by Donna Leon
‘And the group?’ Brunetti persisted.
‘They’re booked to eat at some place near San Marco,’ the woman said.
Her husband interrupted, ‘But we didn’t like the sound of it, all that local colour stuff.’
Brunetti had to admit they were probably right. ‘Do you remember the name?’ he asked.
Both shook their heads regretfully; the man spoke for them. ‘I’m sorry, officer, but I don’t.’
‘You said it was your last night here,’ he began, and they nodded. ‘What time do you leave tomorrow morning?’
‘Not until ten,’ she said. ‘We take the train to Rome, and then we fly out on Thursday. Home in time for Christmas.’
Brunetti pulled their bill towards him, added the cost of his own coffee to it, and put fifteen Euros on the table. The man started to object, but Brunetti said, ‘It’s police business,’ and that lie seemed to satisfy the doctor.
‘I can recommend a restaurant,’ he said, and then added, ‘I’d like to come and talk to you, and to these other people, in your hotel tomorrow morning.’
‘Breakfast’s at seven-thirty,’ she explained, ‘and the Petersons are always right on time. I’ll call Lydia Watts, when we get back if you like, and ask her to come down at eight so you can talk to her.’
‘Is your train at ten or do you leave the hotel at ten?’ Brunetti asked, hoping to be spared the need to be on the other side of San Marco by seven-thirty in the morning.
‘The train, so we have to leave the hotel at nine-fifteen. There’s a boat coming to take us to the station.’
Brunetti got to his feet and waited while the man helped his wife into her parka and then put on his own. Wearing them, the old people doubled in size. He led the way to the door, and held it open for them. Outside, in the campo, he pointed to the right and told them to walk along Calle della Mandorla to the Rosa Rossa and to tell the owner that Commissario Brunetti had sent them.
They both repeated his name, and the man said, ‘Sorry, Commissario. I didn’t hear your rank when you came in. I hope you didn’t mind being called officer.’
‘Not at all,’ Brunetti said with a smile. They shook hands, and Brunetti stood and watched them until they had disappeared beyond the corner of the church.
When he returned to the place where the man had been killed, he found a uniformed officer standing beside one of the stanchions. He saw Brunetti approach and saluted. ‘You alone here?’ Brunetti asked. He noticed that all of the sheets and the few bags that had remained had disappeared and wondered if the police had taken them back with them.
‘Yes, sir. Santini said to tell you he didn’t find anything.’ Brunetti assumed this meant not only shell casings, but any traces of whoever might have killed the man.
He looked at the enclosed area and only then noticed an oval mound of sawdust in the centre. Without thinking, he asked, nodding towards it with his chin, ‘What’s that?’
‘It’s the, er, blood, sir,’ the man answered. ‘Because of the cold.’
The image this conjured up was so grotesque that Brunetti refused to consider it; instead, he told the officer to call the Questura at midnight and remind them that he was to be relieved at one. He asked the young man if he wanted to go and have a coffee before the bar closed and then stood and waited for him.
When the uniformed man was back, Brunetti told him that, if he saw any of the other vu cumprà, he was to tell them that their colleague was dead and ask them to call the police if they had any information about him. He made a particular point of telling the officer to make it clear to them that they would not have to give their names or come to the Questura and that all the police wanted from them was information.
Brunetti used his telefonino to call the Questura. He gave his name, repeated what he had just told the crime scene officer, emphasizing that callers were not to be asked their names, and instructed that all calls relating to the shooting were to be recorded. He called the Carabinieri and, unsure of his authority, asked their cooperation in treating any relevant calls they might receive with the same discretion, and when the maresciallo agreed, asked if they would record their calls as well. The maresciallo observed he was very doubtful that any information would be volunteered by the vu cumprà but nevertheless agreed to do so.
There seemed little else for Brunetti to do, so he wished the young officer a good evening, hoped it would get no colder, and, having decided it would be faster to walk, turned towards Rialto and home.
4
Paola sat, mouth agape, fearing that everything she had ever tried to do as a parent had failed miserably and she had produced a monster, not a child. She stared at her daughter, her baby, her bright, shining angel, and wondered if demonic possession were possible.
Up until that point, dinner had been a normal enough affair, at least as normal as a meal can be when it has been delayed by murder. Brunetti, who had been called from home only minutes before they sat down, had phoned a little after nine, saying he would still be some time. The children’s complaints that they were on the verge of expiring from hunger had by then worn down Paola’s resistance, so she fed them, putting her own dinner and Guido’s back in the oven to keep warm. She sat with the children, sipping idly from a glass of prosecco that gradually grew warm and flat as the children ate their way through enormous portions of a pasticcio made of layers of polenta, ragù, and parmigiano. To follow there was only roasted radicchio smothered in stracchino, though Paola marvelled that either one of her children could possibly eat anything else.
‘Why’s he always have to be late?’ Chiara complained as she reached for the radicchio.
‘He’s not always late,’ a literal-minded Paola answered.
‘It seems that way,’ Chiara said, selecting two long stalks and lifting them on to her plate, then carefully spooning melted cheese on top.
‘He said he’d be here as soon as he could.’
‘It’s not like it’s so important or anything, is it? That he has to be so late?’ Chiara asked.
Paola had explained the reason for their father’s absence, and so she found Chiara’s remark not a little strange.
‘I thought I told you someone was killed,’ she said mildly.
‘Yes, but it was only a vu cumprà,’ Chiara said as she picked up her knife.
It was at this remark that Paola’s mouth fell open. She picked up her glass of wine, pretended to take a sip, moved the platter of radicchio towards Raffi, who appeared not to have heard his sister, and asked, ‘What do you mean by, “only”, Chiara?’ Her voice, she was glad to note, was entirely conversational.
‘Just what I said, that it wasn’t one of us,’ her daughter answered.
Paola tried to identify sarcasm or some attempt to provoke her in Chiara’s response, but there was no hint of either. Chiara’s tone, in fact, seemed to echo her own in terms of calm dispassion.
‘By “us”, do you mean Italians or all white people, Chiara?’ she asked.
‘No,’ Chiara said. ‘Europeans.’
‘Ah, of course,’ Paola answered, picking up her glass and toying with the stem for a moment before setting it down, untasted. ‘And where are the borders of Europe?’ she finally asked.
‘What, Mamma?’ asked Chiara, who had been answering a question put to her by Raffi. ‘I didn’t hear you.’
‘I asked where the borders of Europe were.’
‘Oh, you know that, Mamma. It’s in all the books.’ Before Paola could say anything, Chiara asked, ‘Is there any dessert?’
As a young mother, Paola, herself an only child and without any previous experience of small children, had read all the books and manuals that gave modern parents advice on how to treat their children. She had, further, read many books of psychology, and knew that there was a general professional consensus that one should never subject a child to severe criticism until the reasons for their behaviour or words had been explored and examined, and even then, the parent was enjoined to take into consideratio
n the possibility of damaging the developing psyche of the child.
‘That’s the most disgusting, heartless thing I’ve ever heard said at this table, and I am ashamed to have raised a child capable of saying it,’ she said.
Raffi, who had tuned in only when his radar registered his mother’s tone, dropped his fork. Chiara’s mouth fell open in a mirror of her mother’s expression, and for much the same reason: shock and horror that a person so fundamental to her happiness could be capable of such speech. Like her mother, she dismissed even the possibility of diplomacy and demanded, ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘It’s supposed to mean that vu cumpràs are not only anything. You can’t dismiss them as if their deaths don’t matter.’
Chiara heard her mother’s words; more significantly, she felt the force of her mother’s tone, and so she said, ‘That’s not what I meant.’
‘I’ve no idea what you meant, Chiara, but what you said was that the dead man was only a vu cumprà. And you’d have to do a lot of explaining to make me believe that there’s any difference between what those words say and what they mean.’
Chiara set her fork down on her plate and asked, ‘May I go to my room?’
Raffi, his own fork motionless in his hand, turned his head back and forth between them, confused that Chiara had said what she did and stunned by the power of his mother’s response.
‘Yes,’ Paola said.
Chiara stood, quietly pushed her chair back under the table, and left the room. Raffi, who was familiar with his mother’s sense of humour, turned to her, waiting for the one-line remark he was sure would come. Instead, Paola got to her feet and picked up her daughter’s plate. She placed it in the sink, then went into the living room.
Raffi finished his radicchio, resigned himself to the fact that there would be no dessert that night, set his knife and fork neatly parallel on his plate, then took it over to the sink. He went back to his room.
Brunetti returned to this scene half an hour later. Comforted by the scents that filled the entire apartment, he was eager to see his family and talk of things other than violent death. He went into the kitchen and, instead of the family he expected to see eating dessert and eagerly awaiting his return, he found an all-but empty table and dishes stacked in the sink.
He went searching for them in the living room, wondering if there was something interesting on television, impossible as he knew that to be. He found only Paola, lying on the sofa, reading. She looked up when he came in and said, ‘Would you like to eat something, Guido?’
‘Yes, I think I would. But first I’d like a glass of wine and for you to tell me what’s wrong.’ He went back into the kitchen and got a bottle of Falconera and two glasses. He opened the wine, dismissed all the nonsense about leaving it unpoured long enough to breathe, and went back into the living room. He sat down near her feet, set the glasses on the table in front of the sofa, and poured out two large glasses. He leaned towards her and handed her one, then used the same hand to take her left foot. ‘Your feet are cold,’ he said, then pulled a balding old afghan down from the back of the sofa and covered them.
He took a sip large enough to complement the size of the glass and said, ‘All right, what is it?’
‘Chiara complained that you were late, and when I told her it was because someone had been killed, she said that it was only a vu cumprà.’ She kept her voice dispassionate, reportorial.
‘Only?’ he repeated.
‘Only.’
Brunetti took another drink of wine, rested his head on the back of the sofa, and swirled the wine around in his mouth. ‘Hummm,’ he finally said. ‘Not nice at all, is it?’
Though he couldn’t see Paola, he felt the sofa move as she nodded.
‘You think she heard it in school?’ he asked.
‘Where else? She’s too young to be a member of the Lega.’
‘So is it something her friends bring in from their parents, or is it something the teachers give them?’ he asked.
‘It could be either, I’m afraid,’ she said. ‘Or both.’
‘I suppose so,’ Brunetti agreed. ‘What did you do?’
‘I told her what she said was disgusting and that I’m ashamed she’s my daughter.’
He turned, smiled, held his glass up and saluted her. ‘Always prone to moderation, aren’t you?’
‘What was I supposed to do, send her to some sort of sensitivity training class or give her a sermon on the brotherhood of man?’ Brunetti heard her rage and disgust rekindle as she went on, ‘It is disgusting, and I am ashamed of her.’
Brunetti was pleased she did not bother to assert that their daughter had never heard such things in their home, that they were in no way responsible for this sort of distortion of mind. Heaven alone knew what was suggested by the conversations he and Paola had in front of the children; no one knew what they could have inferred over all those years. He liked to think he was a moderate person, brought up, like most Italians, without racial prejudice, but he was honest enough to accept that this belief was probably yet another national myth. It is easy to grow up without racial prejudice in a society in which there is only one race.
His father hated Russians, and Brunetti had always thought he did so with good reason, if three years as a prisoner of war is a good reason. For his own part, he had an instinctive distrust of southerners, though it was a feeling that caused him no little discomfort. He was far less troubled by his own distrust of Albanians and of Slavs.
But African blacks? That was an almost entirely unfamiliar category for him, and since he was completely ignorant about them, he doubted that he could have infected his children with his prejudices. More likely it was something, like head lice, that Chiara had picked up in school.
‘Do we sit here and castigate ourselves as negligent parents and then punish ourselves for that by not eating dinner?’ he finally asked.
‘I suppose we could,’ she said, her remark entirely devoid of humour.
‘I don’t like the idea of that,’ he said. ‘Either one or the other.’
‘All right,’ she finally said. ‘I’ve been sitting alone in here a long time, which takes care of the castigating, so I suppose we can at least eat dinner in peace.’
‘Good,’ he said, finishing his wine and leaning forward to take the bottle.
As they ate, some tacit agreement having been made not to discuss Chiara’s remark further that evening, Brunetti told her what was said to have happened in Campo Santo Stefano: two men, though no one seemed to have paid much attention to them, appeared out of the darkness and slipped back into it after shooting the African at least five times. It was an execution, not a murder, and certainly there was nothing random about it. ‘He didn’t have a chance, poor devil,’ Brunetti said.
‘Who would want to do something like that? And to a vu cumprà?’ Paola asked. ‘And why?’
These were the questions that had accompanied Brunetti on his walk home. ‘Seems to me that it’s either because of something he did after he got here or something he did before,’ Brunetti said, though he knew this was merely to state the obvious.
‘That doesn’t help much, does it?’ Paola asked, but it was an observation, not a criticism.
‘No, but it’s a place to begin to divide the things we might be looking for.’
Paola, always comfortable when presented with an exercise in logic, said, ‘Begin by examining what you know about him. Which is?’
‘Absolutely nothing,’ Brunetti answered.
‘That’s not true.’
‘What?’
‘You know he was a black African, and you know he was working as a vu cumprà, or whatever we’re supposed to call them now.’
‘Venditore ambulante or extracomunitario,’ Brunetti supplied.
‘That’s about as helpful as “Operatore ecologico”,’ she answered.
‘Huh?’
‘Garbage man,’ Paola translated. She got to her feet and left the room. When she came
back, she had a bottle of grappa and two small glasses. As she poured, she said, ‘So let’s just call him a vu cumprà to save time and confusion, all right?’
Brunetti thanked her for the grappa with a nod, took a sip, and asked, ‘What else do you think we know?’
‘You know that none of the others stayed to try to help him or to help the police in any way.’
‘I’d guess they saw he was dead when he fell.’
‘Would it have been that obvious?’
‘I think so, yes.’
‘And so you know it was an execution,’ Paola went on, ‘not the result of a fight or an argument that provoked it suddenly. Someone wanted him dead and either sent people to do it or came and did it himself.’
‘I’d say he sent people,’ Brunetti offered.
‘How can you tell?’
‘It has that feel about it, the work of professionals. They appeared out of nowhere, executed him, and disappeared.’
‘So what does that tell you about them?’
‘That they’re familiar with the city.’
She gave him a questioning glance, and he elaborated, ‘To know which way to leave. Also to know where he was.’
‘Does that mean Venetian?’
Brunetti shook his head. ‘I’ve never heard of a Venetian who works as a killer.’
Paola considered this and then said, ‘It wouldn’t take all that long to learn at least that much about the city. Some of the Africans are pretty much always there, in Santo Stefano, so all they’d have to do is walk around for a day or so to find them. Or ask someone.’ She closed her eyes and considered the geography of the area and finally said, ‘Afterwards, getting away would be easy. All they’d have to do is go back towards Rialto, or up towards San Marco, or over the Accademia.’
When she stopped, Brunetti continued, ‘Or they could go into San Vidal and then cut back towards San Samuele.’
‘How many places could they get a vaporetto?’ she asked.
‘Three. Four. And then they could have gone either way.’
‘What would you do?’ she asked.
