Transient Desires

by Donna Leon

  ‘Yes. Terrible,’ Brunetti said, not knowing which article the barman had read. Bamba cast his eyes towards the row of booths, saw a raised hand, and slipped out from behind the bar to answer the summons.

  Brunetti picked up the egg and tomato, took a bite, and replaced it on the plate. He drank the water. He realized that, if this were to be his lunch every day, he’d give thought to killing himself. This was indeed fuel, not food: they were good tramezzini, but that did not alter the fact that they were tramezzini, not lunch. And what would follow if we slowly came to accept having a sandwich for lunch?

  Brunetti, although his degree was in law, had always read history, and his reading of modern history had shown him how dictatorships often began with the small things: limiting who could do what jobs, who could marry whom, live here or there. Gradually, those small things had always expanded, and soon some people could not work at all, nor marry, nor – in the end – live. He gave himself a shake and told himself he was exaggerating: the road to hell was not paved with tramezzini.

  He went and stood in front of the cash register. Bamba came back, rang up the bill, and gave the receipt to Brunetti. The bill was three Euros fifty. Brunetti gave Bamba a five Euro note and turned away before the barman could offer him the change.

  On the way back to the Questura, Brunetti waited for the first faint stirring of returning life from somewhere inside of him.

  Outside, the sun had weakened and dropped behind the buildings on his left. The weather had come to its senses, Brunetti thought, and it would soon be time for risotto di zucca. Leaves would begin to turn: he and Paola could wait a few weeks and then have a walk down to I Giardini and see the show the trees put on every year. They used to go and sit under the trees in the Parco Savorgnan, but three of his favourites had been blown down in recent storms, and Brunetti, at the loss of his old friends, had stopped going, even though that decision meant renouncing the pastries at Dal Mas. Until then, they had the colour show at the Giardini Reali: recently they’d been restored; besides, they had the additional attraction of a wonderful café, where the staff didn’t bother people who wanted to sit and read.

  Whatever nourishment had been hidden in that tramezzino failed to make itself felt, nor did it nudge Brunetti with a return of energy sufficient to diffuse his general unease.

  He stopped at the bottom of the stairs in front of the cork board on the wall to his left. The Minister of the Interior was concerned that too many people were using their official cars for purposes that were not work-related, he read.

  ‘Shocking,’ Brunetti muttered to himself, doing his best to sound scandalized. ‘Especially here.’

  The memory of the peculiar lack of joy of last night’s dinner brought Brunetti to a stop. He recalled speaking to two of his old friends who had taken early retirement and now found themselves, it seemed, able to talk only of the sweet antics of their grandchildren.

  No one passed in the corridor, the stairs remained empty, he heard a phone ring in the distance, then it stopped. He moved away from the wall and turned, berating himself for laziness and disregard for his obligations and responsibilities. He took out his phone and, standing just metres from her office, called Signorina Elettra and told her he’d just had a call from one of his informers, who needed to see him immediately.

  Luckily, when Brunetti called him, and then another informer, who had also been of use to him in the past, both men were free and said they could meet him. Although both men lived in Venice, they never met Brunetti there for fear of the possible consequences of being seen with someone known to be a policeman, and so he was to meet the first in Marghera and the second in Mogliano.

  The meetings did not go particularly well. He differed over payment with both of them: the first one had no new information but wanted to be put on a monthly salary. Brunetti refused flatly and wondered if the man would next ask for an extra month’s salary at Christmas.

  The second was a burglar who had abandoned his calling – although not his contacts – with the birth of his first child and had taken a job delivering milk and dairy products to supermarkets. He met Brunetti between deliveries and gave him the name of the distributor who served as the redistribution point for the eyeglass frames continually stolen by employees from the fac­tories producing them in the Veneto. Brunetti explained that, because the information was of no practical use to him and would be passed on to a friend at the Questura in Belluno, fifty Euros was more than fair. The man shrugged, smiled, and agreed, so Brunetti handed him an extra ten, which widened his smile. He thanked Brunetti and climbed back into his white delivery truck, and that was the end of it.

  Brunetti spent the evening with his family, had dinner with them, attentive to what they said and what they ate. After dinner, he took a small glass of grappa out on to the terrace and sipped at it while he looked off to the bell tower of San Marco. At ten o’clock, a ringing church bell told him it was time to take his glass inside and begin to think about going to bed.

  Although he had done next to nothing all day, he was tired and, to his surprise, realized that he still had not shaken off the sadness left by the evening spent with his former classmates. He went down the corridor and stopped at the door to Paola’s study. Intent on her reading, she had not heard him coming, but the radar of long love made her look up and, after a moment’s thought, smile. He felt his spirit warm and said, ‘I’m going to bed now.’

  She closed her book and got to her feet. ‘What a very good idea,’ she said and smiled again.

  3

  Brunetti arrived even later at the Questura the following morning, went to Signorina Elettra’s office, and found her seated some distance from her desk, chair pushed back and to one side, computer dark and ignored. She looked up when he came in; he noticed she had some papers in one hand.

  ‘Am I disturbing you, Signorina?’

  She smiled. ‘Of course not, Commissario. I was having a look at something you might find interesting.’ As evidence, she held up the papers. ‘It’s about those young women in the laguna,’ she said. He nodded to acknowledge that he knew about the incident, not mentioning that his source was Il Gazzettino.

  ‘I’ve just received Claudia’s full report. She was on duty that night and answered the call.’ Signorina Elettra held the papers towards him. ‘Would you like to have a look?’ Her tone made it clear that this was a suggestion and not a question.

  Brunetti reached for the papers, which she tucked into a manila folder. He thanked her and went up to his office to read them.

  A little after three in the morning of Sunday, one of the guards at the Ospedale Civile stepped out on to the ambulance dock at the rear of the hospital for a cigarette and found two young women, both injured, lying unconscious on the wooden dock where the ambulances arrived. He’d ducked back inside and run to Pronto Soccorso, calling ahead for two gurneys. The injured women were taken immediately to the Emergency Room.

  Brunetti looked at the photos taken in the ward before he read more, and what he saw shocked him. One of them appeared to have been badly beaten. Her nose was pressed against her right cheek and there was a long bloody cut above her left eye. The left side of her face was swollen.

  There was also a photo of the second victim. Her face showed no signs of an attack: the report stated that neither of them had wounds on their hands that spoke of having resisted one, although the second young woman’s left arm was broken in two places.

  Both wore wet jeans and sweaters and might have spent some time in the water. One had lost her left tennis shoe; neither carried identification of any kind.

  The attached medical report stated that they were both given a full physical examination to assess the possibility of further injury. Both remained unconscious during this procedure. Neither showed signs of recent sexual activity.

  The young woman with the broken nose, after a brain scan, was quickly transferred to the hospital
in Mestre to await emergency surgery. It was at this point that the police were alerted. The officer on night duty had called, and awoken, Commissario Griffoni. She asked that a launch be sent to take her to the hospital.

  Griffoni’s report stated that, when she arrived, she found the young woman with the broken arm lying on a gurney in a corridor, in tears and begging in English for something to ease the pain. This catapulted Griffoni to the nurses’ desk, where she showed her warrant card and demanded to speak to the doctor in charge. After Griffoni had a few words with him, things went more easily, and the young woman was quickly taken into a treatment room, given an injection, and had her arm set and put in a cast.

  A room for her was found, and Griffoni, who had waited in the corridor, took it upon herself to push her there in a wheelchair. A nurse helped her into bed, and Griffoni sat in the chair at the foot of the bed and assured the young woman that she would stay with her. Griffoni waited for her to fall asleep, which she did almost immediately. At six in the morning, the arrival of the trollies at the end of the hallway woke the young woman, who looked around, groggy.

  Griffoni asked her name and the name of her companion. JoJo Peterson, she told Griffoni; the other was Lucy Watson, but then she grew agitated and asked where Lucy was and what had happened. Griffoni explained about the surgery and lied to assure her that everything was going to be all right. Soon after hearing that, the girl told her that Lucy’s parents worked at the US Embassy in Rome. JoJo and Lucy were friends at university, and they were visiting from the States. She soon fell asleep again: not even the terrific sound storm of breakfast managed to keep her awake.

  Griffoni wrote that Lucy Watson’s parents had been contacted through the Embassy, where her father worked in Human Resources, his wife as a translator.

  Brunetti’s desk phone rang, and he recognized the number of Griffoni’s extension.

  ‘Yes?’ he asked.

  ‘Do you want to come up?’

  ‘Three minutes,’ Brunetti said and replaced the phone.

  Upstairs, Griffoni was already standing in the corridor. This was not a sign of her eagerness to see him but a concession to the size – or lack of size – of her office: if she set her chair just inside the doorway, her back to the door, she could sit at her desk; beyond it there was a bit more than a metre for a guest’s chair and then a wall.

  ‘Tell me,’ he said by way of greeting as he walked in front of her to take his place.

  Pointing to the darkened screen of her computer, she said, ‘The hospital has a camera at every entrance, even on the dock for the ambulances, where they were left.’ She leaned over and clicked the screen into life then shifted it towards Brunetti, who saw a full-screen image that at first confused him.

  He propped his elbow on the desk, rested his chin in his hand, and studied the image. He saw a pattern of rectangles, long and thin, running horizontally; beyond the rectangles, blackness. Griffoni tapped a key, and after a moment the scene brightened, almost as if a floodlight had been turned on, transforming the rectangles into a wooden floor and, beyond it, revealing the darkness as water.

  ‘This it?’ Brunetti asked.

  Griffoni nodded, saying, ‘They sent it half an hour ago. I’ve watched it only once.’

  The film was, strangely, silent: the laguna is never quiet, docks always have the slapping of waves, however small. In the absence of motion to interest him, Brunetti looked at the information at the bottom of the screen: it told the number of the telecamera and the time: 2:57.

  The dock suddenly shook, surprising Brunetti into grasping at the top of the table. A disembodied head appeared a bit beyond the edge, cruised on its own power across the computer screen and stopped.

  A pair of hands suddenly grabbed at the handrails of the ladder to the dock, and a man appeared, moving slowly, gingerly. He kept his eyes on his feet while climbing the ladder, as though he feared falling backwards. He stepped on to the dock and looked around, then turned back towards the water and bent over to speak to someone below. A single hand appeared and passed him a rope, which he wrapped around the stanchion and tightened into place with easy, if slow, familiarity.

  When the boat was moored, the top half of the other person appeared, showing the shoulders and head of a man wearing a woollen cap. He disappeared as quickly as he had appeared and was back a moment later, carrying a small woman, his arms under her shoulders and knees. He reached up and set her on the edge of the dock and then pushed her away from the edge with both hands.

  He disappeared again, only to come back into sight a bit farther to the right with a second woman, held the same way. He placed her down and shoved her across the dock just as he had the first.

  He called to the other man, turned and pointed off screen. The man on the dock shook his head and said something. Whatever it was, it propelled the man in the cap up the ladder and on to the dock. The other raised a hand, as if to stop him, then took a step towards him and placed his hand on his arm. The man with the cap shook free of the other and walked in the direction of the camera. He disappeared from the frame but was quickly back, passing the other and going to the top of the ladder. He turned and started down, called to the other man, and vanished. The other untied the boat and tossed the rope over the edge of the dock, then walked slowly to the ladder, turned, and disappeared very slowly after him. The camera showed only the two women lying on the dock.

  The screen turned black. Griffoni’s voice caused Brunetti to start, so intent had he been on the screen. ‘The camera is motion sensitive and goes black when there’s nothing to be filmed.’

  At 3:05, a man appeared, walking away from the camera, head bent as he pulled a cigarette from an open packet and a lighter from his pocket. He turned sideways, as if protecting the flame from the wind, lit the cigarette, and, raising his head, took a deep pull at it. He froze, the cigarette fell from his hand, and he took three running steps towards the two motionless forms in front of him. He knelt, placed his fingers on the throat of the first, then the second, pushed himself to his knees and disappeared in the direction from which he had come.

  Again the screen darkened. Almost immediately a number of people in white uniforms appeared. With breathtaking speed, they picked up the women, placed them on to gurneys, and hurried back inside. The screen darkened.

  ‘How long did it take them to come to get them?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘Two minutes and forty seconds,’ Griffoni answered. ‘It’s at the bottom of the screen.’

  ‘I’ll never say a bad word about the hospital again,’ Brunetti said. Then he asked, ‘I saw the photo of her face. Who could do that to someone?’

  Griffoni shrugged. ‘I’d like to go back to the hospital to see what I can find out.’

  Instinctively, Brunetti asked, ‘Would you like me to go with you?’

  ‘Isn’t that out of your way?’ Griffoni asked. It wasn’t a yes, but it certainly wasn’t a no.

  ‘Not really, not if I go through Campo Santa Marina,’ he answered.

  She studied her palm, and it apparently decided the issue for her. ‘We could go now. I’m not doing anything, and the Vice-Questore’s left for the day.’ Before Brunetti could ask, Griffoni said, ‘Foa told me he’s been invited to some sort of event by one of those foreign charities that wants to save the city.’

  Brunetti was familiar with these organizations but doubtful that anyone had much of a chance of saving the city. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘they go to expensive restaurants, and that gives people work, and that’s all to the good.’

  As if reading his mind, Griffoni gave one of those smiles of hers that seemed to use only the upper part of her face. Her mouth remained straight in disapproval, but her eyes registered delight in absurdity. ‘It’s a dinner for important Venetians, to explain to them the urgent need to save the city,’ she remarked.

  ‘From?’ Brunetti asked, already making a list, s
tarting with the pollution caused by the planes of the people who came to the charity dinner.

  ‘I think that will be revealed this evening,’ she answered.

  It came to Brunetti to ask, ‘How is it that Foa knows about this?’

  ‘He has to take the Vice-Questore to the first meeting, then return later to take him home from dinner.’

  Brunetti’s mind fled to the notice he had been reading about the improper use of ministry cars to take officials to non-work-related events. Patta was safe: there had been no mention of boats. Cheered by that thought, he got to his feet, saying, ‘Come on, Claudia, I’ll walk you as far as the hospital.’

  This time, both halves of her face smiled.

  4

  By the time they emerged from the Questura, the day had definitely abandoned any idea of warmth. Griffoni, who was Neapolitan, never left a building without carrying at least one more layer of clothing: today a caramel-coloured suede jacket hung over her arm that looked, to Brunetti, far more edible than the sandwich he’d had the day before.

  ‘Did you get that in Naples?’ he asked as she pulled it on and zipped it halfway.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ Brunetti said. ‘If I thought it would fit me, I’d knock you down and steal it.’

  ‘Too much time spent with criminals, I’d say,’ she answered, then added, ‘My uncle has a shop.’

  Brunetti threw his head back and laughed out loud.

  Uncertain whether to be offended or not, Griffoni asked, ‘What’s that about?’

  Still giving the occasional gasp of quiet laughter, Brunetti said, ‘I have a Neapolitan friend – maybe he’s my best friend – and if I ever admire anything, he has an uncle or an aunt or a cousin who just happens to know where to get me one. At a very friendly price.’

  ‘Things that fell off a truck?’ she asked.

  That set Brunetti off laughing again. When he could control himself, he said, ‘He actually told me that once. It was a pair of tennis shoes my son wanted, white, with the signature of some American tennis player, or basketball hero, on the side, and we’d had no peace in the house for a month. I told Giulio about it, when we were talking about our kids; all he did was ask what size Raffi wore. The next day UPS delivered a pair for him, with a note inside saying they’d fallen off a truck.’ He broke off to laugh again.