by Donna Leon
A pod of people broke away from the crowd and went into a bar. Six more walked around toward the front of the church and disappeared up Calle della Mandorla. The man in the bomber jacket clambered up onto the platform and did something to the wires at the back of one of the speakers. That speaker went suddenly dead, but music and static continued to blare forth from the other. He walked hurriedly across the platform and knelt behind the other speaker.
Some more people drifted away. The woman on the platform walked down the steps and disappeared into the crowd, quickly followed by two of the men. When the noise still didn’t stop, the man in the jacket got to his feet and had a huddled conference with the man with the microphone. By the time Brunetti turned his attention away from them, only a handful of people remained in front of the platform.
He climbed back over the low fence and headed toward the Accademia Bridge. Just as he was passing in front of the small florist’s kiosk at the end of the campo, the music and static came to a sudden halt, and a man’s voice, amplified by nothing more than anger, called out, “Cittadini, Italiani,” but Brunetti didn’t stop, nor did he bother to turn around.
He realized that he wanted to talk to Paola. He had, as always and as was against regulations, kept her informed about the progress of the investigation, had given her his impressions of the people he had questioned and the answers they had given him. This time, because there had been no one standing naked in guilt’s spotlight at the very beginning, Paola had refrained from naming the person she believed to be the murderer, a habit Brunetti had never been able to break her of. Devoid of that a priori certainty, she served as the perfect listener, prodding him with questions, forcing him to explain things so clearly that she would understand. Often, forced to explain some lingering uneasiness, he better understood it himself. This time, she had suggested nothing, hinted at nothing, displayed no suspicion of any of the people he mentioned. She listened, interested, and that was all she did.
When he got home, he found that Paola wasn’t there yet, but Chiara was waiting for him. “Papà,” she called from her room when she heard him open the door. A second later, she appeared at the door of her room, a magazine hanging open in her hand. He recognized the yellow-bordered cover of Airone, just as he recognized in its lavish photos, glossy paper, and simple prose style more signs of the American magazine it so closely imitated.
“What is it, sweetheart?” he asked, bending down to kiss the top of her head and then turning to hang his coat in the closet near the door.
“There’s a contest, Papà, and if you win it, you get a free subscription.”
“But don’t you already have a subscription?” he asked, having given it to her for Christmas.
“That’s not the point, Papà.”
“What is the point, then?” he asked, making his way down the hallway toward the kitchen. He flipped on the light and went over to the refrigerator.
“The point is winning,” she said, following him down the hall and making Brunetti wonder if the magazine might be a bit too American for his daughter.
He found a bottle of Orvieto, checked the label, put it back, and pulled out the bottle of Soave they had begun with dinner the night before. He took down a glass, filled it, and took a sip. “All right, Chiara, what’s the contest?”
“You have to name a penguin.”
“Name a penguin?” Brunetti repeated stupidly.
“Yes, look here,” she said, holding the magazine out toward him with one hand and pointing down toward a photo with the other. As she did, he saw a picture of what looked to be the fuzzy mass that Paola sometimes emptied from the vacuum cleaner. “What’s that?” he asked, taking the magazine and turning it toward the light.
“It’s the baby penguin, Papà. It was born last month at the Rome Zoo, and it doesn’t have a name yet. So they’re offering a prize to whoever comes up with the best name for it.”
Brunetti pulled open the magazine and looked more closely at the photo. Sure enough, he saw a beak and two round black eyes. Two yellow flippers. On the opposite page was a full-grown penguin, but Brunetti looked in vain for some familial resemblance between the two.
“What name?” he asked, flipping through the magazine and watching hyenas, ibis, and elephants stream past him.
“Spot,” she said.
“What?”
“Spot,” she repeated.
“For a penguin?” he asked, flipping back to the original article and staring at the photos of the adult birds. Spot?
“Sure. Everyone else is going to call him ‘Flipper’ or ‘Waiter.’ No one else will think of calling him Spot.”
That, Brunetti allowed, was probably true. “You could always save the name,” he suggested, putting the bottle back in the refrigerator.
“What for?” she asked and took the magazine back.
“In case there’s a contest for a zebra,” he said.
“Oh, Papà, you’re so silly sometimes,” she said and went back toward her room, little aware of how much her judgment pleased him.
In the living room, he picked up his book, left facedown when he had gone to bed the night before. While waiting for Paola, he might as well fight the Peloponnesian War again.
She came home an hour later, let herself into the apartment, and came into the living room. She tossed her coat over the back of the sofa and flopped down next to him, her scarf still around her neck. “Guido, you ever consider the possibility that I’m insane?”
“Often,” he said and turned a page.
“No, really. I’ve got to be, working for those cretins.”
“Which cretins?” he asked, still not bothering to look up from the book.
“The ones who run the university.”
“What now?”
“They asked me, three months ago, to give a lecture in Padua, to the English faculty. They said it would be on the British novel. Why do you think I was reading all those books for the last two months?”
“Because you like them. That’s why you’ve read them for the last twenty years.”
“Oh, stop it, Guido,” she said, digging a gentle elbow into his ribs.
“So what happened?”
“I went into the office today to pick up my mail, and they told me that they’d got it all wrong, that I was supposed to be lecturing on American poetry, but no one thought to tell me about the change. Because they’re all in English, anyway.”
“And so, which is it?”
“I won’t know until tomorrow. They’ll go ahead and tell Padua about the change back to the British novel if Il Magnifico approves it.” Both of them had always taken delight in this most wonderful of holdovers from the academic Stone Age, the fact that the rector of the university was addressed as “Il Magnifico Rettore,” the only thing Brunetti had learned in twenty years on the fringes of the university that had managed to make academic life sound interesting to him.
“What’s he likely to do?” Brunetti asked.
“Toss a coin, probably.”
“Good luck,” Brunetti said, putting down his book. “You don’t like the American stuff, do you?”
“Holy heavens, no,” she explained, burying her face in her hands. “Puritans, cowboys, and strident women. I’d rather teach the silver fork novel,” she said, using the English words.
“The what?” Brunetti asked.
“Silver fork novel,” she repeated. “Books with simple plots written to explain to people who made a lot of money how to behave in polite company.”
“For yuppies?” Brunetti asked, honestly interested.
Paola erupted in laughter. “No, Guido, not for yuppies. These books were written in the eighteenth century, when all that money poured into England from the colonies, and the fat wives of Yorkshire weavers had to be taught which fork to use.” She was quiet for a few minutes, considering what he had said. “But if I think about it for a minute, with a little updating, there’s no reason the same couldn’t be said of Bret Easton Ellis, even though
he’s American.” She put her face in his shoulder and gave herself up to giggles, laughing until she was weak at a joke Brunetti didn’t understand.
When she stopped laughing, she took the scarf from her neck and tossed it on the table. “And you?” she asked.
He put his book facedown on his knees and turned to face her. “I talked to the whore and her pimp and then to Signora Trevisan and her lawyer.” Slowly, attentive to his story and careful to get the details right, he told her everything that had happened that day, finishing with Signora Trevisan’s reaction to his question about the prostitutes.
“Did her brother have anything to do with prostitutes?” Paola repeated, careful to duplicate Brunetti’s exact phrasing. “And you think she understood what you meant?”
Brunetti nodded.
“But the lawyer misunderstood?”
“Yes, but I don’t think it was deliberate. He just didn’t get it, that the question was ambiguous and didn’t mean that her brother had sex with them.”
“She did, though?”
Brunetti nodded again. “She’s much brighter than he is.”
“Women usually are,” Paola said and then asked, “What do you think he might have had to do with them?”
“I don’t know, Paola, but her reaction tells me that, whatever it was, she knew about it.”
Paola said nothing, waiting for him to think it through. He took one of her hands in his, kissed the palm, and let it fall to his lap, where she left it, waiting still.
“It’s the only common thread,” he began, talking more to himself than to her. “Both of them, Trevisan and Favero, had the number of the bar in Mestre, and that’s the place where a pimp is running a string of girls, and there’s always a supply of new ones. I don’t know about Lotto, except that he ran Trevisan’s business for him.”
He turned Paola’s hand over and ran his forefinger across the faint blue veins visible on the back.
“Not a lot, is it?” Paola finally asked.
He shook his head.
“The one you talked to, Mara, what did she ask you about the others?”
“She wanted to know if I knew anything about some girls who died this summer and she said something about a truck. I don’t know what she meant.”
Like an aged carp slowly swimming toward the light of day, a memory stirred in the recesses of Paola’s mind, a memory that had to do with a truck and with women. She rested her head against the back of the sofa and closed her eyes. And saw snow. And that small detail was enough to bring the memory to the surface.
“Guido, early this fall—I think it was when you were in Rome for that conference—a truck ran off the highway, up near the Austrian border, I think. I forget the details—I think it skidded on the ice and went off a cliff or something. Anyway, there were women in the back of the truck, and they were all killed, eight or ten of them. It was strange. The story was in the papers one day, but then it disappeared, and I never saw anything else about it.” Paola felt his hand grip hers a bit more firmly. “Was she talking about that, do you think?”
“I remember something about it, a reference to it in a report from Interpol about women who are being brought here as prostitutes,” Brunetti said. “The driver was killed, wasn’t he?”
Paola nodded. “I think so.”
The police up there would have a report; he could call them tomorrow. He tried to remember more about the report from Interpol, or perhaps it had been from some other agency—God alone knew where it was filed. Time enough for all of this tomorrow.
Paola pulled gently on his hand. “Why do you use them?”
“Hmm?” Brunetti asked, not really paying attention.
“Why do you use whores?” Then, before he could misunderstand, she clarified the question, “Men, that is. Not you. Men.”
He picked up their joined hands and waved them in the air, a vague, aimless gesture. “Guiltless sex, I guess. No strings, no obligations. No need to be polite.”
“Doesn’t sound very appealing,” Paola said, and then added, “but I suppose women always want to sentimentalize sex.”
“Yes, you do,” Brunetti said.
Paola freed her hand from his and got to her feet. She glanced down at her husband for a moment, then went into the kitchen to begin dinner.
23
Brunetti spent the first part of his workday hunting through his files for the Interpol report on prostitution and waiting for the operator to put his call through to the police in Tarvisio. The operator was quicker than Brunetti, and he spent fifteen minutes listening to a captain of the carabinieri describe the accident, then ended the conversation with a request that they fax him all of the documents relevant to the case.
It took him twenty minutes to locate the report about the international traffic in prostitutes and a half hour to read it. He found it a sobering experience, and he found the last line, “It is estimated by various police and international organizations that there could be as many as half a million women involved in this traffic,” almost impossible to believe. The report cataloged something that he, like most police officials in Europe, knew was going on; the shocking part was the enormity and complexity of it.
The pattern wasn’t far from what Mara had said she’d experienced: a young woman from a developing country was offered the promise of a new life in Europe—sometimes the reason was love, sweet love, but most often the promise was work as a domestic servant, sometimes as an entertainer. There, in Europe, she was told, she would have a chance at a decent life, could earn enough money to send some back to her family, perhaps even someday bring her family to live with her in that earthly paradise.
Upon arrival, their various discoveries were much like Mara’s, and they learned that the work contract they had signed before leaving was often an agreement to repay as much as fifty thousand dollars to the person responsible for bringing them to Europe. And so they found themselves in a foreign country, having given their passport to the person who brought them in, persuaded that they were breaking the law by their mere presence and were thus subject to arrest and long sentences because of the debt they had incurred by signing the contract. Even at this, many objected and showed no fear of arrest. Gang rape usually subdued them. If not, greater violence often proved persuasive. Some died. Word traveled. There was little resistance.
And so the brothels of the developed world filled up with dark-haired, dark-skinned exotics. Thai women, whose gentle modesty was so flattering to a man’s sense of superiority; those mixed-race Dominicans, and we all know how much those blacks love it, and not least the Brazilians, those hot-blooded Cariocas, born to be whores.
The report went on to state that, transportation costs being what they are, a new market opportunity was seen opening up in the East as thousands of blonde, blue-eyed women lost their jobs or saw their savings gobbled up by inflation. Seventy years of the physical privations of communism had prepared them to fall easy prey to the blandishments of the West, and so they migrated in cars and trucks, on foot, and sometimes even on sleds, all seeking the great El Dorado that was their western neighbor, but finding instead, when they arrived, that they were without papers, without rights, and without hope.
Brunetti believed it all and was staggered by the final number: half a million. He flipped to the back pages and read through the names of the people and organizations that had compiled the report; they were enough to persuade him to believe the number, though it still remained intolerable. There were entire provinces of Italy that didn’t have half a million women living in them. Their numbers could populate whole cities.
When he finished it, he set the report in the center of his desk, then pushed it farther away from him, as if fearing its power to contaminate. He opened his drawer and pulled out a pencil, took a piece of paper, and quickly made a list of three names: one was a Brazilian police major whom he had met while on a police seminar in Paris some years before; one was the owner of an import-export firm with offices in Bangkok; and the thir
d was Pia, a prostitute. All of them, for one reason or another, were in Brunettis debt, and he could think of no better way of calling in those debts than by asking for information.
He spent the next two hours on the phone, running up a bill which was later made to evaporate by a few key strokes on the central computer at the SIP offices. At the end of that time, he knew little more than he had already read in the report, but he knew it more fully, more personally.
Major de Vedia in Rio was unable to share Brunetti’s concern and was incapable of understanding his indignation. After all, seven of his officers had that week been arrested for working as an execution squad for Rio merchants, who paid them to kill the street children who blocked access to their shops. “The lucky ones are the ones who go to Europe, Guido,” he said before he hung up. His contact in Bangkok was just as uncomprehending. “Commissario, more than half of the whores here have AIDS. The girls who get out of Thailand are the lucky ones.”
The most valuable source was Pia, whom he found at home, kept there by her golden retriever, Carolina, who was about to give birth to her first litter. She knew all about the business, was surprised that the police were bothering with it. When she learned that Brunetti’s interest had been provoked by the death of three businessmen, she laughed long and loud. The girls, she explained after she caught her breath, came in from all over; some worked the streets, but many were kept in houses, where better control could be kept over them. Yes, they got banged around a fair bit, if not by the men who ran them, then by some of the men who used them. Complain? To whom? They had no papers, they were persuaded that their mere presence in Italy was a crime; some never even learned to speak Italian. After all, it’s not as if they were engaged in a profession where sparkling conversation counted for very much.
Pia felt no particular animus toward them, though she didn’t hide the fact that she minded the competition. She and her friends, none: of whom had a pimp, at least had some sort of economic stability—an apartment, a car, some even had their own homes—but these foreign women had none, and failing that, they could not afford to reject a client, no matter what he demanded. They and the women who were addicts were the worst off, would accept anything, could be forced to do anything. Powerless, they became the targets of brutality and, worse, the vectors of disease.
