by Donna Leon
His father hated Russians, and Brunetti had always thought he did so with good reason, if three years as a prisoner of war is a good reason. For his own part, he had an instinctive distrust of southerners, though it was a feeling that caused him no little discomfort. He was far less troubled by his own distrust of Albanians and of Slavs.
But African blacks? That was an almost entirely unfamiliar category for him, and since he was completely ignorant about them, he doubted that he could have infected his children with his prejudices. More likely it was something, like head lice, that Chiara had picked up in school.
‘Do we sit here and castigate ourselves as negligent parents and then punish ourselves for that by not eating dinner?’ he finally asked.
‘I suppose we could,’ she said, her remark entirely devoid of humour.
‘I don’t like the idea of that,’ he said. ‘Either one or the other.’
‘All right,’ she finally said. ‘I’ve been sitting alone in here a long time, which takes care of the castigating, so I suppose we can at least eat dinner in peace.’
‘Good,’ he said, finishing his wine and leaning forward to take the bottle.
As they ate, some tacit agreement having been made not to discuss Chiara’s remark further that evening, Brunetti told her what was said to have happened in Campo Santo Stefano: two men, though no one seemed to have paid much attention to them, appeared out of the darkness and slipped back into it after shooting the African at least five times. It was an execution, not a murder, and certainly there was nothing random about it. ‘He didn’t have a chance, poor devil,’ Brunetti said.
‘Who would want to do something like that? And to a vu cumprà?’ Paola asked. ‘And why?’
These were the questions that had accompanied Brunetti on his walk home. ‘Seems to me that it’s either because of something he did after he got here or something he did before,’ Brunetti said, though he knew this was merely to state the obvious.
‘That doesn’t help much, does it?’ Paola asked, but it was an observation, not a criticism.
‘No, but it’s a place to begin to divide the things we might be looking for.’
Paola, always comfortable when presented with an exercise in logic, said, ‘Begin by examining what you know about him. Which is?’
‘Absolutely nothing,’ Brunetti answered.
‘That’s not true.’
‘What?’
‘You know he was a black African, and you know he was working as a vu cumprà, or whatever we’re supposed to call them now.’
‘Venditore ambulante or extracomunitario,’ Brunetti supplied.
‘That’s about as helpful as “Operatore ecologico”,’ she answered.
‘Huh?’
‘Garbage man,’ Paola translated. She got to her feet and left the room. When she came back, she had a bottle of grappa and two small glasses. As she poured, she said, ‘So let’s just call him a vu cumprà to save time and confusion, all right?’
Brunetti thanked her for the grappa with a nod, took a sip, and asked, ‘What else do you think we know?’
‘You know that none of the others stayed to try to help him or to help the police in any way.’
‘I’d guess they saw he was dead when he fell.’
‘Would it have been that obvious?’
‘I think so, yes.’
‘And so you know it was an execution,’ Paola went on, ‘not the result of a fight or an argument that provoked it suddenly. Someone wanted him dead and either sent people to do it or came and did it himself.’
‘I’d say he sent people,’ Brunetti offered.
‘How can you tell?’
‘It has that feel about it, the work of professionals. They appeared out of nowhere, executed him, and disappeared.’
‘So what does that tell you about them?’
‘That they’re familiar with the city.’
She gave him a questioning glance, and he elaborated, ‘To know which way to leave. Also to know where he was.’
‘Does that mean Venetian?’
Brunetti shook his head. ‘I’ve never heard of a Venetian who works as a killer.’
Paola considered this and then said, ‘It wouldn’t take all that long to learn at least that much about the city. Some of the Africans are pretty much always there, in Santo Stefano, so all they’d have to do is walk around for a day or so to find them. Or ask someone.’ She closed her eyes and considered the geography of the area and finally said, ‘Afterwards, getting away would be easy. All they’d have to do is go back towards Rialto, or up towards San Marco, or over the Accademia.’
When she stopped, Brunetti continued, ‘Or they could go into San Vidal and then cut back towards San Samuele.’
‘How many places could they get a vaporetto?’ she asked.
‘Three. Four. And then they could have gone either way.’
‘What would you do?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know. But if I wanted to leave the city, I’d probably go up towards San Marco and cut in towards the Fenice and then to Rialto.’
‘Did anyone see them?’
‘An American tourist. She saw one of them, said he was a man about my age and size, wearing an overcoat, a scarf, and a hat.’
‘Half the city,’ Paola said. ‘Anything else?’
‘That there were other people from her group there and they might have seen something. I’m going to talk to them tomorrow morning.’
‘How early?’
‘Early. I have to leave here before eight.’
She leaned forward and poured him another small glass of grappa. ‘American tourists at eight in the morning. Here, take this: it’s the least you deserve.’
5
The morning dawned unpleasantly. A thick mist hung suspended in the air, eager to cling to anything that passed through it. By the time Brunetti got to the imbarcadero of the Numero Uno, the shoulders of his overcoat were covered by a thin film of droplets, and he pulled in dampness with every breath. The approaching vaporetto slipped silently from fog so thick Brunetti could barely make out the form of the man waiting to moor it and slide back the metal gate. He stepped on board, looked up and saw its radar screen turning, and wondered what it was like out on the laguna.
He took a seat in the cabin and opened that morning’s Gazzettino, but he learned from it considerably less than he had the night before. In possession of few facts, the writer opted for sentiment and spoke of the terrible cost the extracomunitari had to pay for their desire for a chance at bare survival and to earn enough money to send back to their families. No name was given for the dead man, nor was his nationality known, though it was assumed he was from Senegal, the country from which most of the ambulanti came. An elderly man got on at Sant’ Angelo and chose to sit next to Brunetti. He saw the newspaper and mouthed out the headline, then said, ‘Nothing but trouble once you start letting them in.’
Brunetti ignored him.
Brunetti’s silence spurred the man to add, ‘I’d round them up and send them back.’
Brunetti gave a grunt and turned the page, but the old man failed to take the hint. ‘My son-in-law has a shop in Calle dei Fabbri. Pays his rent, pays his help, pays his taxes. He gives something to the city, gives work. And these people,’ he said, making a gesture that stopped just short of slapping the offending page, ‘what do they give us?’
With another grunt, Brunetti folded his newspaper and excused himself to go and stand on deck, though they were only at Santa Maria del Giglio and he had another two stops before he got off.
The Paganelli was a narrow hotel, slipped in, like an architectural dash separating two capital letters, between the Danieli and the Savoia & Jolanda. At the desk he said he was there to meet the Doctors Crowley and was told they were already in the breakfast room. He followed the clerk’s gesture down a narrow corridor and entered a small room that held six or seven tables, at one of which the Crowleys sat. With them were another elderly couple and, between them, a woma
n whose appearance gave evidence of considerable assistance.
When Doctor Crowley saw Brunetti, he got to his feet and waved at him; his wife looked up and smiled a greeting. The other man at the table rose and stayed standing as Brunetti approached. One of the women smiled in Brunetti’s direction; the other did not.
The people presented to him as the Petersons were tiny, bird-like people, dressed in colours as inconspicuous as those of sparrows. She had iron grey hair that capped her head in a tight perm; he was entirely bald, his head covered with deep, sun-hardened furrows running from front to back. The woman who had not smiled, introduced as Lydia Watts, had lustrous red hair and lips the same colour. Brunetti saw her push back a vagrant curl with a hand that no surgery and no art could make look the same age as her face and hair.
The table was covered with the aftermath of breakfast: coffee cups and teapots and fragments of buttered rolls. There were two empty bread baskets and an equally empty platter that might have held meat or cheese.
After Brunetti shook hands with all of them, Dr Crowley pulled over a chair from a neighbouring table and offered it to Brunetti. He sat and when the doctor did too, looked around the table at the assembled Americans. ‘I’m grateful that you agreed to speak to me this morning,’ he said in English.
Dottoressa Crowley answered, ‘It’s only right, isn’t it, to tell you what we saw, if it can help?’ There were nods of agreement from the others.
Her husband took over from her and said, ‘We’ve been talking about it already this morning, Commissario.’ With a gesture that encompassed all of the people at the table, he added, ‘It’s probably best that we each tell you what we saw.’
Dr Peterson cleared his throat a few times, then said, speaking with the sort of clarity that comes of the fear that a foreigner might not otherwise understand, ‘Well, after we got down into that place you call a campo, we were standing sort of in the front, to the left of Fred and Martha, and I was looking down at the purses those fellows were selling. And a man, not the one Martha saw – guy about my height – he moved forward until he was standing just a little bit behind me. He was on my left, but I really didn’t pay any attention to him because, as I said, I was looking at the purses. Then I heard the noise, sort of a zip zip – I didn’t have any idea what it was – sounded like a staple gun or something, or that thing they use when they take your tyres off – and there was the music from behind us, too – and then this guy stepped back without looking where he was going, and then he was gone. I didn’t think anything of it except that I didn’t like the way he pushed back like that, right into the people behind him.
‘Next thing you know, I looked back and I saw that the guy who was selling the purses, he was down on the ground. And then Martha was kneeling beside him, and then Fred, and then they said he was dead.’ He looked at Brunetti, and around at the others.
‘I never saw anything like it in my life,’ Dr Peterson continued, with what began to sound like indignation, as though he thought Brunetti owed him an explanation. He continued: ‘Well, we waited around for a while, I’d say about a half-hour, but nothing happened. No one came. And it was awful cold and we hadn’t had our supper yet, so we came back here to the hotel.’
A waiter passed by their table, and Dr Peterson took his attention away from Brunetti long enough to ask for another pot of coffee. The waiter nodded, noticed Brunetti sitting with them, and asked if he would like un caffè, a question which seemed to confuse the Americans as much as it relieved Brunetti. He had been in America and knew the difference between coffee and caffè.
Peterson turned to his wife and said, speaking to Brunetti, ‘My wife was standing on the other side of me, so she didn’t see anything, did you, honey?’
She shook her head and said in a very soft voice, ‘No, dear.’
‘Nothing at all, Signora?’ Brunetti asked, ignoring her husband and speaking directly to her. ‘Anything at all, no matter how insignificant?’ When she still didn’t answer, he prompted, ‘Did he smoke, say anything, was he wearing anything you noticed?’
The woman smiled and looked at her husband as if to ask him if she had indeed noticed any of these things, but then she shook her head and lowered her eyes.
The woman with the red hair said, ‘One of them had very hairy hands.’
Brunetti turned to her and smiled. ‘Was this the one who was standing by Dr Crowley or the other one, the one near Dr Peterson?’
‘The first one,’ she said, ‘the one near Martha. I didn’t see the other man or, if I did see him, I didn’t pay any attention to him. You see, when I was standing there, my shoe was untied.’ She saw Brunetti’s response to this and explained, ‘And someone must have been standing on it, so when I heard that noise, it startled me, and I must have tried to move, but my foot was trapped and I lost my balance for a moment, and by the time I was steady on my feet again, I’d got sort of turned around. So I saw a man backing away, and I was vaguely conscious that he was near Martha. He had his hand up near his face, pulling at his scarf or his hat, and all I could see was that the back of his hand was very hairy, almost like a monkey’s. But then I heard Martha calling for Fred, and I turned back around and didn’t pay any more attention to him.’
Her appearance had led him to expect her to be flirtatious, but Brunetti found nothing of the coquette in her. She had described the scene simply, and he had no doubt that the man she had seen had hands as hairy as a monkey’s.
When it seemed that no one else was going to add anything, Brunetti asked, ‘Can any of you recall anything else about either of these men?’
His question was met with silence and a general shaking of heads.
‘If I assure you that you will not be kept here to answer further questions and will not be called back to Italy as a result of anything you tell me, will that make it easier for you to answer?’ Brunetti had no idea if foreigners feared getting caught up in the machinery of the judicial system as much as Italians did, but he still thought it wise to assure them that they would not be, even if he was not certain this was true.
None of them said a word.
Before he could attempt to rephrase the question, Dottoressa Crowley said, ‘It’s kind of you to put it that way, Commissario, but you don’t have to do that with us. If we’d seen anything, we’d tell you, even if it meant we had to stay here longer.’
Her husband said, ‘We asked the others when we got back last night, but no one seems to have noticed these men.’
‘Or is willing to say they do,’ added Lydia Watts.
The waiter arrived with their coffee and his caffè. Brunetti added sugar and drank it quickly. He stood and took a number of his business cards from his wallet and handed them around, saying, ‘If you should remember anything at all about what happened, please do get in touch with me. Phone or fax or email. Anything at all that comes to you.’ He smiled and thanked them for their time and their help, and left the hotel without bothering to get their addresses. The hotel would have them, anyway, should he need to confirm anything, not that they had said anything that he could imagine would need confirmation. A thickset, Mediterranean man with hairy hands and another, shorter, one no one could describe, but no witness who had seen either one of them fire a gun.
The mist had not cleared. In fact, it appeared to have grown thicker, so Brunetti was careful to keep the façades of the buildings on his left in sight as he walked down the riva. The mist caused him to pass through the rows of bacharelle without seeing them. This added to the uneasiness he always felt when he walked past them and their vendors, so unlike the comfortable familiarity he felt in the rest of the city. He did not bother to analyse this sensation, was aware of it only in some atavistic, danger-sensing part of his mind. Once beyond them and past the façade of the Pietà, the feeling disappeared, just as the mist was beginning to do.
Brunetti arrived at the Questura a little after nine and asked the man on the switchboard if anyone had called with information about the dead man.
He was told that no calls had come in. On the first floor he found Signorina Elettra’s office empty, which caused him some surprise. The fact that her – and his – immediate superior, Vice-Questore Giuseppe Patta, had not arrived at his place of work, on the contrary, came as no surprise whatsoever. Brunetti stopped in at the officers’ room and asked Pucetti, who was alone there, to come upstairs with him.
Once in his office, Brunetti asked the young officer where Ispettore Vianello was, but Pucetti had no idea. Vianello had come in just after eight, made a few phone calls, then left, saying he would be back before lunchtime.
‘No idea?’ Brunetti asked when they were both seated, unwilling to compromise the young man by asking him outright if he had eavesdropped on Vianello’s conversations.
‘No, sir. I was taking a call, so I couldn’t hear what he said.’ Brunetti was relieved to see that Pucetti no longer sat stiffly erect when speaking to him; sometimes he even went so far as to cross his legs. The young officer had begun to look at home in his uniform, less like some fresh-faced schoolboy dressed for Carnevale.
‘Was it about this dead man, do you know?’
Pucetti thought a moment, then said, ‘I’d guess not, sir. He seemed very relaxed about whatever it was.’
Changing topic, Brunetti said, ‘I asked when I came in, but no one’s called, which means we have no idea who he is or where he was from.’
‘Senegal, probably,’ Pucetti suggested.
‘I know. That’s likely, but we need to be sure if we want to have any hope of identifying him. He had no papers on him, and the fact that no one has called to identify him or to report that one of the vu cumprà is missing means we aren’t going to get any help from the rest of them.’ He was conscious of how dismissive that sounded of an entire class of people, ‘the rest of them’, but he had no time now to concern himself with niceties of expression. ‘So we have to find out who he was, and to do that we need someone who has contact with the others.’