The Waters of Eternal Youth (20 page)

‘Read it before you say that, Brunetti,' Patta said in an ugly voice, slamming his palm flat on the papers again and shoving them in Brunetti's direction.

Once Patta had removed his hand, Brunetti picked up the papers and held them at the correct distance. The cover page bore the letterhead of the Ministry of the Interior. Brunetti reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and took out his glasses. ­One-­handedly he shook them open and put them on. The address jumped into clear focus, as did the text.

Worthy Dottor Patta,

Please note that the Ministry has been informed of – and is about to initiate an investigation of – certain grave irregularities in a number of ongoing investigations currently being conducted by the Questura di Venezia. These irregularities include – but are not limited to:

1. The unauthorized investigation into the bank records of private citizens and certain public and private organizations.

2. Similarly unauthorized searches of public documents and records.

3. Acquisition and perusal of state documents or reserved information by unauthorized persons or civilian employees.

4. Similar behaviour regarding the reserved medical records of certain individuals.

5. A persistent and deliberate attempt to disguise these actions.

The Ministry expects, by the 14
^th
of the current month, a full and detailed report of any facts bearing upon these irregularities and a list of the persons responsible for these violations as well as an accurate account of the precise nature of their involvement in each.

Attached please find a list of the statute numbers, as well as dates of passage, of the laws being violated by these activities.

The email was signed – there was no polite closing phrase – by someone named Eugenia Viscardi, whose title was ‘Assistant to the Minister' and whose illegible signature was placed above her printed name.

Brunetti finished reading, barely glanced at the second page, which contained the relevant numbers of the statutes involved as well as their dates of enactment. He removed his glasses and slipped them back into his pocket. With a gesture that showed just how difficult it was for him to disguise his contempt, Brunetti let the papers fall back on Patta's desk.

‘And you believed this, Dottore?' Brunetti asked, making his astonishment audible. ‘This?' he repeated, waving a hand at the papers that now lay supine on his superior's desk.

‘Of course I believed it,' Patta all but shouted. ‘And I believe it. It's from the Ministry of the Interior, for God's sake.'

‘Is it?' Brunetti asked lightly, having decided that this scene would be better played as farce than as tragedy. ‘Why do you believe that?'

Patta reached over and pulled the papers to him. He lifted them, checked the address of the sender and pounded his forefinger repeatedly upon the letterhead above it: Ministry of the Interior, sure enough.

‘Well, that's a credit to the person who sent it, I suppose,' Brunetti said. Should he play this as a scene from Oscar Wilde or from Pirandello? Then, in a much firmer voice, he said, ‘May I suggest that, to save ourselves time and effort, and possibly embarrassment, we do one simple thing?'

Caught off balance, Patta asked, ‘What?'

‘See if there is a Eugenia Viscardi working in the office of the Minister of the Interior.'

‘Don't be an idiot, Brunetti. Of course there is.' For emphasis, Patta gave the papers another tap, this time with the back of his fingers. ‘She signed this.'

‘Someone signed it, Dottore: I don't question that for a moment. But whether that person is Eugenia Viscardi and whether a woman named Eugenia Viscardi works for the Minister of the Interior, those are different matters entirely.'

‘That's impossible,' Patta said in an unnecessarily loud voice.

‘Then shall we find out?' Brunetti offered.

‘How?'

‘By asking the person I fear you believe responsible for these excesses to check to see if this woman actually works there.'

‘Signorina Elettra?' Patta asked in a softer voice.

‘Yes. For her it's as simple as . . .' The simile failed Brunetti and forced him to change to, ‘It's very simple for her.'

Unwilling to be a witness to Patta's uncertainty, Brunetti looked out of the window and noticed that the leaves had begun to drop from the vines that had overgrown the wall surrounding the garden on the other side of the canal.

‘Why don't you believe it?' Patta asked in what passed, with him, for a reasonable voice.

‘The vagueness of the accusations, for one thing,' Brunetti answered. ‘And the failure to name a single person directly. It's a blanket accusation against the entire Questura. And what's the value of a signature that's only scanned and sent? What legal value or credibility does it have?'

Patta pulled the email back towards himself and read through it again. He sighed and read it all a second time, his finger following the lines of the five specific accusations.

He looked at Brunetti and said, ‘Sit down, Commissario.' When Brunetti was seated, Patta said, ‘There seemed to be something wrong with it on first reading. A certain . . . lack of clarity, especially in the accusations made. And, of course, the tenuous signature.' Brunetti noticed the shift to the passive voice. Signora Viscardi, Assistant to the Minister of the Interior, whose signature was now tenuous, was no longer credited with having made the accusations. Instead, they had been made, requiring no need to attribute the making of them to a specific person. The gears of a Maserati could not be shifted more easily.

Brunetti sat and watched his superior in deferential silence, wondering how long it would take before the ­U-­turn was complete and the ­Vice-­Questore would reveal that he had smelled a rat from the beginning.

‘I smelled a rat from the beginning, you know,' Patta said. ‘I'm glad to see that you share my suspicions.' He smiled at Brunetti as at a valued colleague. He pushed himself back in his chair and folded his arms across his chest. ‘Any suggestions?'

‘Something like this really leaves us only one thing to do, don't you think, Signore?'

Patta nodded sagely but said nothing.

‘Once Signorina Elettra checks to see whether this Viscardi woman exists, that is,' Brunetti said, waving towards the papers that lay between them, as if Signora Viscardi were lying there herself, already half exposed to their exacting vision. ‘If she does not, then you two can decide how best to respond to this attack.' He was careful to use the plural and keep himself free from any involvement in that decision.

‘Exactly,' Patta confirmed. The ­Vice-­Questore picked up his phone and pressed in some numbers. Both of them could hear the phone ringing in the outer office. One, two and then Patta said, ‘Signorina, could you step in here for a moment?'

Signorina Elettra, whose reaction to the email was even more sceptical than Brunetti's – and whose comments more acerbic – managed to dispel the ­Vice-­Questore's fears in very little time. When a ­now-­scandalized Patta demanded to know who might have done such a thing as to send him a false threat, she had no suggestions to offer. She did say, however, that she might be able to discover the real source within a few days. Patta was pleased with this, as he always was when another person offered to do something for him.

She and Brunetti left their superior's office together, buoyed up by his pleasant farewells. Once the door was closed, Signorina Elettra told Brunetti that her friend Giorgio was out of contact temporarily, so it would be a few days before she would have the information about the calls made from the phonecards. Before he had time to ask why she did not, for once, use official channels to seek this information, she explained that the normal procedure took a minimum of ten days.

The investigation of Cavanis' death thus slowed down: the fingerprints and
DNA
left on the murder weapon found no match in police records; no one in the neighbourhood remembered having seen anything unusual near Cavanis' building on the day of the murder; the few men who knew him had heard only vague rumours – passed on from the barman – about his expected turn in fortune.

During this period, a young tourist fell to his death from the
altana
of the apartment he and his girlfriend were renting soon after they were involved in an argument in a restaurant. Police attention was diverted for a few days until it was determined that the argument had been between the two of them and a young Italian who had been too forward in his behaviour towards the young woman; further, the girl had been across the street in a café when her boyfriend fell. Their presence in the apartment, it turned out, had not been registered with the appropriate city office, a violation which led to an investigation of the owners of the apartment, a ­well-­known pharmacist and his wife, who worked in the Land Registry Office.

The police soon discovered that they owned and rented to tourists a total of six apartments, none of the income declared to the authorities. They were also the owners of a boutique ­twenty-­three-­room hotel which somehow had prospered in a building invisible to the Land Registry Office and the Guardia di Finanza, notwithstanding the fact that they had managed to obtain electricity, gas, telephone, water, and garbage collection services, and employed eleven people, all of whom were registered with the tax authority and paying their taxes.

The Guardia di Finanza soon relieved the police of the need to concern themselves with the pharmacist and his wife. The newspapers, although growing tired of the couple, failed to return the public eye to the murder on Rio Marin, so Pietro Cavanis was replaced by usurers, seven hundred kilos of cocaine in a truck coming off the ferry from Patras, and a band of Moldavian criminals known to be at work in the Veneto.

Brunetti felt obliged to tell the Contessa that they had made little progress in the investigation of what had happened to her granddaughter and decided to do this in person. To his surprise, he found both Griffoni and Manuela there when he arrived late one afternoon, and was even more surprised to learn that Griffoni occasionally brought Manuela to see her grandmother and stayed to have tea with them before taking Manuela back home.

Brunetti met Griffoni on the ground floor the next day and, as they started up towards their offices, asked her about this. She explained that, since the horse that she was going out to Preganziol to ride still legally belonged to the Contessa, the least she could do to thank her was accompany Manuela once a week when she went to see her grandmother.

‘What do you talk about with Manuela?' Brunetti asked.

‘Oh, about the people we see on the street, or the shop windows, or the dogs that go by, and how nice it is to have tea with her grandmother.'

‘Every week?'

‘More or less,' Griffoni said. ‘It makes Manuela happy.'

‘Seeing you?' Brunetti asked.

‘Getting out and being with people, seeing life on the streets. Her mother doesn't get on well with her ex- ­mother-­in-­law and doesn't like to go there. This way, with me, Manuela gets to see her grandmother, who's very happy to have her visit,' Griffoni said, having failed to answer his question.

‘What about the horse?' he asked, pausing when they arrived at the second floor.

‘Oh, I go out once in a while and take her out. Petunia's very sweet.'

‘Is that enough for you?' Brunetti asked, not at all sure what he meant but thinking of her silver medal and the sort of horse that would be worth transporting to the Olympics.

‘At this time of our lives, it is. Both of us have had time to calm down and take things more easily,' Griffoni said, a remark that reminded Brunetti of how very little he knew about her life beyond the Questura.

‘Do you ride her in that field?' he asked.

‘The first few times, Enrichetta asked me to, and I did. But then we both got bored, and Enrichetta could see that, so she told me to go out on the paths in the woods.' She smiled at that. ‘It's much better.'

‘I don't remember any woods there,' Brunetti said.

‘Well, there's a plantation where trees are grown to be harvested, and there are paths between the trees,' she said, drawing the trees and the paths with her hands. ‘Besides, we're not doing anything fancy, just trotting along and getting to know one another.'

‘Like a marriage?' he asked.

‘A little bit, yes,' Griffoni laughed, but before she could say anything else, Lieutenant Scarpa approached and stopped at the head of the stairs. Brunetti moved so that Scarpa would not have to pass between them.

‘Good afternoon, Commissari,' he said, raising his hand and giving Brunetti an uncharacteristic smile.

‘Lieutenant,' they both acknowledged and remained silent until his footsteps had disappeared below them. Griffoni said, ‘I'll get back to work,' and turned towards her office, while Brunetti continued towards his own.

That same night the temperature plummeted and it rained: buckets, torrents, floods, cascades. The next morning people waited to leave their homes until they could see that the streets had rejected the thin coating of ice that the rain had left behind. The air had been washed clean, and for the first time in months Brunetti could see the Dolomites from the window of the kitchen.

Brunetti put on his ­thickest-­soled shoes, more suitable for the mountains than for the city, and walked to the ­corner, where he decided to take the vaporetto, conscious that, for the first time in his life, the idea of falling on the street had influenced his behaviour.

When he arrived at the Questura, the officer at the door told him that Signorina Elettra had asked him to go to her office. No, he replied in response to Brunetti's question, the ­Vice-­Questore had not yet arrived.

He could tell, when he entered her office, that she had something unpleasant to tell him. They exchanged greetings, and Brunetti stepped back to lean against the windowsill. No sun to warm his back today. It was Tuesday, and she had been to the flower market, so her office was ablaze, today with tulips: three, no, four different vases of them and no doubt a few more in Dottor Patta's office.

In a bow to autumn, Signorina Elettra was wearing a deep orange woollen dress, with a dark chrysanthemum- red scarf wrapped closely around her neck. Her hair, usually gleaming chestnut, appeared to have more red highlights today. ‘You're not going to like this,' she said, not at all to his surprise.

‘What?'

‘There are two things, Commissario. It's been a week and Giorgio still hasn't been in touch, and he's the only one I can ask to find the calls made with those cards.' She forestalled his question by saying, ‘Yes, I sent an official request, but it'll be at least another week before we get any sort of response.'

Brunetti had the feeling that this news was the lesser evil and said, ‘Let's hope Giorgio can find the information sooner.' He smiled to show he was neither angry nor impatient.

She gave an uncharacteristic ‘Um' before she said, ‘And Dottor Gottardi has looked at all the files concerning Manuela and thinks there's nothing to pursue.' She raised both hands in a sign of surrender.

‘And?' Brunetti asked, refusing to permit himself to remark that Dottor Gottardi was not proving to be a compliant magistrate.

‘He's read your report about the possible link to Cavanis' murder, and he sees no reason to believe the two cases are related. It's not his case, but he says there's not been much progress.'

‘And so?' he asked politely. She hadn't yet said anything he particularly disliked, so the surprise no doubt lay in whatever order the magistrate might have for him.

‘And so he's suggested you be put in charge of everything that's emerged after that boy fell from the
altana
.'

‘I beg your pardon,' Brunetti said. ‘I thought the Guardia di Finanza had taken it over.'

‘That case, yes,' she said. ‘But he thinks there should be a separate investigation into the private hotels and bed and breakfast places.' She looked at the keyboard of her computer as she told him this.

Suddenly he remembered a picture from a book he'd read to the kids when they were young: a cat on a branch in a tree, slowly disappearing and leaving behind only his menacing smile. And that thought led him to Scarpa's almost cordial smile as he was coming up the stairs.

‘It's Scarpa, isn't it?' he asked.

She looked at the screen of her computer and nodded. ‘I'd say so. Probably.'

‘How did he manage that?' Brunetti asked, sure she would know.

‘Do you know Dottor Gottardi?' she asked.

Brunetti had spoken to the magistrate, who had been there only a few months, but had never worked with him on a case before Manuela's.

‘He's from Trento, isn't he?' Brunetti asked.

‘Yes.'

‘And?'

‘And his family is involved in local politics.'

Why was she telling him this? Who cared about the magistrate's family when the only thing that mattered was that he could be such a fool as to believe anything Scarpa told him.

‘His father was mayor of their town for thirty years, and now his older brother is.'

‘How did you learn all of this?' Brunetti demanded with more force than he should have used.

‘My best friend told me,' she said, patting the top of the computer screen.

That stopped Brunetti. ‘What else did your friend tell you?'

‘The whole family are Separatists,' she said. ‘They want to return to being part of Austria.'

‘How does this affect Dottor Gottardi?'

She flicked something invisible from the front of her skirt and said, ‘Every one of them is to the right of the Lega Nord, especially on the subject of immigration. So Gottardi's chosen to become the family rebel. Everyone's equal, immigrants and southerners must be treated with respect.'

A soft moan escaped Brunetti as he followed this to the logical conclusion. ‘So he's got to fall over backwards to show how he treats them with respect? And that means he feels obliged to pay attention to Scarpa because he's a Sicilian.'

‘That's a bit of an exaggeration,' Signorina Elettra suggested.

‘But no less true for that,' insisted Brunetti. He cast around for a solution, not only because he thought the investigation of the hotels could easily be handled by the uniformed branch – Pucetti was certainly bright enough to do it – but because he refused to become Scarpa's puppet.

He glanced over and asked if she had a suggestion, and her face showed that she had.

Memory led to inspiration and he said, ‘The false email from the Ministry of Justice?'

She smiled and nodded.

‘Can you prove it was Scarpa?'

‘Perhaps not in any way that would stand up legally, but the original sender was not very well disguised in the mail from Signora Viscardi.' She said this last with infinite contempt. ‘It can easily be traced back to the Lieutenant.'

A chess player would no doubt have viewed the situation in terms of pawns and rooks being moved about on the board, bestowing advantage here and there. It was now Brunetti's move, but instead of flirting with two forward and one to the right to take the other knight, he wanted to beat Scarpa's head in with a stick.

‘What are our options?' he asked.

She smiled at the plural and gave something that resembled a nod. ‘He's pushed me beyond options, I'm afraid,' Signorina Elettra said, sounding not unlike an exasperated kindergarten teacher. The time of soft words had ended. ‘I think I'll threaten him.'

‘How?'

‘I'll tell him I'm going to send the email to the actual Assistant of the Minister, who is a friend of mine, and ask her to have the Minister read it.'

‘Is she really a friend?' Brunetti asked, marvelling at how wide her net was spread.

‘Of course not.' Then, after a moment, she added, ‘But at least she exists, unlike Eugenia Viscardi.'

‘What will you tell him?'

‘That I'm following the trail of the email to its real source.' Her smile was very broad and equally cold. But then her face grew more sober and she said, ‘I can't imagine how he could have been so sloppy.' Was that disappointment he heard in her voice?

‘He underestimated you,' Brunetti said, meaning it as a compliment.

‘Yes,' she agreed. ‘How insulting.'

Abandoning all thought of mincing words, Brunetti asked, ‘What will you make him do?'

‘Tell Dottor Gottardi that he's given the subject further thought and he's seen that he's been rash, and perhaps it would be wise to continue the investigation into what happened to Manuela.'