Donna Leon - Friends in High Places

Content with what he had got, Brunetti resigned himself to this, thanked his friend, and hung up.

In order to give himself something to do, or perhaps just to keep himself moving and away from his desk, he walked downstairs to Signorina Elettra’s office, where he found her, head bent over a magazine.

She looked up at the sound of his footsteps, ‘Ah, you’re back, Commissario,’ she said, beginning to smile. When she saw the expression he brought into the office with him, her smile dissolved. She closed the magazine, opened a drawer, and pulled a folder from it. Leaning forward, she passed it up to him. ‘I heard about the two young people,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry.’

He didn’t know if he was meant to thank her for her condolences or not. Instead, he nodded as he accepted the folder, then pulled open the cover. ‘The Volpatos?’ he asked.

‘Uh huh,’ she answered. ‘You’ll see from what’s in there that they’ve got to be very well protected.’

‘By whom?’ he asked, glancing down at the first page.

‘Someone in the Guardia di Finanza, I’d say.’

‘Why?’

She stood and leaned over her desk. ‘On the second page,’ she prompted. When he turned to it, she pointed to a row of numbers. ‘The first number’s the year. Then comes the total of their declared wealth: bank accounts, apartments, stocks. And the third column is what they declared as income for those same years.’

‘So,’ he said, commenting on the obvious, ‘each subsequent year, they should earn more, as they certainly own more.’ That much was evident from the expanding list of properties.

He continued to study the lists. Instead of growing larger each year, the third number decreased, even though the Volpatos acquired more apartments, businesses, and houses. Relentlessly, they continued to acquire more and pay less.

‘Have they ever been audited by the Finanza?’ he asked, holding in his hands a fiscal red flag so large and incarnadine as to be easily visible as far away as the central offices of the Guardia di Finanza in Rome.

‘Never,’ she said, shaking her head and sitting back down. ‘That’s why I say they’ve got to be protected by someone.’

‘Did you get copies of their tax returns?’

‘Of course,’ she answered simply, making no attempt to disguise her pride. ‘Those numbers for what they earn every year are repeated on all of them, but they manage to prove that they’ve spent a fortune on capital improvements to their properties, year after year, and they seem incapable of selling a single piece of property at a profit.’

‘Who do they sell them to?’ Brunetti asked, though years of similar experiences had made him familiar with this particular script.

‘So far, among other sales, they’ve sold two apartments to city councillors and two to officers of the Guardia di Finanza. Always at a loss, especially the one that got sold to the colonel.

‘And,’ she continued, flipping over a page and pointing to the top line, ‘it seems they’ve also sold two apartments to a Dottor Fabrizio dal Carlo.’

‘Ah,’ Brunetti sighed. He looked up from the paper and asked, ‘Did you by any chance…?’

Her smile was a benediction. ‘It’s all there: his tax records, a list of the houses he owns, his bank accounts, his wife’s, everything.’

‘And?’ he asked, resisting the impulse to look down at the paper and wanting her to have the pleasure of telling him.

‘Only a miracle could protect him from an audit,’ she said, tapping the papers with the fingers of her left hand.

‘Yet no one’s noticed,’ Brunetti said calmly, ‘all these years: not dal Carlo and not the Volpatos.’

‘That’s not likely to happen, not while prices like these,’ she said, turning back to the front page, ‘are available to city councillors.’ After a pause, she added, ‘And to colonels.’

‘Yes,’ he agreed, closing the file with a tired sigh, ‘and to colonels.’ He tucked the folder under his arm. ‘What about their phone?’

She came close to smiling. ‘They don’t have one.’

‘What?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Not that I can discover. Not in either of their names and not at the address where they live.’ Before Brunetti could ask, she supplied possible explanations. ‘Either it’s because they’re too cheap to pay a phone bill, or else they’ve got a telefonino listed in someone else’s name.’

It was hard for Brunetti to imagine that anyone could, today, exist without a telephone, especially people who were involved in the purchase and sale of properties, the lending of money and all the contacts with lawyers, municipal offices, and notaries those things would entail. Besides, no one could be so pathologically frugal as not to have a phone.

Seeing one avenue of possible investigation eliminated, Brunetti turned his attention back to the murdered couple. ‘If you can,’ he said, ‘see what there is to find out about Gino Zecchino, would you?’

She nodded. She already knew the name.

‘We don’t know who the girl is yet,’ he began, and the possibility struck him that they might never know. He refused to give voice to this thought, however, and said only, ‘Let me know if you find anything.’

‘Yes, sir,’ she said, watching as he left the office.

Upstairs, he decided to add to the scope of the disinformation that was to appear in the newspapers the next morning and spent the next hour and a half on the phone, often consulting the pages of his notebook or occasionally calling a friend for the phone numbers of men and women scattered on both sides of the law. With cajolery, the promise of some future favour, and sometimes with open menace, he convinced a number of people to speak loudly and speak widely of this strange case of the killer who had been doomed to a slow and horrible death by the bite of his victim. Generally there was no hope, usually no therapy, but sometimes, just sometimes, if the bite was treated in time by an experimental technique that was being perfected in the Immunology Laboratory of the Ospedale Civile and dispensed at the Emergency Room, then there was a chance that the infection could be stopped. Otherwise, there was no escape from death, the headline would quickly be proven true, and the victim would indeed Take Vengeance With a Fatal Bite.

He had no idea if this would work, knew only that this was Venice, city of rumour, where an uncritical populace read and believed, listened and believed.

He dialled the central number for the hospital and was about to ask for the office of the Director when he thought better of it and, instead, asked to speak to Dottor Carraro in Pronto Soccorso.

The call was finally put through and Carraro all but barked his name into the receiver; a man too busy to be disturbed, the lives of his patients at risk if he lingered on the phone, kept there by whatever stupidity he was about to be asked.

‘Ah, Dottore,’ Brunetti began, ‘how nice to speak to you again.’

‘Who is this?’ asked the same rude, impulsive voice.

‘Commissario Brunetti,’ he said and waited for the name to register.

‘Ah, yes. Good afternoon, Commissario,’ the doctor said, a sea change audible.

When the doctor seemed disposed to say no more, Brunetti said, ‘Dottore, it seems I might be able to be of some help to you.’ He stopped, giving Carraro the opportunity to enquire. When he failed to, Brunetti went on, ‘It seems we’ve got to decide whether to pass the results of our investigation on to the examining magistrate. Well, that is,’ he corrected himself with an officious little laugh, ‘we’ve got to give our recommendation, whether to continue and begin a criminal investigation. For culpable negligence.’

He heard no more than Carraro’s breathing at the other end. ‘Of course, I’m persuaded that there’s no need of that. Accidents happen. The man would have died anyway. I don’t think there’s any need to cause you any trouble about this, to waste police time in investigating a situation where we’re going to find nothing.’