A Question of Belief

calle.

‘Number two thousand nine hundred and eighty-nine,’ Brunetti said casually. She looked at him as though he were one of those Internet magicians whose sites he had been consulting; Pucetti smiled and said, ‘I’ll tell my grandchildren about this, sir.’

Brunetti was uncertain whether the remark was meant to inflate or deflate his sense of accomplishment and thus said disparagingly, ‘I just happened to be the one who saw her.’ Pucetti nodded, while the young woman continued to stare at him.

‘Now what, sir?’

‘You two go and have a drink in the campo, and I’ll go into San Toma and stand in front of the estate agency and look for a new apartment.’

‘Hot work, Commissario,’ the girl said with sympathy.

Brunetti nodded his thanks for the thought.

Luckily, he had remembered to bring his telefonino with him, so they agreed to keep in contact. He went back to the campo and put himself in front of the window of the estate agency. By this time of the afternoon, the sun was directly behind Brunetti and starting to burn its way slowly through his clothing. It was so intense that he turned first to expose one shoulder, then the other, like San Lorenzo on the grill.

The one advantage was that the angle of light turned the agency window into a giant mirror, in which he soon saw the approaching reflection of an old woman with a brown bag over her shoulder. But her hands no longer grasped the straps and the bag hung ignored at her side. She walked towards him while Brunetti studied the photo of a mansard apartment in Santa Croce, a mere half-million Euros for sixty square metres. ‘Lunacy,’ he whispered.

The woman turned to the right, then left into the calle going down to the embarcadero. Brunetti dialled Pucetti’s number, and when the officer answered, said, ‘She’s going back towards the boat stop. Why don’t you and your friend stop on the doorstep of two thousand nine hundred and eighty-nine for a long embrace?’

‘I’ll suggest it to her this very instant, sir,’ Pucetti said and hung up. Brunetti moved away from the window and into the calle leading towards Goldoni’s house, where he could at least stand in the shade. A few minutes later, Pucetti and the young woman appeared, no longer walking hand in hand.

‘S. Gorini, sir,’ Pucetti. ‘There’s only one name at that number.’

‘Shall we go back to the Questura, then?’ Brunetti suggested.

‘We’re still on duty, sir,’ Pucetti said.

‘I think we’ve all had enough of following people in this heat, officers,’ he said. Their relief was evident in the loosening of their bodies. He smiled at the girl for the first time and said, ‘So let’s see if you can follow a commissario di polizia back to the Questura without being noticed.’

8

Perhaps encouraged by the deference showed to his powers by the young woman, whose full name turned out to be Bettina Trevisoi, Brunetti decided to see what he could find out about S. Gorini by himself. The first thing he discovered, though he had to go only as far as the phone directory, was that the S stood for Stefano. But even with the full name, all Google provided was a wide variety of products and offers to introduce him to young girls. Because he had one of his own at home, Brunetti did not feel in need of another, and so he spurned the cyber- proposals, tempting as others might have found them.

Google having failed him, Brunetti was left to think of other places where reference to a person might be found. There must be a way to discover if he were renting the apartment or if he owned it: probably in some office of the Commune. If he owned it, then he might have a mortgage, and that might lead to his bank and thus provide an idea of his finances. There must be a way to find out if the city had granted him any licences or if he had a passport. Airline files might show if he travelled within Italy or to other countries, and how frequently. If he had any of the special cards offered by the railway, there would be a list of the train tickets he purchased. Copies of his phone bills, for both home phone and telefonino, would give an idea of who his friends and associates were. They would also show if he were running a commercial enterprise from that address. And credit card records often proved veritable mines of information.

He sat in front of the computer, these possibilities assaulting his imagination one after the other. He marvelled at how the most basic services of modern life exposed a person to easy scrutiny and how effectively they eliminated privacy.

But, more importantly, he marvelled at how incapable he was of finding even the first of these things. He knew all of this information must be hidden inside his computer, but he lacked the skills to discover it. He turned to Pucetti; Probationer Trevisoi stood by his side. ‘It’s a waste of time to try to check him out ourselves,’ Brunetti said, careful to use the plural.

He watched as Pucetti fought down the impulse to object. In the last years, the young officer had learned a great deal from Signorina Elettra about the ways to slip around the roadblocks on the information highway. Pucetti glanced at the young woman at his side, and Brunetti could almost hear the creaks in his masculinity as he forced himself to nod. ‘Maybe we better ask Signorina Elettra to have a look,’ Pucetti finally agreed.

Pleased by the young officer’s response and considering that Trevisoi was young, attractive and female, Brunetti stood and offered the chair to Pucetti. ‘Better to have two people taking a look,’ Brunetti said. Then, to Trevisoi, he added, ‘Pucetti’s one of our information-retrieval experts.’

‘Information retrieval, sir?’ she said so innocently that Brunetti began to suspect there was perhaps more behind those dark eyes than he had originally believed.

‘Spying,’ he clarified. ‘Pucetti’s very good at it, but Signorina Elettra’s better.’

‘Signorina Elettra’s the best,’ Pucetti said as he flicked the screen back into life.

On his way to that person’s office, Brunetti decided to restrain himself from repeating Pucetti’s praise. When he entered, Signorina Elettra was just emerging from the office of her superior, Vice-Questore Giuseppe Patta. Today she wore a black T-shirt and a pair of loose black linen slacks and, below them, a pair of yellow Converse sneakers, sockless. She gave a welcoming smile. ‘Have a look,’ she said, moving to her chair and pointing to the screen of her computer. Perhaps as a concession to the heat, her hair was tied back from her face by a green ribbon.

He came to stand behind her and looked at the screen. On it he saw what looked like a page from a catalogue of computers, neat row after neat row and all of them, to Brunetti, looking identical. Were they, he wondered, finally going to order one for him to use in his office? There was no other reason she would bother to show him such things, was there? He was touched by her thoughtfulness.

‘Very nice,’ he said, in a noncommittal voice from which all trace of personal greed had been removed.

‘Yes, they are, aren’t they? Some of them are almost as good as mine.’ Pointing to one of the computers on the screen, she said something about numbers Brunetti could understand, like ‘2.33’ and ‘1333’, and words like ‘mega-hertz’ and ‘giga-bytes’, that he could not.

‘Now look at this,’ she said and scrolled down the screen to a list of prices that were keyed to the models shown above them. ‘See the price of that one?’ she asked, pointing to the third number.

‘One thousand, four hundred Euros,’ he read. She made a noise of assent, saying nothing, so he asked, ‘Is that a good price?’ He was complimented by the thought that the Ministry of Justice might be willing to spend that much on him, but modesty sealed his lips.

‘It’s a very good price,’ she said. She hit a few keys; the image disappeared from the screen and was replaced by a long list of names and numbers. ‘Now look at this,’ she said, pointing to one of the items on the list.

‘Is that the same computer?’ he asked when he read the model name and number.

‘Yes.’

Brunetti ran his eyes over to the number at the right. ‘Two thousand, two hundred?’ he asked. She nodded