A long silence greeted this.
‘Do you have his name?’ Brunetti prodded.
‘Righetto, Angelo Righetto,’ came the terse reply. Brunetti decided to ask nothing at this point. He thanked Gavini, made no promise to phone him about any numbers Rossi might have called, and hung up, wondering about the chill in Gavini’s voice as he pronounced the name of the man in charge of the investigation of his partner’s murder.
He immediately called down to Signorina Elettra and asked her to get copies of all of the calls made from Rossi’s home number during the last three months. When he asked her if it would be possible to find out the number of Rossi’s extension at the Ufficio Catasto and check that, she asked if he wanted the last three months of calls.
While he had her on the line, he asked her if she could call Magistrato Angelo Righetto in Ferrara and connect him as soon as she did.
Brunetti pulled a piece of paper toward him and started making a list of the names of people he thought might be able to give him information about moneylenders in the city. He knew nothing about the usurers, at least nothing more real than his vague certainty that they were there, burrowed into the social fabric as deeply as maggots into dead meat. Like certain forms of bacteria, they needed the security of an airless, dark place in which to thrive, and certainly the fearful state into which their debtors were intimidated provided neither light nor air. In secrecy, and with the unspoken threat of the consequences of late payment or default ever present in the minds of their debtors, they prospered and grew fat. The wonder of it, to Brunetti, was his ignorance of their names, faces, and histories as well as, he realized as he looked down at the still blank piece of paper, any idea of who to ask for help about how he might try to drive them out into the light.
A name came to him, and he pulled out the phone book to find the number of the bank where she worked. As he looked, his phone rang. He answered it with his name.
‘Dottore,’ Signorina Elettra said, ‘I have Magistrato Righetto on the line, if you’d like to speak to him.’
‘Yes, Signorina, I would. Please put him through.’ Brunetti put down his pen and moved the paper to the side of his desk.
‘Righetto,’ a deep voice said.
‘Magistrato, this is Commissario Guido Brunetti, from Venice. I’m calling to ask what you can tell me about the murder of Alessandro Cappelli.’
‘Why are you interested in it?’ Righetto asked, no sign of great curiosity audible in the question. He spoke with an accent Brunetti thought might be from the Sud Tirol; definitely a northerner, at any rate.
‘I have a case here,’ Brunetti explained, ‘another death, that might be related to his, and I wonder what you’ve managed to discover about Cappelli.’
There was a long pause, and then Righetto said, ‘I’d be surprised if any other death was related to it.’ He allowed a brief pause for Brunetti to question him, but as Brunetti said nothing he went on, ‘It looks like we’re dealing with a case of mistaken identity here, not murder.’ Righetto halted for an instant and then corrected himself. ‘Well, murder, of course it’s that. But it wasn’t Cappelli they were trying to kill, and we’re not even sure they were trying to kill the other man so much as frighten him.’
Sensing that it was time he displayed an interest, Brunetti asked, ‘What happened, then?’
‘It was his partner, Gavini, they were after,’ the magistrate explained. ‘At least that’s what our investigation suggests.’
‘Why?’ Brunetti asked, openly curious.
‘It made no sense from the beginning that anyone would want to kill Cappelli,’ Righetto began, making it sound as though no importance whatsoever was to be given to Cappelli’s position as a declared enemy of usurers. ‘We’ve looked into his past, even checked the current cases he was working on, but there’s no indication at all of an involvement with anyone who would want to do something like this.’
Brunetti made a little noise, one that could be interpreted as a sigh of mingled understanding and agreement.
‘On the other hand,’ Righetto continued, ‘there’s his partner.’
‘Gavini,’ Brunetti supplied unnecessarily.
‘Yes, Gavini,’ Righetto said with a dismissive laugh. ‘He’s well known in the area, has the reputation as quite a ladies’ man. Unfortunately, he has the habit of getting himself involved with married women.’
‘Ah,’ Brunetti said with a worldly sigh which he managed to infuse with the appropriate level of manly tolerance. ‘So that was it?’ he asked with bland acceptance.
‘It would seem so. In the last few years, he’s been involved with four different women, all of them married.’
Brunetti said, ‘Poor devil.’ He waited long enough to allow himself to consider the comic implications of what he’d just said and then added with a quick laugh, ‘Maybe he should have limited himself to only one of them.’
‘Yes, but how’s a man to decide?’ the magistrate shot back, and Brunetti rewarded his wit with another hearty laugh.
‘Do you have any idea which one it was?’ Brunetti asked, interested in how Righetto would handle the question, which in its turn would suggest how he was going to handle the investigation.
Righetto allowed himself a pause, no doubt he wanted it to seem like a thoughtful pause, and then said, ‘No. We’ve questioned the women, and their husbands, but all of them can prove they were somewhere else when it happened.’
‘I thought the papers said it was a professional hit,’ Brunetti said, sounding confused.
The temperature of Righetto’s voice dropped. ‘If you’re a policeman, you should know better than to believe what you read in the papers.’
‘Of course,’ Brunetti said, making himself laugh genially, as at a well-earned reproach from a colleague with greater experience and wisdom. ‘You think maybe there was still another woman?’
‘That’s the trail we’re following,’ Righetto said.
‘It happened at their offices, didn’t it?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Yes,’ Righetto answered, willing now, after Brunetti’s hint at another woman, to give further information. ‘The two men look alike: they’re both short and have dark hair. It happened on a rainy day; the killer was on the roof of a building across the street. So there’s little question he mistook Cappelli for Gavini.’
‘But what about all this talk that Cappelli was killed because of his investigation of moneylenders?’ Brunetti asked, putting enough scepticism into his voice to make it clear to Righetto that he wouldn’t believe such nonsense for a minute but perhaps wanted to have the right answer in case someone else, more innocent than he and thus willing to believe everything he read in the papers, should ask him about it.
‘We started by examining that possibility, but there’s nothing there, just nothing. So we’ve excluded it from our investigation.’
Righetto rewarded him with his own broad laugh and then asked, quite casually, ‘You said you had another death there. A murder?’
‘No, no, after what you’ve told me, Magistrato,’ Brunetti said, attempting to sound as dull and ploddish as he could, ‘I’m sure there’s no connection. What we’re dealing with here has got to be an accident.’
16
Like most Italians, Brunetti believed that records were kept of all phone calls made anywhere in the country and copies made of all faxes; like very few Italians, he had reason to know this was true. Belief or certainty, however, made little difference to behaviour: nothing of substance and nothing that could in any way be incriminating to either of the speakers or interesting to any of the agencies of government which chose to eavesdrop was ever discussed on the phone. People spoke in code where ‘money’ became ‘vases’ or ‘flowers’ and investments or bank accounts were referred to as ‘friends’ in foreign countries. Brunetti had no idea of how widespread the belief and the resultant caution were, but he knew enough when he called his friend at the Banca
