Sea of Troubles

by Donna Leon

  Repeatedly he called down to Signorina Elettra's office during the course of the morning, but as it was her habit not to overburden the Questura with her presence when her superior was absent, he wasn't certain whether she had decided to sleep until noon or to go out to Pellestrina. At eleven, his phone rang, and he was greatly relieved to hear her voice.

  'Where are you, Signorina?' he asked, rather than demanded.

  'On the beach of Pellestrina, sir, the side that faces the sea. Did you know they'd removed the grounded ship?' When he didn't answer, she went on, ‘I was surprised not to see it there. My cousin said they hauled it off last year. I miss it.'

  'When did you get there, Signorina?'

  'I came out before lunch on Saturday because I wanted to have as much time here as possible.'

  'What did you tell your cousin?'

  He heard the sharp cry of a seagull. 'That I was sorry I hadn't been out for so long but I wanted to get away from the city for a while,' she said, then paused and the gull had something else to say. When it was finished, she went on, ‘I told Bruna I'd had "una storia" that ended badly and wanted to get away from anything that would remind me of him.' In a softer voice, she added, 'Well, that's true enough,' and Brunetti found himself immediately curious about who he was and why it had ended.

  'How long did you tell her you'd be there?'

  'Oh, I was vague about that; at least a week, probably more, depending on how I felt. But I already feel better; the sun's wonderful, and the air is completely different from the city. I could stay here for ever.'

  The bureaucrat in him spoke before he could help it. ‘I certainly hope you don't mean that.'

  'Just a figure of speech, sir.'

  'What are you going to do?'

  'Walk on the beach and see who I meet. Go and have a coffee at the bar and see what's new. Talk to people. Go fishing.'

  'Just a normal vacation on Pellestrina?' Brunetti asked.

  'Exactly,' she said, to which the gull made no comment. With the promise to call him again, she broke the connection.

  14

  As she slipped the telefonino back into the left pocket of her jacket, Elettra Zorzi was glad she'd thought to bring the suede, instead of the wool. The pockets were deeper and thus more securely held the tiny Nokia, little bigger than a pack of cigarettes. And it was a better match for the navy blue slacks, though she wasn't really happy with the way it looked with the Topsiders she'd brought along to wear on the beach. She'd never liked the combination of leather and suede, wished now she'd bought that pair of fawn-coloured suede loafers she'd seen in the Fratelli Rossetti sale.

  The gull called out again, but she ignored it. When it continued to squawk at her, she turned and walked directly at it until it took off and flew away down the beach in the direction of the Riserva of Ca' Roman. Like most Venetians, she tolerated gulls but loathed pigeons, which she viewed as a source of constant trouble, their nests blocking drainpipes and their constant droppings turning marble into meringue. She thought of the tourists she'd often seen in San Marco, pigeons hopping about on their heads and outstretched arms, and she shivered: flying rats.

  She continued down the beach, away from the village, glad of the feel of the sun on her back, intent on nothing more than reaching San Pietro in Volta and having a coffee before turning back to Pellestrina. She lengthened her stride, aware at every step of how long she'd been sitting at a desk and how much her body rejoiced in this simple act of walking on the beach in the sun.

  Her cousin Bruna, when she'd called last week, had not seemed at all surprised at her suggestion that she come out for a week or so. When she asked why Elettra was free at such short notice, she decided to tell at least part of the truth and explained that she and her boyfriend had planned for months to go to France for two weeks, but their sudden separation had ended those plans, leaving her with the impossibility of changing her request for vacation time. Bruna had shown no sign of taking offence at being only second choice and had insisted she come out immediately, to leave all thought of him behind in the city.

  Though she'd been on Pellestrina only two days, it had pretty much worked. Her ex-boyfriend was a doctor, one of her sister's friends, and she'd probably known for months that he was wrong: too serious, too ambitious, and, she had to admit even this, too greedy. She had feared that being on her own again would be painful; instead, she had begun to realize, she felt rather like that gull: it hadn't liked the way it was treated, so it had taken flight and soared away.

  She walked down to the water's edge and stooped to pull off her shoes and roll up the bottoms of her slacks. She could stand the water only for seconds before she danced back on to the sand, then flopped down and rubbed at one, then the other, foot. When they felt like feet again, she hooked two fingers into the backs of her shoes and walked along, barefoot, free, remembering what it was like to be happy.

  Soon enough she ran out of sand and had to climb the steps to the top of the sea wall. Boats went about their boaty business to her right, and soon the small village of San Pietro in Volta appeared on her left.

  At the bar, which occupied the ground floor of someone's house, she asked for a mineral water and a coffee, drank the water greedily, and sipped at her coffee. The man behind the bar, who was in his sixties, remembered her from other visits and asked when she had arrived. They fell into easy conversation, and soon he was talking about the recent murders, events in which she appeared to take little interest.

  'Cut open, gutted like a fish,' he said. 'Pity. He was a nice boy. Amazing, really, when you think about his father.' Not enough time had passed for people to start to tell the whole truth about Bottin, she realized: he was still close enough to life to make people cautious about what they had to say of him.

  ‘I didn't know them,' she said and glanced idly at the front page of ‘‘ Gazzettino that lay folded on the top of the counter.

  'Marco went to school with my granddaughter,' he said.

  Elettra paid for the water and the coffee, said how wonderful it was to be out here again, and left. She used the sea wall to walk the entire way back to Pellestrina, and by the time she got there she was thirsty again, so she went into the front part of the restaurant for a glass of prosecco. And who should serve her but Pucetti himself, who paid her no more attention than he would any other attractive woman a few years older than he.

  As she drank it, she listened to the men clustered at the bar. They too paid little attention to her, having slotted her into place as Bruna's cousin, the one who came out every summer, and thus a sort of honorary native.

  The murders were mentioned, but only in passing, as just another example of the bad luck that afflicts all fishermen. More important, they discussed what to do about those bastards from

  Chioggia who were coming over into their waters at night and ripping up the clam beds. One man suggested they tell the police; no one bothered to respond to a suggestion so patently stupid.

  She went to the cash register and paid. The owner also remembered her as Bruna's cousin and welcomed her back. They chatted idly for a while, and when he too mentioned the recent murders, she said she was on vacation and didn't want to hear about such things, suggesting by her tone that people from the big city didn't really take much interest in the doings of provincials, however sanguinary they might be.

  The rest of the day, and the next, passed quietly enough. She heard nothing new but was still careful to call Brunetti again and tell him that much, or that little. Remaining strong in her refusal to discuss the recent murders, she quickly adapted to the rhythm of Pellestrina, a village that led life at its own pace. The bulk of the population sailed off to work while it was still dark and returned only in the late morning or early afternoon. Many people went to bed not long after nightfall. She soon fell into a routine. Bruna took care of her grandchildren every day, while their mother taught in the local elementary school. To avoid the confusion brought into the house by the presence of two young children, Elettra spe
nt most of her days outside, walking on the beach, occasionally taking the boat over to Chioggia for a few hours. But she always ended up having a coffee in the bar of the restaurant just at the time the men from the boats began to drift in.

  Within days, she was an attractive fixture, and one that responded to any mention of the Bottins or their murder with silence. She realized from the first that they all disliked Giulio; only as time passed did she begin to sense that the objection to him went far beyond his penchant for violence. After all, these were men who made their living by killing, and though their victims were only fish, the job had rendered many of them casual about blood and gore and the taking of life. The savagery of Giulio's disposal seemed not to trouble them in the least; in fact, if they mentioned it at all, it was with something like grudging admiration. What they seemed to object to was his refusal to put the good of the hunting pack of Pellestrinotti ahead of all else. Any act of aggression or betrayal, so long as it was directed against the fishermen of Chioggia was completely justified, even praiseworthy. Giulio Bottin, however, had seemed capable of behaving in the same way towards his own kind, if it would work to his advantage, and this was something they would not forgive, not even after death, and not even after a death as horrible as his had been.

  On the Wednesday afternoon, as she sat at a table in the front part of the bar, reading through Il Gazzettino and paying no attention, none at all, to the conversations around her, she was conscious of the arrival of someone new. She didn't look up until she had read a few more pages, and when she did, she saw a man a few years older than herself, the casual elegance of whose appearance made him stand out among the fishermen at the bar. He wore a pair of dark grey slacks and a pale yellow V-neck sweater over a shirt that went with his slacks perfectly. She was immediately intrigued by the colour of his sweater and by the fact that he appeared to be completely at ease with and accepted by these men. Most of them, she was sure, would die before they would wear yellow on anything other than a rain slicker.

  He had dark hair and, from what she could see of his profile, dark eyes and brows. His skin was tanned or naturally bronzed; she couldn't tell which. He was taller than most of the other men, an impression heightened by the grace with which he carried himself. Any traditional idea of masculinity, especially in the company of these wind-hardened fishermen, would have been compromised, if not by the sweater, then by the way he inclined his head to listen to the men around him. In him, however, the total effect was of a masculinity so certain of itself as not to be bothered by such trifles of dress or behaviour.

  Elettra consciously returned her eyes to the newspaper and her attention to the man. He was, it turned out, somehow related to one of the fishermen. More drinks were ordered, and Elettra found herself approaching the sports pages, something not even her devotion to duty could cause her to read. She closed the paper and got to her feet. As she walked towards the cash register, one of the men, a relative - she had no idea how - of Bruna's husband, called her over to meet the new arrival.

  'Elettra, this is Carlo; he's a fisherman, one of us.' With two thick fingers, the man plucked at the fine wool of Carlo's sweater and asked, 'He doesn't look it, does he?' The general laughter which greeted this was easy and comfortable, and Carlo joined in with good grace.

  Carlo turned to her and smiled, held out his hand and took hers.

  'Another stranger?' he asked.

  She smiled at the idea. 'If you're not born here, I suppose you're always a stranger,' she answered.

  His chin tilted to one side and he glanced at her more closely. 'Do I know you?' he asked.

  ‘I don't think so,' she answered, momentarily confused into thinking that perhaps she knew him, as well. But she was sure she would have remembered him.

  'No, I haven't met you,' he said with a smile that was even warmer than the one he'd given on taking her hand. ‘I would have remembered.'

  This echo of her own thought disconcerted her. She nodded to him and then to the other men at the bar, muttered something about going back to her cousin's, paid for her coffee, and escaped into the sunlight.

  Her doctor had been handsome; as she walked home, she confessed to herself that she had a weakness for male beauty. This Carlo was not only handsome, but, from the little she had seen of him, simpatico as well. She told herself sternly that she was out here on police business. Though he didn't live on Pellestrina, there was nothing that excluded Carlo from possible connection with the murder of Giulio and Marco Bottin. She smiled at that; soon she'd be like the members of the uniformed branch, seeing everyone, everywhere, as a probable suspect, even before there was any evidence that a crime had been committed.

  She put all thought of the handsome Carlo behind her and went back towards Bruna's home. On the way, she used her telefonino to call Commissario Brunetti at the Questura and tell him that she had nothing to report save that it was the general opinion among the fishermen that, with the change of moon, the anchovies would start to run.

  15

  Brunetti, left behind while Signorina Elettra disported herself in the sun and walked on the beach, without learning anything at all about the murders, was having as little success as she. He had called Luisa Follini's number again, but a man answered, and this time it was Brunetti who hung up without speaking. It was instinct that had made him call her, some atavistic response to the menace radiating from the two men who had come into the store, and it was this same instinct that made him decide to send Vianello to stop in and have a word with her after he made another attempt to find Giacomini.

  Following Brunetti's orders, Vianello went out to Malamocco again, where he managed to find Enrico Giacomini without difficulty. The fisherman recalled the fight between Scarpa and Bottin and said it had been provoked by Scarpa, who had accused Bottin of having a big mouth. Vianello pressed Giacomini and asked if he knew what Scarpa had been talking about, but the fisherman said he could think of nothing, but he said it in such a way as to give the sergeant, no mean judge of situations for all his apparent stolidity, a sense that here he was treading on some Pellestrina secret. Even as he asked the other man if he were sure he had no idea what Scarpa had intended, Vianello was overcome with a sense of the absurdity of his attempt to unearth information from one fisherman about another. Their definition of loyalty was not one that encompassed the police; in fact, it probably failed to encompass all of humanity aside from the small part of it fishing in the waters of the laguna and the Adriatic.

  Both irritated at Giacomini's obvious evasions and curious to learn more about what had taken place between Bottin and Scarpa, Vianello asked Bonsuan to take him down to Pellestrina. Leaving Bonsuan with the boat, he went first to Signora Follini's shop - but it was lunch time, and the shop was closed. Brunetti had warned him not to call attention to Signora Follini, so Vianello walked past it without paying any apparent attention.

  He turned left and towards the address he had been given for Sandro Scarpa, the originator of the remark that had triggered Bottin's anger.

  But Scarpa, who was not at all happy to be pulled away from his lunch by the police, said the fight with Bottin had been provoked by the dead man, and anyone who said anything else was lying. No, he couldn't remember exactly what it was Bottin had said, nor could he recall why it had so angered him. Besides, he added, it hadn't been much of a fight, not really. These things happened, he implied, when it was late at night and men had been drinking: they meant nothing, and no one ever thought about them again.

  With no warning, Vianello asked him if he knew where his brother was; Scarpa said he thought he'd gone to Vicenza to see a friend about something. He did not ask Vianello to leave, only his lunch was growing cold in the kitchen and there was nothing more to say about Bottin. Vianello saw no reason to prolong this conversation and so went to the restaurant to have a glass of wine in the bar.

  When he walked in, he was briefly disoriented and wondered if he was somehow already back at the Questura, for behind the bar he saw Puce
tti, and sitting at a table to the left, reading ‘‘ Gazzettino with the attention he had previously known her to devote only to Vogue, sat Signorina Elettra. Both glanced up when he came in. Both reacted to the sight of his uniform, and he hoped the men standing at the bar saw how they did: even the faces of men he'd repeatedly arrested had seldom shown such suspicion and dislike.

  After a long pause, Pucetti drifted over, asked him what he wanted and then was a long time bringing the glass of prosecco. When he did bring it, it was sour and warm. Vianello took a sip, set the glass sharply on the counter, paid, and left.

  After another few minutes, seeing the sports page approach once again, Signorina Elettra folded the newspaper, paid for her coffee, nodded to a few of the men at the bar, and went out into the sun. She had gone only a few metres when she heard, from behind her, a voice she recognized instantly. 'Going back to your cousin's house?' he asked.

  She turned and saw him, hesitated a moment, then returned the smile he offered her. 'Yes, I suppose so.' When she saw his confusion, she explained, 'She took the kids up to the Lido to buy shoes for the summer, and they won't be back until after lunch.'

  'So you have the chance to eat in peace for a change?' he asked with another, broader smile.

  'No, they're really very good. And besides, they do have first right to the house and to Bruna.'

  'So you're free,' he asked, more interested in that than in discussing the behavior of the children.

  'I suppose so,' she answered, then, realizing how very ungracious that sounded, changed it to, 'Yes, I am.'

  'Good. I hoped to talk you into a picnic on the beach. There's a place on the jetty where the tide has pulled away some of the boulders, so there's no wind at all.'