A Sea of Troubles

by Donna Leon

She turned away from him again, studying the clouds, higher now and moving off towards the mainland.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ he finally asked into her expanding silence.

  ‘Nothing’s really wrong. It’s just that we’re at one of those points where the difference between men and women becomes evident.’

  ‘What difference?’ he asked.

  ‘The capacity of self-deceit,’ she said, but corrected herself and said, ‘Or rather, the things about which we choose to deceive ourselves.’

  ‘Like what?’ he asked, striving for neutrality.

  ‘Men deceive themselves about what they do themselves, but women choose to deceive themselves about what other people do.’

  ‘Men, presumably?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  If she had been a chemist reading the periodic table of the elements, she could not have sounded more certain.

  He finished his Calvados but did not pour any more. A long time passed in silence, during which he considered what she had said. ‘Sounds like men get a better deal,’ he finally replied.

  ‘When don’t they?’

  By the next morning, Brunetti had transformed Paola’s observation that he had thought about little except Signorina Elettra during the last week, which was true, into an assertion that she had reason for jealousy, which was hardly the same thing. Fully persuaded that Paola had no cause for jealousy, his concern for Signorina Elettra continued uppermost in his mind, blunting his ordinary instinct to be suspicious of and curious about everyone involved in a case. Odd tinglings, if they could be called that, thus went unanswered, and some of the finer threads leading out from the investigation remained unfollowed.

  Marotta returned and took over the handling of the Questura. Because murder was such a rare occurrence in Venice, and because Marotta was an ambitious man, he asked for the files on the Bottin murders and, after having read them, said he would take charge of the case himself.

  When he failed to find the number of Signorina Elettra’s telefonino, Brunetti spent a half-hour at the computer, attempting to get into the records at TELECOM, only to give up and ask Vianello if he could obtain the number. When he had it, he thanked the sergeant and went up to his own office to make the call. It rang eight times, then a voice came on, telling him the user of the phone had turned it off but he could, if he chose, leave a voice message. He was about to give his name when he remembered the look she’d given the young man for whom he now had a name and, instead, calling her Elettra and using the intimate tu, said it was Guido and asked her to call him at work.

  He called down to Vianello and asked him to have another look with the computer, this time for anything he could find out about a certain Carlo Targhetta, perhaps resident on Pellestrina. Vianello’s voice was a study in neutrality as he repeated the name, which made it clear to Brunetti that the sergeant had spoken to Pucetti and knew full well who the young man was.

  He took a blank piece of paper from his drawer and wrote the name Bottin in the centre, then the name Follini off on the left. Spadini’s name was next, at the bottom. He drew a line connecting Spadini and Follini. To the right of Spadini’s name, he wrote that of Sandro Scarpa, the waiter’s brother, said to have had a fight with Bottin, whose name he connected to Scarpa’s. Below that he wrote the name of the missing waiter. And then he sat and looked at these names, as if waiting for them to move around on the paper or for new lines to point out interesting connections among them. Nothing appeared. He picked up the pen again and wrote Carlo Targhetta’s name, sticking it into an inconspicuous corner and conscious that he wrote it in smaller letters than those he’d used for the other names.

  Still nothing happened. He opened the front drawer, slipped the paper inside, and went downstairs to see what Vianello had discovered.

  Vianello, in the meantime, had been larking around in the files of the various agencies of government in an attempt to see if Carlo Targhetta had done his military service or if he had ever had any trouble with the police. Quite the opposite, it seemed, or so he told Brunetti when he came into Signorina Elettra’s office, where the sergeant was using the computer.

  ‘He was in the Guardia di Finanza,’ Vianello said, surprised at the news.

  ‘And now he’s a fisherman,’ Brunetti added.

  ‘And probably earning a hell of a lot more doing that,’ remarked Vianello.

  Though this was hardly in question, it did seem a strange career change, and both of them wondered what could have prompted it. ‘When did he stop?’ Brunetti asked.

  Vianello pressed a few keys, studied the screen, pressed some more, and then said, ‘About two years ago.’

  Both of them thought of it, but Brunetti was the first to mention the coincidence. ‘About the same time that Spadini lost his boat.’

  ‘Uh huh,’ Vianello agreed and hit a key that wiped the screen clean. ‘I’ll see if I can find out why he left,’ he said and summoned up a fresh screenful of information. For a number of seconds, new letters and numbers flashed across the screen, chasing one another into and out of existence. After what seemed like an inordinately long time, Vianello said, ‘They’re not saying, sir.’

  Brunetti leaned down over the screen and started to read. Much of it was numbers and incomprehensible symbols, but near the bottom he read, ‘Internal use only, see relevant file,’ after which there followed a long string of numbers and letters, presumably the file in which the reason for Carlo Targhetta’s departure was to be found.

  Vianello tapped his finger on the final phrase and asked, ‘You think this means something, sir?’

  ‘Everything has to mean something, doesn’t it, really?’ Brunetti offered by way of response, though he was curious as to just what this might mean. ‘You know anyone?’ he asked Vianello, using the centuries-old Venetian shorthand: friend? relative? old classmate? someone who owes a favour?

  ‘Nadia’s godmother, sir,’ Vianello said after a moment’s reflection. ‘She’s married to a man who used to be a colonel.’

  ‘They weren’t invited to your anniversary dinner, were they?’ Brunetti asked.

  Vianello smiled at the reminder of the favour Brunetti now owed him. ‘No, they weren’t. He retired about three years ago, but he’d still have access to anything he wanted.’

  ‘Is Nadia very close to them?’ Brunetti asked.

  Vianello’s smile was sharklike. ‘Like a daughter, sir.’ He reached for the phone. ‘I’ll see what he can find out.’

  Brunetti assumed from the brevity of Vianello’s opening salvo that he had reached the retired Colonel directly. He heard him explain his request. When Vianello, after a short pause, said only ‘June two years ago,’ Brunetti assumed that the Colonel had not bothered to ask why the sergeant wanted the information. When Brunetti heard Vianello say, ‘Good, then I’ll call you tomorrow morning,’ he left and went back to his own office.

  22

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING, Brunetti left for work before Paola was awake, thus avoiding the need to answer any questions about the progress of the investigation. Because Signorina Elettra had not answered his call or at least had not phoned him at the Questura the day before, he could allow himself to think she had obeyed him and returned from Pellestrina. Consequently, he toyed with the idea, as he walked to work, that he might arrive at the Questura to find her at her desk, dressed for spring, happy to be back and even happier to see him.

  His thought, however, was not father to her deed, and there was no sign of her in her office. Her computer sat silent, its screen blank, but he went upstairs before that could be made to serve as an omen of any sort.

  Stopping in the officers’ room on the way up, he found Vianello at his desk, a disassembled pistol spread in a mess in front of him. The metal parts lay scattered on an open copy of Gazzetta dello Sport, their dull menace in sharp contrast to the pink paper, like a ballet dancer wearing brass knuckles.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Brunetti asked.

  The sergeant looked up and smiled. �
��It’s Alvise’s, sir. He started to take it apart to clean it this morning, but he couldn’t remember how to put it back together.’

  ‘Where is he?’ Brunetti asked, looking around.

  ‘He went to get a coffee.’

  ‘And left it here?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I thought I’d put it back together for him, sir, and just leave it on his desk.’

  Brunetti gave this the thought it deserved and said, ‘Yes, I think that’s best.’

  Ignoring the gun, Vianello said, ‘The Colonel called back.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And he’s not saying.’

  ‘Which means?’

  ‘It probably means he’d say if they’d told him but they won’t tell him.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  Vianello considered how best to begin, finally saying, ‘He was a colonel, so he’s used to being obeyed by almost everybody. I think what happened is that they refused to tell him why Targhetta left, but he’s ashamed to admit that, so he says that he’s not allowed to reveal the information.’ He paused, then added, ‘It’s his way of saving face, makes it sound like it’s his decision.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘No,’ the sergeant answered, ‘but it’s the explanation that makes most sense.’ There was another long pause and he added, ‘Besides, he owes me a number of favours. He’d do it if he could.’

  Brunetti considered this for some time then, realizing that Vianello must have been thinking about it for even longer, asked, ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I’d guess they caught Targhetta at something but couldn’t prove it or didn’t want to risk the consequences of arresting him or charging him. So they just quietly let him go.’

  ‘And put that in his file?’

  ‘Uh huh,’ Vianello agreed, turning his attention to the pistol. Quickly, with expert fingers, he began to pick up the scattered parts and slip them into place. Within seconds, the pistol was reassembled, returned to cold lethality.

  Setting it aside, Vianello said, ‘I wish she were here.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Signorina Elettra,’ Vianello answered. For some reason, it pleased Brunetti that he did not speak of her familiarly.

  ‘Yes, that would be useful, wouldn’t it?’ Stymied, suddenly aware of how practically dependent upon her he had become in recent years, Brunetti asked, ‘Is there anyone else?’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about that since he called,’ Vianello said. ‘There’s only one person I can think of who might be able to do it.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘You’re not going to like it, sir,’ the sergeant said.

  To Brunetti, that could mean only one thing; that is, one person. ‘I told you I’d prefer not to have anything to do with Galardi,’ Brunetti said. Stefano Galardi, the owner and president of a software company, had gone to school with Vianello, but he had long since left behind him all memory of having grown up in Castello in a house with no heat and no hot water and had soared off into the empyrean reaches of cyber-wealth. He had scaled the social and monetary ladder and was accepted, indeed welcomed, at every table in the city, except perhaps at the table of Guido Brunetti, where he had, six years before, made very obvious and very drunken advances to Paola until told to leave by her very angry and very sober husband.

  Because Galardi was persuaded that Vianello had, almost twenty years ago, saved him from drowning after a particularly riotous Redentore party, he had served, before the advent of Signorina Elettra, as a means to obtain certain kinds of electronic information. Not the least of Brunetti’s pleasures in Signorina Elettra’s prowess was the fact that it freed him of any obligation to Galardi.

  Neither of them said anything for a long time, until Brunetti said, ‘All right. Call him.’ He left the room, not wanting to be present when Vianello did.

  His curiosity was satisfied two hours later, when Vianello came in and, unasked, took the seat opposite his superior. ‘It took him this long to find the right way in,’ he said.

  ‘And?’

  ‘My guess was right. They caught him tampering with evidence in a case and threw him out.’

  ‘What evidence? And what case?’

  Vianello began with the first question. ‘The only thing he could give me was the translation of the code.’ He saw Brunetti’s confusion and said, ‘Remember that list of numbers and letters at the bottom of the report?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He found out what that means.’ Vianello went ahead without forcing Brunetti to ask him. ‘They use it, he told me, in any case where a member of the Finanza either overlooks or hides evidence or in some way attempts to affect the outcome of an investigation.’

  ‘By doing what?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘The same things we do,’ answered a shameless Vianello. ‘Look the other way when we see our grocer not giving a ricevuta fiscale. Not remember seeing the start of any fight between a police officer and a civilian. Things like that.’

  Ignoring Vianello’s second example, Brunetti asked, ‘In his case, what did he do? Specifically.’

  ‘He couldn’t find out. It’s not in the file.’ Vianello allowed Brunetti a moment to digest the significance of this and then added, ‘But the case was Spadini’s. The name’s not there, but the code number for one of the cases Targhetta was working on then is the same as the one listed for Spadini.’

  Brunetti considered this. Life had taught him to be profoundly suspicious of coincidence, and it had similarly taught him to view any seemingly random conjunction of events or persons as coincidence and thus be suspicious of that, as well. ‘Pucetti?’ Brunetti asked.

  Vianello shook his head. ‘I asked him, sir, but he knows nothing at all about Targhetta, just saw him a few times in the bar.’

  ‘With Elettra?’

  ‘He didn’t say, sir.’ Brunetti didn’t notice how evasive Vianello’s answer was.

  Brunetti considered various possibilities, including going out to Pellestrina himself. After a time he asked Vianello, ‘Do you think Montisi’s friend would tell him anything if he called?’

  ‘Only way to know is to ask Montisi,’ Vianello said with a smile. ‘He’s off duty today. You could call him at home.’

  This was quickly done, and Montisi agreed to speak to his friend. He called back ten minutes later to say his friend wasn’t home and wouldn’t be back until that evening.

  That left Brunetti and Vianello nothing to do but stew and worry. The sergeant, preferring to worry in his own office, went downstairs.

  Brunetti thought of the favours he owed and was owed in return as a pack of playing cards grown greasy and torn with much use. You tell me this, and I’ll tell you that; you give me this, and I’ll pay you back with that. You write a letter of recommendation for my cousin, and I’ll see that your application for a mooring for your boat is put on the pile for consideration this week. Sitting at his desk, staring off into space, he mentally pulled out the deck and began to rifle through the cards. He found one, set it aside, and went on. He shuffled through some more, considered selecting another one, but put it back and continued through till the end. Then he went back to the original card and contemplated it, trying to remember when he had last touched it. He hadn’t, but Paola had, devoting a few days to coaching the man’s daughter before her final literature exams at the university. The girl had passed, with honours, certainly more than enough justification for Brunetti to play the card.

  Her father, Aurelio Costantini, had been quietly retired from the Guardia di Finanza a decade ago after being acquitted of charges of association with the Mafia. The charges were true, but the proofs were inadequate, and so the General had quietly been put out to pasture on full pension, there to reap the benefit of his many years of dutiful – and double – service.

  Brunetti called him at home and explained the situation. In a manner graceful yet direct, he added that it had nothing to do with the Mafia. The General, min
dful perhaps that his daughter had applied to Ca’ Foscari for a teaching position, could not have been more eager to help and said he’d call Brunetti before lunch.

  A man of his word, the General called back well before noon, saying that he was on his way to meet a friend who still worked for the Finanza, and if Brunetti would meet him for a drink in about an hour, he’d give him a copy of Targhetta’s entire internal dossier.

  Brunetti dialled his home number and, relieved to be able to speak to the answering machine, left a message saying he wouldn’t be home for lunch but would return at the normal time that evening. The General was a courtly, white-haired man with the upright carriage of a cavalry officer and the elided R so common to the upper classes and those who aspired to them. He sipped at a prosecco while Brunetti, who had seen the size of the folder the General laid on the counter in front of them, quickly ate two sandwiches by way of lunch. They discussed, as people in the city had for the last three months, the weather, both expressing intense hope for rain; nothing else would clean the Augean stables that the narrowest calli had become.

  On his way back to the Questura, Brunetti mused upon the oddness of his own behaviour regarding the two men who had supplied him with the evidence he carried under his arm: Galardi had done nothing but behave in the way drunks are in the habit of behaving, and Brunetti would have nothing to do with him; General Costantini, about whose guilt no doubt existed, had corrupted the state by selling its secrets to the Mafia, yet Brunetti would meet him in public, smile, ask him for favours, and never think of questioning him about the ties he might still have to the Guardia di Finanza.

  The instant he was back in his office, opening the file, all such Jesuitical thoughts disappeared as he dedicated himself to an examination of the personnel file of Carlo Targhetta. Thirty-two, Targhetta had been a member of the Finanza for ten years before ‘deciding to leave’, as the file put it. Venetian by birth, he had done service in Catania, Bari and Genoa before being stationed in Venice three years ago, a year before the incident that led to his departure. His file was full of praise from all of his commanding officers, who spoke of his ‘devotion to duty’ and ‘intense loyalty’.