Transient Desires

by Donna Leon

  ‘I’m here to see Captain Nieddu.’

  ‘And your name, Signore?’ he asked neutrally.

  ‘Brunetti,’ he answered.

  The man shifted in his seat and turned to his left to point towards the gate in a high wire fence, beyond which began a gravel path that passed between two rows of roses trimmed almost to the ground. ‘The office is at the end. I’ll call and tell the Captain you’re on your way.’

  Brunetti thanked him and started towards the path. The gate clicked open in front of him and closed automatically after he passed through. As he walked between the roses, he wondered if it was right to cut them back so much in the autumn, and that led him to consider just how little he knew about plants and how to care for them. Behind the roses was an equally long bed of grass and, behind that, another long rectangle of dark earth that had been turned over and raked. Presumably, taller flowers would be planted there in the spring.

  He had to remind himself that this was a Carabiniere station. At the end of the rows of flowers stood a two-storey brick building and behind it a brick wall. The wall had suffered more weathering and must be older than the building.

  He rang the bell to the right of a metal door and stepped back two paces so that he would be clearly visible from the spy hole in the door. He pulled out his wallet and removed his warrant card. It was only then that he realized he perhaps should not have reached for anything in his pocket, but it was too late to do anything except hold up the card to whoever looked through the hole.

  He heard a noise from inside, and the door was pulled open, revealing a very tall woman in her thirties with shoulder-length dark hair. She wore her uniform jacket: he saw the single bar under the three stars on her lapels. So she was a primo capitano, then, and probably outranked most of the men in the unit.

  As he stepped forward, he put out his hand, saying, ‘Good morning, Laura. I’m pleased to meet you.’

  ‘The pleasure is mine,’ the woman answered in that same deep voice. She stepped back beyond the edge of the open door, saying, ‘We can go to my office and talk there.’ She smiled at last, and he found that almost as attractive as her voice. Her eyes were green; a number of tiny wrinkles spread out from the sides without doing her any damage. Her uniform jacket fitted her closely, making Brunetti wonder where the carabinieri of his youth – fat, moustached, wrinkled – had gone.

  She led the way down a corridor, her trousers hiding her legs. Brunetti looked to the side and into the first open door they passed, and then, like a tailor in a competitor’s atelier, he slowed his pace and glanced inside every open door, although he had no idea what it was he was looking for. What he got to see was pretty much what he saw at the Questura: uniformed officers sitting behind computers at desks piled with papers and file folders. The desks also held photos of women and men, children, cats and dogs, one of a man in shorts on a beach, holding up a fish almost as long as he. The walls were covered with the usual plaques and maps, photos of the President of the Republic, in one office a crucifix, and in another the lion flag of San Marco.

  She stopped at the last door on the right and turned into the room. No surprises here, either, save that the desk was less littered than the ones he’d seen on the way down the corridor. Computer, keyboard, a book that looked like a volume from the standard compilation of penal law. The In box seemed to hold one thin file: the Out box was full.

  She closed the door after him, went behind the desk and sat; Brunetti took the chair closer to the desk and, before he sat, pointed to the In box and said, ‘You have both my compliments and my envy.’

  This time she gave him a broader smile. ‘Begin with flattery, Guido. It always works.’

  ‘I didn’t intend it as that,’ Brunetti said, then added, ‘Although the technique isn’t unknown to me.’

  The noise she made might have been a stifled laugh. She leaned forward, extracted a file from the Out box, and passed a few pages to him.

  As he expected, they contained the photos Signorina Elettra had sent of the two men who had taken the injured young women to the hospital, enlarged almost to life size. These were clipped to some pages of standard-sized paper covered with pencilled lines of brief notes printed in a neat, clear hand. Before he began reading, Brunetti glanced at Captain Nieddu but said nothing. He found it interesting that the notes were not computer-produced and thus, being handwritten, were certainly unrecorded and unofficial. She didn’t comment on this, and Brunetti turned to examining the file.

  He moved the photos aside and began to read. Brunetti was expecting evidence linking the men to the victims, but the text he read sounded – he couldn’t stop himself from thinking – like a bullet outline of a B-grade buddy film. Young men born in the same week, twenty-four years before, one the son of a successful lawyer, the other the son of an odd-job man who cleaned the container tanks at one of the chemical companies at Marghera. Nine years before, away from work and drunk, the odd-job man had driven his car off the road and into a cement pillar. And survived, with reduced mental and physical capacities, not described. The last note was a single, chilling, ‘Institutionalized’.

  Brunetti raised his head and glanced towards the Captain, but she was busy reading another file that had appeared miraculously in front of her and didn’t look up. Brunetti returned to the story. Marcello Vio, who was the only son of the injured man, had two younger sisters as well as a mother. To support them, he left school at fifteen and began to work for his uncle’s transport business, where he remained to this day.

  Filiberto Duso, in this unlikely script, was the young princeling. He and Vio were inseparable at school, until Duso went to liceo to prepare himself for university and Vio went to work. They remained, however, best friends. Together, they sailed the laguna, always in search of adventure, and they were generally considered ‘bravi ragazzi.’

  A number of recent rumours suggested that some of Vio’s ­latest adventures were of questionable legality, perhaps the smuggling of cigarettes from Montenegro or the transport of illegally harvested clams. His uncle, not Duso, was named in conjunction with these actions, although no date nor specific action was provided. Brunetti read three short comments that spoke of, even warned of, the uncle’s influence upon his nephew. On the Giudecca, it was all but impossible to escape the low murmur of Gossip, and Brunetti was wary of putting much faith in a story that was not corroborated by something more closely resembling fact.

  Brunetti finished reading and raised the sheets of paper, and when Nieddu finally looked over at him, he asked, ‘Is this why Vio’s a “person of interest” to you?’

  She nodded. ‘Following in the footsteps of his uncle, Pietro Borgato.’

  ‘Also a person of interest?’

  ‘Even more so. And for some time. There are rumours.’

  ‘What sort?’ Brunetti asked.

  She started to answer but then shrugged and stopped. ‘You know how it is. People say he’s mixed up in bad things, but when you ask, they don’t know what sort of bad things: but they heard it from someone they trust.’ She let him think about that for a short time and then added, ‘A woman who lives next to one of my men said he’s a smuggler, but she didn’t know what he was smuggling.’ She raised a hand and made a waving gesture, as if to drive these remarks away. ‘It might just as easily be that she simply doesn’t like him and thinks he’s got to be a smuggler because he has boats.’

  Because there was nothing he could say, Brunetti remained silent for a moment and then tapped at the photos and asked, ‘How do you know it was these two at the hospital dock?’ he finally asked.

  Instead of answering, Nieddu reached to the In box and pulled out the file. She flicked through it until, finding the paper she sought, she turned it around and leaned across her desk to pass it to him.

  Clipped to the top was a single photo of two young men, arm in arm, relaxed, smiling at the camera. They were dressed in shorts
and T-shirts. Both were deeply tanned; one was heavily muscled. He had pushed his sunglasses back on his head, while the thinner one wore the crown of green laurel leaves that students put on to celebrate their graduation from university. Red silk streamers ran down from a large bow attached to the crown; his mouth was wide open and he seemed ready to take a bite out of the planet. Brunetti’s spirit recalled the joy and wild pride he’d felt when he’d worn the same wreath for a single day: he understood Duso’s expression, for this had to be Duso.

  He studied both faces briefly, placed the photo on the desk, picked up the photos Signorina Elettra had sent and placed them on either side of the photo of the two young men together. He glanced back and forth: there was no confounding him, the one with the sunglasses was Marcello Vio.

  ‘Duso’s graduation party?’ Brunetti asked, tapping at the photo.

  ‘Yes. This summer.’

  ‘Who took it?’

  The Captain hesitated a moment before she answered, ‘One of my men.’

  Brunetti gave no indication of his surprise. ‘How did you get it?’

  ‘He saw the photos we were sent and brought that one to me this morning.’

  Brunetti nodded and considered what she’d just said. To have taken the photo, the officer would have to be a friend, perhaps even a relative, of one of the men in the photo. ‘Am I allowed to compliment you on this?’

  She raised a hand as if to push away what he had said. ‘He’s the one who brought the photo.’

  ‘That means he’s probably from the Giudecca or at least from the city.’

  ‘He is,’ she said. ‘He’s a good man.’

  ‘Not a boy?’ Brunetti asked, surprised.

  ‘No, he’s sixty and sitting out his last years until retirement.’

  ‘I see,’ Brunetti said, doubly struck by the man’s courage. He switched his legs and leaned to tap a finger on the first page of the hand-written text. ‘Do you, or the officer who gave you this information, have proof of anything that’s written in here?’ he asked.

  ‘Aside from information in official documents, no: there’s nothing that anyone would admit having said. Only the usual gossip,’ she answered, and then continued, ‘It’s one thing to believe that something is happening, even to know it is. But that’s not the sort of evidence judges will accept.’ She mirrored him by folding her arms and crossing her legs, then added, ‘And you certainly don’t want anyone to know you passed on the information.’ She stopped speaking, seeming to want some acknowledgement from him.

  Brunetti nodded; it sufficed.

  ‘Since I came here,’ she began, speaking clearly and slowly, perhaps to mask the traces of the Sardinian accent he’d heard, ‘I’ve asked the men and the one other woman in the unit to make a note of gossip and hearsay and things that get said in the bars. It’s all to be written in pencil and given to me. I copy it and destroy the original pieces of paper, so everything is clearly in my handwriting, should it ever become a problem.’

  ‘A problem?’ Brunetti inquired.

  She glanced aside after he asked this and looked out of the window of her office, from which only the brick wall could be seen. She studied the wall, pulled her lips together, and turned back to face him.

  ‘What I’ve heard about you, Commissario, makes me believe you’ll understand if I say that the fact that I am a woman does not make my job any easier; indeed, it often leads to complications.’

  When it seemed she was not going to proceed, Brunetti said, ‘I have no doubt of that. Many of my colleagues don’t like women on the force.’

  ‘Or out of it, I’d venture,’ she responded instantly. Then, returning to her former, and warmer, tone, said, ‘I have something else for you.’ She opened the drawer of her desk, pulled out an envelope, and handed it to him. She had printed his name on the flap. ‘It’s the factual information about them,’ she said. ‘Full names and addresses, phone numbers, current occupation and place of work.’ She paused briefly, then added, ‘Neither has a criminal record. Vio’s been fined for speeding on the laguna three times. Nothing else.’ Before Brunetti spoke, she added, ‘But there’s a growing . . . aura – an unpleasant one – in what is said about him.’ She cleared her throat and returned to fact. ‘There’s no copy of the photo my man took.’ Changing her voice and somehow managing to remove some of its beauty, she added, ‘You didn’t see it.’

  He nodded his thanks to her and slipped the unopened envel­ope into the inner pocket of his jacket.

  They remained silent for some time, Brunetti eager to discover where their conversation would go. The Captain, no doubt sensing this, returned to the original subject. ‘I think there has to be some truth in these rumours. They’ve come to us from a number of people: a former girlfriend of Vio’s and one distant cousin.’ After saying this, she surprised Brunetti by shrugging one shoulder in dismissal.

  In the report she’d written she didn’t seem interested in whether Vio was smuggling cigarettes or not; Brunetti wasn’t much interested, either, and believed there was no sure way to stop it. ‘Do you have an opinion about him?’

  She rubbed at some invisible spot on the surface of her desk while she considered how to answer. Finally she said, ‘I suppose he, or they, brought in some contraband. For the money.’ She looked at Brunetti, then added, ‘The children of friends of mine here went to school with Vio. They say he’s not particularly bright but at heart a good boy.’ After a pause, she added, ‘Unlike the uncle.’

  ‘And the other one? Duso?’

  She shrugged. ‘His father’s a lawyer,’ she said. The word opened Brunetti’s memory, for Duso was the lawyer of a friend, who had always praised his competence and integrity.

  There was no reason to mention this to Nieddu, so he remained silent and waited for her to continue. ‘He’s already working in his father’s office, so it’s only good sense for him not to get mixed up in anything illegal his friend might be part of.’ It was certainly good sense, but it didn’t prove that Duso was also a good boy.

  ‘And the cigarettes?’ Brunetti asked, level-voiced.

  ‘For the love of God, who cares?’ she demanded.

  Realizing they were in perfect agreement, Brunetti proposed, ‘Shall we share anything we learn?’

  ‘Gladly,’ she answered. Then, although it hardly needed explan­­­ation, she added, ‘As you’ve noticed, I haven’t asked you again why you’re interested in these two men. The newspaper accounts say they took them to Pronto Soccorso.’

  Brunetti nodded.

  ‘A neighbour of mine works at the hospital,’ she continued, her tone grown rough. ‘She told me what the young woman looked like when they left her on the dock.’

  ‘We don’t know what happened,’ Brunetti said, feeling awkward at how feeble it sounded.

  ‘But we do know who brought them,’ she snapped. Then, her anger more audible, she added, ‘People treat dogs better.’

  Brunetti stood and shook his right leg to loosen his trousers, then brushed both hands down the sides to make the cloth fall correctly. When he was standing upright, he said, ‘Thank you, Laura, for your time and your cooperation. We’ll have a word with them today, if we can.’ He asked if they could exchange telefonino numbers; she smiled and agreed and pulled out her phone.

  After that was done, Brunetti turned to leave her office; she made no move to follow him to the door. When he got there, he turned around to her and said, ‘One thing. When I speak to Vio, I know nothing about him or his uncle. I won’t stir up waters that are yours.’

  At that, she nodded. ‘Good luck, then,’ she said, and Brunetti left, heading back to the riva and the Number Two to San Zaccaria.

  6

  Brunetti stood on the deck of the vaporetto while he phoned Signorina Elettra to say he had a positive identification of the two suspects and wanted to bring them in for questioning. He stuffed his phone be
tween his shoulder and his ear, pulled out the envelope, and read her their contact information. When she asked, he said he wanted the authorization of a magistrate and that Patta would surely approve, given the connection to the American Embassy. Brunetti remembered how Patta, some years ago, had ended up in the international press: The New York Times itself had mentioned Patta’s name and said, as was its wont, that ‘the arrest struck a serious blow against the Ndrangheta.’ All blows against the Mafia, for the international press, were always ‘serious’, even ‘crippling’. No major European languages were capable of using the more apposite ‘futile’, nor yet ‘pointless’.

  Brunetti specified that the two men were not to be allowed to speak to or telephone anyone once they were in police custody. He did not have to tell her that each was to be taken to a separate interrogation room and did not tell her that one of them was ‘of interest’ to the Carabinieri.

  ‘Send Pucetti to get Vio and ask Vianello to take another launch and bring Duso in. All they know is that they were sent to take him to the Questura, always speaking in the singular.’

  ‘Certainly, Commissario,’ Signorina Elettra said. ‘Shall I begin having a look?’

  ‘A captain in the Carabinieri just told me they checked their records and found nothing,’ Brunetti said.

  Was it a clicking sound he heard, as if she’d been told something beyond belief? Or was she disappointed by what he’d said?

  In either case, the noise was enough to put Brunetti back on track, and he segued effortlessly into, ‘But by all means, you should take a closer look, Signorina.’ His grip on his telefonino relaxed minimally after he said that. Then, in the way a person sends flowers after behaving badly at dinner, he said, ‘One of them has an uncle who lives on the Giudecca. Pietro Borgato. Perhaps you could have a look at him, as well?’

  ‘Do you have an idea of when you might be here, Signore?’ she inquired. It took Brunetti a moment to recover from the delicacy of the question, and when he glanced at his watch, he was surprised to see that it was after one.