Death and Judgement (24 page)

She thought for a moment before answering, it got in about eleven, I think.
’

'The one Trevisan took,
’
Brunetti said and saw the name register.

"The man who was killed last week?
’
she asked after a short pause.

'Yes. Did you know him?
’
Brunetti asked.

'He was a client here. We handled his travel arrangements, for himself and for the people who worked for him.'

'Strange, isn't it?' Brunetti asked. 'Isn't what strange?'

"That two men you know should
the
in the same week.'

Her voice was cool, uninterested. 'No, I don't find it particularly strange, commissario. Certainly, you don't mean to suggest there's some sort of connection between the two.'

Instead of answering her question, he got to his feet. Thank you for your time, Signora Ceroni,' he said, reaching across the desk to shake her hand.

She stood and came around the desk, moving gracefully. 'It is I who should thank you for having taken the trouble to return my glasses to me.'

'It was our duty,' he said, 
'None the less, I thank you for taking the trouble.' She went with him to the door, opened it, and allowed him to pass in front of her to the outer office. The young woman still sat at the desk, and a long sheet of tickets hung suspended from the printer. Signora Ceroni walked with him to the front door of the agency. He opened it, turned and shook hands again, and men headed back
up towards home. Signora Ceroni
stood in front of
the
beach until he turned the corner and disappeared.

24

When he arrived at the Questura, Brunetti stopped first in Signorina Elettra's office and dictated the letter to Giorgio — he couldn't help thinking of him that way now - in which he apologized for what he called clerical inaccuracies on the part of the Questura. The letter would suffice, he hoped, for Giorgio s fiancee and her family while at the same time remaining sufficiently vague so as not to commit him to having actually done anything.

'He
’ll be very gl
ad to get this,' Signorina Elettra said, looking down at
the
page of shorthand notes on her desk.

'And
the
record of his arrest?
’
Brunetti asked.

She glanced up at him, eyes two limpid pools. 'Arrest?
’
She took a sheaf of computer print-out from beside her pad and passed it across to Brunetti. 'Your letter ought to pay him back for this.'

'The numbers in Favero's book?' he asked.

The very same,' she said, unable to disguise her pride.

He smiled, her pleasure immediately contagious. 'Have you looked at it?
’
he asked.

'Just briefly. He's got names, addresses, and I think
he's managed to get the dates and times of all calls going through to all of those numbers from any phones in Venice or Padua.'

'How does he do it?' Brunetti asked, voice reverent with the awe he felt at Giorgio s ability to pry information from SIP; the files of the secret services were easier to penetrate.

'He went to school in the United States for a year, to study computers, and while he was
there
, he join
ed a group of something called “h
ackers". He keeps in touch with them, and they trade
information about how to do th
ings like this.'

'Does he do this at work, using the SIP lines?' Brunetti asked, his awe and gratitude so strong as to erase
the
fact that what Giorgio did was probably illegal.

'Of course.
’
.

'Bless him,' Brunetti said with all the fervour of a person whose phone bill for any given period never corresponded to the use given the phone.

"They're all over the world, these "
hackers",' Signor
ina Elettra added, 'and I don't think there's much that can be hidden from them. He told me he contacted people in Hungary and Cuba to do this. And someplace else. Do they have phones in Laos?'

He was no longer listening but was reading down through
the
long columns of times and dates, of places and names. Patta's name, however, broke through: '... wants to see you'.

'Later,' he said and left her office, going back to his own, reading all
the
way. Inside, he closed the door and went over to stand in the light coming through the window. He stood there, poised like a Roman senator of the time of the Caesars, hands spread wide, slowly studying a long report from the far-flung cities of the Empire. This one did not deal with troop disposition or the shipment of spices and oil. Instead, it told only when two relatively inconspicuous Italians might have called and spoken to people in Bangkok, the Dominican Republic, Belgrade, Manila, and a handful of other cities, but it was no less interesting for that. Pencilled in the margin of the sheets were the locations of the public call boxes from which some of the calls were made. Though some of the calls were made from the offices of both Trevisan and Favero, many more were made from a public phone on the same street as Favero s office in Padua and still more from another one located in a small
calle
that ran behind Trevisan's office.

At the bottom, Brunetti read the names under which the phones were listed. Three, including the one in Belgrade, belonged to travel agencies, and the Manila number belonged to a company named Euro-Employ. At the name, all of the events since Trevisan's death turned into shards of coloured glass in an immense kaleidoscope seen only by Brunetti. And this single name was the final turn of the cylinder that jogged the separate pieces and forced them into a pattern. It was not yet complete, not yet fully in focus, but it was there, and Brunetti understood.

He pulled his address book from his desk drawer, rifling through the pages for the phone number of Roberto Linchianko, a lieutenant-colonel in the Philippine military police, a man who had attended a two-week police seminar in Lyons three years ago and with whom Brunetti had formed a friendship that had lasted since then, though their only communication had been by phone and tax.

His buzzer rang. He ignored it and picked up the phone, got
an outside line, and dialled Lin
chianko's home phone number, though he had no idea at all what time it was in Manila. Six hours ahead, as it turned out, which meant he caught Linchianko just as he was about to go to bed. Yes, he knew Euro-Employ. His disgust came down the wire, leaping across the oceans. Euro-Employ was only one of the agencies engaged in the trade of young women, and it was hardly the worst. All of the papers the women signed before they went off to 'work
’
in Europe were entirely legal. The fact that the papers were signed by the 'X' of an illiterate or by a woman that didn't speak the language of the contract in no way compromised their legality, though none of the women who managed to return to the Philippines thought or sought to bring a legal claim against the agency. In any case, so far as Linchianko knew, very few returned. As to how many were sent, he estimated that there were between fifty and a hundred a week, just from Euro-Employ, and named the agency that booked their tickets, a name already familiar to Brunetti from its presence on the list. Before he hung up, Linchian
ko promised to fax Brunetti the
official police file on both Euro-Employ and the travel agency as well as the personnel files he had kept for years on all of the employment agencies working in Manila.

Brunetd had no personal contacts in any of the other cities on the list from
SIP, but what he learned from Lin
chianko was more than enough to tell him what he would find there.

In all of his reading of Roman and Greek history, one of the things that had always puzzled Brunetti was
the
ease with which the ancients had accepted slavery. The rules of war were different then, he knew, as had been the economic basis of the society, and so slaves were both available and necessary. Perhaps it was a possibility that it might happen to you. should your country lose a war, that made the idea acceptable - no more than a spin of the wheel of fate could make you a slave or master. But no one had spoken against it, not Plato and not Socrates, or, if anyone had, what they said and wrote had not survived.

And today, to the best of his knowledge, no one spoke against it, either, but today the silence was based on the belief that slavery had ceased to exist. He had listened to Paola voice her radical politics for decades, had grown almost deaf to her hurling about terms like 'wage slave' and 'economic chains', but now those cliches rose up to haunt him, for what Linchianko had described to him could be given no other name but slavery.

The full flood of his interior rhetoric was cut off by the repeated buzz of the intercom on his desk. 'Yes, sir,' he said as he picked it up. 'I'd like to talk to you,' said a disgrunded Patta.

‘I’
ll be right down.'

Signorina Elettra was no longer at her desk when Brunetti went downstairs, so he went into Patta's office with no idea of what to expect, not that the possibilities were ever more than a few: after all, how many manifestations could displeasure take?

Today, he was to learn that he was not the target of Patta's dissatisfaction, only the means by which it was to be conveyed to the lower orders, its that sergeant of yours,' Patta began after telling Brunetti to take a seat.

‘
Vianello?'

‘
Yes.'

‘
What do you think he's done?' Brunetti asked, not conscious until after he had spoken of the scepticism implicit in his question.

Patta did not overlook it.
‘I
think he's been abusive to one of the patrolmen.
’

‘
Riverre?' Brunetti asked.

'Then you've heard about it and done nothing?' Patta asked.

‘
No, I've heard nothing. But if there's anyone who deserves abuse, it's Riverre.
’

Patta threw up his hands in a visible manifestation of his irritation,
‘I
've had a complaint from one of the officers.'

'Lieutenant Scarpa?' Brunetti asked, unable to disguise his dislike for the Sicilian who had come up to Venice with his patron, the Vice-Questore, and who served as much as spy as assistant.

'It's not important who made the complaint. What is important is that it was made.'

'Was it an official complaint?' Brunetti asked

'That's irrelevant,' Patta said with swift anger. With Patta, anything he didn't want to hear was irrelevant, regardless of its truth.
‘I
don't want any trouble with the unions. They won't put up with this sort of thing.'

Brunetti, disgusted with this latest example of Patta's cowardice, came close to asking him if there were any threat before which he would not bow down, but he cautioned himself, yet once again, against the rage of fools and, instead, said, 'I'll speak to them.'

'Them?'

'Lieutenant Scarpa, Sergeant Vianello, and Officer Riverre.'

Patta came close, he could tell, to objecting to this, but then, no doubt realizing that
the
problem, even if not solved, was at least out of his hands, said instead, 'And this Trevisan thing?'

‘
We're working on it, sir.'

'Any progress?'

'Very
little
.' At least none he wanted to discuss with Patta.

'Well, take care of this problem with Vianello. Let me know what happens.' Patta turned his attention back to the papers in front of him, his equivalent of a polite dismissal.

Signorina Elettra was no longer at her desk, so Brunetti went down to Vianello's office, where he found the sergeant reading that day's
Gazzettino.

'Scarpa?' Brunetti asked when he came in.

Vianello crumpled the pages of the newspaper together and pressed it down on the desk with an unverifiable remark about Lieutenant Scarpa's mother.

'What happened?'

With one hand, Vianello began to smooth out the pages of his newspaper,
‘I
was talking to Riverre, and Lieutenant Scarpa came in.'

Talking to?'

Vianello shrugged. 'Riverre knew what I meant, and he knew he should have given you that woman's name sooner. I was telling him
that
when
the
lieutenant came in. He didn't like
the
way I was talking to Riverre.'

'What were you saying?'

Vianello folded the paper closed and then in half, then pushed it to the side of his desk,
‘I
called him an idiot'

Brunetti, who knew Riverre was one, round nothing strange in this. 'What did he say?' 'Who, Riverre?' 'No, the lieutenant.'

'He said I could not speak to my subordinates that way.'

'Did he say anything eke?
’
Vianello didn't answer. 'Did he say anything else, sergeant?' Still no answer.

'Did you say anything to him?'

Vianello's voice was defensive,
‘I
told him that the matter was between me and one of my officers,
that
it didn't concern him.'

Brunetti knew he didn't have to waste time telling Vianello how foolish this was.

'And Riverre?' Brunetti asked.

'Oh, he's come to me already and told me that, as far as he remembers our conversation, I was telling him a joke. About a Sicilian.' Vianello permitted himself a small smile here. 'The lieutenant, as Riverre now remembers the incident, came in just as I was giving the punch line, about how stupid the Sicilian was, and the lieutenant didn't understand - we were speaking dialect - and thought I was talking to Riverre.'

'Well, that seems to take care of that,' Brunetti said, though he didn't like the fact that Scarpa had taken his complaint to Patta. Vianello already had enough against him in that quarter, just by virtue of his so often working with Brunetti, and didn't need the opposition of the lieutenant as well.

Abandoning the issue, Brunetti asked, 'Do you remember something about a truck that went off the road, up in Tarvisio, this autumn?'

‘
Yes. Why?'

'Do you remember when it was?'

Vianello paused for a moment before he answered. 'September 26th. Two days before my birthday. First time it's ever snowed that early up there.'

Because it was Vianello, Brunetti didn't have to ask him if he was sure of the date. He left the sergeant to return to his newspaper and went back to his office and to the computer sheets. A call had been made from Trevisan's office to the number in Belgrade at nine in the morning of 26 September, a call that lasted three minutes. The following day, another'call had been made to the same number, but this one came from
the
call box in the
calle
behind Trevisan's office. This one had lasted twelve minutes.