By Its Cover (20 page)

The door was ajar and he went in without bothering to knock. She looked up from the sofa, where she had staked her territorial rights by lying across most of its length. He sat in the empty place at the end, and put his plate and glass on the low table.

‘Guido,’ she said as he picked up the wine and took a sip, ‘someone’s told me a very strange story.’

‘About what?’ he asked, piercing the first artichoke. They had been fried in olive oil and a bit of water, with a whole garlic clove left in and parsley added at the end. He cut it in half and shoved the pieces around in the olive oil, flipped them over and made sure the other sides got their fair share. He ate a piece, sipped the wine, and wiped up some olive oil with a fragment of bread. Taking his glass, he sat back in the sofa. ‘Tell me.’

‘I was talking to Bruno today.’

‘The one who has the camping place?’

‘Yes.’

‘And he said he’s going to run off to Rio with a German tourist and start a samba studio?’ Bruno, whom Brunetti had known for years, was the uncle of a classmate of Paola’s and ran a small hotel on the Lido. Because the Lido was removed from the city centre, the Guardia di Finanza was a less oppressive presence there, and so Brunetti had always assumed that Bruno was less than rigorous in his bookkeeping.

‘Was it something about his clients?’ Brunetti asked, convinced that the comments of tourists were often a window on the real world.

‘No. It came out of the blue.’

‘What?’

‘Some time ago he had a phone call at home. A man, who knew his name, said they were making a survey of all the people who worked in the tourist industry.’

‘They?’ Brunetti asked and sipped at his wine.

‘That’s what he asked: who they were. The man said he was “La Finanza”.’ Paola saw his look and answered it. ‘That’s right, “La Finanza”.’

‘What’s the Guardia di Finanza want from him?’

‘The man said he thought he might be interested in subscribing to some magazines.’

‘What sort of magazines?’

‘He described five of them and said he was sure Bruno would want to subscribe to at least one of them.’

‘What did he do?’

‘What do you think he did? He agreed.’

‘Why?’

‘Because he’s at risk, Guido. He’s at risk like all of us. How many of us obey the law all the time? When we go to dinner in a restaurant, do you get a
ricevuta fiscale
?’

‘Not if I know the people, no,’ Brunetti answered indignantly, as if he’d been asked if he were a shoplifter.

‘That’s against the law, Guido. You’re at risk too. In your case, they’d probably give you a break once you told them you were a policeman,’ she said, then added, ‘But they don’t give breaks to people who aren’t members of the club.’

‘Like Bruno?’ he asked.

‘Like him and all the other people who are honest but who can’t live honestly. His rent has been tripled in the last ten years, and fewer and fewer people want to stay
on the Lido. So he’s breaking the law to survive, earning money and not paying tax on it. Whoever called him knew that. And used it.’

‘When did this happen?’

‘About four months ago.’

Brunetti took another sip of his wine but left the artichokes where they were. ‘Tell me more.’

‘The magazines come by courier, and he has to pay the courier every time. So he has no idea who they’re coming from.’

‘What magazines are they?’

‘The history of the Guardia Costiera, the contribution of the Navy to our society. That sort of thing.’

He knew them well. Every police station in the country had them lying around, unread, unreadable histories of different branches of the state services.

‘Did this person give any other information?’ he asked. ‘Other than to say he was calling for “La Finanza”?’

‘No, nothing. And the phone he called from had the number blocked.’

Brunetti sat back. ‘So there’s only the courier, who gets the money. And he could come from anywhere.’

‘Yes.’

‘Why are you telling me this?’ he asked.

‘Because he paid them. Because the two possibilities are that it’s a fraud – which I think it is – or that the Finanza is actually doing this. Bruno believed it was the Finanza. And paid what he believed was blackmail in order to be left alone.’

There was nothing he could say and nothing he could ask.

‘That’s how we live now, Guido. If some organ of the state calls and threatens us, or we believe it’s an organ of the state, we pay them. That’s what we’re reduced to, paying blackmail money to the state to stay safe from it.’

Brunetti refused to rise to the bait. He wanted to eat his artichokes in peace, finish his wine, and go back to the kitchen to see what was waiting for him in the oven. He did not want to get involved in this, did not even want to comment on it. How else did she expect Bruno to react to a threat like this?

He looked at the remaining artichokes, wondering what he should do. To eat them was to suggest lack of interest in what Paola had said; not to eat them was to have to talk. He picked up his plate and glass and went back to the kitchen. In the oven, he found an oval dish covered with aluminium foil. He touched the side with an exploratory finger, felt that he could safely pull it out. He did, then peeled back the foil.

Two tiny quails lay between a pile of fresh peas and an even larger pile of tiny roasted new potatoes, the whole dish redolent of the cognac in which the quails had been baked. The woman might be a troublemaker, but she knew how to cook. Shoving his remaining artichokes to one side, he transferred everything in the dish to his plate, then set it on the table. He took the wine from the fridge. He’d stick with white. He retrieved
Il Gazzettino
from the living room, where he had left it that morning. Back in the kitchen, he placed the newspaper to the side of his plate and continued reading where he had left off. Like the food, that morning’s news should not be leftovers for the following day: best to consume them while they were still warm.

When he had finished, he put his plate in the sink and ran hot water on it, then found a bottle of cognac and grabbed two glasses. He went down to Paola’s study with what he thought of as a peace offering, though there was no need to establish peace.

She looked up and smiled as he came in, either at his return or at the bottle he brought with him. This time, she pulled back her feet to give him more room and set her book aside. ‘I hope you liked them,’ she said.

‘Wonderful,’ he said and held up the bottle. ‘I thought I’d continue with the theme of cognac.’

She reached for the glass he offered her. ‘That’s very kind, Guido.’ She took a sip and nodded her thanks.

‘I came to tell you what’s happened,’ he said, sitting at her feet.

His second glass of cognac stood untouched in front of him when he finished telling Paola about Franchini’s murder and the books they had found in his apartment.

‘But why would anyone kill him?’ she asked, and in response, he repeated the remark Franchini’s brother had made.

That stopped her. She started to speak but, apparently finding no words, looked away and raised a hand into the air, only to let it drop.

‘I believe him,’ Brunetti said. ‘I can’t explain why I do, but I do. He kept crying, even after he told me.’ Brunetti passed on the other things Franchini’s brother had told him: the blackmailing, Aldo’s fierce desire to rise in the world, talk of some new plan, and his happiness at having found someone to hunt with.

‘And now he’s dead,’ Paola said.

‘Yes.’ In all these years, she had never asked him for details of the deaths he investigated. That someone was dead by the hand of another person was more than enough horror for Paola.

She set her glass on the table in the manner she had when she was finished drinking. Brunetti noticed that the glass was almost full. So, he was surprised to see when he looked at the cognac he no longer wanted, was his own.

‘What do you do now?’

‘Tomorrow afternoon I have an appointment to speak to a woman who knew him.’

‘Knew him how?’ Paola asked.

‘That’s one of the questions I’ll ask her,’ Brunetti said simply.

‘And what else?’

‘Why her ex-companion assaulted him.’

Her curiosity was evident in the look she gave him.

‘It was about six months ago. They had some sort of run-in, and Franchini ended up in the hospital with a broken nose. He didn’t press charges. The man who hit him’s in jail now for something else. So he didn’t do it.’

‘At least that’s something,’ Paola said, then asked, ‘Why talk to her?’

‘To get her to tell me more about Franchini. All he is to me now is a former priest who sat in a library for years, reading the Fathers of the Church, but who, his brother said, was not an honest man. And whose house was filled with stolen books.’ He paused for a moment and then added, ‘I want to see if her story is the same as his brother’s and which one is true.’

‘But can’t they both be?’ Paola asked.

Brunetti considered this for some time and finally asked, ‘Why not?’

17

Brunetti kept this in mind the following afternoon as he crossed the Piazza on his way to Florian’s. He’d had lunch with Paola and the kids; by mutual agreement they had ignored last night’s conversation in favour of trying to arrive at a general decision about where to go for a vacation that summer. ‘Assuming your boss doesn’t make you stay in the city to keep an eye out for pickpockets,’ Chiara had observed, warning Brunetti that he was perhaps too open with his comments about his job.

‘More likely it’ll be boat licences and speeding on the Canal Grande,’ Paola had suggested as he got to his feet. He leaned down to kiss the top of her head. ‘I’ll call if I’m going to be late,’ he told her.

Though they had all talked about it, they had – as was ever the case – failed to agree where to spend their vacation. Paola didn’t much care where they went, so long as she could loll around all day, reading, then go out to dinner in the evening. The children were content if they
had a beach and could go swimming all day. Brunetti wanted the chance to walk long distances surrounded by mountains, come back in the afternoon and fall asleep over a book. Trouble lay ahead, he feared. Terrible thing, giving children the vote.

He came into the Piazza from the Merceria and cut across it in a diagonal that took him towards Florian’s. He paused in the centre of the Piazza and turned to look at the façade of the Basilica. How absurd it was, how excessive, a building thrown together from bits and pieces of loot from Byzantium. What men in their right minds could have designed what he was looking at: the doors, the domes, the light glinting off golden tiles? Hoping to break the building’s spell, he took his phone and dialled Signorina Elettra’s number, struck by the oddness of making a phone call while looking at copies of the horses pillaged from Constantinople almost a thousand years before. Signorina Elettra, who had not appeared in the office that morning, did not answer, leaving him to meet Signora Marzi without the advantage to be had from information about her life and doings.

Inside the café he was struck, as he always was, by the elegant dilapidation of the place. The tablecloths were spotless; the waiters gleamed in white jackets and provided quick and friendly service. But the paint on the walls was faded and chipped, streaked with the marks from the backs of the chairs that had rubbed against them for decades. The velvet on the settees, smoothed by generations of tourists, reminded him of the bald patches on his children’s long-abandoned teddy bears.

He told the waiter he was expecting a female guest and said she would ask for him by name. He went into the first room on the left and said he’d order when his companion arrived, then returned to the front door and selected that day’s
Gazzettino
from the newspapers available for guests.

The story of Franchini’s murder was at the bottom right of the front page of the second section and said only that he had been found dead ‘in mysterious circumstances’ and that the police were conducting an investigation. The victim’s name and age were given correctly, and it was reported that he had formerly been a priest and had worked at a school in Vicenza. Brunetti wondered how they had learned all of this so quickly, which member of the police had spoken to them, and with what authority.

‘Signor Brunetti?’ a woman’s voice asked.

He set the paper on the next table and got to his feet. ‘Signora Marzi?’ he asked, extending his hand.

She was tall, almost as tall as he, her hair a bit too blonde and her makeup more heavily applied than the hour warranted. Her eyes were so dark as almost to be black and were lined with mascara above and below. Her eyebrows had been plucked thin, then returned to their natural width by a black pencil that created the inverted ‘V’ so often seen in the eyebrows of cartoon characters.

Her nose was short and turned up at the end: two faint creases began under it and ran vertically to the top of her mouth. She could be anywhere in her forties; the years would increase or decrease depending on lighting and makeup, and probably on her mood. In either case, she was a woman most men would find attractive.

‘Please,’ he said, motioning her to the padded bench to his left and pulling out the table so she could slip behind it. She sat, rose for a moment to smooth out her skirt, and sat again. On a man, the double-breasted jacket of the dark grey suit she wore would have been traditional, almost boring: on a woman, especially one with hair as short as hers, it was faintly provocative. There was no disguising the quality of the fabric or the cut of the suit. Under it, she wore a round-necked black sweater and a single strand of
pearls. This was not a woman who bought her clothing in Coin. She placed her handbag on the empty space to her right and looked out the window into the Piazza. Lowering her eyes, she studied the objects on the table as if she had never before seen a menu or an envelope containing sugar.

Brunetti caught the waiter’s eye. When he came to the table, Brunetti said, ‘
Un caffè
.’ The waiter turned his attention to the woman, who nodded. ‘
Due
,’ Brunetti said.