A Venetian Reckoning (13 page)

'And all the old rules have been
broken,' he continued. 'For fifty years, ever since the end of the war, all
we've ever been is lied to. By the government, the Church, the political
parties, by industry and business and the military.'

'And the police?' she asked.

'Yes,' he agreed with no hesitation
whatsoever. 'And the police.'

'But you want to stay with them?' she
asked.

He shrugged and poured some more
grappa. She waited. Finally he said, 'Someone's got to try.'

Paola leaned across the table and
placed the palm of her hand against his cheek, tilting his face towards her.
'If I ever try to lecture you about honour again, Guido, hit me with a bottle,
all right?'

He turned his head and kissed her
palm. 'Not until you let me buy some plastic ones’

Two hours later, as Brunetti sat
yawning over Procopius’
Secret
History,
the phone rang.

'Brunetti,’ he answered and glanced
down at his watch.

'Commissario, this is Alvise. He said
to call you.’ 'Who said to call me, Officer Alvise?' Brunetti asked, fishing a
used vaporetto ticket from his pocket and sticking it in the page to keep his
place. Calk with Alvise had a tendency to be either long or confusing. Or both.

The sergeant, sir.'

'Which sergeant, Officer Alvise?'
Brunetti closed his book and set it aside. 'Sergeant Topa, sir.'

Alert now, Brunetti asked, 'Why did
he tell you to call me?'

'Because he wants to talk to you.'

'Why didn't he call me himself,
officer? My name is in the phone book.'

'Because he can't, sir.'

'And why can't he?'

'Because the rules say he can't.'

'What rules?' Brunetti asked, his
growing impatience audible in his tone.

'The rules down here, sir.'

'Down here, where, officer?'

'At the Questura, sir. I'm on night
duty.'

'What is Sergeant Topa doing there,
officer?'

'He's been arrested, sir. The Mestre
boys picked him up, but then they found out who he was, well, found out what he
was. Or what he used to be. I mean a sergeant. Then they sent him back here,
but they told him he could come in by himself. They called to tell us he was
coming, but they let him get here by himself.'

'So Sergeant Topa has arrested
himself?'

Alvise considered this for a moment
and then answered, 'It would seem that way, sir. I don't know how to fill out
the report, where it says, "arresting officer"‘

Brunetti held the phone away from his
ear for a moment then brought it back and asked, 'What has he been arrested
for?'

'He got into a fight, sir.'

'Where?' Brunetti asked, though he
knew the answer even before he asked. 'In Mestre.'

'Who did he have the fight with?'

'Some foreigner.'

'And where's the foreigner?'

'He got away, sir. They had a fight,
but then the foreigner gpt away.'

'How do you know he was a foreigner?'

'Sergeant Topa told me. He said the
man had an accent.'

'If the foreigner ran away, who's
filing the complaint against Sergeant Topa, officer?'

'I figured that's why the boys in
Mestre sent him back to us, sir. They must have thought we'd know what to do.'

'Did the people in Mestre tell you to
make out an arrest report?'

'Well, no, sir,' Alvise said after a
particularly long pause. 'They told Topa to come back here and make a report
about what happened. The only form I saw on the desk was an arrest report, so I
thought I should use that.'

'Why didn't you let him call me,
officer?'

'Oh, he'd already called his wife,
and I know they're just supposed to get one phone call.'

'That's on television, officer, on
American television,' Brunetti said, straining towards patience. 'Where is
Sergeant Topa now?'

'He's gone out to get a coffee.'

'While you fill out the arrest
report?'

'Yes, sir. It didn't seem right to
have him here while I did that'

'When Sergeant Topa gets back - he is
coming back, isn't he?'

'Oh yes, sir, I told him to come
back. That is, I asked him to, and he said he would.'

'When he comes back, tell him to
wait. I'm on my way down there.' Knowing himself able to endure no more,
Brunetti hung up without waiting for Alvise's reply.

Twenty minutes later, having told
Paola that he had to go to the Questura to straighten something out, he arrived
and went directly up to the uniformed officers' room. Alvise sat at a desk, and
across from him sat Sergeant Topa, looking no different from the way he had
looked a year ago when he left the Questura.

The former sergeant was short,
barrel-shaped; the light from the overhead fixture gleamed on his almost bald
head. He had tipped his chair back on its rear legs and sat with his arms
folded over his chest. He looked up when Brunetti came in, studied him for a
moment with dark eyes hidden under thick white eyebrows, and let his chair fall
to the floor with a heavy thud. He got to his feet and held out his hand to
Brunetti, no longer the sergeant and hence able to shake hands as an equal with
the commissario, and, at that gesture, Brunetti found himself suffused with the
dislike he had always felt for the sergeant, a man in whom violence boiled
below the surface in much the same way that fresh-poured polenta waited the
chance to burn the mouth of anyone who tried to eat it.

'Good evening, sergeant,' Brunetti
said, shaking his hand.

'Commissario,' he answered but no
more than that.

Alvise stood and glanced back and
forth between the other men, but he said nothing.

'Perhaps we could go up to my office
to talk,' Brunetti suggested.

'Yes,' Topa agreed.

Brunetti switched on the light when
they went in, didn't bother to remove his coat, hoping that way to make it
clear that he didn't have much time to spend on this, and went to sit behind
his desk.

Topa sat in a chair to the left of
the desk.

'Well?' Brunetti asked.

'Vianello called and asked me to go
and have a look at this place, Pinetta's. I'd heard about it, but I'd never
gone in. Didn't like what I heard about it.'

'What had you heard?'

'Lots of blacks. And Slavs. They're
worse, Slavs..' Brunetti, who tended to agree with this notion, said nothing.

Seeing that he was not going to be
prodded into telling his story, Topa abandoned his comments on national and
racial differences and continued. 'I went in and had a glass of wine. A couple
of guys were playing cards at a table, so I went and looked over their
shoulders. No one seemed to mind. I had some more wine and started to talk to
another man at the bar. One of the card-players left, so I took his place and
played a few hands. I lost about 10,000 lire, and men the man who was playing
came back, so I stopped playing and went back to the bar and had another glass
of wine’ It sounded to Brunetti that Topa could have had a more exciting
evening staying home and watching television.

'What about the fight, sergeant?'

'I'm getting to that. After another
quarter-hour or so, one of the other men left the table, and they asked me if I
wanted to play some more. I told them I didn't, so the man at the bar with me
went and played a few hands. Then the man who had left came back and had a
drink at the bar. We started to talk, and he asked me if I wanted a woman.

'I told him I didn't have to buy it,
that there was plenty going around for free, and then he said that I'd never be
able to get any of what he could get me.'

'What was that?'

'He said he could get me girls, young
girls. I told him I wasn't interested in that, preferred women, and then he
said something insulting.'

'What did he say?'

'He said he didn't think I was
interested in women, either, and I told him I preferred women, real women, to
what he had in mind. And then he started to laugh and shouted something, in
Slav, I think, to some of the men who were playing cards. They laughed. That's
when I hit him.'

'We asked you to go there to try to
get information, not to start a fight,' Brunetti said, making no attempt to
disguise his irritation.

'I won't have people laugh at me,'
Topa said, voice mounting into the tight, angry tone that Brunetti remembered.

'Do you think he meant it?'

'Who?'

'The man in the bar. Who offered you
girls.'

'I don't know. Could have. He didn't
look like a pimp, but with Slavs it's hard to tell.'

'Would you know him if you saw him
again?'

'He's got a broken nose, so he ought
to be easy to spot.'

'Are you sure?’ Brunetti asked.
'About what?' 'The nose.'

'Of course I'm sure,' Topa said,
holding up his right hand. 'I felt the cartilage break.'

'Would you recognize him or a picture
of him?' 'Yes.’

'All right, sergeant. It's too late
to do anything about this now. Come back in the morning and take a look at the
photos, see if you spot him.'

'I thought Alvise wanted to arrest
me.'

Brunetti waved his hand in front of
his face, as if brushing at a fly. 'Forget about it.’

'Nobody talks to me like that guy
did,' Topa said, voice truculent.

'In the morning, sergeant.' Brunetti
told him.

Topa shot him a glance, one that
reminded Brunetti about the story of his last arrest, got to his feet, and left
Brunetti's office, leaving the door open behind him. Brunetti waited a full ten
minutes before he left his office. Outside, it had begun to rain, the first icy
drizzle of winter, but its chill drift against his face was a welcome relief
after the heat of his dislike for Topa's company.

14

Two days later, but not before
Brunetti had been forced to request an order for the files from Judge Vantuno, the
Venice office of SIP provided the police with a list of the local calls made
from Trevisan's home and office during the six months prior to his death. As
Brunetti had expected, some calls had been made to Pinetta's bar, though no
pattern was evident. He checked the list of long-distance calls for the dates
of the calls to the Padua, railway station, but there was no correspondence
between the dates or times of those calls and the ones to the bar in Mestre.

He placed both lists side by side on
his desk and stared down at them. Unlike the long-distance calls, the local
calls had the address of the phone, as well as the name of the person in whose
name it was listed, in a long column that ran down the right of the more than
thirty pages of numbers. He started to read down the column of names and
addresses but gave it up after a few minutes.

He took the paper, left his office,
and went down the steps to Signorina Elettra's open cubicle. The table that
stood in front of the window appeared to be a new one, but the same hand-blown
Venini glass vase stood on it, today filled with nothing more elegant, though
nothing could hope to be more happy, than a massive bouquet of black-eyed
Susans.

In complement to them, Signorina
Elettra today wore a scarf the secret of whose colour had been stolen from
canaries. 'Good morning, commissario,' she said as he came in, breaking into a
smile quite as happy as that the flowers wore.

'Good morning, signorina,' he said.
'I have a question for you,' he began, using the plural, and with a friendly
nod indicating that the other half was her computer.