Friends in High Places

3

‘Tear it down?’ Paola repeated, not at all certain whether to respond with astonishment or laughter. ‘What are you talking about, Guido?’

‘He’s just told me some story about there being no papers on file at the Ufficio Catasto for this apartment. They’ve started a new sort of system to computerize all of their records, but they can’t find any proof that the permits were ever granted – or requested, for that matter – for this apartment when it was built.’

‘That’s absurd,’ Paola said, bending down. She handed him the newspapers, picked up the remaining plastic bag, and headed down the corridor toward the kitchen. She set the bags on the table and started to take the packages out of them. As Brunetti explained, she continued to take out tomatoes, onions, and some zucchini flowers no longer than her finger.

When Brunetti saw the flowers, he stopped talking about Rossi and asked, ‘What are you going to do with those?’

‘Risotto, I think,’ she answered and bent to put a white-paper-covered package into the refrigerator. ‘Remember how good that one was that Roberta made us last week, with the ginger?’

‘Hmm,’ Brunetti answered, glad to be diverted to the far more congenial topic of lunch.

‘Many people at Rialto?’

‘Not when I got there,’ she answered, ‘but by the time I was leaving, it was packed. Most of them were tourists, come, as far as I could see, to take pictures of other tourists. In a few years, we’ll have to get there at dawn or we won’t be able to move.’

‘Why do they go to Rialto?’ he asked.

‘To see the market, I suppose. Why?’

‘Don’t they have markets in their countries? Don’t they sell food?’

‘God knows what they have in their countries,’ Paola answered with the slightest suggestion of exasperation. ‘What else did he say, this Signor Rossi?’

Brunetti leaned back against the kitchen counter. ‘He said that, in some cases, all they do is impose a fine.’

‘That’s pretty standard,’ she said, facing him now that all of the food was put away. ‘That’s what happened to Gigi Guerriero, when he put in that extra bathroom. His neighbour saw the plumber carrying a toilet into the house and called the police and reported it, and he had to pay a fine.’

‘That was ten years ago.’

‘Twelve,’ Paola corrected, out of habit. She saw the tightening of Brunetti’s lips and added, ‘Never mind. Doesn’t matter. What else can happen?’

‘He said that in some cases, when the permits were never requested but the work was done anyway, they were forced to demolish whatever it was that had been built.’

‘Surely he was joking,’ she said.

‘You had a look at Signor Rossi, Paola. Do you think he was the kind of man to joke about something like this?’

‘I suspect Signor Rossi is not the kind of man to joke about anything at all,’ she said. Idly, she went into the living room, where she straightened some magazines lying abandoned on the arm of a chair, then went out on to the terrace. Brunetti followed her. When they were standing side by side, the city lying stretched out before them, she waved at rooftops, terraces, gardens, skylights. ‘I’d like to know how much of that is legal,’ she said. ‘And I’d like to know how much of it has the right permits and has received the condono.’ Both of them had lived in Venice for most of their lives, so they had an endless repertoire of stories about bribes paid to building inspectors or walls made of plasterboard that were pulled down the day after the inspectors left.

‘Half the city’s like that, Paola,’ he said. ‘But we’ve been caught.’

‘We haven’t been caught at anything,’ she said, turning toward him. ‘We haven’t done anything wrong. We bought this place in good faith. Battistini – wasn’t that the man we bought it from – he should have got the permits and the condono edilizio.’

‘We should have made sure he had them before we bought it,’ Brunetti attempted to reason. ‘But we didn’t. All we had to do was see that -’ he said, sweeping his hand in an arc that encompassed all that lay before them – ‘and we were lost.’

‘That’s not the way I remember it,’ Paola said, walking back into the living room and sitting down.

‘That’s the way I remember it,’ Brunetti said.

Before Paola could object, he went on, ‘It doesn’t matter how we remember it. Or how rash we were at the time we bought it. What does matter is that we’re stuck with this problem now.’

‘Battistini?’ she asked.

‘He died about ten years ago,’ Brunetti answered, thus putting an end to any plans she might have had to contact him.

‘I didn’t know,’ she said.

‘His nephew, the one who works on Murano, told me about it. A tumour.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ she said. ‘He was a nice man.’

‘Yes, he was. And he certainly gave us a good price.’

‘I think he fell in love with the newlyweds,’ she said, a smile of recollection crossing her face. ‘Especially newlyweds with a baby on the way.’

‘You think that affected the price?’ Brunetti asked.

‘I always thought it did,’ Paola said. ‘Very un-Venetian of him, but still a decent thing to do.’ She added quickly, ‘But not if we’ve got to tear it down.’

‘That’s more than a bit ridiculous, don’t you think?’ Brunetti asked.

‘You’ve been working for the city for twenty years, haven’t you? You ought to have learned that the fact that something is ridiculous makes no difference at all.’

Wryly, Brunetti was forced to agree. He remembered a fruit seller telling him that, if a customer touched the fruit or vegetables on display, the dealer was subject to a fine of half a million lire. Absurdity seemed no impediment to any ordinance the city thought fit to impose.

Paola slumped down in the chair and stretched her feet out on to the low table between them. ‘So what should I do, call my father?’

Brunetti had known the question would be asked, and he was glad it had come sooner, rather than later. Count Orazio Falier, one of the richest men in the city, could easily work this miracle with no more than a phone call or a remark made over dinner. ‘No. I think I’d like to take care of this myself,’ he said, emphasizing the last word.

At no time did it occur to him, as it did not occur to Paola, to approach the matter legally, to find out the names of the proper offices and officials and the proper steps to follow. Nor did it occur to either of them that there might be a clearly defined bureaucratic procedure by which they could resolve this problem. If such things did exist or could be discovered, Venetians ignored them, knowing that the only way to deal with problems like this was by means of conoscienze: acquaintances, friendships, contacts and debts built up over a lifetime of dealing with a system generally agreed, even by those in its employ, perhaps especially by those in its employ, to be inefficient to the point of uselessness, prone to the abuses resultant from centuries of bribery, and encumbered by a Byzantine instinct for secrecy and lethargy.

Ignoring his tone, she said, ‘I’m sure he could take care of it.’

Before giving himself time to consider, Brunetti asked, ‘Ah, where are the snows of yesteryear? Where the ideals of ‘68?’

Instantly alert, Paola snapped out, ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

He considered her, head flung back, ready for anything, and he realized how intimidating she could be in the classroom. ‘It means that we both used to believe in the politics of the left and in social justice and things like equality under the law.’

‘And?’

‘And now our first impulse is to jump the queue.’

‘Say what you mean, Guido,’ she began. ‘Don’t talk about “our”, please, when I’m the one who made the suggestion.’ She paused for a moment, then added, ‘Your principles are safely intact.’

‘And that means?’ he asked, voice somewhere beyond sarcasm but still short of anger.

‘That mine aren’t. We’ve been fools and fooled for decades, all of us with our hopes for a better society and our idiotic faith that this disgusting political system and these disgusting politicians would somehow transform this country into a golden paradise, run by an endless succession of philosopher kings.’ Her eyes sought his and rested on them. ‘Well, I don’t believe it any more, none of it: I have no faith and I have no hope.’

Though he saw the real tiredness in her eyes when she said this, the resentment he could never suppress crept into his voice, and he asked, ‘And does that mean that any time there’s trouble, you turn to your father, with his money and his connections and the power he carries around in his pockets like the rest of us carry loose change, and ask him to take care of it for you?’

‘All I’m trying to do,’ she began with a sudden change in tone, as if she wanted to defuse things while there was still time, ‘is save us time and energy. If we try to do this the right way, we’ll set foot in the world of Kafka, and we’ll ruin our peace and our lives trying to find the correct papers, only to stumble up against another little bureaucrat like Signor Rossi who will tell us they aren’t the right papers and we have to find others, and others, until we both run screaming mad.’

Sensing that Brunetti had warmed to the change in her tone, she continued, ‘And so, yes, if I can spare us that by asking my father to help, then that’s what I would prefer to do, because I don’t have the patience or the energy to do it any other way.’

‘And if I tell you I would prefer to do this myself, without his help?’ Before she could answer, he added, ‘It’s our apartment, Paola, not his.’

‘Do you mean do this by yourself in a legal way or’ – and here even greater warmth came into her voice – ‘do it by using your own friends and connections?’

Brunetti smiled, a sure sign that peace had been restored, ‘Of course I’ll use them.’

‘Ah,’ she said, smiling too, ‘that’s entirely different.’ Her smile broadened and she turned her mind to tactics. ‘Who?’ she asked, all thought of her father swept from the room.

‘There’s Rallo, on the Fine Arts Commission.’

‘The one whose son sells drugs?’

‘Sold,’ Brunetti corrected.

‘What did you do?’

‘A favour,’ was Brunetti’s only explanation.

Paola accepted this and asked only, ‘But what’s the Fine Arts Commission got to do with it? Wasn’t this floor built after the war?’

‘That’s what Battistini told us. But the lower part of the building is listed as a monument, so it might be affected by whatever happens to this floor.’

‘Uh huh,’ Paola agreed. ‘Anyone else?’

‘There’s that cousin of Vianello’s, the architect, who works in the Comune, I think in the office where they issue building permits. I’ll get Vianello to ask him to see what he can find out.’

Both sat for a while, drawing up lists of favours they’d done in the past and that could be called in now. It was almost noon before they had compiled a list of possible allies and agreed on their probable usefulness. It was only then that Brunetti asked, ‘Did you get the moeche?’

Turning, as was her decades-long habit, to the invisible person who she pretended listened to her husband’s worst excesses, she asked, ‘Did you hear that? We are about to lose our home, and all he thinks about is soft-shelled crabs.’

Offended, Brunetti objected: ‘That’s not all I think about.’

‘What else, then?’

‘Risotto.’

The children, who came home for lunch, were told about the situation only after the last of the crabs had been sent to their reward. At first, they refused to treat it seriously. When their parents managed to persuade them that the apartment really was in jeopardy, they immediately began to plan the move to a new home.

‘Can we get a house with a garden so I can have a dog?’ Chiara asked. When she saw her parents’ faces, she amended this to, ‘Or a cat?’ Raffi displayed no interest in animals and opted, instead, for a second bathroom.

‘If we got one, you’d probably move into it and never come out again, trying to grow that silly moustache of yours,’ Chiara said – the family’s first public recognition of a light shadow that had been gradually making itself visible under her older brother’s nose for the last few weeks.

Feeling not unlike a blue-helmeted UN peacekeeper, Paola intervened. ‘I think that’s enough from the two of you. This isn’t a joke, and I don’t want to listen to you talk about it as though it were.’

The children looked at her, and then, like a pair of baby owls perched on a limb, watching to see which of two nearby predators would strike first, swivelled their heads to look at their father. ‘You heard what your mother said,’ Brunetti told them, a sure sign that things were serious.

‘We’ll do the dishes,’ offered Chiara in a conciliatory way, knowing full well that it was her turn, anyway.

Raffi pushed his chair back and got to his feet. He picked up his mother’s plate, then his father’s, then Chiara’s, stacked them on his own plate, and took them to the sink. More remarkably, he turned on the water and pushed up the sleeves of his sweater.

Like superstitious peasants in the presence of the numinous, Paola and Brunetti fled into the living room, but not before he had grabbed a bottle of grappa and two small glasses.

He poured the clear liquid out and handed a glass to Paola. ‘What are you going to do this afternoon?’ she asked after the first calming sip.

‘I’m going back to Persia,’ Brunetti answered. Kicking off his shoes, he lay back on the sofa.

‘Rather an excessive response to Signor Rossi’s news, I’d say.’ She took another sip. ‘This is that bottle we brought back from Belluno, isn’t it?’ They had a friend up there, who had worked with Brunetti for more than a decade but who had abandoned the police force after being wounded in a shootout and had gone back to take over his father’s farm. Every fall, he set up a still and made about fifty bottles of grappa, an entirely illegal operation. He gave the bottles to family and friends.

Brunetti took another sip and sighed.

‘Persia?’ she finally asked.

He set his glass on the low table and picked up the book he had abandoned on Signor Rossi’s arrival. ‘Xenophon,’ he explained, opening it to the marked page, back in that other part of his life.

‘They managed to save themselves, didn’t they, the Greeks? And get back home?’ she asked.

‘I haven’t got that far yet,’ Brunetti answered.

Paola’s voice took on a faint edge. ‘Guido, you’ve read Xenophon at least twice since we’ve been married. If you don’t know whether or not they got back, then you weren’t paying attention, or you’ve got the first symptoms of Alzheimer’s.’

‘I’m pretending I don’t know what happens so I’ll enjoy it more,’ he explained and put on his glasses. He opened the book, found his place, and began reading.

Paola stared across at him for quite a long time, poured herself another glass of grappa, and took it back with her to her study, abandoning her husband to the Persians.