Years ago, Conte Falier had observed that he had never met anyone who could resist flattery. Brunetti had been younger then and had taken this as a comment on a technique of which the Conte approved, but as the years passed and he knew the man better, Brunetti realized that it was nothing more than another of the Conte’s merciless observations about the nature of human activity. ‘And Cataldo’s wife was working to impress you,’ he heard Paola’s voice again. If he eliminated all sympathy for the woman, how much of what she told him would he still believe? Was he to be seduced by the fact that she had read Ovid’s Fasti and he had not?
21
Brunetti called down to the squad room and asked for Vianello. The Ispettore was out of the office, but someone passed the phone to Pucetti. By now everyone knew that when Vianello was not present, Brunetti would want Pucetti. ‘Come up for a moment, would you?’ Brunetti asked.
It seemed only seconds after Brunetti replaced the phone that Pucetti was there, swinging around the door and into his office, fresh-cheeked, as though he had run, or flown, up the steps. ‘Yes, Commissario?’ he said, eager, all but straining at the leash that might get him out of the office or at least out of whatever it was he had been doing downstairs.
‘Gilda Landi,’ Brunetti said.
‘Yes, sir?’ Pucetti asked with no sign of surprise, only curiosity.
‘She is a civilian employee of the Carabinieri. Well, I assume she’s a civilian and I assume it’s the Carabinieri, but maybe not. Perhaps the Ministry of the Interior. I’d like you to see if you can find out where she works and, if possible, what she does.’ Pucetti raised a hand in a vestigial salute, and left.
Though there was no reason to do it, aside from the fact that he had spent so much of the morning thinking about another woman, Brunetti called Paola and said he could not come home for lunch. She asked no questions, a reaction which bothered Brunetti more than if she had complained. Alone, he left the Questura and walked down into Castello, where he had a bad meal in the worst sort of tourist trap and left feeling both cheated and somehow justified, as if he had paid for having been dishonest with Paola.
When he got back, he stopped in the officers’ squad room, but there was no sign of Pucetti. He went to Signorina Elettra’s office, where he found her at her computer, Pucetti standing behind her, eyes intent on the screen.
When Pucetti saw Brunetti come in, he said, ‘I had to ask her, sir. There was no way I could do that alone. There was one place where if I had. .’
Brunetti stopped him by holding up a hand. ‘Good. I should have told you to ask.’ Then, to Signorina Elettra, who had glanced at him, ‘I didn’t want to burden you with anything else. I had no idea it would be so. .’ He allowed his voice to trail off.
He smiled at them, and the idea came to him that they were, in a sense, his surrogate children at the Questura, Vianello their uncle. And what did that make Patta? The dotty grandfather and Scarpa the wicked stepbrother? He pulled himself back from these thoughts and asked, ‘Did you find her?’
Pucetti moved back, leaving the stage to Signorina Elettra.‘I started with the Ministry of the Interior,’ she said. ‘It’s easy to get into a certain level of their system.’ She was being calmly descriptive and made no attempt to show off by criticizing the laxity with which some agencies guarded their information. ‘After a time, I began to find some places were blocked off to me, and so I had to go back and find other means of access.’ Reading Brunetti’s expression, she said, ‘But the details of how I did it don’t matter, do they?’
Brunetti glanced at Pucetti and saw the look the younger man gave her when she said this. He had last seen that expression on the face of a drug addict when he had smacked a needle out of his hand and crushed it under his heel.
‘. . special squadron set up to examine the Camorra’s control of the garbage industry, and it turns out that Signorina Landi works for the Ministry of the Interior and has done so for some time.’
Suspecting that this was the least of what she had to say, he asked, ‘What else did you learn about her?’
‘She is a civilian, and she is also an industrial chemist with a degree from Bologna.’
‘And her job?’ Brunetti asked.
‘From the little I could see before the. . she does the chemical analysis of what the Carabinieri find or manage to sequester.’
‘What were you about to say?’ Brunetti asked.
She gave Brunetti a long look, then glanced aside at Pucetti before answering, ‘I found it before the connection was interrupted.’
With a start, Brunetti turned towards the door to Patta’s office; Signorina Elettra, seeing this, said, ‘Dottor Patta has a meeting in Padova this afternoon.’
Recalling her hesitation, Brunetti asked, ‘What does that mean to an ignorant person, that the connection was interrupted?’
She considered this briefly before answering him. ‘It means that they’ve got a warning system that shuts everything down the instant it detects an unauthorized access.’
‘Can they trace it?’
‘I doubt it,’ she said in a more confident voice. ‘And if they did, it would lead to a computer at the offices of a company owned by a member of parliament.’
‘Are you telling me the truth?’ he asked.
‘I try always to tell you the truth, Commissario,’ she said, not indignantly, but close.
‘Only try?’ he asked.
‘Only try,’ she answered.
Brunetti chose to let this lie, but he could not pass up the opportunity to take a bit of wind out of her sails. ‘Cataldo’s computer people reported an attempt to break into their system.’
That stopped her, but after a moment’s reflection she said, ‘That trail leads back to the same company.’
‘You seem remarkably nonchalant about this, Signorina,’ Brunetti observed.
‘No, I’m not, not really. I’m glad you told me about it, though: I won’t make the same mistakes again.’ And that, her tone signalled, was that.
‘Does this Signorina Landi work in the same unit as Guarino did?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Yes. From what I managed to see, there are four men and two women, plus Dottoressa Landi and another chemist. The unit’s based in Trieste, with another group working in Bologna. I don’t know the names of the others and found her only because I had a specific name to look for.’
Silence fell. Pucetti looked back and forth between them but said nothing.
‘Pucetti?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Do you know where he was killed, sir?’
‘Marghera,’ Signorina Elettra answered for him.
‘That’s where he was found, Signorina,’ Pucetti corrected in a deferential voice.
‘Other questions, Pucetti?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Who moved the body, and when will the autopsy be done, why was there so little in the newspaper, and what was he doing wherever it was he was killed?’ Pucetti said, not managing to keep his voice calm as he recited this list.
Brunetti saw the look, and then the smile, that Signorina Elettra gave the young officer when he finished. However interesting it would be to have the answers to that list of questions, Brunetti realized that the first one was, at least for the present, the most important: where had Guarino been killed?
He left these thoughts and turned to Signorina Elettra. ‘Would it be possible to contact this Dottoressa Landi?’