Friends in High Places

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Book: Friends in High Places Read Online Free PDF
Author: Donna Leon
trouble, you turn to your father, with his money and his connections and the power he carries around in his pockets like the rest of us carry loose change, and ask him to take care of it for you?’
     
    ‘All I’m trying to do,’ she began with a sudden change in tone, as if she wanted to defuse things while there was still time, ‘is save us time and energy. If we try to do this the right way, we’ll set foot in the world of Kafka, and we’ll ruin our peace and our lives trying to find the correct papers, only to stumble up against another little bureaucrat like Signor Rossi who will tell us they aren’t the right papers and we have to find others, and others, until we both run screaming mad.’
     
    Sensing that Brunetti had warmed to the change in her tone, she continued, ‘And so, yes, if I can spare us that by asking my father to help, then that’s what I would prefer to do, because I don’t have the patience or the energy to do it any other way.’
     
    ‘And if I tell you I would prefer to do this myself, without his help?’ Before she could answer, he added, ‘It’s our apartment, Paola, not his.’
     
    ‘Do you mean do this by yourself in a legal way or’ - and here even greater warmth came into her voice - ‘do it by using your own friends and connections?’
     
    Brunetti smiled, a sure sign that peace had been restored, ‘Of course I’ll use them.’
     
    ‘Ah,’ she said, smiling too, ‘that’s entirely different.’ Her smile broadened and she turned her mind to tactics. ‘Who?’ she asked, all thought of her father swept from the room.
     
    ‘There’s Rallo, on the Fine Arts Commission.’
     
    ‘The one whose son sells drugs?’
     
    ‘Sold,’ Brunetti corrected.
     
    ‘What did you do?’
     
    ‘A favour,’ was Brunetti’s only explanation.
     
    Paola accepted this and asked only, ‘But what’s the Fine Arts Commission got to do with it? Wasn’t this floor built after the war?’
     
    ‘That’s what Battistini told us. But the lower part of the building is listed as a monument, so it might be affected by whatever happens to this floor.’
     
    ‘Uh huh,’ Paola agreed. ‘Anyone else?’
     
    ‘There’s that cousin of Vianello’s, the architect, who works in the Comune, I think in the office where they issue building permits. I’ll get Vianello to ask him to see what he can find out.’
     
    Both sat for a while, drawing up lists of favours they’d done in the past and that could be called in now. It was almost noon before they had compiled a list of possible allies and agreed on their probable usefulness. It was only then that Brunetti asked, ‘Did you get the moeche?’
     
    Turning, as was her decades-long habit, to the invisible person who she pretended listened to her husband’s worst excesses, she asked, ‘Did you hear that? We are about to lose our home, and all he thinks about is soft-shelled crabs.’
     
    Offended, Brunetti objected: ‘That’s not all I think about.’
     
    ‘What else, then?’
     
    ‘Risotto.’
     
    * * * *
     
    The children, who came home for lunch, were told about the situation only after the last of the crabs had been sent to their reward. At first, they refused to treat it seriously. When their parents managed to persuade them that the apartment really was in jeopardy, they immediately began to plan the move to a new home.
     
    ‘Can we get a house with a garden so I can have a dog?’ Chiara asked. When she saw her parents’ faces, she amended this to, ‘Or a cat?’ Raffi displayed no interest in animals and opted, instead, for a second bathroom.
     
    ‘If we got one, you’d probably move into it and never come out again, trying to grow that silly moustache of yours,’ Chiara said - the family’s first public recognition of a light shadow that had been gradually making itself visible under her older brother’s nose for the last few weeks.
     
    Feeling not unlike a blue-helmeted UN peacekeeper, Paola intervened.
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