Anonymous Venetian

by Donna Leon

  ‘What about getting back to Venice?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘Depends on what happens, I suppose.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose.’

  ‘I’ll see if I can find anyone who wants to be in the back of the car,’ Vianello said.

  ‘Who’s on night duty this week?’

  ‘Riverre and Alvise.’

  ‘Oh,’ Brunetti said simply, but the sound spoke volumes.

  ‘That’s who’s on the roster.’

  ‘I guess you better put them in the houses.’ Neither one of them wanted to say that, put in the back of a car, either one of them would simply fall asleep. Of course, there was equal possibility of that if they were put in a house, but perhaps the owners would be sufficiently curious to help keep them awake.

  ‘What about the others? Do you think you’ll be able to get volunteers?’

  ‘There’ll be no trouble,’ Vianello assured him. ‘Rallo will want to come, and I’ll ask Maria Nardi. Her husband is on some sort of training programme in Milano for a week, so she might like to do it. Besides, it’s overtime. Isn’t it?’

  Brunetti nodded, then added, ‘Vianello, make it clear to them that there might be some danger involved.’

  ‘Danger? In Mestre?’ Vianello asked with a laugh, dismissing the idea, then added, ‘Do you want to carry a radio?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so, not with four of you so close.’

  ‘Well, two of us, at any rate,’ Vianello corrected him, saving Brunetti the embarrassment of having to speak slightingly of the lower orders.

  ‘If we’re going to be up all night with this, then I suppose we ought to be able to go home for a while,’ Brunetti said, looking at his watch.

  ‘Then I’ll see you there, sir,’ Vianello said and stood.

  Just as Vianello had said, there was no train that would get Brunetti to the Mestre station at that hour, so he contented himself with taking the Number One bus and getting out, the only passenger at that hour, across from the Mestre train station.

  He walked up the steps into the station then down again through the tunnel that cut under the train tracks and came up on the other side. He emerged on a quiet, tree-lined street, behind him the well-lit parking lot, filled now with cars parked there for the night. The street in front of him was lined on both sides with parked cars; light filtered down on to them from the few street lights above. Brunetti stayed on the right side of the street, where there were fewer trees and, consequently, more light. He walked up to the first corner and paused, looking all round him. About four cars down, on the other side of the street, he saw a couple in a fierce embrace, but the man’s head was obscured by the woman’s, so he could not tell if it was Vianello or some other married man having a stolen hour.

  He looked down the street to the left, studying the houses that lined it on both sides. At the front of one, about half-way down the block, the dim grey light of a television filtered out through the lower windows; the rest were dark. Riverre and Alvise would be at the windows of two of those houses, but he felt no desire to look up in their direction: he was afraid they might take it as a signal of some sort and come rushing to his aid.

  He turned into the street, looking for a light-blue Panda on the right-hand side. He walked to the end of the street, seeing no car that fitted that description, turned, and came back. Nothing. He noticed that, up at the corner, there was a large rubbish bin, and he crossed to the other side, thinking again of those pictures he had seen of what little remained of Judge Falcone’s vehicle. A car turned into the road, coming from the roundabout, and slowed, heading towards Brunetti. He backed between the protection of two parked cars, but it drove past and went into the parking lot. The driver got out, locked his door, and disappeared into the tunnel to the station.

  After ten minutes, Brunetti walked down the same street again, this time looking into each of the parked cars. One of them had a blanket on the floor in the back, and, conscious of how hot it was even out here in the open, Brunetti felt a surge of sympathy for whoever had been drafted in to he under that blanket.

  Half an hour passed, at the end of which Brunetti decided that Crespo wasn’t going to show up. He went back to the road junction and turned left, down to where the couple in the front seat were still engaged in their exchange of intimacies. When he got to the car, Brunetti rapped with his knuckles on the hood, and Vianello pulled himself away from a red-faced Officer Maria Nardi and got out of the car.

  ‘Nothing,’ Brunetti said, looking down at his watch. ‘It’s almost two.’

  ‘All right,’ Vianello said, his disappointment audible. ‘Let’s go back.’ He ducked his head into the car and said to the female officer, ‘Call Riverre and Alvise and tell them to follow us back.’

  ‘What about the man in the car?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘Riverre and Alvise drove out with him. They’ll just come out and meet at the car and drive home.’

  Inside the car, Officer Nardi spoke on the radio, telling the two other officers that no one had shown up, and they were going back to Venice. She looked up at Vianello. ‘All right, Sergeant. They’ll be out in a few minutes.’ Saying that, she got out of the car and opened the back door.

  ‘No, stay there,’ Brunetti said, ‘I’ll sit in the back.’

  ‘That’s all right, Commissario,’ she said with a shy smile, then added, ‘Besides, I’d like the chance to have a bit of distance between me and the sergeant.’ She got in and closed the door.

  Brunetti and Vianello exchanged a glance over the roof of the car. Vianello’s smile was sheepish. They climbed in. Vianello leaned forward and turned the key. The engine sprang to life and a small buzzer sounded.

  ‘What’s that?’ Brunetti asked. For Brunetti, as for most Venetians, cars were alien territory.

  ‘Seat-belt warning,’ Vianello said, pulling his down across his chest and latching it by the gear shift.

  Brunetti did nothing. The buzzer continued to sound.

  ‘Can’t you turn that thing off, Vianello?’

  ‘It’ll go off by itself if you’ll put your seat belt on.’

  Brunetti muttered something about not liking to have machines tell him what to do, but he latched his seat belt, and then he muttered something about this being more of Vianello’s ecological nonsense. Pretending not to hear, Vianello put the car into gear, and they pulled away from the kerb. At the end of the street, they waited a few minutes until the other car drew up behind them. Officer Riverre sat at the wheel, Alvise beside him, and when Brunetti turned to signal to them, he could see a third form in the back, head leaning against the seat.

  The streets were virtually empty at this hour, and they were quickly back on to the road that led to the Ponte della Liberta.

  ‘What do you think happened?’ Vianello asked.

  ‘I thought it had been set up to threaten me in some way, but maybe I was wrong and Crespo really wanted to see me.’

  ‘So what will you do now?’

  ‘I’ll go and see him tomorrow and see what kept him from coming tonight.’

  They pulled on to the bridge and saw the lights of the city ahead of them. Flat black water stretched out on either side, speckled by lights on the left from the distant islands of Murano and Burano. Vianello drove faster, eager to get to the garage and then home. All of them felt tired, let down. The second car, following close behind them, suddenly pulled out into the centre lane, and Riverre sped past them, Alvise leaning out the window and waving happily to them.

  Seeing them, Officer Nardi leaned forward and put her hand on Vianello’s shoulder and started to speak. ‘Sergeant,’ she began and then stopped abruptly as her eyes were pulled up to the rear-view mirror, in which a pair of blinding lights had suddenly appeared. Her fingers tightened on his shoulder and she had time only to shout out, ‘Be careful,’ before the car behind them swerved to the left, pulled abreast and then ahead of them, and then quite deliberately crashed into their left front fender. The force of the impact hurled them to t
he right, slamming them into the guard rail at the side of the bridge.

  Vianello pulled the wheel to the left, but he reacted too slowly, and the rear of the car swung out to the left, carrying them into the middle of the road. Another car coming from behind them at an insane velocity cut to their right and slipped into the space now opened up between them and the guard rail, and then their rear slammed into the guard rail on the left, and they were spun in another half circle, coming to rest in the middle of the road, facing back towards Mestre.

  Dazed, not aware of whether he was in pain or not, Brunetti stared through the shattered windshield and saw only the radiant refraction of the headlights that approached them. One set swished past them on the right and then another. He turned to the left and saw Vianello slumped forward against his seat belt. Brunetti reached down and released his own, shifted around in his seat, and grabbed Vianello’s shoulder. ‘Lorenzo, are you all right?’

  The sergeant’s eyes opened and he turned to face Brunetti. ‘I think so.’ Brunetti leaned down and un-snapped the other seat belt; Vianello remained upright.

  ‘Come on,’ Brunetti said, reaching for the door on his side. ‘Get out of the car or one of those maniacs will slam into us.’ He pointed through what was left of the windshield at the lights that kept approaching from the direction of Mestre.

  ‘Let me call Riverre,’ Vianello said, leaning forward towards the radio.

  ‘No. Cars have passed. They’ll report it to the Carabinieri in Piazzale Roma.’ As if in proof of his words, he heard the first whine of a siren from the other end of the bridge and saw the flashing blue lights as the Carabinieri sped down the wrong side of the bridge to reach them.

  Brunetti got out and leaned down to open the back door. Officer Junior Grade Maria Nardi lay on the back seat of the car, her neck bent at a strange and unnatural angle.

  * * * *

  Chapter Twenty

  The aftermath of the incident was both predictable and depressing. Neither of them had noticed what kind of car hit them, not even the colour or general size, though it must have been a large one to have thrust them to the side with such force. No other cars had been close enough to them to see what happened, or, if they had been, no one reported it to the police. It was clear that the car, after hitting them, had merely continued into Piazzale Roma, turned, and sped back across to the mainland even before the Carabinieri had been alerted.

  Officer Nardi was pronounced dead at the scene, her body taken to the ospedale civile for an autopsy that would merely confirm what was clearly visible from the angle at which her head rested.

  ‘She was only twenty-three,’ Vianello said, avoiding Brunetti’s glance. ‘They’d been married six months. Her husband’s away on some sort of computer training course. That’s all she kept talking about in the car, how she couldn’t wait until Franco got home, how much she missed him. We sat like that for an hour, face to face, and all she did was talk about her Franco. She was just a kid.’

  Brunetti could find nothing to say.

  ‘If I had made her wear her seat belt, she’d still be alive.’

  ‘Lorenzo, stop it,’ Brunetti said, voice rough, but not with anger. They were back in the Questura by then, sitting in Vianello’s office while they waited for their reports of the incident to be typed out so that they could sign them and go home. ‘We can go on all night like that. I shouldn’t have gone to meet Crespo. I should have seen that it was too easy, should have been suspicious when nothing happened in Mestre. Next we’ll be saying we should have come back in an armoured car.’

  Vianello sat beside his desk, looking past Brunetti. There was a large bump on the left side of his forehead, and the skin around it was turning blue. ‘But we did what we did, or we didn’t do what we didn’t do, and still she’s dead,’ Vianello said in a flat voice.

  Brunetti leaned forward and touched the other man’s arm. ‘Lorenzo, we didn’t kill her. The men or the man in that car did. There’s nothing we can do except try to find them.’

  ‘That’s not going to help Maria, is it?’ Vianello asked bitterly.

  ‘Nothing on God’s earth can ever help Maria Nardi again, Lorenzo. We both know that. But I want the men in that car, and I want whoever sent them.’

  Vianello nodded, but he had nothing to say to this. ‘What about her husband?’ Vianello asked.

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘Will you call him?’ There was something other than curiosity in Vianello’s voice. ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Where is he?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘At the Hotel Impero in Milano.’

  Brunetti nodded. ‘I’ll call him in the morning. There’s no sense in calling him now, to add time to his suffering.’

  A uniformed officer came into the office carrying the originals of their statements and two Xerox copies of each. Both men sat patiently and read through the typescripts and then each signed the original and both copies and handed them back to the officer. When he was gone, Brunetti got to his feet and said, ‘I think it’s time to go home, Lorenzo. It’s after four. Did you call Nadia?’

  Vianello nodded. He had called her from the Questura an hour before. ‘It was the only job Maria could get. Her father was a policeman, so someone pulled strings for her, and she got the job. Do you know what she really wanted to do, Commissario?’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about this, Lorenzo.’

  ‘Do you know what she really wanted to do?’

  ‘Lorenzo,’ Brunetti said in a low voice, warning him.

  ‘She wanted to be an elementary schoolteacher, but she knew there were no jobs, so she joined the police.’

  All this time, they had been walking slowly down the steps and now walked across the lobby towards the double doors. The uniformed officer on guard, seeing Brunetti, saluted. The two men stepped outside, and from across the canal, from the trees in Campo San Lorenzo, came the almost deafening chorus of birds as they courted the dawn. It was no longer the full dark of night, but the light was so far only a suggestion, one that turned the world of thick impenetrability into one of infinite possibility.

  They stood on the edge of the canal, looking over towards the trees, their eyes drawn by what their ears perceived. Both had their hands in their pockets and both felt the sudden chill that lay in the air before dawn.

  ‘This shouldn’t happen,’ Vianello said. Then, turning off to the right and his way home, he said, ’Arrivederci, Commissario,’ and walked away.

  Brunetti turned the other way and started back towards Rialto and the streets that would take him home. They’d killed her as though she were a fly; they had stretched out their hands to crush him and, instead, had snapped off her life. Just like that. One minute, she was a young woman, leaning forward to say something to a friend, hand placed lightly, confidently, affectionately on his arm, mouth poised to speak. What had she wanted to say? Was it a joke? Did she want to tell Vianello she had been kidding back there, when she got into the car? Or had it been something about Franco, some final word of longing? No one would ever know. The fleeting thought had died with her.

  He would call Franco, but not yet. Let the young man sleep now, before great pain. Brunetti knew that he couldn’t, not now, tell the young man of Maria’s last hour in the car with Vianello; he couldn’t bear to say it. Later, Brunetti would tell him, for it was then that the young man would be able to hear it, only then, after great pain.

  When he got to Rialto, he looked off to the left and saw that a vaporetto was approaching the stop, and it was that coincidence that decided him. He hurried to the stop and got on to the boat, took it to the station, and caught the morning’s first train across the causeway. Gallo, he knew, would not be at the Questura, so he took a taxi from the Mestre station, giving the driver Crespo’s address.

  The daylight had come when he wasn’t paying attention, and with it had come the heat, perhaps worse here in this city of pavement and cement, roads and high-rise buildings. Brunetti almost welcomed the mounting dis
comfort of the temperature and humidity; it distracted him from what he had seen that night and from what he was beginning to fear he would see at Crespo’s apartment.

  As it had been the last time, the elevator was air-conditioned, already necessary even at this hour. He pushed the button and rose quickly and silently to the seventh floor. He rang Crespo’s doorbell, but this time there was no response from beyond it. He rang again and then again, holding his finger on the bell for long seconds. No footsteps, no voices, no sound of life.

  He took out his wallet and removed from it a small sliver of metal. Vianello had once spent an entire afternoon teaching him how to do this, and, even though he hadn’t been an especially good pupil, it took him less than ten seconds to open Crespo’s door. He stepped across the threshold, saying, ‘Signor Crespo? Your door is open. Are you in here?’ Caution never hurt.