Blood from a stone - Donna Leon

As he walked back, Brunetti decided that the best strategy was to speak immediately to his superior, Vice-Questore Giuseppe Patta, and seek his permission to continue to lead the investigation, though in order to achieve this, he would somehow have to persuade Patta that he did not particularly want the job. He went directly to Patta’s office, outside which he found the man he sought in conversation with Signorina Elettra.

As if someone had whispered the word ‘diamonds’ into the ears of the staff of the Questura as they were dressing for work that morning, Patta wore a new and unusually garish tie-pin, a tiny gold panda with diamond eyes. Signorina Elettra, as though alerted by a sartorial advance warning system, wore a pair of tasteful diamond chip earrings which diminished, though they could not overcome, the impact of Patta’s panda.

With an air of studied casualness, Brunetti greeted them both and asked Signorina Elettra if she had succeeded in locating that Gazzettino article about the former director of the Casinò. Though this was a question Brunetti had invented on the spot to justify his arrival in the office, Signorina Elettra said she had and reached across her desk to hand him a folder.

‘What are you working on at the moment, Brunetti?’ Patta inquired.

Holding up the file, Brunetti said, ‘The Casinò investigation, sir,’ in much the same tone Hercules might have used had he been asked why he was spending so much time in the stables.

Patta turned towards his office. ‘Come with me,’ he said. The remark could have been addressed to either one of them, but the absence of ‘please’ indicated that it was directed at Brunetti.

An Iranian friend had once told Brunetti that underlings there acknowledged the commands of their superiors with a word that sounded like ‘chasham’, a Farsi word meaning ‘I shall put it on my eyes’, which conveyed that the person of lesser importance placed the command of his superior upon his eyes and would do — indeed, see — nothing until the command had been executed. Brunetti often regretted the absence of a similarly servile expression in Italian.

Inside, Patta went to stand at the window, thus preventing Brunetti from taking a seat. He stood just inside the door and waited for Patta to speak. The Vice-Questore stared out of the window for a long time, so long that Brunetti began to wonder if Patta had forgotten about him. He cleared his throat, but the noise evoked no response in Patta.

Just when Brunetti was on the point of speaking, Patta turned from the window and asked, ‘They called you the other night, didn’t they?’

‘About the African, do you mean, sir?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Yes.’

Brunetti nodded.

‘At home?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘Excuse me, sir?’

‘Why did they call you?’

‘I’m not sure I understand, sir. I suppose they called me because I live closest, or perhaps someone here suggested they call me. I really don’t know why.’

‘They didn’t call me,’ Patta said, not without a note of petulance.

After considering what might be the safest answer, Brunetti said, ‘I imagine they simply called whatever name came to mind. Or, for all I know, there’s a list, and they call us at home in turn when it’s necessary for someone to attend the scene of a crime.’ Patta turned back to the window and Brunetti added, ‘Besides, sir, they probably didn’t want to burden someone so senior with the opening stages of an investigation.’ He did not mention that it was precisely those stages which often proved most important in solving a case.

When Patta still did not speak, he added, ‘After all, sir, your skills surely lie in deciding who is best suited to investigate a particular case.’ Brunetti realized how close to the wind he was sailing and decided to say nothing more.

After another long pause, Patta asked, ‘And do you think you’re particularly well suited to this case?’

Brunetti counted to five, very slowly, before he said, ‘No, not particularly.’

As soon as he spoke, Patta was upon him. ‘Does that mean you don’t want it?’

This time Brunetti made it to seven before he answered, ‘I don’t want it and I don’t not want it equally, sir,’ he lied. ‘I am of the opinion that it will turn out to be some story of rivalry between different gangs of blacks and we’ll end up questioning dozens of them, who will all say they have no idea who the man was or who he could have been. And in the end, we’ll learn nothing and just close the case and send it to the archives.’ He tried to sound both disapproving and bored at the same time. When Patta remained silent, Brunetti asked, ‘Is that what you wanted to see me about, sir?’

Patta turned back to him and said, ‘I think you’d better take a seat, Brunetti.’

Suppressing any sign of surprise, Brunetti did as he was told. His superior chose not to move away from the window. Clouds were gathering, and the light was rapidly dimming. Patta’s face had grown less visible since they entered the room, and Brunetti found himself wishing he dared go over and turn the light on, the better to illuminate his superior’s expression.

Finally Patta said, ‘I find your lack of interest unusual, Brunetti.’

Brunetti began to speak, decided to show reluctance, and so waited a few seconds before he said, ‘I suppose it is, sir. But I’m busy at the moment, and I have a feeling that any investigation here will prove futile.’ He glanced at Patta, saw from his stillness how attentive he was, and went on. ‘From the little I’ve heard about the vu cumprà, I’d say they live in a closed world, and there’s no way we can get into it.’ He tried to think of an appropriate comparison, and the best he could come up with was, ‘Like the Chinese.’

‘What?’ Patta demanded sharply. ‘What did you say?’

Startled by his tone, Brunetti said, ‘That they’re like the Chinese here, sir, in that they’re a closed world, a private universe, and we have no understanding of the relationships and rules that operate there, in either case.’

‘But why did you mention the Chinese?’ Patta asked in a calmer voice.

Brunetti shrugged. ‘Because they’re the only other large group I can think of here. Ethnic group, that is.’

‘The Filipinos? The people from Eastern Europe?’ Patta asked. ‘Aren’t they ethnic groups?’

Brunetti thought about this before he answered, ‘I suppose so.’ Then he added, ‘But if I have to tell the truth, it’s because they’re so racially different from us, the Africans and the Chinese, that I lump them together. Maybe that makes them seem more alien, somehow.’ When Patta made no response, he asked, ‘Why do you ask, sir?’

At that, Patta moved away from the window. He did not, however, sit down behind his desk but chose to take a chair opposite Brunetti, a decision that filled Brunetti with a strange disquiet.

‘We don’t trust one another, do we, Brunetti?’ Patta finally asked.

Ordinarily, Brunetti would lie about this and insist that they were both policemen and so it was obvious that they had to trust one another if they were to work together in the best interests of the force, but something warned him that Patta was in no mood for such nonsense, and so he said, ‘No, we don’t.’

Patta considered his answer, glanced at the floor, then back again at Brunetti. At last he said, ‘I want to tell you something that I will not explain, but I want you to trust me when I tell you it’s true.’

Instantly Brunetti thought of a conundrum proposed by his professor of logic: if a person who always lies tells you he is lying, is he telling you the truth or is he lying? Years had passed and he could no longer remember the correct answer, but Patta’s remarks sounded suspiciously similar. He remained silent.

‘We have to leave this alone,’ Patta finally said.

When it was obvious that he was going to say no more, Brunetti asked, ‘I assume this means the murder of the black man?’

Patta nodded.

‘Leave it alone how? Not investigate it or only look like we are, and find nothing?’

‘We can look like we are. That is, we can question people and make reports. But we are not to find anything.’

‘Anything like what?’ Brunetti asked.

Patta shook his head. ‘That’s all I have to say on this matter, Brunetti.’

‘You mean we’re not to find the men who killed him?’ Brunetti asked in a hard voice.

‘I mean only what I said, Brunetti, that we are to leave this alone.’

Brunetti’s impulse was to shout at Patta, but he suppressed it and, instead, asked in a voice he managed to keep calm, ‘Why are you telling me this?’

Patta’s was just as calm as he answered, ‘To spare you trouble, if I can.’ Then, as if provoked to the truth by Brunetti’s silence, he added, ‘To spare us all trouble.’

Brunetti got to his feet. ‘I appreciate the warning, sir,’ he said and walked to the door. He waited there for a moment, curious to see if Patta would ask if he understood and would obey, but the Vice-Questore said nothing more. Brunetti left, careful to shut the door quietly.

Signorina Elettra looked up eagerly as he emerged and started to speak, but Brunetti did nothing more than slide the empty folder back on to her desk. He put his forefinger to his lips and then gestured that he was going back upstairs.

As a kind of insurance that he would not give in to Patta, Brunetti called Paola and described the wooden head, asking her to add it to the information to give to her friend at the university and encouraging her to make the call. Then he opened his mind to possibility. The fact that the Vice-Questore should warn him off an investigation meant that he had himself been warned off, and that raised the question of who would deliver such a warning. And from whom would a warning carry sufficient force to persuade him within less than a day? Patta respected wealth and power, though Brunetti was never sure which meant more to him. Patta would always defer to money, but it was power that could compel his obedience, so the admonition must come from some source powerful enough to force Patta into submission.

Patta had hinted that his warning arose from concern for Brunetti’s safety, a possibility which Brunetti dismissed out of hand. Its origin was more likely to be found in Patta’s fear that Brunetti could not or would not be prevented from continuing the investigation once he began it, even if commanded to do so. The cunning of the snake became evident in Patta’s seeming concern, as if his main priority were Brunetti’s safety and not his own.

The source of a power so great as to force compliance from a Vice-Questore of police? Brunetti closed his eyes and began to run over the rosary beads of possibility. The obvious candidates fell into the general categories of governmental, ecclesiastical, and criminal; the great tragedy of his country, Brunetti mused, was how equal they were as contenders.

15

Signorina Elettra’s arrival interrupted these reflections. She knocked and came in without waiting to be told to do so, approached his desk, and all but demanded, ‘What did he want?’ Then, as if aware of the effrontery of her question, she stepped back and added, ‘He seemed so eager to talk to you, I mean.’

An impulse Brunetti recognized as protective led him to answer, as calmly as though hers had been a normal question, ‘To ask about the murder of the black man.’

‘He was in a very strange mood,’ she volunteered, prodding for a more satisfactory answer.

Brunetti shrugged. ‘He’s always upset when there’s trouble. It reflects badly on the city.’

‘And that reflects badly on him,’ she completed.

‘Even if the victim isn’t one of us,’ Brunetti said, conscious as he spoke of how much he sounded like Chiara. Before Signorina Elettra’s universalist sympathies were offended, he explained, ‘A Venetian, I mean.’

She appeared to accept this and asked, ‘But why one of those poor devils? They never cause any trouble. All they want to do is stand there and sell their bags and try to have a chance at a decent life.’ She drew herself from these sentiments and asked, ‘Did he assign it to you?’

‘No, not specifically. But he didn’t say he wanted anyone else to handle it, so I assume I’m to continue.’ As he said these bland things, his mind kept attempting to follow the trail that led from Patta’s warning back to its source: if Patta had been threatened to warn Brunetti away, then those who continued the investigation would be in danger.

How had Patta phrased it? ‘We have to leave this alone’? How typical that was of him, to make the statement as though it were the result of long consideration and general assent. And ‘have to’, as if it were a truth universally acknowledged that the case was to be abandoned, the man’s murder forgotten or quietly assigned to the realm of forgetting, that overcrowded land.

A Patta who had never existed might have said, ‘I’m being threatened into silencing you, and the thought of losing my job or being hurt fills me with such fear that I will do whatever I can to corrupt the system of justice and stop you from doing your job, just to keep myself safe.’ This phantom Patta’s voice was so real that it all but blocked out Signorina Elettra’s speaking one. Brunetti blinked a few times and drew his attention back in time to hear her ask, ‘. . still report to you?’

‘Yes, of course,’ he answered, as if he had heard the first half of her question. ‘I’ll go on as though I were in charge until I’m told otherwise.’

‘And then?’ she asked.

‘And then I’ll see who he puts in charge and either help that person or else continue to do things on my own.’ It was not necessary to name the person whose appointment would lead to the latter possibility: even in an organization that did not often hunger and thirst for justice’s sake, Lieutenant Scarpa’s contempt for it was noteworthy. Some of the other commissari were unlikely to achieve success in a case that presented difficulties or complexities, but under the direction of a competent magistrate, they would at least make an attempt to apprehend the guilty and would be handicapped only by inexperience or lack of imagination. Scarpa, however, knew no motivation save self-advancement, and even a whisper from his superior — or from forces Brunetti was reluctant to name — that the case not be pursued would suffice to guarantee its doom.

Luckily, the case could not be given to Scarpa, still only a lieutenant, in spite of all of Patta’s efforts to have him promoted. A commissario would still be the chief police officer in charge of the investigation, though nothing could prevent Patta, should he choose to do so, from assigning Scarpa to the case, as well.

‘If only we didn’t have to worry about him,’ Brunetti said, knowing it was unnecessary to pronounce Scarpa’s name and bemused to hear himself sounding so much like an English king trying to resolve a personnel problem.