CB14 Blood From A Stone (2005) (11 page)

Brunetti had often reflected on this, finding it especially strange in foreigners, this belief that some cachet adhered to their address, as if living in Dorsoduro or having a
palazzo
on the Grand Canal could elevate the tone of their discourse or the quality of their minds, render the tedium of their lives interesting or transmute the dross of their amusements into purest gold.

If he thought about it, he felt happiness in being Venetian, not pride. He had not chosen where to be born or what dialect his parents spoke: what pride to be taken in those things?
Not for the first time, he felt saddened by the vanity of human wishes.

‘. . . over near Santa Maria Materdomini,’ he heard Signorina Elettra saying when he tuned back into her conversation with Vianello.

‘Bertolli?’ Vianello asked. ‘The one who used to be on the city council?’

‘Yes, Renato. He’s a lawyer,’ Signorina Elettra said.

‘And the other one?’ Vianello asked.

‘Cuzzoni. Alessandro,’ she said, then waited to see if the name meant anything to either of them. ‘He’s originally from Mira, but he lives here now and has a shop.’

‘What sort of shop?’

‘He’s a jeweller, but most of the stuff he sells is factory made,’ she said with the easy dismissal of a woman who would never wear a piece of machine-made jewellery.

‘Where’s the shop?’ Brunetti asked, not because he was particularly interested but to show them that he really was listening.

‘Off Ventidue Marzo. On that
calle
that goes up towards the Fenice, down from the bridge.’

Brunetti sent his memory walking towards Campo San Fantin, down the narrow
calle
towards the bridge, past the antique shop. ‘Opposite the bar?’ he asked.

‘I think so,’ she answered. ‘I haven’t checked the address, but it’s the only one there, I think.’

‘And these two rent to
extracomunitari
?’ Brunetti asked.

‘That’s what Leonardo tells me. No long-term
contracts, no questions about how many people will eventually live in the apartment, and everything paid in cash.’

‘Furnished or unfurnished?’ Vianello asked.

‘Either, I think,’ Signorina Elettra replied. ‘If you can call it furnished. Leonardo said they did a story once, about two years ago, about one of the apartments they were living in. He said you wouldn’t believe the place: seven of them sleeping in the same room, roaches all over the place. He said the kitchen and bathroom were unlike anything he’d ever seen, and when I asked him what it was like, he made it clear that I didn’t want to know.’

‘And was one of these two the landlord?’ Brunetti asked.

‘I don’t know, and he didn’t say. But Leonardo told me they probably rent to
extracomunitari
.’

‘Did he know where the apartments are?’ Brunetti asked.

‘No. As I say, he’s not even absolutely sure that they do rent to them, but he says he’s heard their names when people talk about who’s willing to rent to
extracomunitari
.’

‘Is this his office?’ Brunetti asked, looking at the address listed for Renato Bertolli and trying to calculate where it might be.

‘Yes. I checked it in
Calli, Campielli e Canali
, and I think he’s got to be just before the
fabbro
, the one who makes keys.’ This was enough for Brunetti. He had been over there a few times, about five years ago, to have a metal banister
made for the final flight of stairs leading to their apartment. He knew the area, though it seemed a strangely out of the way location for a lawyer’s office.

‘I’m not sure how to approach them,’ Brunetti said, taking the paper and waving it gently in the air. ‘If we ask about the apartments, they’ll worry that we’ll report them to the Finanza. Anyone would.’ It did not for an instant occur to him that either man would be declaring the rent on the apartments and thus paying taxes on the money. ‘Can you think of anyone who might be able to get them to talk to us?’

‘I’ve some friends who are lawyers,’ Signorina Elettra said cautiously, as if admitting to some secret vice. ‘I could ask if anyone knows them.’

‘You, Vianello?’ Brunetti asked.

The inspector shook his head.

‘What about the other one, Cuzzoni?’ Brunetti asked.

This time both Signorina Elettra and Vianello shook their heads. Seeing Brunetti’s disappointment, she said,’ I can check at the Ufficio del Catasto and see what apartments they own. Once we know where they live, then we just have to check if there are rental contracts for their other apartments.’

Brunetti’s uncle, who lived near Feltre, used to go hunting, and with him went Diana, an English setter whose greatest joy, aside from gazing adoringly at his uncle as he stroked her ears, was to chase birds. In the autumn, when
the air changed and the hunting season began, a wild restiveness came over Diana, who knew no peace until the day his uncle could finally take down his shotgun and open the door that led to the woods behind his home.

Looking at Signorina Elettra poised on the edge of her chair, Brunetti was struck by how much she resembled Diana: there were the same liquid dark eyes, the flared nostrils, and the badly restrained nervousness at the thought of prey that was to be seized and brought back. ‘Can you find everything with that thing?’ he asked, not needing to name her computer.

She turned towards him and she sat up straighter. ‘Perhaps not everything, sir. But many things.’

‘Don Alvise Perale?’ he asked. He sensed, rather than saw, Vianello’s start of astonishment, but when he turned to look at him, Brunetti saw that the inspector had managed not to display his surprise. Brunetti permitted himself a half-smile, and after a moment Vianello was forced to shake his head in rueful appreciation of Brunetti’s inability to trust anyone fully.

He remembered that Diana needed no encouragement or explanation: a flutter of motion and she was off, like the wind. Signorina Elettra wasted no time with questions or clarifications. ‘The ex-priest, sir?’

‘Yes.’

She rose to her feet in a single graceful motion. ‘I’ll go and see what I can find.’

‘It’s almost eight, Signorina,’ he reminded her.

‘Just a quick look,’ she said and was gone.

When the door closed behind her, Vianello said, ‘Don’t worry, sir. She doesn’t have a bed here. So she’ll go home eventually.’

Brunetti found a seat at the back of the cabin, on the left-hand side of the vaporetto, so his view was of San Giorgio and the façades on the Dorsoduro side of the canal. He studied them as he headed up towards San Silvestro, but his attention was far removed from Venice, even from Europe. He considered the mess that was Africa, and he considered the endless historical argument of whether it was caused by what had been done to the Africans or by what they had done to themselves. It was not a subject upon which he believed himself sufficiently expert to comment, nor one where he thought there was much hope that people would arrive at the kind of consensus that passes for historical truth.

His memory filled with images: Joseph
Conrad’s battleship, firing round after futile round into the jungle in an attempt to force it to submit to peace; shoals of bodies washed up on the shores of Lake Victoria; the shimmering surface of a Benin bronze; the yawning pits where so many of the earth’s riches were mined. No one of these things was Africa, he knew, any more than the bridge under which the boat was passing was Europe. Each was a piece in a puzzle no one could understand. He remembered the Latin words he had once seen on a sixteenth-century map to mark the limit of Western exploration of Africa:
Hic scientia finit
: Knowledge Stops Here. How arrogant we were, he thought, and how arrogant we remain.

At home he found peace, or perhaps it is more accurate to say that he found a truce that seemed to be holding. Chiara and Paola talked as usual at dinner, and if the way Chiara packed away two helpings of pasta with broccoli and capers and then two baked pears was any indication, her appetite had returned to normal. Taking this as a good sign, he allowed himself to stretch out on the sofa in the living room after dinner, the smallest of small glasses of grappa on the table beside him, his current book propped on his stomach. For the last week, he had been rereading Ammianus Marcellinus’ history of the later Roman Empire, a book which Brunetti enjoyed chiefly for its portrait of one of his greatest heroes, the Emperor Julian. But even here he found himself drawn into Africa, with the account of the siege of the town of Leptis in
Tripolis and of the perfidy and duplicity of both attackers and defenders. Hostages were killed, men were condemned to have their tongues cut out for speaking the inconvenient truth, the land was laid waste by pillage and slaughter. He read to the end of the twenty-eighth book but then closed it and decided that an early night would be better than this reminder of how little mankind had changed in almost two millennia.

In the morning, after the children had left for early classes, he and Paola spoke about Chiara, but neither of them was sure what her apparent return to normal behaviour implied. He also repeated his concern about the source of the opinion she had expressed.

‘You know,’ Paola said, after listening to him, ‘all these years the kids have been in school, I’ve listened to their friends’ parents respond to their kids’ bad grades. It’s always the fault of the teacher. No matter what the subject, no matter who the student: it is always the fault of the teacher.’

She dipped a corner of a biscuit in her caffè latte, ate it, and continued. ‘Never once have I heard anyone say, “Yes, Gemma’s really not very bright, so I understand why she didn’t do well in mathematics” or, “Nanni is a bit of a dope, you know, especially at languages.” Not a bit of it. Their children are always the best and the brightest, are perceived as spending every waking moment bent over their books, and into the lambent clarity of their minds no teacher has ever been capable of adding even the dimmest
light or glimmer of improvement. Yet these are the same kids who come home with Chiara or Raffi and talk of nothing but pop music and films, seem to know nothing about anything except pop music and films and, when they can tear their attention away from pop music and films, do nothing except call one another on their
telefonini
or send SMS’s to each other, the grammar and syntax of which I most sincerely hope to be spared.’

Brunetti ate a biscuit, took another, looked across at her and asked, ‘Do you prepare these speeches when you’re washing the dishes, or do such rhetorical flourishes come to you unrehearsed?’

She considered his question in the spirit in which it had been asked and answered, ‘I’d say they come to me quite naturally, though I imagine I’m aided by the fact that I see myself as the Language Police, ever on the prowl for infelicities or stupidities.’

‘Lots of work?’ he asked.

‘Endless.’ She smiled, but the smile disappeared and she said, ‘All of that means I have no idea where she got it from.’

During all of this, his thoughts had never been far from the dead man, and so when she paused, he asked, ‘If you have any time left over after patrolling the language, could you think of someone at the university who might be able to identify an African by looking at a photo? I mean his tribe or where he might come from.’

‘The one who was shot,’ she said.

Brunetti nodded. ‘All we know is that he’s an African – presumably from Senegal – and not even that for sure. Is there anyone there who might help?’

She dipped another biscuit, ate it, took a sip of coffee, and said, ‘I know a man in the archaeology department who spends six months a year in Africa. I could ask him.’

‘Thanks,’ Brunetti said. ‘I’ll ask Signorina Elettra to send the photos to you at the university.’

‘Couldn’t you just bring them home and give them to me?’

‘They’re in the computer file,’ Brunetti said, speaking calmly so that it would sound as if he understood how this was possible.

She glanced at him, surprised. Then, reading his expression, she asked, ‘Who’s my little computer genius, then?’ She smiled.

Chagrined, he returned the smile, and asked, ‘How did you know?’

‘It’s part of being on the Language Police. We detect all forms of mendacity.’

He finished his coffee and set the cup down. ‘I should be home for lunch,’ he said as he got to his feet, then bent and kissed her on the head. ‘From policeman to policeman,’ he said, and left for the Questura.

When he reached his office, he found papers on his desk. The first page was a list of the addresses of the apartments owned by Renato Bertolli and Alessandro Cuzzoni, with a note stating that Cuzzoni was not married, and
Bertolli’s wife owned nothing more than a half-interest in the apartment in which they lived.

Bertolli, whose home address in Santa Croce was given, owned six apartments, for two of which formal rental contracts were on record in the Ufficio delle Entrate. The fact that those two contracts dated back thirty-two and twenty-seven years, when Bertolli would have been a boy, suggested that they were in the hands of Venetian families whose right to remain in them, by now, was virtually beyond challenge. Bertolli and his wife were listed as resident in the third, but no contracts existed for the other apartments, suggesting they were empty, a suggestion which the information from Signorina Elettra’s friend called into question.

Attached was a note in Signorina Elettra’s hand, which read, ‘I called your friend Stefania at the rental agency and asked her to call around for me. She called back to say Bertolli rents all three of the apartments to foreigners by the week or month. She also asked me to tell you she’s still trying to sell the place near Fondamenta Nuove.’

Cuzzoni, then. He lived in San Polo, at an address only a few numbers distant from Brunetti’s, owned the apartment where he lived and a house in Castello, though no contract was on file at the Ufficio delle Entrate to indicate that the house was being rented.

How convenient, that the city offices never bothered with even the most simple cross-check. If no rental contract was on file, then there was
no reason to believe that the owner was being paid rent, and who could be expected to pay tax if an apartment was empty? A person of a certain turn of mind might so argue, but Brunetti had spent decades looking into the myriad ways citizens cheated one another and everyone cheated the state, and so he assumed that there was some other game afoot here, some way that money was being made on the house and taxes avoided. Renting to illegal immigrants seemed as good a way as any.