his voice to trail off.
He smiled at them, and the idea came to him that they were, in a sense, his surrogate children at the Questura, Vianello their uncle. And what did that make Patta? The dotty grandfather and Scarpa the wicked stepbrother? He pulled himself back from these thoughts and asked, ‘Did you find her?’
Pucetti moved back, leaving the stage to Signorina Elettra.‘I started with the Ministry of the Interior,’ she said. ‘It’s easy to get into a certain level of their system.’ She was being calmly descriptive and made no attempt to show off by criticizing the laxity with which some agencies guarded their information. ‘After a time, I began to find some places were blocked off to me, and so I had to go back and find other means of access.’ Reading Brunetti’s expression, she said, ‘But the details of how I did it don’t matter, do they?’
Brunetti glanced at Pucetti and saw the look the younger man gave her when she said this. He had last seen that expression on the face of a drug addict when he had smacked a needle out of his hand and crushed it under his heel.
‘. . special squadron set up to examine the Camorra’s control of the garbage industry, and it turns out that Signorina Landi works for the Ministry of the Interior and has done so for some time.’
Suspecting that this was the least of what she had to say, he asked, ‘What else did you learn about her?’
‘She
‘And her job?’ Brunetti asked.
‘From the little I could see before the. . she does the chemical analysis of what the Carabinieri find or manage to sequester.’
‘What were you about to say?’ Brunetti asked.
She gave Brunetti a long look, then glanced aside at Pucetti before answering, ‘I found it before the connection was interrupted.’
With a start, Brunetti turned towards the door to Patta’s office; Signorina Elettra, seeing this, said, ‘Dottor Patta has a meeting in Padova this afternoon.’
Recalling her hesitation, Brunetti asked, ‘What does that mean to an ignorant person, that the connection was interrupted?’
She considered this briefly before answering him. ‘It means that they’ve got a warning system that shuts everything down the instant it detects an unauthorized access.’
‘Can they trace it?’
‘I doubt it,’ she said in a more confident voice. ‘And if they did, it would lead to a computer at the offices of a company owned by a member of parliament.’
‘Are you telling me the truth?’ he asked.
‘I try always to tell you the truth, Commissario,’ she said, not indignantly, but close.
‘Only try?’ he asked.
‘Only try,’ she answered.
Brunetti chose to let this lie, but he could not pass up the opportunity to take a bit of wind out of her sails. ‘Cataldo’s computer people reported an attempt to break into their system.’
That stopped her, but after a moment’s reflection she said, ‘That trail leads back to the same company.’
‘You seem remarkably nonchalant about this, Signorina,’ Brunetti observed.
‘No, I’m not, not really. I’m glad you told me about it, though: I won’t make the same mistakes again.’ And that, her tone signalled, was that.
‘Does this Signorina Landi work in the same unit as Guarino did?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Yes. From what I managed to see, there are four men and two women, plus Dottoressa Landi and another chemist. The unit’s based in Trieste, with another group working in Bologna. I don’t know the names of the others and found her only because I had a specific name to look for.’
Silence fell. Pucetti looked back and forth between them but said nothing.
‘Pucetti?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Do you know where he was killed, sir?’
‘Marghera,’ Signorina Elettra answered for him.
‘That’s where he was found, Signorina,’ Pucetti corrected in a deferential voice.
‘Other questions, Pucetti?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Who moved the body, and when will the autopsy be done, why was there so little in the newspaper, and what was he doing wherever it was he was killed?’ Pucetti said, not managing to keep his voice calm as he recited this list.
Brunetti saw the look, and then the smile, that Signorina Elettra gave the young officer when he finished. However interesting it would be to have the answers to that list of questions, Brunetti realized that the first one was, at least for the present, the most important: where had Guarino been killed?
He left these thoughts and turned to Signorina Elettra. ‘Would it be possible to contact this Dottoressa Landi?’
She did not respond immediately, leaving Brunetti to wonder if those same alarms would sound were she now to try to find something as simple as a phone number. She glanced at him and her eyes moved to distant focus as she planned some cyber manoeuvre he could never hope to understand.
‘It’s all right,’ she finally said.
‘Which means?’ Brunetti asked, sparing Pucetti the need to ask.
‘I’ll get you her number.’ She rose to her feet, Pucetti quick to pull back her chair. ‘I’ll call you when I have it, sir,’ she said, then added, ‘There’s no risk.’ Pucetti and Brunetti left the office.
Twenty minutes later, good as her word, she called with Signorina Landi’s
To distract himself, Brunetti pulled towards him the oldest pile of papers that had accumulated on his desk and began to read through them, forcing himself to concentrate. One of Vianello’s informers had recently told the Ispettore that he should pay attention to some of the shops in Calle della Mandola that had recently changed hands. If this was money laundering, as the informer suggested, then it was not his concern: let the Guardia di Finanza worry about money.
Besides, it was a street he seldom used, so it was difficult for him to cast his visual memory along it and register the changes of merchandise in the windows. The antique book store was still there, as were the pharmacy, and the optician. The other side of the street was more difficult, for it was there that changes had taken place. There were shops selling trendy olive oil and bottled sauces, glass, then the fruit vendor and the flower shop that was the first to put out lilacs in the spring. They could ask around, he supposed, but it was all rather like the question about Ranzato: were they meant to walk up and down the street, calling on the Camorra to come out of hiding?
He thought of an article he had read months before in one of Chiara’s animal magazines about some sort of toad that had been imported into Australia. Taken there to combat a pest or insect that was endangering the sugar cane crop, this toad — was it the cane toad? — had no natural predators and thus increased relentlessly as it spread north and south. Its poison, it was discovered only after its numbers had shot past control, was strong enough to kill dogs and cats. Cane toads could be stabbed, pierced, run over by cars and still not be killed. Only the crows, it seemed, had learned how to kill them by flipping them over and devouring their viscera.
Did he need a more perfect comparison with the Mafia? Brought back to life by the Americans after the war to control the perceived Communist menace, it had got out of control and, as with the cane toad, its expansion north and south could not be stopped. It could be pierced and stabbed, but it would spring back to life. ‘We need crows,’ Brunetti said out loud, looked up, and saw Vianello at the door.
‘It’s the autopsy report,’ Vianello said in an ordinary voice, as though he had not heard Brunetti speak. He handed Brunetti a manila envelope and, even before Brunetti nodded to him, took a seat in front of his desk.
Brunetti slit open the envelope and slid out the photos, surprised to see that they were no bigger than postcards. He put them on his desk and removed some sheets of paper, placing them to the side of the photos. He looked at Vianello, who had noticed how small the photos were.
‘Economy measure, I suppose,’ Vianello observed.
