GB_23: By Its Cover: A Commissario Guido Brunetti Mystery Page 6

  ‘And if you don’t feel the enthusiasm …’ he began.

  ‘Then there’s no way you’ll ever feel their excitement,’ she said. ‘Or even really understand it.’

  Her mood had softened somehow and so he asked, ‘And the Contessa?’

  Signorina Elettra’s look was suddenly austere. ‘What about her?’ she asked.

  He danced about mentally, searching for a task that would justify his having brought the Contessa back into the conversation. ‘I’d like you to see what you can find out about the gift she made to the library: it was about ten years ago. Anything you can find about the terms and conditions of the donation might help,’ he added, thinking of Patta’s suggestion that the Contessa might ask for the return of the books.

  Her head was lowered over the notebook as she wrote down his request. ‘I’d also like you to see if there’s anything you can find about Aldo Franchini, who lives down towards the bottom of Via Garibaldi and taught in a private school in Vicenza until about three years ago. He has a younger brother who was at school with the Director of the library, who’s probably in her late fifties. So he’s certainly not a young man.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘You might check on his involvement with the Church.’

  She looked up at him and smiled. ‘We live in Italy, Commissario.’

  ‘Which means?’

  ‘That, like it or not, we are all involved with the Church.’

  ‘Indeed,’ was the first thing he could think of to say. ‘But even more so in this case: he used to be a priest.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Indeed,’ he said and turned to leave.

  As he started to walk away, she asked, ‘What sort of thing are you looking for about this Aldo Franchini?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Brunetti confessed. ‘It seems that he was sitting in the same room for at least some of the time that the thefts were taking place.’ She raised her eyebrows at this. ‘For the last three years, he’s been reading the Fathers of the Church.’

  ‘How much time does he spend there? Reading.’

  ‘I didn’t ask. But it must be a great deal. The librarian said he’d become a piece of furniture, almost one of the staff.’

  ‘And he said nothing to them about what was going on?’ she asked.

  ‘He might not have noticed anything.’

  ‘So enraptured with the ravings of the Fathers of the Church?’

  ‘Or his chair might have faced in the other direction.’

  She allowed a few seconds to pass and then asked, ‘Could he have been interested or involved in what was happening?’

  Brunetti shrugged. ‘Involved would mean sitting and reading the Fathers of the Church for three years, or pretending to read them: I don’t know which is worse. Can you imagine the level of greed that would induce a person to do that?’ Before she could answer, he added, ‘Besides, if he’s been reading the Fathers of the Church seriously, then it’s unlikely he’d be involved in anything like this.’

  She looked away from him and at the now-empty screen of her computer for so long that he thought she had nothing to say, but finally she asked, ‘Do you really believe that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Remarkable,’ she said, then added, making no attempt to hide her own surprise, ‘So do I.’

  6

  Brunetti paused on the stairs to reflect on the strangeness of their joint assumption that a person who spent his time reading the Fathers of the Church was likely to be honest. There were many reasons why Franchini could have been reading them: interest in rhetoric, history, the minutiae of theological disagreement. Yet both Brunetti and Signorina Elettra had automatically assumed he could not have been involved in the thefts, nor even aware of them, as if the mantle of the Fathers’ presumed sanctity had covered Franchini as well.

  Brunetti did not remember what the historical Tertullian had to say about theft, but he could hardly have been made a Father of the Church unless he had condemned it, or what use was the Commandment? Was it the fourth? Coveting came later in the list, he knew, a sin that Brunetti had always seen as the antipasto to Orwell’s Thought Crime. In fact, he thought it quite normal to covet someone else’s wife or goods. Why else were movie stars famous and why else build the Reggia di Caserta, buy a Maserati or a Rolls-Royce unless covetousness and envy were in our bones?

  Back at his desk and forgetful of the time difference, he decided to call the office of the History Department of the University of Kansas. He dialled the number and, after five rings, got a recording saying that the offices were open from 9 a.m. until 4 p.m. Monday to Friday and please press 1 to leave a message. He switched to English and explained that he was a commissario of the Italian police and would like someone to call him or email him. He gave his name, phone number, and email address, thanked the machine, and hung up. He looked at his watch again and worked out on the fingers of both hands that it was still the middle of the night in Kansas. Always uneasy when reliant upon the combination of technology and office workers, he turned on his computer and found the email address of the Department of History. He wrote a more detailed explanation of his request, gave Nickerson’s name and area of study as well as the name of the person who had signed the letter, and asked for the courtesy of a quick response because this concerned a criminal case.

  He read quickly through his emails, finding nothing that interested him, however insistent the demands for responses. He brought up the Questura’s file of people arrested in the last ten years, typed in the name Piero Sartor, then added Pietro, just to be sure. His request brought up two possibilities, one for Piero and one for Pietro. But their ages, the first more than sixty and the other only fifteen, excluded them a priori. For purposes of exclusion, he entered the name of Patrizia Fabbiani, but it was not in their files.

  While he was doing this, he thought he might as well duplicate Signorina Elettra’s search and typed in the name of Aldo Franchini. ‘Well, well, well,’ he muttered as the system listed a man of sixty-one, living at Castello 333. Brunetti didn’t know where it was exactly, but he knew it was somewhere beyond the end of Via Garibaldi.

  Franchini had been questioned, though not arrested, six months earlier in connection with an incident in Viale Garibaldi that had sent him to the hospital with a broken nose. A man sitting on a bench along the Viale had told the police that he noticed Franchini on another, a book in one hand, talking to a woman who was standing in front of him. Some time later, he heard an angry voice and looked up to see a man standing where the woman had been. With no advance warning, the man pulled Franchini to his feet and hit him, then walked away.

  The assailant, who was quickly identified and arrested, had a record of petty theft and the receiving of stolen property and was under court order to remain at least one hundred metres from his former companion, whose life he had threatened. She turned out to be the woman who had been talking to the victim.

  Franchini, however, refused to press charges against the assailant, saying that he had stood up when the man shouted at him and must have tripped and broken his nose when he fell.

  Brunetti entered the name of the assailant, Roberto Durà, into the computer and discovered a string of arrests for minor crimes that had never sent him to jail, usually because of lack of witnesses or sufficient evidence or because the prosecuting magistrate had decided the case was not worth pursuing. He discovered that Durà was currently in jail in Treviso, sentenced three months ago to four years for armed robbery and assault.

  Brunetti looked out the window and saw blue sky, clouds huffing and puffing towards the east, a perfect day for a walk down to Castello to have a look around. He stopped in the squad room on his way out, where he saw Ispettore Vianello at his desk, bent forward and speaking into his telefonino, one hand shielding the phone to trap the sound of his voice. Brunetti stopped a few metres from him and watched his face: Vianello’s eyes were closed, his face intent, as though he were urging a racehorse to win, win, win.


  Brunetti had no wish to distract Vianello from the call, so he went to the desk Alvise shared with Riverre and found the former busy writing in a small notebook. When he approached, however, he saw that it was a crossword puzzle: Sudoku was perhaps too taxing for Alvise. So intent was he on the words that he did not sense the approach of his superior. Alvise actually jumped to his feet when Brunetti spoke his name.

  ‘Sì, Signore,’ he said, raising to his forehead the hand that held the pencil and putting his eye at risk.

  ‘When Vianello’s finished, would you ask him to come down to the bar?’

  ‘Of course, Commissario,’ Alvise said and, using his pencil, made a note in the margin of his puzzle book.

  ‘Thanks,’ Brunetti said, failing for once to find a way to engage Alvise in easy conversation. He left the Questura and went along the riva to the bar. Bambola, the Senegalese who now all but ran the place for its owner, smiled when Brunetti came in and poured him a glass of white wine. Brunetti took it, grabbed up that day’s copy of Il Gazzettino, and went to the booth at the far end, near the window, so he could see Vianello arriving. He opened the paper to the centre page. Idly, he looked at his watch: the time made him suddenly aware of how hungry he was. He took out his telefonino, thinking he’d send Paola an SMS to apologize for having forgotten about lunch, but he pushed away cowardice and called her.

  She grumbled, but since she didn’t name the dishes he had missed, he knew her heart wasn’t in it. He promised to be home on time for dinner, said he loved her beyond measure, and hung up. He called over to Bambola and asked him to choose three tramezzini for him and three for Vianello, then turned to the open pages.

  There was the usual political chaos, but Brunetti had vowed not to read anything to do with politics until the end of the year or the arrival of the Philosopher King. Fifty acres of farmland filled with toxic waste in Campania, complete with photos of the poisoned sheep who had had their last meal there. Guardia di Finanza blitz on the offices of the political party that had ruled Lombardia for the last decade. Well, that was politics, wasn’t it? Award of the city’s highest civic honour to the man who wanted to build a tower of surpassing ugliness on the mainland that would be visible from everywhere in Venice. Brunetti sighed and flipped back to the front page, where he saw the photo of the former Director of the MOSE project – seven billion Euros already spent to block the waters of the laguna – now arrested and charged with corruption. Brunetti smiled, raised his glass in a sardonic toast, and took a long sip.

  ‘Alvise said you wanted me to come down,’ Vianello said, setting down the plate of tramezzini and a glass of white wine. Before Brunetti could say anything, the Inspector went back to the bar and returned carrying two glasses of mineral water. He set them on the table and slipped on to the bench opposite Brunetti.

  Brunetti nodded his thanks and picked up a sandwich. ‘You get any fingerprints from those books?’ he asked, not having had time to speak to Vianello before now.

  Vianello took a sip of his wine and said, ‘I’ve never seen those two lab guys so close to tears, both of them.’

  ‘Why?’ Brunetti asked, and took a bite of his egg and tuna.

  ‘You ever think of how many people touch a book in a library?’ Vianello set his glass down and picked up a sandwich.

  ‘Oddio,’ Brunetti said. ‘Of course: there’d be scores of them.’ He sipped at his wine, then asked, ‘They take prints of the people who work there?’

  ‘Yes,’ Vianello said. ‘They kept saying there’d be hundreds of prints in a book, but they were cooperative when we said we had to have them.’

  ‘Even the Direttrice?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘She’s the one who told them just to do it. Even volunteered to give her own.’

  This surprised Brunetti, who had seldom found people in positions of authority cooperative with requests that the police made of them. ‘Good for her,’ he said and took another sandwich. ‘I’m going down to Castello to talk to someone, and I thought you might like to come along.’ Ham and artichokes, and he suspected Bambola must have scraped off some of the mayonnaise before putting it on the plate.

  ‘Sure,’ Vianello said and picked up a second sandwich. ‘You want me to be the good cop or the bad one?’

  Brunetti smiled in return and said, ‘No need for it today. We can both be good cops. I just want to talk to him.’

  ‘Who?’

  Brunetti explained the theft and vandalism at the library, mentioned the connection with the Morosini-Albanis, and then described Signorina Elettra’s strong response to the family name.

  ‘She knew the stepson?’ Vianello asked. ‘What’s his name? Giovanni? Gianni?’ He picked up another sandwich, then sipped at his wine.

  Brunetti’s curiosity was rekindled. Gianni Morosini-Albani was a poster boy for the eradication of the nobility: dishonest, a well-known consumer of illegal substances. He and Signorina Elettra? The very idea.

  He muted his desire to defend her and said only, ‘She didn’t seem pleased to hear his name.’

  ‘He has a reputation of being very charming,’ Vianello said with a complete lack of conviction.

  ‘Yes, many people seem to like him,’ Brunetti offered.

  Vianello dismissed that. ‘Years ago, I had to go along when he was arrested. Well, brought in for questioning. Must be fifteen years ago. He was very pleasant, invited the Commissario in, offered us all coffee. There were three of us, including the Commissario.’ Vianello did not smile at the memory.

  ‘Who was it?’

  ‘Battistella.’ Brunetti remembered him: a fool who had drifted his way to early retirement and could still occasionally be seen in the bars, talking about his illustrious career as a defender of justice. Over the years, Brunetti had noticed, he was no longer offered drinks but seemed willing to buy them for anyone who listened to him, which guaranteed him a constant audience.

  ‘He was thrilled, of course, Battistella. Here was the son of one of the richest families in the city, the heir, the ladies’ man, inviting us in for a coffee,’ Vianello said, his voice growing even harder. ‘Battistella fell in love with him, I think. If he’d wanted to escape, Battistella would have helped him, probably would have given him his gun and held the door for him.’

  ‘Why was he being brought in?’

  ‘A young girl, only about fifteen, sixteen. She’d ended up in the hospital with some sort of overdose the night before. She’d been at a party at the palazzo, but she was found – it was never explained how – at the side entrance to the hospital.’ Vianello paused and, voice even harder, corrected himself. ‘She said she was at the palazzo, but none of the people she said were there remembered seeing her.’

  ‘What happened to her?’

  Vianello gave an eloquent shrug. ‘She was a minor, so the record was sealed. She spent the night in the hospital, and the next morning she was allowed to go home. And when she finally told her parents about what had happened, they called us.’

  ‘And that’s why you went to see him?’ Brunetti reached for another sandwich but saw that Vianello had eaten the last one. He finished his wine.

  ‘The magistrate called him and said he wanted to speak to him about what had happened at the party, but Gianni said he was too busy, and what party was he talking about, anyway?’ Vianello picked up his glass, but there was none left, and he set it down again.

  ‘After the call, the magistrate sent us over to bring him in for a conversation.’

  ‘To see if he could remember the party? Or the girl.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Was it Rotili?’ Brunetti asked, naming a particularly aggressive magistrate whose successes had earned him a transfer to a small town on the border between Piemonte and France, where he could concern himself with the theft of skis and barn animals.

  ‘Yes, and this was probably the thing that led to his transfer. Gianni’s father was still alive then, and he refused to believe his son could do anything wrong.’

  Brunet
ti had never met the late Count, but he knew his reputation and the extent of his power. ‘So Rotili went to Piemonte?’

  ‘Yes,’ Vianello answered without comment.

  ‘And how did the story of the girl end?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘She named four people she said had been there. All of them were at least fifteen years older than she was,’ Vianello added. ‘Including Gianni.’

  ‘And none of them had been at a party and they had never seen the girl in their lives?’

  ‘Yes. And two of them were women,’ Vianello said, unable to hide his disgust.

  ‘How did Battistella behave?’

  ‘I was only a patrolman then, and I had the sense to keep my mouth shut, but it was pretty awful.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Meaning he was a man of about fifty who kowtowed to someone who couldn’t have been much more than thirty, who’d been arrested in at least two other countries by then, and who was known as a drug user, probably a dealer who sold them to his rich friends.’ Vianello leaned forward, bracing his weight on his forearms.

  ‘He told Battistella the girl must be crazy, to invent a story like that. When Battistella agreed with him, Morosini said it was probably because of drugs, and he thought it was terrible, the way people didn’t discipline their children.’

  Vianello shifted back in the bench with no warning, as if trying to get away from his words or from the memory of the scene. ‘I’d had some experience by then, so I didn’t say anything, just did my best to stand there and look stupid.’

  ‘Battistella always liked that,’ Brunetti permitted himself to observe. ‘What happened?’

  ‘It was a nice day, as I remember, so the two of them walked to the Questura together, chatting like the best of old friends.’ He paused, then added, ‘I’m surprised they didn’t hold hands.’