moment the possibility of persuading Italian men — men like him and Vianello — to stop wanting young prostitutes or cheap drugs.
He sat, conscious of the faint slithering sensation as perspiration moved across the skin of various parts of his body. In New Zealand, he had been told, businessmen wore shorts and short-sleeved shirts to work when it was this hot. And hadn’t the Japanese decided to go jacketless during the worst of the summer heat? He took out his handkerchief and wiped the inside of his collar. This was the weather when people killed one another fighting for a parking space. Or because of an angry remark.
His thoughts drifted to the promises he had made to Paola that tonight they would discuss their own vacation. He, a Venetian, was going to turn himself and his family into tourists, but tourists going in the other direction, away from Venice, leaving room for the millions who were expected this year. Last year, twenty million. God have mercy on us all.
He heard a sound at the door and looked up to see Signorina Elettra, the light streaming in his windows illuminating her as in a spotlight. Could it be? Was it possible that, after more than a decade in which his superior’s secretary had brightened his days with the flawlessness of her appearance, the heat had managed to make inroads, even here? Was that a wrinkle down the left side of her white linen shirt?
Brunetti blinked, closed his eyes for a moment, and when he opened them again, saw that it had been an illusion: the line was nothing more than the shadow created by the light coming in from his windows. Signorina Elettra paused at the door and glanced over her shoulder, and as she did another person appeared beside her.
‘Good morning, Dottore,’ she said. The man beside her smiled and said, ‘
To see Toni Brusca out of his office at the Commune during the working day was like seeing a badger out of its sett in daylight hours. Brusca had always made Brunetti think of that animal: thick dark hair with a white stripe running down one side; stocky, short-legged body, incredible tenacity once a subject took his interest.
‘I met Toni on the way here,’ Signorina Elettra said; Brunetti had had no idea the two were acquainted. ‘So I thought I’d show him the way to your office.’ She stepped back and gave what Brunetti recognized as her first-class smile to the visitor. This indicated either that Brusca was a good friend or, Signorina Elettra being a woman of endless and instinctive deceitfulness, that she knew the man was the head of the department of employment records at the Commune and thus a man of potential usefulness.
Brusca gave her a friendly nod and walked over to Brunetti’s desk, gazing around the office as he did so. ‘You certainly have more light than I do,’ he said with open admiration. Brunetti noticed that he carried a briefcase.
Brunetti stepped around his desk and took Brusca’s hand, then clapped him on the shoulder a few times. He nodded to Signorina Elettra, who smiled, though not her first-class smile, and left the office.
Brunetti showed his friend to one of the chairs in front of his desk and sat facing him in the other. He waited for Toni to speak: surely Brusca had not come here to discuss the relative merits of their offices. Toni had never been a man to waste time or energy when he had something he wanted to do, or know: this was something Brunetti remembered from their years together in middle school. The best tactic had always been to sit and wait him out, and this is what Brunetti intended to do.
He did not have long to wait. Brusca said, ‘There’s something I want to ask you about, Guido.’ From his briefcase he pulled out a transparent plastic folder, and from it he pulled a number of papers.
He set the briefcase back on the floor, the papers on his lap, and looked at his friend. ‘A lot of people at the Commune talk to me,’ he said. ‘And they tell me things that sometimes make me curious, and then I ask around and people tell me more things. And because I sit in my ground floor office with only one window and because my job allows me to be curious about what people are doing — and because I am always very polite and very thorough — people tend to answer my questions.’
‘Even if they really aren’t about things that should concern you professionally?’ Brunetti asked, beginning to suspect why Brusca might have come to see his friend the policeman.
‘Exactly.’
‘Is that what you have there?’ Brunetti asked, nodding to the papers. Like Brusca, Brunetti was a man who preferred not to waste time.
Brusca pulled them from their plastic folder and handed them to Brunetti. ‘Take a look,’ he said.
The first paper bore the letterhead of the Tribunale di Venezia. The left side of the sheet held four vertical columns, headed: ‘Case Number, Date, Judge, Courtroom Number’. After a thick vertical line appeared a single box headed ‘Result’. Brunetti shifted the paper to one side and found three more like it. The quality of the reproductions varied: one was so blurred as to be barely legible. A date was stamped on the bottom right of each page with beside it a neat signature, and beside that the stamp of the Ministry of Justice. The dates differed, but the signature was the same. Twice, the seal of the Ministry of Justice was carelessly stamped and ran off the side of the page. Brunetti had spent what seemed a lifetime looking at such documents. How many had he stamped himself before consigning them to their next reader?
These were not the sort of court documents he was accustomed to reading in the course of his own investigations, not the usual transcripts of testimony or of the arguments presented at the conclusion of a trial, nor yet were they copies of the verdicts finally reached. These were for internal use only and, if he was reading them correctly, dealt with preliminary sessions. He found no pattern.
He glanced at Brusca, whose face was impassive. Brunetti returned his attention to the papers. He looked for correspondences and saw that many of the sessions listed had been adjourned or postponed without a hearing, and then he noticed that most of these cases had been heard by the same judge. He recognized the name and had no good opinion of her, though, if pressed, Brunetti could not have explained why that was. Things heard, things overheard, a certain tone of voice used when her name came up in conversation, and something, years ago, that one of his informers had said. No, not said, but implied, and not about her but about someone in her family. The name of the court functionary who had signed the papers meant nothing to him.
He looked across at his friend and said, ‘My guess is that these postponements might work to the advantage of one of the two parties in each case and that Judge Coltellini is somehow involved in the delays.’ Brusca gave an encouraging nod and pointed with his chin to the papers, as if to prompt a promising student. ‘If that means I am to see something more here, then I’d guess that the person who signed the papers is also involved.’
‘Araldo Fontana,’ Brusca said. ‘At the Tribunale. He started working there in 1975, was promoted to chief usher ten years later, and has been there ever since. His scheduled date of retirement is the tenth of April 2014.’
‘What colour is his underwear?’ asked a straight-faced Brunetti.
‘Very funny, very funny, Guido.’
‘All right. Forget the underwear and tell me about him.’
‘As chief usher, he sees that papers are processed and delivered on time.’
‘And “processed and delivered” means. .?’
Brusca sat back and crossed his legs, then raised one hand in a gesture indicative of motion. ‘There’s a central deposit where all documents regarding cases are kept. When they’re needed during a hearing or trial, the ushers see that they’re delivered to the right courtroom so the judge can consult them if necessary. Then, when the hearing is over, the ushers take them back to the central deposit and refile them. When the next hearing is held, they’re delivered again. When a verdict is reached, all of the papers in the case are moved to a permanent storage deposit.’
‘But?’
‘But papers sometimes go missing or aren’t delivered, and when they aren’t there, the judge has no choice but to postpone the hearing and set a later date. And if the hearing is anywhere near a holiday, then the judge might think it best to delay until after the holiday, but in both cases the judge has to check the docket and see when there is an opening to schedule a hearing, and then there might be long delays.’
Brunetti nodded: this had been his general understanding of how things worked. ‘Then tell me,’ he said, ‘because to listen to you is to put my ear to the beating heart of goddess Rumour, what’s going on here?’
Brusca smiled, but barely so. It was an expression not of humour or amusement but one that acknowledged human nature as it was, not as anyone would want it to be. ‘Before I say anything about what might be going on here, I have to tell you one thing.’ He paused long enough to be sure he had Brunetti’s full attention, then continued. ‘He’s a decorous man, Fontana. It’s an old-fashioned word, I know, but he’s an old-fashioned man. Almost as if he were from our parents’ generation: that’s how people speak of him. He wears a suit and tie to work
