Authors: Donna Leon
Neither he nor Brunetti needed to comment upon the folly of this, nor on the fact that so much of what would be sold in his shop as ‘original Venetian handcrafts’ was made in third world countries where the closest the workers ever came
to
a canal was the one behind their houses that served as a sewer.
‘Anyway, I took over the lease and my architect drew up the plans. That is, he drew them up a long time ago, as soon as the guy agreed I could take over, but he couldn’t present them in the Comune until the lease was in my name.’ Again he looked at Brunetti. ‘That was in March.’ Marco raised his right hand in a fist, shot up his thumb, repeated ‘March,’ and then counted out the months. ‘That’s seven months, Guido. Seven months those bastards have made me wait. I’m paying the rent, my architect goes into the planning office once a week to ask where the permits are, and every time he goes, they tell him that the papers aren’t ready or something has to be checked before I can be given the permissions.’
Marco opened his fist and laid his hand flat on the table, then put the other beside it, fingers splayed open. ‘You know what’s going on, don’t you?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ Brunetti said.
‘So last week I told my architect to ask them how much they wanted.’ He looked across, as if curious to see if Brunetti would register surprise, perhaps shock, at what he was telling him, but Brunetti’s face remained impassive.
‘Thirty million.’ Marco paused for a long time, but Brunetti said nothing. ‘If I give them thirty million, then I’ll have the permissions next week and the workers can go in and start the restorations.’
‘And if you don’t?’ Brunetti asked.
‘God knows,’ Marco said with a shake of his head. ‘They can keep me waiting another seven months, I suppose.’
‘Why haven’t you paid them before this?’ Brunetti asked.
‘My architect keeps saying it isn’t necessary, that he knows the men on the planning commission and it’s just a question of lots of requests before mine. And I’ve got problems with other things.’ Brunetti thought for a moment that Marco would tell him about them, too, but all he said was, ‘No, all you need to know about is this one.’
Brunetti remembered the time, a few years ago, when a chain of fast food restaurants had done extensive restorations in four separate locations, keeping their crews working day and night. Almost before anyone knew it, certainly before anyone had any idea that they were going to open, there they were, in business, the odour of their various beef products filling the air like summer in a Sumatran slaughterhouse.
‘Have you decided to pay them?’
‘I don’t have much of a choice, do I?’ Marco asked tiredly. ‘I already spend more than a hundred million lire a year for a lawyer as it is, just keeping ahead of the lawsuits people bring against me in the other businesses and trying to resolve them. If I bring a civil suit against people who work for the city for wilfully preventing me from running my business or whatever crime my lawyer can think of to charge them with, it would just cost me more and drag on for years, and in the end nothing would happen anyway.’
‘Why did you come to me, then?’ Brunetti asked.
‘I wondered if there was anything you could do? I mean, if I marked the money or something…’ Marco’s voice petered out and he tightened his fists. ‘It’s really not the money, Guido. I’ll make that back in a couple of months; so many people want to buy that junk. But I’m just sick to death of having to do business this way. I’ve got shops in Paris and Zurich, and none of this shit goes on there. You apply for building permission, they process your papers, and when they’re ready they give you the permissions and you begin the work. No one’s there, sucking at your tit.’ His fist smashed down on the table. ‘No wonder this place is such a mess.’ His voice rose, suddenly high-pitched and sharp as, for a moment that frightened Brunetti, Marco seemed to lose all control. ‘No one can run a business here. All these bastards want to do is suck us dry.’ Again, his hand came smashing down on the table. The two men and the bartender looked over at them, but none of this was new in Italy, so they nodded in silent agreement and went back to their own conversation.
Brunetti had no idea whether Marco’s condemnation was of Venice in particular or Italy in general. It hardly mattered: he was right either way.
‘What are you going to do?’ Brunetti asked.
Implicit in his question, and both men knew it, was the acknowledgement that there was no way Brunetti could help. As a friend he could commiserate and share Marco’s anger, but as a
policeman
he was impotent. The bribe would be paid in cash and so, as is the way with cash, it would leave no traces. If Marco made an official complaint against someone working in the planning commission, he might just as well close up his shops and go out of business, for he would never obtain another permit, no matter how minor, no matter how urgent.
Marco smiled and shifted to the end of the bench. ‘I just wanted to let off steam, I guess. Or maybe I wanted to push your nose in it, Guido, since you work for them, sort of, and if that was the reason, then I’m sorry and I apologize.’ His voice sounded normal, but Brunetti watched his fingers, this time folding the four corners of a paper napkin into neat triangles.
Brunetti was surprised at how deeply he was offended that any friend of his should consider him as working for ‘them’. But, if he didn’t work for ‘them’, then whom did he work for?
‘No, I don’t think that was why,’ he finally said. ‘Or at least I hope it wasn’t. And I’m sorry, too, because there’s nothing I can do. I could tell you to make
una denuncia
, but I might as well tell you to commit suicide, and I don’t think I want to do that.’ He wondered how Marco could continue to open new businesses if this was the sort of thing he met at every turn. He thought about that restless boy, the one with the big dreams, who had shared his school bench for three years in a row, and he remembered how Marco could never sit still for long, yet he always managed to find the patience to complete one task before rushing off to another.
Maybe
Marco was programmed like a bee and had no option but to work at something and fly off to something new as soon as he’d finished.
‘Well,’ Marco began, slipping out of the bench and getting to his feet. He reached into his pocket, but Brunetti held up a monitory hand. Marco understood, took his hand out of his pocket and extended it to the still-sitting Brunetti.
‘Next time, mine?’
‘Of course.’
Marco glanced at his watch. ‘I’ve got to run, Guido. I’ve got a shipment of Murano glass,’ he began, placing a light smile and heavy emphasis on ‘Murano’, ‘coming in from the Czech Republic and I’ve got to be at the Customs to see it gets through without any trouble.’
Before Brunetti could rise from the bench, Marco was gone, walking quickly, as he had always walked, off to some new project, some new scheme.
3
THOUGH BRUNETTI AND
Paola listened, after dinner, to each other’s account of the day, neither of them saw much of a connection between the two events; certainly neither of them connected the stories they’d heard to the idea of honour or its demands. Paola, in sympathy with Marco, said she’d always liked him, surprising Brunetti into saying, ‘But I thought you didn’t.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘I suppose because he’s so different from the sort of person you tend to like.’
‘Specifically?’
‘I always thought you considered him something of a hustler.’
‘He is a hustler. That’s precisely why I like him.’ When she saw his confusion, she explained,
‘Remember
, I spend most of my professional life in the company of students or academics. The first are usually lazy, and the second are always self-satisfied. The first want to talk about their delicate sensibilities and wounded souls, some sudden injury to which has prevented them from completing what they were meant to do for class; and the second want to talk about how their last monograph on Calvino’s use of the semicolon is going to change the entire course of modern literary criticism. So someone like Marco, who talks about tangible things, about making money and running a business, and who has never, once, in all these years, tried to impress me with what he knows or where he’s been or burdened me with long stories of his suffering; someone like Marco’s a glass of prosecco after a long afternoon spent drinking cold camomile tea.’
‘Cold camomile tea?’ he inquired.
She smiled. ‘I threw it in for the effect achieved by the contrast with the prosecco. It’s a technique of artful exaggeration, akin to the
reductio ad absurdum
, that I’ve picked up from my colleagues.’
‘Who, I imagine, are not at all like prosecco.’
She closed her eyes and put her head back in an attitude of exquisite pain, the sort usually observed in pictures of Saint Agatha. ‘There are days when I’m tempted to steal your gun and take it with me.’
‘Who would you use it on, students or professors?’
‘Surely you’re joking,’ she said in feigned astonishment.
‘No, who?’
‘On my colleagues. The students, poor babies, they’re just young and callow and will grow up, most of them, and turn into reasonably pleasant human beings. It’s my colleagues I long to destroy, if only to put a stop to the endless litany of self-congratulation I have to listen to.’
‘All of them?’ he asked, accustomed to hear her denounce particular people and thus surprised at her scope.
She considered this, as if she knew there were six bullets in his gun and she was preparing a list. After a while she said, not without a certain disappointment, ‘No, not all of them. Maybe five or six.’
‘But that’s still half of your department, isn’t it?’
‘Twelve on the books, but only nine teach.’
‘What do the other three do?’
‘Nothing. But it’s called research.’
‘How can that be?’
‘One of them is aggressive and probably gaga; Professoressa Bettin had what is described as a crisis of nerves and has been put on medical leave until further notice, which probably means until she retires; and the Vice-Chairman, Professore Della Grazia, well, he’s a special case.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘He’s sixty-eight and should have retired three years ago, but he refuses to leave.’
‘But he doesn’t teach?’
‘He can’t be trusted with female students.’
‘What?’
‘You heard me. He can’t be trusted with female
students
. Or, for that matter,’ she added after a reflective pause, ‘with female faculty.’
‘What does he do?’
‘With the students it’s a kind of dirty-minded subtext to everything he says during his tutorials, well, when he still used to have them. Or he’d read graphic descriptions of sex in his classes. But always from the classics, so no one could complain, or if they did, he’d take on an attitude of shocked disdain, as if he were the only protector of the Classical tradition.’ She paused for him to respond, but when he didn’t she went on: ‘With the younger faculty members I’ve been told that he blocks their chance of promotion unless there’s an exchange of sex. He’s the Vice-Chairman of the department, so he gets to approve promotions or, in some cases, disapprove them.’
‘You said he’s sixty-eight,’ Brunetti said, not without a certain disgust.
‘Which, if you think about it, just gives you some idea of how long he’s got away with it.’
‘But no longer?’
‘To a lesser degree, at least since he was taken out of the classroom.’
‘What does he do?’
‘I told you, research.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘It means he collects his salary and, when he decides to leave, he’ll collect a generous bonus and then an even more generous pension.’
‘Is all of this common knowledge?’
‘Among the faculty, certainly; probably among the students, as well.’
‘And nothing is done about it?’
As soon as he spoke, he knew what she was going to answer, and she did. ‘It’s no different from what Marco told you today. Everyone knows these things go on, but no one is willing to take the risk of making a formal complaint because of the consequences. To be the first one to make this public would be professional suicide. They’d be sent to some place like Caltanissetta and made to teach a class in something like…’ He watched her attempting to formulate a subject of sufficient horror. ‘Elements of Bardic Verse in Early Catalan Court Poetry.’
‘It’s strange,’ he said. ‘I suppose we’ve all come, more or less, to expect this sort of thing in a government office. But we all think, or maybe we hope – or maybe I do, anyway – that it’s somehow different in a university.’
Paola repeated her imitation of Saint Agatha and soon after they went to bed.
In the morning, over coffee, Paola asked, ‘Well?’
Brunetti knew exactly what this referred to: the answer he had not given the previous evening, when Paola had told him about the request of her student, and so he said, ‘It depends on what the crime was that was committed, and what the sentence was.’
‘She didn’t say what the crime was, only that he was convicted and sent to San Servolo.’
Idly stirring his coffee, Brunetti asked, ‘And the woman’s Austrian? Did she say who the man was?’
Paola thought back to her hurried conversation with the girl, trying to remember details. ‘No, but she did say the woman was an old friend of her grandfather, so I assume she’s talking about him.’
‘What’s the girl’s name?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Why do you need to know that?’
‘I could ask Signorina Elettra to see if there’s anything in the files.’
‘But the old woman isn’t related to her,’ Paola protested, somehow reluctant to give the girl up to police investigation, no matter how delicate and no matter how well intended that investigation might be. Who knew the consequences of introducing her name into the police computer?
‘Presumably her grandfather would be,’ Brunetti said, sounding far more pedantic than he wanted to but irritated that his wife had brought this homework back with her.
‘Guido,’ Paola said in a voice she herself found unusually firm, ‘all she wanted to know was whether it was theoretically possible that a pardon could be granted. She didn’t ask for a police examination, just for information.’ Paola, a professor of the old school, could not shake herself of the belief that, in some way, she functioned
in loco parentis
to her students, a belief which hardened her resolve not to reveal the girl’s name.