by Donna Leon
‘Ah, near the boat stop,’ Brunetti interrupted. ‘It’s very convenient for going to the Giudecca.’
‘And to the station,’ Duso added, as if he were finishing Brunetti’s sentence. ‘Especially if I can catch the Number 5.2. Then I’m at the station in eighteen minutes.’ He offered the time to Brunetti, as if he hoped it would be helpful to him in the future. Brunetti nodded his thanks.
Well, isn’t he clever? Brunetti thought. He’d happily sit here all morning and talk about vaporetto schedules and the fastest way to get to the station.
‘Let’s stay closer to your apartment, Signor Duso, shall we?’ Brunetti asked in a friendly voice. ‘Your home is also very close to Campo Santa Margherita, is it not?’
Duso leaned back in his chair and smiled easily. ‘I’m afraid I’m too old to be interested in Campo Santa Margherita any longer, Commissario.’ Before Brunetti could question that, Duso went on. ‘I spent a lot of time there when I was at university. Perhaps too much time.’ He sighed, as would an old man remarking that, when he was a child, he understood as a child, but now he was a man and had put away childish things.
Duso moved forward in his chair and folded his hands in front of him. ‘Besides,’ he continued, ‘it’s not the place it was when I was younger.’ Duso restrained himself from shaking his head sadly, Brunetti saw, and went on. ‘There was alcohol, then, plenty of it.’ That remark was followed by a rueful smile. ‘But far fewer drugs.’
Brunetti waited to see what gesture Duso would use to show his disapproval, but he did not move. Instead, he resumed speaking. ‘Today, it’s a drug bazaar: people in the office tell me you can get anything there.’
‘You’re not interested?’ Griffoni asked.
Duso smiled at her question, shrugged, and said, ‘Not any more, I’m not.’ The broad smile returned and he said, ‘I don’t think there’s such a thing as retroactive arrest, so I can tell you I tried drugs once or twice: hashish, marijuana, I even took some pills once that someone gave me when I had to stay up to study for an exam.’ He shook his head in wonder at the things he’d got up to while still a student.
‘But now I’m not,’ he reaffirmed, giving them both a serious look.
‘That’s certainly very interesting, Signor Duso,’ Brunetti said. ‘But could we return to the subject of Campo Santa Margherita?’
‘And the events of Saturday night,’ Griffoni added.
Duso tilted his head and allowed himself to look surprised. ‘I’m afraid this is very confusing, Signori,’ he said. ‘I don’t know why you keep taking things back to Campo Santa Margherita.’
‘Were you there on Saturday night?’ Brunetti asked directly.
Duso looked back at him, then at Griffoni, then at the top of the table, and Brunetti could almost hear him playing the odds. Marcello would never have said anything, so who could have seen him there? Who, in the many groups, the ever-shifting and re-forming groups of young people, could have seen him and recognized or remembered him? Who could have seen them getting into the boat with the two Americans?
Duso looked up. ‘Why do you want to know?’
‘Because we’re police officers,’ Brunetti answered, ‘and because we are interested in a crime that began in Campo Santa Margherita.’
It was an indication of how busy Duso’s mind must be that it took him some time to ask, ‘“Began in”?’
‘Yes,’ Brunetti answered. ‘That’s why we want to confirm that you were there.’
‘What crime?’
‘Leaving the scene of an accident,’ Brunetti began. ‘Violation of the rules of navigation. Refusing aid to an injured person.’
At that, Duso said, speaking sharply, ‘But we . . .’ and stopped himself.
‘You what, Signor Duso? Took them to the hospital and left them on the dock? Without calling anyone? At three in the morning?’
Duso looked across at Brunetti and asked, voice less steady than it had been, ‘I have the right to make a phone call, don’t I?’
‘Yes, you do,’ Brunetti said. ‘You’re free to do it here, any time you wish.’
Saying nothing further, Duso took his telefonino from the inside pocket of his jacket and pushed in a number. It rang three times, and a man’s voice answered.
‘Papi, it’s Berto,’ Duso said, sounding a decade younger. ‘I’m in trouble.’
8
How he wished he had not heard him say that, Brunetti thought. How much like his own son Duso had sounded: contrite, frightened, uncertain what damage his behaviour would do to his father’s career. That fear was not expressed in Duso’s words, of course, but hid in the struggle among fear, respect, and shame that began when he first addressed his father and was not finished even by the time he said goodbye and sat, eyes closed, hand lying palm up on the table, like a modern Christ trying to prepare himself for the first nail.
Brunetti realized he had enjoyed dealing with the young lawyer, had taken pleasure sparring with him and seeing how good the younger man would some day be at it. He had appreciated his manners, even as the two of them took their first jabs at one another. The young man thought quickly, did not descend into sarcasm, was relentlessly polite.
They are so fragile, young people, Brunetti reflected, their self-assurance such a thin layer. They’d grown up more than a generation after Brunetti and his contemporaries, and many of them had had feathered nests to live in, constructed and padded by their successful parents, themselves the heirs of the people who created the great financial Boom of the Sixties.
Brunetti had gone to university with their parents. He still remembered the envy he had felt for some of them, with their jackets from Duca D’Aosta, the store long since disappeared from Frezzeria and moved out to Mestre, of all places. And their Fratelli Rossetti shoes, new with every changing season, and how he’d longed for a pair of tasselled brown loafers, which he’d wear without socks when he’d saved up enough money to buy them. And now he had a pair and didn’t much like them any more and wore them with socks.
He leaned forward in his chair and said, ‘Signor Duso?’
There was no response.
‘Signor Duso?’ Brunetti repeated in a normal voice.
Duso opened his eyes, saw his open hand, and snatched it back before sitting up. He pulled the sleeves of his jacket down and straightened his tie. ‘Sì, Commissario?’ he inquired, almost managing to keep his voice steady.
‘I wonder if we could continue?’ Brunetti asked. ‘You were telling us about Saturday night,’ he added, knowing this was not the case. But phrasing it this way might make it easier for Duso to continue with the story.
Duso put both hands on the table, fingers threaded together, and stared down at them. ‘Marcello and I went to Campo Santa Margherita to see if we could meet some girls.’
‘Marcello Vio?’ Brunetti asked.
Duso nodded and said, ‘Yes. We do it every couple of weeks, and Saturday was probably going to be the last time it would be warm enough for us to stay outside.’
‘Are you usually successful?’
‘Most of the time,’ he said, head still lowered and attention given to his hands. ‘Some of them were in class with me or are still studying, so I know them, or we meet girls that Marcello knows and then we go out; or we meet tourists; sometimes we go swimming.’
‘And the girls you met on Saturday night, were they girls you knew?’
He shook his head. ‘No. We started talking to them. I speak English; Marcello does, although only a little, but it didn’t matter to the girls.’
He paused and Brunetti wondered if this was the moment when Duso was going to begin building a case against the two young women and explain how they had insisted that they go out into the laguna at night, how romantic it would be; no, go faster, please go faster. And maybe the girls had suggested that they find a beach somewhere?
‘Wh
y was that?’ Griffoni asked, perhaps because she didn’t want to listen to what she thought Brunetti was expecting.
‘Well, they’d just got here and they’d been walking around the city all day, and from the way they talked, I knew they were interested in the city, and then one of them said she’d love to see the canals at night.’ He thought about this and added, ‘It was after midnight by then.’
‘But you went out into the laguna, didn’t you?’ Griffoni asked.
‘That was after,’ he said simply.
‘After what?’ she asked.
‘We spent about an hour riding around in the city, but after that Marcello told me he was bored and hungry and wanted to go to that bar over at the Tolentini that’s open until two. I explained this to the girls, and they laughed and said they had lots of food with them.’
‘At one in the morning?’ Griffoni asked.
As if she hadn’t spoken, Duso went on. ‘We went out to the Punta della Dogana and sat on the steps.’ He relaxed a bit as he talked about this. ‘They had everything with them: salami, and ham and cheese, and two loaves of bread, and olives, and tomatoes. Enough food for all of us, and a bottle of wine.
‘I asked them why, and they said they were going to take it back to their room that night if they didn’t find a nice place in the city where they could eat.’ He looked across at Brunetti and said, ‘So we had a picnic.’
Duso’s smile broadened and he said, ‘When we were done, they made us collect everything: all the papers and scraps and napkins and bags. We had to collect it all in one of the plastic bags, and the one called JoJo put it under the seat at the back and told us we had to throw it in the garbage the next morning.’ He pulled his bottom lip into his mouth and closed his eyes. When he opened them, he said, ‘She made us promise.’
‘And then what did you do?’ Griffoni asked.
‘We went out . . . into the laguna.’
‘Where in the laguna?’ Brunetti asked, not that it made much difference.
‘We were heading towards Sant’Erasmo.’
‘That’s quite a distance,’ Brunetti remarked. ‘At night.’
‘I know, I know. That’s what I told Marcello, but he said we were already on the way, and he was going to swing around the island and go back that way.’ Duso shrugged, saying, ‘I don’t know why.
‘I told him to hurry up. It was cold and it was after two, but Marcello’s really happy only when he’s on a boat, like he’s got salt water in his blood: there’s nothing he likes more. So we went along, and the girls were cold and I was, too, but he was Captain Marcello, and he wouldn’t turn back.’ He stopped speaking.
‘What happened then?’ Brunetti asked.
Duso looked across at Brunetti, nodded, understanding that it was time, and continued. ‘They were both standing, jumping up and down to keep warm. They already had our sweaters over their shoulders, but both were cold.’
It seemed to Brunetti that Duso wanted to keep talking so as to delay telling them what had happened, but then it came. ‘There was a sound, almost like an explosion, and the boat stopped. Water came over the prow and the sides and soaked us. The boat just stopped, the way you can walk into a wall when there’s caigo.’ He was Venetian, after all, so he’d use the Venetian word for the densest fog.
‘The girls fell forward. I was right next to them, but I fell off my seat into the boat, so there was no way I could stop them. One of them fell against the side of the boat and hit her head, and the other one fell down into the bottom, half on me, but she still banged against the side. I think she broke something: her wrist or her arm.’
‘What did you do?’
‘For a while I just lay there. I hit my head enough to make me stupid for a minute. Then they both started screaming, and I heard Marcello going “Uh, uh. Uh,” like someone had hit him.’
He looked across at the two of them and said, ‘I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know where we were or if the boat was going to sink.’ He closed his eyes. ‘I keep remembering how dark it was. I could see lights, far away, maybe on Sant’Erasmo.’ His breathing had quickened, and he said, ‘It’s so dark out there. And everything’s so far away.’
Neither Griffoni nor Brunetti spoke: they sat and waited for Duso to calm himself.
‘I asked the girls if they were all right.’ He gave a small laugh entirely absent of humour and added, ‘I guess what I really wanted to know was if they were still alive.’ He tried to laugh, but it came out more choke than laugh.
‘They were moaning. I got them to lie down beside one another, and I put the sweaters over them. And then I went back and asked Marcello what was wrong. He said he’d fallen against the side of the seat in front of him, and it hurt. I told him we had to get to the hospital: for him and for the girls.’ Hearing his voice begin to slip from his control, Duso took deep breaths and closed his eyes until he seemed to quieten down again.
‘But what did you hit?’ Griffoni asked.
‘A briccola. Lots of them have come loose because the tides are stronger, and they’re floating around in the laguna. They’re big, and people keep running into them.’
Before Duso lost himself in explaining the dangers to navigation in the laguna, Brunetti asked, ‘Then what happened?’
‘Marcello said we had to go back, no matter how. I didn’t know where we were or how to navigate, but he did.’
‘And then?’ Brunetti asked.
‘The girls were lying in the bottom of the boat, just sort of whimpering, and I was sitting next to Marcello with my arm around him, trying to keep him warm. The motor was still working, and he said we’d take the girls back, and that I had to help.’
‘What did that mean?’
‘He said we had to take the girls to Pronto Soccorso.’
‘How long did it take you to get to the hospital?’ Brunetti asked.
‘I don’t know, maybe half an hour. I wasn’t thinking clearly any more, but it seemed it took us a lot longer than it took us to get out to Sant’Erasmo.’
‘And when you got there?’
‘Marcello said he could get up on the dock and hold the mooring line, but I had to lift the girls up and put them there. He said it hurt too much for him to do it.’
‘Is that what you did?’
Duso nodded a few times. ‘He pulled the boat up to the dock and stopped, then he climbed up – I had to give him a push from behind so he could get up the ladder. Then I gave him the mooring rope.’
‘Did you manage to move them?’ Griffoni asked.
‘Yes. I picked them up one by one – they were small, both of them – and put them on the dock. They didn’t say anything. I thought maybe they’d – you know – fainted or something.’ Brunetti recalled the video: Duso had been visible, and it seemed that he’d had little trouble lifting the girls to the height of the dock and pushing them across the wooden boards. In the video, they hadn’t moved; Brunetti remembered seeing no sweaters.
‘And Marcello?’
‘He stayed up there while I moved them. I told him to push the alarm by the door, but he stood there like he was paralysed; couldn’t even talk. So I went up on to the dock and pushed the alarm by the door, to let them know inside that there was trouble.’ He paused here and looked at Brunetti and then at Griffoni. ‘He stood there with a hand in the air, like he didn’t want me to do it, but he didn’t say anything.’ He paused for a moment, as if he expected a question, but when neither of them asked, Duso said, ‘So I went down the ladder, and after a minute, Marcello came down, too. And we left.’
‘I see,’ Brunetti said.
When he looked over at Duso, the young man was wide-eyed, staring at the wall behind Brunetti’s head. He opened his mouth to speak, stopped, opened it again, and finally said, ‘I saw her face when I set her down.’
9
‘Where did you go after that?
’ Griffoni broke the silence to ask.
Duso turned his head and glanced at her before looking down at the table in front of him. He said nothing.
Brunetti watched the young man’s face, saw his lips contract and relax and his eyes blink. He appeared distracted, his attention pulled away from the room where they sat.
Brunetti and Griffoni exchanged a glance but remained silent for some time, until Griffoni asked, ‘Could you tell us where you went next, Signor Duso?’
‘Oh, sorry,’ Duso said. ‘Could you repeat the question, Dottoressa?’
‘Where did you go then? After you put the young women on the dock of the hospital.’ She gave him a small encouraging nod but did not smile.
Duso blinked again a few times, as though he’d had to come back from reverie and needed a moment to clear his head. Finally he said, ‘Marcello started down towards the Arsenale, going fast. He kept saying he had to get the boat back.’ Hearing this, Brunetti wondered what damage the boat had suffered but did not think this the time to ask Duso.
The young man continued. ‘We put our sweaters back on. They were soaked, but they kept out the wind. I sat next to him: I still wanted to try to keep him warm. But I kept falling asleep.’
‘Where did you go?’
‘Towards the Arsenale, but then he turned in somewhere, and we went past the Church of the Greci and were in the Bacino, and then he really speeded up. The next thing I remember is pulling up in front of his uncle’s boathouse.’
‘On the Giudecca?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Yes.’
Brunetti didn’t ask any more about that; he could find out later where it was. ‘What did you do?’
‘Marcello said we had to moor the boat and cover it after we cleaned it,’ Duso explained, then added, ‘Marcello had stiffened up all over, so I had to clean it.’
Hearing the mounting irritation in his voice, there for the first time, Griffoni asked, ‘What time would it have been, Signor Duso, when he asked you to cover the boat?’
‘Around four, I guess,’ Duso said after a pause to consider.
