‘It looks very nice,’ he said, smiling and gesturing around the small area with a wave of his hand.
She crossed the room and set an armful of folders on her desk, then turned to face him. ‘I’m glad you like it, Commissario. It would have been impossible to work in here the way it was. Those magazines,’ she added with a delicate shudder.
‘The flowers are beautiful. Are they to celebrate your arrival?’
‘Oh, no,’ she replied blandly. ‘I’ve given a permanent order to Fantin; they’ll deliver fresh flowers every Monday and Thursday from now on.’ Fantin: the most expensive florist in the city. Twice a week. A hundred times a year? She interrupted his calculations by explaining, ‘Since I’m also to prepare the Vice-Questore’s expense account, I thought I’d add them in as a necessary expense.’
‘And will Fantin bring flowers for the Vice-Questore’s office, as well?’
Her surprise seemed genuine. ‘Good heavens, no. I’m certain the Vice-Questore could afford them himself It wouldn’t be right to spend the taxpayers’ money like that.’ She walked around the desk and flipped on the computer. ‘Is there anything I can do for you, Commissario?’ she asked, the issue of the flowers, apparently, settled.
‘Not at the moment, Signorina,’ he said as she bent over the keys.
He knocked on Patta’s door and was told to enter. Though Patta sat where he always did, behind his desk, little else was the same. The surface of the desk, usually clear of anything that might suggest work, was covered with folders, reports; even a crumpled newspaper lay to one side. It was not Patta’s usual L’Osservatore Romano, Brunetti noticed, but the just-short-of-scurrilous La Nuova, a paper whose large readership numbers seemed to rest on the joint proposition that people not only would do base and ignoble things but that they would also want to read about them. Even the air-conditioning, this one of the few offices to have it, seemed not to be working.
‘Sit down, Brunetti,’ the Vice-Questore commanded.
As if Brunetti’s glance were contagious, Patta looked at the papers on his desk and began to gather them up. He piled them one on top of the other, edges every which way, pushed them aside, and sat, his hand forgotten on top of them.
‘What’s happening in Mestre?’ he finally asked Brunetti.
‘We haven’t identified the victim yet, sir. His picture has been shown to many of the transvestites who work there, but none of them has been able to recognize him.’ Patta said nothing. ‘One of the men I questioned said that the man looked familiar, but he couldn’t give a definite identification, so it could mean anything. Or nothing. I think another one of the men I questioned, a man named Crespo, recognized him, but he insisted that he didn’t. I’d like to talk to him again, but there might be problems in doing that.’
‘Santomauro?’ Patta asked and, for the first time in the years they had worked together, succeeded in surprising Brunetti.
‘How do you know about Santomauro?’ Brunetti blurted out and then added, as if to correct his sharp tone, ‘sir.’
‘He’s called me three times,’ Patta said, and then added in a voice he made lower but which was definitely intended for Brunetti to hear, ‘the bastard.’
Immediately on his guard at Patta’s unwonted, and carefully planned, indiscretion, Brunetti, like a spider on its web, began to run his memory over the various strands that might connect these two men. Santomauro was a famous lawyer, his clients the businessmen and politicians of the entire Veneto region. That, if nothing else, would ordinarily have Patta grovelling at his feet. But then he remembered it: Holy Mother Church and Santomauro’s Lega della Moralità, the women’s branch of which was under the patronage and direction of none other than the absent Maria Lucrezia Patta. What sort of sermon about marriage, its sanctity, and its obligations had accompanied Santomauro’s phone calls to the Vice-Questore?
‘That’s right,’ Brunetti said, deciding to admit to half of what he knew, ‘he’s Crespo’s lawyer.’ If Patta chose to believe that a commissario of police found nothing strange in the fact that a lawyer of the stature of Giancarlo Santomauro was the lawyer of a transvestite whore, then it was best to allow him that belief. ‘What has he told you, sir?’
‘He said you harassed and terrified his client, that you were, to use his words, “unnecessarily brutal” in trying to force him to divulge information.’ Patta ran one hand down the side of his jaw, and Brunetti realized it looked as though the vice-questore had not shaved that day.
‘I told him, of course, that I would not listen to this sort of criticism of a commissario of police, that he could come in and file an official complaint if he wanted to.’ Ordinarily a complaint of this sort, from a man of Santomauro’s importance, would have Patta promising to have the offending officer disciplined, if not demoted and transferred to Palermo for three years. And Patta would usually have done this even before asking for details. Patta continued in his role as defender of the principle that all men are equal before the law. ‘I will not tolerate civilian interference with the workings of the agencies of the state.’ That, Brunetti was sure, could loosely be translated to read that Patta had a private axe to grind with Santomauro and would be a willing partner to any attempt to see the other man lose face.
‘Then do you think I ought to go ahead and question Crespo again, sir?’
No matter how great his immediate anger at Santomauro might be, it was too much to expect Patta to overcome the habit of decades and order a policeman to perform an action that opposed the will of a man with important political connections. ‘Do whatever you think is necessary, Brunetti.’
‘Is there anything else, sir?’
Patta didn’t answer, so Brunetti got to his feet. ‘There is one other thing, Commissario,’ Patta said before Brunetti had turned to walk away.
‘Yes, sir?’
‘You have friends in the publishing world, don’t you?’ Oh, good lord, was Patta going to ask him to help? Brunetti looked past his superior’s head and nodded vaguely. ‘I wonder if you would mind getting in touch with them.’ Brunetti cleared his throat and looked at his shoes. ‘I find myself in an embarrassing situation at the moment, Brunetti, and I would prefer that it go no further than it has already.’ Patta said no more than that.
‘I’ll do what I can, sir,’ Brunetti said lamely, thinking of his ‘friends in the publishing world’, two writers on financial affairs and one political columnist.
‘Good,’ Patta said and paused. ‘I’ve asked that new secretary to try to get some information on his taxes.’ It was not necessary for Patta to explain whose taxes he meant. ‘I’ve asked her to give you anything she finds.’ Brunetti was too surprised by this to do anything but nod.
Patta bent his head over the papers and Brunetti, reading this as a dismissal, left the office. Signorina Elettra was no longer at her desk, so Brunetti wrote a note and left it on her desk. ‘Could you see what your computer tells you about the dealings of Avvocato Giancarlo Santomauro?’
He went back upstairs to his office, conscious of the heat, which he felt expanding, seeking out every corner and crevice of the building, ignoring the thick walls and the marble floors, bringing thick humidity with it, the sort that caused sheets of paper to turn up at the corners and cling to any hand that touched them. His windows were open, and he went to stand by them, but they did no more than bring new heat and humidity into the room, and, now that the tide was at its lowest, the penetrating stench of corruption that always lurked beneath the water, even here, close to the broad expanse of open water in front of San Marco. He stood by the window, sweat soaking through his slacks and shirt to his belt, and he thought of the mountains above Bolzano and of the thick down comforters under which they slept during August nights.