Dressed for Death (32 page)

‘What?’ she asked and half rose
to her feet. Her notebook fell to the floor, and she bent to pick it up. ‘I beg
your pardon, Commissario,’ she said when she had the notebook open on her lap
again. ‘In the Archives? I was trying to see if there was anything there about Avvocato
Santomauro or perhaps Signor Mascari.’

‘And what luck have you had?’

‘None, unfortunately. Neither of
them has ever been in trouble with the police. Absolutely nothing.’

‘No one in the building has any
idea of the way things are filed down there, Signorina, but I’d like you to see
what you can find about the people on those lists.’

‘On both, Dottore?’

She had prepared them, so she
knew that they contained more than two hundred names. ‘Perhaps you could begin
with the second one, the people who receive money. The list has their names and
addresses, so you can check at the city hall and find out which of them are
registered here as residents.’ Though it was a holdover from the past, the law
which required all citizens to register officially in the city where they
resided and to inform the authorities of any change in address made it easy to
trace the movements and background of anyone who came under official scrutiny.

‘I’d like you to check the people
on that list, find out if any of them have criminal records, either here or in
other cities. Other countries, though I have no idea of what you’ll be able to
find.’ Signorina Elettra nodded as she took notes, suggesting that all of this
was child’s play. ‘Also,’ he continued, ‘once Vianello finds out who’s paying
rent under the table, then I’d like you to take those names and do the same.’
She looked up a few seconds after he finished speaking. ‘Do you think you could
do this, Signorina? I have no idea what happened to the old files after we
began to switch over to computers.’

‘Most of the old files are still
down there,’ she said. ‘They’re a mess, but some things are still to be found
in them.’

‘Do you think you could do this?’
She had been here less than two weeks, and already it seemed to Brunetti that
she had been there for years.

‘Certainly. I find myself with a
great deal of time on my hands,’ she said, leaving an opening wide enough for
Brunetti to herd sheep through.

He gave in to the impulse and
asked, ‘What’s happening?’

‘They’re having dinner tonight.
In Milano. He’s having himself driven over there this afternoon.’

‘What do you think will happen?’
Brunetti asked, though he knew he shouldn’t.

‘Once Burrasca’s arrested, she’ll
be on the first plane. Or perhaps he’ll offer to drive her back to Burrasca’s
after dinner - he’d enjoy that, I think, driving up with her and finding the
cars from the Finance Police. She’ll probably come back with him tonight if she
sees them.’

‘Why does he want her back?’
Brunetti finally asked.

Signorina Elettra glanced up at
him, puzzled by his density. ‘He loves her, Commissario. Surely, you must
realize that.’

* * * *

Chapter Twenty-Three

The
heat usually robbed Brunetti of all appetite, but that night he found himself
really hungry for the first time since he had eaten with Padovani. He stopped
at Rialto on the way home, surprised to find some of the fruit and vegetable
stalls still open after eight. He bought a kilo of plum tomatoes so ripe the
vendor warned him to carry them carefully and not put anything on top. At
another stall, he bought a kilo of dark figs and got the same warning. Luckily,
each warning had come with a plastic bag, so he arrived at home with a bag in
each hand.

When he got inside, he opened all
the windows in the apartment, changed into loose cotton pants and a T-shirt,
and went into the kitchen. He chopped onions, dropped the tomatoes in boiling
water, the more easily to peel them, and went out on the terrace to pick some
leaves of fresh basil. Working automatically, not really paying attention to
what he was doing, he prepared a simple sauce and then put water on to cook the
pasta. When the salted water rose to a rolling boil, he threw half a package of
penne rigate
into the water and stirred them around.

As he did all of this, he kept
thinking of the various people who had been involved in the events of the last
ten days, not trying to make any sense of the jumble of names and faces. When
the pasta was done, he poured it through a colander, tossed it into a serving
bowl, then poured the sauce on top of it. With a large spoon, he swirled it
round, then went out on to the terrace, where he had already taken a fork, a
glass and a bottle of Cabernet. He ate from the bowl. Their terrace was so high
that the only people close enough to see what he was doing would have to be in
the bell tower of the church of San Polo. He ate all the pasta, wiping the
remaining sauce up with a piece of bread, then took the bowl inside and came
out with a plate of freshly washed figs.

Before he started on them, he
went back inside and picked up his copy of Tacitus’
Annals of Imperial Rome.
Brunetti picked up where he had left off, with the account of the myriad horrors
of the, reign of Tiberius, an emperor for whom Tacitus seemed to have an
especial distaste. These Romans murdered, betrayed, and did violence to honour
and to one another. How like us they were, Brunetti reflected. He read on,
learning nothing to change that conclusion, until the mosquitoes began to
attack him, driving him inside. On the sofa, until well after midnight, he read
on, not at all troubled by the knowledge that this catalogue of crimes and
villainies committed almost two thousand years ago served to remove his mind
from those that were being committed around him. His sleep was deep and
dreamless, and he awoke refreshed, as if he believed that Tacitus’ fierce,
uncompromising morality would somehow help him through the day.

* * * *

When
he got to the Questura the following morning, he was surprised to discover that
Patta had found time, before he left for Milano the previous day, to request of
the instructing judge a court order that would provide them with the records of
both the Lega della Moralità and the Banca di Verona. Not only that, but the
order had been delivered to both institutions that morning, where the officials
in charge had promised to comply. Though both institutions insisted it would
take some time to prepare the necessary documents, neither had been precise on
just how long that would be.

By eleven, there was still no
sign of Patta. Most of the people who worked in the Questura bought a newspaper
that morning, but in none of them was there mention of Burrasca’s arrest. This
fact came as no surprise, neither to Brunetti nor the rest of the staff, but it
did a great deal to increase the eagerness, to make no mention of the
speculation, about the results of the Vice-Questore’s trip to Milano the
evening before. Rising above all of this, Brunetti contented himself with
calling the Guardia di Finanza to ask if his request for the loan of personnel
to check the financial records of both the bank and the Lega had been granted.
Much to his surprise, he learned that the instructing judge, Luca Benedetti,
had already called and suggested that the papers be examined by the Financial
Police as soon as they were produced.

When Vianello came into his
office shortly before lunch, Brunetti was sure he had come to report that the
papers had not arrived or, more likely, that some bureaucratic obstacle had
suddenly been discovered by both the bank and the Lega, and delivery of the
papers would be delayed, perhaps indefinitely.

‘Buon giorno,
Commissario,’ Vianello said when
he came in.

Brunetti looked up from the
papers on his desk and asked, ‘What is it, Sergeant?’

‘I’ve got some people here who
want to talk to you.’

‘Who?’ Brunetti asked, placing
his pen down on the papers in front of him.

‘Professore Luigi Ratti and his
wife,’ Vianello answered, offering no explanation save the terse, ‘from Milano.’

‘And who are the professor and
his wife, if I might ask?’

‘They’re the tenants in one of
the apartments in the care of the Lega, have been for a little more than two years.’

‘Go on, Vianello,’ Brunetti said,
interested.

‘The professor’s apartment was on
the part of the list I had, so I went to speak to him this morning. When I
asked him how he had come by the apartment, he said that the decisions of the
Lega were private. I asked him how he paid his rent, and he explained that he
paid two hundred and twenty thousand lire into the Lega’s account at the Banca
di Verona every month. I asked him if I might take a look at his receipts, but
he said he never kept them.’

‘Really?’ Brunetti asked, even
more interested now. Because there was never any telling when some agency of
the government would decide that a bill had not been paid, a tax not collected,
a document not issued, no one in Italy threw out any official form, least of
all proof that some sort of payment had been made. Brunetti and Paola, in fact,
had two complete drawers filled with utility bills that went back a decade and
at least three boxes filled with various documents stuffed away in the attic.
For a person to say he had thrown away a rent receipt was either an act of
sovereign madness, or a lie. ‘Where is the professor’s apartment?’

‘On the Zattere, with a view
across to the Giudecca,’ Vianello said, naming one of the most desirable areas
in the city. Then he added, ‘I’d say it’s six rooms, the apartment, though I
saw only the entrance hall.’

‘Two hundred and twenty thousand
lire?’ Brunetti asked, thinking that this was what Raffi had paid for a pair of
Timberlands a month ago.

‘Yes, sir,’ Vianello said.

‘Why don’t you ask the professor
and his wife to come in, then, Sergeant? By the way, what is the professor a
professor of?’

‘I don’t think of anything, sir.’

‘I see,’ Brunetti said and
screwed the cap back on to his pen.

Vianello went over to the door
and opened it, then stepped back to allow Professore and Signora Ratti to come
into the office.

Professore Ratti might have been
in his early fifties, but he was keeping that fact at bay to the best of his
ability. He was aided in the attempt by the ministrations of a barber who cut
his hair so close to the scalp that the grey would be mistaken for blond. A
Gianni Versace suit in dove-grey silk added to the youthful look, as did the
burgundy silk shirt which he wore open at the throat. His shoes, which he wore
without socks, were the same colour as the shirt, made of woven leather that
could have come only from Bottega Veneta. Someone once must have warned him
about the tendency of the skin under his chin to wattle, for he wore a knotted
white silk cravat and held his chin artificially high, as if compensating for a
careless optician who had put the lenses in his bifocals in the wrong places.

If the professor was fighting a
holding action against his age, his wife was engaged in open combat. Her hair
bore an uncanny resemblance to the colour of her husband’s shirt, and her face
had the tautness that came only from the vibrancy of youth or the skill of
surgeons. Blade-thin, she wore a white linen suit with a jacket left open to
display an emerald-green silk shirt. Seeing them, Brunetti wondered how they
managed to walk around in this heat and still look fresh and cool. The coolest
part of them was their eyes.

‘You wanted to speak to me,
Professore?’ Brunetti asked, rising from his chair but making no attempt to
shake hands.

‘Yes, I did,’ Ratti said,
motioning to his wife to sit in the chair in front of Brunetti’s desk and then
going, unasked, to pull a second from where it stood against the wall. When
they were both comfortable, he continued, ‘I’ve come to tell you how much I
dislike having the police invade the privacy of my home. Even more, I want to
complain about the insinuations that have been made.’ Ratti, like so many
Milanesi, elided all of the R’s in his speech, a sound which Brunetti could not
help associating with actresses of the more pneumatic variety.

‘And what insinuations are those,
Professore?’ Brunetti asked, resuming his seat and signalling to Vianello to
stay where he was, just inside the door.