‘With an inspiration such as that presented by the Vice-Questore, Signora, it could have been nothing but,’ Guarino said in a dead level voice.
Brunetti watched as her attention turned to the man who had spoken. ‘Indeed,’ she answered, giving Guarino her brightest look. ‘I’m so pleased to discover another person who finds him inspiring.’
‘How could one fail to, Signora? Or is it Signorina?’ Guarino asked, injecting into his voice curiosity, or was it astonishment, that she might still be unmarried.
‘After the current head of our government, Vice-Questore Patta is the most inspiring man I’ve ever encountered,’ she answered, smiling, but responding to only the first of his inquiries.
‘I can well believe it,’ Guarino agreed. ‘Charismatic, each of them in his own way.’ Turning to Brunetti, he asked, ‘Is there a place where we can talk?’
Brunetti nodded, not trusting himself to speak, and they left the office. As they climbed the stairs, Guarino asked, ‘How long has she worked for the Vice-Questore?’
‘Long enough to fall completely under his spell,’ Brunetti answered. Then, at Guarino’s look, ‘I’m not sure. Years. It seems as if she’s always been here, though she hasn’t.’
‘Would things fall apart if she weren’t?’ Guarino asked.
‘Yes, I’m afraid so.’
‘We have someone like her in the office,’ the Major answered. ‘Signora Landi: the formidable Gilda. Is your Signora Landi a civilian?’
‘Yes, she is,’ Brunetti answered, wondering that Guarino had failed to notice the jacket that had hung oh-so-negligently on the back of her chair. Brunetti knew little of fashion, but he could spot an Etro lining at twenty paces, and he knew that the Ministry of the Interior was not in the habit of using it in their uniform jackets. Guarino had apparently overlooked the clue.
‘Married?’
‘No,’ Brunetti answered, then surprised himself by asking, ‘Are you?’
Brunetti had moved ahead of the other officer, so he did not hear his answer. He turned back and said, ‘Excuse me?’
‘Not really,’ Guarino said.
Now, what in hell was that supposed to mean? Brunetti asked himself. ‘I’m afraid I don’t understand,’ he said politely.
‘We’re separated.’
‘Oh.’
Inside Brunetti’s office he led his guest over to the window and showed him what view there was: the eternally about-to-be-renovated church and the completely restored rest home. ‘Where does the canal go?’ Guarino asked, leaning forward and looking to the right.
‘Down to Riva degli Schiavoni and the
bacino
.’
‘You mean the
laguna
?’
‘Well, the water that will take you out to the
laguna
.’
‘Sorry to sound like such a country bumpkin,’ Guarino said, ‘I know it’s a city, but it still doesn’t feel like one to me.’
‘No cars?’
Guarino smiled and grew younger. ‘Well, it’s partly that. But the strangest thing is the silence.’ After a long moment, he saw that Brunetti was about to speak but added, ‘I know, I know, most people in cities hate the traffic and the smog, but the worst is the noise, believe me. It never stops, even late at night or early in the morning: there’s always a machine at work somewhere: a bus, or a car, a plane coming in to land, or a car alarm.’
‘Usually the worst we get,’ Brunetti said with an easy laugh, ‘is someone walking under your window and talking late at night.’
‘They would have to talk very loud to bother me,’ Guarino said and laughed.
‘Why?’
‘I live on the seventh floor.’
‘Ah,’ was the only thing Brunetti could think of to say, so unusual to him was the reality of such a thing. In the abstract, he knew that people in cities lived in tall buildings, but it seemed inconceivable that they would hear any noise on the seventh floor.
He waved Guarino to a chair and sat down himself. ‘What is it you want from the Vice-Questore?’ he asked, feeling that they had spent enough time on preliminaries. He pulled open his second drawer with his foot, then propped his crossed feet on it.
The casual gesture seemed to relax Guarino, who went on. ‘A bit less than a year ago, our attention was called to a trucking company in Tessera, not far from the airport.’
Brunetti was immediately alert: a month ago, the attention of the entire region had been called to a trucking company in Tessera.
‘We first got interested when the name of the company turned up in the course of another investigation,’ Guarino continued. This was a routine lie Brunetti himself had used countless times, but he let it pass unremarked.
Guarino stretched out his legs and glanced back at the window, as if the view of the façade of the church would help him tell his story in the clearest way. ‘Once our attention had been called to this company, we went to talk to the owner. Been in the family for more than fifty years; inherited from his father. It turned out he’d been having problems: rising fuel costs, competition from foreign haulers, workers who went on strike whenever they didn’t get what they wanted, need for new trucks and equipment. The usual things.’
Brunetti nodded. If this was the same trucking company in Tessera, then the ending had not been one of the usual things. With a candour and resignation that surprised Brunetti, Guarino said, ‘So he did what anyone would do: he started to cook the books.’ Almost with regret, he added, ‘But he wasn’t very good at it. He could drive and fix a truck and make out a schedule for pick-ups and deliveries, but he was not a bookkeeper, so the Guardia di Finanza smelled something wrong the first time they took a look at his records.’
‘Why did they investigate his records?’ Brunetti asked.
Guarino raised his hand in a gesture that could mean anything.
‘Did they arrest him?’
The
Maggiore
looked at his feet, then flicked a hand at his knee, wiping away a speck invisible to Brunetti. ‘It’s more complicated than that, I’m afraid.’ This seemed obvious to Brunetti: why else would Guarino be there, talking to him?
Slowly, and with some reluctance, Guarino said, ‘The person who told us about him said he was transporting things we were interested in.’
Brunetti cut him off by saying, ‘There are a lot of things being shipped around that we’re all interested in. Perhaps you could be more specific.’
Ignoring Brunetti’s interruption, Guarino went on, ‘A friend of mine in the Guardia told me what they had found, and I went to talk to the owner.’ Guarino glanced at Brunetti and then away. ‘I offered him a deal.’
‘In return for not arresting him?’ Brunetti asked unnecessarily.
Guarino’s look was as angry as it was sudden. ‘It’s done all the time. You know it.’ Brunetti watched the
Maggiore
decide to say what he would immediately regret saying. ‘I’m sure you do it.’ Guarino’s look softened at once.
‘Yes, we do,’ Brunetti said calmly, then added, to see how Guarino would react, ‘And it doesn’t always work out the way it’s planned.’
‘What do you know about this?’ the other man demanded.
‘Nothing more than what you’ve just told me,
Maggiore
.’ When Guarino said nothing, he asked, ‘And then what happened?’
Guarino took another swipe at his knee, then forgot about it and left his hand there. ‘He was killed in a robbery,’ he finally said.
The details began to seep into Brunetti’s memory. Because Tessera was closer to Mestre than to Venice, Mestre had been given the case. Patta had outdone himself in seeing that the Venice police did not get dragged into the investigation, claiming lack of manpower and jurisdictional uncertainty. Brunetti had spoken of it at the time to friends in the Mestre police, but they said it looked like a botched robbery with no leads.
‘He always went in early,’ Guarino continued, still not bothering to give the dead man’s name, an omission which irritated Brunetti. ‘At least an hour before the drivers and the other workers. They shot him. Three times.’ Guarino looked across at him. ‘You know about it, of course. It was in all the papers.’
‘Yes,’ Brunetti said, not mollified: Guarino had been a long time about it. ‘But I never read more than what was in the papers.’
‘Whoever did it,’ Guarino went on, ‘had already searched his office, or went through it after they killed him. They tried to open a wall safe – failed – went through his pockets and took whatever money he had on him. And his watch.’
‘So it looked like a robbery?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Suspects?’
‘No.’
‘Family?’
‘Wife, two grown children.’
‘They involved with the company?’
Guarino shook his head. ‘The son’s a doctor in Vicenza. The daughter’s an accountant and works in Rome. The wife’s a teacher, due to retire in a couple of years. With him gone, it all fell apart. The business didn’t survive him by a week.’ He saw Brunetti’s raised eyebrows. ‘I know it sounds incredible, in the age of the computer, but none of our people could find a list of orders, or routes, or pick-ups and deliveries, not even a list of drivers. He must have kept everything in his head. All of the records were a mess.’
‘So what did the widow do?’ Brunetti asked blandly.
‘She had no choice: she closed it down.’
‘Just like that?’ Brunetti asked.
‘What else could she do?’ Guarino answered, almost as if he were pleading with Brunetti to have patience with the woman’s inexperience. ‘I told you, she’s a teacher. Elementary school. She didn’t have a clue. It was one of those one-man businesses we’re so good at running.’
‘Until that one man dies,’ Brunetti said ruefully.
‘Yes,’ Guarino said and sighed. ‘She wants to sell it, but no one’s interested. The trucks are old, and now there aren’t any clients. The best she can hope for is that another company will buy up the trucks and she’ll be able to find someone to take over the lease for the garage, but she’ll still end up selling it all for nothing.’Guarino stopped speaking, almost as if he had given all the information he was prepared to give. He had not said a thing, Brunetti realized, about whatever might have passed between the two of them during the time they knew one another and, in a certain sense, worked together.
‘Am I correct in assuming,’ Brunetti asked, ‘that you discussed something other than the fact that he was cheating on his taxes?’ If not, then there was no reason for the man to be here, though he hardly had to point this out to Guarino.
Guarino measured out a single word. ‘Yes.’
‘And that he gave you information about something other than his tax situation?’ Brunetti found his voice growing tight. For God’s sake, why couldn’t the man just tell him what was going on and ask him whatever he wanted? For surely he had not come here to chat about the lovely silence of the city nor the charms of Signora Landi.
Guarino seemed content to say nothing further. Finally, making no attempt to disguise his irritation, Brunetti asked, ‘Perhaps you could stop wasting my time and explain why you’re here?’
3
It was obvious that Guarino had been waiting for Brunetti’s patience to expire, for his answer came without hesitation and quite calmly. ‘The police treated his death as a robbery that went bad and turned into murder.’ Before Brunetti could ask what the police made of the three shots, Guarino volunteered, ‘We suggested that approach. I don’t think they cared one way or the other. Doing it like that was probably easier for them.’
And, reflected Brunetti, probably ensured the murder’s swift passage out of the news, but instead of remarking on that, he asked, ‘What do you think happened?’
Again, that quick glance at the church, the flick at his knee, and then Guarino said, ‘I think whoever it was, one or more of them were waiting when he went in. There were no other signs of violence on his body.’
Brunetti imagined the waiting men, their unsuspecting victim, and their interest in learning what he knew. ‘Do you think he told them anything?’
Guarino’s glance was sharp, and he answered, ‘They could get it out of him without having to hurt him, you know.’ He paused, as if conjuring up the memory of the dead man, and added, with audible reluctance, ‘I was his contact, the person he talked to.’ This, Brunetti realized, explained Guarino’s edginess. The Carabiniere glanced away, as if uncomfortable at the memory of how easy it had been for him to make the murdered man talk. ‘He wouldn’t have been hard to frighten. If they had threatened his family, he would have told them whatever they wanted.’
‘And what would that have been?’
‘That he had been talking to us,’ Guarino said after only the faintest hesitation.
‘How did he get mixed up in this to begin with?’ Brunetti asked, fully aware that Guarino had not yet explained what it was the dead man had been involved with.
Guarino made a small grimace. ‘That was what I asked him the first time I talked to him. He said that when the business started to go bad, he used up their savings, his and his wife’s, then he went to the bank to try to take out a loan. Well, another loan: he already had a large one.
‘They turned him down, of course,’ Guarino went on. ‘That’s when he began not registering jobs or payments, even if he was paid by cheque or bank transfer.’ He shook his head in silent criticism of such folly. ‘As I told you, he was an amateur. Once he started to do that, it was only a question of time until he got caught.’ With clear regret, as if reproaching the dead man for some minor offence, he said, ‘He should have known.’
Absently, Guarino rubbed at his forehead and continued. ‘He said that he was frightened at the beginning. Because he knew he was no good at accounting. But he was desperate, and . . .’ Guarino left that unfinished, then resumed. ‘A few weeks later – this is what he told me – a man came to see him at his office. He said he’d heard he might be interested in working privately, not bothering with receipts, and if so he had some work to offer him.’ Brunetti said nothing, so Guarino continued. ‘The man he talked to,’ he said, ‘lives here.’ He watched for Brunetti’s reaction, then said, ‘That’s why I’m here.’