Donna Leon: The Golden Egg

With every show of utter uninterest in their conversation, Signorina Elettra returned to her computer, her bearing making it evident that she found it more absorbing. She seemed to disappear, as if she actually occupied less space in the room, a tactic which Brunetti both admired and envied.

Patta turned and went back into his office, saying over his shoulder, ‘Come in here.’

Brunetti’s sensibilities had grown a hard callus over the years, and he was now virtually invulnerable to Patta’s manner. Casual disregard, the absence of respect for anyone he considered an inferior: these things no longer caused Brunetti concern. Violence or its threat might have offended or angered him, but so long as Patta chose passive, rather than active, disrespect, Brunetti remained untroubled.

‘Sit,’ Patta said as he walked around his desk. As Brunetti watched, the Vice-Questore crossed his legs and then, as if remembering the crease in his trousers, immediately uncrossed them. He met his subordinate’s neutral glance. ‘Do you know why I want to talk to you?’

‘No, sir,’ Brunetti said with every evidence of ignorance.

‘It’s about something important,’ Patta said, glancing aside after he spoke. ‘The mayor’s son.’

Brunetti refrained from asking how the mayor’s son, whom Brunetti knew to be an untalented lawyer, could be important. Instead, he tried to look eager for the Vice-Questore’s revelations. He nodded with calculated neutrality.

Again, Patta crossed his legs. ‘Actually, it’s a favour for his son’s fiancée. The girl – young woman – owns a shop. Well, half owns a shop. She has a partner. And the partner has been doing something that might not be entirely legal.’ Patta stopped, either to draw breath or to search for a way to explain to Brunetti how something not ‘entirely legal’ might refer to the bribery of a public official. Clam-like, Brunetti sat in his safe place and waited to see what route Patta would choose.

The straight and narrow, as it turned out, at least in the fashion that term was understood by the Vice-Questore. ‘For some time, the partner has been persuading the vigili to ignore the tables outside the shop.’ Patta stopped, his use of the word, ‘persuading’ proof that he had exhausted his store of frankness.

‘Where is this shop, Dottore?’ Brunetti asked.

‘In Campo San Barnaba. It sells masks.’

Brunetti closed his eyes and gave every appearance of searching through his memory. ‘Next to the shop with the expensive cheese?’

Patta raised his head quickly and stared at Brunetti, as though he’d caught him trying to steal his wallet. ‘How do you know that?’ he demanded.

Calmly, calmly, with an easy smile, Brunetti said, ‘I live near there, sir, so I pass through the campo often.’ When Patta said no more, Brunetti prodded, ‘I’m not sure I understand your involvement in this, Dottore.’

Patta cleared his throat and said, ‘As I mentioned, it’s her partner who’s been dealing with the vigili, and only now has this young woman realized that he might have been inducing them to ignore the space they use in front of the shop.’

In response to an intentionally dull look from Brunetti, Patta added, ‘It’s possible they don’t have all the permits to use that space.’

Hearing ‘inducing’ and ‘it’s possible’, Brunetti wondered what he would have to do to make Patta use the word ‘bribe’. Hold his hand over a flame? Threaten to rip off one of his ears? And had Patta any intention of revealing the identity of the partner?

‘You have friends who work there, don’t you?’ Patta asked.

‘Where, sir?’ Brunetti asked, unsure whether Patta meant the office that granted the permits and, if so, why the mayor couldn’t just walk down the hall in the Commune and do his son’s dirty work for him.

‘The vigili, of course,’ Patta said with a certain lack of patience. ‘They’re all Venetian, so you must know them.’ Though he had been working in Venice for more than a decade, Patta still thought of himself as a Sicilian, an opinion in which he was joined by everyone else at the Questura.

‘I do know some of them, Dottore,’ Brunetti said and then, suddenly tired of the conversation, asked, ‘What would you like me to do?’

Patta leaned forward and answered in a softer voice. ‘Speak to them.’

Brunetti nodded, hoping that his silence would be answered with further information.

Patta, perhaps realizing a certain lack of precision in his instructions said, ‘I’d like you to find out if the vigili involved are trustworthy.’

‘Ah,’ Brunetti allowed himself to say, making no sign of the wild hilarity evoked in him by Patta’s choice of word. Trustworthy? Not to reveal that they had been accepting bribes from the business partner of the mayor’s future daughter-in-law? Trustworthy? Not to reveal that a request for information had come from a commissario of police? Trustworthy? Brunetti found it interesting that it seemed never to have occurred to Patta to wonder if the same thing could be said of the mayor, or his son, or his son’s fiancée.

A long silence settled on the room. A minute passed, quite a long time when two men are seated facing one another. A sudden obstinacy overcame Brunetti: if Patta wanted something from him, then he would have to ask him for it directly.

Some of this must have conveyed itself to Patta, for he finally said, ‘I want to know if there’s any danger this might become public, if this girl is going to cause him trouble.’ He shifted in his seat and added, ‘These are difficult times.’

So there it was: the girl might cause the mayor – who was to run for re-election the following year – trouble. This was not about law: it was about reputation and probably about re-election. In a land where no one was without sin, everyone feared the first hand that reached for a rock, especially if the hand emerged from the cuff of a uniform. Once that started, there was no knowing when the next hand reaching for a rock might emerge from the pale grey uniform sleeve of the Guardia di Finanza.

‘But how can I find out?’ Brunetti inquired politely, as if he were not already busy making a list of the various ways he could.

‘You’re Venetian, for God’s sake. You can talk to these people: they trust you.’ Then, aside, to some invisible Recorder of Injustices, Patta said, ‘It’s a secret club you have, you Venetians. You do things among yourselves, in your own way.’

This, Brunetti forbore to say, from a Sicilian.

‘I’ll see what I can find out,’ was all he said. He got to his feet and left the office.

When Brunetti stepped out of Patta’s office, Signorina Elettra glanced in his direction and raised one eyebrow. Brunetti doubled the gesture and made a circling gesture with one hand to tell her to come up to his office when she could. Face still bland, she turned back to the screen of her computer, and Brunetti left the room.

He stopped in the officers’ squad room and asked Pucetti to come upstairs with him. Inside, when the young officer was seated, Brunetti said, ‘You have much to do with

the vigili?’

He watched Pucetti try to figure out the reason for the question and liked him for that. ‘My cousin Sandro is one, sir. So was his father until he retired.’

‘You close to them?’ Brunetti asked.

‘They’re family, sir,’ Pucetti said.

‘Close enough to ask them about bribes?’

Pucetti weighed this up before he answered. ‘Sandro, yes; my uncle, no.’

Curious, Brunetti asked, ‘Because you couldn’t ask him or because he wouldn’t tell you?’

‘A little bit of both, I think, sir. But mostly because he wouldn’t tell me.’

‘How long did he work for them?’