She had been taking note of his requests, and when he finished, she looked at him and said, ‘I have some of this information already, but I can change the dates and make it look as if the request wasn’t made until the magistrate authorized it.’ She glanced at her notes and said, tapping at the list with the end of her pencil, ‘He probably doesn’t know yet how to ask for all of this, but I suspect I could make a few suggestions that might help him.’
‘Suggestions,’ Brunetti said in a dead level voice.
The look she gave him would have brought a lesser man to his knees. ‘Please, Commissario,’ was all she said, and then she picked up the phone.
Within minutes it was done, and the magistrate’s secretary, with whom Signorina Elettra spoke with easy familiarity, said the warrants would be delivered the next morning. Brunetti restrained himself from asking the name of the magistrate, certain that he would learn it from the signature when he saw the papers the next day. Well, he told himself as he considered the speed and efficiency with which her request had been granted: why should the judiciary be any different from any other public or private institution? Favours were granted to the person whose request was accompanied by a raccomandazione, and the more powerful the person who made the raccomandazione, or the closer the friendship between the assistants who saw to the details, the more quickly the request was granted. Need a hospital bed? Best to have a cousin who is a doctor in that hospital, or is married to one. A permit to restore a hotel? Problems with the Fine Arts Commission about a painting you want to move to your apartment in London? The right person had but to speak the word to the right official or to someone to whom the official owed a favour, and all paths were made smooth.
Brunetti found himself, not for the first time, trapped in ambivalence. In this case, it worked to his advantage – and, he told himself, to the civic good – that Signorina Elettra had turned the judicial system of the city into her fief. But in places where persons of lesser… lesser probity… were in charge, the results might not be as salutary.
He left these thoughts, thanked her for her help, and went back to his office.
It was there, after an hour during which he read and initialled various documents and reports, that Signorina Elettra came to speak to him. ‘I’ve found the man of my dreams,’ she said as she came in, and said it in such a way as to lead Brunetti to understand that the man was the young magistrate.
‘I take it he availed himself of your experience with the peculiarities of the city.’
Her smile was calm, her nod an exercise in graciousness. ‘His secretary said a few kind words about me before she put me through to him.’
‘After which you induced him to overlook the dubious legality of some of the things you asked him to authorize?’
The phrase appeared to wound her; if nothing else, it spurred her into saying, ‘I’m not sure there any longer exists a legality in this country that is not dubious.’
‘Be that as it may, Signorina,’ Brunetti said, ‘I’m curious to know what you persuaded him to authorize.’
‘Everything,’ she said with unconcealed delight. ‘I think this young man might prove a gold mine for us.’
Brunetti thought of the warning written above the Gates of Hell and was for a moment tempted to dissociate himself from her further progress into a land, not of dubious, but of absent, legality, but hypocrisy was not among his vices. Also, he appreciated the fact that she had used the plural, and so he smiled and said, ‘I tremble at the thought of what you might ask him to authorize.’
Failing to disguise her disappointment, she said, ‘I’d never compromise you in any of this, Dottore.’
‘Just yourself?’ he enquired, knowing the impossibility of this.
Her failure to answer forced him, finally, to confront the fact that she had for years been making requests that lay far beyond her mandate. But how to ask the question without making it sound like an accusation?
‘To whom will the responses to these requests be sent?’
‘To the Vice-Questore, of course,’ she said simply, and for a moment Brunetti had a vision of her as she would appear when saying this to a judge, saw her hair pulled tightly back, face completely unadorned by makeup, jewellery forgone; the modest way she was dressed, perhaps in a dark blue suit with a skirt of an unfashionable cut and length, sensible shoes. Would she risk wearing a pair of glasses? Her eyes would be modestly turned down in the face of the majesty of the law; her speech modest; no jokes, no sparring, no wit. He wondered, for the first time, if she had some sort of dreary second name she would pull out for an occasion like this: Clotilde, Olga, Luigia. And Patta – Brunetti had no choice but to use the American phrase – would take the fall.
‘You’d do that to him?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Please, Dottore,’ she said in an offended voice, ‘you must give me some credit for human affection, or weakness.’
As a matter of fact, Brunetti had reason to give her more than some credit for those things, and so he asked, deciding to speak bluntly, ‘But if anything went wrong, you’d let Patta hang for this?’
She managed to look genuinely shocked at his question, shocked and then disappointed that he could think of asking such a thing. ‘Ah,’ she said, letting the syllable run on for a long time, ‘I could never live with myself if I did that. Besides, you have no idea of how long it would take me to train whoever was sent to replace him.’ At least, Brunetti thought, there was something other than rank hypocrisy on offer here.
With grudging voice, she said, ‘And I must confess that, over the years, I’ve become almost fond of him.’ Hearing her say it like this surprised Brunetti into accepting that he probably shared her feelings.
After leaving him with enough time to consider everything she had said, she added, with an easy smile, ‘Besides, all of the requests are sent in Lieutenant Scarpa’s name.’ Her use of the passive voice did not go unremarked by Brunetti.
It took him but a moment to realize the genius of it. ‘So it appears that the Lieutenant has been exceeding his professional powers all these years? Asking for information without an order from a magistrate,’ he mused, not thinking it necessary to comment on the trail of cyber-proof that was sure to have been left behind him.
‘He’s also been breaking into bank codes, pilfering information from Telecom, rifling through the classified files held on citizens in state offices, and stealing copies of people’s credit card statements,’ she said, scandalized by the magnitude of the Lieutenant’s perfidy.
‘I’m shocked,’ Brunetti said. And he was: what kind of mind could set up such an elaborate trap for the Lieutenant? ‘And all of these requests came directly from his email?’ he asked, wondering what labyrinth she had created to deal with the responses.
Her hesitation was minimal, her answer a smile as she said, ‘The Lieutenant believes he is the only person who has the password to his account.’ Her voice softened, but her look did not. ‘I didn’t want him to be troubled reading any replies, so they’re transferred automatically to one of the Vice-Questore’s accounts.’ The name ‘Giorgio’ slithered into Brunetti’s ear, Signorina Elettra’s frequently named friend, the cyber-genius of all cyber-geniuses, but discretion stood on Brunetti’s tongue and he did not speak the name aloud, nor did he ask if the Vice-Questore knew of the existence of his account.
‘Remarkable, that the Lieutenant would be so rash as to use his own address to get this information,’ Brunetti said, his thoughts turning to Riverre and Alvise and how very safe this information would make them.