Authors: Donna Leon
23
As soon as he decided that he needed to speak to Targhetta, Brunetti spent some time debating whether to call Paola and tell her he was going out to Pellestrina. He didn't want her to question his motives, nor was he much inclined to examine them himself. Better, then, just to have Bonsuan take him out and have done with it.
He didn't want to take Vianello, though he did not bother to analyse his motives for that decision. He did, however, rewind the tape, stick it in his pocket, and stop in the officers' room to borrow a small battery-powered tape recorder, just on the off chance that he might find someone on Pellestrina who would be willing to listen to it and perhaps identify the voice of the caller.
The day had turned cooler, and there were dark clouds to the north, enough to give him reason to hope that rain might finally be on the way. He remained below deck in the cabin on the way out, reading through yesterday's newspaper and a boating magazine one of the pilots had left behind. By the time they reached Pellestrina, he had learned a great deal about 55 horsepower motors, but nothing further about Carlo Targhetta or Vittorio Spadini.
As they were pulling in, he went upstairs and joined Bonsuan in the cabin.
Glancing back towards the city, Bonsuan said,
‘I
don't like this.'
'What, coming out here?' Brunetti asked.
'No, the feel of the day.'
'What does that mean?' Brunetti asked, suddenly impatient with sailors and their lore.
'The way the air feels. And the wind. It feels like
bora.'
The newspaper had forecast fair weather and rising temperatures. Brunetti told him this but Bonsuan snorted in disgust. 'Just feel it,' he insisted. 'That's
bora.
We shouldn't be out here.'
Brunetti looked ahead of them and saw bright sun dancing on still water. He stepped out of the cabin as the boat pulled up to the dock. The air was still, and when Bonsuan killed the motor, not a sound disturbed the peaceful silence of the day.
Brunetti jumped off and moored the boat, feeling quite proud of being able to do so. He left Bonsuan to find other old sailors to discuss the weather with and went to the village and the restaurant where his investigation had begun.
When he entered, there was a moment's pause in the conversation, but then it jump-started itself as everyone attempted to fill the silence created by the arrival of a commissario of police. Brunetti went to the counter and asked for a glass of white wine, looking around him while he waited for it, not smiling but not looking as if he had any particular reason to be there.
He nodded to the barman when he brought the wine and held up a hand to prevent his turning away. 'Do you know Carlo Targhetta?' he asked, deciding to waste no more time in futile attempts to outwit the Pellestrinotti.
The barman tilted his chin to one side to give every indication that he was considering the question, then said, 'No, sir. Never heard of him.'
Before Brunetti could turn to the old man standing beside him at the counter, the barman announced, in a voice loud enough to be heard by everyone in the room, 'Anyone here know someone called Carlo Targhetta?'
A chorus repeated the same response, 'No, sir. Never heard of him.' With that, normal conversation resumed, though Brunetti registered the quick exchange of complicit smiles.
He directed his attention to his wine and reached idly for that day's
Gazzettino,
lying folded on the bar. He flipped it to the front page and started to read the headlines. Gradually, he felt the room's attention wander away from him, especially at the entrance of a beefy-faced man who came in saying that it had started to rain.
He spread the paper on the bar. With his left hand, he pulled the tape recorder from his pocket and slipped it under the newspaper. He'd run the tape back to the place where the caller had accused Spadini directly of a crime and his voice had grown heated and loud. He lifted the corner to look at the recorder. He thumbed the
volume
dial, set his right forefinger on the
play
button, and let the paper fall back into place. Keeping his finger on the button, he raised his glass and took a sip, his attention seemingly devoted entirely to the newspaper.
Three men went outside to see about the rain, and the men left in the bar grew quiet, waiting for them to come back and report.
Brunetti pressed
play
. 'That bastard Spadini's fishing up millions every day. And he never pays a lira in taxes. It's all black. Everything he earns is black.'
The glass of wine fell from the hand of the old man standing beside him and shattered on the floor.
'Maria Santissima
’
he exclaimed. 'It's Bottin. He's not dead.'
His voice drowned out the next exchange on the tape, but the entire bar heard Targhetta say,
'...
we prefer to be a bit more certain about just who is making the
denuncia.'
'Oh, Dio,'
said the old man, reaching a feeble hand towards the counter and propping his weight on it. 'It's Carlo.'
Brunetti slipped his hand under the newspaper and pushed the
stop
button. The loud click rang out in the silence, wounding it but not altering it. The old man was silent, though his lips continued to move in muttered prayer or protest.
The door opened and the three men came back, their shoulders dark and their heads wet with the rain. Joyously, like children let out of school early, they cried out, 'It's raining, it's raining,' then fell silent when they sensed the charged atmosphere in the room.
'What's wrong?' one of them asked, putting the question to no one in particular.
Brunetti said, in an entirely normal voice, 'They told me about Bottin and Spadini.'
The man he addressed looked around the bar for confirmation and found it in the averted eyes and continuing silence. He shook his arms, spraying water around him, then went to the bar and said, 'Give me a grappa, Piero.'
The barman set it down in front of him without speaking.
Talk gradually resumed, but quietly. Brunetti signalled to the waiter and pointed to the old man beside him. He brought a glass of white wine for the old man, who took it and drank it down like water, replacing the glass loudly on the bar. Brunetti nodded, and the waiter refilled it. Turning to face him, Brunetti asked, 'Targhetta?'
'His nephew
’
the old man said and swallowed the second glass. 'Spadini's?'
The man looked at Brunetti and held his glass out to the waiter, who filled it again. Instead of drinking it, the old man set it on the bar and stared into it. He had the rheumy eyes of the habitual drinker, the man who woke up to wine and went to sleep with it on his tongue.
'Where's Targhetta now?' Brunetti asked, folding the paper, as if this were the least interesting question he could think of.
'Fishing, probably, with his uncle. I saw them at the dock a half-hour ago.' His lips puckered in a fisherman's disapproval, and Brunetti waited for him, like Bonsuan, to say something about the
bora
and not liking the feel of the air, but instead he said, 'Probably took that woman again. Bad luck, having a woman on a boat'
Brunetti's hand tightened on the paper. 'What woman?' he forced himself to ask in a neutral voice.
"That one he's been fucking. The one from Venice.'
'Ah,' Brunetti said, forcing his hand to release the paper and pick up his glass of wine. He took a sip, nodded his approval at the old man and then at the waiter. He made himself look at the newspaper again, as if utterly uninterested in this woman from Venice and what Carlo was doing to her, concerned only with yesterday's soccer results.
Light flashed at the windows, and after a moment thunder followed, so loud as to set the bottles at the back of the bar rattling. The door opened and another man slipped in, wet as an otter. When he paused at the open door, all sound inside the bar was drowned by the sound of the rain, battering down, exploding from the gutters. Another flash of light streamed in, and everyone in the bar braced themselves for the explosion that must follow. When it came it lingered for long seconds and, just as it began to roll away, was replaced by the fierce shriek of the
bora,
sweeping down from the north. Even inside the bar, they were aware of the sudden drop in temperature.
'Where would they be?' Brunetti asked the old man.
He drank the wine and gave Brunetti an inquisitive look. Brunetti nodded at the waiter, and again the glass was filled. Before he touched it, the old man said, 'They haven't been out long. Probably try to get away from this.' With his chin, he indicated the door and, beyond it, the lightning, wind and rain that had turned the day to chaos.
'How?' Brunetti asked, reining in his rising fear and careful to make it sound as if he was only mildly curious about the ways of the
laguna
and the men who fished upon its waters.
The old man turned his attention to the man to his right, the first to come in from the rain. 'Marco,' he asked, 'where would Vittorio go?'
Brunetti was conscious of the strained silence as all of the fishermen waited to see who would be the next to follow the old man in breaking ranks by talking to the policeman.
The man questioned looked down into his glass, and some instinct prevented Brunetti from signalling the waiter to fill it. Instead, he stood quietly and waited for an answer.
The man addressed as Marco looked at the old man. After all, it was he who had asked the question. If the policeman heard th
e answer, it wasn't his fault, ‘I
think he'd try for Chioggia.'
A man at a far table said, in quite an ordinary voice
’
He'd never make it, not with the
bora,
and not with the tide behind it. If he went anywhere near the Porto di Chioggia, he'd be taken out to sea.' No one objected, no one spoke; the only sounds were of the rain and wind, now a single, overwhelming noise.
From another table, a man's voice said, 'Vittorio's a bastard, but he'll know what to do.'
Another half-rose to his feet and flung out his hand in the direction of the door. 'No one knows what to do in that.' His angry tones were immediately answered by another bolt of lightning, closer now, swiftly followed by a cascade of thunder.
When the sound diminished to the mere pounding of rain, a man near the door said, 'If it gets worse, he'd probably try to run ashore down at the Riserva.' Brunetti had spent a good deal of time studying the map, having things on it pointed out to him by Bonsuan, so he knew this had to be the Riserva di Ca' Roman, a barren oblong of sandy soil that hung like a pendant drop from the southern end of the long, thin finger of Pellestrina.
'Run aground?' Brunetti asked him.
The man began to answer, but his voice was lost in a tremendous crash of thunder that seemed to shake the entire building. When silence finally returned, he tried again. 'There's no place to dock, but he could probably run his boat up on to the beach.'
'Why not come back here?'
The old man shook his head wearily, either at the impossibility of such a feat in weather like this or at the ignorance of a person who would have to ask it. 'No chance. If he tried to turn in the canal, the wind and tide could turn him over. Only thing he can do is try to run on to Ca' Roman. Back in '27
’
he began, making it sound as though he'd seen that storm, too, 'that's what happened to Elio Magrini. Flipped him over like a turtle. They never found him, and what was left of the boat wasn't worth salvaging.' He raised his glass, perhaps to the memory of Elio Magrini, and emptied it in a single long swallow.
During all of this, Brunetti had been considering possibilities: with the wind coming from the north-west and the retreating tide pushed along by it, the narrow spit of land that led down to Ca' Roman would be awash, perhaps already completely under water. He and Bonsuan could get there only by boat, and if what the old man said was true, that would mean running the police launch aground.
'You really think she's gone out with him? In this?' Brunetti asked in his best man of the world voice.
The puff of wind the old man shot out of his compressed lips expressed disgust, not only at the foolishness of Signorina Elettra, but at that of all women. Adding nothing, the old man pushed himself away from the bar and went to sit at one of the tables.
Brunetti placed a few thousand lire on the bar, put the tape recorder back in his pocket, and started for the door. Just before he reached it, it banged open from outside, but no one came in: only wind and rain battered it repeatedly against the wall. Brunetti stepped out into the rain, careful to pull the door shut behind him.
He was instantly wet; it happened so quickly that he had no time to worry about it or to think about protecting himself from the rain. One moment he was dry, the next soaked through, his shoes filled with water, as though he'd stepped into a lake. He set off back towards the pier and, perhaps, Bonsuan. After a few seconds he had to raise a hand above his eyes to block the power of the wind that drove rain into them, blinding him. His progress was slowed by the added weight of water that bore him down, pulling at his shoes and jacket.