A Sea of Troubles

by Donna Leon

  ‘No,’ Paola said, ignoring his sarcasm. ‘I doubt that would have done any good.’ Paola had met Signorina Elettra only twice, both times at official dinners given by Patta for members of the Questura staff. Each time, though they had been introduced to one another and had managed to speak for a few moments, they had been seated at different tables, something Brunetti had always viewed as a conscious decision on Patta’s part to keep the two women from talking about him.

  Ever practical, Paola leaped over theory and recrimination and set herself to deal with reality. ‘Is there any way you can see that someone could be put there to keep an eye on her?’

  ‘I’m not sure at this point that that will be necessary.’

  ‘When and if it does become necessary, it will be too late to do anything about it,’ Paola said, and he was forced to agree, though he didn’t tell her this.

  ‘Well?’ she insisted.

  ‘I spoke to Vianello to see if there’s anyone on the force who lives out there.’ He shook his head to indicate the answer. ‘Besides, she was very insistent that she doesn’t want anyone except me and Vianello to know where she is and what she’s doing.’ Before Paola could ask, he explained. ‘She said no one in her family knows what she does, though I find that hard to believe. I’d agree it’s unlikely that her relatives on Pellestrina know, especially if she sees them only once a year, but I’m sure that some members of her family must pay attention to what she does.’

  ‘And if they do know or someone asks her about it, or someone finds out she works at the Questura?’ Paola asked.

  ‘Oh,’ he said instantly, ‘I’m sure she’d be able to invent something to explain it. She’s an excellent liar; I’ve listened to her do it for years.’

  ‘But what if she’s in danger?’ Paola asked, bringing him back to earth.

  ‘I certainly hope she isn’t.’

  ‘That’s not an answer, Guido, and it’s not enough.’

  ‘There’s nothing we can do. She’s decided this and I don’t think she can be stopped.’

  ‘You sound very cavalier about it, I must say.’

  Brunetti was uncertain of how his wife would respond to any revelation of his feelings for another woman, so he made no attempt to defend himself.

  ‘It would be terrible if anything happened to her,’ Paola said.

  Biting back the confession that it would break his heart, Brunetti reached forward and picked up his Calvados.

  The next morning, Brunetti got to the Questura after nine, delayed by phone calls to three different informers, calls he was always careful to make from public phones and only to their telefonini. Though all had read about the crime, none of them could give him any information about the Bottins or their murder. All promised to call him if they heard anything, but none was optimistic because the crime had taken place so far away. As far as his Venetian contacts were concerned, it might as well have taken place in Milan.

  The subject of his discussion with Paola was not in her office when he got there, so he went up to his own and read quickly through the newspapers. The national papers had understandably not bothered with the Bottins, but Il Gazzettino had given them half of the first page of the second section. In the hyperventilated style the local paper reserved for crimes of violence, the article began by asking if the Bottin men had felt some sort of strange premonition or if they had known, when they woke up the previous morning, that it would turn out to be the last day of their lives. Since these questions had become, by now, the paper’s opening trope in any account of any violent death, Brunetti muttered, ‘Probably not.’

  The story repeated the facts Brunetti had already learned: the father had died from a blow to the head, the son from a knife wound. Both had been dead when the boat was set on fire and sunk. The newspaper account told him nothing new, though it did contain small photos of the two dead men. Bottin had the rough-featured look of a man who had spent too much time in the open. His expression showed the usual sullen hostility to be seen in photos on official documents. Marco, on the other hand, was smiling, two deep dimples visible just at the corners of his mouth. While the father was dark, his neck short and thick, Marco seemed made of finer, lighter materials. His fineness of feature would probably have disappeared, Brunetti realized, after two decades on the sea, but there was an easy grace about the tilt of Marco’s head that made Brunetti curious about his mother and about the forces that had led him to share in the brutality of his father’s fate.

  8

  SIGNORINA ELETTRA DIDN’T come into his office until more than two hours after he arrived. When he saw her, Brunetti found it impossible to resist the impulse to approach her, and he raised himself from his chair. Propriety, however, restrained him. ‘Good morning,’ he said casually, hoping, by the ordinariness of his greeting, to carry them back to simpler times, before she’d got the idea – no, he’d be honest here – before he’d given her the idea of going out to Pellestrina.

  ‘Good morning, sir,’ she said in an entirely normal way. He saw in her hand a few sheets of paper.

  ‘The Bottins?’ he asked.

  She held them up. ‘Yes. But very little, really,’ she said apologetically. ‘I’m still working on the others.’

  ‘Let me see,’ he said, as he sat down, very carefully keeping his tone level.

  She placed the papers in front of him, then turned and made towards the door. Brunetti watched her leave, the narrowness of her back exaggerated by a light blue sweater with thin white vertical stripes. He remembered, then, asking her, some years ago, about the new millennium and what her plans and hopes for it were. Her plans, she’d answered, were to see how well baby blue, the announced colour of the new decade, suited her, and her only hope was that it would. When pressed, she’d admitted that she did have one or two other little things to hope for, but she hardly thought they were worth talking about, and that had been the end of that. Well, it suited her, baby blue, and Brunetti found himself wishing that, whatever other hopes she might have had, they’d all been granted her.

  The Bottins, when he looked through the papers, were revealed as rather unexceptional men: they owned both the house on Pellestrina and the Squallus jointly, though they had separate bank accounts. Both owned cars, though Marco was also sole owner of a house on Murano, left to him by his mother.

  Beyond the realm of the financial, Giulio began to stand out: he was known to the Carabinieri on the Lido and was the subject of a number of denuncie, three of them resulting from fights in bars and one from an incident that had taken place between two boats on the laguna, though the other boat had not been Scarpa’s. Bottin seemed, however, to have lived a charmed life so far as the police were concerned, for, however well known he was to them, formal charges had never been made against him, which suggested a lack of evidence or reluctance on the part of witnesses to testify. Marco had never been reported to the police.

  Brunetti searched for a report of whatever had happened between the boats on the laguna, but no details were provided. He stopped himself from calling Signorina Elettra to ask her who might be able to provide this information, hoping she’d somehow forget about going.

  Instead, he called down to the squad room and asked for Montisi to be sent up to his office.

  The pilot knocked on the door a few minutes later, came in without bothering to salute or acknowledge Brunetti’s rank, and took the seat Brunetti pointed out to him. He sat with his feet flat on the floor in front of him, his hands grasped around the arms of his chair, almost as if long exposure to the sea had made him eternally expectant of some sudden shift of tide or current. Brunetti could see the short stump of Montisi’s little finger, the last two joints lost in some long-forgotten boating accident.

  ‘Montisi,’ Brunetti began, ‘do you have any friends who are fishermen?’

  Montisi showed no curiosity. ‘Fishermen, yes. Vongolari, no.’ The heat with which he answered surprised Brunetti, as did the distinction he drew.

  ‘What’s wrong with t
he vongolari?’ he asked.

  ‘They’re figli di puttane, every one of them.’

  Brunetti had heard a similar opinion of the clam fishermen from Vianello, among others, but he’d never heard it expressed with such disgust.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because they’re hyenas,’ Montisi answered. ‘Or vultures. They suck up everything with their damned vacuum cleaner scoops, rip up the breeding beds, destroy whole colonies.’ Montisi paused, pulled himself forward in his chair, then went on. ‘They don’t think about the future. The clam beds have fed us for centuries and could feed us for ever. They just dig and dig like wild animals, destroying everything.’

  Brunetti remembered his lunch on Pellestrina. ‘Vianello won’t eat them any more, clams.’

  ‘Ah, Vianello,’ Montisi said dismissively. ‘He does it for health reasons.’ On Montisi’s lips, this sounded like an obscenity.

  Not quite sure how he was meant to respond, Brunetti asked, ‘Is it safe to eat them, then?’

  Montisi shrugged. ‘At my age, it’s safe to eat anything.’ He paused, then went on, ‘No, I suppose it isn’t safe to eat some of them. The bastards dig them up right in front of Porto Marghera, and God knows what’s been pumped or dumped into the water there. I’ve seen the bastards, anchored there at night, with no lights, scooping them up, not fifty metres from the sign saying that the waters are contaminated and fishing’s forbidden.’

  ‘But who’d eat them?’ Brunetti asked, thinking again of the clams he’d eaten on Pellestrina.

  ‘No one who knew,’ the pilot answered. ‘But who does know? Who knows where anything in the market comes from any more? A pile of clams is a pile of clams.’ Montisi looked up at him then, smiled, and added, ‘No passports. No health cards.’

  ‘But isn’t there some control, doesn’t someone check them?’

  Montisi smiled at such innocence from one no longer young but did not deign to answer.

  ‘No, tell me, Montisi,’ Brunetti insisted. ‘Aren’t there health inspectors?’ Even as he spoke, Brunetti realized how little he knew about this subject. He’d fished in the laguna since he was a boy, but he knew nothing at all about the business of fishing there.

  ‘There are all sorts of inspectors, Dottore,’ Montisi answered. Holding up his right hand, he counted them out on his fingers. ‘There are inspectors who are supposed to make random checks of the fish that are already on sale in the market: are they really fresh when they’re being sold as fresh? There are the inspectors who are supposed to check whether there are any dangerous substances in the fish: heavy metals or poisons or chemicals – all those things that flood into the laguna from the factories. Then there are the inspectors from the Magistrato alle Acque, whose job it is to see that the fishermen fish only where they’re supposed to.’ He closed his hand into a fist and added, ‘These are the ones I know about, but I’m sure, if you looked, you could find all sorts of other inspectors. But that doesn’t mean anything gets inspected or, if it does, that whatever they find gets reported.’

  ‘Why not?’ Brunetti asked.

  Montisi’s smile was compassion itself. Instead of speaking, however, he contented himself with rubbing his thumb across the end joint of his first three fingers.

  ‘But who pays?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘Use your imagination, Dottore. Anyone who does something they don’t want people to know about or something that would hurt their business if people found out about it: someone with a boat or a fish stall at Rialto, or a business that ships contaminated flounder to Japan or some other country hungry for fish.’

  ‘Are you sure about this, Montisi?’

  ‘Does that mean am I sure this happens or do I know the names of the people who do it?’

  ‘Both.’

  Montisi gave his superior a long, reflective look before he answered. ‘I suppose, if I thought about it, I could come up with the names of people, friends of mine who work in the laguna, who I think might have given money to see that someone overlooked something. And I suppose, if I asked around a bit, I could come up with the names of the people they gave it to.’ He stopped.

  ‘But?’

  ‘But two of my nephews are fishermen, have their own boats. And I retire in two years.’

  When Brunetti realized that was all the answer Montisi was willing to volunteer, he asked, ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means my life is on the laguna, not here at the Questura; at least it won’t be two years from now.’

  Brunetti found it a reasonable enough stance. But he tried, nevertheless. ‘But if these fish are contaminated in some way, then isn’t it dangerous for people to eat them?’

  ‘Does that mean what I think it does, sir?’ Montisi asked quietly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘That you’re appealing to my duty as a citizen to help get rid of a public danger? It sounds to me like you’re asking me to act like I’m Greenpeace and tell you who these people are so that you can stop them from doing something that’s dangerous to people and the environment.’

  Though there was not a hint of sarcasm in the way he spoke, Brunetti could not help but feel that Montisi’s remark made a fool of him. ‘Yes, I suppose it’s something like that,’ he admitted unwillingly.

  Montisi moved around in the chair, pulled himself upright, and placed his palms flat on his knees, though his feet were still firmly braced in anticipation of a sudden wave. ‘I’m not an educated man, sir,’ he began, ‘so I’m sure my thinking on this isn’t very clear, but I don’t see what difference it makes.’ Brunetti chose not to interrupt, so the pilot went on. ‘Remember when there was talk of closing the chemical plants because of the pollution they caused?’ He glanced across at Brunetti and waited for an answer.

  ‘Yes.’ Of course he remembered. Investigators had, a few years ago, found all manner of toxic material seeping, pouring, flooding into the laguna from the various chemical and petrochemical plants on the mainland. There’d even been a list in the papers of the workers who had died from cancer during the last ten years, a number so high as to soar off the charts of all probability. A judge had ordered the plants closed, declaring them a danger to the health of the people who worked there, leaving moot the question of the damage they did to the people who lived around them. And within a day there had been a mass protest and the threat of violence from the workers themselves, the very men who handled, breathed in, got splashed by the toxins that were said to be killing them. They demanded that the factories be kept open, that they continue to be allowed to work, and insisted that the long-term possibility of disease was less dangerous than the immediate one of unemployment. And so the plants remained open, the men continued to work, and very little more was said or written about this other tide that flowed into the laguna.

  Montisi had gone silent, and so Brunetti prompted him. ‘What about it?’

  ‘Luca has a patient,’ Montisi began, naming his son, a doctor with an office in Castello. ‘He’s got some rare form of lung cancer. Never smoked a cigarette in his life. His wife doesn’t smoke, either.’ He waved his right hand in the general direction of the mainland. ‘But he’s worked out there for twenty years.’

  Montisi stopped; Brunetti asked, ‘And?’

  ‘And though Luca’s got statistics that say this form of cancer is found only in people who have had long exposure to one of the chemicals they use out there, he still refuses to believe it could have been caused by the place where he works. His wife says it’s God’s will, and he says it’s just bad luck. Luca gave up talking to him about it when he saw that it didn’t make any difference to them what it was that was going to kill him. He says there’s no way he could make him believe his work had anything to do with it.’

  This time, Montisi didn’t bother to wait for Brunetti to ask for clarification. ‘So I don’t think it makes any difference if someone warns people that the clams are dangerous, or the fish or the shrimp. They’re going to say that their parents always ate them and they lived to be
ninety or they’re going to say that you can’t worry about everything. Or they’re going to get angry that you’re trying to take people’s jobs away from them. But the one thing you’re not going to do is stop people from doing what they want to do, whether it’s eat fish that glows in the dark or pay a bribe so they can go on catching and selling it.’

  This, Brunetti realized, was the longest speech he’d heard Montisi give in all the years he’d known him. Because the pilot had begun it by mentioning his nephews and the fact of his imminent retirement, Brunetti refused to believe that his explanation was completely truthful.

  ‘When you retire,’ Brunetti began, ‘are you going to work with your nephews?’

  ‘I’ve got a pilot’s licence,’ Montisi answered. ‘I can’t afford to buy a taxi. I don’t think I’d like the work, anyway. They’re another bunch of greedy bastards.’

  ‘And you know the laguna,’ Brunetti suggested.

  ‘And I know the laguna.’

  Resigned, Brunetti asked, ‘Is there anything you can tell me?’

  Montisi, he knew, was not as tough as he appeared to be. Over the years, Brunetti had occasionally seen him discard the carapace he wore, abandon the disguise of dour old sea dog who was never surprised by the crimes of men. ‘It might help, you know,’ Brunetti added, doing his best to make it sound as if he was suggesting, rather than pleading.

  Montisi pushed himself to his feet. Before he turned to the door, he said, ‘It’s not a question of which fishermen do this, sir; it’s more a question of which ones don’t.’ He aimed his right hand in the general direction of his forehead in what Brunetti supposed was meant to be a salute, then added, ‘It’s too big for you, and it’s too big for us.’ He said good morning and left the office.

  This left Brunetti little wiser than before he asked the pilot to come up. He realized now how foolish he had been to hope that appeals to loyalty to the police or the public good would have any effect when in competition with tribe or, worse, family. He supposed it was a step towards civilization, the ability to think of tribe or family rather than of the self, but it seemed such a tiny step. As always, when he caught himself making these sweeping generalizations about human behaviour, usually when he needed some justification for criticizing the behaviour of someone he knew, he ended up asking himself if, in the same circumstances, he’d behave any differently. The usual conclusion he came to, that he probably would not, put an end to his reflections and left him feeling slightly uncomfortable with an ever-judgmental self. After all, there was very little evidence that public institutions or government took even the least interest in the public good.