Friends in High Places

certainly seemed true: more than a thousand years had passed since the first buildings rose on the swampy land, so surely many of them must be in danger of falling down, but nothing ever did fall down. They leaned, tilted, buckled, and curved, but he could not remember ever having heard of a building that had actually collapsed. Surely, he had seen abandoned buildings with roofs that had caved in, boarded-up houses with walls that had fallen in, but he’d never heard of a real collapse, of a building falling in on its inhabitants.

‘Whose idea was this?’

‘I don’t know,’ Stefania said. ‘You never find out things like that.’

‘Do the people in the various offices know about this?’

Instead of giving him a direct answer, she said, ‘Think about it, Guido. Somebody has to see that some of these papers disappear, that files are lost, for you can be sure that a lot of others will be lost just because of the usual incompetence. But someone would have to see that specific papers ceased to exist,’

‘Who would want that?’ he asked.

‘It would most likely be the people who own the houses where the illegal work was done, or it could be the people who were supposed to check the restorations and didn’t bother.’ She paused and then added, ‘Or who did check and were persuaded,’ she began, giving that last word ironic emphasis, ‘to approve what they saw, regardless of what was drawn on the plans.’

‘So who are they?’

‘The Building Commissions.’

‘How many are there?’

‘One for every sestiere, six of them.’

Brunetti imagined the scope and breadth of such an undertaking, the number of people who would have to be involved. He asked, ‘Wouldn’t it just be easier for people to go ahead with the work and then pay a fine when it’s discovered that something doesn’t conform to the plans they submitted, rather than go to the trouble of bribing someone to see that the plans are destroyed? Or lost,’ he amended.

‘That’s the way people did it in the past, Guido. Now that we’re involved in all this Europe stuff, they make you pay the fine, but they also make you undo the work and do it again the right way. And the fines are terrible: I had a client who put up an illegal altana, not even a big one, about two metres by three. But his neighbour reported him. Forty million lire, Guido. And he had to take it down, as well. In the old days, at least he’d have been able to leave it there. I tell you, this business of being involved in Europe is going to ruin us. Soon you won’t be able to find anyone brave enough to take a bribe.’

Though he could hear the moral indignation in her voice, Brunetti was not sure he shared it. ‘Steffi, you’ve named a lot of people, but who do you think would be most likely to be able to arrange this?’

‘The people there, in the Ufficio Catasto,’ she answered instantly. ‘And if any thing’s going on, dal Carlo would have to know about it, and I’d guess he’d have his snout in the trough. After all, the plans have to pass through his office at one time or another, and it would be child’s play for him to destroy specific papers.’ Stefania thought for a moment and then asked, ‘Are you thinking of doing something like this, Guido, getting rid of the plans?’

‘I told you, there are no plans. That’s what put them on to me in the first place.’

‘But if there are no plans, then you can claim they were lost along with the others that are going to be lost.’

‘But how do I prove that my home exists, that it was really built?’ Even as he asked the question, he was overcome with the absurdity of all of this: how did one prove the existence of reality?

Her response was immediate. ‘All you’ve got to do is find an architect who will make the plans for you,’ and before Brunetti could interrupt to ask the obvious question, she answered it for him, ‘and have him put a false date on them’.

‘Stefania, we’re talking about fifty years ago.’

‘Not really. All you’ve got to do is claim you made restorations a few years ago and then have plans drawn up to conform to the way the apartment is now, and put that date on them.’ Brunetti could think of no response to make to this, so she went on, ‘It’s simple, really. If you want, I can give you the name of an architect who will do it for you. Nothing easier, Guido.’

She’d been so helpful that he didn’t want to offend her, so he said, ‘I’ll have to ask Paola about it.’

‘Of course,’ Stefania said. ‘What a fool I am. That’s the answer, isn’t it? I’m sure her father knows the people who could get this taken care of. Then you wouldn’t have to bother with getting an architect.’ She stopped: for her, the problem was solved.

Brunetti was just getting ready to answer this, when Stefania broke in and said, ‘I’ve got a call coming in on the other line. Pray it’s a buyer. Ciao, Guido,’ and she was gone.

He thought about their conversation for a while. Reality was there, malleable and obedient: all one had to do was wrest it this way, push it a bit that way, and make it conform to whatever vision one might have. Or if reality proved intractable, then one simply pulled up the big guns of power and money and opened fire. How simple, how easy.

Brunetti realized that this line of thought led to places he would prefer not to go, and so he flipped open the phone book again and dialled the number of the Ufficio Catasto. The phone rang repeatedly but no one picked it up. He glanced at his watch, saw that it was almost four, and put the phone down, muttering to himself that he was a fool to expect to find anyone at work there in the afternoon.

He hunched down in his chair and propped his feet on the open bottom drawer. Arms folded across his chest, he gave himself over to the reconsideration of Rossi’s visit. He’d seemed an honest man, but that appearance was common enough, especially among the dishonest. Why had he followed up on the official letter by going in person to Brunetti’s house? By the time he’d phoned, later, he’d learned Brunetti’s rank. For a moment, Brunetti considered the possibility that Rossi had originally come in search of the offer of a bribe, but he dismissed that: the man had been too patently honest.

When he’d found out that the Signor Brunetti who couldn’t find the plans of his apartment was a high-placed policeman, had Rossi flicked his line into the moving current of gossip to see what he could pull up about Brunetti? No one would dare to move ahead in any delicate dealing without doing this; the secret was knowing whom to ask, just where to drop the hook so as to catch the necessary information. And had he, subsequent to whatever his sources had reported about Brunetti, decided to approach him with what he had discovered at the Ufficio Catasto?

Illegal building permits and whatever could be earned in bribes from granting them seemed a cheap item on the vast menu of corruption offered by public offices: Brunetti found it impossible to believe that anyone would risk much, certainly not his life, by threatening to expose some ingenious scheme to loot the public purse. The implementation of the computer project to centralize documents and thus lose those which time had made inconvenient would raise the stakes, but Brunetti doubted this would be enough to have cost Rossi his life.

His reflections were interrupted by the arrival of Signorina Elettra, who came into his office without bothering to knock. ‘Am I interrupting you, sir?’ she asked.

‘No, not at all. I was just sitting here thinking about corruption.’

‘Public or private?’ she asked.

‘Public,’ he said, putting his feet under his desk and sitting up straight.

‘Like reading Proust,’ she said, deadpan. ‘You think you’re finished with it, but then you discover there’s another volume. Then another one after that.’

He looked up, waiting for more, but all she said, laying some papers on his desk, was, ‘I’ve learned to share your suspicion of coincidence, sir, so I’d like you to take a look at the names of the owners of that building.’

‘The Volpatos?’ he asked, knowing somehow that it could be nothing else.

‘Exactly.’

‘For how long?’

She leaned over and pulled out the third page. ‘Four years. They bought it from a certain Mathilde Ponzi. The declared price is here,’ she said, pointing to a figure typed at the right side of the page.

‘Two hundred and fifty million lire?’ Brunetti said, his astonishment audible. ‘It’s four floors, must be at least a hundred fifty square metres to the floor.’

‘That’s only the declared price, sir,’ Signorina Elettra said.

Everyone knew that, to avoid taxes, the price of a house declared on the bill of sale never reflected the actual price paid or, if it did, it did so unclearly, through a glass darkly: the real price would be anywhere from two to