A Sea of Troubles

by Donna Leon

  He turned and saw the ruined fort behind him. He went back to it: perhaps there were other doors or other entrances in which the pilot might have taken shelter. To the left of the doorway he’d used there was another one, leading up. He climbed up a single flight of stairs, hoping that the movement would bring some relief to his chilling body, but he found neither warmth nor Montisi. He went back outside and returned to where he had started, seeing nothing. Still farther along to the left, he found another door, also leading down.

  At the entrance he called the pilot’s name. A noise, perhaps a voice, answered him, and he went down the steps. Montisi sat against the wall just at the bottom, his head leaning back against it, his huddled body illuminated by the sun that cascaded down the steps. When he reached the older man, Brunetti could make out the paleness of his face, but he could see that the cut on his head had stopped bleeding. Montisi, too, had discarded his life jacket.

  ‘Come on, Montisi,’ he said, making himself sound hearty and in charge. ‘Let’s get out of here and back to Pellestrina.’

  Montisi smiled agreement and started to get to his feet. Brunetti helped him up; once he was upright, the older man seemed fairly steady.

  ‘How are you?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘Got a terrible headache,’ the pilot said, smiling, ‘but at least I’ve still got a head to ache.’ He freed himself from Brunetti’s arm and started up the stairs. At the top, he turned and called back down, ‘God, what a storm. Nothing like it since 1927.’

  Because the shadow cast by Montisi’s body fell down the stairway, blocking the light, Brunetti looked down at the first step to see where to set his foot. When he looked up, he saw that Montisi had sprouted a branch. Even before he registered the impossibility of this, the panic he’d felt during the storm leaped at him. Men don’t grow branches; pieces of wood do not grow out of the chests of men. Not unless they have been pushed in from the other side.

  His mind was still processing this information when his body moved. It pushed aside reflection, cause – effect reasoning, and the ability to draw a conclusion, all those things which are said to define humanity. His body pounded up the stairs, he opened his mouth and emitted an animal roar of bare-fanged aggression. Montisi turned, very gently and slowly, like a groom about to kiss his bride, and fell down the steps towards Brunetti. He twisted as he fell, his weight so heavy that Brunetti had no hope of supporting him as he crashed past him. The piece of wood jutting from his chest, a thick sliver that could at one time have been an oar, or a sharp piece of tree limb, dragged across Brunetti’s legs, snagging the wool of his trousers and leaving a red welt on his thighs.

  Instinct registered that Montisi was beyond help and propelled Brunetti up the stairs and into the fading light of a tranquil spring evening. In front of him stood a short, barrel-chested man, one of the men he’d seen in Signora Follini’s store, his hands raised in a wrestler’s expectant grasp. He’d been momentarily stunned by Brunetti’s shout and now by his sudden appearance, but now he recovered and moved towards Brunetti on wide-spread legs, his thick body compressed with menace. His left hand glowed red in the light of the setting sun.

  Brunetti was unarmed. As an adult, words and wit had always served him as sufficient weaponry, and he had seldom, since becoming a policeman, been called upon to defend himself. But he had been raised a Venetian, in a poor family, with a father given to violence and drink. He had learned early how to defend himself, not only against his father but against anyone who mocked him for his father’s behaviour. Civilization dropped from him, and he kicked the man between the legs.

  Spadini crumpled, collapsed to the ground with a howl, his hands helplessly clutching at himself. He lay there, moaning and sobbing, paralysed with pain. Brunetti ran down the steps and turned Montisi gently on to his back; the pilot looked back at him with surprised eyes. Brunetti flipped Montisi’s jacket open and pulled his clasp knife from the right pocket of his uniform trousers, where he’d seen the pilot put it a hundred times, a thousand times, for more years than Chiara had been alive. Brunetti ran back up the stairs.

  The man still lay on the ground; his moans had not decreased. Looking around him, Brunetti saw a plastic shopping bag lying on the ground; he picked it up and, using Montisi’s knife, sliced it into strips. He yanked the man’s hands away from his body and pulled them behind him. Roughly, wanting to hurt him, Brunetti tied his wrists together, then found another bag and repeated the process, careless of how tightly he drew the strips. He tested them by trying to pull the man’s arms apart, but they held fast. He found a third bag, cut it into more strips, and tied the man’s ankles together. Then, remembering something he’d once read in a report from Amnesty International, he threaded a strip between the wrists and the ankles and yanked the man’s legs up until he was anchored in a backward curve that Brunetti hoped was even more painful than it looked.

  More slowly this time, he went back down the steps and over to Montisi. Knowing that the bodies of murder victims must not be touched until the medical examiner has declared them dead, he nevertheless bent down over Montisi and pressed his eyes closed, keeping his fingers pressed against the lids for long seconds. When he took his hands away, the eyes remained shut. He searched the pockets of Montisi’s jacket, then of his thermal vest, bloody now, until he found the pilot’s telefonino.

  He went back outside and dialled 112. The phone rang fifteen times before it was answered. Too tired to comment, he gave his name and rank and explained where he was. He gave a brief account of the situation and asked that either a launch or a helicopter be sent immediately.

  ‘This is the Carabinieri, Commissario,’ the young officer explained. ‘Perhaps it would be better if you called your own commander with your request.’

  The chill that had worked itself into Brunetti’s bones washed into his voice. ‘Officer, it is now 6.37. If your phone log doesn’t show you placed a call for a launch or helicopter within the next two minutes, you will regret it.’ As he spoke, he began to spin wild plans: to find out this man’s name, to have Paola’s father use his position to threaten his commander into dismissing him, tell the other pilots who had refused to help Montisi.

  Before he got to the end of the list, the man answered, ‘Yes, sir,’ and hung up.

  From memory, he dialled Vianello’s number.

  ‘Vianello,’ he answered on the third ring.

  ‘It’s me, Lorenzo,’ Brunetti said.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Montisi’s dead. I’m at Ca’ Roman, by the fort.’ He waited for Vianello to say something, but the sergeant remained silent, waiting.

  ‘I’ve got the man who did it. He’s here.’ The man lay at his feet, his face flushed crimson as he strained at the strips holding him in that painful, helpless curve. Brunetti looked down at him, and the man opened his mouth, either to protest or to implore.

  Brunetti kicked him. He didn’t aim for any particular place, not for his head and not for his face. He just lashed out with his right foot, and as chance had it, he caught the man on the top of his shoulder, just where it joined his neck. He groaned and went silent.

  Brunetti turned his attention back to Vianello. ‘I called and told them to send a launch or a helicopter.’

  ‘Who’d you call?’ Vianello asked.

  ‘I dialled 112.’

  ‘They’re hopeless,’ Vianello decreed. ‘I’ll call Massimo and get out there in half an hour. Where are you, exactly?’

  ‘By the fort,’ Brunetti said, not at all concerned to know who Massimo was or just what Vianello would do.

  ‘I’ll be there,’ Vianello said and hung up.

  Brunetti put the telefonino into the pocket of his jacket, forgetting to switch it off. Without so much as a glance at the man on the ground, he went and sat on an immense stone by the wall of the fort. He leaned back against the wall and stared off to the west, his face warmed by the fading rays of the sun. He took his hands from his armpits and held the palms out towards the su
n, as a chilled man would towards a fire. He thought of removing his jacket but decided it would take too much effort to do so, even though he knew he’d be warmer if he could free himself of its sodden weight.

  He waited for something to happen. Nothing much did. The man on the ground moaned and moved around but Brunetti bothered to look at him only occasionally and then only to assure himself that his ankles and hands were still securely tied. At one point, he found himself thinking that, if he were to pick up one of the stones that lay nearby and hit the man on the front of the head with it, he could claim the man had attacked him after killing Montisi and he’d died during the ensuing struggle. It troubled Brunetti to find himself thinking this, but it troubled him even more to realize he was dissuaded from action, at least in part, by his realization that the marks of the ligatures on the man’s wrists and ankles would show what had really happened.

  Slowly, taking the warmth of the day with it, the sun surrendered itself to the grey flatness of the coastline. To the north, the light faded, erasing the jagged ramparts and jutting spires of that horror, Marghera. He heard a fly buzz. Listening intently, he realized it was not a fly but the sound of a motor, sharp and high and approaching at great speed. A launch from the Questura? Vianello and the heroic Massimo? Brunetti had no idea which of his possible saviours it might be; it could just as easily be a passing taxi or some waterborne commuter hurrying home, now that the storm was over and peace restored. He thought for a moment of what a comfort it would be to see Vianello, tough and bear-like Vianello, and then he remembered that Vianello was Montisi’s greatest friend on the force.

  He had three children, Montisi: a doctor, a psychologist and an archaeologist, and it had all been done on the salary of a police pilot. Yet Montisi had always been the first to insist on paying for a round of coffees or drinks; police rumour had it that he and his wife helped support a young Bosnian woman who had studied archaeology with their youngest son and needed to pass only two more exams before graduation. Brunetti had no idea if this were true, and now he’d probably never know. It hardly mattered, though.

  The buzzing grew closer, then stopped, and he heard a man’s voice shout his name.

  26

  BRUNETTI PUSHED HIMSELF to his feet, feeling for the first time in his life a warning shot from the territory of age. So this was what it would be like, the aching hip, the long pull of muscles in the thighs, the unsteadiness of the ground under his feet, and the overwhelming realization that everything was simply too much trouble. He started towards the beach, heading in the general direction of the voice that had called his name. Once he stumbled when his right foot caught in a trailing plant, and another time he started back in fear when a bird shot up from under his feet, no doubt warning him away from her nest.

  Protecting her young, protecting her young, and who to protect Montisi’s children, even though they were no longer young? He heard a noise from the opposite direction and looked up, hoping to see Vianello, but it was Signorina Elettra. At least, a bedraggled young woman who looked very much like Signorina Elettra. One sleeve of her jacket was gone, and through a long tear in her slacks, he could see her calf. One foot was bare, a bloody scrape across the top of her instep. But it was her hair that most surprised him, for in a wide patch just above her right ear it was cut short, no more than a few centimetres from her head. It stuck out like the hair on the tops of the ears of baby jaguars and was little longer than that.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he asked.

  She raised a hand towards Brunetti. ‘Come and find him. Please.’ She didn’t wait for him to answer but turned and made off in the direction from which she must have come. He noticed that she favoured her left foot, the one without a shoe.

  ‘Signore,’ he heard Vianello say behind him.

  Brunetti turned and saw him, dressed in jeans and a heavy woollen sweater. Over his arm he carried a second one. Behind him stood another man in civilian clothes, a hunting rifle in one hand: no doubt the Massimo that Vianello said would bring him out so quickly.

  ‘There’s a man over there by the fort, on the ground. Watch him,’ Brunetti called to the man with the gun, then beckoned to Vianello and set off after Signorina Elettra.

  The beach was littered with all sorts of junk, the hundreds of things that get stirred up from the bottom of the laguna by every storm and left to rot until a tide or a new storm carries them back to their watery dump. He saw pieces of life buoys, countless plastic bottles, some with their tops screwed on tightly; there were large hunks of fishing net, shoes and boots, plastic cutlery, seemingly enough for an army. Each time he saw a piece of wood, a sliver of oar or branch, he turned his eyes away, looking for bottles or plastic cups.

  When they came upon her, she was kneeling on the sand at the edge of the water. Lying in the shallow water just in front of her was a fishing boat. Its left side was stove in, and the water around it was covered with an expanding slick of black oil.

  Hearing them approach, she looked up. ‘I don’t know what happened, but he’s gone.’

  Vianello walked over to her, draped the sweater around her shoulders, and offered her his hand to help her to her feet. She ignored him and pulled the sweater down from her shoulders, letting it drop on the sand

  Vianello squatted down beside her. Fussily, he picked up the sweater and placed it back over her shoulders, tying the arms together under her chin. ‘Come with us now,’ he said and got to his feet, helping her to stand beside him.

  He started to speak but stopped when he heard a noise from the direction of Pellestrina. The three of them, like chickens on a perch, turned their heads in the direction of the sharp keening that announced the arrival of the Carabinieri.

  Elettra began to shiver uncontrollably.

  They stood on the beach and waited while the Carabinieri launch approached. It swept up in a tight curve, and the pilot killed the motor and drifted to a stop a few metres offshore. Three flak-jacketed officers at the bow held shotguns aimed at the people on the beach. When the man at the wheel recognized Vianello and called out to the others to lower their guns, they did so, though with a certain reluctance.

  ‘Two of you come and help her,’ Brunetti called out, ignoring the fact that even his rank gave him no authority over these men. ‘Take her back to the hospital.’ The three officers looked to their pilot for instruction. He nodded. There was no landing stage, so they would have to jump into the surf and wade ashore. While they hesitated, Signorina Elettra turned to Brunetti and said, ‘I can’t go back without him.’

  Before Brunetti could answer, Vianello turned to Elettra and picked her up bodily, one arm around her shoulder, the other under her knees. He walked into the water and waded out to the boat. Brunetti saw her start to protest, but her words, as well as Vianello’s response, were cut off by the noise of his splashing. When Vianello reached the side of the boat, one of the Carabinieri knelt and reached over the side, taking Signorina Elettra from his arms.

  He sat her upright and Brunetti saw Vianello reach into the boat and adjust the sweater over her shoulders, then the motor sprang into life again, and the boat started to move away. Vianello standing in the water and Brunetti on the beach both watched as it grew smaller, but Signorina Elettra did not turn back to them.

  Vianello came back to the shore, and silently the two of them returned to Massimo and his prisoner. They found Vianello’s friend sitting on the stone where Brunetti had waited earlier, his rifle lying across his knees. The bound man cried out when he saw them approach. ‘Cut me loose!’ He shouted it as an order. The men ignored him.

  ‘Montisi’s down there,’ Brunetti said, indicating the doorway and the steps running down from it. It was harder to see down inside now that the light was abandoning the day.

  ‘Massimo,’ Vianello said, turning to his friend. ‘Give me the flashlight.’ From one of the many pockets of his hunting jacket, Massimo took a thin black flashlight and held it out to Vianello.

  ‘Wait here,’ Brunetti s
aid to the man with the gun. They went down together, the light streaming out in front of them. As they descended the steps, Brunetti pleaded with something he didn’t believe in to let them somehow find Montisi alive down there; wounded and stunned but alive. He had long ago abandoned his childhood habit of trying to cut a deal with whoever it was that might control these things, and so he merely asked for it to be true, offering nothing in return.

  But Montisi, though certainly wounded, was not alive, and never again would he be stunned by anything. His last earthly shock had been the sudden explosion of pain in his chest as he turned back towards Brunetti from the steps, making his joke about still having a head and marvelling at the power of the storm.

  Vianello flashed the light across his friend’s face for just a moment, then let his hand fall to his side. The light illuminated his shoes, a filthy patch of ground, and Montisi’s left shoulder, just enough to show the jagged point of wood that protruded so inappropriately from his chest.

  After a minute, Vianello went back to the stairway, careful to keep the light from shining on Montisi’s face again. Brunetti followed him. At the top, they saw that Vianello’s friend hadn’t moved, nor had the rifle, nor had the hog-tied man.

  ‘Please,’ the bound man pleaded, all threat, all menace gone from his voice. ‘Please.’

  Vianello took a knife from the back pocket of his jeans, flicked it open, and knelt down over him. Idly, Brunetti wondered if the sergeant were going to cut the man’s bonds or his throat and couldn’t find it in himself to care much, either way. He watched as the hand holding the knife disappeared, blocked from sight by Vianello’s body. The man’s body twitched, and his legs swung forward, cut free of his wrists.

  He lay still for a moment, gasping with the pain it caused him to move. Motionless, he watched Vianello through narrowed eyes. The sergeant pushed the blade closed with the palm of his right hand and reached around to slip the knife back into his pocket. The bound man chose that instant to strike. He pulled his knees towards his chest, gasping at the pain it caused his stretched muscles to do it, and struck out at Vianello with his bound feet, striking him just at the hip and knocking him sprawling.