Ribasso nodded. ‘Filippo studied biochemistry: I think he joined that branch because he wanted to do something useful. Maybe important. They were glad to get him.’
‘How long ago was that?’
‘Eight, nine years. Maybe. I’ve known him only for the last five or six.’ Then, before Brunetti could ask, Ribasso added, ‘We never worked on a case together.’
‘Not this one?’ Griffoni asked.
Ribasso shifted his weight from one foot to another. ‘I told you, he would talk to me.’
‘What else did he tell you?’ Brunetti asked. Quickly, Griffoni broke in to add, ‘It can’t make any difference to him now.’
Ribasso took a few steps towards his car. He turned back to face them. ‘He told me the whole thing stank of Camorra. The man who got killed — Ranzato — he was only one of the people mixed up in it. Filippo was trying to find out how all this stuff got moved around.’
‘How much are we talking about?’ Griffoni broke in to ask. ‘Tons?’
‘Hundreds of tons, I’d say,’ Brunetti added.
‘Hundreds of thousands of tons is closer to the truth,’ Ribasso said, silencing them both.
Brunetti attempted to do the numbers, but he had no idea what weight a truck could carry and so could not do even the most basic calculation. His mind flashed to his children, for it was they and their children who would inherit the contents of those trucks.
Ribasso, as if chastened by his own words, prodded at the frosted mud with the tip of his boot, then looked at them and said, ‘Someone tried to drive him off the road a week ago.’
‘He didn’t tell me that,’ Brunetti said. ‘What happened?’
‘He avoided them. They pulled up level with him — this was out on the autostrada coming down from Treviso — and when they started to move towards him, he slammed on his brakes and pulled over and stopped. They kept going.’
‘Did you believe him?’
Ribasso shrugged and turned back to the place where Guarino’s body had been. ‘Someone got him.’
Brunetti and Griffoni rode back to Piazzale Roma in relative silence, both of them burdened by the sight of death and chilled by their long exposure to the cold and waste of Marghera. Griffoni asked Brunetti why he had failed to tell Ribasso he had identified the man in the photo Guarino had sent him, and Brunetti explained that the Captain, who must surely have known about it, had not considered it necessary to tell him anything. No stranger to the rivalry that existed between the different branches of the forces of order, she said no more.
Brunetti had called ahead, and there was a launch waiting to take them to the Questura. But even inside the warm cabin of the boat, and with the heater turned on high, they did not grow warm.
Inside his office, he stood by the radiator, reluctant to call Avisani and justifying the delay until he felt warm again. Finally he went to his desk, found the number, and dialled it.
‘It’s me,’ he said, striving to sound natural.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘The worst,’ Brunetti said, immediately embarrassed by the melodrama.
‘Filippo?’ Avisani asked.
‘I’m just back from seeing his body,’ Brunetti said. No questions came. Into the silence, he said, ‘He was shot. They found him this morning at the petrochemical complex in Marghera.’
After a long pause, Avisani said, ‘He always said it was a possibility. But I didn’t believe him. I mean, who could? But. . it’s different. When it happens. Like this.’
‘Did he tell you anything else?’
‘I’m a journalist, remember,’ came the immediate reply, just short of anger.
‘I thought you were his friend.’
‘Yes. Yes.’ Then, in a more sober voice, Avisani said, ‘It was the usual thing, Guido: the more he found out, the more obstacles he encountered. The magistrate in charge of the case was transferred, and the new one didn’t seem very interested. Then two of his best assistants were transferred. You know what it’s like.’
Yes, Brunetti thought, he did know what it was like. ‘Anything else?’ he asked.
‘No, just that. It was nothing I could use: I’ve heard it too many times.’ The line went dead.
Like many people involved in police work, Brunetti had long ago realized that the tentacles of the various mafias penetrated deep into every aspect of life, including most public institutions and many businesses. It would be impossible to count the number of policemen and magistrates who had found themselves transferred to some provincial dead end just at the point when their investigations began to uncover embarrassing links to the government. No matter how people tried to ignore it, the evidence of the depth and breadth of penetration was overwhelming. Had the news-papers not recently proclaimed the mafias, with 93 billion Euros in yearly earnings, the third largest enterprise in the country?
Brunetti had observed the Mafia and its close relatives, the N’Dragheta and the Camorra, grow ever more powerful, moving from the dark corners of his investigations until they were now the Prime Mover in the universe of crime. Like that French nobleman in the book he had read as a boy — The Scarlet Pimpernel. He tried to recall the poem describing those who tried to find and destroy him: ‘They seek him here, They seek him there, Those Frenchies seek him everywhere.’
Or was the Lernean Hydra a better image, impossible to destroy because of its many heads? He remembered the joyous feeding frenzy of the press after the arrests of Riina, Provenzano, Lo Piccolo, the suggestion endlessly repeated that finally the government had been triumphant in its long battle against organized crime. As if the death of the president of General Motors or British Petroleum would bring those monoliths to their knees. Had no one ever heard of vice-presidents?
If anything, the arrests of those dinosaurs would give opportunities for younger men, university-trained men, better able to direct their organizations like the multinational corporations they had become. And, he could never forget, the arrests of two of those men had taken place at about the same time as the indulto, that beneficent wave of the legal wand that had set free more than 24,000 criminals, many of them the foot soldiers of the Mafia. Ah, how accommodating the law could be, when it was in the hands of those who best knew how to use it.
16
Brunetti decided it would be better to talk to Patta about Guarino, but when he arrived at the Questura, the guard at the entrance told him the Vice-Questore had left an hour before. Relieved, he went up to his office and called Vianello to ask him to come up. When the Inspector arrived, Brunetti told him about going out to Marghera and seeing Guarino, lying dead on his back in the field.
‘Where had they moved him from?’ Vianello asked immediately.
‘There’s no way of knowing. The men who found him walked around him as if they were at a picnic.’
‘Convenient,’ Vianello observed.
‘Before you begin with conspiracy theories,’ Brunetti — who had already begun to do so — said, but Vianello cut him short.
‘You trust this Ribasso?’
‘I think so, yes.’
‘Then not telling him you put a name to the man in the photo Guarino sent you doesn’t make any sense.’
‘Habit.’
‘Habit?’
‘Or territoriality,’ Brunetti compromised.
‘Lot of that around,’ Vianello observed, then added, ‘Nadia says it’s because of the goats.’
‘What goats? What are you talking about?’
‘Well, inheritance, really, who we leave the goats to or who gets them after we die.’ Had Vianello suddenly taken leave of his senses, or was Nadia using the garden behind their apartment for something other than flowers?