Transient Desires

by Donna Leon

  But streaming services, it seemed, were fair game to both of them. He had inquired about this some time before and been told that, because the programmes and films did not belong to a specific person, no one would be hurt if they were not paid for. Brunetti presented the argument of copyright, only to be told that there was no single author in this case, but an enormous multinational company that, it turned out, owned huge palm oil plantations in Indonesia and thus, it seemed from what they told him, had renounced all moral right to profit of any sort. The most tangential facts could be put together in justification of almost anything. How was it that he had missed the coronation of the non sequitur?

  After the kids had disappeared, Paola asked him what was wrong; Brunetti kissed her cheek and said he’d tell her later, then left and grumbled his way back to the Questura.

  14

  The first thing Brunetti did when he got back to his office was phone Griffoni and ask her to come down, saying he was reluct­ant to risk his life again by encountering the obstacles presented by her chair and desk. Her laughter was a presage, he hoped, of a return to their easy collaboration.

  A few minutes later, she came in without bothering to knock and took her usual seat facing him. She leaned forward and placed a manila cover on his desk, opened it, removed a single sheet of paper, and placed it on his desk too. Then she took out a set of papers held by a paperclip and set that beside the single sheet. In response to his question, Griffoni covered the single sheet and said, ‘From Elettra. About Vio and Duso.’ Finally, Brunetti thought, they’ve come to a first-name basis.

  ‘What about them?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘The juvenile file of Marcello Vio. There’s none for Duso.’

  ‘She’s not here?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘Not today, but her spirit is ever here with us,’ Griffoni said with mock solemnity. Then, more briskly, she continued, ‘She doesn’t trust us to go into some places by ourselves without leaving traces that we’ve been there, so she found Vio’s record and sent it to me,’ she said, then continued, reminding Brunetti of the no-go areas Signorina Elettra kept for herself. ‘She won’t show me how to get information about the military, anything that has to do with crimes against children, or anything that might require access to the Vatican.’

  He realized this was not the time to question Signorina Elettra’s decision and so pointed to the paper under Griffoni’s hand and asked, ‘What’s in it?’ She shrugged. ‘Nothing surprising. Vio and boats, Vio and boats, Vio and boats. Driving big ones without a licence for them. Speeding. Driving at night without lights. He’s lucky he still has a licence.’

  ‘Lucky?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘I figure some of the people who stopped him knew him or knew his uncle and let the small things pass. Boat people: they stick together. And there’s no record he ever broke anything but maritime rules.’

  ‘Maritime laws,’ Brunetti corrected her.

  She smiled and repeated, ‘Laws.’

  She held up the paper and waved it in the air. ‘His problem – at least as I see it – is testosterone.’

  ‘Then,’ Brunetti began, pointing to the other papers she had placed on his desk, ‘what are those?’

  ‘Some family history, about Vio’s uncle, Pietro Borgato,’ she said, smiling.

  Failing to hide his surprise, Brunetti asked, ‘Did she send them to you?’

  ‘No. She’s hasn’t had time to start on him,’ Griffoni answered. ‘So I had a look myself. Instead of lunch.’

  She pushed the papers towards him with a single finger, leaving it there, and said, ‘It’ll be easier if I simply tell you the things that caught my attention.’

  Brunetti nodded, so she continued. ‘Water’s in the family blood. Borgato’s father started with the ACTV as a crew member when he was in his early twenties. By thirty, he was the pilot of a vaporetto. His son Pietro followed him into the company as a simple sailor. I’m told it’s always helped if someone in your family puts in a good word for you; even better if someone in the family already works on the boats.’

  ‘Just like anywhere,’ Brunetti commented.

  She nodded and went on. ‘But Pietro was a different sort of man. His work record is bad: he complained, argued with passengers, asked people to show him their tickets – which was none of his business – and was finally disciplined for getting into a fight with a colleague and then fired when he got into a fight with a passenger.’ Before Brunetti could ask, she said, ‘There’s no explanation of the fight in the ACTV records, only that he hit a passenger and was fired.’

  Looking down at them, she tapped at the papers, as if to summon something from them. ‘The passenger was a woman,’ she said, surprising Brunetti. ‘It sounds like the whole thing was hushed up and he was let go.’

  ‘No charges against him?’

  ‘No, my guess is that ACTV decided they’d buy the woman’s silence if she didn’t press charges.’

  ‘That makes sense,’ Brunetti said, meaning it. ‘Never offend the tourists.’

  ‘She was Venetian,’ said Griffoni, then glanced at him, and, seeing his surprise, reached for the papers. She paged through them and finally read out, ‘Anna Bruzin, 35, housewife, Canareggio 4565.’

  ‘What else?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘The usual,’ Griffoni answered, turning a page. ‘A few scuffles in bars that we responded to. Only one charge, for having thrown a man into the water. But two days later, the man came in and said he was drunk, and that he fell in while Borgato was trying to pull him away from the water. And the charge was dropped.’

  Brunetti couldn’t stop himself from letting out a puff of air. He looked across at her, but she was looking at the page. ‘You ever known a . . . ?’ he broke off for a moment and then asked, ‘Did this happen on the Giudecca?’

  Griffoni checked the report and said, ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ve never known a Giudecchino, drunk or sober, to fall into the water,’ he said, then shook his head a few times.

  Griffoni waited a moment or two and then continued. ‘After he was fired, he disappeared from the city until about ten years ago, when he came back and bought the warehouse he has now and two boats, hired two men, and went into the transport business. Since then, he’s bought two more big boats and a smaller one and become a successful businessman.’

  ‘More testosterone?’ Brunetti inquired.

  Griffoni shook her head. ‘Either his has decreased with age, or he’s learned how to control it. There’s no further mention of violence.’ She glanced at the pages, flipped to the last, and said, ‘He’s come to the attention of the police – the water police – only for illegal mooring.’ When Brunetti did not respond, she added, ‘I found that in the records of the city police – aside from that, there’s nothing.’

  Silence settled on the room and remained in control until Brunetti asked, ‘Do you know where he went when he left the city?’

  ‘No,’ Griffoni answered. ‘I haven’t looked for any change of residence, but if he wanted to rent a place to live, he’d have to do that.’

  ‘If he worked, there’d be records,’ Brunetti said. ‘He’d pay taxes.’ Then, before she could point it out, he added, ‘Unless he worked in black.’

  Griffoni suggested, ‘If he worked anywhere, it would probably be on a boat: fishing, transport.’

  ‘So that means Trieste,’ Brunetti continued, running his mind along the coastline of Italy, ‘or Ancona, Bari, Brindisi, the ports in Sicily, Naples, Civitavecchia, and Genova.’

  ‘I’ll check for residence first,’ Griffoni said. ‘That’ll be easier than trying to find where he might have worked.’ She started to speak, paused, then said, ‘Guido, I’m not sure I understand why we’re going to all of this trouble about him.’

  ‘Borgato?’

  ‘Yes.

  ‘I’m not sure I understand it myself,’ Brunett
i confessed. ‘But the whole thing puzzles me, and I suppose that means it interests me.’

  Again, she paused, and again she went ahead. ‘You sound like you’re tired of watching crime shows on television and want to change the channel so you can look at a different series, with bigger thrills.’

  ‘For the love of God, don’t wish that on me,’ Brunetti said, laughing. She looked up at him directly then – eager, smiling – the familiar Claudia, back at work. ‘When Borgato returned to Venice,’ Brunetti continued, speaking normally again, ‘he had enough money to buy a warehouse and two boats, so he must have earned it wherever he was during those years. So check his finances: bank records, loans, anything.’

  Griffoni slid the manila cover towards her, pulled a pen from Brunetti’s side of the desk, and wrote down a few things, paused a moment, and added something else. Suddenly she got to her feet, leaving the papers and keeping the folder in her hand. ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ she said and left.

  Because Paola was meeting with colleagues for dinner, the family was on its own, cast off by the mother to go out and hunt and gather for themselves. The children had cadged an invitation from their grandparents, and Brunetti had resigned himself to making himself a pasta with the sauce Paola had left in the refrigerator for him. He was prepared to grate the parmigiano fresh.

  No one was there when he arrived, and he went immediately to Paola’s study, which over the years had come to serve as his reading room. Paola had sent him a message that afternoon to tell him the new translation of Tacitus had arrived and was on her desk, as indeed it proved to be. He grabbed it up and had a quick look at the blurbs on the back cover, all enthusiastic. Book still in his hands, he kicked off his shoes, lay down on the sofa, and started to read.

  Brunetti had always preferred to read while horizontal. His habit was probably the result of the poverty of his family: a child who loved reading and who was raised in a house that was heated minimally, if at all, during the winter would perforce develop the habit of reading in bed. Even now, in a far grander house – and a far warmer one – he still concentrated better on books that were propped on his chest.

  He ignored the introduction as well as the notes from the translator and decided to open the book at random to get a taste of what awaited him. Thus he found himself reading the story of Sejanus, chief of the Praetorian Guard, the man the Emperor Tiberius referred to as ‘the partner of my labours,’ little realizing that his partner was busy – as many subsequent historians asserted – with the labour of clearing his own way to the throne of the Caesars, first by murdering Tiberius’ only son while keeping in his sights his two grandsons.

  A phrase caught Brunetti’s attention, and he went back and read it again, and then again. ‘I give only one example of the falsity of gossip and hearsay, and I urge my readers to beware of incredible tales, however widely they might be believed and instead to believe the unvarnished truth.’

  Brunetti let the open book fall on to his stomach and stared out the window at rooftops and windows that reflected the setting sun. Two thousand years ago, the bulk of the population illiterate, most news was transmitted by word of mouth, and Tacitus was warning his readers to be careful about believing what they heard and to trust only unvarnished truth. ‘Whatever that is,’ a voice whispered to Brunetti’s inner ear. Had Tacitus been a prophet as well as an historian, Brunetti wondered, by so well anticipating the consequences of television and social media?

  Brunetti returned to the world of two thousand years before and read on. Unfortunately, the following few years were missing from the original text, although Sejanus must certainly have continued to plot and perfect his flattery of Tiberius. When the text resumed after that gap, Sejanus had fallen, and his memory, and family, were in the process of being destroyed.

  But why, Brunetti wondered, should he believe the story as Tacitus tells it? Did his sources tell him the truth? Did they even know the truth? Almost a century had passed between these events and the time Tacitus wrote of them. Much could have been lost from the common memory, or distorted, or deliberately obscured.

  Brunetti’s thoughts moved to the newspapers he read and those others that were available at the news-stands. Each day, they reported the news and made their readers aware of the events the editors judged to be of political, economic, medical or social importance. And how different those explanations were, how conflicting their interpretations. Only the sports pages were reliable: the scores given could be checked and authenticated, as could the rankings in the various leagues. But wait a minute. If the news gave the sum written on a player’s contract, it did not report accurately how much the player would actually receive. Endorsements, interviews, marketing, even his appearance at a dinner or a party, the cars he was given, the shoes, the clothing: how to calculate this? Where was the ‘unvarnished truth’?

  A key turning in the lock of the front door pulled him back from the wanderings that often resulted from his reading. At first he thought it was Paola, because she could always fit the key into the lock without repeated trying. But he waited for the way the door closed. Too loud for her. And then the first heavy footstep.

  ‘Ciao, Raffi,’ he called out in welcome.

  His son appeared at the door, almost as tall as Brunetti, with a mass of dark hair he said he was too busy to get cut, now so long that the top of his backpack pushed at it. Suddenly, Brunetti saw him with new eyes, and saw that his son was handsome. No sooner had he thought this than he searched for a way to alter the thought and judge him as no more than not bad looking, anything that would avert whichever jealous spirits might be waiting to hear words of praise.

  They sat at opposite ends of the sofa, talking about the business of their day. Raffi explained that he had decided to come home to write an essay for his Italian History class instead of having dinner with his grandparents. He talked about the teacher of this class, a vocal member of the Lega that had once wanted a separate Northern Italy, to be called Padania, but had now taken the other compass points under its all-encompassing wings.

  The teacher and Raffi had already differed on a number of points, including the Italian presence in Abyssinia before the Second World War, which the professor presented as a golden age for Abyssinia. When Raffi mentioned the use of poison gas, dropped from planes, during what he chose to call an ‘invasion’, the teacher denied it. ‘The people threw flowers at the feet of our soldiers,’ he insisted.

  ‘Why does he dismiss everything I say? Even if I tell him where I found the information?’

  Brunetti felt the desire to lean over and ruffle Raffi’s hair and tell him to calm down. Instead, he stretched out his legs and put his feet on the table in front of them. ‘There’s no use in trying to reason with him, Raffi,’ Brunetti said in a soft voice. ‘He’s decided what’s true and what isn’t, so anything you say in argument against him will only provoke him.’

  ‘But he’s a teacher, Papà. He’s supposed to tell us what happened in the past and where to find the evidence.’

  That was true enough, Brunetti thought.

  ‘Your grandfather was there,’ he said suddenly.

  Raffi turned towards his father, mouth open in surprise. ‘What?’

  ‘My father. Your grandfather. He was there during the occupation.’

  ‘I never knew that,’ Raffi said.

  ‘Well, he was.’

  ‘How do you know?’ Raffi asked urgently.

  ‘My grandmother had his service record,’ Brunetti explained. ‘She needed it to claim her widow’s pension.’

  ‘Didn’t he have a pension already?’ Raffi asked, confused. ‘From the army?’

  ‘He was awarded one,’ Brunetti said, then quickly added, ‘but family legend always said he refused to take it.’

  ‘But your family was poor, wasn’t it?’ Raffi asked, as though he’d heard something about such a situation and thought he knew what it me
ant.

  ‘He told them he wouldn’t take it,’ Brunetti said.

  ‘That’s crazy,’ Raffi objected, but seeing Brunetti’s sudden glance, added, ‘If they were poor, I mean.’

  Brunetti shrugged and smiled, as he so often did when talking about his father’s side of the family. ‘He said it wasn’t right to take money for doing what he did there.’

  ‘So he didn’t have a pension?’

  ‘No, not for going to Abyssinia, but he did accept one for being wounded and held as a prisoner of war. He thought it was right that the state paid him for that.’

  Raffi rubbed his hands across his face and back through his hair. ‘I don’t understand,’ he said. ‘He was a soldier just the same, wasn’t he? Both times.’

  ‘Yes, he was,’ Brunetti answered, suddenly uncomfortable at the fact that his son hadn’t instantly perceived the difference.

  ‘So why wouldn’t he take the pension?’ Raffi asked.

  ‘Did you ever read about what our soldiers did in Addis Ababa? After the attack on Graziano?’

  ‘He was our general, wasn’t he?’ Raffi asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Brunetti answered and left it at that, not eager to enter into a discussion of the General or his behaviour.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Bombs were thrown at Graziano. At a meeting. And he allowed the troops to . . . well, to punish the people of the city.’

  ‘How?’

  Brunetti thought about how best to answer this and finally said, ‘Any way they chose.’

  Raffi’s face went blank and grew minimally paler, so much so that Brunetti saw clearly where the moustache and beard were growing.

  Raffi leaned against the back of the sofa and folded his arms. ‘I don’t know what that means,’ he said after a long time.

  How strange this scene was, Brunetti thought: usually it was the sons and daughters who came to their parents with the revelation that their nation’s history had not been made by saints and angels, that it too had done the dirty jobs that are part of history, and it was the parents who tried to explain that times had been different then, people had thought in different ways, valued other beliefs, other lives.