A Sea of Troubles

by Donna Leon

  He reflected on his brief conversation with Montisi. Certainly, over the years, he’d read numerous accounts of the violence in those waters: boats running aground or into one another; men fallen or knocked overboard and then either saved or drowned; shots fired from boats that were not seen, coming from men whose identity was never discovered. For the most part, however, the laguna was generally perceived as a benign presence by the people who lived their lives surrounded by it, many of whom owed their lives and fortunes to it.

  In the face of his growing curiosity, he abandoned the superstitious idea that he could somehow influence Signorina Elettra’s decision and called down to her to ask if she would check the files of the Gazzettino for the last three years and see what she could find about the laguna, fishermen, and the vongolari, specifically anything that had to do with acts of violence among the fishermen themselves and between them and the police. He knew he’d read more than one article, but because reports of violence on the water often were made to the harbour police or the Carabinieri, he had paid little attention to them.

  Child of its waters, Brunetti still idealized the laguna as a peaceful place. Did people in India, he wondered, think of Mother Ganges in this manner, as the liquid source of all life, the giver of food and bringer of peace? He’d recently read an article in one of Paola’s English magazines on the pollution of the Ganges and the way it was now, in many places, irreversibly fouled, sure to carry disease, if not death, to the people who bathed in or drank its waters, while a lethargic government concerned itself with posturing and empty phrases. He contemplated this but before he could begin to bask in a sense of European superiority, he recalled Vianello’s refusal to eat molluscs and Montisi’s explanation of the forces that allowed them to be dredged from the bottom of the laguna.

  From his lower drawer he took out the phone book. Feeling not a little foolish, he opened it at the Ps and, quickly turning the pages, found ‘Police’. The sub-listings, for San Polo, Railway and Frontier, were not very promising. Nor did he think there would be much joy on offer from the Postal Police or the Highway Police. He shut the directory, dialled the switchboard downstairs, and asked the operator to whom calls about trouble in the laguna were directed. The man on duty explained that it depended what sort of problem got called in: accidents were reported to the Capitaneria di Porto; crimes were dealt with either by the Carabinieri or, and here the operator’s voice grew a bit strained, by themselves.

  ‘I understand,’ Brunetti said. ‘But who goes out to investigate?’

  ‘It depends, sir,’ the operator said, his voice a study in discretion. ‘If we don’t have a boat available, then we call the Carabinieri and they go.’

  Brunetti knew too well why the Carabinieri divers had been unavailable to examine the wreck of the Squallus, so he merely made a note of this, believing it wiser not to comment.

  ‘And in the last few years . . .’ Brunetti began, then stopped himself and said, ‘No, forget it. I’ll wait for Signorina Elettra.’

  Just as he hung up, he thought he heard the operator’s voice, disembodied by distance, say, ‘We’re all waiting for her’, but he couldn’t be sure.

  Like all Italians, Brunetti had grown up hearing Carabinieri jokes: Why are two Carabinieri always sent to investigate? One to write and one to read. He understood that the Americans told the same jokes about Poles, and the English told them at the expense of the Irish. During his career, Brunetti had seen much to prove the truth of this piece of folk wisdom, but it was only in recent years that anything had weakened his faith in a second belief: that, however stupid, however dim they might be, the Carabinieri were rocklike in their honesty.

  Becalmed, he could invent nothing with which to busy himself, and so he pulled towards him a sheaf of unread papers and reports and began to glance through them, skimming the texts, paying little attention save to find the place at the end where he was meant to initialize them before passing them on to the next reader. When the kids were younger, he’d been told that the homework they did had all to be collected by their school, put into an archive and kept for ten years. He couldn’t remember now who’d told him, though he did remember having visualized, at the time, an enormous archive, as large as the city itself, where all official papers were stored. The Roman historians he so loved had often described an Italian peninsula densely, in parts impenetrably, covered in trees: oak, beech, chestnut; all gone now, of course, cut down to clear land for farming or to build boats. Or, he thought sadly, to be turned into paper to add to the already stored documents that, if unchecked, might some day cover the entire peninsula once again. He’d consigned his fair share of papers to that archive in his time, he thought, as he put his initials on another sheet and set it aside. He glanced at his watch and, reluctant to be perceived as nagging at Signorina Elettra for the information he’d requested, decided to go home for lunch.

  9

  HE FOUND PAOLA at the kitchen table, head bent over a copy of either Panorama or Espresso, the two weekly magazines to which she subscribed. Her custom was to let back issues pile up for at least six months before reading them, for she insisted that this was sufficient time to put things into proper perspective and thus allow the current pop star to die of an overdose and lapse into well-merited obscurity; to permit Gina Lollobrigida to launch and abandon yet another career, to wipe the slate clean of all talk of plans for the current political riforma and replace it with an entirely new one.

  Glancing down, he saw a photo of two men wearing the distinctive white coats of chefs and the red and white banded hoods of Father Christmas. On the page to their left was a heavily laden table: the evergreens and red candles told him that Paola’s reading had finally taken her as far as the end of last year.

  ‘Oh, good,’ he said as he bent to kiss the top of her head. ‘Does this mean we’re having goose for lunch?’ When she ignored him, he added, ‘Bit hot for that, isn’t it? Though whatever it is, it smells wonderful.’

  She looked up and smiled. ‘Would that goose were what they suggested for Christmas dinner,’ she added, tapping at one of the pages with a disapproving forefinger. ‘I can’t believe these people.’

  As this was a frequent response to her reading of these magazines, Brunetti turned his attention to a bottle of Pinot Grigio which he took out of the refrigerator. Pulling two glasses from the cabinet behind, he filled them halfway. As he set Paola’s beside her, he made an inquisitive noise.

  She chose to construe this as a sign of interest and replied, ‘They’re telling us that we should abandon all new ideas about eating and return to the way our parents and grandparents ate.’ Brunetti, who had had enough of nouvelle cuisine to last a lifetime, could not have agreed more strongly. Knowing that Paola, a more adventurous eater, differed from him in this, he kept his opinion to himself.

  ‘Listen to what they suggest as a way to begin a Christmas dinner in the style of our grandparents.’ She picked up the magazine and shook it angrily, as if the attempt would shake some sense into it. ‘“Goose liver with small pear tarts al Taurasi – whatever or whoever that is – with pineapple flavoured with limoncello.”’ She looked up at Brunetti, who had the presence of mind to shake his head in what he thought was a damning fashion.

  Encouraged, she went on, ‘Then listen to this. “Sartù – whatever that is – of rice with slices of eggplant with eggs and tiny meatballs di annecchia with a sauce of San Marsano tomatoes.”’ Overcome with disgust at this final excess, she tossed the magazine on to the table, where it closed, thus providing Brunetti with a sight of the prosperous female breasts which served both magazines as a sort of obligatory cover logo. ‘Where do they think our grandparents lived – at the court of Louis the Fourteenth?’ she demanded.

  Brunetti, who knew that at least one of Paola’s great-grandparents had served at the court of the first king of Italy, again chose silence as a response.

  Pushing the magazine farther away, she asked, ‘Why is it so difficult for them to remember wha
t a poor country Italy was, and not so long ago?’

  This seemed something more than a rhetorical question, and so Brunetti answered, ‘I think people prefer to remember happy times, well, happier times, and if they can’t remember them, then to change the memories and make them happier.’

  ‘Old people seem to,’ Paola agreed. ‘If you listen to the old women at Rialto, all you hear is how much better things were in the past, how much better they lived, even with less.’

  ‘Or maybe it’s because most of the journalists are young, so they really don’t remember how things were.’

  She nodded. ‘And we certainly have no sense of historical memory, not as a society, that is. I had a look at Chiara’s history book last week, and it frightened me. In the chapters on this century, it just glides right past the Second World War. Mussolini makes a walk-on appearance in the Twenties, then he’s led astray by the wicked Germans, and then it’s all over and Rome is free again. Though not before our valiant troops fought like lions and died like heroes.’

  ‘We were never taught anything at all about it in school, not that I can remember,’ Brunetti said, pouring himself another half-glass of wine.

  ‘Well,’ Paola said after taking a sip of her own, ‘when we were in school, the Right was in power, so they’d hardly want an honest discussion of Fascism. And once they formed their alliance with the Left, it would be inconvenient to talk about Communism.’ Another sip. ‘And since we changed sides during the war, I suppose they have to be careful who they present as the bad guys or the good guys.’

  ‘Who’s “they”?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘The people who write the history books. Or, rather, the politicians who decide who will write the history books, at least the ones that get used in the schools.’

  ‘And the idea of simple historical truth?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘You spend most of your time reading history, Guido: that should be enough to show you there is no such thing.’

  He had only to call to mind the difference between the Protestant and Catholic histories of the Papacy to see how right she was. But that was religion, where everyone is expected to lie; here, they were talking about living memory: people were still alive who had taken part in the events they were talking about; the fathers of most of his friends had fought in the war.

  ‘Maybe it’s harder to distinguish the truth when you know it from your own experience,’ he suggested, then, seeing her confusion, he added, ‘If it’s just records of people you never knew, from hundreds of years ago, then you can be honest, or at least you’re more likely to be honest.’

  ‘Like the Church’s account of the Inquisition?’ she inquired.

  He grinned at his defeat and asked, ‘If not goose, what are we having?’

  Gracious in her victory, she said, ‘I thought we’d eat the food of our forefathers.’

  ‘Specifically?’

  ‘Those involtini you like so much, with prosciutto and artichoke hearts in the centre.’

  ‘I doubt that any ancestor of mine ever ate such a thing,’ he confessed.

  ‘There’s polenta to go with them. To preserve historical truth.’

  Both children were present at lunch, but they were curiously subdued, concerned with the last weeks of school and the final exams of the year. Raffi, who hoped to begin university in the autumn, had become something of a phantom during the last months, emerging from his room only for meals or to ask his mother’s help with a difficult translation from the Greek. His romance with Sara Paganuzzi was kept alive, it seemed, only by means of late night phone calls and occasional before-dinner meetings in Campo San Bortolo. Chiara, who was coming into the full inheritance of her mother’s beauty more with every passing month, was still so caught up in the mysteries of mathematics and celestial navigation that she remained ignorant of the power her beauty was likely to give her.

  When lunch was finished, Paola moved out on to the terrace, taking their coffee and luring her husband along with her. The early afternoon sun was so hot that Brunetti removed his tie before he joined her, the first sure sign that summer was on the way.

  They sat in easy silence. Voices drifted towards them from a terrace to their left; occasionally one of the sheets hung to dry from the window of the apartment beneath them snapped in the freshening breeze which, alas, held no promise of rain.

  ‘I’m probably going to spend a fair amount of time out in Pellestrina,’ Brunetti said.

  ‘When?’

  ‘Starting this week, even as early as tomorrow.’

  ‘To keep an eye on her?’ Paola asked, without renewing her objections to Signorina Elettra’s decision to go out to Pellestrina.

  ‘Partly, though I’m not sure when she plans to get there.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘To talk to people and see what they say.’

  ‘Will they talk to you if they know you’re a policeman?’

  ‘Well, they can’t refuse to talk to me, not really, though they can refuse to tell me the truth, or say they can’t remember anything about the Bottins. That’s the usual technique.’

  ‘Then why talk to them?’ Paola asked.

  ‘Because of what they don’t tell me or what they lie to me about.’ He closed his eyes and lay back in the sun, letting it beat down on his face for the first time that year. After a long time, he said, ‘I guess it makes me like one of those historians or forces me to behave the way they do.’ He waited for Paola to ask for clarification, and when she did not, he glanced at her to see if she’d fallen asleep. But she had not. She sat beside him, attentive, waiting for him to continue.

  ‘I’ve got to listen to all of the variant accounts, weigh the evidence, adjusting my response according to who profits from the different versions.’

  ‘And keeping in mind that everyone is lying to you?’

  ‘Or is likely to be lying to me,’ he agreed.

  ‘And then?’

  ‘And then I see what Signorina Elettra has been told.’

  ‘And then?’ she repeated.

  ‘I’ve no idea.’

  ‘And you’ll be back at night?’

  ‘I should be. Why?’

  She gave him a long look then, surprised at his question. ‘In case I finally decide to run off with the postman. I’d like to know you’ll still be here to feed the kids.’

  Late in the afternoon, Signorina Elettra called up to Brunetti and told him that Vice-Questore Patta wanted to see him in his office. Brunetti seldom greeted such a summons with pleasure, but he was so bored with the reading and initialling of reports that he welcomed even this opportunity to escape. Quickly he went downstairs and into Signorina Elettra’s office.

  She greeted him with a smile. ‘He wants to tell you who will be in charge while he’s away.’

  ‘Not me, I hope,’ Brunetti said; it would complicate his plans to spend time in Pellestrina.

  ‘No, he’s already spoken to Marotta,’ she said, naming a commissario from Turin who had been assigned to the Venice Questura earlier in the year.

  ‘Am I meant to be offended?’ Brunetti asked. Marotta was by far his junior and a non-Venetian, so his appointment could be intended as nothing but a calculated insult.

  ‘Probably. Or at least I think he’d like you to be.’

  ‘Then I’ll do my best to appear so,’ Brunetti said. ‘I’d hate to disappoint him just as he’s going off on vacation.’

  ‘It’s not a vacation, sir,’ she said in a voice laden with reprimand. ‘It’s a conference about new methods of crime prevention,’ she insisted, making no mention of the details of the invitation.

  ‘In London,’ Brunetti added.

  ‘In London,’ she confirmed.

  ‘In English,’ Brunetti said.

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed in that language.

  ‘Which the Vice-Questore speaks as well as he speaks Finnish.’

  ‘Probably better than Finnish. He can say, “Bond Street”, “Oxford Street”, and “The Dorchester”.’


  ‘And “The Ritz”,’ Brunetti suggested. ‘Don’t forget that.’

  ‘You’ve discussed this with him?’ she asked.

  ‘Which, the conference or his English?’

  ‘The conference and who should go.’

  ‘I didn’t want to waste the time. He told me a few weeks ago that he was going, and before I could raise the question of the language, he told me that his wife had agreed to go along as interpreter.’

  ‘He never told me that,’ Signorina Elettra said, barely disguising her surprise and, he thought, irritation. ‘Does she speak English?’

  ‘As well as he,’ Brunetti said and turned to knock at Patta’s door.

  The Vice-Questore, as always when in the act of mistreating Brunetti – to whom the invitation had been addressed – cast himself in the role of the injured party. To create the proper visual setting for this, he chose to remain seated at his desk, putting himself lower than Brunetti.

  ‘Where have you been for the last few days?’ he asked as soon as he saw Brunetti, who recognized the technique of the pre-emptive strike. Patta himself, wearing a grey suit Brunetti had never seen before, looked as though he’d been spending the last few days getting ready for his trip to London. His greying hair was freshly cut, and his face wore the early summer glow that comes from the careful attention of tanning lamps. As ever, Brunetti was struck by how absolutely right Patta looked for the job of senior police official; senior anything, for that matter.