A Sea of Troubles

by Donna Leon

  At the Questura, he went first to the room used by the officers and there found Montisi, who often opted to work the quieter Sunday shift. The pilot was sitting in the strangely empty officers’ room, looking idly at a ragged copy of Il Gazzetta dello Sport in a manner that suggested he would be just as interested in staring at the wall. Brunetti spread the map on top of the newspaper, repeated what the fisherman said about where he found Signora Follini, and asked the pilot to explain what could have happened to have brought her there.

  After studying the map for a while, Montisi asked, ‘How bad was she?’

  She was dead, Brunetti thought. How much worse could things be for her? ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘You saw her body, didn’t you?’ the pilot asked patiently.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How much damage had been done?’

  ‘Her eyes were gone.’

  Montisi nodded, as if he’d expected this. ‘How about her arms and legs? Did it look like she’d been dragged on the bottom?’

  Brunetti, with some reluctance, cast his memory back to the last he’d seen of Signora Follini. ‘She was wearing a sweater and slacks, so I couldn’t see her arms or legs. But I didn’t notice any damage to her hands or face. Aside from the eyes.’

  Montisi grunted and bent over the map. ‘They brought her in about eight, didn’t they?’

  ‘That’s when the call reached me.’ Brunetti was surprised to realize that, even with the pilot, he didn’t mention that the call had come from Pucetti. Perhaps this was the beginning of real paranoia.

  ‘You don’t have any idea of when she went in?’

  ‘No.’

  Montisi pushed himself up from the desk and went over to a glass-fronted bookcase, a relic from former days. He pulled open the door and took down a thin, paper-covered book, flipped it open, ran his forefinger down a page, turned it, did the same with the next, and then the next. He found what he was searching for, studied it, then shut the book and put it back in the case.

  When he returned to the desk, he said, ‘I need to know how long she was in the water. She could have drifted out there from just about anywhere: Chioggia, Pellestrina, even from one of the other channels if she was dumped over the side.’ He paused, then added, ‘The tide was running strong last night because of the full moon, and it was running out when they found her, so she was headed out to sea. That would make it more unlikely that she’d be found.’

  ‘I won’t know when she died until later this morning, after I talk to Rizzardi,’ Brunetti said.

  Montisi indicated that he had heard. ‘If she was in the water for a long time, then whoever did it probably just tossed her in, not planning much of anything. But if she wasn’t dead a long time, then they threw her in some place where they knew the tide would pull her out into the Adriatic. If she got caught in the bottom of the channel, then there wouldn’t have been much of her left when she got there: the tides are strong, and she’d be moving quickly. A lot of her would have been pulled off by the stones down there.’

  Montisi saw the look his superior gave him. ‘It’s not my doing, sir. It’s just the way the tides work.’

  Brunetti thanked him for the information, made no comment on Montisi’s casual assumption that she had been murdered, and went back up to his own office to wait for it to be time to call Rizzardi.

  The doctor, however, called him first to tell him that the cause of death was simple drowning, in salt water.

  ‘Could someone have drowned her?’ he asked.

  Rizzardi’s answer took a moment to come. ‘Possibly. All they’d have to do is push her in from a boat or take her into the water and hold her down. There were no recent signs that she had been tied up.’

  Before Brunetti could ask about that, the pathologist added, ‘From a gynaecological point of view, she was interesting.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘There are signs that, at one time or another, she’d had most of the major venereal diseases, and there are signs of at least one abortion.’

  ‘She was an addict for years,’ Brunetti said. Rizzardi grunted, as though that fact were so obvious as barely to merit mention. ‘And, it seems, a prostitute.’

  ‘That’s what I would have guessed,’ Rizzardi observed with a neutrality that reminded Brunetti of how much he liked the doctor, and why.

  Brunetti went back to the question he had not been able to ask. ‘You said there were no recent signs that she had been tied up. What does that mean?’

  There was a long hesitation but at last the pathologist said, ‘There are signs of binding on the upper arms and ankles. So I’d guess that whoever she was with most recently, if she had a steady man, was interested in rough stuff.’

  ‘What do you mean, “rough stuff?” Rape?’

  ‘No,’ Rizzardi’s answer was immediate.

  ‘Then what else? What else can it be?’

  ‘If sex is rough, it’s not necessarily rape,’ Rizzardi said with sufficient asperity to leave Brunetti waiting for a terse, ‘Commissario’ at the end of the sentence.

  ‘Then what’s rape?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘If either partner is unwilling, then it’s rape.’

  ‘Either?’

  Rizzardi’s voice softened, ‘We live in different times, Guido. The days are gone when rape was something that happened only between a violent man and an innocent woman.’

  Brunetti, father of a teenage daughter, was curious to hear what Dottor Rizzardi had to say on the subject, but he couldn’t see how this would advance his investigation and so he let it go and asked, ‘When did it happen?’

  ‘I’d guess it was two days ago, some time Friday night.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Just believe me, Guido. This isn’t television, where I have to talk about the contents of her stomach or the amount of oxygen in her blood. Two days ago,’ he repeated, ‘probably in the evening, after ten or so. Just believe me and believe it will stand up in court.’

  ‘If it ever gets to court,’ Brunetti said absently, a remark not necessarily intended for the pathologist.

  ‘Well, that’s your job. I just tell you what the physical evidence tells me. You’ve got to figure out why and how and who.’

  ‘Would that it were so easy,’ Brunetti said.

  Rizzardi chose not to discuss the relative demands of their separate professions and ended the call, leaving Brunetti to go out to Pellestrina to begin to try to answer those questions.

  18

  EVEN THOUGH IT was Sunday, Brunetti saw no reason why he and Vianello should not go out to Pellestrina in the hope of discovering something that might contribute to an understanding of Signora Follini’s death. Montisi was not at all unwilling to take them out, insisting that the news in the paper bored him; since he didn’t like soccer much he would just as soon not waste his time reading about the day’s matches.

  As they stood on the deck of the launch at the Giardini stop, motor idling, waiting for Vianello to show up, Brunetti returned to Montisi’s remark and asked, ‘What sports do you like, then?’

  ‘Me?’ Montisi asked, a delaying tactic Brunetti recognized from long familiarity with witnesses who found a question uncomfortable.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you mean to play or to watch, sir?’ Montisi asked evasively.

  By now more curious about the reason for Montisi’s reluctance than to know the answer to the question, Brunetti said, ‘Either.’

  ‘Well, I don’t play sports, not at my age,’ Montisi said in a manner that suggested no further information would be forthcoming.

  ‘But to watch?’ Brunetti asked.

  Montisi looked off down the long, tree-lined viale that led to Corso Garibaldi, eager for a sign of Vianello. Brunetti watched the people walking by. After a long time, Montisi said, ‘Well, sir, it’s not like I know anything about it or I go to any special trouble to watch it, but I like to look at the sheepdog trials, on television. From Scotland, you know.’ When Brunetti said nothing, Monti
si added, ‘And New Zealand.’

  ‘Not much coverage in the Gazzettino, I’d imagine,’ Brunetti observed.

  ‘No,’ the pilot answered, then, looking off towards the arch at the end of the viale, said, ‘There’s Vianello,’ relief audible in his voice.

  The sergeant, today in uniform, waved as he approached and then jumped on deck. Montisi pulled away from the riva and headed towards the now familiar canal that led towards Pellestrina’s peaceful observance of the Lord’s Day.

  The fact that religion is a thing of the past and no longer exerts any real influence on the behaviour of the people of Italy has in no way affected their churchgoing habits, especially in the smaller villages. In fact, some sort of algebraic equation might well be made to connect the smallness of a parish and the proportion of people who attend Mass. It is those gross heathens, the Romans and the Milanese, who do not attend, the millions among whom they live keeping them safe from the eye and tongue of local comment. The Pellestrinotti, however, are conscientious in their attendance at Mass, regular attendance allowing them to keep track of the doings of their neighbours without seeming to pry, for anything that has happened, especially anything that could call into question either virtue or honesty, is sure to be discussed on the steps of the church on Sunday morning.

  It was there that Brunetti and Vianello awaited them, and awaited events, just before twelve, as the eleven o’clock Mass was ending and the villagers of Pellestrina were enjoined one final time to ‘go in peace’.

  Religion, Brunetti reflected, as he stood on the steps, though he had never realized this until Paola had pointed it out to him, always made him uncomfortable. Paola had had what he considered the good fortune to be raised, more or less, entirely free of religion, as neither of her parents had ever bothered attending church functions, at least not those where religious observance of any sort was the reason for attendance. Their social position often required them to attend ceremonies such as the investiture of bishops or cardinals, even the coronation, if that is the proper noun, of the current Pope. But these were ceremonies which had to do not with faith but with power, which quality Paola had always insisted was the real business of the Church.

  Because she was as devoid of faith as she was of the habit of religious observance, she had no grudge against religion, not at all, and viewed the peculiar ways in which people chose to observe its rules with anthropological distance. Brunetti, on the other hand, had been raised by a mother who believed, and though he had ceased to do so well before his adolescence, he nonetheless carried within him the memory of faith, though faith deceived. He knew his attitude to religion was adversarial, if not antagonistic; however much he tried to fight this, he could not escape it or the guilt it caused him. As Paola never ceased to remind him, ‘I’d rather be a pagan suckled on a creed outworn . . .’

  All of this crowded into his head as he stood on the steps of the church, waiting to see who would emerge and what new information they would bring him. An organ pealed out, the purity of its tone speaking more to the quality of the sound system inside the church than to the talent of the organist. The doors swung open, the music swelled and cascaded down the steps, quickly followed by the first members of the congregation. Seeing them, Brunetti was struck, not for the first time, by how haunted the faces of people emerging from church were.

  Had they been a herd of animals, a flock of sheep jumping over a low stile into a new field, their sudden apprehension of a foreign presence could not have been more evident, nor could the wave of uneasiness that rippled from the front to the back of the group as each new member became aware of the potential threat that awaited them on the steps. Had Vianello not been in uniform, Brunetti had no doubt that many of them would have pretended not to have seen the two men. As it was, some of them still made a great business of not noticing them, though Vianello’s white uniform hat was as glaringly evident as the halo on any of the saints left behind them in the church.

  Brunetti, making an attempt not to appear to be doing so, studied the faces of the people who walked past him. At first, he thought he was noticing the effect of their conscious efforts to look both innocent and ignorant, but then he realized that what he was seeing were the effects of a restrictive geography: many of them looked alike. The men were all short, their heads round, eyes close together. Their generally muscular build he attributed to the work most of them did, as must be the case with the sun-scored and deeply lined faces of all of them, even the youngest. The women showed more diversity of feature, though a common thickness seemed to have settled on the bodies of any of them over the age of thirty.

  This morning no one paused on the steps of the church to talk to their neighbours. Instead, the entire congregation responded to some common, urgent summons to their homes. To say they fled is to exaggerate. To say they moved away quickly and nervously is not.

  As the last of them moved off, Brunetti turned to Vianello, hoping to lighten his sense of discomfiture by asking if they should blame their failure on the sergeant’s uniform. Before he could speak, however, he saw Signorina Elettra emerge from the bar that stood to the left of the church. That is, he saw her emerge from the bar briefly and then step partly back inside. She came out again, more slowly this time, and as she walked away from the door, he saw the reason for the delay: a young man held her hand and stood in the doorway, calling back to someone inside the bar. Whatever it was he said, it caused a shout of laughter from more than one voice, at which Signorina Elettra yanked his arm, finally pulling him from the doorway.

  The young man stepped towards her and with what seemed the ease of long familiarity put his arm around her shoulder and pulled her close. There was an utter lack of coquettishness in the way she responded, wrapping her left arm around his waist and falling into step beside him, moving towards the two policemen they had not yet seen. Considerably taller than she, the man leaned his head down and said something; Elettra glanced up at his face and answered with a smile Brunetti had never seen her use before. The man bent and kissed the top of her head, causing them to stop for an instant. When he lifted his head, he saw Brunetti and Vianello on the steps of the church and came to a sudden halt.

  Signorina Elettra, surprised, looked up at the young man’s face, then followed the path of his eyes. The exclamation that emerged from her open mouth was drowned by the first peal of the church bells above them. She recovered her composure long before the twelfth bell struck, by which time she had redirected her attention, momentarily distracted by the unexpected sight of a policeman on the steps of the church, to the serious business of lunch with her new friend.

  After an hour of attempting to interview the people of Pellestrina, Brunetti decided it would be futile until they had all finished their lunch. He and Vianello therefore retreated to the restaurant and had a sober meal which neither of them enjoyed, despite the freshness of the food and the crispness of the wine. They decided to split up, hoping that the sympathy Vianello had established when he spoke to people would be sufficient to overcome the inevitable response to his uniform.

  At the first two houses, Brunetti was told that they did not know Signora Follini at all well, one of the men even going so far as to say that he took his wife down to the Lido in the car once a week: at the local store the prices were far too high and many of the items on sale no longer fresh. The man was an embarrassingly bad liar, a fact which his wife tried to ignore by carefully arranging and rearranging four porcelain figurines which bore a vague resemblance to dachshunds. Brunetti thanked them both, and left.

  No one answered the door at the next two houses; the response might as easily have been the result of choice as absence. The third door, however, was opened almost before he finished knocking, presenting Brunetti with every policeman’s dream: the watchful neighbour. He knew her from a single glance at her tight lips, recognized the type in her eager eyes and forward-leaning posture. The fact that she did not rub her palms together did not detract from the overall impression of satis
faction conveyed by her avid smile: here at last was someone who would share her shock and horror at the terrible deeds, commissions and omissions of which her neighbours were guilty.

  Her hair was coiled in a thin bun at the back of her head, recalcitrant wisps held down by a scented greasy pomade. Though her face was thin, her body was rounded, with no visible waist. Over a black dress that was slowly turning green with age and repeated washing, she wore a soiled apron which, years ago, might once have been covered with flowers.

  ‘Good afternoon, Signora,’ he began, but before he could give his name, she interrupted him.

  ‘I know who you are and why you’re here. It’s about time you came to talk to me.’ She tried to express disapproval, but it was impossible for her to suppress her satisfaction at his arrival.

  ‘I’m sorry, Signora,’ he began, ‘but I wanted to see what the others had to say before talking to you.’

  ‘Come in, come in,’ she said, turning and leading him towards the back of the house. He followed her down a long, damp hallway, at the end of which light came from an open doorway into the kitchen. Here there was no change in temperature, no comforting warmth to compensate for the seaside dankness of the corridor, and no pleasant scents of cooking to cut through the oppressive smell of mould, wool, and something feral and animal he couldn’t recognize.

  She directed him to a seat at the table and, without offering him anything to drink, sat down opposite.

  Brunetti took a small notebook from the side pocket of his jacket, opened it, and uncapped his pen. ‘Your name, Signora?’ he asked, careful to speak Italian and not Veneziano, knowing that the more formal and official this interview could be made to seem, the greater would be her pleasure and sense of gratification at finally having made the authorities aware of the many things she had nursed to her bosom all these thankless years.

  ‘Boscarini,’ she said. ‘Clemenza.’ He made no comment and wrote silently.