It was still early enough for the boats not yet to be crowded with tourists, so he took the Number One from San Silvestro, standing on deck and reading the Gazzettino. This did little to alleviate his mood. Nor did the sight of Scarpa standing at the bottom of the stairs when he walked into the Questura.
Brunetti passed by him silently and started up the steps. From behind, he heard Scarpa call, 'Commissario, if I might have a word…'
Brunetti turned and looked down on the uniformed man. 'Yes, Lieutenant?'
'I'm calling Signora Gismondi in for questioning again today. Since you seem so interested in her, I thought you might want to know.'
'"Interested," Lieutenant?' Brunetti confined himself to asking.
Ignoring the question, Scarpa added, 'No one remembers seeing her at the train station that morning.'
‘I dare say that could also be said of most of the other seventy thousand people in the city’ Brunetti said wearily. 'Good morning, Lieutenant’
Inside his office, he found himself reflecting on Scarpa's behaviour. His deliberate obstructionism might be nothing more than a sign of his hatred of Brunetti and the people who worked with him, Signora Gismondi being nothing more than a tool. Not for the first time, Brunetti speculated on a further meaning, that Scarpa might be attempting to remove the focus of attention from some other person. The possibility still left him feeling faintly sick.
To distract himself from this idea, he read his way through the papers that had accumulated in his in-tray over the last few days, chief of which was a notice from the Ministero dell'Interno, spelling out the changes to law enforcement policies resultant upon, as the document would have it, the passage of recent laws by Parliament. He read it with interest, reread it with anger. When he finished it the second time, he set it down on the middle of his desk, gazed out the window, and said aloud in disgust, 'Why not just let them run the whole country?' His pronoun did not refer to the elected members of Parliament.
He busied himself with other papers that awaited his attention and successfully resisted the temptation to go downstairs to attempt to interfere with whatever was being done to Signora Gismondi. He knew that there was no way a case could be made against her and that she was nothing more than a pawn in a game even he did not fully understand, but he knew that any attempt to help her would work only to her disservice.
He passed a stupid hour, then another, before Vianello, knocked at his door. When the inspector entered, Brunetti's first glance told him something was wrong.
Vianello stood in front of Brunetti's desk, a sheaf of papers in his hand. 'It's my fault, sir,' Vianello said.
'What?' Brunetti asked.
'It was right there in front of me, and I never bothered to ask.'
'What are you talking about, Vianello?' Brunetti asked sharply. 'And sit down. Don't just stand there.'
Vianello appeared not to hear this and held up the papers. 'He worked in the contracts office,' he said, waving the papers for emphasis. 'It was his job to study the building plans submitted for any work that had to be done on the schools and see if they met the specific needs of the pupils and teachers in that particular school.' He pulled out one sheet of paper and set the others on Brunetti's desk. 'Look,' he said, holding it up. 'He had no power to approve the contracts, but he did have the power to recommend.' He added the sheet to the papers on Brunetti's desk and stepped back, as though he feared they might burst into flames. 'I was in there, talking about him, and I never bothered to ask what office it was.'
'Who, the son?'
'Yes. That's where he started. The father worked in the personnel office, and God knows no one's going to ask for a bribe there.'
'And the dates?'
Vianello picked up the papers and looked through them. 'The payments started after he had been there for four years.' He looked across at Brunetti. "That's more than enough time for him to have become familiar with the way things worked.'
'If that's how they worked.'
'Commissario,' Vianello said, an unwonted note of asperity in his voice, 'it's a city office, for God's sake. How else do you think things work?'
'Who was in charge of the office when the payments began?'
Without having to consult the papers, Vianello answered, 'Renato Fedi. He was named head of the department about three months before the accounts were opened.'
'And went on to bigger and better things,' Brunetti chimed in. But then asked, 'Who was in charge when Battestini started working there?'
'Piero De Pra was there when he started, but he's dead now. Luca Sardelli took over when De Pra died, but he lasted only two years himself before he was transferred to the Sanitation Department. Before it was privatized,' he added.
'Any idea why he was transferred?'
Vianello shrugged. ‘From the little I've heard about him, I'd guess he's one of those nonentities who just gets shifted around from office to office because he's made it his business to make friends with everyone, so no one has the courage to fire him. They just keep him around until they see a convenient spot to move him, and they get rid of him.'
Resisting the strong impulse to repeat his remark about the Questura, Brunetti contented himself with asking, instead, 'And he's at the Assessorato dello Sport now?'
'Yes.'
'Any idea what he does?' 'No.'
'Find out’ Brunetti said. Before Vianello could acknowledge the command, Brunetti asked, 'And Fedi?'
'He followed Sardelli, stayed there two years, and then left the civil service to take over his uncle's construction company. He's run it since then.'
'What sort of things do they do?' Brunetti asked.
'Yes’ Vianello answered. 'Restorations. Of schools, among other things.'
Brunetti cast his memory back to his conversation with Judge Galvani, trying to remember if there had been anything in the judge's reference to Fedi that he had overlooked, some tone, or a suggestion that he take a closer look at the man, but he could remember nothing. It occurred to him then that Galvani was not a friend and owed him no favours, so perhaps he would not have made the suggestion, even if there were reason to do so. He felt a moment's hot exasperation: why did it always have to be like this, with no one willing to do anything unless there were personal gain to be had from it or because some favour had to be repaid?
He drew his attention back to Vianello, who was saying,'… has grown steadily for the last five years'.
'I'm sorry, Vianello,' he said, ‘I was trunking about something else. What did you say?'
'That his uncle's company won a contract to restore two schools in Castello when Fedi was in charge of the school board, and that it's grown steadily since then, especially after he took over.'
'How do you know this?'
'We looked at the papers in his office and his tax returns for those years.'
For a moment, he was tempted to ask angrily if this meant Vianello and Signorina Elettra had somehow found the time that morning to go to Fedi's office and ask to please examine their client records and tax returns, and this without bothering to get an order from a judge. Instead, he said, 'Vianello, this has got to stop.'
'Yes, sir,' the inspector said perfunctorily, then added, 'My guess is that the tenders for the work that went to the uncle's company would have been evaluated by Battestini. He was working in that job then.'
With acute awareness of the hopeless irony of the question, Brunetti asked, 'Can you find out if he did examine them?'
Gracious in victory, Vianello did no more than nod. 'His signature or initials have got to be on the original bid if he was the person who checked it for the school board.' He forestalled Brunetti's next question by saying, 'No, sir, we don't have to go and look at the papers. There's a code on the offer, indicating who examined it and checked that it met the school's requirements, so all we have to do is find Fedi's bid and see who handled it.'