By Its Cover (8 page)

Brunetti entered the name of the assailant, Roberto Durà, into the computer and discovered a string of arrests for minor crimes that had never sent him to jail, usually because of lack of witnesses or sufficient evidence or because the prosecuting magistrate had decided the case was not worth pursuing. He discovered that Durà was currently in jail in Treviso, sentenced three months ago to four years for armed robbery and assault.

Brunetti looked out the window and saw blue sky, clouds huffing and puffing towards the east, a perfect day for a
walk down to Castello to have a look around. He stopped in the squad room on his way out, where he saw Ispettore Vianello at his desk, bent forward and speaking into his
telefonino
, one hand shielding the phone to trap the sound of his voice. Brunetti stopped a few metres from him and watched his face: Vianello’s eyes were closed, his face intent, as though he were urging a racehorse to win, win, win.

Brunetti had no wish to distract Vianello from the call, so he went to the desk Alvise shared with Riverre and found the former busy writing in a small notebook. When he approached, however, he saw that it was a crossword puzzle: Sudoku was perhaps too taxing for Alvise. So intent was he on the words that he did not sense the approach of his superior. Alvise actually jumped to his feet when Brunetti spoke his name.

‘
Sì
,
Signore,
’ he said, raising to his forehead the hand that held the pencil and putting his eye at risk.

‘When Vianello’s finished, would you ask him to come down to the bar?’

‘Of course, Commissario,’ Alvise said and, using his pencil, made a note in the margin of his puzzle book.

‘Thanks,’ Brunetti said, failing for once to find a way to engage Alvise in easy conversation. He left the Questura and went along the
riva
to the bar. Bambola, the Senegalese who now all but ran the place for its owner, smiled when Brunetti came in and poured him a glass of white wine. Brunetti took it, grabbed up that day’s copy of
Il Gazzettino
, and went to the booth at the far end, near the window, so he could see Vianello arriving. He opened the paper to the centre page. Idly, he looked at his watch: the time made him suddenly aware of how hungry he was. He took out his
telefonino
, thinking he’d send Paola an SMS to apologize for having forgotten about lunch, but he pushed away cowardice and called her.

She grumbled, but since she didn’t name the dishes he had missed, he knew her heart wasn’t in it. He promised to be home on time for dinner, said he loved her beyond measure, and hung up. He called over to Bambola and asked him to choose three
tramezzini
for him and three for Vianello, then turned to the open pages.

There was the usual political chaos, but Brunetti had vowed not to read anything to do with politics until the end of the year or the arrival of the Philosopher King. Fifty acres of farmland filled with toxic waste in Campania, complete with photos of the poisoned sheep who had had their last meal there. Guardia di Finanza blitz on the offices of the political party that had ruled Lombardia for the last decade. Well, that was politics, wasn’t it? Award of the city’s highest civic honour to the man who wanted to build a tower of surpassing ugliness on the mainland that would be visible from everywhere in Venice. Brunetti sighed and flipped back to the front page, where he saw the photo of the former Director of the MOSE project – seven billion Euros already spent to block the waters of the
laguna
– now arrested and charged with corruption. Brunetti smiled, raised his glass in a sardonic toast, and took a long sip.

‘Alvise said you wanted me to come down,’ Vianello said, setting down the plate of
tramezzini
and a glass of white wine. Before Brunetti could say anything, the Inspector went back to the bar and returned carrying two glasses of mineral water. He set them on the table and slipped on to the bench opposite Brunetti.

Brunetti nodded his thanks and picked up a sandwich. ‘You get any fingerprints from those books?’ he asked, not having had time to speak to Vianello before now.

Vianello took a sip of his wine and said, ‘I’ve never seen those two lab guys so close to tears, both of them.’

‘Why?’ Brunetti asked, and took a bite of his egg and tuna.

‘You ever think of how many people touch a book in a library?’ Vianello set his glass down and picked up a sandwich.

‘
Oddio
,’ Brunetti said. ‘Of course: there’d be scores of them.’ He sipped at his wine, then asked, ‘They take prints of the people who work there?’

‘Yes,’ Vianello said. ‘They kept saying there’d be hundreds of prints in a book, but they were cooperative when we said we had to have them.’

‘Even the Direttrice?’ Brunetti asked.

‘She’s the one who told them just to do it. Even volunteered to give her own.’

This surprised Brunetti, who had seldom found people in positions of authority cooperative with requests that the police made of them. ‘Good for her,’ he said and took another sandwich. ‘I’m going down to Castello to talk to someone, and I thought you might like to come along.’ Ham and artichokes, and he suspected Bambola must have scraped off some of the mayonnaise before putting it on the plate.

‘Sure,’ Vianello said and picked up a second sandwich. ‘You want me to be the good cop or the bad one?’

Brunetti smiled in return and said, ‘No need for it today. We can both be good cops. I just want to talk to him.’

‘Who?’

Brunetti explained the theft and vandalism at the library, mentioned the connection with the Morosini-Albanis, and then described Signorina Elettra’s strong response to the family name.

‘She knew the stepson?’ Vianello asked. ‘What’s his name? Giovanni? Gianni?’ He picked up another sandwich, then sipped at his wine.

Brunetti’s curiosity was rekindled. Gianni Morosini-Albani was a poster boy for the eradication of the nobility: dishonest, a well-known consumer of illegal substances. He and Signorina Elettra? The very idea.

He muted his desire to defend her and said only, ‘She didn’t seem pleased to hear his name.’

‘He has a reputation of being very charming,’ Vianello said with a complete lack of conviction.

‘Yes, many people seem to like him,’ Brunetti offered.

Vianello dismissed that. ‘Years ago, I had to go along when he was arrested. Well, brought in for questioning. Must be fifteen years ago. He was very pleasant, invited the Commissario in, offered us all coffee. There were three of us, including the Commissario.’ Vianello did not smile at the memory.

‘Who was it?’

‘Battistella.’ Brunetti remembered him: a fool who had drifted his way to early retirement and could still occasionally be seen in the bars, talking about his illustrious career as a defender of justice. Over the years, Brunetti had noticed, he was no longer offered drinks but seemed willing to buy them for anyone who listened to him, which guaranteed him a constant audience.

‘He was thrilled, of course, Battistella. Here was the son of one of the richest families in the city, the heir, the ladies’ man, inviting us in for a coffee,’ Vianello said, his voice growing even harder. ‘Battistella fell in love with him, I think. If he’d wanted to escape, Battistella would have helped him, probably would have given him his gun and held the door for him.’

‘Why was he being brought in?’

‘A young girl, only about fifteen, sixteen. She’d ended up in the hospital with some sort of overdose the night before. She’d been at a party at the
palazzo
, but she was
found – it was never explained how – at the side entrance to the hospital.’ Vianello paused and, voice even harder, corrected himself. ‘She said she was at the
palazzo
, but none of the people she said were there remembered seeing her.’

‘What happened to her?’

Vianello gave an eloquent shrug. ‘She was a minor, so the record was sealed. She spent the night in the hospital, and the next morning she was allowed to go home. And when she finally told her parents about what had happened, they called us.’

‘And that’s why you went to see him?’ Brunetti reached for another sandwich but saw that Vianello had eaten the last one. He finished his wine.

‘The magistrate called him and said he wanted to speak to him about what had happened at the party, but Gianni said he was too busy, and what party was he talking about, anyway?’ Vianello picked up his glass, but there was none left, and he set it down again.

‘After the call, the magistrate sent us over to bring him in for a conversation.’

‘To see if he could remember the party? Or the girl.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Was it Rotili?’ Brunetti asked, naming a particularly aggressive magistrate whose successes had earned him a transfer to a small town on the border between Piemonte and France, where he could concern himself with the theft of skis and barn animals.

‘Yes, and this was probably the thing that led to his transfer. Gianni’s father was still alive then, and he refused to believe his son could do anything wrong.’

Brunetti had never met the late Count, but he knew his reputation and the extent of his power. ‘So Rotili went to Piemonte?’

‘Yes,’ Vianello answered without comment.

‘And how did the story of the girl end?’ Brunetti asked.

‘She named four people she said had been there. All of them were at least fifteen years older than she was,’ Vianello added. ‘Including Gianni.’

‘And none of them had been at a party and they had never seen the girl in their lives?’

‘Yes. And two of them were women,’ Vianello said, unable to hide his disgust.

‘How did Battistella behave?’

‘I was only a patrolman then, and I had the sense to keep my mouth shut, but it was pretty awful.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning he was a man of about fifty who kowtowed to someone who couldn’t have been much more than thirty, who’d been arrested in at least two other countries by then, and who was known as a drug user, probably a dealer who sold them to his rich friends.’ Vianello leaned forward, bracing his weight on his forearms.

‘He told Battistella the girl must be crazy, to invent a story like that. When Battistella agreed with him, Morosini said it was probably because of drugs, and he thought it was terrible, the way people didn’t discipline their children.’

Vianello shifted back in the bench with no warning, as if trying to get away from his words or from the memory of the scene. ‘I’d had some experience by then, so I didn’t say anything, just did my best to stand there and look stupid.’

‘Battistella always liked that,’ Brunetti permitted himself to observe. ‘What happened?’

‘It was a nice day, as I remember, so the two of them walked to the Questura together, chatting like the best of old friends.’ He paused, then added, ‘I’m surprised they didn’t hold hands.’

‘And you?’

‘Oh, I walked behind them, and I made it obvious that I wasn’t interested in what they said. I walked next to the other guy – I don’t even remember who it was any more – and we occasionally said something to one another. But I listened to a lot of their conversation.’ After a moment, he said, ‘It was hard not to hear it.’

‘About?’

‘About young girls.’

‘Ah,’ Brunetti said. ‘It’s not a terribly long walk from their
palazzo
to the Questura, so you didn’t have to listen to much of it, at least.’

‘As my grandmother often told us, God’s mercy is everywhere.’ Vianello got to his feet and they started down towards Castello.

7

They walked because not to do so would be to throw away the joy of this waning day. It had grown warm enough to encourage the wisteria buds to flex their muscles, like athletes who scrape their feet on the ground prior to a sprint or a leap: they’d begun their yearly creep over the brick wall of the garden on the opposite side of the canal they were passing, Brunetti noticed. Within a week, their panicles would be suspended over the water, and after another their lavender eruption would take place overnight, hurling scent across to every passer-by, enough to make anyone who caught a whiff wonder what in heaven’s name he or she was doing going to work on a day like this, staring at a computer screen, when outside, life was starting all over again.

For Brunetti, springtime was a succession of scent memories: the lilacs in a courtyard over by Madonna dell’Orto; the bouquets of lily of the valley brought in by the old man from Mazzorbo, who each year sold them on
the steps of the church of the Gesuiti and who had been coming for so many years that no one dared to question his right to set up shop; and the smell of fresh sweat from clean bodies pressed together on the now-crowded vaporetti, a welcome relief after a winter of the musty smell of jackets and coats worn too many times, sweaters unwashed for too long.

If life had a smell, it was to be found in springtime. There were times when Brunetti wanted to bite at the air to try to taste it, impossible as he knew that to be. It was too soon to start ordering a spritz, but his desire for rum punch had disappeared with the last cold day.

As had happened to him since boyhood, Brunetti felt a surge of directionless goodwill towards everything and everyone around him, as at the end of a period of emotional hibernation. His eye approved of all it saw, and the possibility of a walk was an intoxication. Like a sheepdog, he guided Vianello the way he wanted to go, leading him past S. Antonin and out to the
riva
. San Giorgio stood opposite them, the view of it filtered through the tallmasted boats moored along the side wall that faced them.

‘It’s days like this that make me want to quit,’ Vianello surprised him by saying.

‘Quit what?’

‘Work. Being a policeman.’

Brunetti exercised his will and remained calm. ‘And do what?’ he asked.

Both of them knew it would have been shorter to go the back way and over the bridge in front of the Arsenale and then along the Tana, but the chance to look at that open expanse of water had lured them, and they had proved incapable of resisting its force.