A Sea of Troubles

by Donna Leon

  ‘If they’ve got a woman’s body in their fishing nets, it doesn’t seem to me there’s any way they can help getting involved with us,’ Brunetti said, transferring a bit of his anger to Vianello.

  ‘People don’t think of those things, I’m afraid. Perhaps most of all when they’ve got a woman’s body in their nets.’

  Knowing the sergeant was right and sorry he’d spoken so sharply, Brunetti said, ‘Of course, of course.’

  The lights of Malamocco swept by, then the Alberoni, and then there was nothing but the long straight sweep towards Pellestrina. Soon, ahead of them they saw the scattered lights of the houses and the straight line of lights on the dock along which the town was built. Strangely enough, there was no evidence that anything extraordinary had taken place, for there were only a few people visible on the riva. Surely, even the Pellestrinotti could not have been so quickly hardened to death.

  The pilot, who had not been out to Pellestrina during this investigation, started to pull the launch into the empty place in the line of fishing boats. Brunetti jumped up the steps and put a hand on his shoulder, saying, ‘No, not here. Down at the end.’

  Instantly, the pilot reversed the engines, and the boat slowed, then started to pull back from the riva. ‘Over there, to the right,’ Brunetti told him, and the pilot brought the boat gently up to the dock. Vianello tossed the mooring rope to a man who approached them, and as soon as he had tied it round the metal stanchion, Brunetti and Vianello jumped from the boat.

  ‘Where is she?’ Brunetti asked, leaving it to the boat’s markings to explain who they were.

  ‘Over here,’ the man said, turning back towards the small group of people who stood in the dim light cast by the street lamps. As Brunetti and Vianello approached, the group separated, creating a passage towards what lay on the pavement.

  Her feet lay in a pool of light, her head in darkness, but when Brunetti saw the blonde hair, he knew who it was. Fighting down a surge of relief, he drew closer. At first he thought her eyes were closed, that some gentle soul had pressed them closed for her, but then he saw that they were gone. He remembered that one of the policemen had explained the decision to bring up the bodies of the Bottins because there were crabs down below. He had read books in which the stomachs of people in situations like this were said to heave, but what Brunetti felt registered in his heart, which pounded wildly for a few seconds and did not grow steady until he looked away from the woman’s face, out over the calm waters of the laguna.

  Vianello had the presence of mind to ask, ‘Who found her?’

  A short, stocky man stepped forward from the shadows. ‘I did,’ he said, careful to keep his eyes on Vianello rather than on the silent woman over whom all of this was being said.

  ‘Where did you find her? And when?’ Vianello asked.

  The man pointed in the general direction of the mainland, off to the north. ‘Out there, about two hundred metres offshore, right at the mouth of the Canale di Ca’ Roman.’

  When he failed to answer Vianello’s second question, Brunetti repeated it. ‘When?’

  The man glanced down at his watch. ‘About an hour ago. I brought her up in my net, but it took me a long time to get her alongside the boat.’ He looked back and forth between Brunetti and Vianello, as if searching to see which of them would be more likely to believe what he said. ‘I was alone in my sandolo, and I was afraid I’d capsize if I pulled her in.’ He stopped.

  ‘So what did you do?’

  ‘I towed her,’ he said, obviously troubled by having to confess this. ‘It was the only way to get her here.’

  ‘Did you recognize her?’ Brunetti asked.

  He nodded.

  Glad not to have to look at Signora Follini, Brunetti let his eyes rove around the faces of the people above her, but Signorina Elettra was not among them. If they looked down at the body, their faces disappeared in the shadows cast by the overhead lights, but most of them preferred not to. ‘When did any of you see her last?’ he asked.

  No one answered.

  He caught the eye of the one woman standing in the group. ‘You, Signora,’ he said, keeping his voice soft, merely inquisitive, no trace of authority in it. ‘Can you remember when you last saw Signora Follini?’

  The woman stared back at him with frightened eyes, then glanced to right and left. Finally she said, all in a rush, ‘A week ago. Maybe five days. I went to the store for toilet paper.’ Suddenly aware of what she had said in front of all these men, she covered her mouth with her hand, looked down, then quickly up again.

  ‘Perhaps we could move away from here.’ Brunetti suggested, moving back towards the bright windows of the houses. A man approached from the direction of the village carrying a blanket. As he drew close to the body, Brunetti forced himself to say, ‘You’d better not do that. The body shouldn’t be touched.’

  ‘It’s for respect, sir,’ the man insisted, though he didn’t look down at her. ‘She shouldn’t be left like that.’ He held the blanket draped over one arm, a gesture that conveyed a curious sense of formality.

  ‘I’m sorry, but I think it’s better,’ Brunetti said, giving no hint of how deeply he sympathized with the man’s desire. His refusal to let the man cover Signora Follini lost him whatever sympathy he might have gained by moving the crowd away from the body.

  Sensing this, Vianello moved a few steps further towards the village, put his hand lightly on the arm of the woman, and said, ‘Is your husband here, Signora? Perhaps he could take you home.’

  The woman shook her head, freed her arm from his hand, but slowly and with no hint of having taken or wanting to give offence, and walked away towards the houses, leaving the matter to the men.

  Vianello moved closer to the man who had stood next to the woman. ‘Can you remember when you saw Signora Follini last, Signore?’

  ‘Some time this week, perhaps Wednesday. My wife sent me to get mineral water.’

  ‘Do you remember who else might have been in the store when you were there?’

  The man hesitated a moment before he answered. Both Brunetti and Vianello noticed this; neither gave any sign that they had.

  ‘No.’

  Vianello didn’t ask for an explanation. Instead, he turned back to the crowd. ‘Can anyone else tell me when they saw her?’

  One man said, ‘Tuesday. In the morning. She was opening the store. I was on my way to the bar.’

  Another volunteered, ‘My wife bought the newspaper on Wednesday.’

  When no one else spoke, Vianello asked, ‘Does anyone remember seeing her after Wednesday?’ None of them answered. Vianello pulled his notebook from his back pocket, opened it, and said, ‘Could I ask you to give me your names?’

  ‘What for?’ demanded the man with the blanket.

  ‘We’re going to have to speak to everyone in the village,’ Vianello began reasonably, as if taking no notice of the question or the tone in which it had been asked, ‘so if I can get your names, we won’t have to bother any of you again.’

  Though not fully persuaded by this, the men nevertheless gave him their names and, when asked, their addresses. Then they filed slowly away, moving in and out of the circles of light, leaving the pavement to the two policemen and, at a distance, to the woman who lay silent, her blank eyes raised to the stars.

  17

  BEFORE HE SPOKE, Brunetti moved even farther away from the body of the dead woman. ‘When I was in the store with her last week, two men came in. It was obvious they made her nervous. When I called her, I think it was Monday, she hung up as soon as she heard my name. When I called again, later in the week, a man answered, and I hung up without saying anything. Probably stupid.’ He thought of what he’d learned about her, that she had been an addict for so many years and had stopped, come home, and gone to work in her parents’ store. ‘I liked her. She had a sense of humour. And she was tough.’ The subject of these observations lay behind them, deaf now to the opinion of others.

  ‘Sounds like you mean
that as a compliment,’ Vianello said.

  Without hesitation, Brunetti answered, ‘I do.’

  After a pause, Vianello asked, ‘And she didn’t have any illusions about life in Pellestrina, did she?’

  Brunetti looked over at the low houses of the village. A light went out in a downstairs window of one of them, and then in another. Was it because the residents of Pellestrina hoped to get what sleep they could before the fishing fleet set sail or was it to darken their rooms, the better to enable them to see what was going on outside? ‘I don’t think any of them have any illusions about living here.’

  If either of them thought about going to the bar to have a drink while they waited for the scene of crime team, neither suggested it. Brunetti glanced back at the police launch and saw the pilot, sitting in a pool of light on the mushroom-shaped top of the metal stanchion, smoking a cigarette, but he didn’t move off in that direction. It seemed little enough to remain with Signora Follini until the others arrived to transform her into a crime victim, a statistic.

  The second police launch brought not only the four men of the team but a young doctor from the hospital who worked as a substitute when neither Rizzardi nor Guerriero was available. Brunetti had been at two crime scenes when he had been sent to declare the victim dead, and both times the doctor had behaved in a way that Brunetti did not like, dismissive of the solemnity of the moment. Only five years out of medical school, Dottor Venturi had apparently spent his time acquiring the arrogance, rather than the compassion, of his profession. He had also carefully copied the meticulous dress of his superior, Rizzardi, though the result always seemed slightly ridiculous on his short, stubby body.

  The boat pulled in and moored beside theirs; the doctor jumped heavily down and walked towards the forms he knew to be Brunetti and Vianello, but he made no acknowledgement of their presence. He wore a dark charcoal grey suit with just the faintest of dark vertical stripes, a pattern which emphasized, rather than disguised, his rotundity.

  He looked down at Signora Follini’s body for a moment, then pulled the handkerchief from his breast pocket and dropped it on the wet pavement beside her before kneeling carefully on it. He picked up her hand without bothering to look at her face, felt her wrist, then let it slap wetly back on the pavement. ‘She’s dead,’ he said to no one in particular. He glanced up at Brunetti and Vianello to see how they would respond.

  When neither of them spoke, Venturi repeated, ‘I said she was dead.’

  Brunetti looked away from the laguna then and glanced down at the young doctor. He wanted to know the cause of her death, but he did not want to watch this young man touch her again, so he simply nodded in acknowledgement and turned back to his contemplation of the distant lights visible on the water.

  Vianello signalled to the men who had drawn up behind the doctor as he knelt over the body. Venturi started to get to his feet, but the toe of his right foot slipped on the wet pavement and he stopped himself from falling prone only by putting both palms flat down in front of him. Quickly he scrambled to his feet. He moved away from the body, careful to keep his dirty hands away from his sides, turned to one of the photographers, and said, ‘Would you get me my handkerchief?’

  The photographer, a man of about Brunetti’s age, was busy setting up his tripod. He pulled one of the legs out, screwed it in place, looked over at the doctor and said, ‘I didn’t drop it,’ and turned his attention to the second leg.

  Venturi opened his mouth to reprimand the technician, thought better of it, and headed off in the direction of the launch, leaving his handkerchief on the ground beside the body. Brunetti watched as he walked away, hands held horizontal, and was struck by how much like a penguin he looked. The empty boat bobbed out in the water, at least a metre from the edge of the pier. Neither of the pilots was anywhere to be seen. Rather than haul the boat closer by means of its mooring rope or attempt the broad leap from the pier to the deck, Venturi walked along the pier and sat on a wooden park bench. Brunetti suddenly noticed the heavy evening mist that had settled in, and was glad of it.

  He walked back to Signora Follini and knelt beside her, welcoming the momentary distraction of the dampness that began to soak into the knees of his trousers. She wore a low-cut angora sweater, the pile of the fabric swirled into chaotic ridges and whirls by the water in which she had floated. Though he was no pathologist, Brunetti was familiar with the signs of violent death, but he saw none here. The skin of her throat was untouched, as was the fabric of her sweater. With the fingers of his right hand, he lifted the hem of her sweater, exposing her stomach. Seeing nothing but the stretch marks of age, he turned his eyes away and covered her again.

  The various technicians busied themselves while Vianello and Brunetti waited. As they stood there idly, Brunetti saw the man with the blanket approach again. He went up to Vianello and said, nodding in the direction of the technicians, ‘When they’re finished, can you cover her?’

  Vianello agreed and took the blanket the man offered.

  ‘I don’t need it back, so don’t worry about that,’ the man said, then walked away from the pier and disappeared into the darkness at the mouth of a small alley that ran between the houses. Time passed. Occasionally, the darkness was punctured by flashes from the technician’s camera. Vianello waited until the crime team had finished and started to assemble their equipment, then he walked over to Signora Follini, flung the blanket open in the air and let it fall over her, careful to cover her face and her eyes.

  ‘Rizzardi would have told us something,’ Vianello said as he rejoined Brunetti.

  ‘Rizzardi would have picked up his own handkerchief,’ Brunetti answered.

  ‘Does it matter that we won’t know what killed her until the autopsy?’ Vianello asked.

  Brunetti tilted his chin in the direction of the houses of Pellestrina, most of them fully dark by now. ‘Do you think any of them is going to help us, even when we do know?’

  ‘It seems some of them liked her,’ Vianello said with cautious optimism.

  ‘They liked Marco Bottin, too,’ was Brunetti’s rejoinder.

  Because of the presence in the village of Signorina Elettra and Pucetti, Brunetti judged it better to delay until the next day the questioning that would have to be done. That might give the two of them, moving casually among the residents, the opportunity to hear things which would be forgotten or ignored by the time the police began the formal inquiry into the death of Signora Follini.

  Brunetti signalled to the technicians and they unrolled a stretcher. The blanket barely shifted as they lifted Signora Follini and carried her over to the launch.

  On the way back to Venice, Brunetti stood on deck, thinking of the jokes he and Vianello had made about Signora Follini, though at the time neither of them had had any idea of how practised her attentions had been. He took some comfort in the thought that, had she heard their jokes, she might have been amused by them, but the realization that she was now far beyond any possibility of sensing his regret merely added to his remorse.

  He was home long after midnight but found Paola, as he had hoped, waiting for him. She was sitting in bed, reading, but she closed the book and set it on the table then removed her glasses before she spoke. ‘What happened?’

  Brunetti hung his jacket in the closet, pulled off his tie and draped it over the back of a chair. ‘Signora Follini. Someone pulled her out of the laguna,’ he said as he started to unbutton his shirt. He sat, more tired than he had realized, on the chair beside the bed and bent down to untie his shoes. ‘Someone tossed her in the water and left her to drown, I think.’

  ‘Because of the other killings?’ she asked.

  ‘It would have to be.’

  ‘Is she still out there?’ Paola asked. For a moment, Brunetti thought she must mean Luisa Follini, whose body was by now lying in the chill company of the other dead at the Ospedale Civile, but then he realized she must mean Signorina Elettra.

  ‘I’ll tell her to come back,’ he said. Before
Paola could comment, he padded down to the bathroom, where he was careful to avoid looking at himself in the mirror as he brushed his teeth.

  Some time later, when he slipped under the covers beside her, Paola picked up just where things had been left. ‘Will she listen to you?’

  ‘She always listens to me.’

  ‘So does Chiara,’ Paola said but left it at that.

  He turned towards her and draped his arm over her stomach. He felt her move, and the light in the room went out. She shifted and slipped her arm around him until his head rested comfortably in the hollow just under her shoulder. He lay in the arms of his wife and thought of another woman, but because he told himself he was thinking of her safety, he made no effort to resist the thought.

  After a long time, so long that both of them should have been asleep, Paola said, ‘You better do something about this.’

  He made a noise, and then more time passed, and then they both slept.

  The next morning, even before he left home, he called the morgue and asked the attendant who had been assigned to do the autopsy on the woman brought in from Pellestrina the night before.

  ‘Dottor Rizzardi.’

  ‘Good. When?’

  There was a pause, and Brunetti heard the sound of a page being turned. ‘There were two people who died in Castello. Probably fumes from their water heater. But I can put her up first. He should be done by eleven.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Brunetti. ‘Tell him I’ll call, would you?’

  ‘Certainly, Commissario,’ the attendant said and put the phone down.

  Brunetti was keen to know when Signora Follini had died, and only Rizzardi could tell him that. Some time after Wednesday, unless he found someone who said they’d seen her later than that.

  And where? He found the map of the laguna and studied the narrow length of Pellestrina. At the southern end was the mouth of the canal where she had been found, about three kilometres from the village, just beyond the protected area of the Riserva of Ca’ Roman. He folded the map and slipped it into the inside pocket of his jacket. Only one of the pilots could tell him what he wanted to know about tides and currents and the way things drifted in the water.