Friends in High Places

18

On the way up to his office, he looked at the papers he’d taken from Signorina Elettra’s desk: a long print-out of all the numbers called from both Rossi’s home and from his office. In the margin, she had noted that Rossi’s name did not appear as a customer for any of the mobile telephone companies, which suggested that he had been calling on a phone issued by the Ufficio Catasto. Four of the calls made from his office were to the same number, one that had the Ferrara prefix and that Brunetti thought was the number of Gavini and Cappelli’s office. When he got to his desk, he checked it and proved his memory right. The calls had all been made in a period of less than two weeks, the last one the day before Cappelli was murdered. Nothing after that.

Brunetti sat for a long time, wondering at the connection between the two dead men. He realized that he was now considering them the two murdered men.

While he waited for Signorina Elettra, he considered many things: the location of Rossi’s office at the Ufficio Catasto and how much privacy it would have afforded him; the appointment of Magistrato Righetto to the investigation of Cappelli’s murder; the likelihood that a professional killer would mistake another man for his victim and why, after that crime, no further attempt was made on the supposed real victim. He thought about these and other things, and then he returned to the list of the people who might be able to provide him with information, but stopped when he realized he wasn’t at all sure what sort of information he wanted. Certainly he needed to know about the Volpatos, but he also needed to know more about financial trafficking in the city and the secret processes by which money flowed into and out of the hands of its citizens.

Like most citizens, he knew that the records of sales and transfers of property titles were kept at the Ufficio Catasto. Beyond that, his understanding of just what it was they did was vague. He remembered Rossi’s enthusiasm that several offices were uniting their files in an attempt to save time and make information more simple to recover. He wished now that he had taken the trouble to ask Rossi more about this.

He grabbed the phone book from his bottom drawer, flipped it open to the Bs, and hunted for a number. When he found it, he dialled and waited until a female voice answered, ‘Bucintoro Real Estate, good afternoon.’

‘Ciao, Stefania,’ he said.

‘What’s the matter, Guido?’ she asked, startling him with the question and making him wonder what had been audible in his voice.

‘I need some information,’ he answered just as directly.

‘Why else would you call me?’ she said without the flirtatiousness that usually filled her voice when she spoke to him.

He chose to ignore both the silent criticism of her tone and the overt criticism of her question. ‘I need to know about the Ufficio Catasto.’

‘The what?’ she said in a loud, artificially confused voice.

‘Ufficio Catasto. I need to know what it is exactly they do, who works there, and who is to be trusted among them.’

‘That’s a big order,’ she said.

‘That’s why I called you.’

Suddenly the flirtatiousness was back. ‘And I, sitting here every day, hoping you’ll call wanting something else.’

‘What, my treasure? Just name it,’ he offered in his Rodolfo Valentino voice. Stefania was joyously married and the mother of twins.

‘An apartment to buy, of course.’

‘I might have to do that,’ he said, voice suddenly serious.

‘Why?’

‘I’ve been told that our home is going to be condemned.’

‘What does that mean, condemned?’

‘That we might have to pull it down.’

A second after he said this, he heard Stefania’s sharp peal of laughter, but he wasn’t sure if the target was the patent absurdity of the situation or her surprise that he might find this in any way unusual. After a few more small noises of mirth, she said, ‘You can’t be serious.’

‘That’s exactly how I feel about it. But I had someone from the Ufficio Catasto tell me exactly that. They couldn’t find any record either that it had been built or that permits to do so had ever been given, so they might decide it has to be pulled down.’

‘You must have misunderstood,’ she said.

‘He sounded serious.’

‘When did this happen?’

‘A few months ago.’

‘Have you heard anything else?’

‘No. That’s why I’m calling you.’

‘Why don’t you call them?’

‘I wanted to talk to you first, before I did.’

‘Why?’

‘To know what my rights are. And to know who they are, the people who make the decisions in the office.’

Stefania didn’t respond, and so he asked, ‘Do you know them, the people who are in charge there?’

‘No more than anyone else in the business does.’

‘Who are they?’

‘The important one is Fabrizio dal Carlo; he’s the boss of the entire Ufficio.’ With dismissive scorn, she added, ‘An arrogant shit. He has an assistant, Esposito, but he’s a nonentity because dal Carlo keeps all the power in his own hands. And then there’s Signorina Dolfin, Loredana, whose existence, or at least so I’ve been told, is entirely based on two pillars: the first is not letting anyone forget that, even though she might be no more than a secretary in the Ufficio Catasto, she is a descendant of Doge Giovanni Dolfin,’ she said, then added, as if it mattered, ‘I forget his dates.’

‘He was Doge from 1356 to 1361, when he died of the plague,’ Brunetti supplied seamlessly. To prompt her back into speech, he asked, ‘And the second?’

‘Disguising her adoration of Fabrizio dal Carlo.’ She let that register and then added, ‘I’m told she’s much better at the first than the second. Dal Carlo makes her work like a dog, but that’s probably what she wants, though how anyone could feel anything toward him except contempt is a mystery to me.’

‘Is there anything there?’

Stefania’s laugh exploded down the line. ‘God, no, she’s old enough to be his mother. Besides, he’s got a wife and at least one other woman, so there’d be little enough time for her anyway, even if she weren’t as ugly as sin.’ Steffi considered all of this for a moment and then added, ‘It’s pathetic, really. She’s given up years of her life being the loyal servant to this third-rate Romeo, probably hoping that he’ll some day realize how much she loves him and fall into a dead faint at the thought that it is a Dolfin who’s in love with him. God, what a waste: if it weren’t so sad, it would be funny.’

‘You make it sound as if all of this were common knowledge.’

‘It is. At least to anyone who works with them.’

‘Even that he has other women?’

‘Well, that’s meant to be a secret, I suppose.’

‘But isn’t?’

‘No. Nothing ever is, is it? Here, I mean.’

‘No, I suppose not,’ Brunetti admitted, giving silent thanks that this was so.

‘Anything else?’ he asked.

‘No, nothing that springs to mind. No more gossip. But I think you should call them and ask about this business with your apartment. From what I’ve heard, the whole idea of putting all the records together was just a smokescreen, anyway. It’ll never happen.’

‘A smokescreen for what?’

‘What I heard was that someone in the city administration decided that so much of the restoration done in the last couple of years was illegal – well, that a large part of the actual work done was so much at variance with the designs submitted in the original plans – that it would be better if the permits and the requests for them were made to disappear. That way, no one could ever check the plans against what was actually done. So they set up this project to join everything together.’

‘I’m not sure I follow you, Stefania.’

‘It’s simple, Guido,’ Stefania chided him. ‘With all these papers being shifted from one office to another, being sent from one side of the city to another, it’s inevitable that some of them will be lost.’

Brunetti found this both inventive and efficient. He stored it away as an explanation he might try to use for the nonexistence of the plans for his own house, should notice ever be given that he had to produce them. ‘And so,’ he continued for her, ‘if questions were ever asked about the placement of a wall or the presence of a window, the owner would just have to produce their own plans and…’

Stefania cut him off: ‘Which would of course correspond perfectly with the actual structure of the house.’

‘And in the absence of the official plans, conveniently lost during the reorganization of the files,’ Brunetti began, to an accompanying murmur of approval from Stefania, pleased that he had begun to understand, ‘there would be no way for any city inspector or future buyer ever to be sure that the restorations that had in fact been made were different from the ones that had been requested and approved on the missing plans.’ He finished saying this and, as it were, stepped silently back in order to admire what he had discovered. Ever since he was a child, he’d often heard people say of Venice, ‘Tutto crolla, ma nulla crolla.’ And it certainly seemed true: more than a thousand years had passed since the first buildings rose on the swampy land, so surely many of them must be in danger of falling down, but nothing ever did fall down. They leaned, tilted, buckled, and curved, but he could not remember ever having heard of a building that had actually collapsed. Surely, he had seen abandoned buildings with roofs that had caved in, boarded-up houses with walls that had fallen in, but he’d never heard of a real collapse, of a building falling in on its inhabitants.

‘Whose idea was this?’

‘I don’t know,’ Stefania said. ‘You never find out things like that.’

‘Do the people in the various offices know about this?’

Instead of giving him a direct answer, she said, ‘Think about it, Guido. Somebody has to see that some of these papers disappear, that files are lost, for you can be sure that a lot of others will be lost just because of the usual incompetence. But someone would have to see that specific papers ceased to exist,’

‘Who would want that?’ he asked.

‘It would most likely be the people who own the houses where the illegal work was done, or it could be the people who were supposed to check the restorations and didn’t bother.’ She paused and then added, ‘Or who did check and were persuaded,’ she began, giving that last word ironic emphasis, ‘to approve what they saw, regardless of what was drawn on the plans.’

‘So who are they?’

‘The Building Commissions.’

‘How many are there?’

‘One for every sestiere, six of them.’

Brunetti imagined the scope and breadth of such an undertaking, the number of people who would have to be involved. He asked, ‘Wouldn’t it just be easier for people to go ahead with the work and then pay a fine when it’s discovered that something doesn’t conform to the plans they submitted, rather than go to the trouble of bribing someone to see that the plans are destroyed? Or lost,’ he amended.

‘That’s the way people did it in the past, Guido. Now that we’re involved in all this Europe stuff, they make you pay the fine, but they also make you undo the work and do it again the right way. And the fines are terrible: I had a client who put up an illegal altana, not even a big one, about two metres by three. But his neighbour reported him. Forty million lire, Guido. And he had to take it down, as well. In the old days, at least he’d have been able to leave it there. I tell you, this business of being involved in Europe is going to ruin us. Soon you won’t be able to find anyone brave enough to take a bribe.’

Though he could hear the moral indignation in her voice, Brunetti was not sure he shared it. ‘Steffi, you’ve named a lot of people, but who do you think would be most likely to be able to arrange this?’

‘The people there, in the Ufficio Catasto,’ she answered instantly. ‘And if any thing’s going on, dal Carlo would have to know about it, and I’d guess he’d have his snout in the trough. After all, the plans have to pass through his office at one time or another, and it would be child’s play for him to destroy specific papers.’ Stefania thought for a moment and then asked, ‘Are you thinking of doing something like this, Guido, getting rid of the plans?’

‘I told you, there are no plans. That’s what put them on to me in the first place.’

‘But if there are no plans, then you can claim they were lost along with the others that are going to be lost.’

‘But how do I prove that my home exists, that it was really built?’ Even as he asked the question, he was overcome with the absurdity of all of this: how did one prove the existence of reality?

Her response was immediate. ‘All you’ve got to do is find an architect who will make the plans for you,’ and before Brunetti could interrupt to ask the obvious question, she answered it for him, ‘and have him put a false date on them’.

‘Stefania, we’re talking about fifty years ago.’

‘Not really. All you’ve got to do is claim you made restorations a few years ago and then have plans drawn up to conform to the way the apartment is now, and put that date on them.’ Brunetti could think of no response to make to this, so she went on, ‘It’s simple, really. If you want, I can give you the name of an architect who will do it for you. Nothing easier, Guido.’

She’d been so helpful that he didn’t want to offend her, so he said, ‘I’ll have to ask Paola about it.’

‘Of course,’ Stefania said. ‘What a fool I am. That’s the answer, isn’t it? I’m sure her father knows the people who could get this taken care of. Then you wouldn’t have to bother with getting an architect.’ She stopped: for her, the problem was solved.

Brunetti was just getting ready to answer this, when Stefania broke in and said, ‘I’ve got a call coming in on the other line. Pray it’s a buyer. Ciao, Guido,’ and she was gone.

He thought about their conversation for a while. Reality was there, malleable and obedient: all one had to do was wrest it this way, push it a bit that way, and make it conform to whatever vision one might have. Or if reality proved intractable, then one simply pulled up the big guns of power and money and opened fire. How simple, how easy.

Brunetti realized that this line of thought led to places he would prefer not to go, and so he flipped open the phone book again and dialled the number of the Ufficio Catasto. The phone rang repeatedly but no one picked it up. He glanced at his watch, saw that it was almost four, and put the phone down, muttering to himself that he was a fool to expect to find anyone at work there in the afternoon.

He hunched down in his chair and propped his feet on the open bottom drawer. Arms folded across his chest, he gave himself over to the reconsideration of Rossi’s visit. He’d seemed an honest man, but that appearance was common enough, especially among the dishonest. Why had he followed up on the official letter by going in person to Brunetti’s house? By the time he’d phoned, later, he’d learned Brunetti’s rank. For a moment, Brunetti considered the possibility that Rossi had originally come in search of the offer of a bribe, but he dismissed that: the man had been too patently honest.

When he’d found out that the Signor Brunetti who couldn’t find the plans of his apartment was a high-placed policeman, had Rossi flicked his line into the moving current of gossip to see what he could pull up about Brunetti? No one would dare to move ahead in any delicate dealing without doing this; the secret was knowing whom to ask, just where to drop the hook so as to catch the necessary information. And had he, subsequent to whatever his sources had reported about Brunetti, decided to approach him with what he had discovered at the Ufficio Catasto?

Illegal building permits and whatever could be earned in bribes from granting them seemed a cheap item on the vast menu of corruption offered by public offices: Brunetti found it impossible to believe that anyone would risk much, certainly not his life, by threatening to expose some ingenious scheme to loot the public purse. The implementation of the computer project to centralize documents and thus lose those which time had made inconvenient would raise the stakes, but Brunetti doubted this would be enough to have cost Rossi his life.

His reflections were interrupted by the arrival of Signorina Elettra, who came into his office without bothering to knock. ‘Am I interrupting you, sir?’ she asked.

‘No, not at all. I was just sitting here thinking about corruption.’

‘Public or private?’ she asked.

‘Public,’ he said, putting his feet under his desk and sitting up straight.

‘Like reading Proust,’ she said, deadpan. ‘You think you’re finished with it, but then you discover there’s another volume. Then another one after that.’

He looked up, waiting for more, but all she said, laying some papers on his desk, was, ‘I’ve learned to share your suspicion of coincidence, sir, so I’d like you to take a look at the names of the owners of that building.’

‘The Volpatos?’ he asked, knowing somehow that it could be nothing else.

‘Exactly.’

‘For how long?’

She leaned over and pulled out the third page. ‘Four years. They bought it from a certain Mathilde Ponzi. The declared price is here,’ she said, pointing to a figure typed at the right side of the page.

‘Two hundred and fifty million lire?’ Brunetti said, his astonishment audible. ‘It’s four floors, must be at least a hundred fifty square metres to the floor.’

‘That’s only the declared price, sir,’ Signorina Elettra said.

Everyone knew that, to avoid taxes, the price of a house declared on the bill of sale never reflected the actual price paid or, if it did, it did so unclearly, through a glass darkly: the real price would be anywhere from two to three times as much. Everyone, in fact, referred as a matter of course to the ‘real’ price and the ‘declared’ price, and only a fool, or a foreigner, would think they were the same.

‘I know that,’ Brunetti said. ‘But even if what they actually paid was three times as much, it’s still a bargain.’

‘If you look at their other real estate acquisitions,’ Signorina Elettra began, pronouncing that noun with a certain measure of asperity, ‘you’ll see that they have enjoyed similar good fortune in most of their dealings.’

He turned back to the first page and read down through the information. Indeed, it did appear that the Volpatos had often managed to find houses that cost very little. Thoughtfully, Signorina Elettra had provided the number of square metres in each ‘acquisition’, and a quick calculation suggested to Brunetti that they had managed to pay an average declared price of less than a million lire a square metre. Even allowing for the variables created by inflation and factoring in the disparity between the declared price and the real price, they still ended up consistently paying far less than a third of the average price for real estate in the city.

He glanced up at her. ‘Am I to assume that the other pages tell the same story?’ he asked.

She nodded.

‘How many properties are there?’

‘More than forty, and I haven’t even begun to examine the other properties listed under the names of Volpatos who might turn out to be relatives.’

‘I see,’ he said, turning his attention back to the papers. On the last pages she had attached current bank statements for their individual accounts as well as a number of joint accounts. ‘How do you manage to do this,’ he began, but seeing the sudden change that came over her face at these words, he added, ‘so quickly?’

‘Friends,’ she answered, then added, ‘Shall I see what sort of information Telecom has to give us about the phone calls they’ve made?’

Brunetti nodded, certain that she had already begun this process. She smiled and left the room; Brunetti returned his attention to the papers and the numbers. They were nothing short of staggering. He recalled the impression the Volpatos had made on him: that they were without education or social position or money. And yet they were people, from what these papers told him, of enormous wealth. If even only half the properties were rented – and people did not accumulate apartments in Venice to let them sit empty – then they must be receiving twenty or thirty million lire a month, as much as many people made in a year. Much of this wealth was safely deposited in four different banks, and even more was invested in government bonds. Brunetti understood little of the workings of the stock market in Milan, but he knew enough to recognize the names of the safest stocks, and the Volpatos had hundreds of millions invested in them.

Those shabby people: he summoned them from memory and recalled the worn handle on her plastic handbag, the stitching on her husband’s left shoe that showed how often it had been repaired. Was this camouflage to protect them from the jealous eyes of the city or was it a form of avarice run mad? And where, in all of this, was he meant to fit the battered body of Franco Rossi, found fatally injured in front of a building owned by the Volpatos?