Brunetti was led to ask, ‘Why are you curious about whether she’s honest or not?’
‘Because if she trusts her husband, then maybe he’s worth trusting.’
‘And you think she does?’ Brunetti asked.
‘I watched them last night, and there was nothing false about them. She loves him, and he loves her.’
‘But loving isn’t trusting, is it?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Ah, how good to hear the cool tones of your scepticism, Guido. We live in such sentimental times that I sometimes forget my best instincts.’
‘Which tell you what?’
‘That a man can smile and smile yet be a villain.’
‘The Bible?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Shakespeare, I think,’ the Conte said.
Brunetti suspected the conversation was over, but then the Conte said, ‘I wondered if you could do me a favour, Guido. Discreetly.’
‘Yes?’
‘You have information there, far better than I sometimes have, and I wondered if you could get someone to have a look around to see if Cataldo is anyone I would want to . . .’
‘Trust?’ Brunetti asked provocatively.
‘Never that, Guido,’ Conte Falier said with adamantine certainty. ‘Perhaps better to say whether he’s someone I would want to invest with. He’s in a terrible hurry for me to decide, and I don’t know if my own people can find . . .’ The Conte’s voice drifted away, as if he could not think of the words to express the precise nature of his interest.
‘I’ll see what I can do,’ Brunetti said, realizing that he was curious about Cataldo but not wanting, just then, to try to figure out why.
He and the Conte exchanged pleasantries, and the conversation ended.
He glanced at his watch and saw that he would have time to speak to Signorina Elettra, his superior’s secretary, before going home to lunch. If anyone could have a discreet look into Cataldo’s business dealings, it was surely she. He toyed for a moment with the idea of asking her to check, while she was about it, for whatever she could find about Cataldo’s wife, as well. He felt a flush of embarrassment at his desire to see a photo of what she had looked like before the . . . before the marriage.
To enter Signorina Elettra’s office was to be reminded that it was Tuesday. An enormous vase of pink French tulips stood on a desk in front of her window. The computer which she had allowed a generous and grateful Questura to supply her with some months before – consisting of nothing more than an anorexic screen and a black keyboard – left ample room on her desk for an equally large bouquet of white roses. The coloured wrapping lay neatly folded in the bin used only for paper, and woe to the member of staff who forgot and stuffed paper carelessly in the regular garbage. Paper; cardboard; metal; plastic. Brunetti had once heard her on the phone with the president of Vesta, the private company which had been awarded – he turned his thoughts away from consideration of the factors that might have affected that choice – the contract to collect garbage in the city, and he still recalled the exquisite politeness with which she had called to his attention the many ways a police investigation or, worse, one from the Guardia di Finanza, could impede the easy running of his company and how expensive and troublesome could be the unexpected discoveries to which an official financial investigation often led.
After that conversation – but surely not as a result – the garbage men had altered their schedule and begun to moor their ‘barca ecologica’ in front of the Questura every Tuesday and Friday mornings after picking up paper and cardboard from the residents in the area of SS Giovanni e Paolo. The second Tuesday, Vice-Questore Giuseppe Patta had ordered them to leave when he saw the boat moored there and had been outraged at the brutta figura of policemen seen carrying bags of papers from the Questura to a garbage scow.
It had taken Signorina Elettra no time at all to lead the Vice-Questore to see the tremendous publicity advantage to be gained from introducing an eco-iniziativa that was the product, of course, of Dottor Patta’s wholehearted commitment to the ecological health of his adopted city. The following week, La Nuova sent not only a journalist but a photographer, and the next day’s front page carried a long interview with Patta and above it a large photo. Though it did not show him actually carrying a bag of rubbish out to a garbage scow, it did show him at