Beastly Things (6 page)

‘All right. Take Griffoni: she might like a murder for a change.’ Still, after all these years, Patta could astonish him with some of the things he said.

He could also astonish Brunetti with the things he did not know. ‘She’s in Rome, sir: that course in domestic violence.’

‘Ah, of course, of course,’ Patta said with the wave of a man so busy that he could not be expected to remember everything.

‘Vianello isn’t assigned to anything at the moment.’

‘Take anyone you want,’ Patta said expansively. ‘We can’t have something like this happening.’

‘No, sir. Of course not.’

‘A person can’t come to this city and be murdered.’ Patta managed to sound indignant, but there was no way
to
tell if his emotions were aroused by what had happened to the man or because of what would happen to tourism as a result. Brunetti did not want to ask.

‘I’ll get busy with it then, sir.’

‘Yes, do,’ Patta told him. ‘Keep me informed of what happens.’

‘Of course, sir,’ Brunetti said. He glanced at Patta, but he had started to read one of the papers that lay on his desk. Saying nothing, Brunetti let himself out of the office.

7

HE CLOSED THE
door behind him. In response to Signorina Elettra’s glance, Brunetti said as he approached her desk, ‘He asked me to take the case.’

She smiled. ‘Asked, or did you have to encourage him?’

‘No, the suggestion was his. He even told me to ask Griffoni to work on it with me.’ If her smile had been connected to a dimmer, his words had turned the knob down. He went on, as though he had noticed nothing peculiar about her response to the attractive blonde Commissario’s name, ‘Forgetting she’s in Rome, of course. So I asked for Vianello, and he didn’t object.’

Calm restored, Brunetti decided to hammer it into place and asked, the idea having come to him while he was with Patta, ‘Isn’t there a new rule, some sort of statute of limitations, for students at the university?’ Even Patta did not deserve to be subjected, year after year, to the consequences of this farce.

‘There’s talk of changing the rules so that they have to
leave
after a certain time,’ she answered, ‘but I doubt that anything will come of it.’

Talk of normal things appeared to have restored her mood; to maintain it, Brunetti asked, ‘Why?’

She turned towards him fully and rested her chin on her hand before she answered. ‘Think about what would happen if everyone agreed to accept the obvious and hundreds of thousands of these students were sent away.’ When he did not comment, she continued. ‘They’d have to accept – and their parents would have to accept – that they are unemployed and likely to remain that way.’ Before Brunetti could speak, she voiced the argument he was about to make: ‘I know they’ve never worked, so they wouldn’t appear in the statistics as having lost their jobs. But they’d have to face the fact, as would their parents, that they’re virtually unemployable.’ Brunetti agreed with her, with a brief nod. ‘So for as long as they’re enrolled in a university, government statistics can ignore them, and they in turn can ignore the fact that they’re never going to have decent jobs.’ He thought she was finished, but she added, ‘It’s an enormous holding pool of young people who live off their parents for years and never learn a skill that would make them employable.’

‘Such as?’ Brunetti inquired.

She raised her hand and ran it through her hair. ‘Oh, I don’t know. Plumbing. Carpentry. Something useful.’

‘Instead of?’

‘The son of a friend of mine has been studying Art Administration for seven years. The government cuts the budget for museums and art every year, but he’s going to get his degree in Art Administration.’

‘And then?’

‘And then he’d be lucky to get a job as a museum guard, but he’d scorn that because he’s an art administrator,’ she
said
. In a kinder voice, she added, ‘He’s a bright boy and loves the subject, and for all I know would be perfect for a job in a museum. Only there are not going to be any jobs.’

Brunetti thought of his son, now in his first year, and his daughter, soon to enter the university. ‘Does this mean my children face the same future?’

She opened her mouth to speak but stopped herself.

‘Go ahead,’ Brunetti said. ‘Say it.’

He saw the moment when she decided to do so. ‘Your wife’s family will see that they’re protected, or your father-in-law’s friends will see that they’re offered jobs.’

Brunetti realized she never would have said something like this a few years ago and probably would never have said it now had he not provoked her with his reference to Griffoni. ‘The same as with the children of any well-connected family?’ he asked.

She nodded.

Suddenly mindful of her politics, he asked, ‘You don’t object to this?’

She shrugged, then said, ‘Whether I do or I don’t won’t change it.’

‘Did it help you get your job at the bank?’ he asked, referring to the job she had left, more than a decade ago, to come and work at the Questura, a choice no one who worked with her had ever understood.

She lifted her chin from her hand, saying, ‘No, my father didn’t help. In fact, he didn’t want me to work in a bank at all. He tried to convince me not to do it.’

‘Even though he was in charge of one?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Exactly. He said it had shown him how soul-rotting it was to work with money and to think about money all the time.’

‘But you did it anyway?’ Brunetti was still surprised to
be
engaged in this sort of conversation with her: their exchanges of personal information were usually cushioned by irony or masked by indirection.

‘For a number of years, yes.’

‘Until?’ he asked, wondering if he was about to unravel the secret that had rumbled through the Questura for years and aware that, should she tell him, he could never repeat it.

Her smile changed and began to remind him of a famous one, last seen disappearing amidst the branches of a tree. ‘Until it began to rot my soul.’

‘Ah,’ Brunetti said, deciding that was all the answer he was going to get and probably all he wanted.

‘Will there be anything else, Signore?’ Before he could respond, she said, ‘They’ve sent the photos and videos from the protest.’

Brunetti could not disguise his astonishment. ‘So fast?’

Her smile was as compassionate as that of a Renaissance Madonna. ‘By computer, sir. They’re in your email.’ She glanced over his shoulder and studied the wall behind him for a few seconds, then added, ‘I have a friend who works in the central health office for the Veneto. I can ask him to have a look to see if there’s some central record kept of cases of this disease …’

‘Madelung,’ Brunetti supplied. The look she gave him showed him that the repetition was not necessary.

‘Thank you,’ she said to show there were no hard feelings, and then, ‘There might be numbers for the Veneto, if people are being treated.’

‘Rizzardi said he’d call someone he knows in Padova,’ Brunetti said, hoping to spare her the effort.

She made a dismissive noise. ‘They might want an official request. Doctors often do,’ she said, as though she were a biologist speaking of some lower order of insect.
‘It
could take days. Even longer.’ Brunetti appreciated her discretion in not bothering to say how quickly her friend might do it.

‘He was in the lane coming south when I saw him,’ he suddenly said.

‘Which means?’

‘He might have been coming down from Friuli. Could you ask your friend if they have the same sort of records, too?’

‘Of course,’ she said amiably. ‘The men who blocked the road were protesting about the new milk quotas, weren’t they?’ she asked. ‘Lowering production?’

‘Yes.’

‘Greedy fools,’ she said with emphasis that surprised him.

‘You seem sure of that, Signorina,’ he remarked.

‘Of course I am. There’s too much milk, there’s too much cheese, there’s too much butter, and there are too many cows.’

‘Compared to what?’ he asked.

‘Compared to common sense,’ she said heatedly, and Brunetti wondered what he had stumbled into.

Paola cooked with oil, not butter; he’d be sick if he had to drink a glass of milk, they did not eat much cheese, and Chiara’s principles had long since sent beef fleeing from their table, so Brunetti was – in terms of behaviour – on Signorina Elettra’s side of whatever principle was under discussion here. What he did not understand, however, was the force underlying her fervour, nor did he want to stand there and discuss it.

‘If you receive anything from your friend, let me know, would you?’

‘Of course, Commissario,’ she said with her usual warmth and turned to her computer. Brunetti decided to
go
and have a look for the dead man in the films they had been sent of the incident last autumn.

Brunetti climbed the stairs to his office, reminding himself he could now access any video file that had been put into the new system.

He opened his mail account and found the link. Within seconds, the screen showed him, first, the original report and the written notes of the individual officers who had been there. After he read those, he had no trouble opening the file containing the police videos and those from the television station. When he watched the first clip and saw the flames consuming the minivan bearing the Televeneto logo, he understood the station’s eagerness to cooperate.

He watched the first two clips, each lasting only a few seconds, but there was no sign of the man, then another, without success. Then, in the fourth, the man appeared. He stood, as Brunetti now remembered him standing, at the edge of the traffic island that divided the north and south sections of the autostrada. He was on screen for only a few seconds, his head and his distinctive neck and torso visible in front of a red car stopped in the middle of the road. A few people, three men and a woman, stood next to him, all of them staring straight ahead. The camera panned back to show a single row of helmeted men moving forward, their transparent shields side by side, all of them united in lock step. The video ended.

Brunetti opened the next one. This time the camera shot from behind the rank of Carabinieri as they approached the ragged group of farmers, their advancing line opening to flow around a car that had been set on fire. The next clip had been taken, it seemed, from a
telefonino
, but there was no identification of source: it could as easily belong to a police officer as some bystander whose phone had
been
sequestered. It showed a man slinging a pail of brown liquid at a carabiniere and hitting him square in the chest with it. The carabiniere retorted with a sidearm slash with his stick that caught the protestor on the lower arm and sent the pail into the air, with splashes flying from it as it disappeared to the right. The man bent forward, grabbing at his arm with his other hand, and was shoved to the ground by two Carabinieri. The video ended.

He typed in Pucetti’s address and forwarded the email and attached video clips, shut down his computer, and went downstairs in search of the man himself.

8

BRUNETTI PAUSED AT
the door of the officers’ squad room and had a look around. Vianello, talking to the new recruit, Dondini, had his back to the door. Pucetti, upon whose lowered face Brunetti could not help but read the results of their last interchange, seemed as oblivious to his surroundings as he was to the papers spread on the surface of his desk. The worst part of Brunetti was glad to see the younger man so preoccupied: it would spare the rest of them a lot of trouble in future if he learned greater discretion in breaking the rules and perhaps the law.

‘Pucetti,’ he called as he came in. ‘I’ve got a favour to ask.’ He walked towards the young man’s desk, gesturing to Vianello to join them when he could.

Pucetti shot to his feet, but he no longer snapped out a salute at the sight of his superior. ‘I’ve found the man who was in the canal this morning. Have you read the report?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Yes, sir,’ Pucetti said.

‘There’s a series of videos from that incident with the farmers on the autostrada last year. He was there.’

‘You mean we arrested him?’ Pucetti asked with badly disguised astonishment. ‘And no one remembered?’ It was implicit in his tone that
he
would surely have remembered, but Brunetti let that pass.

‘No. He was there, but only as a spectator. There’s no mug shot,’ Brunetti said. ‘A video shows him standing at the side of the road, watching.’

Pucetti could not hide his interest.

‘There’s something I’d like you to help me with,’ Brunetti said with a smile, and the younger man, much in the manner of a hunting dog who has heard a familiar whistle, all but went into point position.

Vianello came over to them then and asked, ‘What did you find?’

‘A video with the man Rizzardi worked on this morning,’ Brunetti answered, disliking the verb as soon as he heard himself using it. ‘He was caught on the autostrada in that farmers’ protest last year.’ He told Pucetti about the email he had just sent him and said, ‘I’d like you to see if you can print out copies of specific frames.’

‘Nothing easier, sir,’ Pucetti said, in the eager voice Brunetti was accustomed to hearing him use. ‘Which one is he in?’

‘He’s in the fourth clip. Man with a dark beard; very thick shoulders and neck. I’d like you to see if you can stop it and get a picture of him we can use for identification.’ Before Pucetti could ask, Brunetti said, without explanation, ‘We can’t show a photo of him as he is.’

Pucetti looked over at the officers’ computer, the same machine that had been there for years. ‘It would be much easier if I could work on this on my own equipment at home, sir,’ he said, not panting, but visibly keen to be let off the leash.

‘Then go and do it. If anyone asks, tell them it’s part of the murder investigation,’ he said, knowing that the only person likely to ask was Lieutenant Scarpa, the looming nemesis of the uniformed branch, Patta’s assistant, his eyes and ears. Then, in his automatic response to keep information from the Lieutenant, Brunetti amended this: ‘No, if anyone asks, better to say I’m sending you over to San Marco to get some papers from the Commissariat there.’