Mitri had appeared at Patta’s office with a lawyer, one known to Brunetti, at least by reputation. Brunetti had a vague memory that Zambino usually concerned himself with business law, normally for large companies out on the mainland. He thought he might live in the city, but so few companies remained here that Zambino, at least professionally, had been forced to follow the exodus to the mainland in search of work.
Why bring a business lawyer to a meeting with the police? Why involve him in something that was or might become a criminal matter? Zambino had the reputation, he recalled, of being a forceful man, not without enemies, yet he hadn’t said a word during the entire time Brunetti was in Patta’s office.
He called down and asked Vianello to come up. When the sergeant came in some minutes later, Brunetti waved him to a seat. ‘What do you know about a certain Dottor Paolo Mitri and Avvocato Giuliano Zambino?’
Vianello must have learned their names in some other way, for his answer was immediate. ‘Zambino lives in Dorsoduro, not far from the Salute. Big place, must be three hundred metres. He specializes in corporate and business law. Most of his clients are out on the mainland: chemicals and petrochemicals, pharmaceuticals and one factory that manufactures heavy earth-moving equipment. One of the chemical companies he works for was caught dumping arsenic into the
Brunetti listened until the sergeant had finished, wondering if Signorina Elettra had been the source of this information. ‘And Mitri?’
Brunetti sensed that Vianello was fighting hard to disguise his pride in having so swiftly gathered all of this information. He continued eagerly, ‘He got his start in one of the pharmaceutical companies, began there when he got out of university. He’s a chemist, but he doesn’t work at that any more, not after he took over the first factory, then two more. He’s branched out in the last few years and as well as a number of factories, he owns that travel agency, two estate agencies and is rumoured to be the major shareholder in the string of fast-food restaurants that opened last year.’
‘Any trouble, either of them?’
‘No,’ Vianello said. ‘Neither of them.’
‘Could that be negligence?’
‘On whose part?’
‘Ours.’
The sergeant considered this for a moment. ‘Possibly. There’s a lot of that around.’
‘We might take a look, eh?’
‘Signorina Elettra is already talking to their banks.’
‘Talking?’
Instead of answering, Vianello spread his hands flat on Brunetti’s desk and aped typing into a computer.
‘How long has he owned this travel agency?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Five or six years, I think.’
‘I wonder how long they’ve been arranging these tours.’ Brunetti said.
‘I can remember seeing the posters for them a few years ago, in the agency we use down in Castello,’ Vianello said. ‘I wondered how a week in Thailand could cost so little. I asked Nadia and she explained what it meant. So I’ve sort of kept an eye on the windows in travel agencies since then.’ Vianello did not explain the motive for his curiosity and Brunetti did not ask.
‘Where else do they go?’
‘The tours?’
‘Yes.’
‘Usually Thailand, I think, but there are lots of them to the Philippines. And Cuba. And in the last couple of years they’ve started them to Burma and Cambodia.’
‘What are the ads like?’ asked Brunetti, who had never paid any attention to them.
‘They used to say things overtly: “In the middle of the red light district, friendly companions, all dreams come true”, that sort of thing. But now that the law’s been changed, it’s all in a sort of code: “Hotel staff very open- minded, near the night spots, friendly hostesses.” It’s all the same sort of thing, though, lots of whores for men too lazy to go out on the road and look for them.’
Brunetti had no idea how Paola had learned about this or how much she knew concerning Mitri’s agency. ‘Has Mitri’s place got the same sort of ads?’
Vianello shrugged. ‘I suppose so. The ones who do it all seem to use a similar coded language. You learn to read it after a while. But most of them also do a lot of legitimate booking: the Maldives, the Seychelles, wherever there’s cheap fun and lots of sun.’
For a moment Brunetti feared that Vianello, who had had a pre-cancerous growth removed from his back some years ago and had militantly avoided the sun since then, would launch into his favourite topic, but instead Vianello said, ‘I’ve asked about him. Downstairs. Just checking to see if the boys know anything.’
‘And?’
Vianello shook his head. ‘Nothing. Might as well not exist.’
‘Well, it’s not illegal, what he’s doing,’ Brunetti said.
‘I know it’s not illegal,’ Vianello finally said. ‘But it should be.’ Then, before Brunetti could answer, he added, ‘I know it’s not our job to make the law. Probably not even our job to question it. But no one should be allowed to send grown men off to have sex with children.’
Put like that, Brunetti realized, there was little to be argued against it. But all the travel agency did, so far as the law was concerned, was arrange for the purchase of tickets so that people could travel to other places and arrange hotels for them when they arrived. What they did when they were there was entirely their own affair. Brunetti found himself remembering his university course in logic and how excited he had been by the all but mathematical simplicity of it. All men are mortal. Giovanni is a man. Therefore Giovanni is mortal. There had been rules, he remembered, for checking the validity of a syllogism, something about a major term and a middle term: they had to be in certain places and not too many of them could be negative.
The details seemed to have disappeared, flown off to join all those other facts, statistics, and first principles that had escaped his keeping in the decades since he had finished his exams and been accepted into the ranks of the doctors of law. He recalled, even at this remove, the tremendous sense of assurance that had come to him in learning that certain laws did apply and could be used to govern the validity of conclusions, that they could be demonstrated to be correct or arrived at truly.
The ensuing years had worn away that assurance. Now truth, seemed to reside in the possession of those who could shout the loudest or hire the best lawyers. And there was no syllogism that could resist the argument of a gun or a knife, or any of the other forms of argumentation with which his professional life was filled.
He pulled himself away from these reflections and returned his attention to Vianello, caught him in mid- sentence: ‘… a lawyer?’
‘Excuse me?’ Brunetti said. ‘I was thinking about something else.’
‘I wondered if you’d thought of getting a lawyer for this.’
Ever since he had walked down from Patta’s office, Brunetti had been thrusting away this idea. Just as he would not answer for his wife to the men in the upstairs office, he had not allowed himself to plan a strategy for dealing with the legal consequences of Paola’s behaviour. Though he was acquainted with most of the criminal lawyers in the city and was on reasonably good terms with many of them, he knew them only in the most strictly professional way. He found himself going through their names, trying to recall that of the man who had made a successful defence in a murder case two years ago. He pulled his mind away. ‘My wife will have to take care of that, I think.’
Vianello nodded and got to his feet. He didn’t say anything further and left the office.
When he was gone, Brunetti pushed himself up and began to pace back and forth between the wardrobe and the window. Signorina Elettra was checking out the bank records of two men who had done nothing more than report a crime and suggest it be settled in a way that would give least trouble to the person who all but boasted of having committed it. They had gone to the trouble of coming to the Questura, where they had offered a compromise, which would save the culprit from the legal consequences of her behaviour. And Brunetti was going to sit idly by as
He had no doubts whatsoever about the illegality of what Paola had done. He stopped walking and considered
