Something caught in his memory, and he went back to the box of kitchen linens, opened it and pulled out a plastic string shopping bag of a kind that had been popular in his childhood but had long since disappeared. He slipped the large round handles over his left wrist, wiped his hands on a towel, and tossed it into one of the boxes.
He went back to the box of papers and quickly sorted through them, leaving behind magazines and newspapers and choosing only what looked like letters or documents. He pulled open the mouth of the bag and put the papers inside carelessly, suddenly overwhelmed by the desire to be free of this enclosed space, this heat, and the permeating smell of dust and unwashed objects.
Outside the attic, he used the kitchen knife to screw the flange back into place, then slipped the knife into the pocket of his jacket. On the landing, he tried the door of the apartment, but it was shut: he didn’t bother to use the picks to see if it was double-locked.
Downstairs, he pulled open the outside door and stepped into the full heat of the afternoon sun, soothed by the sense that its rays would burn him clean of the smell and dirt of the attic.
When he arrived at the Questura, shortly after three, the first person he saw was Lieutenant Scarpa, just pulling up in one of the police launches. Because they could not avoid reaching the entrance at the same time, Brunetti prepared some innocuous greeting, keeping the string bag to the side away from Scarpa.
‘Have you been in a fight, Commissario?’ Scarpa asked with seeming concern when he saw the stains on Brunetti’s jacket and shirt.
‘Oh, no. I tripped when I was walking past a building site and fell against a wall,’ Brunetti said with equally false sincerity. ‘But thank you for asking.’
Holding the string bag so that it remained largely out of sight behind him, Brunetti nodded to the guard who opened the door for them, nodded to him in return and snapped out a crisp salute for the lieutenant. Not thinking it necessary to say anything further to Scarpa, Brunetti walked across the foyer and started up the steps. From behind him, he heard the lieutenant say, ‘I haven’t seen a bag like that for ages, Commissario. It’s just like the ones our mothers used to use,’ and then, after a long pause, he added, ‘when they could still do the shopping.’
The faltering of Brunetti’s step was so slight as not to be evident, as had been the first signs of the madness which had seized his mother a decade ago and still held her prisoner. He had no idea how Scarpa had learned about her, indeed, had no proof that he knew, but then why else the lieutenant’s frequent references to their mothers? And why his repeated, and falsely humorous, suggestion that any lapse of memory or efficiency on the part of anyone at the Questura must be a sign of senility?
Ignoring the remark, Brunetti continued up to his office. He closed the door, set the bag on his desk, removed his jacket and held it up to look at the front. Grey linen and one of his favourites, it had broad black stains running horizontally across the front; he doubted that any cleaning could remove them. He draped it on the back of his chair and loosened his tie. It was only then that he noticed how filthy his hands were, so he went down to the bathroom on the floor below and washed them, then splashed water on his face and ran his wet hands around the back of his neck.
Seated at his desk, he pulled the bag towards him, spread it open, and drew the stack of papers from it. Abandoning the idea of trying to sort them into categories, he began to read them over as they lay in the pile. Gas bills, ENEL, water and garbage bills, all paid through her account at Uni Credit: these were clipped together according to utility and arranged in chronological order. There was a sheaf of letters of complaint from neighbours, Signora Gismondi among them, about the noise of her television. They dated back seven years and had all been sent raccomandate. There was a photocopy of her marriage certificate, a letter from the Ministero dell’ Interno to her husband, acknowledging receipt of his report of 23 June 1982.
There followed a stack of letters, all addressed to either Signora Battestini or her husband, sometimes to both. He opened them and read quickly through the first paragraph of each, then glanced quickly through the rest of the letters to see if there was anything that might be important. Some were painfully pro forma letters from a niece, Graziella, written in a very unschooled hand, each thanking her for a Christmas gift, though the gift was never specified. Over the course of the years, Graziella’s handwriting and painfully simple grammar remained unchanged.
One of the envelopes bearing Graziella’s name and return address contained no letter: instead, he found a sheet of paper written in the sharp, spiky letters of a different hand. Along the left margin ran a list of four sets of initials, and to the right of each of them a series of numbers or, in some cases, numbers preceded by or followed by a letter or letters. A voice spoke his name from the door, and he looked up to see Vianello. Instead of a greeting, Brunetti surprised him by asking, ‘You like crossword puzzles, don’t you?’
Nodding, the inspector came across the room and sat in one of the chairs in front of Brunetti’s desk. Brunetti passed him the sheet of paper and said, ‘What do you make of this?’
Vianello took the sheet, laid it flat on the surface of his superior’s desk, and, propping his chin in both palms, looked down at it. Brunetti continued to go through the other papers, leaving Vianello to it.
After a number of minutes but without taking his eyes from the paper, Vianello asked, ‘Do I get a clue?’
‘It was in the attic of the old woman who was murdered last month.’
A few more minutes passed and finally Vianello asked, ‘Have you got a phone book, sir? The yellow pages.’
Curious, Brunetti bent down and pulled the Venice yellow pages out of his bottom drawer.
The inspector opened the book at the front and flipped through a few pages. Then he picked up the sheet of paper and laid it on top of the open book. He placed his right forefinger on the first item on the list and ran his left down a page of the book which Brunetti could not see. Apparently finding what he was looking for, Vianello moved his right finger to the second, and the left again hunted down the page of the phone book. Satisfied with whatever he was finding, Vianello grunted and moved his right finger. This process continued until he got to the fourth item on the list, at which he looked up at Brunetti and smiled.
‘Well?’ Brunetti asked.
Vianello turned the book around and pushed it across the desk. On the right-hand page Brunetti saw, in capital letters, BAR, followed by the first few dozen names of the alphabetical listing of the hundreds of bars in the city. Vianello’s broad forefinger passed into his field of vision and drew his attention to the left-hand page. He understood instantly: BANCHE. Of course, banks. So the list was a series of abbreviations of their names, followed by the account numbers.
‘I also know a three-letter Cambodian monetary unit beginning with K, sir,’ Vianello said.
8
AFTER A FEW minutes’ discussion, Brunetti went downstairs and made a few photocopies of the paper. When he came back, he and Vianello wrote out the full names of the banks beside each of the abbreviations. When they had them all, Brunetti asked, ‘Are you good enough to get into them?’ leaving it to Vianello to infer that he meant with a computer and not with a pickaxe and crowbar.
Regretfully, Vianello shook his head and said, ‘Not yet, sir. She let me try it once, with a bank in Rome, but I left a trail so broad that a friend of hers sent her an email the next day to ask her what she thought she was doing.’
‘He knew she did it?’ Brunetti asked.
‘The man told her he recognized her technique in the way I first entered the system.’
‘Which was?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Oh, you wouldn’t understand, sir,’ Vianello said in a haunting echo of the cool, objective tone Signorina Elettra used and which the inspector had probably learned from her. ‘She started me off using an opening code, then she let me try to find a specific piece of information.’
‘Which was?’ Brunet
ti said, adding, ‘if I might ask.’
‘She wanted me to see if I could discover how much money had been transferred into a particular account from a numbered account in Kiev.’
‘Whose account?’ Brunetti asked.
Vianello pressed his lips together, considering, and then named the Assistant Minister in the Department of Commerce who had been most active in arranging government loans to the Ukraine.
‘Did you find out?’
‘Alarm bells,’ Vianello began, then explained, ‘figuratively, that is – began to sound. So I got out as quickly as I could, but not before I’d left very obvious signs that I’d been in there.’
‘Why would she want to know something like that?’ Brunetti mused.
‘I think she already knew, sir,’ Vianello said, then added, ‘In fact, I’m sure she did. That’s how she knew how to help me get in.’
‘Did she explain to her friend?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Oh, no, sir. That would just have made it worse, if he knew she was helping the police.’
‘You mean none of these people she asks for help knows where she works?’ asked an astonished Brunetti.
‘Oh, no. That would be the end of it, if they did.’
‘Then where do they all think she’s working?’ He had some vague idea that any messages she sent must be traceable to the Questura. They all had email addresses: he’d even used his a few times, and he knew it was perfectly clear that it was at the Venice Questura.
‘I think she reroutes things, sir,’ Vianello said cautiously.
Though Brunetti wasn’t clear how this could be done, the verb made it clear that it had been done. ‘Reroutes it how, through what?’
‘Probably her last working address.’
‘The Banca d’Italia?’ asked an astonished Brunetti. At Vianello’s nod, Brunetti demanded, ‘Do you mean she’s sending and getting information via an address at a place where she hasn’t worked for years?’ At the second nod, Brunetti raised his voice. ‘It’s the national bank, for God’s sake. How can they allow a person who hasn’t worked there for years to use their address as if she still did?’
‘I don’t think they would allow it, sir,’ Vianello agreed, then explained, ‘that is, if anyone there knew she was using it.’
To continue with this conversation, Brunetti suddenly realized, would lead either to madness or, more dangerously, to criminal knowledge which, at some time in the future, he might have to deny under oath. But, unable to control his curiosity, he asked, ‘Did you find out?’
‘Find out what?’
‘How much was deposited?’
‘No.’
‘Did she?’
‘I assume so.’
‘Why? Did she tell you?’
‘No. She said it was privileged information, and I couldn’t have it unless I found it out myself.’
Hearing this, the expression, ‘Honour among thieves’, did flit through Brunetti’s mind, but his admiration and respect caused him to swat it aside and return his attention to the matter at hand. ‘Then we have to ask her to do this?’
‘I think so. Yes.’
Together they got to their feet and, Vianello carrying the sheet of paper with the deciphered initials, they went downstairs to see if Signorina Elettra was in her office.
She was, but unfortunately so was her immediate superior, Vice-Questore Giuseppe Patta, today wearing a cream linen suit with a black shirt, also of linen. His tie, of slate-coloured silk, had threads of the same colour as the suit running diagonally across it. Brunetti noticed, as he had failed to do earlier, that Signorina Elettra was wearing a black linen suit and a cream-coloured silk blouse. It occurred to him that, had the two of them planned this, Patta would probably have been motivated by emulation, she by parody.
Seeing Vianello with a sheet of paper in his hand, Patta demanded, ‘What’s that, Inspector? Something to do with the Commissario’s nonsensical idea that that woman was not murdered by the Romanian?’
‘No, Vice-Questore,’ a humbled Vianello said. ‘It’s a code I use for choosing teams for the Totocalcio.’ He brought the paper out from behind him and made as if to show it to Patta, saying, ‘You see, this first column is the code for the team name, and then here are the numbers of the players I think are going to . . .’
‘That’s enough, Vianello,’ Patta said with undisguised irritation. Then, to Brunetti, ‘Unless you’re busy choosing your winning teams, too, Commissario, I’d like to have a word with you.’ He turned towards the door to his office.
‘Of course, sir,’ said Brunetti and followed him, leaving Vianello to talk to Signorina Elettra.
Patta went to his desk but didn’t invite Brunetti to sit, a good sign, for it meant the Vice-Questore was in a hurry. It was almost five: Patta would barely have time for the police launch to take him over to the Cipriani for a swim and get him home in time for dinner.
‘I won’t keep you, Commissario. I want to remind you that this case is settled, regardless of what your ridiculous ideas about it might be,’ he began, not bothering to specify which of Brunetti’s ideas he found ridiculous and thus allowing himself the option of considering them all to be so. ‘The facts speak for themselves. The Romanian killed that poor old woman, tried to escape the country, and then gave clear proof of her guilt by trying to escape from a routine police inspection at the border.’ He put his hands together, making a steeple out of his fingers, and covered his mouth for a second with his forefingers, then separated them and said, ‘I don’t want the work of this police department called into question by a suspicious and irresponsible press.’
He raised his chin and devoted his full attention, and gaze, to Brunetti. ‘Have I made myself clear, Commissario?’
‘Excellently clear, sir.’
‘Good,’ he said, taking Brunetti’s affirmation as agreement that he would do as he was told. ‘Then I won’t keep you any longer. I have a meeting to attend.’
Brunetti murmured polite words and left the office. Outside, Signorina Elettra sat at her desk, reading a magazine; there was no sign of Vianello. When she looked up, Brunetti raised a finger and pointed at his nose, then upwards in the direction of his office. He heard Patta’s door open behind him. Signorina Elettra glanced back at her magazine, ignoring Brunetti, and idly flipped a page. He left and went up to his office to wait for her.
Vianello was by the window of Brunetti’s office when he arrived, standing on his toes and leaning out of the window, looking down at the dock in front of the Questura. Brunetti heard the motor of one of the launches start up, then listened as it pulled away and started down towards the Bacino and, presumably, off towards the Cipriani. Saying nothing, Vianello drew his head back inside and moved towards a chair.
A moment later Signorina Elettra came in and closed the door behind her. She took the chair next to Vianello; Brunetti leaned back against his desk.
He hardly thought it necessary to ask her if Vianello had told her what had to be done. ‘Will you be able to check them all?’ he asked.
‘Only this one will be difficult,’ she said, pointing to a name halfway down the list. ‘Deutsche Bank. They’ve taken over two other banks, but their office here is new, and I’ve never had to ask them for anything, so it might take me some time, but I can make the requests to the others this afternoon: I should have the answers by tomorrow.’ The way she phrased it, one not familiar with her tactics would assume that all of this would be done according to strict banking procedure: all information given in compliance with court orders which, in turn, had been supplied in response to police inquiries filed through the proper channels. Since this was a process which ordinarily took months and which new laws made increasingly difficult, if not impossible, the reality was that the information would be plucked from the files of the banks as effortlessly as the wallet from the back pocket of an unsuspecting Belgian tourist on the Number One vaporetto.
Looking at Vianello, Brunetti asked, ‘What do you think?’
With a polite nod at Signorina Elettra to show that she had told him about Brunetti’s conversation with Signora Gismondi, Vianello said, ‘If the woman you spoke to is telling the truth, then it’s not likely that Signora Ghiorghiu killed the old woman. Which means that someone else did, and I agree that these bank records are a good first place to look for a reason why.’
Signorina Elettra interrupted here. ‘Do you think there’s any chance that she might have been the murderer?’
Vianello glanced at him, equally curious, and Brunetti said, ‘If you’ve seen the photos of Signora Battestini’s body, you’ve seen what the blows did to her head.’ Taking their silence for assent, he went on, ‘It doesn’t make any sense to me that the Ghiorghiu woman would go back and do that in cold blood. She had a lot of money, she had a train ticket home, and she was already at the station. And from what Signora Gismondi said, it sounds as though she’d had time to calm down. I can’t see any reason why she’d go back and kill the old woman, and if she did, not in that way. That was rage, not calculation.’
‘Or calculation disguised as rage,’ suggested Vianello.
This opened vistas of malice Brunetti preferred not to contemplate, but he nodded in reluctant assent. Rather than speculate about the possible, however, he wanted them to discuss the actual, and so he turned his attention to Signorina Elettra. ‘I’ll talk to her lawyer tomorrow and to the relatives.’ Turning to Vianello, he said, ‘I’d like you to go and see if people in the neighbourhood remember seeing anything that day.’
‘Is this official?’ Vianello asked.
Brunetti sighed. ‘I think it would be better if you managed to make your questions casual, if such a thing is possible.’