A Sea of Troubles

by Donna Leon

  ‘I need to know about tax evasion.’

  ‘Read the newspaper, sir,’ she said, laughing at her own joke. When there was no response, she said, the laughter gone and her voice less rich for that, ‘You can call their main office and ask. There’s a maresciallo there, Resto, who can tell you everything you need to know. Just tell him I told you to call.’

  He had known her long enough to recognize the polite inflexibility he was dealing with. ‘I think it would be better if you handled it, Signorina.’

  All pleasantness dropped from her voice as she said, ‘If you keep this up, sir, I’ll be forced to take a week of real vacation, and I’d rather not do that because it would take a lot of time to adjust the timetables.’

  He wanted to cut it short and simply ask her who the man was he had seen her with yesterday, but their relationship had ill prepared him for such a question, especially in the tone he knew he would be incapable of preventing himself from using. He was her superior, but that hardly gave him the authority to act in loco parentis. Because the difference in their positions precluded the intimacy of friendship, he could not ask her to tell him what was going on between her and the handsome young man he had seen her with. He could not think of a way to express concern that would not sound like jealousy, and he could not explain, even to himself, which it was he actually felt.

  ‘Then tell me if you’ve learned anything,’ he said in a voice he forced himself to make less stern, hoping that this would be viewed as compromise rather than the defeat it so clearly was.

  ‘I’ve learned to tell un sandolo from un puparin, and I’ve learned to spot a school of fish on a sonar screen,’ she said.

  He avoided the lure of sarcasm and asked, voice bland, ‘And about the murders?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she admitted. ‘I’m not from here, so no one talks about them in front of me, at least not to say more than the sort of things people say.’ She sounded wistful at the confession that the Pellestrinotti did not treat her like one of their own, and he wondered about the lure of the place, or the people, that could cause this response. Yet he would not ask.

  ‘What about Pucetti? Has he learned anything?’

  ‘Not that I know, sir. I see him in the bar when he makes me a coffee, but he’s given no sign that he has anything to tell me. I don’t see that there’s any sense in keeping him out here any longer.’

  She was not alone in that sentiment: Brunetti had already had three questions about Pucetti from Lieutenant Scarpa, Patta’s assistant, who had noticed the absence of the young officer’s name from the regular duty roster. With the ease of long habit, Brunetti had lied and told Scarpa that he had assigned the young officer to the investigation of suspected drug shipments at the airport. There was no reason for his lie beyond his instinctive suspicion of the lieutenant and his desire that no one at all should learn of Pucetti’s presence, nor that of Signorina Elettra, on Pellestrina.

  ‘The same goes for you, Signorina,’ he said, aiming at lightness and humour. ‘When are you coming back?’

  ‘I told you, sir. I want to stay a bit longer.’

  Above the cries of the gulls, a man’s voice called out, ‘Elettra.’ He heard her sudden intake of breath, and then she said into the phone, ‘Ti chiamerò. Ciao Silvia,’ and then she was gone, leaving Brunetti strangely unsettled that, in order finally to use the familiar tu with him, she had had to call him Silvia.

  Signorina Elettra had no trouble whatsoever in addressing Carlo as tu. In fact, there were times when she thought that the grammatical intimacy did little justice to the sense of ease and familiarity she felt with him. Not only had something about him seemed familiar when they first met; it had continued to grow as she listened to him talk and came to know him better. They both loved mortadella, but they also loved, of all improbable things, Asterix and Bracio di Ferro, sugarless coffee and Bambi, and both confessed that they had cried when they learned of the death of Moana Pozzi, going on to say they’d never felt so proud to be Italian as when they saw the spontaneous outpouring of sympathy for the death of a porno star.

  They’d spent hours talking during this week, and it had pained her, in the face of his openness, to maintain the lie that she was working for a bank. He’d expanded on his brief history of his life and told her he’d studied economics in Milano before abandoning his studies and returning home when his father died two years ago. There was, as neither of them needed to be told, no suitable work for a man who still had to pass two exams before finishing his degree in economics. She admired his honesty in telling her that he had no choice but to become a fisherman, and she delighted in hearing the pride with which he spoke of his gratitude to his uncle for having offered him a job.

  The work on the boat was so heavy and exhausting that he had twice fallen asleep in her company, once while they sat in their cave on the beach and once as he sat beside her in the bar. She didn’t mind either time, as it gave her the chance to study the small hollow just in front of his ear and the way his face relaxed and grew younger as he slept. She often told him he was too thin, and he replied that it was the work that did it. Though he ate like a wolf, and she had seen proof of this at every meal, she saw no trace of fat on his body. When he moved, he seemed to be composed of flexing lines and muscles; the sight of his bronzed forearm had once brought her close to tears, so beautiful did she find it.

  When she gave it thought, she reminded herself that she was out on Pellestrina in order to listen to what people had to say about murder, not to fall into the orbit of a young man, no matter how beautiful he might be. She was there in the hope of picking up some piece of information that might be of use to the police, not to find herself enmeshed by a man who, if only by virtue of his occupation, could well be one of the people she should be gathering information about.

  All of this fled her mind as Carlo’s arm found its already familiar place on her shoulder, his left hand curving around behind her to come to rest on her arm. She’d already grown accustomed to the way his hand registered his emotions, fingers tightening on her arm when he wanted to emphasize something he said or tapping out a quick rhythm whenever he was preparing to make a joke. Though a number of men had touched her arm, few had managed to touch her heart the way he did. One night, when she’d gone out on the boat with him and his uncle, she’d seen his hands glistening in the light of the full moon, covered with fish guts, scales and blood, his face distant and intense with the need to shovel them from the nets into the refrigerated hold below decks. He’d looked up and seen her watching him and had immediately turned himself into Frankenstein’s monster, arms raised in front of him, fingers quivering menacingly as he tromped, stiff-kneed, towards her.

  She squealed. There is no more delicate word: she squealed in delighted horror and backed up against the rail of the boat. The monster approached, and as he reached her, his hands moved past her head, careful not to touch her hair, and Carlo’s smiling mouth came down softly on her own, lingering there until his uncle shouted from the tiller, ‘She’s not a fish, Carlo. Get back to work.’

  But today, here on the beach, there was no thought of work. His hand tightened on her arm; a gull squawked and took flight as he pulled her, not roughly but not gently, towards him. Their kiss was long and their bodies grew, if possible, closer together. He pulled away from her, moved his hand up and placed it gently on the back of her head, pressing her face into the angle of his shoulder. His hand moved and began gently running up and down, up and down her back then stopped, fingers splayed, at her belt.

  Elettra made a sound, part sigh, like a soprano about to begin an important aria. The tips, only the tips, of his last two fingers slipped below her belt. Her mouth opened and she pressed it against his collarbone, then suddenly she bit at it through the heavy wool of his sweater.

  She moved back from him then, grabbed blindly for his hand, and moved off, quickly, leading him down the beach and towards the entrance to the cave in the jetty.

  20

  BRUN
ETTI, LESS TROUBLED by his passions, but still smarting from being called Silvia, considered the lies he had just told Signorina Elettra. There was no information he wanted from the Guardia di Finanza, and it was true that Vianello had indeed arrived at a point where he could summon up a remarkable amount of information from the computer. The name of the Finanza stuck in his mind, however, reminding him of something else he’d read or been told about them; as always, it had been something unpleasant.

  He got up and stood by his window, his attention drawn down into Campo San Lorenzo, where someone – perhaps the old men who lived in the nursing home there – had constructed multi-storeyed shelters for the stray cats who had haunted the campo for years. He wondered what generation of cat he looked at today, how they were descended from the cats who’d been there when he’d first come to the Questura, more than a decade ago.

  The name crept into his mind with all the grace and limberness of one of those cats: Vittorio Spadini, the man said to be Luisa Follini’s lover. He’d had his boat confiscated by the Finanza, when was it, two years ago? Spadini lived on Burano; it was a fine spring day, a perfect day to go out to Burano for lunch. Brunetti left word with the guard at the door that, if anyone asked for him, he was to say that the Commissario had a dental appointment and would be back after lunch.

  He got off the vaporetto at Mazzorbo and turned to his left, eager for the walk to the centre of Burano, already anticipating lunch at da Romano, where he hadn’t eaten for years. The sun warmed him and his stride lengthened, his body happy to be in the sun, breathing in the iodine-laden air. Dogs romped on the new grass, and old ladies sat in the sun, glad for the added chance at life that springtime promised them. An enormous black dog rose up from beside his master, who sat calmly reading the Gazzettino, and lumbered towards Brunetti. He bent down and offered the back of his hand, which the dog licked happily. Then, tired of Brunetti, he loped back and flopped down again beside his owner.

  Even before he reached the Burano boat station, Brunetti had begun to notice the presence of people, far more than seemed normal for a weekday morning in late spring. When he got to the first of the stalls selling ‘original Burano lace’, most of which he had always thought was imported from Indonesia, he found his way forward blocked by pastel-coloured bodies. He began to skirt around them, confused by how unaware they seemed that other people wanted to walk to actual destinations rather than mill around and regroup idly in the middle of the pavement.

  He turned from the piazza into Via Galuppi and headed for da Romano; he was sure he could reserve a place for one o’clock: a single person was always welcome in a restaurant. At worst, he might have to wait a quarter-hour, but on a day like this it would be a joy to sit at a table in one of the bars that lined the street, sip a prosecco, perhaps read the paper.

  The small tables in front of the restaurant were all occupied; at many of them, three people sat at tables designed for two. He passed through the door and into the restaurant, but before he could speak, one of the waiters, hurrying past with a platter of seafood antipasto, saw him and called out, ‘Siamo al completo.’

  For a moment, it occurred to Brunetti to argue and try to find a place, but when he glanced around inside he abandoned the idea and left. Two other restaurants were similarly full, though it was just after twelve, far too early for a civilized person to want to eat.

  Brunetti had lunch in a bar, standing at the counter and eating toast filled with flabby ham and a slice of cheese that tasted as if it had spent most of its life in plastic. The prosecco was bitter and almost completely flat; even the coffee was bad. Disgusted with his meal and angered by the disappointment of his hopes, he walked dispiritedly down to a small park, bent on sitting in the sun to allow his mood to lighten. He sat on the first bench he saw, put his head back and turned his face to the sun. After a few minutes, his attention was drawn by a furious barking, and he opened his eyes to see again the enormous black dog, which he now recognized as a Newfoundland.

  The dog dashed madly across the grass, aiming at a small blonde girl who stood at the foot of the ladder of a long children’s slide. Seeing the dog approaching, the little girl grabbed the sides of the ladder and began to scramble up. The dog’s owner stood at the other side of the park, its leash hanging helplessly from his hand, calling after the dog.

  Barking wildly, the dog reached the slide. The girl, at the top, screamed in terror, her voice high and piercing. Suddenly the dog launched itself up the ladder, astonishing Brunetti, who watched helplessly as it reached the top. The girl dropped on to the top of the metal slide and sailed down; the dog plunged after her, front legs stiff.

  The little girl sprawled into the sand at the bottom of the slide, and Brunetti leaped to his feet and started to run in her direction, his hand reaching helplessly for the gun he had, again, forgotten to wear. He closed his right hand into a fist and ran on.

  The dog landed just to the left of the little girl, who opened her arms and embraced its enormous head. Its barks were drowned by her shrill laughter, and then all noise stopped as the dog set itself to trying to lick her face off.

  Brunetti stopped, almost pitching headlong on to the grass. He looked across at the dog’s owner, who waved once and started towards him. The little girl got to her feet and ran around to the ladder, the dog following joyously in her wake. Again he followed her up to the top and then down the slide, and at the bottom they fell into the same pink-tongued tableau. Before the owner could reach him, Brunetti turned and walked away, heading for Campo Vigner, the address the phone book listed for Vittorio Spadini.

  The house on the right of Spadini’s was bright red, the one to the left as bright a blue. The Spadini house, however, was a pale pink, bleached clean by years of rain and sun. Brunetti noticed other signs: a curtain falling from the rod at one of the windows, the right side of a shutter all but eaten through by rot. The Buranesi were, if nothing else, a house-proud people, and so it surprised him to see such patent signs of neglect.

  He rang the bell, waited a moment, and rang it again. No one answered, so after a time he went to the red house and rang the bell there. It was opened by a round woman, or at least his first glance suggested that she was round. Short, even shorter than Chiara, she must have weighed more than a hundred kilos, most of which had decided to settle between her breasts and her knees. Her head was round and her face was round; even her little eyes, squeezed tight by the flesh surrounding them, were round.

  ‘Good afternoon, Signora,’ he said. ‘I’m looking for Signor Spadini.’

  ‘So are a lot of people,’ she said with a laugh that set most of her body shaking loosely.

  ‘I beg your pardon.’

  ‘His wife’s looking for him, and his sons are looking for him, and I suppose, if my husband thought there was any chance of getting the money he lent him back, he’d be looking for him, too.’ Again, she laughed and again she shook.

  Brunetti, unsettled by the strange dissonance between what she had to say and the way she chose to say it, asked, ‘When was the last time anyone saw him?’

  ‘Oh, last week some time.’ Then, explaining the casualness with which she said this, she explained, ‘He does this all the time, disappears and doesn’t come home until he’s spent all his money and has to go to work again.’

  ‘As a fisherman?’

  ‘Of course,’ she said, this time not laughing; in fact, her face expressed confusion that this stranger at her door could think there was anything else a man from Burano could do to earn his living.

  ‘And his wife?’

  ‘She works,’ the woman explained. Then, seeing that Brunetti was about to ask for an explanation, added, ‘a cleaner at the elementary school’.

  As if it had suddenly occurred to her that this man, clearly not a Buranesi, though he did speak Veneziano, had not explained the reason for his curiosity, she asked, ‘Why do you want to see him?’

  Brunetti smiled easily and, he hoped, wryly. ‘I suppose I’m in the same po
sition as your husband, Signora. I lent him some money.’ He sighed, shook his head, and spread his hands in a display of mingled disappointment and resignation. ‘Any idea where I might find him?’

  She laughed again, this time at the absurdity of his errand. ‘No, not until he decides to come back. He’s a forest bird, Vittorio: he arrives and disappears when he wants to, and there’s no catching him, no matter how much you might want to.’

  For a moment, Brunetti toyed with the idea of giving her his home number and asking her to call if Spadini returned, but he thought better of it, thanked her for her help, and added, ‘I hope your husband has better luck.’

  All of her shook again at the unlikeliness of this; she smiled, and closed the door, leaving Brunetti to make his way through the milling crowds towards the vaporetto and back to Venice.

  Back at the Questura, he was astonished to find Pucetti, in uniform, standing outside the Ufficio Straniero, keeping an eye on the people who stood in line, waiting for their papers to be processed.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ he asked the equally surprised officer.

  ‘I called in this morning and asked for you, sir,’ Pucetti said, ignoring the people who stood behind him. ‘But I was put through to Lieutenant Scarpa. I think he’d left orders that he was to speak to me whenever I called. He said he had direct orders from the Vice-Questore that I was to report here instantly, in uniform. I tried to tell him I was on a special assignment, but he said it would be grounds for dismissal if I refused to obey.’ Pucetti had the courage not to look away and spoke directly to Brunetti. ‘I didn’t think I could refuse a direct order, sir. So I came back.’

  ‘Have you seen him?’ Brunetti asked, keeping a tight rein on his anger.

  ‘Scarpa?’

  ‘Yes,’ Brunetti answered, refusing to correct Pucetti for omitting the lieutenant’s title. ‘What did he say?’