scales of her trade. On one side he put the words ‘only a possibility’ and on the other the publicity sure to accrue at the news that a woman had been killed in her home. After all these years, he was well aware of the workings of his superior’s mind and knew that the first obstacle would be the damage to the image of the city, second the damage to tourism.
‘And the effect on tourism?’ an outraged Patta demanded of him half an hour later, reversing the order of his concerns but still not managing to surprise Brunetti. The Vice-Questore had, by evident force of will, contained himself until he finished listening to these latest ravings from his ever-insubordinate subordinate. ‘What are we supposed to tell these people? That they aren’t safe in their homes, but to have a good time anyway?’
Brunetti, well schooled in the rhetorical excesses and inconsistencies of his superior, forbore to point out that tourists, at least when they were in Venice, were not in their homes, however safe or unsafe they might be therein. He nodded in a manner he hoped would be considered sage.
Brunetti concentrated on meeting his superior’s gaze – Patta hated to have anyone’s attention stray from him, surely the first step on the road to disobedience – and gave every appearance that he was dealing with rational opposition. ‘Yes, I see your point, Vice-Questore,’ Brunetti said. ‘I just hope that Dottor Niccolini…’ he allowed his voice to trail away, as if his thoughts had been written on a blackboard and he was wiping them out.
‘What about him?’ Patta asked, eyes alert to everything he considered a nuance.
‘Nothing, sir,’ Brunetti said evasively, uncertain whether he should be bored or mortified by his own behaviour.
‘What about Dottor Niccolini?’ Patta said in a cold voice, exactly the one Brunetti had tried to provoke.
‘That’s just it, sir: he’s a doctor. That’s how he introduced himself at the hospital, and that’s how Rizzardi addressed him.’ This was pure fantasy on Brunetti’s part. But it might have been true, which sufficed.
‘And so?’
‘They asked him to identify his mother’s body,’ Brunetti added, trying to make it sound as if he were suggesting something to Patta that delicacy made difficult to say.
‘People just see the face,’ Patta asserted, but an instant later he compromised his certainty by asking, ‘don’t they?’
Brunetti nodded and said, ‘Of course,’ as though that were the end of it.
‘What does that mean?’ Patta demanded in a voice intended to be menacing but which Brunetti, familiar with the beast these many years, recognized as the voice of uncertainty.
Brunetti forced himself to look at his hands, carefully folded in his lap, and then directly into Patta’s eyes, always the best tactic for lying. ‘He would have been shown the marks, Vice-Questore,’ he said; then, before Patta could ask about that, he continued, ‘And because they thought he was a doctor, they would have explained them to him. Well, explained what they might be.’
Patta considered this. ‘You think Rizzardi would actually do that?’ he asked, unable to disguise his dissatisfaction that the
‘He’d think it was correct because he was speaking to a colleague,’ Brunetti said.
‘But he’s only a veterinarian,’ Patta raged, speaking the noun with contempt and apparently forgetting not only his son’s relationship with his husky but the many times he had expressed his belief that vets’ professional skill exceeded that of the doctors at the Ospedale Civile.
Brunetti nodded but chose to say nothing. Instead, he sat quietly and observed Patta’s face as the consciousness behind it measured the odds and considered the possibilities. Niccolini was an unknown player: he worked outside the province of Venice, so he could have some political weight unknown to Patta. Veterinarians worked with farmers, and farmers were close to the Lega, and the Lega was a growing political force. Beyond this, for lack of fantasy, Brunetti’s imagination could not go in pursuit of Patta’s.
Finally Patta said, sounding not at all happy about the fact, ‘I’ll have to ask a magistrate to authorize something.’ A sudden thought crossed his handsome face; did the Vice-Questore actually pause to adjust his tie? ‘Yes, we’ve got to get to the bottom of this. Tell Signorina Elettra what you want me to ask him for. And I’ll see to it.’
It had been so flawless that Brunetti had not seen the change take place. He recalled the passage – he thought it was in the Twenty-Fifth Canto – where Dante sees the thieves transformed into lizards, lizards into thieves, the moment of transformation invisible until complete. One instant one thing, the next another. So too had Patta passed from the sustainer of peace at any compromise to the relentless seeker after justice, ready to mobilize the forces of order in the pursuit of truth. Like Dante’s sinners, he fell back to earth already in the guise of his opposite, then rose and walked away with nothing more than a glance over his shoulder.
‘I’ll go and speak to her about it now, shall I, sir?’ Brunetti suggested.
‘Yes,’ Patta encouraged. ‘She’ll know which magistrate is best. One of the young ones, I think.’
Brunetti got to his feet and wished his superior good morning.
Signorina Elettra appeared neither surprised nor pleased at her superior’s change of course. ‘There’s a nice young magistrate I can ask,’ she said with the calculating smile she might use when asking the butcher for a plump young chicken. ‘He hasn’t had much experience, so he’s likely to be open to… suggestion.’ This, Brunetti thought, was probably much the way the Old Man of the Mountain spoke of his apprentice assassins as he sent them about their tasks.
‘How old is he?’ Brunetti asked.
‘He can’t be thirty,’ she said, as though that number were a word she had heard in some other language and perhaps knew the meaning of. Then, in a far more serious voice, she asked, ‘What do you want him to ask for?’
‘Access to the records of the Ospedale Civile for the time Madame Reynard was a patient there; employee records for the same period, if such things exist; authorization to speak to Morandi and Signora Sartori; tax records for both of them and all documents regarding the sale of Cuccetti’s wife’s house to Morandi; Reynard’s death certificate, and a look at the will to see how much she left him, as well as any other bequests.’ That sounded, to Brunetti, like more than enough to be getting on with.
She had been taking note of his requests, and when he finished, she looked at him and said, ‘I have some of this information already, but I can change the dates and make it look as if the request wasn’t made until the magistrate authorized it.’ She glanced at her notes and said, tapping at the list with the end of her pencil, ‘He probably doesn’t know yet how to ask for all of this, but I suspect I could make a few suggestions that might help him.’
‘Suggestions,’ Brunetti said in a dead level voice.
The look she gave him would have brought a lesser man to his knees. ‘Please, Commissario,’ was all she said, and then she picked up the phone.
Within minutes it was done, and the magistrate’s secretary, with whom Signorina Elettra spoke with easy familiarity, said the warrants would be delivered the next morning. Brunetti restrained himself from asking the name of the magistrate, certain that he would learn it from the signature when he saw the papers the next day. Well, he told himself as he considered the speed and efficiency with which her request had been granted: why should the judiciary be any different from any other public or private institution? Favours were granted to the person whose request was accompanied by a
Brunetti found himself, not for the first time, trapped in ambivalence. In this case, it worked to his advantage – and, he told himself, to the civic good – that Signorina Elettra had turned the judicial system of the city into her fief. But in places where persons of lesser… lesser probity… were in charge, the results might not be as salutary.
He left these thoughts, thanked her for her help, and went back to his office.
It was there, after an hour during which he read and initialled various documents and reports, that Signorina Elettra came to speak to him. ‘I’ve found the man of my dreams,’ she said as she came in, and said it in such a way as to lead Brunetti to understand that the man was the young magistrate.
