Donna Leon - Friends in High Places

‘Not really. All you’ve got to do is claim you made restorations a few years ago and then have plans drawn up to conform to the way the apartment is now, and put that date on them.’ Brunetti could think of no response to make to this, so she went on, ‘It’s simple, really. If you want, I can give you the name of an architect who will do it for you. Nothing easier, Guido.’

She’d been so helpful that he didn’t want to offend her, so he said, ‘I’ll have to ask Paola about it.’

‘Of course,’ Stefania said. ‘What a fool I am. That’s the answer, isn’t it? I’m sure her father knows the people who could get this taken care of. Then you wouldn’t have to bother with getting an architect.’ She stopped: for her, the problem was solved.

Brunetti was just getting ready to answer this, when Stefania broke in and said, ‘I’ve got a call coming in on the other line. Pray it’s a buyer. Ciao, Guido,’ and she was gone.

He thought about their conversation for a while. Reality was there, malleable and obedient: all one had to do was wrest it this way, push it a bit that way, and make it conform to whatever vision one might have. Or if reality proved intractable, then one simply pulled up the big guns of power and money and opened fire. How simple, how easy.

Brunetti realized that this line of thought led to places he would prefer not to go, and so he flipped open the phone book again and dialled the number of the Ufficio Catasto. The phone rang repeatedly but no one picked it up. He glanced at his watch, saw that it was almost four, and put the phone down, muttering to himself that he was a fool to expect to find anyone at work there in the afternoon.

He hunched down in his chair and propped his feet on the open bottom drawer. Arms folded across his chest, he gave himself over to the reconsideration of Rossi’s visit. He’d seemed an honest man, but that appearance was common enough, especially among the dishonest. Why had he followed up on the official letter by going in person to Brunetti’s house? By the time he’d phoned, later, he’d learned Brunetti’s rank. For a moment, Brunetti considered the possibility that Rossi had originally come in search of the offer of a bribe, but he dismissed that: the man had been too patently honest.

When he’d found out that the Signor Brunetti who couldn’t find the plans of his apartment was a high-placed policeman, had Rossi flicked his line into the moving current of gossip to see what he could pull up about Brunetti? No one would dare to move ahead in any delicate dealing without doing this; the secret was knowing whom to ask, just where to drop the hook so as to catch the necessary information. And had he, subsequent to whatever his sources had reported about Brunetti, decided to approach him with what he had discovered at the Ufficio Catasto?

Illegal building permits and whatever could be earned in bribes from granting them seemed a cheap item on the vast menu of corruption offered by public offices: Brunetti found it impossible to believe that anyone would risk much, certainly not his life, by threatening to expose some ingenious scheme to loot the public purse. The implementation of the computer project to centralize documents and thus lose those which time had made inconvenient would raise the stakes, but Brunetti doubted this would be enough to have cost Rossi his life.

His reflections were interrupted by the arrival of Signorina Elettra, who came into his office without bothering to knock. ‘Am I interrupting you, sir?’ she asked.

‘No, not at all. I was just sitting here thinking about corruption.’

‘Public or private?’ she asked.

‘Public,’ he said, putting his feet under his desk and sitting up straight.

‘Like reading Proust,’ she said, deadpan. ‘You think you’re finished with it, but then you discover there’s another volume. Then another one after that.’

He looked up, waiting for more, but all she said, laying some papers on his desk, was, ‘I’ve learned to share your suspicion of coincidence, sir, so I’d like you to take a look at the names of the owners of that building.’

‘The Volpatos?’ he asked, knowing somehow that it could be nothing else.

‘Exactly.’

‘For how long?’

She leaned over and pulled out the third page. ‘Four years. They bought it from a certain Mathilde Ponzi. The declared price is here,’ she said, pointing to a figure typed at the right side of the page.

‘Two hundred and fifty million lire?’ Brunetti said, his astonishment audible. ‘It’s four floors, must be at least a hundred fifty square metres to the floor.’

‘That’s only the declared price, sir,’ Signorina Elettra said.

Everyone knew that, to avoid taxes, the price of a house declared on the bill of sale never reflected the actual price paid or, if it did, it did so unclearly, through a glass darkly: the real price would be anywhere from two to three times as much. Everyone, in fact, referred as a matter of course to the ‘real’ price and the ‘declared’ price, and only a fool, or a foreigner, would think they were the same.

‘I know that,’ Brunetti said. ‘But even if what they actually paid was three times as much, it’s still a bargain.’

‘If you look at their other real estate acquisitions,’ Signorina Elettra began, pronouncing that noun with a certain measure of asperity, ‘you’ll see that they have enjoyed similar good fortune in most of their dealings.’

He turned back to the first page and read down through the information. Indeed, it did appear that the Volpatos had often managed to find houses that cost very little. Thoughtfully, Signorina Elettra had provided the number of square metres in each ‘acquisition’, and a quick calculation suggested to Brunetti that they had managed to pay an average declared price of less than a million lire a square metre. Even allowing for the variables created by inflation and factoring in the disparity between the declared price and the real price, they still ended up consistently paying far less than a third of the average price for real estate in the city.

He glanced up at her. ‘Am I to assume that the other pages tell the same story?’ he asked.

She nodded.

‘How many properties are there?’

‘More than forty, and I haven’t even begun to examine the other properties listed under the names of Volpatos who might turn out to be relatives.’

‘I see,’ he said, turning his attention back to the papers. On the last pages she had attached current bank statements for their individual accounts as well as a number of joint accounts. ‘How do you manage to do this,’ he began, but seeing the sudden change that came over her face at these words, he added, ‘so quickly?’

‘Friends,’ she answered, then added, ‘Shall I see what sort of information Telecom has to give us about the phone calls they’ve made?’

Brunetti nodded, certain that she had already begun this process. She smiled and left the room; Brunetti returned his attention to the papers and the numbers. They were nothing short of staggering. He recalled the impression the Volpatos had made on him: that they were without education or social position or money. And yet they were people, from what these papers told him, of enormous wealth. If even only half the properties were rented – and people did not accumulate apartments in Venice to let them sit empty – then they must be receiving twenty or thirty million lire a month, as much as many people made in a year. Much of this wealth was safely deposited in four different banks, and even more was invested in government bonds. Brunetti understood little of the workings of the stock market in Milan, but he knew enough to recognize the names of the safest stocks, and the Volpatos had hundreds of millions invested in them.