A Sea of Troubles cgb-10

by Donna Leon

  'None. But there are rumours that he gambles.'

  'Unluckily, it would seem,' Brunetti observed. 'Everyone who gambles gambles unluckily.' Brunetti gave this the laugh it deserved, then asked, 'And since then?'

  'I've no idea,' Resto answered. 'He's not been reported to us since then, so there's nothing else I can tell you about him.'

  Brunetti asked, 'Did you meet him?'

  'Yes.'

  'And?'

  Without hesitation, Resto said, 'And he's a very unpleasant man. Not because of what he did. Everyone cheats. We expect that. But there was a kind of frenzy in his resistance to us I've rarely seen before. I don't think it had anything to do with the money he lost, though I could be wrong.'

  'If not the money, then what?'

  'Losing. Or being defeated,' Resto suggested. 'I've never seen a man so angry at having been caught, though it was impossible we wouldn't catch him, he'd been so stupid.' It sounded as though it was Spadini's carelessness he disapproved of, not his dishonesty.

  'Would you say he's violent?' Brunetti asked.

  'Does that mean do I think he's capable of those murders?'

  'Yes.'

  ‘I don't know. I suppose many people are, though they don't realize it until they get into the right situation. Or the wrong one,' Resto added quickly. 'Maybe. Maybe not.' When Brunetti said nothing, Resto said, 'I'm sorry not to be able to answer that for you, but I just don't know.'

  'That's all right,' Brunetti said. 'Thank you for what you could tell me.'

  'Let me know what happens, will you?' Resto said, surprising Brunetti with his request.

  'Of course. Why?'

  'Oh, just curious,' Resto said, disguising something, though Brunetti couldn't tell what. With a mutual exchange of pleasantries, the two men took their leave of each other.

  21

  Brunetti found his family seated around the table when he came in, almost-empty dishes of lasagne before them. Chiara got up and kissed him, Raffi said, 'Qiao, Papa' before returning to his pasta, and Paola smiled in his direction. She went to the stove, bent and opened the oven, pulled from it a plate with a large rectangle of lasagne in the centre, and set it at his place.

  He went to the bathroom, washed his hands, and came back, aware of how hungry he was and how happy to be home with them.

  'You look like you were in the sun today,' Paola said, pouring him a glass of Cabernet.

  He took a sip. 'Is this the stuff that student of yours makes?' he asked, raising the glass and studying the colour.

  'Yes. Do you like it?'

  'Yes. How much did we buy?'

  'Two cases.'

  'Good,' he said and started to eat his pasta.

  'You look like you were in the sun today,' Paola repeated.

  Chewing, he swallowed, and said, ‘I was out on Burano.'

  'Papa, can I go out with you the next time you go?' Chiara interrupted.

  'Chiara, I'm talking to your father,' Paola said.

  'Can't I talk to him at the same time?' she asked with every evidence of offended pride. 'When I'm finished.'

  'But we're talking about the same thing, aren't we?' Chiara asked, smart enough to remove any sound of resentment from her voice.

  Paola looked at her plate then set her fork very carefully beside her unfinished lasagne.

  ‘I asked your father,' she began, and Brunetti was aware of her referring to him as 'your father'. Beneath that linguistic distance, he suspected, lay some other.

  Chiara started to speak, but Raffi gave her a sharp kick under the table, and her head swung towards him. He pressed his lips together and narrowed his eyes at her, and she stopped.

  Silence fell, then lay, on the table. 'Yes,' Brunetti said, clearing his throat and then continuing. ‘I went out to Burano to talk to someone, but he wasn't there. I tried to eat at da Romano, but there were no tables.' He finished his lasagne and looked across at Paola. 'Is there any more? It's delicious’ he added.

  'What else is there, Mamma?' Chiara demanded, appetite overcoming Raffi's warning.

  'Beef stew with peppers’ Paola said.

  "The one with potatoes?' Raffi asked, his voice rich with feigned enthusiasm.

  'Yes’ Paola said, getting to her feet and starting to stack the plates. The lasagne, to Brunetti's diappointment, proved to be much like the Messiah: there was no second coming.

  With Paola busy at the stove, Chiara waved a hand to get Brunetti's attention, then tilted her head to one side, gaped her mouth open and stuck out her tongue. She crossed her eyes and tilted her head to the other side, then turned it into a metronome, shaking it quickly back and forth, her tongue lolling slackly from her mouth.

  From her place at the stove, where she was busy serving the stew, Paola said, 'If you think this beef will give you Mad Cow Disease, Chiara, perhaps you'd prefer not to eat any.'

  Instantly, Chiara's head was motionless, her hands folded neatly in front of her. 'Oh, no, Mamma,' she said with oily piety, 'I'm very hungry, and you know it's one of my favourites.'

  'Everything's your favourite’ Raffi said.

  She stuck her tongue out again, but this time her head remained motionless.

  Paola turned back to the table, placing a dish in front of Chiara, then Raffi. She set another in front of Brunetti and then served herself. She sat down.

  'What did you do at school today?' Brunetti asked the children jointly, hoping that one of them would answer. As he ate, his attention drifted from the chunks of stewed beef to the cubes of carrot, the small slices of onion. Raffi was saying something about his Greek instructor. When he paused, Brunetti looked across at Paola and asked, 'Did you put Barbera in this?'

  She nodded, and he smiled, pleased he'd got it right. 'Wonderful,' he said, spearing another piece of beef. Raffi concluded his story about the Greek teacher, and Chiara cleared the table. 'Little plates,' Paola told her when she was done.

  Paola went to the counter and removed the round top from the porcelain cake dish she had inherited from her Great-Aunt Ugolina in Parma. Inside it, as Brunetti had hardly dared hope, was her apple cake, the one with lemon and orange juice and enough Grand Marnier to permeate the whole thing and linger on the tongue for ever.

  'Your mother is a saint,' he said to the children.

  'A saint,' repeated Raffi.

  'A saint,' intoned Chiara as an investment towards a second helping.

  After dinner, Brunetti took a bottle of Calvados, intent on maintaining the apple theme introduced by the cake, and went out on to the terrace. He set the bottle down, then went back into the kitchen for two glasses and, he hoped, his wife. When he suggested to Chiara that she do the dishes, she made no objection.

  'Come on’ he said to Paola and returned to the terrace.

  He poured the two glasses, sat, put his feet up on the railing, and looked off at the clouds drifting in the far distance. When Paola sat down in the other chair, he nodded towards the clouds and asked, 'You think it'll rain?'

  ‘I hope so. I read today that there are fires in the mountains up above Belluno.'

  'Arson?' he asked.

  'Probably’ she answered. 'How else can they build on it?' It was a peculiarity of the law that undeveloped land upon which the construction of houses was forbidden lost that protection as soon as the trees on it ceased to exist. And what more efficient means of removing trees than fire?

  Neither of them much wanted to follow up this subject, and so Brunetti asked, 'What's wrong?'

  One of the things Brunetti had always loved about Paola was what he persisted, in the face of all her objections to the term, in thinking of as the masculinity of her mind, and so she did not bother to feign confusion. Instead, she said, ‘I find your interest in Elettra strange. And I suppose if I were to think about it a bit longer, I'd probably find it offensive.'

  It was Brunetti who echoed, innocently, 'Offensive?'

  'Only if I thought about it much longer. At the moment, I find it only strange, worthy of comment,
unusual.'

  'Why?' he asked, setting his glass on the table and pouring some more Calvados.

  She turned and looked at him, her face a study in open confusion. But she did not repeat his question; she attempted to answer it. 'Because you have thought about little except her for the last week, and because I assume your trip to Burano today had something to do with her.'

  Other qualities he had always admired in Paola were the fact that she was not a snoop and that jealousy was not part of her makeup. 'Are you jealous?' he asked before he had time to think.

  Her mouth dropped open and she stared at him with eyes that might as well have been stuck out on stalks, so absolute was her attention. She turned away from him and said, addressing her remarks to the campanile of San Polo, 'He wants to know if I'm jealous.' When the campanile did not respond, she turned her eyes in the direction of San Marco.

  As they sat, the silence lengthening between them, the tension of the scene drifted away as if the mere mention of the word 'jealousy' had sufficed to chase it off.

  The half-hour struck, and Brunetti finally said, "There's no need for it, you know, Paola. There's nothing I want from her.'

  'You want her safety.'

  "That's for her, not from her,' he insisted.

  She turned towards him then and asked, without any trace of her usual fierceness, 'You really believe this, don't you, that you don't want anything from her?'

  'Of course,' he insisted.

  She turned away from him again, studying the clouds, higher now and moving off towards the mainland.

  'What's wrong?' he finally asked into her expanding silence.

  'Nothing's really wrong. It's just that we're at one of those points where the difference between men and women becomes evident.'

  'What difference?' he asked.

  'The capacity of self-deceit,' she said, but corrected herself and said, 'Or rather, the things about which we choose to deceive ourselves.'

  'Like what?' he asked, striving for neutrality.

  'Men deceive themselves about what they do themselves, but women choose to deceive themselves about what other people do.'

  'Men, presumably?' he asked.

  'Yes.'

  If she had been a chemist reading the periodic table of the elements, she could not have sounded more certain.

  He finished his Calvados but did not pour any more. A long time passed in silence, during which he considered what she had said. 'Sounds like men get a better deal,' he finally replied.

  'When don't they?'

  By the next morning, Brunetti had transformed Paola's observation that he had thought about little except Signorina Elettra during the last week, which was true, into an assertion that she had reason for jealousy, which was hardly the same thing. Fully persuaded that Paola had no cause for jealousy, his concern for Signorina Elettra continued uppermost in his mind, blunting his ordinary instinct to be suspicious of and curious about everyone involved in a case. Odd tinglings, if they could be called that, thus went unanswered, and some of the finer threads leading out from the investigation remained unfollowed.

  Marotta returned and took over the handling of the Questura. Because murder was such a rare occurrence in Venice, and because Marotta was an ambitious man, he asked for the files on the Bottin murders and, after having read them, said he would take charge of the case himself.

  When he failed to find the number of Signorina Elettra's telefonino, Brunetti spent a half-hour at the computer, attempting to get into the records at TELECOM, only to give up and ask Vianello if he could obtain the number. When he had it, he thanked the sergeant and went up to his own office to make the call. It rang eight times, then a voice came on, telling him the user of the phone had turned it off but he could, if he chose, leave a voice message. He was about to give his name when he remembered the look she'd given the young man for whom he now had a name and, instead, calling her Elettra and using the intimate tu, said it was Guido and asked her to call him at work.

  He called down to Vianello and asked him to have another look with the computer, this time for anything he could find out about a certain Carlo Targhetta, perhaps resident on Pellestrina. Vianello's voice was a study in neutrality as he repeated the name, which made it clear to Brunetti that the sergeant had spoken to Pucetti and knew full well who the young man was.

  He took a blank piece of paper from his drawer and wrote the name Bottin in the centre, then the name Follini off on the left. Spadini's name was next, at the bottom. He drew a line connecting Spadini and Follini. To the right of Spadini's name, he wrote that of Sandro Scarpa, the waiter's brother, said to have had a fight with Bottin, whose name he connected to Scarpa's. Below that he wrote the name of the missing waiter. And then he sat and looked at these names, as if waiting for them to move around on the paper or for new lines to point out interesting connections among them. Nothing appeared. He picked up the pen again and wrote Carlo Targhetta's name, sticking it into an inconspicuous corner and conscious that he wrote it in smaller letters than those he'd used for the other names.

  Still nothing happened. He opened the front drawer, slipped the paper inside, and went downstairs to see what Vianello had discovered.

  Vianello, in the meantime, had been larking around in the files of the various agencies of government in an attempt to see if Carlo

  Targhetta had done his military service or if he had ever had any trouble with the police. Quite the opposite, it seemed, or so he told Brunetti when he came into Signorina Elettra's office, where the sergeant was using the computer.

  'He was in the Guardia di Finanza,' Vianello said, surprised at the news.

  'And now he's a fisherman,' Brunetti added.

  'And probably earning a hell of a lot more doing that,' remarked Vianello.

  Though this was hardly in question, it did seem a strange career change, and both of them wondered what could have prompted it. 'When did he stop?' Brunetti asked.

  Vianello pressed a few keys, studied the screen, pressed some more, and then said, 'About two years ago.'

  Both of them thought of it, but Brunetti was the first to mention the coincidence. 'About the same time that Spadini lost his boat.'

  'Uh huh,' Vianello agreed and hit a key that wiped the screen clean. 'I'll see if I can find out why he left,' he said and summoned up a fresh screenful of information. For a number of seconds, new letters and numbers flashed across the screen, chasing one another into and out of existence. After what seemed like an inordinately long time, Vianello said, 'They're not saying, sir.'

  Brunetti leaned down over the screen and started to read. Much of it was numbers and incomprehensible symbols, but near the bottom he read, 'Internal use only, see relevant file,' after which there followed a long string of numbers and letters, presumably the file in which the reason for Carlo Targhetta's departure was to be found.

  Vianello tapped his finger on the final phrase and asked, 'You think this means something, sir?'

  'Everything has to mean something, doesn't it, really?' Brunetti offered by way of response, though he was curious as to just what this might mean. 'You know anyone?' he asked Vianello, using the centuries-old Venetian shorthand: friend? relative? old classmate? someone who owes a favour?

  'Nadia's godmother, sir,' Vianello said after a moment's reflection. 'She's married to a man who used to be a colonel.'

  "They weren't invited to your anniversary dinner, were they?' Brunetti asked.

  Vianello smiled at the reminder of the favour Brunetti now owed him. 'No, they weren't. He retired about three years ago, but he'd still have access to anything he wanted.'

  'Is Nadia very close to them?' Brunetti asked.

  Vianello's smile was sharklike. 'Like a daughter, sir.' He reached for the phone. 'I'll see what he can find out.'

  Brunetti assumed from the brevity of Vianello's opening salvo that he had reached the retired Colonel directly. He heard him explain his request. When Vianello, after a short pause, said only 'June two years ago,'
Brunetti assumed that the Colonel had not bothered to ask why the sergeant wanted the information. When Brunetti heard Vianello say, 'Good, then I'll call you tomorrow morning,' he left and went back to his own office.

  22

  The following morning, Brunetti left for work before Paola was awake, thus avoiding the need to answer any questions about the progress of the investigation. Because Signorina Elettra had not answered his call or at least had not phoned him at the Questura the day before, he could allow himself to think she had obeyed him and returned from Pellestrina. Consequently, he toyed with the idea, as he walked to work, that he might arrive at the Questura to find her at her. desk, dressed for spring, happy to be back and even happier to see him.

  His thought, however, was not father to her deed, and there was no sign of her in her office. Her computer sat silent, its screen blank, but he went upstairs before that could be made to serve as an omen of any sort.

  Stopping in the officers' room on the way up, he found Vianello at his desk, a disassembled pistol spread in a mess in front of him. The metal parts lay scattered on an open copy of Gazzetta dello Sport, their dull menace in sharp contrast to the pink paper, like a ballet dancer wearing brass knuckles.

  'What's going on?' Brunetti asked.

  The sergeant looked up and smiled. 'It's Alvise's, sir. He started to take it apart to clean it this morning, but he couldn't remember how to put it back together.'

  'Where is he?' Brunetti asked, looking around.

  'He went to get a coffee.'

  'And left it here?'

  'Yes.'

  'What are you doing?'

  'I thought I'd put it back together for him, sir, and just leave it on his desk.'

  Brunetti gave this the thought it deserved and said, 'Yes, I think that's best.'

  Ignoring the gun, Vianello said, 'The Colonel called back.'

  'And?'

  'And he's not saying.' 'Which means?'

  'It probably means he'd say if they'd told him but they won't tell him.'

  'Why do you say that?'

  Vianello considered how best to begin, finally saying, 'He was a colonel, so he's used to being obeyed by almost everybody. I think what happened is that they refused to tell him why