Donna Leon - A Question of Belief

‘Of course there’s evidence. There’s the semen of another man.’

‘That’s not what killed him,’ Brunetti shot back rashly.

Patta braced his elbows on the desk and pressed his lips against his folded hands, as if hoping to restrain whatever he wanted to say to Brunetti. The two men sat like that for some time, and then Patta asked, ‘Do you want to place this story in the papers, or shall I ask Lieutenant Scarpa to do it?’

In his most moderate, reasonable voice, Brunetti said, ‘I think it would be better if the Lieutenant did it, sir.’

‘Are you sure you don’t want to do it, Brunetti? After all, some of these reporters are your friends.’

‘Thank you, sir, but if I ask them to print it, I’d have to tell them I don’t believe it. The Lieutenant is far more at ease speaking to the press.’ Brunetti smiled and rose from his chair. He went to the door, opened it, and closed it quietly, pulling on it to make sure it was securely closed: he didn’t want too much of the cold air of the Vice-Questore’s office to escape.

Leaving Patta’s office, Brunetti took the course of wisdom and did not pause to talk to Signorina Elettra. He went up to his own office and called the farmhouse where Paola and the children were staying. Paola picked up on the seventh ring, answering with her name.

‘It’s hot and damp and the back canals stink,’ he said by way of salutation, then, ‘Why aren’t you out walking?’

‘We were out all day, Guido. I was out on the patio, reading.’

‘Farmhouses aren’t supposed to have patios,’ Brunetti said grumpily.

‘Would it help if I said it’s the place where they used to slaughter pigs and the pavement slants down to a gutter where the blood was collected? And it still smells faintly of pigs’ blood when the sun shines on it directly, making it impossible for me to devote my full critical expertise to the nuanced dialogues of The Europeans ?’

‘Are you lying?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘To make you feel better.’ Then, the demands of sentimentality dispatched, Paola asked, ‘How are things there?’

‘Someone important whose wife I questioned complained to Patta, so I had to listen to a quarter-hour of his paranoia this afternoon.’

‘What’s Patta afraid of?’ she asked.

‘God knows. Not being invited to the Lions Club Ball, it sounds to me. If they have one. I don’t understand him: he acts like he’s still living at the court of the Bourbons, and the greatest achievement he could aspire to is to be recognized by a prince. If he ever had lunch with your father, he’d probably expire of joy.’

‘My father’s not a prince,’ she observed.

‘Well, counts are in the same line of business.’

‘The monarchy was abolished in 1946,’ she said with the asperity of a historian.

‘You’d never know it from the bowing and scraping I’ve seen in my day,’ Brunetti replied.

‘What’s going on?’ she asked, uninterested in Brunetti’s observations regarding the higher orders.

‘The man who was killed was described by two reliable witnesses as a good man. He argued with his neighbours, had trouble with a judge, and was probably gay.’

‘Rich and suggestive as that information is, I’m not sure it’s enough to help me identify the killer, if that’s why you called,’ she said.

‘No, it’s not much for anyone to work on, is it?’ Brunetti agreed. ‘I really called to tell you I miss you and the kids with all my heart and wish I were there.’

‘Get this settled and come up. We can always stay another week.’

‘And spoil the children?’ he asked with false horror.

‘And have a vacation,’ she corrected him. They exchanged further pleasantries and Brunetti set the phone down feeling refreshed.

He began to run over his conversation with Signora Fulgoni. He had asked her to confirm when she and her husband had returned, and she had given him a time defined by the sounding of the midnight bell: few answers could be more precise. Then he had asked her how long they had been in the building, and her answer had been equally precise. It was when he asked her how they had found out about the apartment that her demeanour had changed.

‘Well, let’s just find out about that, shall we?’ he said out loud.

Vianello, whom Brunetti found in the squad room, assured him that it would be a relatively simple task to find information about the rental contract because he had recently learned how to access — in the use of that euphemism he betrayed Signorina Elettra as his teacher — the files of the Commune. Good as his word, and using the names of Puntera and the Fulgonis, he had the date of the contract within minutes as well as the number of the file at the Uffico di Registri where a copy of it could be found.

‘Do we have to go over there to find out how much rent they’re paying?’ Brunetti asked.

Vianello started to speak, hesitated, gave quite an embarrassed look, and said, ‘No, not really.’

‘I’m assuming the amount of the rent’s not in here,’ Brunetti said, tapping the screen with his fingernail.

‘No,’ Vianello said, then immediately corrected himself and said, ‘I mean yes.’

‘Which is it, Lorenzo?’ Brunetti asked.

‘It’s in the contract, certainly, but it wouldn’t be in the computer files of the Uffico di Registri.’

‘Then where would it be?’

‘In Fulgoni’s tax declarations.’

‘They’re in there, too?’ Brunetti asked with a friendly nod in the direction of the computer, making it thus a metonym for information itself.

‘Yes.’

‘Well?’ Brunetti said, waving an impatient hand at the screen.

‘I don’t know how to get to them,’ Vianello confessed.

‘Ah,’ Brunetti said and went back to his office. In face of the likelihood that Patta was still in his office, Brunetti called Signorina Elettra and asked if she could check Pantera’s tax records and see what rent he was being paid for the three apartments in the palazzo on the Misericordia.

‘Nothing easier, Commissario,’ she said. He replaced the phone, fighting to prevent the casualness of her response from lessening his regard for Vianello.

He stared at the wall for a few moments and then called her back. When she answered, he said, ‘While you’re having a look at that information, could you see if there’s a list of his legal expenses and the names of any lawyers he’s paid money to in the last few years? And any fines he might have paid for any of his companies. Or damages in a legal case. In fact, anything that connects him to lawyers or the courts.’

‘Of course, Signore,’ she said, and Brunetti gave silent thanks that the heavens had blessed him with this modern Mercury who so effortlessly carried messages between him and what he had come to think of over the years as Cyber-Heaven. A man of his age, with the prejudices of a person raised on paper, he was deeply unsettled by the idea that so much personal and private information was electronically available to any person able to find the way to it. Of course, he was perfectly willing to profit from Signorina Elettra’s depredations, but that did not stop him from viewing her activities as just that: depredations.

Suddenly Brunetti was overcome by a wave of something approaching exhaustion. There was the heat, the solitude in which he was living, the need to defer to Patta in order to do what he thought right, and then there was the bloodstain on the pavement of the courtyard, the blood of that good man, Fontana.

He left the Questura without speaking to anyone, took the Number One to San Silvestro, where he went into Antico Panificio and ordered a take-out pizza with hot sausage, ruccola, hot pepper, onion and artichokes, then went home and sat on the terrace and ate it while drinking two beers and reading Tacitus, the bleakness of whose vision of politics was the only thing he could tolerate in his current state. Then he went to bed and slept deeply and well.