Drawing Conclusions - Donna Leon [85]
‘Suggestions,’ Brunetti said in a dead level voice.
The look she gave him would have brought a lesser man to his knees. ‘Please, Commissario,’ was all she said, and then she picked up the phone.
Within minutes it was done, and the magistrate’s secretary, with whom Signorina Elettra spoke with easy familiarity, said the warrants would be delivered the next morning. Brunetti restrained himself from asking the name of the magistrate, certain that he would learn it from the signature when he saw the papers the next day. Well, he told himself as he considered the speed and efficiency with which her request had been granted: why should the judiciary be any different from any other public or private institution? Favours were granted to the person whose request was accompanied by a raccomandazione, and the more powerful the person who made the raccomandazione, or the closer the friendship between the assistants who saw to the details, the more quickly the request was granted. Need a hospital bed? Best to have a cousin who is a doctor in that hospital, or is married to one. A permit to restore a hotel? Problems with the Fine Arts Commission about a painting you want to move to your apartment in London? The right person had but to speak the word to the right official or to someone to whom the official owed a favour, and all paths were made smooth.
Brunetti found himself, not for the first time, trapped in ambivalence. In this case, it worked to his advantage – and, he told himself, to the civic good – that Signorina Elettra had turned the judicial system of the city into her fief. But in places where persons of lesser … lesser probity… were in charge, the results might not be as salutary.
He left these thoughts, thanked her for her help, and went back to his office.
It was there, after an hour during which he read and initialled various documents and reports, that Signorina Elettra came to speak to him. ‘I’ve found the man of my dreams,’ she said as she came in, and said it in such a way as to lead Brunetti to understand that the man was the young magistrate.
‘I take it he availed himself of your experience with the peculiarities of the city.’
Her smile was calm, her nod an exercise in graciousness. ‘His secretary said a few kind words about me before she put me through to him.’
‘After which you induced him to overlook the dubious legality of some of the things you asked him to authorize?’
The phrase appeared to wound her; if nothing else, it spurred her into saying, ‘I’m not sure there any longer exists a legality in this country that is not dubious.’
‘Be that as it may, Signorina,’ Brunetti said, ‘I’m curious to know what you persuaded him to authorize.’
‘Everything,’ she said with unconcealed delight. ‘I think this young man might prove a gold mine for us.’
Brunetti thought of the warning written above the Gates of Hell and was for a moment tempted to dissociate himself from her further progress into a land, not of dubious, but of absent, legality, but hypocrisy was not among his vices. Also, he appreciated the fact that she had used the plural, and so he smiled and said, ‘I tremble at the thought of what you might ask him to authorize.’
Failing to disguise her disappointment, she said, ‘I’d never compromise you in any of this, Dottore.’
‘Just yourself?’ he enquired, knowing the impossibility of this.
Her failure to answer forced him, finally, to confront the fact that she had for years been making requests that lay far beyond her mandate. But how to ask the question without making it sound like an accusation?
‘To whom will the responses to these requests be sent?’
‘To the Vice-Questore, of course,’ she said simply, and for a moment Brunetti had a vision of her as she would appear when saying this