Friends in High Places

dawn or we won’t be able to move.’

‘Why do they go to Rialto?’ he asked.

‘To see the market, I suppose. Why?’

‘Don’t they have markets in their countries? Don’t they sell food?’

‘God knows what they have in their countries,’ Paola answered with the slightest suggestion of exasperation. ‘What else did he say, this Signor Rossi?’

Brunetti leaned back against the kitchen counter. ‘He said that, in some cases, all they do is impose a fine.’

‘That’s pretty standard,’ she said, facing him now that all of the food was put away. ‘That’s what happened to Gigi Guerriero, when he put in that extra bathroom. His neighbour saw the plumber carrying a toilet into the house and called the police and reported it, and he had to pay a fine.’

‘That was ten years ago.’

‘Twelve,’ Paola corrected, out of habit. She saw the tightening of Brunetti’s lips and added, ‘Never mind. Doesn’t matter. What else can happen?’

‘He said that in some cases, when the permits were never requested but the work was done anyway, they were forced to demolish whatever it was that had been built.’

‘Surely he was joking,’ she said.

‘You had a look at Signor Rossi, Paola. Do you think he was the kind of man to joke about something like this?’

‘I suspect Signor Rossi is not the kind of man to joke about anything at all,’ she said. Idly, she went into the living room, where she straightened some magazines lying abandoned on the arm of a chair, then went out on to the terrace. Brunetti followed her. When they were standing side by side, the city lying stretched out before them, she waved at rooftops, terraces, gardens, skylights. ‘I’d like to know how much of that is legal,’ she said. ‘And I’d like to know how much of it has the right permits and has received the condono.’ Both of them had lived in Venice for most of their lives, so they had an endless repertoire of stories about bribes paid to building inspectors or walls made of plasterboard that were pulled down the day after the inspectors left.

‘Half the city’s like that, Paola,’ he said. ‘But we’ve been caught.’

‘We haven’t been caught at anything,’ she said, turning toward him. ‘We haven’t done anything wrong. We bought this place in good faith. Battistini – wasn’t that the man we bought it from – he should have got the permits and the condono edilizio.’

‘We should have made sure he had them before we bought it,’ Brunetti attempted to reason. ‘But we didn’t. All we had to do was see that -’ he said, sweeping his hand in an arc that encompassed all that lay before them – ‘and we were lost.’

‘That’s not the way I remember it,’ Paola said, walking back into the living room and sitting down.

‘That’s the way I remember it,’ Brunetti said.

Before Paola could object, he went on, ‘It doesn’t matter how we remember it. Or how rash we were at the time we bought it. What does matter is that we’re stuck with this problem now.’

‘Battistini?’ she asked.

‘He died about ten years ago,’ Brunetti answered, thus putting an end to any plans she might have had to contact him.

‘I didn’t know,’ she said.

‘His nephew, the one who works on Murano, told me about it. A tumour.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ she said. ‘He was a nice man.’

‘Yes, he was. And he certainly gave us a good price.’

‘I think he fell in love with the newlyweds,’ she said, a smile of recollection crossing her face. ‘Especially newlyweds with a baby on the way.’

‘You think that affected the price?’ Brunetti asked.

‘I always thought it did,’ Paola said. ‘Very un-Venetian of him, but still a decent thing to do.’ She added quickly, ‘But not if we’ve got to tear it down.’

‘That’s more than a bit ridiculous, don’t you think?’ Brunetti asked.

‘You’ve been working for the city for twenty years, haven’t you? You ought to have learned that the fact that something is ridiculous makes no difference at all.’

Wryly, Brunetti was forced to agree. He remembered a fruit seller telling him that, if a customer touched the fruit or vegetables on display, the dealer was subject to a fine of half a million lire. Absurdity seemed no impediment to any ordinance the city thought fit to impose.

Paola slumped down in the chair and stretched her feet out on to the low table between them. ‘So what should I do, call my father?’

Brunetti had known the question would be asked, and he was glad it had come sooner, rather than later. Count Orazio Falier, one of the richest men in the city, could easily work this miracle with no more than a phone call or a remark made over dinner. ‘No. I think I’d like to take care of this myself,’ he said, emphasizing the last word.

At no time did it occur to him, as it did not occur to Paola, to approach the matter legally, to find out the names of the proper offices and officials and the proper steps to follow. Nor did it occur to either of them that there might be a clearly defined bureaucratic procedure by which they could resolve this problem. If such things did exist or could be discovered, Venetians ignored them, knowing that the only way to deal with problems like this was by means of conoscienze: acquaintances, friendships, contacts and debts built up over a lifetime of dealing with a system generally agreed, even by those in its employ, perhaps especially by those in its employ, to be inefficient to the point of uselessness, prone to the abuses resultant from centuries of bribery, and encumbered by a Byzantine instinct for secrecy and lethargy.

Ignoring his tone, she said, ‘I’m sure he could take care of it.’

Before giving himself time to consider, Brunetti asked, ‘Ah, where are the snows of yesteryear? Where the ideals of ‘68?’

Instantly alert, Paola snapped out, ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

He considered her, head flung back, ready for anything, and he realized how intimidating she could be in the classroom. ‘It means that we both used to believe in the politics of the left and in social justice and things like equality under the law.’

‘And?’

‘And now our first impulse is to jump the queue.’

‘Say what you mean, Guido,’ she began. ‘Don’t talk about “our”, please, when I’m the one who made the suggestion.’ She paused for a moment, then added, ‘Your principles are safely intact.’

‘And that means?’ he asked, voice somewhere beyond sarcasm but still short of anger.

‘That mine aren’t. We’ve been fools and fooled for decades, all of us with our hopes for a better society and our idiotic faith that this disgusting political system and these disgusting politicians would somehow transform this country into a golden paradise, run by an endless succession of philosopher kings.’ Her eyes sought his and rested on them. ‘Well, I don’t believe it any more, none of it: I have no faith and I have no hope.’

Though he saw the real tiredness in her eyes when she said this, the resentment he could never suppress crept into his voice, and he asked, ‘And does that mean that any time there’s trouble, you turn to your father, with his money and his connections and the power he carries around in his pockets like the rest of us carry loose change, and ask him to take care of it for you?’

‘All I’m trying to do,’ she began with a sudden change in tone, as if she wanted to defuse things while there was still time, ‘is save us time and energy. If we try to do this the right way, we’ll set foot in the world of Kafka, and we’ll ruin our peace and our lives trying to find the correct papers, only to stumble up against another little bureaucrat like Signor Rossi who will tell us they aren’t the right papers and we have to find others, and others, until we both run screaming mad.’

Sensing that Brunetti had warmed to the change in her tone, she continued, ‘And so, yes, if I can spare us that by asking my father to help, then that’s what I would prefer to do, because I don’t have the patience or the energy to do it any other way.’

‘And if I tell you I would prefer to do this myself, without his help?’ Before she could answer, he added, ‘It’s our apartment, Paola, not his.’