by Donna Leon
From what Brunetti could make of the euphemistic language in the file, at the time of his resignation, Targhetta had been serving as an operator assigned to answering anonymous calls that came in to report cases of tax evasion. He had made an error in reporting one of the calls: the Finanza maintained it was one of commission, while Targhetta insisted it had been one of omission. The Guardia di Finanza had eliminated the necessity of deciding which by offering Targhetta the opportunity to leave the service, an offer he had accepted, though he left without a pension.
Enclosed was a cassette tape, labelled with a date that Brunetti took to be the day of the call that had precipitated events. Stapled to the inside of the folder was a pile of papers headed with the same date: a glance suggested it was a transcript of the calls. He took the tape down to one of the rooms where recordings were made of interrogations. He slipped the tape into the recorder and pushed ‘Play’. He opened the file.
There followed a long call, transcribed on the first page, in which a woman said she wanted to report her husband, a butcher, for not fully declaring his income. Her accent was pure Giudecca, and the way she spoke of her husband suggested decades of resentment. All doubt of her motivation disappeared when she lost control and began screaming that this would settle him and ‘quella puttana di Lucia Mazotti’. Some of her wilder accusations were noted only by a modest line of asterisks.
The next calls were from old women who said they had not been given ricevute fiscali by their newsagents, only to be told, with great patience on Targhetta’s part, Brunetti had to admit, that newsagents didn’t have to give receipts. Targhetta was careful to thank both of them for doing their civic duty, though the weariness with which he did so was clear, at least to Brunetti.
‘Guardia di Finanza,’ Brunetti listened to Targhetta’s by now familiar voice say.
‘Is this the right number to call?’ a man’s voice asked in heavy Veneziano.
Brunetti had noticed, in the previous calls, that Targhetta always answered in Italian, but if his caller spoke in Veneziano, he slipped into dialect to make them feel more comfortable. He did so now, asking, ‘What did you want to call about, sir?’
‘About someone who isn’t paying taxes.’
‘Yes, this is the right number.’
‘Good, then I want you to take his name.’
‘Yes, sir?’ Targetta asked and paused for the response.
‘Spadini, Vittorio Spadini. From Burano.’
There was a longer pause, then Targhetta said, without any trace of a Venetian accent, his voice far more formal and official, ‘Could you tell me more about this, sir?’
‘That bastard Spadini’s fishing up millions every day,’ the man said, voice tight with malice or anger. ‘And he never pays a lira in taxes. It’s all black, so it’s never taxed. Everything he earns is black.’
In the past, Targhetta had asked for more information about the person being accused: where they lived, what sort of business they had. This time, instead, he asked, ‘Could you give me your name, sir?’ He had never done that before.
‘I thought this line was supposed to be anonymous?’ the caller said, immediately suspicious.
‘It usually is, sir, but in a case of something like this – you did talk of millions, didn’t you? – we prefer to be a bit more certain about just who is making the denuncia.’
‘Well, I’m not going to give you my name,’ the man said hotly. ‘But you better take down that bastard’s name. All you’ve got to do is go to the fish warehouse in Chioggia when he unloads, and you’ll see how much he’s caught, and you’ll see who’s buying it.’
‘I’m afraid we can’t do that unless I have your name, sir.’
‘You don’t need my name, you bastard. It’s Spadini you should be after.’ With that, the man slammed down the phone.
There was a brief silence, and then he heard Targhetta say, ‘Guardia di Finanza’.
Brunetti switched off the tape recorder and looked down at the transcript. There, clearly typed out in the manner of a play script, were all of the calls, the characters’ names given as ‘Finanziere Targhetta’ and ‘Cittadino.’
He flipped through the remaining pages and saw that there were three more calls. He switched the tape back on and, following the script, listened to all of them, through to the end of both transcript and tape.
He read the last page again and turned it over, expecting to find the blank inside cover of the file. Instead he found, written by hand, a small group of separate sheets held together by a paper clip. Each had spaces at the top for date, time, name of the accused, and at the bottom a small space for the initials of the officer taking the call. He counted them and found only six. He read the name of the butcher, of the two newsagents, and the names given during the three final calls, but there was no record of the call about Spadini. Seven calls on the tape and seven calls in the transcript, but only six calls listed on the separate invoices, each of them carefully initialled ‘CT’ at the bottom.
He pushed ‘REWIND’ and, starting and stopping, eventually found the beginning of the call that did not appear on the transcript. He played it through, listening attentively to the voice of the caller. His mother would have identified the accent instantly; if it had been from anywhere on the main island, she probably could have told him which sestiere the man came from. The best Brunetti could determine was that it came from one of the islands, perhaps from Pellestrina. He played the tape again and listened to the surprise in Targhetta’s voice when he heard Spadini’s name. He had been unable to disguise it, and it was then that he had begun to discourage the caller: there was no other way to describe his manner on the tape. The more the caller attempted to provide information, the more insistently did Targhetta tell him that he was obliged to give his name, a demand that was sure to drive off any witness, especially one dealing with the Guardia di Finanza.
He realized how wise the Finanza was to record the calls. So this was how the watchers were watched. Targhetta, unaware that the call was being recorded, would only have to neglect to fill out the form to believe that he had removed all trace of the call. When confronted with the recording of the missing call, if that was the way the Finanza did things, all he would have to do is say the form must have been lost. Obviously, they had not believed him, for how else could his sudden departure from the service after ten years be explained?
But could someone who had worked for the Finanza for a decade have been so stupid as not to realize that the calls were recorded? Brunetti knew, from long experience, that even when phone calls were recorded, they were not necessarily listened to again. Targhetta may well have put his trust in bureaucratic incompetence and hoped that his lapse would pass unnoticed, or, from the sound of his voice, he may have been so surprised that he had responded instinctively and tried to silence the caller without any thought of the consequences.
There remained only one piece of the puzzle or, thought Brunetti as he pulled out the paper on which he’d drawn lines between the names of the people involved, only one line to draw: the one connecting Targhetta and Spadini. That was easy: geometry had long ago taught him that a straight line was the shortest distance between two points. But that did not get him any closer to understanding the connection: that would depend upon his penetrating the silence of the Pellestrinotti.
23
AS SOON AS he decided that he needed to speak to Targhetta, Brunetti spent some time debating whether to call Paola and tell her he was going out to Pellestrina. He didn’t want her to question his motives, nor was he much inclined to examine them himself. Better, then, just to have Montisi take him out and have done with it.
He didn’t want to take Vianello, though he did not bother to analyse his motives for that decision. He did, however, rewind the tape, stick it in his pocket, and stop in the officers’ room to borrow a small battery-powered tape recorder, just on the off chance that he might find someone on Pellestrina who would be willing to listen to it and perhaps identify the
voice of the caller.
The day had turned cooler, and there were dark clouds to the north, enough to give him reason to hope that rain might finally be on the way. He remained below deck in the cabin on the way out, reading through yesterday’s newspaper and a boating magazine one of the pilots had left behind. By the time they reached Pellestrina, he had learned a great deal about 55 horsepower motors, but nothing further about Carlo Targhetta or Vittorio Spadini.
As they were pulling in, he went upstairs and joined Montisi in the cabin.
Glancing back towards the city, Montisi said, ‘I don’t like this.’
‘What, coming out here?’ Brunetti asked.
‘No, the feel of the day.’
‘What does that mean?’ Brunetti asked, suddenly impatient with sailors and their lore.
‘The way the air feels. And the wind. It feels like bora.’
The newspaper had forecast fair weather and rising temperatures. Brunetti told him this but Montisi snorted in disgust. ‘Just feel it,’ he insisted. ‘That’s bora. We shouldn’t be out here.’
Brunetti looked ahead of them and saw bright sun dancing on still water. He stepped out of the cabin as the boat pulled up to the dock. The air was still, and when Montisi killed the motor, not a sound disturbed the peaceful silence of the day.
Brunetti jumped off and moored the boat, feeling quite proud of being able to do so. He left Montisi to find other old sailors to discuss the weather with and went to the village and the restaurant where his investigation had begun.
When he entered, there was a moment’s pause in the conversation, but then it jump-started itself as everyone attempted to fill the silence created by the arrival of a commissario of police. Brunetti went to the counter and asked for a glass of white wine, looking around him while he waited for it, not smiling but not looking as if he had any particular reason to be there.
He nodded to the barman when he brought the wine and held up a hand to prevent his turning away. ‘Do you know Carlo Targhetta?’ he asked, deciding to waste no more time in futile attempts to outwit the Pellestrinotti.
The barman tilted his chin to one side to give every indication that he was considering the question, then said, ‘No, sir. Never heard of him.’
Before Brunetti could turn to the old man standing beside him at the counter, the barman announced, in a voice loud enough to be heard by everyone in the room, ‘Anyone here know someone called Carlo Targhetta?’
A chorus repeated the same response, ‘No, sir. Never heard of him.’ With that, normal conversation resumed, though Brunetti registered the quick exchange of complicit smiles.
He directed his attention to his wine and reached idly for that day’s Gazzettino, lying folded on the bar. He flipped it to the front page and started to read the headlines. Gradually, he felt the room’s attention wander away from him, especially at the entrance of a beefy-faced man who came in saying that it had started to rain.
He spread the paper on the bar. With his left hand, he pulled the tape recorder from his pocket and slipped it under the newspaper. He’d run the tape back to the place where the caller had accused Spadini directly of a crime and his voice had grown heated and loud. He lifted the corner to look at the recorder. He thumbed the VOLUME dial, set his right forefinger on the PLAY button, and let the paper fall back into place. Keeping his finger on the button, he raised his glass and took a sip, his attention seemingly devoted entirely to the newspaper.
Three men went outside to see about the rain, and the men left in the bar grew quiet, waiting for them to come back and report.
Brunetti pressed PLAY. ‘That bastard Spadini’s fishing up millions every day. And he never pays a lira in taxes. It’s all black. Everything he earns is black.’
The glass of wine fell from the hand of the old man standing beside him and shattered on the floor. ‘Maria Santissima,’ he exclaimed. ‘It’s Bottin. He’s not dead.’
His voice drowned out the next exchange on the tape, but the entire bar heard Targhetta say, ‘. . . we prefer to be a bit more certain about just who is making the denuncia.’
‘Oh, Dio,’ said the old man, reaching a feeble hand towards the counter and propping his weight on it. ‘It’s Carlo.’
Brunetti slipped his hand under the newspaper and pushed the STOP button. The loud click rang out in the silence, wounding it but not altering it. The old man was silent, though his lips continued to move in muttered prayer or protest.
The door opened and the three men came back, their shoulders dark and their heads wet with the rain. Joyously, like children let out of school early, they cried out, ‘It’s raining, it’s raining,’ then fell silent when they sensed the charged atmosphere in the room.
‘What’s wrong?’ one of them asked, putting the question to no one in particular.
Brunetti said, in an entirely normal voice, ‘They told me about Bottin and Spadini.’
The man he addressed looked around the bar for confirmation and found it in the averted eyes and continuing silence. He shook his arms, spraying water around him, then went to the bar and said, ‘Give me a grappa, Piero.’
The barman set it down in front of him without speaking.
Talk gradually resumed, but quietly. Brunetti signalled to the waiter and pointed to the old man beside him. He brought a glass of white wine for the old man, who took it and drank it down like water, replacing the glass loudly on the bar. Brunetti nodded, and the waiter refilled it. Turning to face him, Brunetti asked, ‘Targhetta?’
‘His nephew,’ the old man said and swallowed the second glass.
‘Spadini’s?’
The man looked at Brunetti and held his glass out to the waiter, who filled it again. Instead of drinking it, the old man set it on the bar and stared into it. He had the rheumy eyes of the habitual drinker, the man who woke up to wine and went to sleep with it on his tongue.
‘Where’s Targhetta now?’ Brunetti asked, folding the paper, as if this were the least interesting question he could think of.
‘Fishing, probably, with his uncle. I saw them at the dock a half-hour ago.’ His lips puckered in a fisherman’s disapproval, and Brunetti waited for him, like Montisi, to say something about the bora and not liking the feel of the air, but instead he said, ‘Probably took that woman again. Bad luck, having a woman on a boat.’
Brunetti’s hand tightened on the paper. ‘What woman?’ he forced himself to ask in a neutral voice.
‘That one he’s been fucking. The one from Venice.’
‘Ah,’ Brunetti said, forcing his hand to release the paper and pick up his glass of wine. He took a sip, nodded his approval at the old man and then at the waiter. He made himself look at the newspaper again, as if utterly uninterested in this woman from Venice and what Carlo was doing to her, concerned only with yesterday’s soccer results.
Light flashed at the windows, and after a moment thunder followed, so loud as to set the bottles at the back of the bar rattling. The door opened and another man slipped in, wet as an otter. When he paused at the open door, all sound inside the bar was drowned by the sound of the rain, battering down, exploding from the gutters. Another flash of light streamed in, and everyone in the bar braced themselves for the explosion that must follow. When it came it lingered for long seconds and, just as it began to roll away, was replaced by the fierce shriek of the bora, sweeping down from the north. Even inside the bar, they were aware of the sudden drop in temperature.
‘Where would they be?’ Brunetti asked the old man.
He drank the wine and gave Brunetti an inquisitive look. Brunetti nodded at the waiter, and again the glass was filled. Before he touched it, the old man said, ‘They haven’t been out long. Probably try to get away from this.’ With his chin, he indicated the door and, beyond it, the lightning, wind and rain that had turned the day to chaos.
‘How?’ Brunetti asked, reining in his rising fear and careful to make it sound as if he was only mildly curious about the ways of the laguna and the men
who fished upon its waters.
The old man turned his attention to the man to his right, the first to come in from the rain. ‘Marco,’ he asked, ‘where would Vittorio go?’
Brunetti was conscious of the strained silence as all of the fishermen waited to see who would be the next to follow the old man in breaking ranks by talking to the policeman.
The man questioned looked down into his glass, and some instinct prevented Brunetti from signalling the waiter to fill it. Instead, he stood quietly and waited for an answer.
The man addressed as Marco looked at the old man. After all, it was he who had asked the question. If the policeman heard the answer, it wasn’t his fault. ‘I think he’d try for Chioggia.’
A man at a far table said, in quite an ordinary voice,’ He’d never make it, not with the bora, and not with the tide behind it. If he went anywhere near the Porto di Chioggia, he’d be taken out to sea.’ No one objected, no one spoke; the only sounds were of the rain and wind, now a single, overwhelming noise.
From another table, a man’s voice said, ‘Vittorio’s a bastard, but he’ll know what to do.’
Another half-rose to his feet and flung out his hand in the direction of the door. ‘No one knows what to do in that.’ His angry tones were immediately answered by another bolt of lightning, closer now, swiftly followed by a cascade of thunder.
When the sound diminished to the mere pounding of rain, a man near the door said, ‘If it gets worse, he’d probably try to run ashore down at the Riserva.’ Brunetti had spent a good deal of time studying the map, having things on it pointed out to him by Montisi, so he knew this had to be the Riserva di Ca’ Roman, a barren oblong of sandy soil that hung like a pendant drop from the southern end of the long, thin finger of Pellestrina.
‘Run aground?’ Brunetti asked him.
The man began to answer, but his voice was lost in a tremendous crash of thunder that seemed to shake the entire building. When silence finally returned, he tried again. ‘There’s no place to dock, but he could probably run his boat up on to the beach.’
