three times as much. Everyone, in fact, referred as a matter of course to the ‘real’ price and the ‘declared’ price, and only a fool, or a foreigner, would think they were the same.
‘I know that,’ Brunetti said. ‘But even if what they actually paid was three times as much, it’s still a bargain.’
‘If you look at their other real estate acquisitions,’ Signorina Elettra began, pronouncing that noun with a certain measure of asperity, ‘you’ll see that they have enjoyed similar good fortune in most of their dealings.’
He turned back to the first page and read down through the information. Indeed, it did appear that the Volpatos had often managed to find houses that cost very little. Thoughtfully, Signorina Elettra had provided the number of square metres in each ‘acquisition’, and a quick calculation suggested to Brunetti that they had managed to pay an average declared price of less than a million lire a square metre. Even allowing for the variables created by inflation and factoring in the disparity between the declared price and the real price, they still ended up consistently paying far less than a third of the average price for real estate in the city.
He glanced up at her. ‘Am I to assume that the other pages tell the same story?’ he asked.
She nodded.
‘How many properties are there?’
‘More than forty, and I haven’t even begun to examine the other properties listed under the names of Volpatos who might turn out to be relatives.’
‘I see,’ he said, turning his attention back to the papers. On the last pages she had attached current bank statements for their individual accounts as well as a number of joint accounts. ‘How do you manage to do this,’ he began, but seeing the sudden change that came over her face at these words, he added, ‘so quickly?’
‘Friends,’ she answered, then added, ‘Shall I see what sort of information Telecom has to give us about the phone calls they’ve made?’
Brunetti nodded, certain that she had already begun this process. She smiled and left the room; Brunetti returned his attention to the papers and the numbers. They were nothing short of staggering. He recalled the impression the Volpatos had made on him: that they were without education or social position or money. And yet they were people, from what these papers told him, of enormous wealth. If even only half the properties were rented – and people did not accumulate apartments in Venice to let them sit empty – then they must be receiving twenty or thirty million lire a month, as much as many people made in a year. Much of this wealth was safely deposited in four different banks, and even more was invested in government bonds. Brunetti understood little of the workings of the stock market in Milan, but he knew enough to recognize the names of the safest stocks, and the Volpatos had hundreds of millions invested in them.
Those shabby people: he summoned them from memory and recalled the worn handle on her plastic handbag, the stitching on her husband’s left shoe that showed how often it had been repaired. Was this camouflage to protect them from the jealous eyes of the city or was it a form of avarice run mad? And where, in all of this, was he meant to fit the battered body of Franco Rossi, found fatally injured in front of a building owned by the Volpatos?
19
Brunetti spent the next hour contemplating greed, a vice for which Venetians had always had a natural propensity. La Serenissima was, from the beginning, a commercial enterprise, so the acquisition of wealth had ever been among the highest goals toward which a Venetian was trained to aspire. Unlike those profligate southerners, Romans and Florentines, who made money in order to toss it away, who delighted in hurling golden cups and plates into their rivers in order to make public display of their wealth, the Venetians had early on learned to acquire and maintain, to keep, to amass, and to hoard; they had also learned to keep their wealth hidden. Surely, the grand
Its symptoms were far more manifest in the minor families, the fat merchants who built their more modest
Through the centuries, this tendency to accumulate had filtered down and taken firm root in the general population. It was called many things – thrift, economy, prudence – Brunetti himself had been raised to value all of these. In its more exaggerated form, however, it became nothing more than relentless, pitiless avarice, a disease which ravaged not only the person who suffered from it, but all those who came in contact with the infected person.
He remembered, as a young detective, being called to serve as a witness at the opening of the house of an old woman who had died one winter in the common ward of the hospital, her condition much aggravated by malnutrition and the sort of physical battering that came only from prolonged exposure to cold. Three of them had gone to the address given on her identity card, had broken the locks on the front door, all of them, and entered. There they found an apartment of more than two hundred square metres, squalid and stinking of cat, the rooms filled with boxes full of old newspapers, on top of which were piled plastic bags filled with rags and discarded clothing. One room contained nothing but bags of glass bottles of all types: wine bottles, milk bottles, small medicine bottles. Another contained a fifteenth-century Florentine wardrobe that was later valued at one hundred and twenty million lire.
Though it was February, there was no heat: not that the heat was not turned on but that no heating system existed in the house. Two of them were detailed to search for papers that might help find the old woman’s relatives. Brunetti, opening a drawer in her bedroom, found a bundle of fifty-thousand-lire notes tied with a piece of dirty string, while his colleague, searching in the living room, found a stack of postal bank books, each with more than fifty million lire on deposit.
At that point, they’d left the house and sealed it, notified the Guardia di Finanza to come and sort it out. Later, Brunetti had learned that the old woman, who died without relatives or testament, had left more than four billion lire, left it, in lieu of surviving relatives, to the Italian state.
Brunetti’s best friend had often said that he wanted death to take him just at the moment he laid his last lira down on a bar and said, ‘Prosecco for everyone.’ It had happened pretty much like that, and fate had given him forty years less than that old woman, but Brunetti knew that his had been the better life, and the better death.
He shook himself free of these memories and pulled the current duty roster out of his drawer, relieved to see that Vianello was on the night shift that week. The sergeant was at home, busy painting the kitchen, and very glad to be asked to meet Brunetti at the Ufficio Catasto at eleven the next morning.
Brunetti, like almost every citizen of the country, had no friends at the Guardia di Finanza, nor did he want any. He did, however, need access to the information they might have about the Volpatos, for only the Finanza, which busied itself burrowing into the intimate fiscal secrets of citizens, would have any clear idea of just how much of the Volpatos’ enormous wealth was declared and thus taxed. Instead of bothering himself with considering the correct bureaucratic process by which a request for information could be made, he dialled Signorina Elettra and asked her if she could get into their files.
‘Ah, the Guardia di Finanza,’ she breathed, making no attempt to disguise the rapture with which she greeted this request, ‘I’ve longed to be asked to do this.’
‘You wouldn’t do it on your own, Signorina?’ he asked.
‘Why no, sir,’ she answered, surprised that he would ask. ‘That would be, well, that would be poaching, wouldn’t it?’
‘And this, if I ask you to do it?’
‘Big game hunting, sir,’ she sighed and was gone.
He called down to the crime squad and asked when he was going to get the report on the building where
