Anonymous Venetian aka Dressed for Death

‘Do you know him?’

‘Santomauro?’ Vianello asked, unnecessarily. Crespo was hardly someone he’d be likely to know.

Brunetti nodded.

‘He used to be my cousin’s lawyer, before he became famous. And expensive.’

‘What did your cousin say about him?’

‘Not all that much. He was a good lawyer, but he was always willing to push the law, to make it do what he wanted it to do.’ A common enough type in Italy, Brunetti thought, where law was often written but was seldom clear.

‘Anything else?’ Brunetti asked.

Vianello shook his head. ‘Nothing I can remember. It was years ago.’ Before Brunetti could ask him to do it, Vianello said, ‘I’ll call my cousin and ask. He might know other people Santomauro worked for.’

Brunetti nodded his thanks. ‘I’d also like to see what we can find out about this Lega: where they meet, how many of them there are, who they are, and what it is they do.’ When he stopped to think about it, Brunetti found it strange that an organization so well known that it had become a common reference point for humour should, in truth, have managed to reveal so little about itself. People knew about the Lega, but if Brunetti’s own experience was anything to go by, no one had a clear idea what the Lega did.

Vianello had his notebook in his hand now and took this all down. ‘Do you want me to ask questions about Signora Santomauro, as well?’

‘Yes, anything you can find.’

‘I think she’s from Verona originally. A banking family.’ He looked across at Brunetti. ‘Anything else, sir?’

‘Yes, that transvestite in Mestre, Francesco Crespo. I’d like you to put the word out here and see if anyone knows him or if the name means anything.’

‘What has Mestre got on him, sir?’

‘Nothing more than that he was arrested twice for drugs, trying to make a sale. The boys in Vice have him on their list, but he lives in an apartment on Viale Ronconi now, a very nice apartment, and I suppose that means he’s moved beyond Via Cappuccina and the public gardens. And see if Gallo has come up with names for the manufacturers of the dress and the shoes.’

‘I’ll see what I can find out,’ Vianello said, making notes for himself. ‘Anything else, sir?’

‘Yes. I’d like you to keep an eye on any missing person reports that come in for a man in his early forties, same description as the dead man. It’s in the file. Maybe the new secretary can do something about it on her computer.’

‘From what region, sir?’ Vianello asked, pen poised over the page. The fact that he didn’t ask about the secretary was enough to tell Brunetti that word of her arrival had already spread.

‘If she can do it, for the entire country. Also missing tourists.’

‘You don’t like the idea of a prostitute, sir?’

Brunetti remembered that naked body, so terribly like his own. ‘No, it’s not a body anyone would pay to use.’

Chapter Twelve

On Saturday morning, Brunetti accompanied his family to the train station, but it was a subdued group that got on to the Number One vaporetto at the San Silvestro stop: Paola was angry that Brunetti would not leave what she had taken to calling ‘his transvestite’ to come up to Bolzano at least for the first weekend of the vacation; Brunetti was angry that she wouldn’t understand; Raffaele regretted leaving the virginal charms of Sara Paganuzzi behind, though he took some comfort from the fact that they would be reunited in one week’s time – besides, until then, there would be fresh mushrooms to hunt for in the woods; Chiara, as was so often the case, was entirely unselfish in her regret, for she wished that her father, who always worked too hard, could get away and have a real vacation.

Family etiquette dictated that everyone carry their own bag, but since Brunetti would be going only as far as Mestre, and hence had no bag, Paola took advantage of him to carry her large suitcase while she carried only her handbag and The Collected Letters of Henry James, a volume so formidable in size as to convince Brunetti that she wouldn’t have had time for him, anyway. Because Brunetti carried Paola’s suitcase, the domino theory was immediately made manifest, and Chiara stuffed some of her books into her mother’s suitcase, thus leaving space in her own for Raffi’s second pair of mountain boots. Whereupon his mother insisted that he use that space to carry her copy of The Sacred Fount, having decided that this was the year she would finally have enough time to read it.

They all climbed into the same compartment of the 8.35, a train that would get Brunetti to Mestre in ten minutes and themselves to Bolzano in time for lunch. No one had much to say during the short trip across the laguna: Paola made sure he had the phone number of the hotel in his wallet, and Raffaele reminded him that this was the same train Sara was to take next Saturday, leaving Brunetti to wonder if he was supposed to carry her bag, too.

At Mestre, he kissed the children, and Paola walked down the corridor to the door with him. ‘I hope you can come up next weekend, Guido. Even better, that you get this settled and can come up even sooner.’

He smiled, but he didn’t want to tell her how unlikely that was: after all, they didn’t even know who the dead man was yet. He kissed her on both cheeks, got down from the train, and walked back towards the compartment where the children were. Chiara was already eating a peach. As he stood on the platform, gazing at them through the window, he saw Paola come back into the compartment and, almost without glancing at her, pull out a handkerchief and hand it to Chiara. The train began to move just as Chiara turned to wipe her mouth and, turning, saw him on the platform. Her face, half of it still gleaming with peach juice, lit up with pure delight and she leaped to the window. ‘Ciao, Papa, ciao, ciao,’ she shouted over the sound of the engine. She stood on the seat of the train and leaned out, waving Paola’s handkerchief at him madly. He stood on the platform and waved until the tiny white flag of love disappeared in the distance.

When he got to Gallo’s office at the Mestre Questura, the sergeant met him at the door. ‘We’ve got someone coming out to take a look at the body,’ he said with no prelude.

‘Who? Why?’

‘Your people had a call this morning. From a,’ and here he looked down at a piece of paper in his hand, ‘from a Signora Mascari. Her husband is the director of the Venice office of the Bank of Verona. He’s been gone since Saturday.’

‘That’s a week ago,’ Brunetti said. ‘What’s taken her this long to notice he’s missing?’

‘He was supposed to go on a business trip. To Messina. He left Sunday afternoon, and that’s the last she heard of him.’

‘A week? She let a week go before she called us?’

‘I didn’t speak to her,’ Gallo said, almost as if Brunetti had been accusing him of negligence.

‘Who did?’

‘I don’t know. All I have is a piece of paper that was put on my desk, telling me that she’s going to Umberto Primo this morning to take a look at him and hoped to get there by nine.’

The men exchanged a look; Gallo pushed up his sleeve and glanced at his watch.

‘Yes,’ Brunetti said. ‘Let’s go.’

There ensued a muddle that was almost cinematic in its idiocy. Their car found itself in heavy early-morning traffic; the driver decided to cut round it and come at the hospital from the rear, only to meet even heavier traffic, which got them to the hospital after Signora Mascari had not only identified the body as that of her husband, Leonardo, but had left in the same taxi that had brought her out from Venice, heading towards the Mestre Questura, where, she was told, the police would answer her questions.

All of this meant that Brunetti and Gallo got back to the Questura to find that Signora Mascari had been waiting for them for more than quarter of an hour. She sat, upright and entirely alone, on a wooden bench in the corridor outside Gallo’s office. She was a woman whose dress and manner suggested, not that her youth had fled, but that it had never existed. Her suit, a midnight-blue raw silk, was conservative in cut, the skirt a bit longer than was then