A Venetian Reckoning Read online

  'But he had them,' Brunetti said. 'Yes, he had them.'

  'He could easily call from a public phone,' Brunetti suggested.

  ‘I know, I know.'

  'What about other international calls? Any country he called often?'

  'He called a lot of countries often.'

  'International clients?' Brunetti asked.

  'Some of the calls were to clients, yes. But a lot of them don't correspond to anyone he worked for.'

  'What countries?' Brunetti asked.

  'Austria, the Netherlands, and the Dominican Republic,' della Corte began, then added, 'Wait and I'll get the list.' The phone clunked down, Brunetti heard the rustle of papers, and then della Cortes voice returned. 'And Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria.'

  'How often did he call?'

  'Some of them twice a week.'

  'The same number or numbers?'

  'Often, but not always.'

  'You trace them?'

  The Austrian number is listed as a travel agency in Vienna.'

  'And the others?'

  'Commissario, I don't know how familiar you are with Eastern Europe, but they don't even have phone books, let alone an operator who can tell you who a number belongs to.’

  'The police?’

  Delia Corte let out a snort of contempt. 'Have you called the numbers?’ Brunetti asked. 'Yes. No one answers.' 'None of them?’ 'None of them.'

  'What about the phone in the railway station and the bar?' Brunetti asked.

  As an answer, he got another of those snorts, but then della Corte explained. 'I was lucky to get permission to trace the numbers.’ Delia Corte paused a long time, and Brunetti waited for the request he knew was coming. 'I thought that, as you're so much closer, you might be able to get someone to keep an eye on the phone in the bar.'

  'Where is it?' Brunetti asked, taking a pen from his desk but being very careful not to promise anything.

  'Does that mean you'll send someone?' ' ‘I’ll try,’ Brunetti answered, the best he could do. •Where is it?’

  'All I have is a name and address. I don't know Mestre well enough to know where it is.' As far as Brunetti was concerned, Mestre was not a city worth knowing well enough to know where anything was.

  ‘It's called Bar Pinetta. Via Fagare, number 16. You know where it is?' della Corte asked.

  'Via Fagare's somewhere around the railway station, I think. But I've never heard of the bar.' Having agreed, sort of, to help with this, Brunetti thought he could ask for some information in return. 'Have you got any idea how they might be connected?'

  'You know about the pharmaceuticals?' della Corte asked.

  'Who doesn't?' Brunetti asked by way of answer. 'You think they might both be mixed up in that?'

  Instead of answering directly, della Corte said, it's a possibility. But we want to start by checking all of his clients. He worked for a lot of people in the Veheto.'

  'The right kind of people?'

  'The very best kind of people. In the last couple of years, he'd begun to call himself a "consultant" instead of just an accountant.'

  'Was he good?'

  'He's said to have been the best.’

  'Good enough to figure out the tax form then,' Brunetti suggested, hoping with the joke to create more fellow feeling with della Corte. All Italians, he knew, were united in their loathing of the tax office, but this year, with a tax form that numbered thirty-two pages and which the Minister of Finance had confessed himself unable to understand or complete, that loathing had reached new intensity.

  Della Corte's muttered obscenity, though it certainly made clear his feelings about the tax office, did not speak over much of fellow feeling. 'Yes, it seems he was good enough even for that. I tell you, his list of clients would make most accountants sick with envy.'

  'Did it include Medi-tech?' Brunetti asked, naming the largest of the companies embroiled in the current price-fixing scandal.

  'No. It looks like he didn't have anything to do with their work for the Ministry. And his work for the Minister appears to have been entirely private, that is, on his personal income.'

  'He wasn't involved in the scandal?' Brunetti asked, finding this even more interesting.

  'Not that we can see.'

  'Any other possible motive for.. .’ Brunetti paused for a moment, then found the right word, 'For his death?'

  Delia Corte paused a moment before answering. 'We haven't turned up anything. He was married, thirty-seven years, apparently happily. Four children, all of them university graduates, and none of them, from what we can see, any cause of trouble.'

  'Murder, then?'

  'Most probably.'

  'You going to give it to the press?'

  'No, not until we have something else to tell them or unless one of them finds out about the coroner's report,' answered della Corte, making it sound like he would be able to prevent that from happening for some time.

  'And when they find out?' Brunetti was leery of the press and its many violences upon the truth.

  ‘I’ll worry about that when it happens,' della Corte said brusquely. 'Will you let me know if you find out anything about that bar?'

  'Certainly. Can I call you at the Questura?'

  Delia Corte gave him the direct number to his office. 'And, Brunetti, if you find anything, don't give the information to anyone else who might answer my phone, all right?'

  'Of course,' Brunetti agreed, though he found the request strange.

  'And I'll call you if Trevisan's name comes up again. See if you can find out any way they might have been connected. A phone number isn't all that much.'

  Brunetti agreed, though it was something, and as far as Trevisan's death was concerned, it was a good deal more than they had.

  Delia Corte's goodbye was abrupt, as if he had been called away to more important things.

  Brunetti replaced the phone and sat back in his chair, trying to think of a connection that could link the Venetian lawyer to the accountant from Padua..Both men would have travelled in the same social and professional circles, so it was not at all to be wondered at if they knew one another or if one's address book listed the other's number. How odd, though, for it to be listed without a name, and what odd company for it to keep, two public phones and numbers in some foreign country. Odder still was the fact that the number should appear in the address book of a man who was murdered during the same week as Trevisan.

  Brunetti called down to Signorina Elettra to ask if SIP had yet responded to his request that they supply a record of all of Trevisan's phone calls for the last six months, only to learn that she had placed their report on his desk the previous day. He hung up and began to sort through the papers on the top of his desk, shoving aside personnel reports he had postponed completing for the last two weeks and a letter from a colleague with whom he had worked in Naples, too depressing to be reread or answered.

  The phone records were there, a manila folder that contained what turned out to be fifteen sheets of computer print-out. He cast his eye down the first page and saw that only long-distance calls were not' ‘I, both from Trevisan's office and from his home. Each column began with the numerical city code or, where it applied, country code and then listed the number called, the time of the call, and its duration. In a separate column to the right were listed the names of the cities and countries to which those codes corresponded. Quickly, he paged through the report and saw that it listed only outgoing calls made from the phones and bore no listing of those received. Perhaps no request had been made, or perhaps SIP took longer to trace those, or perhaps, just as likely, some new bureaucratic nightmare had been invented for the processing of such a request, and the information would be delayed.

  Brunetti ran his eyes down the column of cities on the right No pattern appeared on the first pages, but by the fourth, he could see that Trevisan - or whoever had been calling from Trevisan's phones, as he was careful to remind himself - called three numbers in Bulgaria with some regularity, at least two
or three times a month. The same was true of numbers in Hungary and Poland. He remembered that the first country had been named by della Corte, though the others had not been. Interspersed with these were calls to the Netherlands and England, these perhaps explained by the nature of Trevisan's law practice. The Dominican Republic appeared nowhere on the list, and the calls to Austria and the Netherlands, the other countries della Corte had mentioned, seemed not to have been made with any great frequency.

  Brunetti had no idea now much of a lawyer's business would be handled by phone, so he had no idea if the list he was reading represented an inordinate number of phone calls.

  He called down to the switchboard and asked to be . connected to the number della Corte had given him. When the other policeman answered, Brunetti identified himself and asked to be given the numbers in Padua and Mestre that had been listed in Favero's address book.

  After della Corte read them out to him, Brunetti said, 'I've got a list of Trevisan's calls here, but only the long distance, so the Mestre number won't appear. You want to wait while I check it for the Padua number?'

  'Ask me if I want to the in the arms of a sixteen-year-old,' della Corte said. 'You'll get the same answer.'

  Taking that for a yes, Brunetti ran his eye down the list, pausing wherever he saw the 049 prefix of Padua. The first three pages revealed nothing, but then on the fifth, and again on the ninth, he saw the number. It disappeared for a time, and then appeared on the fourteenth page, called three times in the same week.

  Della Corte s answer when Brunetti told him this was a low, two-syllable hum. 'I think I better get someone to cover that phone in Padua.'

  'And I'll get someone to go and have a look at the bar,' Brunetti said, interested now, eager to know what the bar was like, who frequented it, but most eager to get his hands on a list of Trevisan's local calls and see if the bar's number appeared on it.

  Brunetti's long years and grim experience as a policeman had destroyed whatever belief he might ever have had in coincidence. A number that was known to two men who had been murdered within a few days of one another was not some random fact, some statistical curiosity to be commented on and then forgotten. The number in Padua had significance, though Brunetti had no idea what it was, and he was suddenly sure that the number of the bar in Mestre was going to appear on the list of Trevisan's local calls.

  Promising to let della Corte know as soon as he learned anything about the phone in Mestre, he depressed the bar on the receiver and dialled Vianello's extension. When the sergeant answered, Brunetti asked him to come up to his office.

  A few minutes later, Vianello came in. Trevisan?' he asked, meeting Brunetti's gaze with one of frank curiosity.

  'Yes. I've just had a call from the police in Padua, about Rino Favero.'

  'The accountant, the one who worked for the Minister of Health?' Vianello asked. When Brunetti nodded, Vianello burst out, speaking with real passion, 'They should all do it.'

  Brunetti looked up, momentarily startled.

  'Do what?' he asked.

  'Kill themselves, the whole filthy lot of them.' As suddenly as he had erupted, Vianello subsided and sat in the chair in front of Brunetti's desk.

  'What brought that on?' Brunetti asked.

  Instead of answering, Vianello shrugged, waving one hand in the air in front of him.

  Brunetti waited.

  'It was the editorial in the Corriere this morning,' Vianello finally answered. 'Saying what?'

  'That we should have pity on these poor men, driven to take their own lives by the shame and suffering imposed on them, that the judges should let them out of prison, return them to their wives and families. I forget the rest of it; just reading that much made me sick.' Brunetti remained silent, so Vianello continued. 'If someone who snatches a purse gets put in gaol, we don't read editorials, at least not in the Corriere, begging that they be released or that we all feel sorry for them. And God knows how much these pigs have stolen. Your taxes. Mine. Billions, thousands of billions.' Suddenly conscious of how high his voice was rising, Vianello repeated the wave of his hand, brushing away his anger, and asked, in a far more moderate voice, 'What about Favero?’

  'It wasn't suicide,' Brunetti said.

  Vianello "s look was frankly surprised. 'What happened?' he asked, his explosion apparently forgotten.

  'He had so much barbiturate in him there was no way he could have driven.'

  'How much?' Vianello asked.

  'Four milligrams' but before Vianello could tell him this was hardly a heavy dosage, he added, 'of Roipnol' Vianello knew as well as did Brunetti that four milligrams would put either one of them to sleep for the next day and a half.

  'What's the connection with Trevisan?' Vianello asked.

  Like Brunetti, Vianello had long since lost his faith in coincidence, so he listened with fixed attention to the story of the phone number known to both of the dead men.

  "The Padua railway station?' Vianello asked. 'Via Fagare?'

  'Yes, it's a bar called Pinetta's. You know it?'

  Vianello looked off to the side for a moment and then nodded. 'I think so, if it's the place I'm thinking of. Off to the left of the railway station?'

  'I don't know,' Brunetti answered. 'I know it's near the railway station, but I've never heard of it.'

  'Yes, I think it's this place. Pinetta's?'

  Brunetti nodded, waiting for Vianello to say more.

  'If it's the one I'm thinking of, it's pretty bad. Lots of North Africans, those 'vous compras' you see all over the place.' Vianello paused for a moment, and Brunetti prepared himself to hear some sort of slighting remark about these unlicensed vendors who crowded the streets of Venice, selling their imitation Gucci bags and African carvings. But Vianello surprised him by saying, instead, 'Poor devils.'

  Brunetti had long since abandoned the hope of ever hearing anything like political consistency from his fellow citizens, but still he wasn't prepared for Vianello's sympathy for these immigrant street vendors, usually the most despised of the hundreds of thousands of people flooding into Italy in hopes of dining on the crumbs that fell under the table of the country's wealth. Yet here was Vianello, a man who not only voted for the Lega Nord but who argued strongly that Italy should be divided in half just north of Rome - in his wilder moments, he was known to call for the building of a wall to keep out the barbarians, the Africans, for they were all Africans south of Rome - here was Vianello calling these same Africans 'poor devils’ and apparently meaning it.

  Though the remark puzzled Brunetti, he didn't want to spend time talking about it now. So he asked, instead, 'Have we got someone who can go in there at night?'

  'And do what?' Vianello asked, just as glad as Brunetti to avoid the other topic.

  'Have a couple of drinks. Talk to people. See who uses the phone. Or answers it'

  'Someone who doesn't look like a cop, you mean?'

  Brunetti nodded.

  'Pucetti?' Vianello suggested.1

  Brunetti shook his head. 'Too young.'

  'And probably too dean,’ Vianello added immediately.

  'You make it sound like a nice place, Pinetta's.'

  it's the kind of place where I'd prefer to be wearing my gun,' Vianello said. Then, after a moment's reflection, he added, too casually, 'Sounds like the place for Topa,’ mentioning a sergeant who had retired six months before, after thirty years with the police. Topa's real name was Romano, but no one had called him that for more than five decades, not since he was a child, small and round-bodied, looking just like the little baby mouse his nickname suggested. Even after he got his full growth and became so thick-chested that his uniform jackets had to be specially made, the name remained, wildly incongruous but no less unchangeable. No one ever laughed at Topa for having a- nickname with a feminine ending. A number of people, during his thirty years of service, had tried to harm him, but no one had ever dared laugh at his nickname.

  When Brunetti said nothing, Vianello glanced quickly up
at him and then as quickly down, ‘I know how you feel about him, commissario.' And then, before Brunetti had time to comment, 'He wouldn't even be working, at least not officially. He'd just be doing you a favour.'

  'By going into Pinetta's?'

  Vianello nodded.

  ‘I don't like it,' Brunetti said.

  Vianello continued. 'He'd just be a retired man, going into a bar for a drink, perhaps for a game of cards.' In the face of Brunetti's continuing silence, Vianello added, 'A retired policeman can go into a bar and have a game of cards if he wants to, can't he?'

  'That's the thing I don't know,' Brunetti said.

  'What?'

  'Whether he'd want to.' Neither of them, it was clear, wanted to mention or saw any sense in bringing up the reasons for Topa's early retirement. A year ago, Topa had arrested the twenty-three-year-old son of a city councillor for molesting an eight-year-old schoolgirl. The arrest took place late at night, at the young man's home, and when the suspect arrived at the Questura, his left arm and his nose were broken. Topa insisted that the young man had attacked him in an attempt to escape; the young man maintained that Topa had stopped on the way to the Questura, pulled him into an alley, and beaten him.

  The man at the desk when they arrived at the Questura that night tried, with no success, to describe the look that Topa gave the suspect when he began to tell this story. The young man never repeated it, and no official complaint was ever bunched. But a week later word filtered down from Vice-Questore Patta's office that it was time for the sergeant to retire, and he did, losing out on a part of his pension by doing so. The young man was sentenced to two years of house arrest. Topa, who had one grandchild, a girl of seven, was never heard to speak of the arrest, his retirement, or the events surrounding it.

  Refusing to acknowledge Brunetti's glance, Vianello asked,'Should I call him?'

  Brunetti hesitated for a moment and then said, with singular lack of good grace, 'All right.'

  Vianello knew better than to smile. 'He's not back from work until eight. I’ll call him then.'

  'Work?' Brunetti asked, though he knew he shouldn't. The law forbade retired officers from working: if they did, they forfeited their pensions.