Friends in High Places (21 page)

‘Are they that dangerous?’ Brunetti asked, taking her empty glass and reaching over to place it beside his own on the bar.

‘Let’s go outside,’ she said. Out in the
campo,
she moved over until she stood to the left of the flagpole, just in front of the windows of the bookstore. Whether by accident or design, Franca was at least two metres from the people nearest to her in the
campo,
two old women leaning toward one another, propped up by their canes.

Brunetti came up and stood beside her. The light rose over the tops of the buildings, making their reflections clearly visible in the window. Unclear and unfocused, the couple in the window could easily have been those teenagers who had, decades ago, often met here for a coffee with friends.

The question came unsummoned, ‘Are you really that frightened?’ Brunetti asked.

‘My son’s fifteen,’ she said by way of explanation. Her level tone might just as easily have been used to comment on the weather or, indeed, upon her son’s interest in soccer.

‘Why did you want to meet here, Guido?’ she asked.

He smiled, ‘I know you’re a busy woman, and I know where you live, so I thought this would be a convenient place: you’re almost home.’

‘That’s the only reason?’ she asked, looking away from the reflected Brunetti to the real one.

‘Yes. Why do you ask?’

‘You really don’t know anything about them, do you?’ was the only answer she gave.

‘No. I know they exist, and I know they’re here in the city. They’d have to be. But we’ve never had any official complaints about them.’

‘And it’s usually the Finanza that deals with them, isn’t it?’

Brunetti shrugged. He had no idea just what the officers of the Guardia di Finanza did deal with: he often saw them, in their grey uniforms decorated with the bright flames of a presumed justice, but he saw little evidence that they did much other than encourage an oppressed people to new methods of tax evasion.

He nodded, not willing to commit his ignorance to words.

Franca looked away from him and around the small
campo.
Silently, she stood and looked around her. With her chin, she indicated the fast food restaurant that stood on the other side. ‘What do you see?’

He looked across at the glass fa
ç
ade taking up most of that side of the small square. Young people went in and out; many of them sat at small tables, clearly visible through the immense windows.

‘I see the destruction of two thousand years of culinary culture,’ he said, with a laugh.

‘And just outside, what do you see?’ she asked soberly.

He looked again, disappointed that she had not laughed at his joke. He saw two men in dark suits, each with a briefcase in his hand, talking to one another. To the left of them, a young woman stood, handbag clutched awkwardly under her arm as she looked through her address book and tried to punch in a number on her
telefonino
at the same time. Behind her, a shabbily dressed man, perhaps in his late sixties, tall and very thin, was leaning down to speak to an older woman dressed all in black. She was bent forward with age, her tiny hands grasped tightly around the handle of a large black handbag. She had a narrow face and a long, pointed nose, a combination which, when added to her hunched posture, gave the general impression of one of the smaller marsupials.

‘I see a number of people doing what people do in Campo San Luca.’

‘Which is?’ she asked, looking up at him, eyes sharp now.

‘Meeting by chance or arrangement and talking, then going to have a drink, the way we did, and then going home to lunch, the way we will.’

‘And those two?’ she asked, tilting her chin toward the thin man and the old woman.

‘She looks like she’s on her way home to lunch, just back from a long mass at one of the smaller churches.’

‘And he?’

Brunetti looked over towards them again. They were still deep in conversation. ‘It looks like she’s trying to save his soul and he doesn’t want any part of it,’ Brunetti said.

‘He has none to save,’ Franca said, surprising him that such a judgement should come from a woman he’d never heard speak badly of anyone. ‘Nor does she,’ she added in a cool, unforgiving voice.

She turned a half-step back toward the bookstore and looked into the window again. Keeping her back to Brunetti, she said, ‘That’s Angelina Volpato, and her husband, Massimo. They’re two of the worst moneylenders in the city. No one has any idea when they started, but for the last ten years, they’ve been the ones most people have used.’

Brunetti sensed a presence at their side: a woman had come up to look into the window. Franca said nothing. When she moved off, Franca continued, ‘People know about them and know they’re here most mornings. So they come and talk to them, and then Angelina invites them to their home.’ She paused and then added, ‘She’s the real vampire’, then paused again. When she had grown calm, she went on. ‘It’s there that she calls in the notary and they make up the papers. She gives them the money, and they give her their houses or their businesses or their furniture.’

‘And the sum?’

‘That depends on how much they need and how long they need it for. If it’s only a few million, then they agree to give her their furniture. But if it’s a significant sum, fifty million or more, then she works out the interest - people have told me she can calculate interest in an instant, though the same people have told me she’s illiterate; so’s her husband.’ She stopped here, lost in her own account, then resumed, ‘If it’s a large sum, then they agree to give her title to their house if they haven’t paid her a certain sum by a certain date.’

‘And if they don’t pay?’

‘Then her lawyer takes them to court, and she’s got the paper, signed in front of a notary.’

As she spoke, always keeping her eyes on the covers of the books in the window, Brunetti examined his memory, and his conscience, and was forced to admit that none of this was news to him. The precise details were unknown, perhaps, but not the fact that this sort of thing went on. But it belonged to the Guardia di Finanza, or it had until now, until circumstance and dumb chance had called his attention to Angelina Volpato and her husband, still standing there, across from him, deep in conversation on a bright spring day in Venice.

‘How much do they charge?’

‘It depends on how desperate people are,’ Franca answered.

‘How do they know that?’

She took her eyes away from the little piggies driving fire engines and looked up at him. ‘You know as well as I do: everyone knows everything. All you have to do is try to borrow money from a bank, and everyone in the bank knows it by the end of the day, their families by the morning, and the whole city by the afternoon.’

Brunetti had to admit the truth of this. Whether because people in Venice were all related to one another by blood or friendship, or simply because the city was in reality nothing more than a tiny town, no secret could survive long in this intense, incestuous world. It made perfect sense to him that financial need would quickly become public information.

‘What sort of interest do they charge?’ he asked again.

She started to answer, stopped herself, then continued, ‘I’ve heard people talk of twenty per cent a month. But I’ve also heard them talk of fifty.’

The Venetian in Brunetti had it worked out in an instant. ‘That’s six hundred per cent a year,’ he said, unable to disguise his indignation.

‘Much more if it’s compound interest,’ Franca corrected, demonstrating that her family’s roots in the city extended deeper than Brunetti’s.

Brunetti turned his attention back to the two people on the other side of the
campo.
As he watched, their conversation finished and the woman moved away, turning towards Rialto, while the man headed in their direction.

As he drew near, Brunetti saw the bulbous forehead, the skin rough and dangling in flakes as from some untreated disease, the full lips and heavy-lidded eyes. The man had a strange, bird-like walk and with each step lightly placed each foot down flat, as if concerned about wearing down the heels of his much-repaired shoes. His face bore the burdens of age and sickness, but the gangling walk, especially as Brunetti saw it from behind as the man turned into the
calle
that led toward the city hall, gave a strange sense of youthful awkwardness.

When he looked back, the old woman had disappeared, but the image of a marsupial, or some sort of upright rat, remained in Brunetti’s memory. ‘How do you know about all of this?’ he asked Franca.

‘I work in a bank, remember,’ she answered.

‘And those two are the court of last resort for the people who can’t get anything from you?’ She nodded. ‘But how do people find out about them?’ he asked.

She studied him, as if considering how much she could trust him, then said, ‘I’ve been told that sometimes people in the bank recommend them.’

‘What?’

‘That when people try to borrow money from a bank and are refused, occasionally one of the employees will suggest they try talking to the Volpatos. Or to whichever moneylender is paying them a percentage.’

‘How much of a percentage?’ Brunetti asked in a level voice.

She shrugged. ‘I’m told that depends,’

‘On what?’

‘On how much they finally borrow. Or on the sort of deal the banker has with the usurers.’ Before Brunetti could ask anything else, she added, ‘If people need money, they’ll get it somewhere. If not from friends or family, and if not from a bank, then from people like the Volpatos.’

The only way Brunetti could ask the next question was to be direct, and so he asked, ‘Is this connected with the Mafia?’

‘What isn’t?’ Franca asked in return, but when she saw his irritated response to this, she added, ‘Sorry, that was just a wisecrack. I’ve no direct knowledge that they are. But if you think about it for a while, you’ll realize how good a way it would be to launder money.’

Brunetti nodded. Only Mafia protection could allow something as profitable as this to go on unquestioned, unexamined by the authorities.

‘Have I ruined your lunch?’ she asked, suddenly smiling, her mood changing in a way he remembered.

‘No, not at all, Franca.’

‘Why are you asking about this?’ she finally asked.

‘It might be connected with something else.’

‘Most things are,’ she added but asked him nothing, another quality he had always prized in her. ‘I’ll get home, then,’ she said, and leaned up to kiss him on both cheeks.

‘Thanks, Franca,’ he answered, pulling her a bit closer to him, comforted by the feel of her strong body and even stronger will. ‘It’s always a joy to see you.’ Even as she patted his arm and turned away, he realized that he had not asked her about the other moneylenders, but he couldn’t call her back now and ask. All he could think of was to go home.

* * * *

17

As he walked, Brunetti let his memory slip back to the time he had spent with Franca, more than two decades ago. He was conscious of how much he had enjoyed again putting his arms around that comfortable figure, once so familiar to him. He remembered a long walk they had taken on the beach of the Lido the night of Redentore; it must have been when he was seventeen. Fireworks long finished, they’d walked along, hand in hand, waiting for dawn, reluctant to let the night end.

But it had, as had many things between them, and now she had her Mario, and he had his Paola. He stopped at Biancat and bought a dozen irises for his Paola, happy to be able to do so, happy at the thought that she would be upstairs, waiting for him.

She was in the kitchen when he came in, seated at the table, shelling peas.