Donna Leon - Doctored Evidence

He went back to his desk and pulled out a diary from 1998 in which he kept phone numbers. He looked one up, dialled the offices of Arcigay in Marghera, where he asked to speak to Emilio Desideri, the Director. He was put on hold and learned that, straight or gay, Vivaldi was the man.

'Desideri,' a deep voice said. 'It's me, Emilio: Guido. I need to ask you a favour.'

'A favour I can do with a clear conscience?' 'Probably not.'

'No surprises there. What is it?'

'I've got two names – well, four,' he added, deciding to add Sardelli and Fedi, 'and I'd like you to tell me if any of them might be open to blackmail.'

'It's not a crime to be gay any more, Guido, remember?'

'It is to bash someone's head in, Emilio,' Brunetti shot back. 'That's why I'm calling.' He waited for Desideri to say something. He didn't, and so Brunetti went on. ‘I want only for you to tell me if you know that any one of these men is gay-'

'And that will be enough to tell you that he was capable of bashing someone's head in, as you so delicately put it?'

'Emilio,' Brunetti said with studied calm, 'I'm not trying to harass you or anyone else who is gay. I don't care that you are. I don't care if the Pope is. I even like to think I wouldn't care if my son were, though that's probably a lie. I simply want to find a way to understand what might have happened to this old woman.'

'The Battestini woman? Paolo's mother?'

'You knew her?'

‘I knew about her.'

'Are you at liberty to say how you did?' 'Paolo was involved with someone I knew, and he told me – but not until after Paolo had died – what sort of woman Paolo said she was’

'Would he talk to me, this man?'

Tf he were still alive, perhaps’

Brunetti greeted this news with a long silence and then asked, 'Do you remember anything he told you?'

'That Paolo always said how much he loved her, but to him it always sounded like it was really a case of how much he hated her.'

'For any reason?'

'Greed. She lived to put money in the bank, it seems. It was her greatest joy, and it sounded like it was her only joy.'

'What was he like, Paolo?'

'I never met him.'

'What did your friend say about him?'

'He wasn't a friend. He was a patient. He was in analysis with me for three years.'

'Sorry. What did he say about him?'

'That he had acquired more than a little of her disease but that his greatest joy was in giving her money because it seemed to make her happy to get it. I always took that to mean that it stopped her nagging him, but I could be wrong. It might genuinely have made him happy to give it to her. There was little enough happiness in his life, otherwise.'

'He died of AIDS, didn't he?'

'Yes, so did his friend.'

'I'm sorry for that, too.'

'You sound like you really mean it, Guido’ Desideri said, but with no surprise.

‘I am. No one deserves that.'

'All right. Give me the names.'

Brunetti read out the names of D'Alessandro and Nardi, and when Desideri said nothing, added those of Fedi and Sardelli.

For a long time, Desideri still said nothing, but the tension in his silence was so palpable that Brunetti held his breath. Finally Desideri asked, 'And you think Paolo might have been blackmailing this person?'

'The evidence we have suggests that he was,' Brunetti temporized.

He heard the rasp as Desideri pulled in an enormous breath, then he heard only, ‘I can't do this,' and Desideri was gone.

Brunetti had a vague memory of hearing Paola once quote some English writer who said he would sooner betray his country than his friends. She had thought it a Jesuitical idea, and Brunetti was forced to agree, however expert the English were at making the vile sound noble. So one of the four was gay and was sufficiently a friend, or perhaps a patient, of Desideri that he could not give his name to the police, even in a murder investigation, perhaps because it was a murder investigation. The list had been narrowed, unless Vianello found someone else who was gay. Or, Brunetti reflected, unless there were some other reason for blackmail.

Twenty minutes later, Vianello came into Brunetti's office, the list of names still in his hand. He took his usual place on the other side of the desk, slid the sheet on to it, and said, 'Nothing’

Brunetti's question was in his glance.

'One's dead,' he said, pointing to a name. 'He retired the year after the payments started and died three years ago’ He moved his finger down the list. 'This one got religion and is living in some sort of commune or something, down near Bologna; has been for three years.' He pushed the paper a few centimetres in Brunetti's direction and sat back in the chair. 'And of the two who are still there, one's become the head of school inspections, Giorgio Costantini: he's married and seems like a decent man.'

Brunetti named two former heads of government and remarked that the same two things might be said of them.

Spurred on to the defensive, Vianello said, 'I've got a cousin who plays rugby with him at weekends. He says he's all right, and I believe him.'

Brunetti let this pass without further observation. Instead, he asked, 'And the other?' 'He's in a wheelchair.' 'What?'

'He's the guy who got polio when he went to India. You read about him, didn't you?'

The story rang a faint bell, though Brunetti had long forgotten the details. 'Yes, I remember something. How long ago did it happen, about five years?'

'Six. He got sick while he was there, and by the time they managed to diagnose it, it was too late to evacuate him, so he was treated there, and now he's in a wheelchair.' Vianello, in a tone that suggested he was still smarting from Brunetti's refusal to believe his cousin's assessment of Giorgio Costantini, said, "That might not be enough for you to exclude him, but I think a man might have other things to think about after landing in a wheelchair than continuing to pay blackmail.' He paused again. ‘I could be wrong, of course.'

Brunetti gave Vianello a long glance but instead of rising to the bait, said, 'I'm still hoping Lalli will tell me something.'

'Betray a fellow gay?' Vianello asked in a tone Brunetti didn't like.

'He has three grandchildren.'

'Who?'

'Lalli.'

Vianello shook his head at this, Brunetti couldn't tell if in disbelief or disapproval.

'He's been my friend for a long time,' Brunetti said with steady calm. 'He's a decent man.'

Vianello knew a reprimand when he heard it and chose not to respond.

Brunetti was about to say something, when Vianello glanced away from him. It could have been his refusal to concede the point of Lalli's decency, or it could have been no more than his refusal to look at Brunetti, but whatever it was, Brunetti took it in his turn to be offended and was provoked into saying, ‘I think I'd like to talk to the one who's not in a wheelchair. The rugby player’

'As you wish, sir,' Vianello said. He got to his feet and, saying nothing else, left the office.

As the door closed behind Vianello, Brunetti came to his senses. 'Where'd all that come from?' he muttered. Was this the way drunks woke up, he asked himself, or the intemperately wrathful? Did they experience this feeling of having watched from the sidelines as someone disguised as themselves spoke their way through a bad script? He reflected on his conversation with Vianello, trying to pinpoint the moment when a simple exchange of information between friends had spun out of control and turned into a testosterone-charged battle over territory between rivals. To make matters worse, the territory over which they had fought was nothing more than Brunetti's refusal to accept an opinion because it had come from a man who chose to play rugby.