Death in a Strange Country

by Donna Leon

  ‘Can you do anything about him?’

  ‘Ah, there I can do nothing.’

  ‘Can or will do nothing?’

  ‘From some positions, Guido, can and will are the same.’

  ‘That’s sophistry,’ Brunetti shot back.

  The Count laughed outright. ‘Yes, it is, isn’t it? Then let me say it like this: I prefer to do nothing else about this matter save what I’ve told you I will do.’

  ‘And why is that?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘Because,’ the Count replied, ‘I can bring myself to care for nothing beyond my family.’ The tone of his voice was terminal; Brunetti would get no explanation beyond that.

  ‘May I ask you one more question?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘When I called and asked if I could talk to you, you asked if I wanted to talk about Viscardi. Why was that?’

  The Count looked at him in involuntary surprise, then returned his attention to the boats on the canal. When a few had gone past, he answered, ‘Signor Viscardi and I have common business interests.’

  ‘What is that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Precisely what I said, that we have interests in common.’

  ‘And may I ask what those interests are?’

  The Count faced him before he answered, ‘Guido, my business interests are a subject I do not discuss, except with those who are involved in them directly.’

  Before Brunetti could protest, the Count added, ‘Upon my death, interest in those matters will pass beyond my control. Many will pass to your wife,’ he paused here, then added, ‘and to you. But until that time, I will discuss them only with those people who are concerned with them.’

  Brunetti wanted to ask the Count if his dealings with Signor Viscardi were legitimate dealings, but he didn’t know how to ask this without offending him. Worse, Brunetti feared he didn’t himself any longer know what the word ‘legitimate’ meant.

  ‘Can you tell me anything about Signor Viscardi?’

  The Count’s answer was a long time in coming. ‘He has business interests in common with a number of other people. Many of them are very powerful people.’

  Brunetti heard the warning in the Count’s voice, but he also saw the connection that lurked there, as well.

  ‘Have we just been talking about one of them?’

  The Count said nothing.

  ‘Have we just been talking about one of them?’ he repeated.

  The Count nodded.

  ‘Will you tell me about the interests they have in common?’

  ‘I can – I will – tell you no more than that you should have nothing to do with either one of them.’

  ‘And if I choose to do so?’

  ‘I would prefer that you didn’t.’

  Brunetti couldn’t resist saying, ‘And I prefer that you tell me about their business interests.’

  ‘Then we seem to be at an impasse, don’t we?’ the Count asked in a voice that was artificially light and conversational. Before Brunetti could answer, they heard a noise behind them and both turned to see the Countess come into the room. She hurried quickly over to Brunetti, high heels tapping out a happy message on the parquet. Both men stood. ‘Guido, how nice to see you,’ she said, leaning up to kiss him on both cheeks.

  ‘Ah, my dearest,’ the Count said, bending over her hand. Married for forty years, Brunetti thought, and still he kisses her hand when she comes into the room. At least he doesn’t click his heels.

  ‘We were just talking about Chiara,’ the Count said, smiling benignly at his wife.

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Brunetti, ‘we were just saying how lucky Paola and I are that both of the children are so healthy.’ The Count shot him a look over his wife’s head, but she smiled up at both of them, saying, ‘Yes, thank God for that. We’re so lucky we live in a healthy country like Italy.’

  ‘Indeed,’ agreed the Count.

  ‘What can I bring her from Capri?’ asked the Countess.

  ‘Only your safe return,’ Brunetti said gallantly. ‘You know what it’s like down there in the South.’

  She smiled up at him. ‘Oh, Guido, all that talk about the Mafia can’t be true. It’s just stories. All my friends say it is.’ She turned to her husband for confirmation.

  ‘If your friends say so, my dear, then I’m certain it is,’ the Count said. To Brunetti, ‘I’ll take care of those things for you, Guido. I’ll make the calls tonight. And please speak to your friend at Vicenza. There’s no need for either one of you to preoccupy yourself with this.’

  His wife gave him a questioning look. ‘Nothing, my dearest,’ he said. Just some business Guido asked me to look into for him. Nothing important. Just some paperwork that I might be able to get through more quickly than he can.’

  ‘How kind of you, Orazio. And Guido,’ she said, positively aglow with this vision of happy families, ‘I’m so glad you’d think to ask.’

  The Count put his hand under her arm and said, ‘We might think about leaving now, dearest. Is the launch here?’

  ‘Oh, yes, that’s what I came to tell you. But I forgot about it with all this talk of business.’ She turned to Brunetti. ‘Give my love to Paola and kiss the children for me. I’ll call when we get to Capri. Or is it Ischia? Orazio, which is it?’

  ‘Capri, my dearest.’

  ‘I’ll call, then. Goodbye, Guido,’ she said, standing on tiptoe to kiss him again.

  The Count and Brunetti shook hands. All three of them walked down into the courtyard together. The Count and Countess turned and walked through the water gate and stepped into the launch that waited for them at the landing stage of the palazzo. Brunetti let himself out of the main door, careful to slam it closed behind him.

  22

  Monday was a normal day at the Questura: three North Africans were brought in for selling purses and sunglasses on the street without a licence; two break-ins were reported in various parts of the city; four summonses were given to boats caught without the proper safety equipment aboard; and two known drug addicts were brought in for threatening a doctor who refused to write them prescriptions. Patta appeared at eleven, called up to Brunetti to learn if there was any progress on the Viscardi case, made no attempt to disguise his irritation that there had not been, and went to lunch half an hour later, not to return until well past three.

  Vianello came up to report to Brunetti that the car had not shown up on Saturday, and he had been left waiting at Piazzale Roma for an hour, standing at the number five bus stop with a bouquet of red carnations in his arms. He had finally given up and gone home and given his wife the flowers. Keeping his part of the bargain, even if the criminals couldn’t be depended on, Brunetti changed the duty roster to give Vianello the following Friday and Saturday free, asking him to get in touch with the boy on Burano to see what had gone wrong and why Ruffolo’s friends had not shown up for the meeting.

  He had bought all of the major papers on the way to his office and passed the better part of the morning reading through them, searching for any reference to the dump near Lake Barcis, Gamberetto, or anything that had to do with the deaths of the two Americans. History, however, refused to concern itself with any of these topics, so he ended up reading the soccer news and calling it work.

  He bought the papers again the next morning and began to read through them carefully. Riots in Albania, the Kurds, a volcano, Indians killing one another, this time for politics, instead of religion, but there was no mention of the finding of toxic waste near Lake Barcis.

  Knowing it was foolish but unable to stop himself from doing it, he went down to the switchboard and asked the operator for the number of the American base. If Ambrogiani had been able to find out anything about Gamberetto, Brunetti wanted to know what it was and found himself incapable of waiting for the other man to call. The operator gave him both the central number and that of the Carabinieri office. Brunetti had to walk to Riva degli Schiavoni before he found a public phone that would take a magnetic phone card. He dialle
d the number of the Carabinieri station and asked for Maggiore Ambrogiani. The Maggiore was not at his desk at the moment. Who was calling, please? ‘Signor Rossi, from the Generali Insurance Company. I’ll call back this afternoon.’

  Ambrogiani’s absence could mean nothing. Or anything.

  As he did whenever he was overcome by nervousness, Brunetti walked. He turned left and walked along the water until he came to the bridge that took him to Sant’ Elena, crossed it, and walked around this farthest part of the city, finding it no more interesting than he ever had in the past. He cut back through Castello, along the wall of the Arsenale, and back towards Santi Giovanni e Paolo, where all of this had begun. Intentionally, he avoided the campo, refusing to look at the place where Foster’s body had been pulled out of the water. He cut directly towards the Fondamente Nuove and followed the water until he had to turn away from it and head back into the city. He passed the Madonna dell’ Orto, noticed that work was still being done on the hotel, and suddenly found himself in Campo del Ghetto. He sat on a bench and watched the people going past him. They had no idea, none at all. They distrusted the government, feared the Mafia, resented the Americans, but they were all generalized, unfocused ideas. They sensed conspiracy, as Italians always have, but they lacked the details, the proofs. They had learned enough, from long centuries of experience, to know that the proof was there, amply, but those same brutal centuries had also taught the people that whatever government happened to be in power would always succeed in hiding any and all proof of its evildoing from its citizens.

  He closed his eyes, sank lower on the bench, glad of the sun. When he opened them, he saw the two Mariani sisters walking across the campo. They must be in their seventies now, both of them, with their shoulder-length hair, high heels, and bright carmined lips. No one any longer remembered the facts, but everyone remembered the story. During the war, the Christian husband of one of them had denounced her to the police, and both of them were taken away to one of the camps. No one remembered which it had been, Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau; the name hardly mattered. After the war, they had returned to the city, having survived no one knew what horrors, and here they were, almost fifty years later, walking across the Campo del Ghetto, arm in arm, each with a bright yellow ribbon in her hair. For the Mariani sisters, there had been conspiracy, and certainly they had seen the proof of human evil, and yet here they walked in the rich sunshine of a peaceful afternoon in Venice, sun dappled on their flowered dresses.

  Brunetti knew that he was being unnecessarily sentimental. He was tempted to go home directly, but he went back to the Questura instead, walking slowly, in no hurry to get there.

  When he arrived, he found a note on his desk, ‘See me about Ruffolo. V’, and went down immediately to Vianello.

  The officer was at his desk, talking to a young man who sat in a chair facing him. When Brunetti approached, Vianello said to the young man, ‘This is Commissario Brunetti. He can answer your questions better than I can.’

  The young man stood but made no attempt to shake hands. ‘Good afternoon, Dottore,’ he said. ‘I came because he called me,’ leaving it to Brunetti to figure out who the ‘he’ was. The boy was short, stocky, and had hands that were a few sizes too big for his body, already red and swollen, even though he couldn’t have been more than seventeen. If his hands were not enough to show that he was a fisherman, his accent, the rugged undulance of Burano, was. On Burano, you either fished or made lace; the boy’s hands excluded the second possibility.

  ‘Sit down, please,’ Brunetti said, drawing up a second chair for himself. Obviously the boy’s mother had trained him well, for he continued to stand until both men were seated, then took his place, sitting up straight, hands wrapped around the sides of the seat of his chair.

  When he began to speak in the rough dialect of the outer islands, no Italian not born in Venice could have understood him. Brunetti wondered if the boy could, in fact, speak Italian at all. But his curiosity about dialect was soon lost when the boy continued, ‘Ruffolo called my friend again, and my friend called me, and since I told the Sergeant here that I would tell him if I heard from my friend again, I came in to tell him.’

  ‘What did your friend say?’

  ‘Ruffolo wants to talk to someone. He’s frightened.’ He stopped at that and looked sharply up at the two policemen to see if they had noticed his slip. It seemed that they had not, so he continued, ‘I mean my friend said that he sounded frightened, but all he, this friend of mine, would say is that Peppino wanted to talk to someone, but he said that a sergeant isn’t enough. He wants to talk to someone high up.’

  ‘Did your friend say why Ruffolo wants to do this?’

  ‘No, sir, he didn’t. But I think his mother told him to do it.’

  ‘Do you know Ruffolo?’

  The boy shrugged.

  ‘What would frighten him?’

  This time, the shrug was probably meant to mean that the boy didn’t know. ‘He thinks he’s smart. Ruffolo. He always talks big, talks about the people he met inside and about his important friends. When he called, he told me,’ the boy said, forgetting about the existence of the imaginary friend, the supposed intermediary in all of this, ‘that he wanted to give himself up but that he had some things to trade. He said that you’d be glad to get them, that it was a good trade.’

  ‘Did he say what that was?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘No, but he said to tell you that there are three of them, that you’d understand that.’

  Brunetti did. Guardi, Monet, and Gauguin. ‘And where does he want this person to meet him?’

  As if he suddenly realized that the imaginary friend was no longer there to serve as a buffer between himself and the forces of authority, the boy stopped and looked around the room, but the friend was gone; not a sign of him remained.

  ‘You know that catwalk that goes along the front of the Arsenale?’ the boy asked.

  Both Brunetti and Vianello nodded. At least half a kilometre long, the elevated cement walkway led from the shipyards within the Arsenale to the Celestia vaporetto stop, running about two metres above the waters of the laguna.

  ‘He said he’d be there, at the part where there’s that little beach, the one on the Arsenale side of the bridge. At midnight, tomorrow night.’ Brunetti and Vianello exchanged a glance over the boy’s lowered head, and Vianello mouthed the word ‘Hollywood’.

  ‘And who does he want to meet him there?’

  ‘Somebody important. He said that’s why he didn’t show up on Saturday, not for just a sergeant.’ Vianello, it appeared, took this with good grace.

  Brunetti allowed himself a moment’s fantasy, picturing Patta, complete with onyx cigarette holder and walking stick and, because these late nights were foggy, his Burberry raincoat, collar artfully raised, waiting on the Arsenale catwalk as the bells of San Marco boomed out midnight. Because it was his fantasy, Brunetti had Patta meet, not Ruffolo, who spoke Italian, but this simple boy from Burano, and the fantasy petered out amidst the garbled sound of the boy’s heavy dialect and Patta’s slurred Sicilian pronunciation, both whipped away from their mouths by the midnight winds from the laguna.

  ‘Will a Commissario be important enough?’ Brunetti asked.

  The boy looked up at that, not certain how to take it. ‘Yes, sir,’ he said, deciding to take it seriously.

  ‘At midnight tomorrow night?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Did Ruffolo say, did he tell your friend, that he’d bring those things with him?’

  ‘No, sir, he didn’t say. He just said he’d be on the catwalk at midnight, near the bridge. By the little beach.’ It wasn’t really a beach, Brunetti remembered, more a place where the tides had driven enough sand and gravel up against one of the walls of the Arsenale to allow a place where plastic bottles and old boots could wash up and be covered with slimy seaweed.

  ‘If your friend speaks to Ruffolo again, tell him I’ll be there.’

  Satisfied that he had
done what he came for, the boy got to his feet, nodded his head awkwardly to both men, and left the office.

  ‘Probably going to go and look for a phone so he can call Ruffolo and tell him the deal’s on,’ Vianello said.

  ‘I hope so. I don’t want to spend an hour standing out there waiting for him if he doesn’t show up.

  ‘Would you like me to come along, sir?’ Vianello volunteered.

  ‘Yes, I think I would,’ Brunetti said, realizing he was not the stuff of heroes. But then he added, more practically, ‘But it’s probably a bad idea. He’ll have friends planted at either end of the catwalk, and there’s no place at either end where you could be without being seen. Besides, there’s no meanness in Ruffolo. He’s never been violent.’

  ‘I could go down there and ask if I could stay in one of the houses.’

  ‘No, I don’t think it’s a good idea. He’d think of that, and his friends will probably be wandering around there, watching out for just that.’ Brunetti tried for a moment to form a mental image of the area around the Celestia stop, but all he could remember were anonymous blocks of public housing, an area almost completely devoid of shops or bars. In fact, if it were not for the presence of the laguna, there would be no telling it was in Venice, all of the apartments were so new, utterly without character or individuality. Might as well be in Mestre or Marghera.

  ‘What about the other two?’ Vianello asked, meaning the other two men involved in the robbery.

  ‘I imagine they want a part of Ruffolo’s deal. Or else he’s a lot smarter now than he was two years ago, and he managed to get the paintings away from them.’

  ‘Maybe they got the jewellery,’ Vianello suggested.

  ‘Possibly. But it’s more likely that Ruffolo’s the spokesman for all three.’

  ‘Doesn’t make any sense, does it?’ Vianello asked. ‘I mean, they got away with it, they’ve got the paintings and the jewellery. What’s the advantage to them if they just give up, give it all back?’