Death in a Strange Country (30 page)

He checked the copyright
of the book and saw that it had been printed only the year before, so the list
was current. He turned to the back and saw a region-by-region map of the places
where illegal dumping sites had been found. The provinces of Vicenza and Verona
were heavily dotted, especially the region just north of both cities, leading
up to the foothills of the Alps.

He closed the book,
folding the list carefully inside it. There was nothing more he could do until
he spoke to the boy’s father, but still he burned with the desire to go there
now, futile as he knew that desire to be.

The intercom buzzed. ‘Brunetti,’
he said, picking it up.

‘Commissario,’ Patta’s
voice said, ‘I’d like you to come down to my office right now.’

For a fleeting instant,
Brunetti wondered if Patta was having his phone tapped or a record kept of his
calls and somehow knew that he was still in contact with the American base.
Even this new information about the toxins, Brunetti knew, would not deflect
the other man from his attempt to keep things quiet. And the instant he learned
that Brunetti suspected that so lofty an institution as something that could be
graced with the name of ‘company’ might be involved, Patta was sure to threaten
to reprimand him officially if he persisted in his attempt to learn what had
happened. If the forces of law were not to defer to the desires of business,
then surely the Republic was imperilled.

He went immediately down
to Patta’s office, knocked, and was told to enter. Patta was poised at his
desk, looking as though he had just come from a film audition. A successful
one. As Brunetti entered, Patta was busy fitting one of his Russian cigarettes
into his onyx holder, careful to hold both away from his desk, lest a particle
of tobacco fall upon and somehow diminish the gleaming perfection of the
Renaissance desk behind which he sat. The cigarette proving resistant, Patta
kept Brunetti waiting in front of him until he had managed to fit it carefully
within the gold circle of the holder. ‘Brunetti,’ he said, lighting the
cigarette and taking a few cautious exploratory puffs, perhaps seeking to taste
the effect of the gold, ‘I’ve had a very upsetting phone call.’

‘Not your wife, I hope,
sir,’ Brunetti said in what he hoped was a meek voice.

Patta rested the
cigarette on the edge of his malachite ashtray, then grabbed quickly at it as
the weight of the holder caused it to topple back onto the desk. He replaced
it, this time resting it level, burning end and mouthpiece balanced on opposing
sides of the round ashtray. As soon as he took his hand from it, the weight of
the head of the holder pressed it down. The end of the cigarette slipped out,
and both cigarette and holder fell, the holder with a rich clatter, into the
bowl of the ashtray.

Brunetti folded his hands
behind him and looked out of the window, bouncing up and down a few times on
the balls of his feet. When he looked back, the cigarette was extinguished, the
holder gone.

‘Sit down, Brunetti.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ he
said, ever-polite, taking his usual place in the chair in front of the desk,

‘I’ve had,’ Patta
resumed, ‘a phone call.’ He paused just long enough to dare Brunetti to repeat
his suggestion, then continued, ‘From Signor Viscardi, from Milan.’ When
Brunetti asked nothing, he added, ‘He called to tell me that you are calling
his good name into question.’ Brunetti did not jump to his own defence, so
Patta was forced to explain. ‘He said that his insurance agent has received a
phone call, from you, I might add, asking how he knew so quickly that certain
things had been taken from the
palazzo.’
Had Patta been in love with the
most desirable woman in the world, he could not have whispered her name with
more adoration than he devoted to that last word. ‘Further, Signor Viscardi has
learned that Riccardo Fosco, a known leftist’ - and what did this mean,
Brunetti wondered, in a country where the President of the Chamber of Deputies
was a Communist? - ‘has been asking suggestive questions about Signor Viscardi’s
financial position.’

Patta paused here to give
Brunetti an opportunity to jump to his own defence, but he said nothing. ‘Signor
Viscardi,’ Patta continued, voice growing more indicative of the concern he
felt, ‘did not volunteer this information; I had to ask him very specific
questions about his treatment here. But he said that the policeman who
questioned him, the second one, though I see no reason why it was necessary to
send two, that this policeman seemed not to believe some of his answers. Understandably,
Signor Viscardi, who is a well-respected businessman, and a fellow member of
the Rotary International’ - it was not necessary here to specify who his fellow
member was -’found this treatment upsetting, especially as it came so soon
after his brutal treatment at the hands of the men who broke into his palace
and made off with paintings and jewellery of great value. Are you listening,
Brunetti?’ Patta suddenly asked.

‘Oh, yes, sir.’

‘Then why don’t you have
anything to say?’

‘I was waiting to learn
about the upsetting phone call, sir.’

‘Damn it,’ Patta shouted,
slamming his hand down on the desk. ‘This was the upsetting call. Signor
Viscardi is an important man, both here and in Milan. He has a great deal of
political influence, and I won’t have him thinking, and saying, that he has
been treated badly by the police of this city.’

‘I don’t understand how
he has been badly treated, sir.’

‘You understand nothing,
Brunetti,’ Patta said in tight-lipped anger. ‘You call the man’s insurance
agent the same day the claim is made, as if you suspected there was something
strange about the claim. And two separate policemen go to the hospital to
question him and show him photos of people who had nothing to do with the
crime.’

‘Did he tell you that?’

‘Yes, after we’d been
speaking a while and I assured him that I had every confidence in him.’

‘What did he say,
exactly, about the photo?’

‘That the second
policeman had shown him a photo of a young criminal and had seemed not to
believe him when he said he didn’t recognize the man.’

‘How did he know the man
in the photo was a criminal?’

‘What?’

Brunetti repeated
himself. ‘How did he know that the photo of the man he was shown was the photo
of a criminal? It could have been a photo of anyone, the policeman’s son,
anyone.’

‘Commissario, who else
would they show him a picture of if not of a criminal?’ When Brunetti didn’t answer,
Patta repeated his exasperated sigh. ‘You’re being ridiculous, Brunetti.’
Brunetti started to speak but Patta cut him off. ‘And don’t try to stick up for
your men when you know they’re in the wrong.’ At Patta’s insistence that the
offending police were ‘his’, there slipped into Brunetti’s mind a vision of
what it must be like when Patta and his wife tried to portion out
responsibility for the failures and achievements of their two sons. ‘My’ son
would win a prize at school, while ‘yours’ would be disrespectful to teachers
or fail an exam.

‘Have you anything to
say?’ Patta finally asked.

‘He couldn’t describe the
men who attacked him, but he knew which pictures they were carrying.’

Once again, Brunetti’s
insistence did no more than display to Patta the poverty of the background from
which he came. ‘Obviously, you’re not accustomed to living with precious
objects, Brunetti. If a person lives for years with objects of great value, and
here I mean aesthetic value, not just material price’ - his voice urged
Brunetti to stretch his imagination to encompass the concept – ‘then they come
to recognize them, just as they would members of their own family. So, even in
a flashing moment, even under stress such as Signor Viscardi experienced, he
would recognize those paintings, just as he would recognize his wife.’ From
what Fosco had said, Brunetti suspected Viscardi would have less trouble
recognizing the paintings.

Patta leaned forward,
paternally, and asked, ‘Are you capable of understanding any of this?’

‘I’ll understand a lot
more when we speak to Ruffolo.’

‘Ruffolo? Who’s he?’

‘The young criminal in
the photo.’

Patta said no more than
Brunetti’s name, but he said it so softly that it called for an explanation.

‘Two tourists were
sitting on a bridge and saw three men leave the house with a suitcase. Both of
them identified the photo of Ruffolo.’

Because he had not
bothered to read the report on the case, Patta didn’t ask why this information
wasn’t contained in it. ‘He could have been hiding outside,’ he suggested.

‘That’s entirely
possible,’ Brunetti agreed, though it was far more likely to him that Ruffolo
had been inside, and not hiding.

‘And what about this
Fosco person? What about his phone calls?’

‘All I know about Fosco
is that he’s the Financial Editor of one of the most important magazines in the
country. I called him to get an idea of how important Signor Viscardi was. So
we’d know how to treat him.’ This so precisely mirrored Patta’s thinking that
he was incapable of questioning Brunetti’s sincerity. Brunetti hardly thought
it necessary to make an excuse for the seriousness with which the policemen had
seen fit to question Viscardi. Instead, he said, ‘All we’ve got to do is get
our hands on this Ruffolo, and everything will be straightened out. Signor
Viscardi will get his paintings back, the insurance company will thank us, and
I imagine the
Gazzettino
would run a story on the front page of the
second section. After all, Signor Viscardi is a very important man, and the
quicker this is settled, the better it will be for all of us.’ Suddenly
Brunetti felt himself overwhelmed with a wave of disgust at having to do this,
go through this stupid charade every time they spoke. He looked away, then back
at his superior.

Patta’s smile was as
broad as it was genuine. Could it be that Brunetti was finally beginning to
have some sense, to take some heed of political realities? If so, then Patta
believed that the credit for this might not unjustly be laid at his own door.
They were a headstrong people, these Venetians, clinging to their own ways,
outdated ways. Lucky for them that his appointment as Vice-Questore had brought
them some exposure to the larger, more modern world, the world of tomorrow.
Brunetti was right. All they had to do was find this Ruffolo character, get the
paintings back, and Viscardi would be firmly behind him.
     
   

‘Right,’ he said,
speaking crisply, the way policemen in American films spoke, ‘let me know
 
as soon as this Ruffolo
is in custody. Do you need any more men assigned to this?’
     
                     
         

‘No, sir,’ Brunetti said
after a reflective pause. ‘I think we’ve got enough on it right now. It’s just
a question of waiting until he makes a false step. That’s bound to happen soon
enough.’

Patta was completely
uninterested in what it was or was not a question of. He wanted an arrest, the
return of the paintings, and Viscardi’s support should he decide to run for
city councillor. ‘Fine, let me know when you have something,’ he said,
 
dismissing Brunetti with
the tone, if not with the words. Patta reached for another cigarette and Brunetti,
unwilling to wait and watch the ceremony, excused himself and went down to
speak to Vianello.
 
                     
                     
                     
   

‘Any word on Ruffolo?’Brunetti
asked when he went into the office.
               
                     
               

‘There is and there isn’t,’
Vianello answered,
rising minimally from his chair in deference to his superior,
then lowering himself back into it.
               
 

‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning that the word is
that he’d like to talk.’

‘Where’d the word come
from?’
 
                     
       

‘From someone who knows someone
who
 
knows him.’