Beastly Things

6

THAT LEFT PATTA. The obligation to deal with his superior often filled Brunetti with an anticipatory weariness, as if he were a swimmer who had miscounted laps and suddenly realized he still had ten to do in water that grew increasingly chilly. Also, like any athlete in competition, Brunetti had made a study of the track record of his opponent. Patta was quick off the block, had no compunction about obstructing the path of other competitors so long as he could get away with doing so, but lacked staying power and often dropped back in any long competition. Unfortunately, no matter how far behind he might fall in a race, he could be depended upon to appear at the award ceremony, and the force did not exist that could prevent him from hauling himself up on to the podium the instant that medals started to be handed round.

To know this was to be forewarned, but to be forewarned served little purpose when one’s opponent was Vice-Questore Giuseppe Patta, Sicily’s best gift to the forces of order, kept for more than a decade at his position in Venice in anomalous defiance of the rule that high police officials were transferred every few years. Patta’s tenacity in his post had puzzled Brunetti until he realized that the only policemen who were systematically transferred away from the cities where they combated crime were those who met with success, especially those who were successful in their opposition to the Mafia. To manage the arrest of the highest members of a Mafia clan in a major city was to guarantee transfer to some backwater in Molise or Sardegna, where major crimes included the theft of livestock or public drunkenness.

Thus perhaps Patta’s professional longevity in Venice, where the mounting evidence of Mafia infiltration did nothing to spur his efforts to combat it. Mayors came and went, all of them pledging to correct the ills their predecessors had ignored or encouraged. The city grew dirtier, hotels proliferated and rents increased, every available inch of sidewalk space was rented out to someone wanting to sell unusable junk from a portable stall, and still the waves of promises to sweep away all these ills rose up ever new and ever higher. And there, becalmed at a safe distance behind the breaking wave, was Vice-Questore Giuseppe Patta, friend to every politician he had ever met, the now-almost-permanent face of the forces of order in the city.

Brunetti, however, a tolerant and moderate man, had trained himself to count his superior’s virtues rather than his faults, and so he acknowledged that there was no proof that Patta was in the pay of any criminal organization; he had never ordered the mistreatment of a prisoner; he would upon occasion believe incontrovertible evidence of the guilt of a wealthy suspect. Had he been a judge, Patta would surely have been a thoughtful one, always ready to weigh the social position of the accused. In the broad scale of things, Brunetti often reflected, these were not ruinous weaknesses.

Signorina Elettra sat at her desk outside her superior’s office and smiled at Brunetti as he entered. ‘I thought I’d report to the Vice-Questore,’ he said.

‘He’ll be glad of the distraction,’ she said soberly. ‘His younger son just called to say he’s failed his exam.’

‘The less-bright one?’ Brunetti inquired, forcing himself not to refer to the boy as stupid, though he was.

‘Ah, Commissario, you force me to make a distinction that is beyond my powers,’ she said with a straight face and serious voice.

Some years ago, Roberto Patta had more than once come close to being arrested, saved only by his father’s position. His involvement with the sale of drugs, however, had come to an end in an early morning car crash in which his fiancée had died, and only his father’s position had kept him from being tested for alcohol and drugs until almost a full day after the accident, when both tests proved negative. With her death, however, something seemed to have snapped inside the boy, and he had abandoned – according to the rumours that circulated in the Questura – both drink and drugs and devoted his limited energies to finishing his degree and becoming an accountant.

It was a hopeless attempt. Brunetti knew it; Patta probably did, as well, yet the boy persisted, taking the same exams year after year, always failing them and determining each time to study harder and take them again, probably never pausing to consider that the state exams – should divine intervention confer his degree – would be even more difficult. Various officers whose children were in the same class as he repeated the stories about his dogged efforts, and over the course of years the common mind of the Questura had gone from considering him the spoiled child of a negligent father to the hard-working, if limited, son of a devoted parent. The mystery of it – fatherhood was always a mysterious thing to Brunetti – was Patta’s devotion to his two sons and his desire that they succeed in life by their own merits, an idea that had formed in him in response to the accident.

‘How long ago did he speak to him?’ Brunetti asked.

‘About an hour,’ she answered and then added in a different voice, ‘His father was busy talking on his telefonino so Roberto called me and asked me to put him through.’ She pulled her lips together in resignation. ‘He told me what had happened. He was crying.’

‘How old is he now, do you know?’

‘Twenty-six, I think.’

‘God, he’ll never make it, will he?’

She shook away the very possibility. ‘Not unless someone can fix things for him with the examining committee.’

‘He won’t do it?’ Brunetti asked, indicating with his chin the door to Patta’s office. ‘He’s done it in the past.’

‘He won’t do it any more.’

‘But why?’

‘God knows. It would be easy enough. He’s certainly cultivated the right people in the last decade.’

‘Maybe they don’t know whose son he is,’ Brunetti suggested.

‘Perhaps,’ she answered, clearly not persuaded.

‘So it’s really true?’ Brunetti asked, marvelling at a parent who would not bend a rule to help his child.

Brunetti crossed the room and knocked on Patta’s door.

‘Avanti!’ came the response, and Brunetti went in.

Patta looked older than he had the day before. He was still a fine figure of a man: muscular, broad-shouldered, with a face that cried out to be immortalized in bronze or stone. But there were faint hollows under his cheekbones this morning, something Brunetti had never noticed before, and his skin looked taut and almost dusty.

‘Good morning, Vice-Questore,’ Brunetti said, approaching the desk.

‘Yes, what is it?’ Patta asked, as though a waiter had approached his table while he was deep in conversation.

‘I wanted to tell you about the man who was found over near the Giustinian this morning, sir.’

‘The drowned man?’ Patta asked.

‘The report must have been confused, sir,’ Brunetti said, remaining at some distance from Patta’s desk. ‘There was water in his lungs: that’s in Rizzardi’s report. But he was stabbed before he went into the water. Three times.’

‘So it’s murder?’ Patta said in a voice that registered understanding but was devoid of interest or curiosity.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘You better take a seat, then, Brunetti,’ Patta said, as though he had suddenly noticed that the man in front of him was still standing.

‘Thank you, sir,’ answered Brunetti. He sat, careful not to make any sudden moves, at least not until he figured out Patta’s mood.

‘Why would someone stab him and put him in the water?’ Patta asked, and Brunetti refused to allow himself to answer that, if he knew why, he could go out and arrest the person who did it and thus save them all a great deal of time and effort.

‘Do you have an identification?’ Patta asked before Brunetti could respond to his first question.

‘Signorina Elettra is working on it, sir.’

‘I see,’ Patta said and left it at that. Abruptly, the Vice-Questore got to his feet and walked over to the window. He stood gazing out of it for so long that Brunetti began to wonder if he should ask him something in order to recapture his attention, but he decided to wait it out. Patta opened the window and let a draught of soft air into the room, then closed it and came back to his chair. ‘Do you want it?’ he asked when he sat back down.

The options open to Brunetti made the question ludicrous. His choices were Pucetti’s baggage handlers, the anticipated increase in pickpocketing that springtime and Easter were bound to bring to the city, the never-ending illegal harvesting of clams, or a murder. But softly, softly, he warned himself. Never let Patta know what you are thinking, and never ever let him know what you want. ‘If there’s no one else free to handle it, sir. I could pass the Chioggia case’ – how much better than calling it the illegal clamming – ‘to the uniformed branch. Two of them are Chiogiotti and could probably use their families to find out who’s digging the clams.’ Eight years at university to chase after illegal clammers.

‘All right. Take Griffoni: she might like a murder for a change.’ Still, after all these years, Patta could astonish him with some of the things he said.

He could also astonish Brunetti with the things he did not know. ‘She’s in Rome, sir: that course in domestic violence.’

‘Ah, of course, of course,’ Patta said with the wave of a man so busy that he could not be expected to remember everything.

‘Vianello isn’t assigned to anything at the moment.’

‘Take anyone you want,’ Patta said expansively. ‘We can’t have something like this happening.’

‘No, sir. Of course not.’

‘A person can’t come to this city and be murdered.’ Patta managed to sound indignant, but there was no way to tell if his emotions were aroused by what had happened to the man or because of what would happen to tourism as a result. Brunetti did not want to ask.

‘I’ll get busy with it then, sir.’

‘Yes, do,’ Patta told him. ‘Keep me informed of what happens.’

‘Of course, sir,’ Brunetti said. He glanced at Patta, but he had started to read one of the papers that lay on his desk. Saying nothing, Brunetti let himself out of the office.