15
Signorina Elettra’s arrival interrupted these reflections. She knocked and came in without waiting to be told to do so, approached his desk, and all but demanded, ‘What did he want?’ Then, as if aware of the effrontery of her question, she stepped back and added, ‘He seemed so eager to talk to you, I mean.’
An impulse Brunetti recognized as protective led him to answer, as calmly as though hers had been a normal question, ‘To ask about the murder of the black man.’
‘He was in a very strange mood,’ she volunteered, prodding for a more satisfactory answer.
Brunetti shrugged. ‘He’s always upset when there’s trouble. It reflects badly on the city.’
‘And that reflects badly on him,’ she completed.
‘Even if the victim isn’t one of us,’ Brunetti said, conscious as he spoke of how much he sounded like Chiara. Before Signorina Elettra’s universalist sympathies were offended, he explained, ‘A Venetian, I mean.’
She appeared to accept this and asked, ‘But why one of those poor devils? They never cause any trouble. All they want to do is stand there and sell their bags and try to have a chance at a decent life.’ She drew herself from these sentiments and asked, ‘Did he assign it to you?’
‘No, not specifically. But he didn’t say he wanted anyone else to handle it, so I assume I’m to continue.’ As he said these bland things, his mind kept attempting to follow the trail that led from Patta’s warning back to its source: if Patta had been threatened to warn Brunetti away, then those who continued the investigation would be in danger.
How had Patta phrased it? ‘We have to leave this alone’? How typical that was of him, to make the statement as though it were the result of long consideration and general assent. And ‘have to’, as if it were a truth universally acknowledged that the case was to be abandoned, the man’s murder forgotten or quietly assigned to the realm of forgetting, that overcrowded land.
A Patta who had never existed might have said, ‘I’m being threatened into silencing you, and the thought of losing my job or being hurt fills me with such fear that I will do whatever I can to corrupt the system of justice and stop you from doing your job, just to keep myself safe.’ This phantom Patta’s voice was so real that it all but blocked out Signorina Elettra’s speaking one. Brunetti blinked a few times and drew his attention back in time to hear her ask, ‘. . still report to you?’
‘Yes, of course,’ he answered, as if he had heard the first half of her question. ‘I’ll go on as though I were in charge until I’m told otherwise.’
‘And then?’ she asked.
‘And then I’ll see who he puts in charge and either help that person or else continue to do things on my own.’ It was not necessary to name the person whose appointment would lead to the latter possibility: even in an organization that did not often hunger and thirst for justice’s sake, Lieutenant Scarpa’s contempt for it was noteworthy. Some of the other commissari were unlikely to achieve success in a case that presented difficulties or complexities, but under the direction of a competent magistrate, they would at least make an attempt to apprehend the guilty and would be handicapped only by inexperience or lack of imagination. Scarpa, however, knew no motivation save self-advancement, and even a whisper from his superior — or from forces Brunetti was reluctant to name — that the case not be pursued would suffice to guarantee its doom.
Luckily, the case could not be given to Scarpa, still only a lieutenant, in spite of all of Patta’s efforts to have him promoted. A commissario would still be the chief police officer in charge of the investigation, though nothing could prevent Patta, should he choose to do so, from assigning Scarpa to the case, as well.
‘If only we didn’t have to worry about him,’ Brunetti said, knowing it was unnecessary to pronounce Scarpa’s name and bemused to hear himself sounding so much like an English king trying to resolve a personnel problem.
Her smile began in her eyes, then progressed across the rest of her face. Finally she said, ‘Don’t tempt me, sir.’
‘Only in the sense of transferring him, Signorina,’ he said with exaggerated emphasis, never quite sure where his suggestions might take her.
She gazed out of the window in contemplation of the facade of the church of San Lorenzo. ‘Ah,’ she breathed in a sigh that seemed to go on for ever, and then silence. She tilted her head to one side, as if adjusting her vision to the contemplation of some object only she could see, and then at last she smiled.
‘The Interpol class on technological surveillance,’ she said.
Amazed, Brunetti asked, ‘The one in Lyon?’
‘Yes.’
‘But isn’t that open only to officers who have been selected by them, before they’re transferred to Interpol?’
‘Yes,’ she answered. ‘He’s been applying to Interpol for years.’
‘But always unsuccessfully, I thought.’
With her most minimal smile, Signorina Elettra remarked, ‘So long as Georges runs the personnel office there, Lieutenant Scarpa’s application will remain unsuccessful.’
‘Georges?’ Brunetti inquired, as if they had discovered they had the same accountant.
‘I was much younger then,’ she offered by way of explanation.
Brunetti, as if he understood exactly what this meant, said only, ‘Of course,’ and then, trying to reel her back, ‘Scarpa?’
She returned to the present and explained the future. ‘He could be invited to Lyon and do the course, but then when it’s finished, someone could discover that the invitation was meant to go to some other Lieutenant Scarpa.’
‘What other Lieutenant Scarpa?’ Brunetti asked.
‘I’ve no idea,’ she said impatiently. ‘Surely there must be a score of them in the police.’
‘And if there aren’t?’
‘Then surely there has to be a Lieutenant Scarpa in the Army, or the
‘Don’t forget the Railway Police,’ Brunetti reminded her.
‘Thank you.’
‘How long does this course last?’ he asked.
‘Three weeks, I think.’
‘And Interpol will pay for it?’
‘Of course.’
‘Are you sure Georges will do it?’
If she had been an antinomian questioned about the importance of faith, she could have looked no more surprised, but still she did not deign to answer. When Brunetti said no more, she moved towards the door. Pausing there, she said, ‘
Brunetti took the thought of who might be behind the warning given to Patta to a lunch of fellow police officials from the Veneto, and it kept him silent company as he talked amiably with his colleagues and listened to the usual speeches about the need to protect the social order from the forces which menaced it from all sides. Idly, Brunetti flipped over his menu and took a pen from his pocket. As the minutes — and then the quarter-hours — passed, he made a list of the concrete nouns that were most frequently invoked as well as any proposal for a specific course of action. As the second hour began, he had three nouns on his paper, ‘home’, ‘family’, and ‘security’, but no note of a specific project or plan beyond ‘decisive action’ and ‘swift intervention’. Why can we never talk in the concrete? he asked himself. Why must we always speak in generalities as glowing as they are meaningless?
Back in his office, Brunetti remembered that this was one of the days when Paola did not have to go back to the university after lunch, leaving her free to spend the afternoon at home, reading or commenting on student papers or, for all he knew, lying on the sofa and watching soap operas. How wonderful it would be, he thought, to have such a job. Five hours a week in the classroom, seven months a year, and the rest of the time free to read. Paola was expected to attend various faculty meetings and sit on two separate committees, though she had never
