A Sea of Troubles

  Seeing the cranes, stark and angular, Brunetti was struck by how seldom he ever saw them in motion. Two of them still towered above the hollow shell of the opera theatre, as motionless as all attempts to rebuild it. Thinking of the proud boast blazoned across the front page of Il Gazzettino the day after the fire, that the theatre would be rebuilt where it was and as it was, within two years, Brunetti didn’t know whether to laugh or weep, a decision he had had far more than two years to consider. Popular belief, itself interchangeable with truth, had it that the motionless cranes cost the city ten million lire a day, and popular imagination had long since abandoned any attempt to calculate the final cost of restoration. Years passed, the money seeped away, and yet the cranes stood motionless, rising silently above the endless yammering and legal squabbling about who would get to perform the reconstruction.

  Both of them stopped talking and watched the city draw near. No city is more self-regarding than Venice: cheap and vulgar self-portraits lined the sides of many streets; almost every kiosk peddled garish plastic gondolas; hacks whose berets falsely proclaimed them to be artists sold horrible pastels at every turn. At every step she pandered to the worst and flashed out the meretricious. Added to this was the terrible aftermath of all of these dry weeks: narrow calli that stank of urine, both dog and human; a thin layer of dust that was forever underfoot, no matter how many times the streets were swept. And yet her beauty remained unblemished, just as it remained supreme.

  The pilot cut to the right and drew up in front of the Questura. Brunetti waved his thanks and jumped on to the embankment, quickly followed by Vianello.

  ‘And now, sir?’ the sergeant asked as they passed through the tall glass doors.

  ‘Call the hospital and check when they’re going to do the autopsies. I’ll set Signorina Elettra to work on the Bottins.’ Before Vianello could ask, he added, ‘And on Sandro Scarpa, and while she’s at it, Signora Follini.’

  At the top of the first flight of steps, Brunetti turned off towards Patta’s office, and Vianello went down to the uniformed men’s office.

  ‘Still thrashing it out with Veblen?’ Brunetti asked as he came into Signorina Elettra’s small office.

  She picked up an envelope and used it to mark her place, then set the book aside. ‘It’s not easy reading. But I couldn’t find it in translation.’

  ‘I could have lent you mine,’ Brunetti offered.

  ‘Thank you, sir. If I had known you had it . . .’ she began, then let the sentence drop. She wouldn’t have asked her superior to bring her a book to read at work.

  ‘Has the Vice-Questore come in yet?’

  ‘He was here for a half-hour after lunch, but then he said he had to go to a meeting.’

  One of the things Brunetti liked about Signorina Elettra was the merciless accuracy of her speech. Not, ‘had to go to a meeting’, but the more precise, ‘said he had to go to a meeting’.

  ‘Are you free, then?’

  ‘As the air itself, sir,’ she said, folding her hands in front of her like a diligent pupil and sitting up very straight in her chair.

  ‘The murdered men were Giulio Bottin and his son, Marco. Both are from Pellestrina and both are fishermen. I’d like you to find whatever you can about them.’

  ‘Everywhere, sir?’

  Assuming this to mean everywhere she had access to with her computer or through her network of friends and connections, he nodded. ‘And Sandro Scarpa, also of Pellestrina and probably a fisherman. See if the name Giacomini comes up in anything about them; I don’t have a first name. And a Signora Follini, who runs the store there.’

  At the name, Signorina Elettra raised her eyebrows in an open avowal of interest.

  ‘You know her?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘No, not really, no more than to say hello to.’

  Brunetti waited for her to add something to this but when she did not, he went on, ‘I don’t know if it’s a married name or not.’ Signorina Elettra shook her head to indicate she had no clearer idea. ‘I guess she’s about fifty,’ Brunetti offered, then couldn’t resist adding, ‘Though you’d probably have to drive bamboo shoots under her fingernails to get her to admit it.’

  She looked up, startled, and said, ‘That’s a very unkind thing to say.’

  ‘Is it any less unkind if it’s true?’ he asked.

  She considered for a moment and then answered, ‘No, probably more so.’

  In defence of his remark, he said, ‘She flirted with me,’ putting ironic emphasis on ‘me’ to suggest the absurdity of the woman’s behaviour.

  Signorina Elettra glanced at him quickly. ‘Ah,’ was the only thing she allowed herself to say and then just as quickly asked, ‘Any other names, sir?’

  ‘No, but see if you can find if they owned the boat free and clear.’ He thought for a moment, exploring possibilities. ‘And see if any sort of insurance claim was ever made on it.’

  She nodded each time he spoke but didn’t bother to write any of this down.

  ‘Do you know anyone out there?’ he asked suddenly.

  ‘I have a cousin who has a house in the village,’ she answered modestly, disguising any pleasure she might have felt in finally being asked this question.

  ‘In Pellestrina?’ he asked, with interest.

  ‘Actually, she’s my father’s cousin. She shocked the family, ages ago, by marrying a fisherman and moving out there. Her eldest daughter married a fisherman, too.’

  ‘And do you visit them?’

  ‘Every summer,’ she said. ‘I usually spend a week there, sometimes two.’

  ‘How long have you been doing this?’ he asked, his mind running well ahead of his question.

  She permitted herself to smile. ‘Ever since we were kids. And I have even gone fishing on her son-in-law’s boat.’

  ‘You? Fishing?’ Brunetti asked, as astonished as if she’d said she had taken up Sumo wrestling.

  ‘I was younger then, sir,’ she said, then, casting into the deep waters of memory, she added, ‘I think it might have been the season Armani tried navy blue.’

  He conjured her up then, wide-cut slacks, no doubt a mixture of silk and cashmere, cut low on the hip like the ones sailors wore. Not a white cap, certainly not that, but a captain’s hat, brim covered in gold braid. He abandoned this vision, returned to her office, and asked, ‘You still go out there?’

  ‘I hadn’t made plans yet to go out this summer, sir, but if you ask it like that, I suppose I can.’

  Brunetti had had no idea at all of asking her to go and had inquired out of simple curiosity, wondering if she knew someone who would be willing to talk to them openly. ‘No, nothing like that, Signorina,’ he said. ‘I was just surprised at the coincidence.’ Even as he spoke, however, he was considering what she had just told him: a cousin in Pellestrina, a cousin married to a fisherman.

  She interrupted his thoughts by saying, ‘I hadn’t made any other plans for vacation, you know, sir, and I really do love it there.’

  ‘Please, Signorina,’ he said, forcing himself to sound convinced and, he hoped, convincing, ‘it’s hardly anything we could ask of you.’

  ‘No one’s asking, sir. I’m merely trying to decide where to go for the first part of my vacation.’

  ‘But I thought you just came back from . . .’ he began, but she stopped him with a glance.

  ‘There are so few days I manage to take,’ she said modestly, and at the words, he blotted from his memory the postcards that had arrived at the Questura from Egypt, Crete, Peru and New Zealand.

  Before she could suggest anything, he said, ‘I hardly think any of this is proper, Signorina.’

  She gave him a look that combined shock and injury. ‘I’m not sure it’s anyone’s business where I choose to spend my vacation, sir.’

  ‘Signorina,’ he began by way of protest, but she cut him short with her most efficient voice.

  ‘We can discuss this again at some other time, sir, but first let me see what I can find out about
those people.’ She turned her head to one side, as if hearing a sound Brunetti could not. ‘I think I remember something about the Bottins, a few years ago. But I’ll have to think about it.’ She gave him a broad smile. ‘Or I can ask my cousin.’

  ‘Of course,’ Brunetti agreed, not at all pleased at the way she had outmanoeuvred him. Habitual caution made him ask, ‘Do they know you work here?’

  ‘I doubt it,’ she answered. ‘Most people really aren’t interested in other people or what they do, not unless it bothers or affects them in some way.’ Brunetti had concluded much the same thing, through years of experience. He wondered if her belief was theoretical or practical; she seemed so young and so untender.

  She looked up at him and said, ‘My father never approved of the fact that I left the bank, so I doubt he’s told anyone where I’m working. I imagine most of my family still think I work there. If they bother to think about it at all, that is.’

  Brunetti had become aware of what his enthusiasm had led her to contemplate, and again he protested. ‘Signorina, this is not a good idea. These two men were murdered.’ Her glance was cool, uninterested. ‘And you’re really not a member of the police, not officially, that is.’ As he had seen done in countless films, she turned up her palm, bent her fingers, and examined her nails, as though they were the most interesting thing in the room. With her thumbnail, she flicked an invisible speck from another nail, then glanced in his direction to see if he was finished.

  ‘As I was saying, sir, I think I’ll be on vacation next week. The Vice-Questore will be gone, so I don’t think he’ll be much inconvenienced by my absence.’

  ‘Signorina,’ Brunetti said, his voice calm and official, ‘there could be a certain measure of danger involved here.’ She didn’t answer. ‘You don’t have the skills,’ he said.

  ‘Would you rather send Alvise and Riverre?’ she asked drily, naming the two worst officers on the force. Then she repeated, ‘Skills?’

  He began to speak, but she cut him off again. ‘What skills do you think I’m going to need, Commissario: to fire a gun or restrain a suspect or jump from a third-floor window?’

  He refused to answer, not wanting to provoke her further and reluctant to admit he was responsible in any way for her hare-brained idea.

  ‘What sort of skills do you think I’ve been using here since I was hired? I don’t go out and arrest people, but I send you to the people you should arrest, and I give you the evidence that will help convict them. And I do it, sir, by asking people questions and then thinking about what they tell me and using that to go and ask other questions of other people.’ She paused but he said nothing, merely nodded to show that he was listening to what she said.

  ‘If I do it with this,’ she said, waving a red-nailed hand above her computer keyboard, ‘or I go out to Pellestrina to spend time with people I’ve known for years, there’s really little difference.’

  When he saw that she had stopped, he said, ‘I’m concerned about your safety, Signorina.’

  ‘How gallant,’ she said, stunning him with her tone.

  ‘And I don’t have the authority to send you out there. It would be completely irregular.’ He marvelled at the realization that he didn’t have the authority to stop her.

  ‘But I have the authority to grant myself a week’s vacation, sir. There’s nothing irregular about that.’

  ‘You can’t do that,’ he insisted.

  ‘Our first fight,’ she said with a falsely tragic face, and he was forced to smile.

  ‘I really don’t want you to do this, Elettra,’ he said.

  ‘And the first time you’ve used my name.’

  ‘I don’t want it to be the last,’ he shot back.

  ‘Is that a threat to fire me or a warning that someone out there might kill me?’

  He thought about his answer for a long time before he gave it. ‘If you’ll promise not to go out there, I’ll promise never to fire you.’

  ‘Commissario,’ she said, returning to her usual formality, ‘tempting as that offer is, you must understand that Vice-Questore Patta would never let you fire me, not even if I were discovered to be the person who killed those two men. I make his life too comfortable.’ Brunetti was forced to admit, at least to himself, the truth of this.

  ‘If I charge you officially with insubordination?’ he asked, though both of them knew his heart wasn’t in it.

  As if he had not spoken, she continued, ‘I’ll need some way to keep in touch with you.’

  ‘We can give you a telefonino,’ he said, caving in.

  ‘It’ll be easier for me to use my own,’ she said. ‘But I’d like to have someone there, just in case what you say is true and there is some danger.’

  ‘Some of our men will be sent out to investigate. We can tell them you’re there.’

  Her answer was instant. ‘No. I don’t trust them not to talk to me if they see me or, if you tell them to ignore me, make such a production of it that they’ll call attention to me in any case. I don’t want anyone here to know what I’m doing. If possible, I don’t want them even to know I’m there. Except you and Sergeant Vianello.’

  Did her reluctance, he wondered, result from information he didn’t have about the people who worked in the Questura or from a scepticism about human nature even more profound than his own? ‘If I assign myself the investigation, then I’ll be the one to go out to talk to people, just Vianello and I.’

  ‘That would be best.’

  ‘How long are you planning on staying out there?’

  ‘I can stay as long as I usually do, I suppose: a week, perhaps a bit more. It’s not as if the people in the village are going to see me get down from the orange bus and come up to tell me the name of the person who did it, is it, sir? I’ll just go out and stay with my cousin and see what’s new and what people are talking about. Nothing at all unusual about that.’

  There was little left to settle. ‘Would it be too melodramatic if I asked if you’d like to take a gun with you?’ he asked.

  ‘I think it would be far more melodramatic if I accepted, sir,’ she said, and turned away, as glad as he to be finished with all of this. ‘I’ll start seeing what I can find about the Bottins, shall I?’ she asked, reaching out to swing the screen of her computer towards her.

  7

  ‘YOU’RE GOING TO let her do what?’ Paola protested that night after dinner, when he had finished telling her about his trip to Pellestrina and his subsequent conversation – he wanted to call it a confrontation but thought that was an exaggeration – with Signorina Elettra in the office. ‘You’re going to let her go out to Pellestrina and play detective? Alone? Unarmed? With a killer running around? Are you out of your mind, Guido?’

  They were still sitting at the table, the children gone off to do whatever it is dutiful and obedient children do after dinner in order to avoid their share of the housework. She set her glass, still half full of Calvados, back on the table and stared across at him. ‘I repeat: are you out of your mind?’

  ‘There was no way I could stop her,’ Brunetti insisted, conscious of how weak the admission made him sound. In his recounting of the incident, he had omitted to mention that the original idea had come from him and had given Paola a modified version in which Signorina Elettra insisted on her own initiative that she take a more active part in the investigation. Brunetti heard himself emerging from his telling of the tale as the hapless boss, outwitted by his secretary and too indulgent to endanger her career by imposing upon her the necessary discipline.

  Long experience with the prevarications of men in positions of power led Paola to suspect that what she heard was at some variance with the truth. She saw no profit, however, in questioning his account of the incident when it was only the results that interested her.

  ‘So you’re going to let her go?’ she repeated.

  ‘I told you, Paola,’ he said, thinking it would be better to wait until this was over before he poured himself another Calvados, ‘it’s not
at all a case of letting her; it’s a case of not being able to stop her. If I hadn’t given in, she would have taken a week of vacation and gone out there on her own anyway to start asking questions.’

  ‘Then is she the one who’s out of her mind?’ Paola demanded.

  Though there were many questions Brunetti would have liked answered about Signorina Elettra, this was not among them. Rather than say that, he gave in to his baser nature and poured himself another drop of Calvados.

  ‘What does she think she’s going to be able to do?’ Paola asked.

  He set his glass down untouched. ‘The way she explained it to me, she hopes to employ the same tactics and techniques she does with her computer: ask questions, listen to the answers, then ask more questions.’

  ‘And what if, while she’s asking one of these questions, someone decides to stick a knife into her stomach the way they did with that fisherman’s son?’ Paola demanded.

  ‘That’s exactly what I asked her,’ Brunetti said, which was certainly true in intention if not in fact.

  ‘And?’

  ‘She’s convinced that the fact that she’s been going out there every summer for years is enough.’

  ‘To what – shroud her in a cloak of invisibility?’ Paola rolled her eyes and shook her head in astonishment.

  ‘She’s not a fool, Paola,’ Brunetti said in Signorina Elettra’s defence.

  ‘I know that, but she’s only a woman.’

  He had been leaning forward to pick up his glass when she spoke, but her remark stopped him cold. ‘This from the Rosa Luxemburg of feminism?’ he asked. ‘She’s only a woman?’

  ‘Oh, fight fair, Guido,’ Paola said with real anger. ‘You know what I mean. She’ll be out there with a telefonino and her wits, but someone else is out there with a knife, and this someone has already murdered two people. Those aren’t odds I’d want to give to anyone I cared about.’

  He registered her last remark and let it pass for the moment. ‘Perhaps you should have talked to her, instead of me.’