Donna Leon - A Question of Belief

What was not clear to Brunetti was the reason for any involvement on the part of Fontana. Love, love, love did not seem sufficient motive to corrupt a man described as ‘decorous’, but then it never did, did it?

It was seldom, after all these years, that Brunetti could be moved to indignation by some new revelation of the skill with which his fellow citizens managed to slip around the edges of the law. In some instances — though he confessed this to no one — he felt grudging admiration for the ingenuity employed, especially when it entailed getting around a law which he judged to be unjust or a situation he thought outright insane. When traffic lights were deliberately programmed to change more quickly than dictated by law so that the police could divide the extra money paid in fines with the men setting the timing devices, who but a lunatic would think bribing a policeman a crime? When scores of indicted criminals sat in Parliament, who could believe in the rule of law?

It would be difficult to say that Brunetti was shocked by the purported behaviour of Judge Coltellini, but he was certainly surprised, not least because the judge in question was a woman. Though Brunetti used statistics to support his conviction that women were less criminal than men, his belief was really based on his upbringing and experience of life. What he thought to be the right order of things — should Brusca’s insinuations be true — had been doubly overturned.

With Brusca’s suggestion in mind, Brunetti spread the papers on his desk and studied them anew. Centring his attention on Judge Coltellini’s name, he saw that it appeared numerous times on each of the four pages, and that her name stood beside six case numbers. He opened his desk and pulled out some coloured highlighting pens. He started at the top of the first page with the green and highlighted her name the first time it appeared in the first case, then used the same colour to go through the entire list, using it to indicate all of the times she held hearings in that case. He did the same with the next case, using pink this time. The third, yellow; the fourth, orange, and then he had to circle the fifth case number with pencil, and the last with red pen.

The Greens had come before her only three times: the second appearance took place on the date listed in the ‘Result’ column of the first appearance, and the third on the date scheduled in the second: but still the entire process had taken two years. The Pink case respected all of the dates set for each subsequent hearing, though there had been six of them, each separated by at least half a year. Brunetti was curious to know what the case had been about; what had it taken three years to decide?

The Yellow trail was more suggestive. The first hearing, which had taken place more than two years before, ended with an unexplained six-month postponement, and when that hearing was held, a new date was set, without explanation, more than five months ahead. When the third hearing was held, the ‘Results’ box contained a new date, six months away, and the phrase, ‘Missing documents’. The next postponement, this one for another six months, was explained by ‘Illness’, though whose illness was not explained. This next hearing, on the twentieth of December, appeared to have served only to postpone things a further four months, this explained by ‘Holidays’ in the last column. The new date, in the second half of April, convinced Brunetti that it had been scheduled during the Easter holidays, but Judge Coltellini surprised him by apparently holding a hearing and then setting a new date — seven months ahead — to allow herself to ‘Question new witnesses’.

Brunetti wondered what new witnesses there could be in a case that had been moving — though he immediately chided himself for having so precipitously chosen that verb — through the courts for almost three years. No wonder people dreaded being caught in the wheels of Juggernaut: it was axiomatic that the worst thing that could befall a person, short of serious illness, was to become embroiled in a court case. Indeed.

The judge managed to surprise Brunetti again by having resolved the Orange case in less than a year, though the Pencil and the Red Pen cases were still dragging their slow lengths along, each of them for more than two years.

He searched in his desk for a list of numbers and then dialled Brusca’s telefonino.

‘Yes?’ Brusca inquired in a calm tone, quite as though he were still in Brunetti’s office, that same tone Brunetti had heard him use in history class during their first year of middle school. In all these years, Brunetti had never known his friend to display surprise at human behaviour, no matter how base, though, God knows, working in the offices of the city administration would have exposed him to a bellyful of it.

‘I’ve taken a closer look at those papers,’ Brunetti said. ‘Have you shown them to anyone else?’

‘For what purpose?’ Brusca asked, his tone suddenly as serious as Brunetti’s.

‘If it’s true, then it should be stopped,’ Brunetti said, knowing that the idea of retribution was absurd.

‘Yes, you’re right,’ Brusca said, striving to sound as though they were discussing the quality of a soccer team and not the corruption of the judicial system. ‘But I don’t think that’s likely,’ he added

‘Then why did you give them to me?’ Brunetti made no attempt to disguise his irritation.

For a long time, there was no response from Brusca’s end of the line, and then he said, ‘I thought you might be able to think of something to do. And I hoped you’d be outraged by it.’

‘That’s putting it a bit too strongly,’ Brunetti said.

‘All right, all right, not outrage. Hope, then. Perhaps that’s what I admire in you, that you can still hope that things will turn right and the Augean Stables will be cleansed.’

‘That’s unlikely, as you say,’ Brunetti agreed. Then, turning back to the original purpose of the call and with the voice of friendship restored, he asked, ‘Really, why did you give them to me?’

‘It’s true. I hoped you’d be able to do something,’ Brusca answered. Then, in a voice Brunetti suspected his friend was deliberately making sound lighter, he added, ‘Besides, it’s always nice to be able to cause one of them a bit of trouble.’

‘I’ll see what I can do,’ Brunetti said, knowing as he spoke how little chance there was of that.

Brusca said a quick goodbye.

Brunetti propped his left elbow on his desk and rubbed his thumbnail back and forth along his lower lip. His shirt felt clammy under his arms and across his back. He went to the window and looked down at the water of the canal, black in the day’s harsh reflection. Campo San Lorenzo had been baked free of life; even the cats who lived in the multi-storey cat condominium erected against the façade of the church had disappeared; he wondered if they had fled the city to go on vacation.

For a moment, he let himself indulge in a fantasy about cats on vacation in the mountains or at the seaside, sent there by DINGO, the city’s cooperative society of animal lovers. Brunetti hated the ‘ animalisti ’, hated them for their defence of the loathsome, disease-ridden pigeons, hated them for having rounded up all of the wild cats of the city, no doubt to the delight of the ever-increasing population of rats. While on the subject of animals, he added to his list of people he hated those who did not clean up after their dogs; if he had his way, he’d slap a fine on them so strong it would. .

‘Commissario?’ His attention was torn from wild speculation about the amount of the fine he’d impose and the system he’d invent to implement it.

‘Yes, Signorina?’ he said, turning towards her. ‘What is it?’