Uniform Justice (26 page)

‘Of what?’ the boy demanded.

‘To hurt you,’ she said.

‘And a lie wouldn’t?’ he asked, but in confusion, without anger.

She turned her palm upwards, splaying open her fingers, in a gesture that spoke of uncertainty and, in a strange way, of hope.

‘What happened?’ Giuliano asked. When she didn’t answer, he added, ‘Please tell me, Zia.’

Brunetti watched her struggle towards speech. Finally she said, ‘He was jealous of your
mother
and accused her of having an affair.’ As the boy showed no curiosity about this, she went on. ‘He shot her and then himself.’

‘Is that why
Mamma
is the way she is?’

She nodded.

‘Why didn’t you tell me? I always thought it was a disease you were afraid to tell me about.’ He stopped and then, as if carried forward on the current of his own confessions, added, ‘That it was something in the family. And it would happen to me, too.’

This broke her, and she started to cry openly, silently, save for an occasional deep intake of breath.

Brunetti turned his attention to the boy and asked, ‘Will you tell me what you think happened, Giuliano?’

The boy looked at Brunetti, at the weeping woman, and then back at Brunetti. ‘I think they killed him,’ he finally said.

‘Who?’

‘The others.’

‘Why?’ Brunetti asked, leaving for later the question of who ‘they’ were.

‘Because of his father and because he tried to help me.’

‘What did they say about his father?’ Brunetti asked.

‘That he was a traitor.’

‘A traitor to what?’

‘
La Patria
,’ the boy answered, and never had Brunetti heard the words spoken with such contempt.

‘Because of his report?’

The boy shook his head. ‘I don’t know. They never said. They just kept telling him his father was a traitor.’

When it seemed that Giuliano had reached a halting place, Brunetti prodded him by asking, ‘How did he try to help you?’

‘One of them started talking about my father. He said he knew what had happened and that my mother was a whore. That there wasn’t any accident, and that she’d gone crazy when my father killed himself because it was her fault that he did.’

‘And what did Moro do?’

‘He hit him, the one who said this, Paolo Filippi. He knocked him down and broke one of his teeth.’

Brunetti waited, not wanting to press him, afraid that it would break the thread of the boy’s revelations.

Giuliano went on. ‘That stopped it for a while, but then Filippi began to threaten Ernesto, and then a bunch of his friends did, too.’ Brunetti’s attention was riveted by the name Filippi, the third-year student whose father supplied material to the military.

‘What happened?’

‘I don’t know. I didn’t hear anything that night, the night he died. But the next day they all seemed strange – worried and happy at the same time, like kids who have a secret or a secret club.’

‘Did you say anything? Ask anyone?’

‘No.’

‘Why?’

Giuliano looked straight at Brunetti as he said, ‘I was afraid’, and Brunetti was struck by how much courage it took for him to say that.

‘And since then?’

Giuliano shook his head again. ‘I don’t know. I stopped going to classes and stayed in my room most of the time. The only people I talked to were you and then that policeman who came to the bar, the nice one.’

‘What made you leave?’

‘One of them, not Filippi, but one of the others, saw me talking to the policeman, and he remembered him from when he was asking questions at the Academy, and then Filippi told me if I talked to the police I better watch out …’ His voice trailed off, leaving the sentence unfinished. He took a deep breath and added, ‘He said I should be careful and that talking to the police could drive a person to suicide, and then he laughed.’ He waited to see what effect this would have on Brunetti, and then said, ‘So I left. I just walked out and came home.’

‘And you’re not going back,’ his aunt startled them both by interrupting. She got to her feet, took two steps towards her nephew, and stopped. Looking across at Brunetti, she said, ‘No more. Please, no more of this.’

‘All right,’ Brunetti agreed, standing. For a moment, he debated whether to tell the boy he would have to make a formal statement, but this was not the time to try to force anything from
him
, especially not with his aunt present. In future, they could deny that this conversation had taken place or they could admit it. Which they chose to do was irrelevant to Brunetti: what interested him was the information he had obtained.

As they made their way back to the front hall, he heard the deep, comforting bass of Vianello’s voice, interspersed with a light female warbling. When Brunetti and the others entered the room, Giuliano’s mother turned to greet them, her face aglow with joy. Vianello stood in the middle of the room, a wicker basket full of brown eggs dangling from his right hand. Giuliano’s mother pointed to Vianello and said, ‘Friend.’

24

ON THE WAY
back to Venice, Brunetti explained that, although they now had enough to warrant calling the Filippi boy in for questioning, he would prefer them to dedicate their energies to seeing what they could find out about his father.

Vianello surprised him by suggesting he take a few hours the next day to have a look on the Internet to see what he could discover. Brunetti forbore from comment on his phrase, ‘have a look’, which sounded to him like vintage Signorina Elettra, when he considered the relief that would come to him if someone other than Signorina Elettra, someone to whom he was less beholden by the heavy demands of past favours, were to be the one to discover sensitive information.

‘How will you do it?’ he asked Vianello.

Keeping his eyes on the traffic that filled the roads leading towards Venice, Vianello said, ‘The same way Signorina Elettra does: see what I can find and then see what my friends can find.’

‘Are they the same friends as hers?’ Brunetti asked.

At this question, Vianello took his eyes from the road and permitted himself a quick glance in Brunetti’s direction. ‘I suppose.’

‘Then perhaps it would be faster to ask Signorina Elettra,’ a defeated Brunetti suggested.

He did so the following morning, stepping into her office and asking her if her military friend was back from Livorno and, if so, whether he would allow her to have a look at their files. As if she had known upon rising that the day would cause her to engage the military, Signorina Elettra wore a dark blue sweater with small buttoned tabs on the shoulders not unlike epaulettes.

‘You wouldn’t happen to be wearing a sword, would you?’ Brunetti asked.

‘No, sir,’ she answered, ‘I find it very inconvenient for daytime wear.’ Smiling, she pressed a swift series of keys on her computer, paused a moment, then said, ‘He’ll start working on it now.’

Brunetti went back to his office.

He read two newspapers, calling it work, while he waited for her, then made a few phone
calls
, not attempting to justify them as anything other than maintaining good relations with people who might some day be asked to provide him with information.

When there had been no sign of Signorina Elettra before lunchtime, he left the Questura without calling her, though he did call Paola to say he would not be home for lunch. He went to da Remigio and ate insalata di mare and coda di rospo in tomato sauce, telling himself that, because he drank only a
quartino
of their house white wine and limited himself to a single grappa, it was a light meal and would entitle him to have something more substantial that evening.

He looked into Signorina Elettra’s office on his way up to his own, but she was gone. His heart dropped, for he feared that she had left for the day and he would have to wait until the following day to learn about Filippi. But she did not disappoint. At three-thirty, just as he was considering going down to ask Vianello to have a look on the computer, she came into his office, a few papers in her hand.

‘Filippi?’ he asked.

‘Isn’t that the name of a battle?’

‘Yes. It’s where Bruto and Cassio were defeated.’

‘By Marc’ Antonio?’ she asked, not at all to his surprise.

‘And Ottaviano,’ he added for the sake of correctness. ‘Who then went on, if memory serves, to defeat Antonio.’

‘It serves,’ she said, placing the papers on his desk, adding, ‘A tricky lot, soldiers.’

He nodded at the papers. ‘Do they lead you to that conclusion, or does the battle of Filippi?’

‘Both,’ she answered. She explained that she would be leaving the Questura in an hour because she had an appointment and left his office.

There didn’t seem to be more than a dozen sheets of paper, but they contained an adequate summary of both men’s rise through the ranks of the military. After graduating from the San Martino Academy, Filippi went on to the formal military academy in Mantova, where he proved to be a mediocre cadet. Filippi finished in the middle of his class, beginning a career that had little to do with battle or its many dangers. He had spent his early years as ‘resource specialist’ in a tank regiment. Promoted, he had served for three years on the staff of the military attaché to Spain. Promoted again, he was posted as executive officer in charge of procurement for a regiment of paratroopers, where he remained until his retirement. Glancing back at Filippi’s first posting, Brunetti’s attention was caught by the word, ‘tank’, and his mind flew instantly to his father and the rage into which that word would catapult him. For two of the war years, while the Army staggered under the command of General Cavallero, ex-director of the Ansaldo armaments complex, Brunetti’s father had driven one of their tanks. More than once he had seen the men of his battalion blown to fragments
as
the armour plating shattered like glass under enemy fire.

Toscano had enjoyed a similarly un-bellicose career. Like Filippi, he had risen effortlessly through the ranks, as though helped along by gentle puffs of wind from the cheeks of protecting cherubs. After years in which he had certainly never been disturbed by the sound of shots fired in anger, Colonello Toscano had been appointed to serve as military adviser to Parliament, the position from which he had been encouraged to retire two years before. He now served as professor of history and military theory at the San Martino Academy.

Beneath the two pages bearing the letterhead of the Army were two more containing lists of property owned by Filippi and Toscano and by members of their families, as well as copies of their most recent bank statements. Perhaps they both had rich wives; perhaps both came from wealthy families; perhaps both had been careful with their salaries all those years. Perhaps.

Years ago, when he first met Paola, Brunetti had limited himself to phoning her only every few days in the hope of disguising his interest and in the equally vain hope of maintaining what he then defined as his male superiority. The memory of this awkward restraint came to him as he dialled Avisani’s number in Palermo.

But Avisani, when he heard Brunetti’s voice, was as gracious as Paola had been, all those years ago. ‘I’ve wanted to call you, Guido, but
things
are crazy here. No one seems to know who’s in charge of the government.’

Brunetti marvelled that a reporter as experienced as he should think anyone would find this worthy of comment but said only, ‘I thought I’d call. And nag.’

‘It’s not necessary,’ Avisani answered with a laugh. ‘I’ve had a trawl through the files, but the only thing I could come up with – aside from what I told you last time – is that both of them, Filippi and Toscano, own enormous amounts of stock in Edilan-Forma.’

‘What does “enormous” mean?’

‘If you’ve managed to convert to thinking in Euros, perhaps ten million each.’

Brunetti made a low humming noise of interest then asked, ‘Any idea how they acquired it?’

‘Toscano’s really belongs to his wife. At least it’s listed in her name.’

‘You told me Filippi was married to the President’s cousin.’

‘Yes. He is. But the stock is in his name, not hers. It seems that he was paid in stock while he was on the board.’

Neither spoke for a long time until finally Brunetti broke the silence by saying, ‘It would be in both of their interests to see that the price of the stock didn’t drop.’

‘Exactly,’ agreed Avisani.

‘A parliamentary investigation might have just that effect.’

This time it was the journalist who answered
with
a noise, though his was more a grunt than a hum.

‘Did you check the stock?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Steady as a rock, well, as a rock that continues to move upward and that gives out steady dividends.’

The phone line was silent, but both of them heard the tumble and roll of the other’s calculations and conclusions. Finally Avisani said, sounding stressed, ‘I’ve got to go, Guido. We might wake up tomorrow morning with no government.’

‘It’s a pity Tommaso d’Aquino is no longer with us,’ Brunetti observed mildly.

Confused, Avisani asked, ‘What?’ then amended it to ‘Why?’

‘He might have added that to his proofs of the existence of God.’

Another muffled noise and Avisani was gone.

But how, Brunetti wondered, to penetrate the world of the cadets? He had long held the view that it was no accident that the Mafia had grown in the home of the Vatican, for both demanded the same fidelity from their followers and both punished betrayal with death, either earthly or eternal. The third in this trinity of twisted loyalty was undoubtedly the military: perhaps the business of imposing death upon the enemy made it easy to impose it upon their own.

He sat for a long time, dividing his gaze between the wall of his office and the façade of
San
Lorenzo, but on neither surface saw he any way to penetrate the code that reigned at San Martino. Finally he picked up the phone and called Pucetti. When the officer answered, Brunetti asked, ‘How old is Filippi?’

‘Eighteen, sir.’

‘Good.’

‘Why?’