Blood from a stone - Donna Leon

Tempting as the thought was, Brunetti refused to believe that she was suggesting he leave the Questura and not return until Thursday evening, so he went back downstairs and into Signorina Elettra’s office. He noticed that Patta’s door was ajar, so he said as he went in, ‘Good morning, Signorina. I’d like to speak to the Vice-Questore if he’s free.’

She rose to her feet, went over to Patta’s door, pushed it fully open, and went inside. He heard her say, ‘Commissario Brunetti would like a word with you, sir.’ She came out a moment later and said, ‘He’s free, Commissario.’

‘Thank you, Signorina,’ he said politely and went through the open door.

‘Close it,’ Patta said by way of greeting.

Brunetti did so and, uninvited, sat in one of the wooden chairs in front of Patta’s desk.

‘Why did you hang up on me?’ Patta demanded.

Brunetti pulled his eyebrows together and gave evidence of thought. ‘When, sir?’

Tiredly, Patta said, ‘Entertaining as you might find it, I can’t play this game with you this morning, Commissario.’ Instinct warned Brunetti to say nothing, and Patta went on. ‘It’s this black man. I want to know what you’ve done.’

‘Less than I want to do, sir,’ Brunetti said, a remark that was both the truth and a lie.

‘Do you think you could be more specific?’ Patta asked.

‘I’ve spoken to some of the men who worked with him,’ Brunetti began, thinking it best to skate over the details of this meeting and the methods used to bring it about, ‘and they refused to give me any information about him. I no longer know how to get in touch with them.’ He thought he would suggest he believed that Patta took some interest in what was going on in the city and so said, ‘You’ve probably noticed that they are no longer here.’

‘Who, the vu cumprà?’ Patta asked with no genuflection to politeness of phrase.

‘Yes. They’ve disappeared from Campo Santo Stefano,’ Brunetti said, making no reference to the absence of at least some of them from their homes. He had no way of knowing if it was true or not, but still he said, ‘They seem to have disappeared from the city.’

‘Where have they gone?’ Patta asked.

‘I have no idea, sir,’ Brunetti admitted.

‘What else have you done?’

Putting on his best voice, Brunetti lied. ‘That’s all I’ve been able to do. There was no useful information in the autopsy report.’ That was certainly true enough: Rizzardi’s report on the signs of torture had come after the official one, and by the time it arrived, the original report — Brunetti’s thoughts turned to a phrase he had adopted from Spanish colleagues — had been disappeared. ‘Everything that happened suggests that he was a Senegalese who somehow angered the wrong people and didn’t have enough sense to leave the city.’

‘I hope this information has been passed on to the investigators from the Ministry of the Interior,’ Patta said.

Tired of lying but also aware that any more passivity would only feed Patta’s suspicions, Brunetti said, ‘I hardly thought that necessary, sir. They seemed quite able to get to it without my help.’

‘It’s their job, Brunetti. If I might remind you,’ Patta said.

This was too much for Brunetti, and he shot back, ‘It’s my job, too.’

Patta’s face flushed suddenly red, and he pointed an angry finger at Brunetti. ‘Your job is to do what you’re told to do and not to question your superiors’ decisions.’ He slapped his hand on the top of his desk for emphasis.

The sound reverberated in the office, and Patta waited for silence before he spoke again, though something in Brunetti’s manner made him hesitate a second before he said, ‘Does it ever occur to you that I might know more about what’s really going on than you do?’

Given Patta’s apparent lack of familiarity with most of the staff at the Questura and what they did, Brunetti’s first impulse was to laugh the question to scorn, but then he thought that Patta might be speaking of the powers behind the Questura, indeed, the powers behind the Ministry of the Interior, in which case he might well be right.

‘Of course that’s occurred to me,’ Brunetti said. ‘But I don’t see what difference it makes.’

‘It makes the difference that I know when certain cases are more in the province of other agencies,’ Patta said in an entirely reasonable voice, as though he and Brunetti were old schoolfriends chatting amiably about the state of the world.

‘That doesn’t mean they should be allowed to have them.’

‘Do you think you’re a better judge of when we should and should not handle things?’ Patta asked, the familiar scorn slipping back into his voice.

It was on the tip of Brunetti’s tongue to say that no one should decide when the investigation of a man’s murder was to be buried in sand, but this would make it clear to Patta that he had no intention of abandoning the case. He contented himself with the lie and answered with a cranky, ‘No.’ He put as much pained resignation as he could muster into his voice and added, ‘I can’t decide that.’ Let Patta make of it what he would.

‘I’ll take that to mean you’re now willing to behave reasonably in this, Brunetti, shall I?’ Patta asked, his voice giving no indication of either satisfaction or triumph.

‘Yes,’ Brunetti said. ‘If the Ministry is going to take this over, should I continue with the university?’ he asked, referring to the newly opened investigation of the Facoltà di Scienze Giuridiche, where some of the professors and assistant professors of the history of law were suspected of selling advance copies of the final exams to students.

‘Yes,’ Patta said, and Brunetti waited for the corollary, as certain to follow as the final section of a da capo aria. ‘I’d like it to be handled discreetly,’ Patta satisfied him by adding. ‘Those fools at the university in Rome have a major scandal on their hands, and the Rector would like to avoid something similar here, if possible. It can only damage the reputation of the university.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Brunetti said and, to Patta’s apparent surprise, got to his feet and left the office. His wife had taught at the university for almost two decades, so Brunetti had a pretty fair idea of how much reputation the university had to save.

Signorina Elettra was not at her desk, but she was outside in the corridor leading to the stairs. ‘You had a call from Don Alvise,’ she said.

‘You know him?’ Brunetti asked, surprised to realize she might.

‘Yes, for a number of years. He sometimes asks me for information.’

Helpless to resist, Brunetti asked, ‘What sort of information?’

‘Nothing to do with the police, sir, or with what I do here; I can assure you of that.’ And that was all she said.

‘You spoke to him?’

‘Yes.’

‘What did he say?’

‘That he spoke to a number of people, and some of them said the man you asked about was a good man, and some of them said he was bad.’ Brunetti felt a sudden jolt of anger: the Cumaean Sibyl could do better than that, for God’s sake.

He waited a moment for his anger to pass and asked, ‘Didn’t he express an opinion?’

‘No,’ she answered.

‘Did he know him?’ Brunetti asked, almost demanded.

‘You’d have to ask him that, sir.’

Brunetti let his gaze wander off beyond her, to a photograph of a former Questore. ‘Anything else?’ he finally asked.

‘I spent some time following the tracks of the person or persons who broke into my computer,’ she said. ‘The tracks lead back to Rome.’

‘Where in Rome?’ he asked peevishly. Instantly contrite, he added, ‘Well done,’ and smiled. He knew she would be pleased to be able to tell him it was the Ministry of the Interior, so he asked only, ‘Who was it?’

‘Il Ministero degli Esteri.’

‘The Foreign Ministry?’ he asked, unable to disguise his surprise.

‘Yes.’ Then, before he could ask, she added, ‘I’m sure.’

Brunetti’s imagination, already halfway up the steps of the Ministry of the Interior, had to hopscotch across the city to an entirely different building, and the mental list of possibilities he had prepared had to be tossed away and a new one prepared. For more than a decade, the two ministries had vied with one another in seeing who could best ignore the problem of illegal immigration, and when some disaster at sea or incident at the border made denial temporarily difficult, they switched to mutual recrimination and then to deceit. Numbers could be adjusted, nationalities altered, and the press could always be counted on to slap a photo of a bedraggled woman and child on to the front page, whereupon popular opinion would lapse into sentimentality long enough to allow the current shipload of refugees into the country, after which people lost interest in the subject, thus permitting the ministries to return to their normal policy of willed ignorance.

But that still did not explain the interference of the Foreign Ministry — if Signorina Elettra said it was they, then so it was — in a case of such apparent insignificance. He had no idea why they should choose to concern themselves with the murder of an itinerant street pedlar, though there were certainly many reasons why they might choose to concern themselves with the murder of a man in possession of six million Euros in diamonds.

‘I’ve already started asking questions,’ she said. During recent years, Brunetti’s understanding of her methods had expanded sufficiently that he no longer pictured her sitting at her desk, making phone call after phone call or, like the Little Match Girl, walking from person to person in search of aid. This understanding, however, stopped far short of a firm grasp of the arcana of her contacts and of the skill with which she pilfered from the supposedly secret files of both government and private agencies. Not only government ministries were capable of willed ignorance.

‘And Bocchese wants to see you,’ she said.

That seemed to be all she wanted to tell him, so he thanked her and went down to Bocchese’s office. On the steps, he encountered Gravini, who held up a hand both in greeting and to stop Brunetti.

‘They’re gone, sir, the ambulanti,’ he said, looking concerned, as if he feared Brunetti would hold him responsible for the men’s disappearance. ‘I spoke to my friend Muhammad, but he hasn’t seen anyone from that group for days and says that their house is empty.’

‘Does he have any idea of what might have happened to them?’

‘No, sir. I asked him, but all he knew was that they were gone.’ Gravini raised his hand again to display his disappointment and said, ‘I’m sorry, sir.’

‘That’s all right, Gravini,’ Brunetti said. Then he added, knowing that everything that was said in the Questura was repeated, ‘We’ve been relieved of the case, so it doesn’t matter any more.’ He patted Gravini on the shoulder to show his good faith and continued down the stairs.

When he entered the lab, Brunetti found the technician bent over a microscope, the fingers of one hand busy adjusting a knob on the long barrel.

Bocchese, one eye pressed to the instrument, made a noise that could have been a greeting or could just as easily have been a grunt of satisfaction at whatever he saw under the lens. Brunetti walked over and had a look at the plate of the microscope, expecting to see a glass slide. Instead, he saw a dark brown rectangle, half the size of a pack of cigarettes, that appeared to be metal of some sort.

‘What’s that?’ he asked without thinking.

Bocchese didn’t answer him. Adjusting the knob, he studied the object for a few moments more, then drew back from the eyepiece, turned to Brunetti and said, ‘Take a look.’

He slid down from the stool, and Brunetti took his place. He had looked at slides in the past, usually when Bocchese or Rizzardi wanted to show him some detail of human physiology or the processes that constituted its destruction.

He placed his right eye to the sculpted eyepiece and closed the other. All he saw was what appeared to be an enormous eye, but black and metallic, with a round hole in the centre as its iris. He braced his open palms on the table, blinked once, and looked again. The image still resembled an eye, with the thinnest of lines indicating the eyelashes.

He stood upright. ‘What is it?’

Bocchese moved beside him and slid the metal piece from its place under the lens. ‘Here, take a look,’ he said, handing it to Brunetti.

The rectangle certainly had the weight of metal; on its surface Brunetti saw a sword-wielding knight mounted on a caparisoned horse no bigger than a postage stamp. The man’s armour was carved in great detail, as was that of the horse. His head and face were covered by a helmet, but the horse wore only some sort of protection on its ears, and a thin line of damask material down the front of its face. It was the horse’s eye, he realized, that he had seen. Without the magnification, he had to hold the plaque to the light to be able to see the tiny hole of the iris.

‘What is it?’ Brunetti asked again.

‘I’d say it’s from the studio of Moderno, which is what my friend wanted me to tell him.’

Utterly at a loss, Brunetti asked, ‘What friend and why did he want you to tell him?’

‘He collects these things. So do I. So whenever he’s offered a really good piece, he asks me to check it for him to see that it’s what the seller says it is.’

‘But here?’ Brunetti asked, indicating the laboratory.

‘The microscope,’ Bocchese said, giving it the sort of affectionate pat one might give a favourite dog. ‘It’s much better than the one I have at home, so I can see every detail. It helps me be certain.’

‘You collect these?’ Brunetti asked, holding the rectangle up close to his face, the better to examine the scene. The horse reared up, nostrils flared in fear or anger. The knight’s left hand, covered in a thick mailed glove, pulled the reins tight while his right arm poised just at the farthest point of backward extension. In less than a second, both horse and man would crash forward, and God pity anything that stood before them.

Bocchese’s answer was an exercise in caution. ‘I’ve got a few.’

‘It’s beautiful,’ Brunetti said, handing it back carefully. ‘I’ve seen them in museums, but if you can’t get close to them, then you can’t really see the detail, can you?’

‘No,’ Bocchese agreed. ‘And you miss the patina, and the feel of it.’ To display that last, he held out his hand, the bronze piece cushioned in his palm, and hefted it up and down a few times. ‘I’m glad you think it’s beautiful.’ Bocchese’s expression was as warm as his voice had suddenly become.

Brunetti held his breath at the intimacy of the moment. In the years they had worked together, he had never doubted the technician’s loyalty, but this was the first time Brunetti had seen him express a feeling stronger than the detached irony with which he chronically viewed human activity. ‘Thank you for showing it to me,’ was all Brunetti could think of to say.