Friends in High Places (5 page)

He was at his desk, devoting a great deal of thought to how best to avoid stating self-evident truths, when his phone rang. ‘Brunetti,’ he said and flipped over to the third page of the names of those arrested for petty theft in the last two months.

‘Commissario?’ a man’s voice asked.

‘Yes.’

‘This is Franco Rossi.’

The name was the most common one a Venetian could have, equivalent to ‘John Smith’, so it took Brunetti a moment to sort through the various places he could expect to find a Franco Rossi, and it was only then that he found himself in the Ufficio Catasto.

‘Ah, I’ve been hoping to hear from you, Signor Rossi,’ he lied easily. His real hope was that Signor Rossi had somehow disappeared, taking the Ufficio Catasto and its records along with him. ‘Is there some sort of news?’

‘About what?’

‘The apartment,’ Brunetti asked, wondering what other sort of news he might be expecting to hear from Signor Rossi.

‘No, nothing,’ Rossi answered. ‘The office has been given the report and will consider it.’

‘Have you any idea when that might be?’ Brunetti asked diffidently.

‘No. I’m sorry. There’s no way of telling when they’ll get around to it.’ Rossi’s voice was brisk, dismissive.

Brunetti was momentarily struck by how apt a slogan these words would be for most of the city offices he had dealt with, both as a civilian and as a policeman. ‘Did you want more information?’ he asked, remaining polite, conscious that he might, some time in the future, have need of Signor Rossi’s good will, even perhaps his material aid.

‘It’s about something else,’ Rossi said. ‘I mentioned your name to someone, and they told me where you worked.’

‘Yes, how can I help you?’

‘It’s about something here at the office,’ he said, then stopped and corrected himself, ‘Well, not here because I’m not at the office. If you understand.’

‘Where are you, Signor Rossi?’

‘On the street. I’m using my
telefonino.
I didn’t want to call you from the office.’ The reception faded out and when Rossi’s voice came back, he was saying, ‘because of what I wanted to tell you.’

If that was the case, Signor Rossi would have been well advised not to use his
telefonino,
a means of communication as open to the public as the newspaper.

‘Is what you have to tell me important, Signor Rossi?’

‘Yes, I think it is,’ Rossi said, his voice lower.

‘Then I think you’d better find a public phone and call me on that,’ Brunetti suggested.

‘What?’ Rossi asked uneasily.

‘Call me from a public phone, Signore. I’ll be right here and I’ll wait for your call.’

‘You mean this call isn’t safe?’ Rossi asked, and Brunetti heard the same tightness that had choked him off when he refused to move out on to the terrace of Brunetti’s apartment.

‘That’s an exaggeration,’ Brunetti said, trying to sound calm and reassuring. ‘But there will be no trouble if you make the call from a public phone, especially if you use my direct number.’ He gave the number to Rossi and then repeated it as, he thought, the young man wrote it down.

‘I’ve got to find some change or buy a phone card,’ Rossi said and then, after a brief pause, Brunetti thought he heard him hang up, but the voice drifted back, and Rossi seemed to say, ‘I’ll call you back.’

‘Good. I’ll be here,’ Brunetti started to say, but he heard the phone click before he could finish.

What had Signor Rossi discovered at the Ufficio Catasto? Payments made so that some incriminatingly accurate blueprint could be made to disappear from a file and another one, more inventive, could be put in its place? Bribes paid to a building inspector? The idea that a civil servant would be shocked by any of this, even more, that he would call the police, made Brunetti want to laugh out loud. What was wrong with them over at the Ufficio Catasto, that they would hire a man as innocent as this?

For the next few minutes, while Brunetti waited for Rossi to call him back, he attempted to work out what good might come to him were he to help Signor Rossi with whatever he had discovered. With a pang of conscience - though a very small one - Brunetti realized he had every intention of making use of Signor Rossi, knew that he would go out of his way to help the young man and give special attention to whatever problem he had, knowing that, in return, a debt would be chalked up to his own account. This way, if nothing else, any favour he asked in return would be charged against his account, not against Paola’s father’s.

He waited ten minutes, but the phone did not ring. When it did, half an hour later, it was Signorina Elettra, his superior’s secretary, asking if he wanted her to bring up the photos and list of articles of jewellery that had been found out on the mainland, in the caravan of one of the gypsy children who had been arrested two weeks ago. The mother insisted that the pieces were all hers, that they had been in the family for generations. Given the value of the jewellery, that seemed a most unlikely claim. One piece, Brunetti knew, had already been identified by a German journalist as stolen from her apartment more than a month ago.

He glanced at his watch and saw that it was after five. ‘No, Signorina, don’t bother. It can wait until tomorrow.’

‘All right, Commissario,’ she said. ‘You can pick them up when you come in.’ She paused and he heard the rustle of papers at the other end of the line. ‘If there’s nothing else, I’ll go home, then.’

‘The Vice-Questore?’ Brunetti asked, wondering how she dared leave more than an hour early.

‘He left before lunch,’ she answered, her voice neutral. ‘He said he was going to lunch with the Questore, and I think they were going back to the Questore’s office afterwards.’

Brunetti wondered what his superior would be getting up to when speaking to his own superior. Patta’s excursions into the fields of power never resulted in anything good for the people who worked in the Questura: usually his attempt to flaunt his single-minded energy resulted in new plans and directives that were imposed, vigorously enforced, and then ultimately abandoned when they proved to be futile or redundant.

He wished Signorina Elettra a pleasant evening and hung up. For the next two hours, he waited for the phone to ring. Finally, a bit after seven, he left his office and went downstairs into the officers’ squad room.

Pucetti was at the duty desk, a book open in front of him, chin propped on two fists as he looked down at the pages.

‘Pucetti?’ Brunetti said as he came in.

The young officer looked up and, seeing Brunetti, was instantly on his feet. Brunetti was glad to see that, for the first time since he’d come to work at the Questura, the young officer managed to resist the impulse to salute.

‘I’m going home now, Pucetti. If anyone calls for me, a man, please give him my home phone number and ask him to call me there, would you?’

‘Of course, sir,’ the young officer answered, and this time he saluted.

‘What are you reading?’ Brunetti asked.

‘I’m not reading, sir, not really. I’m studying. It’s a grammar book.’

‘Grammar?’

‘Yes, sir. Russian.’

Brunetti looked down at the page. Sure enough, Cyrillic letters ran across the page. ‘Why are you studying Russian grammar?’ Brunetti asked, and then added, ‘If I might ask, that is.’

‘Of course, sir,’ Pucetti said with a small smile. ‘My girlfriend’s Russian, and I’d like to be able to talk to her in her own language.’

‘I didn’t know you had a girlfriend, Pucetti,’ Brunetti said, thinking of the thousands of Russian prostitutes flooding into Western Europe and striving to keep his voice neutral.

‘Yes, sir,’ he said, his smile broader.

Brunetti risked it. ‘What is she doing here in Italy? Working?’

‘She’s teaching Russian and mathematics at my kid brother’s high school. That’s how I met her, sir.’

‘How long have you known her?’

‘Six months.’

‘That sounds serious.’

Again, the young man smiled, and Brunetti was struck by the sweetness of his face. ‘I think it is, sir. Her family’s coming here this summer, and she wants them to meet me.’

‘So you’re studying?’ he asked, nodding down at the book.

Pucetti ran a hand through his hair. ‘She told me they don’t like the idea of her marrying a policeman: both of her parents are surgeons, you see. So I thought it might help if I could speak to them, even a little bit. And since I don’t speak German or English, I thought maybe it would show them I’m not just a dumb cop if I could speak to them in Russian.’

‘That sounds very wise. Well, I’ll leave you to your grammar,’ Brunetti said.

He turned to leave, and from behind him, Pucetti said,
‘Das vedanya.’

Knowing no Russian, Brunetti could not respond in kind, but he said goodnight and left the building. The woman’s teaching mathematics, and Pucetti’s studying Russian to be good enough to please her parents. On his way home, Brunetti considered this, wondering if, in the end, he himself was nothing but a dumb cop.

On Fridays Paola did not have to go to the university, and so she usually spent the afternoon preparing a special meal. All of the family had come to expect it, and that night they were not disappointed. She had found a leg of lamb at the butcher’s behind the vegetable market and served it with tiny potatoes sprinkled with rosemary, zucchini
trifolati,
and baby carrots cooked in a sauce so sweet that Brunetti could have continued to eat them for dessert, had that not been pears baked in white wine.

After dinner he lay, not unlike a beached whale, in his usual place on the sofa, permitting himself just the smallest glass of Armagnac, merely a whisper of liquid in a glass so small as barely to exist.

When Paola joined him after dismissing the children to their homework with the life-endangering threats they had come to anticipate, she sat down and, far more honest in these things than he, poured herself a healthy swig of Armagnac. ‘Lord, this is good,’ she said after the first sip.

As if in a dream, Brunetti said, ‘You know who called me today?’

‘No, who?’

‘Franco Rossi. The one from the Ufficio Catasto.’

She closed her eyes and leaned back in her chair. ‘Oh, God, and I thought it was all over or had gone away.’ After a while she asked, ‘What did he say?’

‘He wasn’t calling about the apartment.’

‘Why else would he call you?’ Before he could answer, she asked, ‘He called you at work?’

‘Yes. That’s what’s so strange about it. When he was here, he didn’t know I worked for the police. He asked me, well, he sort of asked me what I did, and all I said was that I’d studied law.’

‘Do you usually do that?’

‘Yes.’ He offered no other explanation, and she asked for none.

‘But he found out?’

‘That’s what he said. Someone he knew told him.’

‘What did he want?’

‘I don’t know. He was calling on his
telefonino,
and since it sounded like he was going to tell me something he didn’t want made public, I suggested he call me back from a public phone.’

‘And?’

‘He didn’t call.’

‘Maybe he changed his mind.’

To the extent that a man can shrug when he is filled with lamb and lying on his back, Brunetti shrugged.