Donna Leon - Friends in High Places

‘The banks have closed already, so that can wait until tomorrow,’ he said.

She smiled up at him. ‘The records never close,’ she said. ‘I should have everything in a few hours.’

She reached down and pulled open a drawer, from which she took a pile of papers. ‘I’ve got these,’ she began but suddenly stopped and looked to her left, toward the door of her office.

He sensed, rather than saw, a motion and turned to see Vice-Questore Patta, just now returned from lunch.

‘Signorina Elettra,’ he began, making no acknowledgement that he was aware of Brunetti standing in front of her desk.

‘Yes, Dottore?’ she asked.

‘I’d like you to come into my office to take a letter.’

‘Of course, Dottore,’ she said, placing the papers she had just taken from the drawer on the centre of her desk and tapping at them with the first finger of her left hand, a gesture which Brunetti’s body prevented Patta from seeing. She pulled open her front drawer and removed an old-fashioned stenographer’s pad. Did people still dictate letters, and did secretaries still sit, legs crossed like Joan Crawford’s, quickly taking words down in little squiggles and crosses? As Brunetti wondered about this, he realized that he had always left it to Signorina Elettra to decide how to phrase a letter, had relied on her to choose the correct rhetorical elaboration with which to disguise simple things or to smooth the way for requests which went beyond the strict limits of police power.

Patta walked past him and opened the door to his office, and Brunetti had the distinct feeling that he was himself behaving in the manner of one of those timid forest animals, a lemur perhaps, which froze at the slightest sound, declaring itself invisible by virtue of its immobility and thus believing itself safe from any roving predator. Before he could speak to Signorina Elettra, he saw her get to her feet and follow Patta into his office, but not before glancing back at the papers on her desk. As she closed the door behind her, Brunetti observed no suggestion of timidity in her bearing.

He leaned over her desk, pulled the papers toward him, and then quickly wrote a note, asking her to find the name of the owner of the building in front of which Rossi had been found.

On the way up to his office, he looked at the papers he’d taken from Signorina Elettra’s desk: a long print-out of all the numbers called from both Rossi’s home and from his office. In the margin, she had noted that Rossi’s name did not appear as a customer for any of the mobile telephone companies, which suggested that he had been calling on a phone issued by the Ufficio Catasto. Four of the calls made from his office were to the same number, one that had the Ferrara prefix and that Brunetti thought was the number of Gavini and Cappelli’s office. When he got to his desk, he checked it and proved his memory right. The calls had all been made in a period of less than two weeks, the last one the day before Cappelli was murdered. Nothing after that.

Brunetti sat for a long time, wondering at the connection between the two dead men. He realized that he was now considering them the two murdered men.

While he waited for Signorina Elettra, he considered many things: the location of Rossi’s office at the Ufficio Catasto and how much privacy it would have afforded him; the appointment of Magistrato Righetto to the investigation of Cappelli’s murder; the likelihood that a professional killer would mistake another man for his victim and why, after that crime, no further attempt was made on the supposed real victim. He thought about these and other things, and then he returned to the list of the people who might be able to provide him with information, but stopped when he realized he wasn’t at all sure what sort of information he wanted. Certainly he needed to know about the Volpatos, but he also needed to know more about financial trafficking in the city and the secret processes by which money flowed into and out of the hands of its citizens.

Like most citizens, he knew that the records of sales and transfers of property titles were kept at the Ufficio Catasto. Beyond that, his understanding of just what it was they did was vague. He remembered Rossi’s enthusiasm that several offices were uniting their files in an attempt to save time and make information more simple to recover. He wished now that he had taken the trouble to ask Rossi more about this.

He grabbed the phone book from his bottom drawer, flipped it open to the Bs, and hunted for a number. When he found it, he dialled and waited until a female voice answered, ‘Bucintoro Real Estate, good afternoon.’

‘Ciao, Stefania,’ he said.

‘What’s the matter, Guido?’ she asked, startling him with the question and making him wonder what had been audible in his voice.

‘I need some information,’ he answered just as directly.

‘Why else would you call me?’ she said without the flirtatiousness that usually filled her voice when she spoke to him.

He chose to ignore both the silent criticism of her tone and the overt criticism of her question. ‘I need to know about the Ufficio Catasto.’

‘The what?’ she said in a loud, artificially confused voice.

‘Ufficio Catasto. I need to know what it is exactly they do, who works there, and who is to be trusted among them.’

‘That’s a big order,’ she said.

‘That’s why I called you.’

Suddenly the flirtatiousness was back. ‘And I, sitting here every day, hoping you’ll call wanting something else.’

‘What, my treasure? Just name it,’ he offered in his Rodolfo Valentino voice. Stefania was joyously married and the mother of twins.

‘An apartment to buy, of course.’

‘I might have to do that,’ he said, voice suddenly serious.

‘Why?’

‘I’ve been told that our home is going to be condemned.’

‘What does that mean, condemned?’

‘That we might have to pull it down.’

A second after he said this, he heard Stefania’s sharp peal of laughter, but he wasn’t sure if the target was the patent absurdity of the situation or her surprise that he might find this in any way unusual. After a few more small noises of mirth, she said, ‘You can’t be serious.’

‘That’s exactly how I feel about it. But I had someone from the Ufficio Catasto tell me exactly that. They couldn’t find any record either that it had been built or that permits to do so had ever been given, so they might decide it has to be pulled down.’

‘You must have misunderstood,’ she said.

‘He sounded serious.’

‘When did this happen?’

‘A few months ago.’

‘Have you heard anything else?’

‘No. That’s why I’m calling you.’

‘Why don’t you call them?’

‘I wanted to talk to you first, before I did.’

‘Why?’

‘To know what my rights are. And to know who they are, the people who make the decisions in the office.’

Stefania didn’t respond, and so he asked, ‘Do you know them, the people who are in charge there?’

‘No more than anyone else in the business does.’

‘Who are they?’

‘The important one is Fabrizio dal Carlo; he’s the boss of the entire Ufficio.’ With dismissive scorn, she added, ‘An arrogant shit. He has an assistant, Esposito, but he’s a nonentity because dal Carlo keeps all the power in his own hands. And then there’s Signorina Dolfin, Loredana, whose existence, or at least so I’ve been told, is entirely based on two pillars: the first is not letting anyone forget that, even though she might be no more than a secretary in the Ufficio Catasto, she is a descendant of Doge Giovanni Dolfin,’ she said, then added, as if it mattered, ‘I forget his dates.’