Friends in High Places

‘And could you repeat to me what you told him?’ Brunetti asked, pulling a sheet of paper towards him.

‘I told you: I called after Sandro’s death,’ Gavini said, and then asked, ‘Do you know about that?’

‘No.’

‘Sandro Cappelli,’ Gavini said, as if the name would explain everything. It did strike a faint chord in Brunetti’s memory: he couldn’t remember why he knew the name, but he was sure that whatever he knew of it was bad. ‘He was my partner in the practice here,’ Gavini added.

‘What sort of practice, Signor Gavini?’

‘Legal. We’re lawyers. Don’t you know anything about this?’ For the first time, a note of exasperation slipped into his voice, the note that inevitably came into the voice of anyone who spent enough time dealing on the phone with an unresponsive bureaucracy.

Gavini’s saying that they were lawyers jogged Brunetti’s memory. He remembered Cappelli’s murder, almost a month ago. ‘Yes, I know the name. He was shot, wasn’t he?’

‘Standing at the window of his office, a client sitting behind him, at eleven in the morning. Someone shot him through the window with a hunting rifle.’ As he rapped out the details of his partner’s death, Gavini’s voice took on the staccato rhythm of real anger.

Brunetti had read the newspaper accounts of the murder, but he knew no facts. ‘Is there a suspect?’ he asked.

‘Of course not,’ Gavini shot back, making no attempt to stop his anger from boiling over. ‘But we all know who did it.’

Brunetti waited for Gavini to spell it out for him. ‘The moneylenders. Sandro’d been after them for years. He had four cases running against them when he died.’

The policeman in Brunetti caused him to ask, ‘Is there any evidence of this, Signor Gavini?’

‘Of course not,’ the lawyer all but spat down the line. ‘They sent someone, paid someone and sent him to do it. It was a contract killing: the shot came from the roof of a building on the opposite side of the street. Even the police here said it had to be a contract killing; who else would want to murder him?’

Brunetti had too little information to be able to answer questions about Cappelli’s death, even rhetorical ones, and so he said, ‘I ask you to excuse my ignorance about your partner’s death and the people responsible, Signor Gavini. I was calling you about something entirely different, but after what you’ve said, I wonder if it is so different.’

‘What do you mean?’ Gavini asked. Though the words were abrupt, his voice was curious, interested.

‘I’m calling about a death we’ve had here in Venice, a death that looks accidental but might not be.’ He waited for Gavini’s questions, but none came, and so he continued. ‘A man fell from scaffolding here, and died. He worked in the Ufficio Catasto and had a phone number in his wallet when he died, but without any city code. This is one of the numbers it might have been.’

‘What was his name?’ Gavini asked.

‘Franco Rossi.’ Brunetti allowed him a moment for reflection or memory, then asked, ‘Does it mean anything to you?’

‘No, it doesn’t.’

‘Is there any way you could find out if it meant something to your colleague?’

Gavini was a long time in answering. ‘Do you have his number? I could check the phone logs,’ he suggested.

‘One moment,’ Brunetti said and bent to pull open his bottom drawer. From it, he took the phone book and checked through the listings for Rossi: there were seven columns of them, and about a dozen of those were Francos. He found the address and read the phone number to Gavini, then asked him to wait while he flipped to the pages for the Comune of Venice and found the number for the Ufficio Catasto. If Rossi had been rash enough to call the police from his telefonino, he might easily have called the lawyer from his office or received calls there.

‘It will take me a while to check the logs,’ Gavini said. ‘I’ve got someone waiting to see me. But as soon as he’s gone, I’ll call you back.’

‘Perhaps you could ask your secretary to do it for you.’

Gavini’s voice suddenly took on an odd note of excessive formality, almost of caution. ‘No, I think I’d prefer to do this myself.’

Brunetti said that he’d wait for Gavini’s call, gave his direct number, and the two men hung up.

A phone that had been disconnected months ago, an old woman who knew no one named Franco Rossi, a car rental agency with no such client, but now the partner of a lawyer whose death had been as violent as Rossi’s: Brunetti well knew the time that could be wasted in following false scents and chasing down misleading trails, but this had the right feel to it, however uncertain he might be of what it was or where it might be leading.

Like the plagues inflicted upon the children of Egypt, moneylenders afflicted the children of Italy and caused them to suffer. Banks extended credit reluctantly and generally only with the guarantee of the sort of financial security that would obviate the need to borrow. Short-term credit for the businessman who had little cash at the end of the month or the salesman whose clients were slow in paying was virtually non-existent. And all of this was compounded by a habitual sloth in the paying of bills which could be said to characterize the entire nation.

Into this breach stepped, as everyone knew but few would say, the moneylenders, gli strozzini, those shadowy persons who were willing and able to lend at short notice and with little security from the borrowers. Their rates of interest more than compensated for any risk they might incur. And, in a sense, the idea of risk was academic at best, for the strozzini had methods which greatly reduced the possibility that their clients – if that is the right name for them – would fail to repay the money they had borrowed. Men had children, and children could disappear; men had daughters, and young girls might be raped; men had their lives, and these had been known to be lost. Occasionally the press carried stories which, without being entirely clear, managed nevertheless to suggest that certain actions, often unpleasant or violent, had resulted from the failure to repay borrowed money. But seldom did the people involved in these stories end up under prosecution or close police examination: a wall of silence hedged them safely round. Brunetti had to struggle to recall a case where enough evidence had been gathered to lead to a conviction for moneylending, a crime with a place in the statutes, however infrequently it appeared in the courtroom.

Brunetti sat at his desk and allowed his imagination and his memory to consider the many possibilities offered by the fact that Franco Rossi might have been carrying Sandro Cappelli’s office phone number in his wallet when he died. He tried to recall Rossi’s visit and to reconstruct his sense of the man. Rossi had been serious about his work: that was perhaps the most lasting impression he had left with Brunetti. A bit humourless, more earnest than seemed possible in a man so young, Rossi had still been likeable and eager to provide what help he could.

All of this thinking, in the absence of any clear idea of what was going on, got Brunetti nowhere, but it did manage to pass the time until Gavini called.

Brunetti answered on the first ring. ‘Brunetti.’

‘Commissario,’ Gavini said and identified himself. ‘I’ve been through both the client files and the phone logs.’ Brunetti waited for more. ‘No client named Franco Rossi is listed, but Sandro called Rossi’s number three times during the month before he died.’

‘Which one? At home or at work?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Does it make a difference?’

‘Everything might make a difference.’

‘At his office,’ Gavini offered.

‘How long did the calls last?’

The other man must have had the paper under his hand because he said, without hesitation, ‘Twelve minutes, then six, then eight.’ Gavini waited for Brunetti to respond, and when he didn’t, asked, ‘What about Rossi? Do you know if he called Sandro?’

‘I haven’t checked his phone records yet,’ Brunetti admitted, feeling not a little embarrassed. Gavini said nothing, and Brunetti went on: ‘I’ll have them by tomorrow.’ Suddenly he remembered that this man was a lawyer, not a fellow officer, which meant he had no responsibility to him and no need to share information with him.

‘What’s the name of the magistrate handling the case there?’ he asked.

‘Why do you want to know?’

‘I’d like to talk to him,’ Brunetti said.