Sea of Troubles (7 page)

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.'

'No,' Paola said, ignoring his sarcasm. 'I doubt that would have done any good.' Paola had met Signorina Elettra only twice, both times at official dinners given by Patta for members of the Questura staff. Each time, though they had been introduced to one another and had managed to speak for a few moments, they had been seated at different tables, something Brunetti had always viewed as a conscious decision on Patta's part to keep the two women from talking about him.

Ever practical, Paola leaped over theory and recrimination and set herself to deal with reality. 'Is there any way you can see that someone could be put there to keep an eye on her?'

'I'm not sure at this point that that will be necessary.'

'When and if it does become necessary, it will be too late to do anything about it,' Paola said, and he was forced to agree, though he didn't tell her this.

'Well?' she insisted.

‘I
spoke to Vianello to see if there's anyone on the force who lives out there.' He shook his head to indicate the answer. 'Besides, she was very insistent that she doesn't want anyone except me and Vianello to know where she is and what she's doing.' Before Paola could ask, he explained. 'She said no one in her family knows what she does, though I find that hard to believe. I'd agree it's unlikely that her relatives on Pellestrina know, especially if she sees them only once a year, but I'm sure that some members of her family must pay attention to what she does.'

'And if they do know or someone asks her about it, or someone finds out she works at the Questura?' Paola asked.

'Oh,' he said instantly, 'I'm sure she'd be able to invent something to explain it. She's an excellent liar; I've listened to her do it for years.'

'But what if she's in danger?' Paola asked, bringing him back to earth.

‘I
certainly hope she isn't.'

"That's not an answer, Guido, and it's not enough.'

'There's nothing we can do. She's decided this and I don't think she can be stopped.'

'You sound very cavalier about it, I must say.'

Brunetti was uncertain of how his wife would respond to any revelation of his feelings for another woman, so he made no attempt to defend himself.

'It would be terrible if anything happened to her,' Paola said.

Biting back the confession that it would break his heart, Brunetti reached forward and picked up his Calvados.

The next morning, Brunetti got to the Questura after nine, delayed by phone calls to three different informers, calls he was always careful to make from public phones and only to their
telefonini.
Though all had read about the crime, none of them could give him any information about the Bottins or their murder. All promised to call him if they heard anything, but none was optimistic because the crime had taken place so far away. As far as his Venetian contacts were concerned, it might as well have taken place in Milan.

The subject of his discussion with Paola was not in her office when he got there, so he went up to his own and read quickly through the newspapers. The national papers had understandably not
bothered with the Bottins, but
Il
Gazzettino
had given them half of the first page of the second section. In the hyperventilated style the local paper reserved for crimes of violence, the article began by asking if the Bottin men had felt some sort of strange premonition or if they had known, when they woke up the previous morning, that it would turn out to be the last day of their lives. Since these questions had become, by now, the paper's opening trope in any account of any violent death, Brunetti muttered, 'Probably not.'

The story repeated the facts Brunetti had already learned: the father had died from a blow to the head, the son from a knife wound. Both had been dead when the boat was set on fire and sunk. The newspaper account told him nothing new, though it did contain small photos of the two dead men. Bottin had the rough-featured look of a man who had spent too much time in the open. His expression showed the usual sullen hostility to be seen in photos on official documents. Marco, on the other hand, was smiling, two deep dimples visible just at the corners of his mouth. While the father was dark, his neck short and thick, Marco seemed made of finer, lighter materials. His fineness of feature would probably have disappeared, Brunetti realized, after two decades on the sea, but there was an easy grace about the tilt of Marco's head that made Brunetti curious about his mother and about the forces that had led him to share in the brutality of his father's fate.

8

Signorina Elettra didn't come into his office until more than two hours after he arrived. When he saw her, Brunetti found it impossible to resist the impulse to approach her, and he raised himself from his chair. Propriety, however, restrained him. 'Good morning,' he said casually, hoping, by the ordinariness of his greeting, to carry them back to simpler times, before she'd got the idea - no, he'd be honest here - before he'd given her the idea of going out to Pellestrina.

'Good morning, sir,' she said in an entirely normal way. He saw in her hand a few sheets of paper.

'The Bottins?' he asked.

She held them up. 'Yes. But very little, really,'

she said apologetically. 'I'm still working on the others.'

'Let me see
’
he said, as he sat down, very carefully keeping his tone level.

She placed the papers in front of him, then turned and made towards the door. Brunetti watched her leave, the narrowness of her back exaggerated by a light blue sweater with thin white vertical stripes. He remembered, then, asking her, some years ago, about the new millennium and what her plans and hopes for it were. Her plans, she'd answered, were to see how well baby blue, the announced colour of the new decade, suited her, and her only hope was that it would. When pressed, she'd admitted that she did have one or two other little things to hope for, but she hardly thought they were worth talking about, and that had been the end of that. Well, it suited her, baby blue, and Brunetti found himself wishing that, whatever other hopes she might have had, they'd all been granted her.

The Bottins, when he looked through the papers, were revealed as rather unexceptional men: they owned both the house on Pellestrina and the
Squallus
jointly, though they had separate bank accounts. Both owned cars, though Marco was also sole owner of a house on Murano, left to him by his mother.

Beyond the realm of the financial, Giulio began to stand out: he was known to the Carabinieri on the Lido and was the subject of a number
of
denuncie,
three of them resulting from fights in bars and one from an incident that had taken place between two boats on the
laguna,
though the other boat had not been Scarpa's. Bottin seemed, however, to have lived a charmed life so far as the police were concerned, for, however well known he was to them, formal charges had never been made against him, which suggested a lack of evidence or reluctance on the part of witnesses to testify. Marco had never been reported to the police.

Brunetti searched for a report of whatever had happened between the boats on the
laguna,
but no details were provided. He stopped himself from calling Signorina Elettra to ask her who might be able to provide this information, hoping she'd somehow forget about going.

Instead, he called down to the squad room and asked for Bonsuan to be sent up to his office.

The pilot knocked on the door a few minutes later, came in without bothering to salute or acknowledge Brunetti's rank, and took the seat Brunetti pointed out to him. He sat with his feet flat on the floor in front of him, his hands grasped around the arms of his chair, almost as if long exposure to the sea had made him eternally expectant of some sudden shift of tide or current. Brunetti could see the short stump of Bonsuan's little finger, the last two joints lost in some long-forgotten boating accident.

'Bonsuan,' Brunetti began, 'do you have any friends who are fishermen?'

Bonsuan showed no curiosity. 'Fishermen, yes.
Vongolari,
no.' The heat with which he answered surprised Brunetti, as did the distinction he drew.

'What's wrong with the
vongolari?'
he asked.

"They're
figli di puttane,
every one of them.'

Brunetti had heard a similar opinion of the clam fishermen from Vianello, among others, but he'd never heard it expressed with such disgust.

'Why?'

'Because they're hyenas,' Bonsuan answered. 'Or vultures. They suck up everything with their damned vacuum cleaner scoops, rip up the breeding beds, destroy whole colonies.' Bonsuan paused, pulled himself forward in his chair, then went on. 'They don't think about the future. The clam beds have fed us for centuries and could feed us for ever. They just dig and dig like wild animals, destroying everything.'

Brunetti remembered his lunch on Pellestrina. 'Vianello won't eat them any more, clams.'

'Ah, Vianello
’
Bonsuan said dismissively. 'He does it for health reasons.' On Bonsuan's lips, this sounded like an obscenity.

Not quite sure how he was meant to respond, Brunetti asked, 'Is it safe to eat them, then?'

Bonsuan shrugged. 'At my age, it's safe to eat anything.' He paused, then went on, 'No, I suppose it isn't safe to eat some of them. The bastards dig them up right in front of Porto Marghera, and God knows what's been pumped or dumped into the water there. I've seen the bastards, anchored there at night, with no lights, scooping them up, not fifty metres from the sign saying that the waters are contaminated and fishing's forbidden.'