are registered here as residents.’ Though it was a holdover from the past, the law which required all citizens to register officially in the city where they resided and to inform the authorities of any change in address made it easy to trace the movements and background of anyone who came under official scrutiny.

‘I’d like you to check the people on that list, find out if any of them have criminal records, either here or in other cities. Other countries, though I have no idea of what you’ll be able to find.’ Signorina Elettra nodded as she took notes, suggesting that all of this was child’s play. ‘Also,’ he continued, ‘once Vianello finds out who’s paying rent under the table, then I’d like you to take those names and do the same.’ She looked up a few seconds after he finished speaking. ‘Do you think you could do this, Signorina? I have no idea what happened to the old files after we began to switch over to computers.’

‘Most of the old files are still down there,’ she said. ‘They’re a mess, but some things are still to be found in them.’

‘Do you think you could do this?’ She had been here less than two weeks, and already it seemed to Brunetti that she had been there for years.

‘Certainly. I find myself with a great deal of time on my hands,’ she said, leaving an opening wide enough for Brunetti to herd sheep through.

He gave in to the impulse and asked, ‘What’s happening?’

‘They’re having dinner tonight. In Milano. He’s having himself driven over there this afternoon.’

‘What do you think will happen?’ Brunetti asked, though he knew he shouldn’t.

‘Once Burrasca’s arrested, she’ll be on the first plane. Or perhaps he’ll offer to drive her back to Burrasca’s after dinner – he’d enjoy that, I think, driving up with her and finding the cars from the Finance Police. She’ll probably come back with him tonight if she sees them.’

‘Why does he want her back?’ Brunetti finally asked.

Signorina Elettra glanced up at him, puzzled by his density. ‘He loves her, Commissario. Surely, you must realize that.’

The heat usually robbed Brunetti of all appetite, but that night he found himself really hungry for the first time since he had eaten with Padovani. He stopped at Rialto on the way home, surprised to find some of the fruit and vegetable stalls still open after eight. He bought a kilo of plum tomatoes so ripe the vendor warned him to carry them carefully and not put anything on top. At another stall, he bought a kilo of dark figs and got the same warning. Luckily, each warning had come with a plastic bag, so he arrived at home with a bag in each hand.

When he got inside, he opened all the windows in the apartment, changed into loose cotton pants and a T-shirt, and went into the kitchen. He chopped onions, dropped the tomatoes in boiling water, the more easily to peel them, and went out on the terrace to pick some leaves of fresh basil. Working automatically, not really paying attention to what he was doing, he prepared a simple sauce and then put water on to cook the pasta. When the salted water rose to a rolling boil, he threw half a package of penne rigate into the water and stirred them around.

As he did all of this, he kept thinking of the various people who had been involved in the events of the last ten days, not trying to make any sense of the jumble of names and faces. When the pasta was done, he poured it through a colander, tossed it into a serving bowl, then poured the sauce on top of it. With a large spoon, he swirled it round, then went out on to the terrace, where he had already taken a fork, a glass and a bottle of Cabernet. He ate from the bowl. Their terrace was so high that the only people close enough to see what he was doing would have to be in the bell tower of the church of San Polo. He ate all the pasta, wiping the remaining sauce up with a piece of bread, then took the bowl inside and came out with a plate of freshly washed figs.

Before he started on them, he went back inside and picked up his copy of Tacitus’ Annals of Imperial Rome. Brunetti picked up where he had left off, with the account of the myriad horrors of the, reign of Tiberius, an emperor for whom Tacitus seemed to have an especial distaste. These Romans murdered, betrayed, and did violence to honour and to one another. How like us they were, Brunetti reflected. He read on, learning nothing to change that conclusion, until the mosquitoes began to attack him, driving him inside. On the sofa, until well after midnight, he read on, not at all troubled by the knowledge that this catalogue of crimes and villainies committed almost two thousand years ago served to remove his mind from those that were being committed around him. His sleep was deep and dreamless, and he awoke refreshed, as if he believed that Tacitus’ fierce, uncompromising morality would somehow help him through the day.