Anonymous Venetian aka Dressed for Death

‘Don’t let her hear you say that,’ Brunetti warned, laughing.

‘If I’m a lucky woman, Signora Patta will never hear me say anything.’ More amiably, she asked, ‘What do you think Patta will do?’

Brunetti finished his coffee and set his cup down before he answered. ‘I don’t think there’s very much he can do except wait for Burrasca to get tired of her or for her to get tired of Burrasca and come back.’

‘What’s he like, Burrasca?’ Paola didn’t waste time asking if the police had a file on Burrasca. As soon as anyone in Italy made enough money, someone would have a file.

‘From what I’ve heard, he’s a pig. He’s part of that Milano world of cocaine, cars with fast engines, and girls with slow brains.’

‘Well, he’s got half of one of them this time,’ Paola said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Signora Patta. She’s not a girl, but she’s certainly got a slow brain.’

‘Do you know her that well?’ Brunetti was never sure whom Paola knew. Or what.

‘No, I’m simply inferring it from the fact that she married Patta and stayed married to him. I imagine it would be difficult to put up with a pompous ass like that.’

‘But you put up with me,’ Brunetti said, smiling, in search of a compliment.

Her look was level. ‘You’re not pompous, Guido. At times you’re difficult, and sometimes you’re impossible, but you are not pompous.’ No compliments here.

He pushed himself back from the table, feeling that it was perhaps time to go to the Questura.

When he got to his office, he looked through the papers waiting for him on his desk, disappointed to find nothing about the dead man in Mestre. He was interrupted by a knock on the door. ‘Avanti,’ he called, thinking it might be Vianello with something from Mestre. Instead of the sergeant, a dark-haired young woman walked in, a sheaf of files in her right hand. She smiled across the room at him and approached his desk, looking down at the papers in her hand and paging through them.

‘Commissario Brunetti?’ she asked.

‘Yes.’

She pulled a few papers from one of the files and placed them on the desk in front of him. ‘The men downstairs said you might want to see these, Dottore.’

‘Thank you, Signorina,’ he said, pulling the papers across the desk towards him.

She remained standing in front of his desk, clearly waiting to be asked who she was, perhaps too shy to introduce herself He looked up, saw large brown eyes in an appealing full face and an explosion of bright lipstick. ‘And you are?’ he asked with a smile.

‘Elettra Zorzi, sir. I started work last week as secretary to Vice-Questore Patta.’ That would explain the new desk outside Patta’s office. Patta had been going on for months, insisting that he had too much paperwork to handle by himself. And so he had managed, like a particularly industrious truffle pig, to root around in the budget long enough to find the money for a secretary.

‘I’m very pleased to meet you, Signorina Zorzi,’ Brunetti said. The name rang familiarly in his ear.

‘I believe I’m to work for you, as well, Commissario,’ she said, smiling.

Not if he knew Patta, she wouldn’t. But still he said, ‘That would certainly be very nice,’ and glanced down at the papers she had placed on the desk.

He heard her move away and glanced up to follow her out of the door. A skirt, neither short nor long, and very, very nice legs. She turned at the door, saw him looking at her, and smiled again. He looked down at the papers. Who would name a child Elettra? How long ago? Twenty-five years? And Zorzi; he knew lots of Zorzis, but none of them was capable of naming a daughter Elettra. The door closed behind her, and he returned his attention to the papers, but there was little of interest in them; crime seemed to be on holiday in Venice.

He went down to Patta’s office but stopped in amazement when he entered the anteroom. For years, the room had held only a chipped porcelain umbrella stand and a desk covered with outdated copies of the sort of magazines generally found in dentists’ offices. Today, the magazines had vanished, replaced by a computer console attached to a printer that stood on a low metal table to the left of the desk. In front of the window, in place of the umbrella stand, stood a small table, this one of wood, and on it rested a glass vase holding an enormous bouquet of orange and yellow gladioli.

Either Patta had decided to give an interview to Architectural Digest, or the new secretary had decided that the opulence Patta believed fitting for his office should trickle out to where worked the lower orders. As if summoned by Brunetti’s thoughts, she came into the office.

‘It looks very nice,’ he said, smiling and gesturing around the small area with a wave of his hand.

She crossed the room and set an armful of folders on her desk, then turned to face him. ‘I’m glad you like it, Commissario. It would have been impossible to work in here the way it was. Those magazines,’ she added with a delicate shudder.

‘The flowers are beautiful. Are they to celebrate your arrival?’

‘Oh, no,’ she replied blandly. ‘I’ve given a permanent order to Fantin; they’ll deliver fresh flowers every Monday and Thursday from now on.’ Fantin: the most expensive florist in the city. Twice a week. A hundred times a year? She interrupted his calculations by explaining, ‘Since I’m also to prepare the Vice-Questore’s expense account, I thought I’d add them in as a necessary expense.’

‘And will Fantin bring flowers for the Vice-Questore’s office, as well?’

Her surprise seemed genuine. ‘Good heavens, no. I’m certain the Vice-Questore could afford them himself It wouldn’t be right to spend the taxpayers’ money like that.’ She walked around the desk and flipped on the computer. ‘Is there anything I can do for you, Commissario?’ she asked, the issue of the flowers, apparently, settled.

‘Not at the moment, Signorina,’ he said as she bent over the keys.

He knocked on Patta’s door and was told to enter. Though Patta sat where he always did, behind his desk, little else was the same. The surface of the desk, usually clear of anything that might suggest work, was covered with folders, reports; even a crumpled newspaper lay to one side. It was not Patta’s usual L’Osservatore Romano, Brunetti noticed, but the just-short-of-scurrilous La Nuova, a paper whose large readership numbers seemed to rest on the joint proposition that people not only would do base and ignoble things but that they would also want to read about them. Even the air-conditioning, this one of the few offices to have it, seemed not to be working.

‘Sit down, Brunetti,’ the Vice-Questore commanded.

As if Brunetti’s glance were contagious, Patta looked at the papers on his desk and began to gather them up. He piled them one on top of the other, edges every which way, pushed them aside, and sat, his hand forgotten on top of them.

‘What’s happening in Mestre?’ he finally asked Brunetti.

‘We haven’t identified the victim yet, sir. His picture has been shown to many of the transvestites who work there, but none of them has been able to recognize him.’ Patta said nothing. ‘One of the men I questioned said that the man looked familiar, but he couldn’t give a definite identification, so it could mean anything. Or nothing. I think another one of the men I questioned, a man named Crespo, recognized him, but he insisted that he didn’t. I’d like to talk to him again, but there might be problems in doing that.’

‘Santomauro?’ Patta asked and, for the first time in the years they had worked together, succeeded in surprising Brunetti.

‘How do you know about Santomauro?’ Brunetti blurted out and then added, as if to correct his sharp tone, ‘sir.’

‘He’s called me three times,’ Patta said, and then added in a voice he made lower but which was definitely intended for Brunetti to hear, ‘the bastard.’

Immediately on his guard at Patta’s unwonted, and carefully planned, indiscretion, Brunetti, like a spider on its web, began to run his memory over the various strands that might connect these two men. Santomauro was a famous lawyer, his clients the businessmen and politicians of the entire Veneto region. That, if nothing else, would ordinarily have Patta grovelling at his feet. But then he remembered it: Holy Mother Church and Santomauro’s Lega della Moralita, the women’s branch of which was under the patronage and direction of none other than the absent Maria Lucrezia Patta. What sort of sermon about marriage, its sanctity, and its obligations had accompanied Santomauro’s phone calls to the Vice-Questore?