Wilful Behaviour Read Free Page B

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and took over the lease.’ He glanced at Brunetti to see that he was following. ‘But because I want to sell masks and souvenirs, I’ve got to have show windows so people can see all the stuff. He just had that one on the right side where he had the provolone and scamorza, but there’s one on the left, too, only his father closed it up, bricked it over, about forty years ago. But it’s on the original plans, so it can be opened up again. And I need it. I need two windows so people can see all the junk and take a mask home to Düsseldorf.’
    Neither he nor Brunetti needed to comment upon the folly of this, nor on the fact that so much of what would be sold in his shop as ‘original Venetian handcrafts’ was made in third world countries where the closest the workers ever came to a canal was the one behind their houses that served as a sewer.
    ‘Anyway, I took over the lease and my architect drew up the plans. That is, he drew them up a long time ago, as soon as the guy agreed I could take over, but he couldn’t present them in the Comune until the lease was in my name.’ Again he looked at Brunetti. ‘That was in March.’ Marco raised his right hand in a fist, shot up his thumb, repeated ‘March,’ and then counted out the months. ‘That’s seven months, Guido. Seven months those bastards have made me wait. I’m paying the rent, my architect goes into the planning office once a week to ask where the permits are, and every time he goes, they tell him that the papers aren’t ready or something has to be checked before I can be given the permissions.’
    Marco opened his fist and laid his hand flat on the table, then put the other beside it, fingers splayed open. ‘You know what’s going on, don’t you?’ he asked.
    ‘Yes,’ Brunetti said.
    ‘So last week I told my architect to ask them how much they wanted.’ He looked across, as if curious to see if Brunetti would register surprise, perhaps shock, at what he was telling him, but Brunetti’s face remained impassive.
    ‘Thirty million.’ Marco paused for a long time, but Brunetti said nothing. ‘If I give them thirty million, then I’ll have the permissions next week and the workers can go in and start the restorations.’
    ‘And if you don’t?’ Brunetti asked.
    ‘God knows,’ Marco said with a shake of his head. ‘They can keep me waiting another seven months, I suppose.’
    ‘Why haven’t you paid them before this?’ Brunetti asked.
    ‘My architect keeps saying it isn’t necessary, that he knows the men on the planning commission and it’s just a question of lots of requests before mine. And I’ve got problems with other things.’ Brunetti thought for a moment that Marco would tell him about them, too, but all he said was, ‘No, all you need to know about is this one.’
    Brunetti remembered the time, a few years ago, when a chain of fast food restaurants had done extensive restorations in four separate locations, keeping their crews working day and night. Almost before anyone knew it, certainly before anyone had any idea that they were going to open, there they were, in business, the odour of their various beef products filling the air like summer in a Sumatran slaughterhouse.
    ‘Have you decided to pay them?’
    ‘I don’t have much of a choice, do I?’ Marco asked tiredly. ‘I already spend more than a hundred million lire a year for a lawyer as it is, just keeping ahead of the lawsuits people bring against me in the other businesses and trying to resolve them. If I bring a civil suit against people who work for the city for wilfully preventing me from running my business or whatever crime my lawyer can think of to charge them with, it would just cost me more and drag on for years, and in the end nothing would happen anyway.’
    ‘Why did you come to me, then?’ Brunetti asked.
    ‘I wondered if there was anything you could do? I mean, if I marked the money or something…’ Marco’s voice petered out and he