Friends in High Places (22 page)

‘Risi e bisi,’
he said by way of greeting when he saw the peas, the irises held out in front of him.

Smiling at the sight of the flowers, she said, ‘It’s the best thing to do with new peas, isn’t it, make risotto?’ and raised her cheek to receive his kiss.

Kiss given, he answered, for no real reason, ‘Unless you’re a princess and you need them to put under your mattress.’

‘I think the risotto’s a better idea,’ she answered. ‘Would you put them in a vase while I finish these?’ she asked, gesturing with one hand to the full paper bag on the table beside her.

He pulled a chair over to the cabinets, took a piece of newspaper from the table and spread it on the seat, then stepped up to reach for one of the tall vases that stood on top of one of the cabinets.

‘The blue one, I think,’ she said, looking up and watching him.

He stepped down, put the chair back in place, and took the vase over to the sink. ‘How full?’ he asked.

‘About halfway. What would you like after?’

‘What is there?’ he asked.

‘I’ve got that roast beef from Sunday. If you sliced it very thin, we could have that and then maybe a salad.’

‘Is Chiara eating meat this week?’ Spurred to it by an article about the treatment of calves, Chiara had a week ago declared that she would be a vegetarian for the rest of her life.

‘You saw her eat the roast beef on Sunday, didn’t you?’ Paola asked.

‘Ah, yes, of course,’ he answered, turning to the flowers and tearing the paper from them.

‘What’s wrong?’ she asked.

‘The usual things,’ he answered, holding the vase under the tap and turning on the cold water. ‘We live in a fallen universe.’

She returned to her peas. ‘Anyone who does either of our jobs should know that,’ she answered.

Curious, he asked, ‘How does it come from yours?’ A policeman for twenty years, he needed no one to tell him that mankind had fallen from grace.

‘You deal with moral decline. I deal with that of the mind.’ She spoke in the elevated, self-mocking tone she often used when she caught herself taking her work seriously. Then she asked, ‘Specifically, what’s done this to you?’

‘I had a drink with Franca this afternoon.’

‘How is she?’

‘Fine. Her son’s growing up, and I don’t think she much likes working in a bank.’

‘Who could?’ Paola asked, but it was more a ritual response than a serious question. She returned to his original unexplained statement and asked, ‘How does seeing Franca suggest it’s a post-lapsarian universe? It usually has the opposite effect, on all of us.’

Slowly slipping the flowers one by one into the vase, Brunetti played back her comment a few times, searching for some hidden and possibly rancorous meaning and finding none at all. She observed his pleasure in meeting this old, dear friend, and she shared the joy he took in her company. At that realization, his heart gripped tight for an instant, and he felt a sudden flush of heat in his face. One of the irises fell to the counter. He picked it up, put it in with the others, and set the vase carefully aside, safely back from the edge.

‘She said something about being afraid for Pietro if she talked to me about moneylenders.’

Paola stopped what she was doing and turned to look at him. ‘Moneylenders?’ she asked. ‘What have they got to do with anything?’

‘Rossi, that man from the Ufficio Catasto who died, he had the phone number of a lawyer in his wallet, a lawyer who had taken on a number of cases against them.’

‘A lawyer where?’

‘In Ferrara.’

‘Not that one they murdered?’ she asked, looking up at him.

Brunetti nodded, interested that Paola would so casually assume that Cappelli had been murdered by ‘them’, and then added, ‘The magistrate in charge of the investigation excluded moneylenders and seemed very interested in persuading me that the killer actually got the wrong man.’

After a long pause, during which Brunetti watched the play of thought reflect itself in her face, she asked, ‘Is that why he had his number, because of moneylenders?’

‘I’ve no proof. But it’s coincidental.’

‘Life’s coincidental.’

‘Murder’s not.’

She folded her hands on top of the pile of discarded pea pods. ‘Since when is this murder? Rossi, I mean.’

‘Since I don’t know when. Maybe since never. I just want to find out about this and see why Rossi called him, if I can.’

‘And Franca?’

‘I thought, because she works in a bank, she might know about moneylenders.’

‘I thought that’s what banks are supposed to do, lend money.’

‘They often don’t, at least not on short notice and not to people who might not pay it back.’

‘Then why ask her?’ From the immobility of her posture, Paola might have been an examining magistrate.

‘I thought she might know something.’

‘You said that. But why Franca?’

He had no reason, save that she was the first person whose name had occurred to him. Besides, it had been some time since he’d seen her and he’d wanted to do so, nothing more than that. He stuffed his hands into his pockets and shifted his weight to his other foot. ‘No real reason,’ he finally said.

She unlatched her fingers and went back to shelling the peas. ‘What did she tell you, and why is she afraid for Pietro?’

‘She mentioned, even showed me, two people.’ Before Paola could interrupt, he said, ‘We met in San Luca, and there was this couple there. They’re in their sixties, I’d say. She said they lent money.’

‘And Pietro?’

‘She said there might be a connection to the Mafia and money laundering, but she didn’t want to say anything more than that.’ He saw from Paola’s brief nod that she shared his opinion that the mere mention of the Mafia would be enough to make any parent fear for any child.

‘Not even to you?’ she asked.

He shook his head. She glanced up at him, and he repeated the gesture.

‘Serious, then,’ Paola said.

‘I’d say so.’

‘Who are the people?’

‘Angelina and Massimo Volpato.’

‘You ever heard of them?’ she asked

‘No.’

‘Who have you asked about them?’

‘No one. I just saw them twenty minutes ago, before I came home.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘Find out whatever I can about them.’

‘And then?’

‘That depends on what I learn.’

There was silence then Paola said, ‘I was thinking about you today, about your work.’ He waited. ‘It was when I was washing the windows, and that’s what made me think of you,’ she added, surprising him.

‘Why the windows?’

‘I was washing them, and then I did the mirror in the bathroom, and that’s when I thought of what you do.’

He knew she’d continue, even if he said nothing, but he also knew she liked to be encouraged, so he asked, ‘And?’

‘When you clean a window,’ she said, eyes on his, ‘you have to open it and pull it toward you, and when you do that, the angle of the light that’s coming through it changes.’ She saw that he was following, so she continued, ‘So you get it clean. Or you think you do. But when you close the window, the light comes through from the original angle, and then you see that the outside’s still dirty, or that you missed a patch on the inside. That means you have to open it and clean it again. But you can never be sure it’s really clean until you close it again or until you move so that you see it from a different angle.’

‘And the mirror?’ he asked.

She looked up at him and smiled. ‘You see a mirror only from one side. No light comes from behind, so when you clean it, it’s clean. There’s no trick of perception.’ She looked back down at her work.

‘And?’

Still looking at the peas, perhaps to hide her disappointment in him, she explained, ‘That’s what your work’s like, or how you want it to be. You want to clean mirrors, want everything to be two-dimensional and easy to take care of. But every time you begin to take a look at something, it turns out to be like the windows: if you change perspective or you look at things from a new angle, everything changes.’

Brunetti considered this for a long time and then added, hoping to lighten the mood, ‘But in both cases, I’ve always got to clean up the dirt.’

Paola said, ‘You said that; I didn’t.’ When Brunetti made no response, she dropped the last peas into the bowl, and got to her feet. She walked to the counter and set the bowl down. ‘Whichever it is you do, I suppose you’d prefer to do it on a full stomach,’ she said.

* * * *

Stomach indeed full, he started to do it that afternoon, as soon as he got back to the Questura. He began, a better place than most, with Signorina Elettra.

Smiling, she greeted his arrival, today dressed in something that looked tantalizingly nautical: navy blue skirt, a square-yoked silk blouse. He caught himself thinking that all she lacked was a little sailor hat until he saw a stiff white cylindrical cap sitting on the desk beside her computer.

‘Volpato,’ he said before she could ask him how he was. ‘Angelina and Massimo. They’re in their sixties.’

She pulled forward a sheet of paper and began to write.

‘Living here?’

‘I think so, yes.’

‘Any idea where?’

‘No,’ he answered.

‘That’s easy enough to check,’ she said, making a note. ‘What else?’

‘I’d like financial records most of all: bank accounts, any investments they might have, property registered in their names, anything you can find.’ He paused while she wrote and then added, ‘And see if we have anything on them.’

‘Phone records?’ she asked.

‘No, not yet. Just the financial stuff.’

‘For when?’

He looked down at her and smiled. ‘When do I always want everything?’

She pushed back her cuff and glanced down at the heavy diver’s watch on her left wrist. ‘I should be able to get the information from the city offices this afternoon.’

‘The banks have closed already, so that can wait until tomorrow,’ he said.

She smiled up at him. ‘The records never close,’ she said. ‘I should have everything in a few hours.’

She reached down and pulled open a drawer, from which she took a pile of papers. ‘I’ve got these,’ she began but suddenly stopped and looked to her left, toward the door of her office.

He sensed, rather than saw, a motion and turned to see Vice-Questore Patta, just now returned from lunch.

‘Signorina Elettra,’ he began, making no acknowledgement that he was aware of Brunetti standing in front of her desk.

‘Yes, Dottore?’ she asked.

‘I’d like you to come into my office to take a letter.’

‘Of course, Dottore,’ she said, placing the papers she had just taken from the drawer on the centre of her desk and tapping at them with the first finger of her left hand, a gesture which Brunetti’s body prevented Patta from seeing. She pulled open her front drawer and removed an old-fashioned stenographer’s pad. Did people still dictate letters, and did secretaries still sit, legs crossed like Joan Crawford’s, quickly taking words down in little squiggles and crosses? As Brunetti wondered about this, he realized that he had always left it to Signorina Elettra to decide how to phrase a letter, had relied on her to choose the correct rhetorical elaboration with which to disguise simple things or to smooth the way for requests which went beyond the strict limits of police power.