Sea of Troubles

by Donna Leon

  He had three daughters, Bonsuan: a doctor, an architect and a lawyer, and it had all been done on the salary of a police pilot. Yet Bonsuan had always been the first to insist on paying for a round of coffees or drinks; police rumour had it that he and his wife helped support a young Bosnian woman who had studied law with their youngest daughter and needed to pass only two more exams before graduation. Brunetti had no idea if this were true, and now he'd probably never know. It hardly mattered, though.

  The buzzing grew closer, then stopped, and he heard a man's voice shout his name.

  26

  Brunetti pushed himself to his feet, feeling for the first time in his life a warning shot from the territory of age. So this was what it would be like, the aching hip, the long pull of muscles in the thighs, the unsteadiness of the ground under his feet, and the overwhelming realization that everything was simply too much trouble. He started towards the beach, heading in the general direction of the voice that had called his name. Once he stumbled when his right foot caught in a trailing plant, and another time he started back in fear when a bird shot up from under his feet, no doubt warning him away from her nest.

  Protecting her young, protecting her young, and who to protect Bonsuan's young, even though they were no longer young? He heard a noise from the opposite direction and looked up, hoping to see Vianello, but it was Signorina Elettra. At least, a bedraggled young woman who looked very much like Signorina Elettra. One sleeve of her jacket was gone, and through a long tear in her slacks, he could see her calf. One foot was bare, a bloody scrape across the top of her instep. But it was her hair that most surprised him, for in a wide patch just above her right ear it was cut short, no more than a few centimetres from her head. It stuck out like the hair on the tops of the ears of baby jaguars and was little longer than that.

  'Are you all right?' he asked.

  She raised a hand towards Brunetti. 'Come and find him. Please.' She didn't wait for him to answer but turned and made off in the direction from which she must have come. He noticed that she favoured her left foot, the one without a shoe.

  'Signore,' he heard Vianello say behind him.

  Brunetti turned and saw him, dressed in jeans and a heavy woollen sweater. Over his arm he carried a second one. Behind him stood another man in civilian clothes, a hunting rifle in one hand: no doubt the Massimo that Vianello said would bring him out so quickly.

  'There's a man over there by the fort, on the ground. Watch him,' Brunetti called to the man with the gun, then beckoned to Vianello and set off after Signorina Elettra.

  The beach was littered with all sorts of junk, the hundreds of things that get stirred up from the bottom of the laguna by every storm and left to rot until a tide or a new storm carries them back to their watery dump. He saw pieces of life buoys, countless plastic bottles, some with their tops screwed on tightly; there were large hunks of fishing net, shoes and boots> plastic cutlery, seemingly enough for an army. Each time he saw a piece of wood, a sliver of oar or branch, he turned his eyes away, looking for bottles or plastic cups.

  When they came upon her, she was kneeling on the sand at the edge of the water. Lying in the shallow water just in front of her was a fishing boat. Its left side was stove in, and the water around it was covered with an expanding slick of black oil.

  Hearing them approach, she looked up. ‘I don't know what happened, but he's gone.'

  Vianello walked over to her, draped the sweater around her shoulders, and offered her his hand to help her to her feet. She ignored him and pulled the sweater down from her shoulders, letting it drop on the sand

  Vianello squatted down beside her. Fussily, he picked up the sweater and placed it back over her shoulders, tying the arms together under her chin. 'Come with us now,' he said and got to his feet, helping her to stand beside him.

  He started to speak but stopped when he heard a noise from the direction of Pellestrina. The three of them, like chickens on a perch, turned their heads in the direction of the sharp keening that announced the arrival of the Carabinieri.

  Elettra began to shiver uncontrollably.

  They stood on the beach and waited while the Carabinieri launch approached. It swept up in a tight curve, and the pilot killed the motor and drifted to a stop a few metres offshore. Three flak-jacketed officers at the bow held shotguns aimed at the people on the beach. When the man at the wheel recognized Vianello and called out to the others to lower their guns, they did so, though with a certain reluctance.

  'Two of you come and help her,' Brunetti called out, ignoring the fact that even his rank gave him no authority over these men. 'Take her back to the hospital.' The three officers looked to their pilot for instruction. He nodded. There was no landing stage, so they would have to jump into the surf and wade ashore. While they hesitated, Signorina Elettra turned to Brunetti and said, ‘I can't go back without him.'

  Before Brunetti could answer, Vianello turned to Elettra and picked her up bodily, one arm around her shoulder, the other under her knees. He walked into the water and waded out to the boat. Brunetti saw her start to protest, but her words, as well as Vianello's response, were cut off by the noise of his splashing. When Vianello reached the side of the boat, one of the Carabinieri knelt and reached over the side, taking Signorina Elettra from his arms.

  He sat her upright and Brunetti saw Vianello reach into the boat and adjust the sweater over her shoulders, then the motor sprang into life again, and the boat started to move away. Vianello standing in the water and Brunetti on the beach both watched as it grew smaller, but Signorina Elettra did not turn back to them.

  Vianello came back to the shore, and silently the two of them returned to Massimo and his prisoner. They found Vianello's friend sitting on the stone where Brunetti had waited earlier, his rifle lying across his knees. The bound man cried out when he saw them approach. 'Cut me loose!' He shouted it as an order. The men ignored him.

  'Bonsuan's down there,' Brunetti said, indicating the doorway and the steps running down from it. It was harder to see down inside now that the light was abandoning the day.

  'Massimo,' Vianello said, turning to his friend. 'Give me the flashlight.' From one of the many pockets of his hunting jacket, Massimo took a thin black flashlight and held it out to Vianello.

  'Wait here,' Brunetti said to the man with the gun. They went down together, the light streaming out in front of them. As they descended the steps, Brunetti pleaded with something he didn't believe in to let them somehow find Bonsuan alive down there; wounded and stunned but alive. He had long ago abandoned his childhood habit of trying to cut a deal with whoever it was that might control these things, and so he merely asked for it to be true, offering nothing in return.

  But Bonsuan, though certainly wounded, was not alive, and never again would he be stunned by anything. His last earthly shock had been the sudden explosion of pain in his chest as he turned back towards Brunetti from the steps, making his joke about still having a head and marvelling at the power of the storm.

  Vianello flashed the light across his friend's face for just a moment, then let his hand fall to his side. The light illuminated his shoes, a filthy patch of ground, and Bonsuan's left shoulder, just enough to show the jagged point of wood that protruded so inappropriately from his chest.

  After a minute, Vianello went back to the stairway, careful to keep the light from shining on Bonsuan's face again. Brunetti followed him. At the top, they saw that Vianello's friend hadn't moved, nor had the rifle, nor had the hog-tied man.

  'Please,' the bound man pleaded, all threat, all menace gone from his voice. 'Please.'

  Vianello took a knife from the back pocket of his jeans, flicked it open, and knelt down over him. Idly, Brunetti wondered if the sergeant were going to cut the man's bonds or his throat and couldn't find it in himself to care much, either way. He watched as the hand holding the knife disappeared, blocked from sight by Vianello's body. The man's body twitched, and his legs swung forward, cut free of his wrists.


  He lay still for a moment, gasping with the pain it caused him to move. Motionless, he watched Vianello through narrowed eyes. The sergeant pushed the blade closed with the palm of his right hand and reached around to slip the knife back into his pocket. The bound man chose that instant to strike. He pulled his knees towards his chest, gasping at the pain it caused his stretched muscles to do it, and struck out at Vianello with his bound feet, striking him just at the hip and knocking him sprawling.

  He pulled his feet back, cocking them in order to kick Vianello again, but Massimo got to his feet as the man was still in motion and walked over to him, holding the rifle upside down. The bound man sensed the presence looming over him and relaxed, stretching his feet out in front of him, away from Vianello, who was struggling to his feet. 'All right, all right. I stopped,' Spadini said and smiled. Massimo, quite casually, brought the rifle up into the air and plunged it down, smashing the butt into Spadini's nose. Brunetti could hear it break, a wet, crunching sound, like the sound of stepping on a cockroach or a water beetle.

  Spadini howled and rolled away in circles to escape the man with the rifle, his hands trapped behind his back. Calmly, Massimo set the butt of the gun into a tuft of sandy grass at his feet. After he'd wiped it back and forth a half-dozen times, he inspected the butt, finding it clean enough. Ignoring the sobs of the man whose shattered nose continued to leak blood on to the sand below his head, Massimo went back to the stone by the wall and sat down again.

  He glanced at Brunetti. "I used to go fishing with Bonsuan.'

  No one said anything until a Carabinieri all-terrain vehicle arrived from Pellestrina and sped across the sand towards them, careless of the destruction it caused to the dunes or to the nesting birds who could not escape its wheels

  27

  The Carabinieri who emerged from the jeep showed little surprise at what they saw, and when Brunetti finally explained things to them, they seemed even less interested in his story. One of them went down the stairs to the bunker; when he came back, he was already talking on his telefonino, calling for an ambulance to come and pick up the body.

  In the meantime, the other two had pushed Spadini into the jeep, not bothering to untie his hands and leaving him propped on the back seat like an unsteady package. Neither Brunetti nor Vianello was willing to leave Bonsuan's body unattended, so they refused the offer to accompany the others back to the Carabinieri post on the Lido. As they watched, one of the Carabinieri climbed into the back seat beside Spadini, then the other two got into the front and their jeep sped away.

  Vianello's bulk no longer held out the promise of animal comfort to Brunetti, so he walked down to the edge of the water. Vianello let him go, choosing to stand to the left of the doorway leading down to the bunker. For a while, he watched the motionless Brunetti, himself watching the motionless city in the distance, visible again now that the storm had passed. Both of them were sodden and chilled but neither of them paid any particular attention to this until Massimo came back from his boat with a captain's jacket for Brunetti. He helped the Commissario remove his own jacket and held the other for him while he stuffed his arms into the sleeves. Brunetti's jacket remained on the ground. At the sound of a siren approaching from the north, Vianello turned his attention to that and abandoned his commander to his reflections.

  Brunetti returned to the fort when he heard the ambulance pull up. Neither he nor Vianello went down the stairs to help the two attendants with the stretcher. When they emerged, their burden tilted awkwardly to enable them to manoeuvre it up the steps and through the narrow doorway, a blue cloth lay draped over it, its centre projecting like a narrow pyramid. The attendants went to the back of the ambulance and slid the stretcher through the doors. Before they closed them, Brunetti and Vianello climbed inside and pulled down the folding seats at either side. Silently, they rode back to Lido, and then back to Venice on a water ambulance with the equally silent Bonsuan.

  At the Questura, Brunetti initiated the process of formally charging Spadini with the murder of Bonsuan. At best, and Brunetti knew this, the evidence linking him with the murders of the Bottins and of Signora Follini was no more than circumstantial: though he could be shown to have motive, no evidence had yet been found to link him directly with either crime. He would certainly have alibis, and they would certainly turn out to be, all of them, from fishermen, all of whom were guaranteed to swear that Spadini had been with them when the two men were murdered and when Signora Follini drowned.

  Brunetti told the morgue attendants not to touch the wooden stake that had killed Bonsuan, and he ordered that a technician be sent to take fingerprints from it before it was removed from his body. It was unlikely that, this time, Spadini would find someone able to provide him an alibi.

  His thoughts turned to Bonsuan's widow and to their three daughters, now fatherless. Men go about their business of killing one another, often in defence of their honour, that most meretricious of baubles, leaving women to pay the price. The thought of a fifth woman, Signorina Elettra, came into his mind, and he wondered what grief all of this would cost her.

  Pushing this away, he got up from his desk and, hardly conscious of the thought of honour, went to speak to Bonsuan's widow.

  Later, at home, he explained as much as he could to Paola. 'All she kept saying was that he had less than a year, that all he wanted to do was go fishing and enjoy his grandchildren.' The words clung to him, like the fiery robes that had destroyed Creon's daughter: no matter how he twisted and turned, trying to pull free of them, they stuck to him, burning.

  Brunetti and Paola sat talking on the terrace, the children huddled like anchorites in their rooms, preparing for the year-end exams. To the west, the light was long gone away from all of them, leaving behind only sound and the memory of form and line.

  'What will she do?' Paola asked

  'Who? Anna?' he asked, thinking still of Bonsuan's widow.

  'No. She has her family. Elettra.'

  Startled by the question, he answered, 'I don't know. I hadn't thought.'

  'Is he dead, the young man?' she asked.

  'They're looking for him,' was the only answer Brunetti could give.

  'Who?'

  'The Guardia di Finanza sent two boats out, and we've got a launch looking for him.'

  'And?' Paola asked, familiar with this sort of answer.

  'I doubt it. Not after a storm like this.'

  Paola could think of nothing to say to this and so asked, instead, 'And the uncle?'

  Brunetti had spent the last hours considering this. 'I doubt we'll get anyone on Pellestrina to say they know anything about the murders there. Even with someone like Spadini, they still won't talk.'

  'God, and we say it's Southerners who are crippled by ideas about omerta,' Paola exclaimed. When Brunetti didn't respond to this, she asked, 'What about Bonsuan?'

  'There's no way he can get out of that. He'll get twenty years,' Brunetti said, thinking how little difference it seemed to make.

  Neither of them spoke for a long time.

  At last, turning her thoughts to life, Paola asked, 'Will Elettra get over it?'

  ‘I don't know,' Brunetti demurred, then added, surprising himself, ‘I don't really know her that well.'

  Paola gave this a great deal of thought and finally answered, 'We never know them well, do we?'

  'Who?'

  'Real people.'

  'What do you mean, "real people"?'

  'As opposed to people in books,' Paola explained. 'They're the only ones we ever really know well, or know truly.' Again she gave him a moment to consider, then said, 'Maybe that's because they're the only ones about whom we get reliable information.' She glanced at him, then added, as she would to a class, just to see if they were following, 'Narrators never lie.'

  'And my perception of you?' he asked, voice close to indignation, driven towards anger by the seeming irrelevance of this conversation or by the circumstances in which she'd chosen to begin it. 'Isn't that true?'


  She smiled. 'As real as mine of you.'

  His response was immediate. ‘I don't like that answer.'

  'That's neither here nor there, my dear.' They lapsed into silence. After a long time, she reached across to him and placed her hand on his arm. 'She'll be all right so long as she's still sure that her friends love her.'

  It did not occur to Brunetti to question her use of the word 'love'.

  'We do.'

  ‘I know,' Paola said and went to check on the children.