Death in a Strange Country by Donna Leon
‘What’s that got to do with the Americans?’
‘I don’t know. That’s why I want to speak to the boy’s parents.’
‘All right. I’ll get busy with this now and call you this afternoon.’
‘Can you find him without the Americans finding out?’
‘I think so,’ Ambrogiani answered. ‘We have copies of the vehicle registrations, and almost all of them have cars, so I can find out if he’s still here without having to ask them any questions.’
‘Good,’ Brunetti said. ‘I think it would be best if this stayed with us.’
‘You mean, as opposed to the Americans?’
‘For now, yes.’
‘Fine. I’ll call you after I check the records.’
‘Thanks, Maggiore.’
‘Giancarlo,’ the Carabiniere said. ‘I think we can call one another by our first names if we’re going to do something like this.’
‘I agree,’ Brunetti said, glad to find an ally. ‘Guido.’
When he hung up, Brunetti found himself wishing he were in America. One of the great revelations to him when he was there was the system of public libraries: a person could simply walk in and ask questions, read any book he wanted, easily find a catalogue of magazines. Here in Italy, either one bought the book or found it in a university library, and even there it was difficult to gain access without the proper cards, permissions, identification. And so how to find out about PCBs, what they were, where they came from, and what they did to a human body that came in contact with them?
He glanced at his watch. There was still time to get to the bookshop at San Luca if he hurried; it was likely to have the sort of book that might be useful to him.
He got there fifteen minutes before it closed and explained what he wanted to the sales assistant. He said that there were two basic books on toxic substances and pollution, though one had more to do with emissions that went directly into the atmosphere. There was a third book, a sort of general guide to chemistry for the layman. After glancing through them, Brunetti bought the first and the third, then added a rather strident-looking text, published by the Green party, that bore the title, Global Suicide. He hoped that the treatment of the subject would be more serious than either the title or the cover promised.
He stopped at a restaurant and had a proper lunch, then went back to the office and opened the first book. Three hours later, he had begun to see, with mounting shock and horror, the extent of the problem that industrial man had created for himself and, worse, for those who would follow him on the planet.
These chemicals, it seemed, were essential in many of the processes necessary to modern man, among them refrigeration, for they served as the coolant in domestic refrigerators and air conditioners. They were also used in the oil for transformers, but the PCBs were only a single flower in the deadly bouquet industry had presented to mankind. He read the chemical names with difficulty, the formulae with incomprehension. What remained were the numbers given for the half-life of the substances involved. He thought this was the time it took the substance to become half as deadly as it was when measured. In some cases, the number was hundreds of years; in some it was thousands. And it was these substances which were produced in enormous quantities by the industrialized world as it hurtled towards the future.
For decades, the Third World had been the rubbish dump of the industrialized nations, taking in shiploads of toxic substances, which were scattered around on their pampas, savannahs, and plateaux, placed there in exchange for current wealth, no thought given to the future price that would come due and be paid by future generations. And now, with some of the countries in the Third World refusing any longer to serve as the dumping ground of the First, the industrial countries were constrained to devise systems of disposal, many of them ruinously expensive. As a result, fleets of phantom trucks with false manifests travelled up and down the Italian peninsula, seeking and finding places to unload their lethal cargoes. Or boats sailed from Genoa or Taranto, holds filled with barrels of solvents, chemicals, God alone knew what, and when they arrived at their final ports, those barrels were no longer on board, as though the god who knew their contents had decided to take them to his bosom. Occasionally, they washed ashore in North Africa or Calabria, but no one, of course, had any idea where they might have come from, nor did anyone notice when they were delivered back to the waves that had brought them to the beaches.
The tone of the book published by the Green party irritated him; the facts terrified him. They named the shippers, named the companies that paid them, and, worst, showed photos of the places where these illegal dumps had been found. The rhetoric was accusatory, and the culprit, according to the authors, was the entire government, hand in glove with the companies which produced these products and were not constrained by law to account for their disposal. The last chapter of the book dealt with Vietnam and the results that were just now beginning to be seen of the genetic cost of the tons of dioxin that had been dumped on that country during its war with the United States. The descriptions of birth defects, elevated rates of miscarriage, and the lingering presence of dioxin in fish, water, the very land itself were clear and, even allowing for the inevitable exaggerations of the writers, staggering. These same chemicals, the authors maintained, were being dumped all over Italy on a day-to-day, business-as-usual basis.
When Brunetti stopped reading, he realized that he had been manipulated, that the books all had enormous flaws in their reasoning, that they assumed connections where none could be shown, placed guilt where the evidence didn’t. But he realized as well that one of the basic assumptions made in all of the books was probably true: a violation of the law this widespread and unpunished – and the refusal of the government to pass more stringent laws – argued for a strong link between the offenders and the government whose job it was to prevent or prosecute them. Was it into this vortex that those two innocents at the base had stepped, brought there by a child with a rash on his arm?
18
Ambrogiani called him back about five to tell him that the boy’s father, a sergeant who worked in the contracting office, was still stationed at Vicenza; at least his car was still there and had had its registration renewed only two weeks before, and since that process required the signature of the owner of the vehicle, it was safe to assume that he was still in Vicenza.
‘Where does he live?’
‘I don’t know,’ answered Ambrogiani. ‘The papers have only his mailing address, a postbox here at the base, but not his home address.’
‘Can you get it?’
‘Not without their learning that I’m interested in him.’
‘No. I don’t want that,’ Brunetti said. ‘But I want to be able to talk to him, away from there.’
‘Give me a day. I’ll have one of my men go into the office where he works and find out who he is. Luckily, they all wear those name tags on their uniforms. Then I’ll see about having him followed. It shouldn’t be too difficult. I’ll call you tomorrow, and then you can think about setting up a meeting with him. Most of them live off the base. In fact, if he’s got children, he’s certain to. I’ll call you tomorrow and let you know what I manage, all right?’
Brunetti could see no better way. He realized how much he wanted to get on a train to Vicenza immediately, speak to the boy’s father, and begin to piece together the puzzle of how the picnic and the rash and that pencilled notation in the margin of the medical record had led to the murder of those two young people. He had some of the pieces; the boy’s father must have another one; sooner or later, by putting them together and examining them, switching them to new positions, he would be sure to see the pattern that now lay hidden.
Seeing no other solution, he agreed to Ambrogiani’s suggestion that he wait for his call the following day. He opened the third book again, drew a piece of paper from his desk, and began to make a list of all of the companies which were suspected of hauling or shipping toxic wastes without the proper authorization and
He checked the copyright of the book and saw that it had been printed only the year before, so the list was current. He turned to the back and saw a region-by-region map of the places where illegal dumping sites had been found. The provinces of Vicenza and Verona were heavily dotted, especially the region just north of both cities, leading up to the foothills of the Alps.
He closed the book, folding the list carefully inside it. There was nothing more he could do until he spoke to the boy’s father, but still he burned with the desire to go there now, futile as he knew that desire to be.
The intercom buzzed. ‘Brunetti,’ he said, picking it up.
‘Commissario,’ Patta’s voice said, ‘I’d like you to come down to my office right now.’
For a fleeting instant, Brunetti wondered if Patta was having his phone tapped or a record kept of his calls and somehow knew that he was still in contact with the American base. Even this new information about the toxins, Brunetti knew, would not deflect the other man from his attempt to keep things quiet. And the instant he learned that Brunetti suspected that so lofty an institution as something that could be graced with the name of ‘company’ might be involved, Patta was sure to threaten to reprimand him officially if he persisted in his attempt to learn what had happened. If the forces of law were not to defer to the desires of business, then surely the Republic was imperilled.
He went immediately down to Patta’s office, knocked, and was told to enter. Patta was poised at his desk, looking as though he had just come from a film audition. A successful one. As Brunetti entered, Patta was busy fitting one of his Russian cigarettes into his onyx holder, careful to hold both away from his desk, lest a particle of tobacco fall upon and somehow diminish the gleaming perfection of the Renaissance desk behind which he sat. The cigarette proving resistant, Patta kept Brunetti waiting in front of him until he had managed to fit it carefully within the gold circle of the holder. ‘Brunetti,’ he said, lighting the cigarette and taking a few cautious exploratory puffs, perhaps seeking to taste the effect of the gold, ‘I’ve had a very upsetting phone call.’
‘Not your wife, I hope, sir,’ Brunetti said in what he hoped was a meek voice.
Patta rested the cigarette on the edge of his malachite ashtray, then grabbed quickly at it as the weight of the holder caused it to topple back onto the desk. He replaced it, this time resting it level, burning end and mouthpiece balanced on opposing sides of the round ashtray. As soon as he took his hand from it, the weight of the head of the holder pressed it down. The end of the cigarette slipped out, and both cigarette and holder fell, the holder with a rich clatter, into the bowl of the ashtray.
Brunetti folded his hands behind him and looked out of the window, bouncing up and down a few times on the balls of his feet. When he looked back, the cigarette was extinguished, the holder gone.
‘Sit down, Brunetti.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ he said, ever-polite, taking his usual place in the chair in front of the desk.
‘I’ve had,’ Patta resumed, ‘a phone call.’ He paused just long enough to dare Brunetti to repeat his suggestion, then continued, ‘From Signor Viscardi, from Milan.’ When Brunetti asked nothing, he added, ‘He called to tell me that you are calling his good name into question.’ Brunetti did not jump to his own defence, so Patta was forced to explain. ‘He said that his insurance agent has received a phone call, from you, I might add, asking how he knew so quickly that certain things had been taken from the palazzo.’ Had Patta been in love with the most desirable woman in the world, he could not have whispered her name with more adoration than he devoted to that last word. ‘Further, Signor Viscardi has learned that Riccardo Fosco, a known leftist’ – and what did this mean, Brunetti wondered, in a country where the President of the Chamber of Deputies was a Communist? – ‘has been asking suggestive questions about Signor Viscardi’s financial position.’
Patta paused here to give Brunetti an opportunity to jump to his own defence, but he said nothing. ‘Signor Viscardi,’ Patta continued, voice growing more indicative of the concern he felt, ‘did not volunteer this information; I had to ask him very specific questions about his treatment here. But he said that the policeman who questioned him, the second one, though I see no reason why it was necessary to send two, that this policeman seemed not to believe some of his answers. Understandably, Signor Viscardi, who is a well-respected businessman, and a fellow member of the Rotary International’ – it was not necessary here to specify who his fellow member was – ‘found this treatment upsetting, especially as it came so soon after his brutal treatment at the hands of the men who broke into his palace and made off with paintings and jewellery of great value. Are you listening, Brunetti?’ Patta suddenly asked.
‘Oh, yes, sir.’
‘Then why don’t you have anything to say?’
‘I was waiting to learn about the upsetting phone call, sir.’
‘Damn it,’ Patta shouted, slamming his hand down on the desk. ‘This was the upsetting call. Signor Viscardi is an important man, both here and in Milan. He has a great deal of political influence, and I won’t have him thinking, and saying, that he has been treated badly by the police of this city.’
‘I don’t understand how he has been badly treated, sir.’
‘You understand nothing, Brunetti,’ Patta said in tight-lipped anger. ‘You call the man’s insurance agent the same day the claim is made, as if you suspected there was something strange about the claim. And two separate policemen go to the hospital to question him and show him photos of people who had nothing to do with the crime.’
‘Did he tell you that?’
‘Yes, after we’d been speaking a while and I assured him that I had every confidence in him.’
‘What did he say, exactly, about the photo?’
‘That the second policeman had shown him a photo of a young criminal and had seemed not to believe him when he said he didn’t recognize the man.’
‘How did he know the man in the photo was a criminal?’
‘What?’
Brunetti repeated himself. ‘How did he know that the photo of the man he was shown was the photo of a criminal? It could have been a photo of anyone, the policeman’s son, anyone.’
‘Commissario, who else would they show him a picture of if not of a criminal?’ When Brunetti didn’t answer, Patta repeated his exasperated sigh. ‘You’re being ridiculous, Brunetti.’ Brunetti started to speak but Patta cut him off. ‘And don’t try to stick up for your men when you know they’re in the wrong.’ At Patta’s insistence that the offending police were ‘his’, there slipped into Brunetti’s mind a vision of what it must be like when Patta and his wife tried to portion out responsibility for the failures and achievements of their two sons. ‘My’ son would win a prize at school, while ‘yours’ would be disrespectful to teachers or fail an exam.
‘Have you anything to say?’ Patta finally asked.
‘He couldn’t describe the men who attacked him, but he knew which pictures they were carrying.’
Once again, Brunetti’s insistence did no more than display to Patta the poverty of the background from which he came. ‘Obviously, you’re not accustomed to living with precious objects, Brunetti. If a person lives for years with objects of great value, and here I mean aesthetic value, not just material price’ – his voice urged Brunetti to stretch his imagination to encompass the concept – ‘then they come to recognize them, just as they would members of their own family. So, even in a flashing moment, even under stress such as Signor Viscardi experienced, he would recognize those paintings, just as he would recognize his wife.’ From what Fosco had said, Brunetti suspected Viscardi would have less trouble recognizing the paintings.
Patta leaned forward, paternally, and asked, ‘Are you capable of und
‘I’ll understand a lot more when we speak to Ruffolo.’
‘Ruffolo? Who’s he?’
‘The young criminal in the photo.’
Patta said no more than Brunetti’s name, but he said it so softly that it called for an explanation.
‘Two tourists were sitting on a bridge and saw three men leave the house with a suitcase. Both of them identified the photo of Ruffolo.’
Because he had not bothered to read the report on the case, Patta didn’t ask why this information wasn’t contained in it. ‘He could have been hiding outside,’ he suggested.
‘That’s entirely possible,’ Brunetti agreed, though it was far more likely to him that Ruffolo had been inside, and not hiding.
‘And what about this Fosco person? What about his phone calls?’
‘All I know about Fosco is that he’s the Financial Editor of one of the most important magazines in the country. I called him to get an idea of how important Signor Viscardi was. So we’d know how to treat him.’ This so precisely mirrored Patta’s thinking that he was incapable of questioning Brunetti’s sincerity. Brunetti hardly thought it necessary to make an excuse for the seriousness with which the policemen had seen fit to question Viscardi. Instead, he said, ‘All we’ve got to do is get our hands on this Ruffolo, and everything will be straightened out. Signor Viscardi will get his paintings back, the insurance company will thank us, and I imagine the Gazzettino would run a story on the front page of the second section. After all, Signor Viscardi is a very important man, and the quicker this is settled, the better it will be for all of us.’ Suddenly Brunetti felt himself overwhelmed with a wave of disgust at having to do this, go through this stupid charade every time they spoke. He looked away, then back at his superior.
Patta’s smile was as broad as it was genuine. Could it be that Brunetti was finally beginning to have some sense, to take some heed of political realities? If so, then Patta believed that the credit for this might not unjustly be laid at his own door. They were a headstrong people, these Venetians, clinging to their own ways, outdated ways. Lucky for them that his appointment as Vice-Questore had brought them some exposure to the larger, more modern world, the world of tomorrow. Brunetti was right. All they had to do was find this Ruffolo character, get the paintings back, and Viscardi would be firmly behind him.