'Mine.'
'As in?'
'Something for which they could be blackmailed.'
'Broad field.'
Brunetti thought it wisest to spare Masiero his reflections on the Seven Deadly Sins and answered only, 'Yes.'
He heard scrabbling sounds on the other end, and then Masiero asked, 'Tell me their names.'
'Luigi D'Alessandro, Riccardo Ledda, Benedetto Nardi, and Gianmaria Poli.'
Masiero grunted as Brunetti read off each of the names.
'You know any of them?' Brunetti asked.
'Poli's dead,' Masiero said. 'About two years ago. Heart attack. And Ledda was transferred to Rome six years ago. I'm not sure about the other two, what there might be to blackmail them about, but I can ask around.'
'Could I ask you to do it without calling attention to what you're doing?' Brunetti asked.
'Like going up to them and asking them if they're being blackmailed for something?' the other man answered shortly, making no attempt to disguise his irritation at Brunetti's question. 'I'm not an idiot, Guido. I'll see what I can find out and call you back.'
It came to Brunetti to apologize, but before he could say anything, Masiero was gone.
Again he called his friend Lalli at his office and, after listening to the other man explain that he had been too busy to check into Battestini, Brunetti said he had two more names to give' him, those of D'Alessandro and Nardi.
'This time I'll do it. I'll find the time’ Lalli promised, and was gone, leaving it to Brunetti to wonder if he were the only man in the city not driven to distraction by the pressure of work.
Habit took him to the window, where he studied the long cloths which hung from the scaffolding on the facade of the Ospedale di San Lorenzo, site of another massive restoration project. A crane, perhaps the same one that had stood still over the church for so many years, now stood equally motionless over the old people's home. There was no evidence that work was progressing. Brunetti tried, and failed, to recall ever having seen anyone on the scaffolding; he tried to remember when the scaffolding had gone up: months ago, at the very least. The sign in front of the church, he knew, said that the work there was begun according to the law of 1973, but he had not been at the Questura then and so had no idea if that was the year in which work was meant to begin or merely the date of its authorization. Was it only in this city, he wondered, that one measured things in terms of how long the work had not been going on?
He went back to his desk and pulled out a diary from 1998 in which he kept phone numbers. He looked one up, dialled the offices of Arcigay in Marghera, where he asked to speak to Emilio Desideri, the Director. He was put on hold and learned that, straight or gay, Vivaldi was the man.
'Desideri,' a deep voice said. 'It's me, Emilio: Guido. I need to ask you a favour.'
'A favour I can do with a clear conscience?' 'Probably not.'
'No surprises there. What is it?'
'I've got two names – well, four,' he added, deciding to add Sardelli and Fedi, 'and I'd like you to tell me if any of them might be open to blackmail.'
'It's not a crime to be gay any more, Guido, remember?'
'It is to bash someone's head in, Emilio,' Brunetti shot back. 'That's why I'm calling.' He waited for Desideri to say something. He didn't, and so Brunetti went on. ‘I want only for you to tell me if you know that any one of these men is gay-'
'And that will be enough to tell you that he was capable of bashing someone's head in, as you so delicately put it?'
'Emilio,' Brunetti said with studied calm, 'I'm not trying to harass you or anyone else who is gay. I don't care that you are. I don't care if the Pope is. I even like to think I wouldn't care if my son were, though that's probably a lie. I simply want to find a way to understand what might have happened to this old woman.'
'The Battestini woman? Paolo's mother?'
'You knew her?'
‘I knew about her.'
'Are you at liberty to say how you did?' 'Paolo was involved with someone I knew, and he told me – but not until after Paolo had died – what sort of woman Paolo said she was’
'Would he talk to me, this man?'
Tf he were still alive, perhaps’
Brunetti greeted this news with a long silence and then asked, 'Do you remember anything he told you?'
'That Paolo always said how much he loved her, but to him it always sounded like it was really a case of how much he hated her.'
'For any reason?'
'Greed. She lived to put money in the bank, it seems. It was her greatest joy, and it sounded like it was her only joy.'
'What was he like, Paolo?'
'I never met him.'
'What did your friend say about him?'
'He wasn't a friend. He was a patient. He was in analysis with me for three years.'
'Sorry. What did he say about him?'
'That he had acquired more than a little of her disease but that his greatest joy was in giving her money because it seemed to make her happy to get it. I always took that to mean that it stopped her nagging him, but I could be wrong. It might genuinely have made him happy to give it to her. There was little enough happiness in his life, otherwise.'
'He died of AIDS, didn't he?'
'Yes, so did his friend.'
'I'm sorry for that, too.'
'You sound like you really mean it, Guido’ Desideri said, but with no surprise.
‘I am. No one deserves that.'
'All right. Give me the names.'
Brunetti read out the names of D'Alessandro and Nardi, and when Desideri said nothing, added those of Fedi and Sardelli.
For a long time, Desideri still said nothing, but the tension in his silence was so palpable that Brunetti held his breath. Finally Desideri asked, 'And you think Paolo might have been blackmailing this person?'
'The evidence we have suggests that he was,' Brunetti temporized.
He heard the rasp as Desideri pulled in an enormous breath, then he heard only, ‘I can't do this,' and Desideri was gone.
Brunetti had a vague memory of hearing Paola once quote some English writer who said he would sooner betray his country than his friends. She had thought it a Jesuitical idea, and Brunetti was forced to agree, however expert the English were at making the vile sound noble. So one of the four was gay and was sufficiently a friend, or perhaps a patient, of Desideri that he could not give his name to the police, even in a murder investigation, perhaps because it was a murder investigation. The list had been narrowed, unless Vianello found someone else who was gay. Or, Brunetti reflected, unless there were some other reason for blackmail.
Twenty minutes later, Vianello came into Brunetti's office, the list of names still in his hand. He took his usual place on the other side of the desk, slid the sheet on to it, and said, 'Nothing’
Brunetti's question was in his glance.
'One's dead,' he said, pointing to a name. 'He retired the year after the payments started and died three years ago’ He moved his finger down the list. 'This one got religion and is living in some sort of commune or something, down near Bologna; has been for three years.' He pushed the paper a few centimetres in Brunetti's direction and sat back in the chair. 'And of the two who are still there, one's become the head of school inspections, Giorgio Costantini: he's married and seems like a decent man.'
Brunetti named two former heads of government and remarked that the same two things might be said of them.
