by Donna Leon
‘Nothing,’ Brunetti said, looking down at his watch. ‘It’s almost two.’
‘All right,’ Vianello said, his disappointment audible. ‘Let’s go back.’ He ducked his head into the car and said to the female officer, ‘Call Riverre and Alvise and tell them to follow us back.’
‘What about the man in the car?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Riverre and Alvise drove out with him. They’ll just come out and meet at the car and drive home.’
Inside the car, Officer Nardi spoke on the radio, telling the two other officers that no one had shown up, and they were going back to Venice. She looked up at Vianello. ‘All right, Sergeant. They’ll be out in a few minutes.’ Saying that, she got out of the car and opened the back door.
‘No, stay there,’ Brunetti said, ‘I’ll sit in the back.’
‘That’s all right, Commissario,’ she said with a shy smile, then added, ‘Besides, I’d like the chance to have a bit of distance between me and the sergeant.’ She got in and closed the door.
Brunetti and Vianello exchanged a glance over the roof of the car. Vianello’s smile was sheepish. They climbed in. Vianello leaned forward and turned the key. The engine sprang to life and a small buzzer sounded.
‘What’s that?’ Brunetti asked. For Brunetti, as for most Venetians, cars were alien territory.
‘Seat-belt warning,’ Vianello said, pulling his down across his chest and latching it by the gear shift.
Brunetti did nothing. The buzzer continued to sound.
‘Can’t you turn that thing off, Vianello?’
‘It’ll go off by itself if you’ll put your seat belt on.’
Brunetti muttered something about not liking to have machines tell him what to do, but he latched his seat belt, and then he muttered something about this being more of Vianello’s ecological nonsense. Pretending not to hear, Vianello put the car into gear, and they pulled away from the kerb. At the end of the street, they waited a few minutes until the other car drew up behind them. Officer Riverre sat at the wheel, Alvise beside him, and when Brunetti turned to signal to them, he could see a third form in the back, head leaning against the seat.
The streets were virtually empty at this hour, and they were quickly back on to the road that led to the Ponte della Liberta.
‘What do you think happened?’ Vianello asked.
‘I thought it had been set up to threaten me in some way, but maybe I was wrong and Crespo really wanted to see me.’
‘So what will you do now?’
‘I’ll go and see him tomorrow and see what kept him from coming tonight.’
They pulled on to the bridge and saw the lights of the city ahead of them. Flat black water stretched out on either side, speckled by lights on the left from the distant islands of Murano and Burano. Vianello drove faster, eager to get to the garage and then home. All of them felt tired, let down. The second car, following close behind them, suddenly pulled out into the centre lane, and Riverre sped past them, Alvise leaning out the window and waving happily to them.
Seeing them, Officer Nardi leaned forward and put her hand on Vianello’s shoulder and started to speak. ‘Sergeant,’ she began and then stopped abruptly as her eyes were pulled up to the rear-view mirror, in which a pair of blinding lights had suddenly appeared. Her fingers tightened on his shoulder and she had time only to shout out, ‘Be careful,’ before the car behind them swerved to the left, pulled abreast and then ahead of them, and then quite deliberately crashed into their left front fender. The force of the impact hurled them to the right, slamming them into the guard rail at the side of the bridge.
Vianello pulled the wheel to the left, but he reacted too slowly, and the rear of the car swung out to the left, carrying them into the middle of the road. Another car coming from behind them at an insane velocity cut to their right and slipped into the space now opened up between them and the guard rail, and then their rear slammed into the guard rail on the left, and they were spun in another half circle, coming to rest in the middle of the road, facing back towards Mestre.
Dazed, not aware of whether he was in pain or not, Brunetti stared through the shattered windshield and saw only the radiant refraction of the headlights that approached them. One set swished past them on the right and then another. He turned to the left and saw Vianello slumped forward against his seat belt. Brunetti reached down and released his own, shifted around in his seat, and grabbed Vianello’s shoulder. ‘Lorenzo, are you all right?’
The sergeant’s eyes opened and he turned to face Brunetti. ‘I think so.’ Brunetti leaned down and un-snapped the other seat belt; Vianello remained upright.
‘Come on,’ Brunetti said, reaching for the door on his side. ‘Get out of the car or one of those maniacs will slam into us.’ He pointed through what was left of the windshield at the lights that kept approaching from the direction of Mestre.
‘Let me call Riverre,’ Vianello said, leaning forward towards the radio.
‘No. Cars have passed. They’ll report it to the Carabinieri in Piazzale Roma.’ As if in proof of his words, he heard the first whine of a siren from the other end of the bridge and saw the flashing blue lights as the Carabinieri sped down the wrong side of the bridge to reach them.
Brunetti got out and leaned down to open the back door. Officer Junior Grade Maria Nardi lay on the back seat of the car, her neck bent at a strange and unnatural angle.
Chapter Twenty
The aftermath of the incident was both predictable and depressing. Neither of them had noticed what kind of car hit them, not even the colour or general size, though it must have been a large one to have thrust them to the side with such force. No other cars had been close enough to them to see what happened, or, if they had been, no one reported it to the police. It was clear that the car, after hitting them, had merely continued into Piazzale Roma, turned, and sped back across to the mainland even before the Carabinieri had been alerted.
Officer Nardi was pronounced dead at the scene, her body taken to the ospedale civile for an autopsy that would merely confirm what was clearly visible from the angle at which her head rested.
‘She was only twenty-three,’ Vianello said, avoiding Brunetti’s glance. ‘They’d been married six months. Her husband’s away on some sort of computer training course. That’s all she kept talking about in the car, how she couldn’t wait until Franco got home, how much she missed him. We sat like that for an hour, face to face, and all she did was talk about her Franco. She was just a kid.’
Brunetti could find nothing to say.
‘If I had made her wear her seat belt, she’d still be alive.’
‘Lorenzo, stop it,’ Brunetti said, voice rough, but not with anger. They were back in the Questura by then, sitting in Vianello’s office while they waited for their reports of the incident to be typed out so that they could sign them and go home. ‘We can go on all night like that. I shouldn’t have gone to meet Crespo. I should have seen that it was too easy, should have been suspicious when nothing happened in Mestre. Next we’ll be saying we should have come back in an armoured car.’
Vianello sat beside his desk, looking past Brunetti. There was a large bump on the left side of his forehead, and the skin around it was turning blue. ‘But we did what we did, or we didn’t do what we didn’t do, and still she’s dead,’ Vianello said in a flat voice.
Brunetti leaned forward and touched the other man’s arm. ‘Lorenzo, we didn’t kill her. The men or the man in that car did. There’s nothing we can do except try to find them.’
‘That’s not going to help Maria, is it?’ Vianello asked bitterly.
‘Nothing on God’s earth can ever help Maria Nardi again, Lorenzo. We both know that. But I want the men in that car, and I want whoever sent them.’
Vianello nodded, but he had nothing to say to this. ‘What about her husband?’ Vianello asked.
‘What about him?’
‘Will you call him?’ There was something other than curiosity in Vianello�
�s voice. ‘I can’t.’
‘Where is he?’ Brunetti asked.
‘At the Hotel Impero in Milano.’
Brunetti nodded. ‘I’ll call him in the morning. There’s no sense in calling him now, to add time to his suffering.’
A uniformed officer came into the office carrying the originals of their statements and two Xerox copies of each. Both men sat patiently and read through the typescripts and then each signed the original and both copies and handed them back to the officer. When he was gone, Brunetti got to his feet and said, ‘I think it’s time to go home, Lorenzo. It’s after four. Did you call Nadia?’
Vianello nodded. He had called her from the Questura an hour before. ‘It was the only job Maria could get. Her father was a policeman, so someone pulled strings for her, and she got the job. Do you know what she really wanted to do, Commissario?’
‘I don’t want to talk about this, Lorenzo.’
‘Do you know what she really wanted to do?’
‘Lorenzo,’ Brunetti said in a low voice, warning him.
‘She wanted to be an elementary schoolteacher, but she knew there were no jobs, so she joined the police.’
All this time, they had been walking slowly down the steps and now walked across the lobby towards the double doors. The uniformed officer on guard, seeing Brunetti, saluted. The two men stepped outside, and from across the canal, from the trees in Campo San Lorenzo, came the almost deafening chorus of birds as they courted the dawn. It was no longer the full dark of night, but the light was so far only a suggestion, one that turned the world of thick impenetrability into one of infinite possibility.
They stood on the edge of the canal, looking over towards the trees, their eyes drawn by what their ears perceived. Both had their hands in their pockets and both felt the sudden chill that lay in the air before dawn.
‘This shouldn’t happen,’ Vianello said. Then, turning off to the right and his way home, he said, ’Arrivederci, Commissario,’ and walked away.
Brunetti turned the other way and started back towards Rialto and the streets that would take him home. They’d killed her as though she were a fly; they had stretched out their hands to crush him and, instead, had snapped off her life. Just like that. One minute, she was a young woman, leaning forward to say something to a friend, hand placed lightly, confidently, affectionately on his arm, mouth poised to speak. What had she wanted to say? Was it a joke? Did she want to tell Vianello she had been kidding back there, when she got into the car? Or had it been something about Franco, some final word of longing? No one would ever know. The fleeting thought had died with her.
He would call Franco, but not yet. Let the young man sleep now, before great pain. Brunetti knew that he couldn’t, not now, tell the young man of Maria’s last hour in the car with Vianello; he couldn’t bear to say it. Later, Brunetti would tell him, for it was then that the young man would be able to hear it, only then, after great pain.
When he got to Rialto, he looked off to the left and saw that a vaporetto was approaching the stop, and it was that coincidence that decided him. He hurried to the stop and got on to the boat, took it to the station, and caught the morning’s first train across the causeway. Gallo, he knew, would not be at the Questura, so he took a taxi from the Mestre station, giving the driver Crespo’s address.
The daylight had come when he wasn’t paying attention, and with it had come the heat, perhaps worse here in this city of pavement and cement, roads and high-rise buildings. Brunetti almost welcomed the mounting discomfort of the temperature and humidity; it distracted him from what he had seen that night and from what he was beginning to fear he would see at Crespo’s apartment.
As it had been the last time, the elevator was air-conditioned, already necessary even at this hour. He pushed the button and rose quickly and silently to the seventh floor. He rang Crespo’s doorbell, but this time there was no response from beyond it. He rang again and then again, holding his finger on the bell for long seconds. No footsteps, no voices, no sound of life.
He took out his wallet and removed from it a small sliver of metal. Vianello had once spent an entire afternoon teaching him how to do this, and, even though he hadn’t been an especially good pupil, it took him less than ten seconds to open Crespo’s door. He stepped across the threshold, saying, ‘Signor Crespo? Your door is open. Are you in here?’ Caution never hurt.
No one was in the living-room. The kitchen glistened, fastidiously clean. He found Crespo in the bedroom, on the bed, dressed in yellow silk pyjamas. A piece of telephone wire was knotted around his neck, his face a horrible, stuffed parody of its former beauty.
Brunetti didn’t bother to look around or examine the room; he went to the apartment next door and knocked on the door until a sleepy, angry man opened it, shouting at him. By the time the laboratory crew arrived from the Mestre Questura, Brunetti had also had time to call Maria Nardi’s husband in Milano and tell him what had happened. Unlike the man at the door, Franco Nardi didn’t shout; Brunetti had no idea if this was better or worse.
Back at the Questura in Mestre, Brunetti told a just-arrived Gallo what had happened and turned the examination of Crespo’s apartment and body over to him, explaining that he had to go back to Venice that morning. He did not tell Gallo that he was returning in order to attend Mascari’s funeral; already the atmosphere swirled with too much death.
Even though he came back to the city from a place of violent death, came back in order to be present at the consequences of another, he could not stop his heart from contracting at the sight of the bell towers and pastel facades that swept into view as the police car crossed the causeway. Beauty changed nothing, he knew, and perhaps the comfort it offered was no more than illusion, but still he welcomed that illusion.
The funeral was a miserable thing: empty words were spoken by people who were clearly too shocked by the circumstances of Mascari’s death to pretend to mean what they said. The widow sat through it all rigid and dry-eyed and left the church immediately behind the coffin, silent and solitary.
* * * *
The newspapers, as was only to be expected, went wild at the scent of Crespo’s death. The first story appeared in the evening edition of La Notte, a paper much given to red headlines and the use of the present tense. Francesco Crespo was described as ‘a transvestite courtesan’. His biography was given, and much attention was paid to the fact that he had worked as a dancer in a gay discoteca in Vicenza, even though his tenure there had lasted less than a week. The writer of this article drew the inevitable link to the murder of Leonardo Mascari, less than a week ago, and suggested that the similarity in victim indicated a person who was exacting a deadly vengeance against transvestites. The writer did not seem to believe it necessary to explain why this might be.
The morning papers picked up this idea. The Gazzettino made reference to the more than ten prostitutes who had been killed just in the province of Pordenone in recent years and attempted to draw a line between those crimes and the murders of the two transvestites. Il Manifesto gave the crime two full columns on page four, the writer using the opportunity to refer to Crespo as ‘yet another of the parasites who cling to the rotting body of Italian bourgeois society’.
In its magisterial discussion of the crime, II Corriere della Sera veered quickly from the murder of a relatively insignificant prostitute to that of a well-known Venetian banker. The article made reference to ‘local sources’ who reported that Mascari’s ‘double life’ had been an item of common knowledge in certain quarters. His death, therefore, was simply the inevitable result of the ‘spiral of vice’ into which his weakness had transformed his life.
Interested by this revelation of ‘sources’, Brunetti put a call through to the Rome office of that newspaper and asked to speak to the writer of the article. That person, when contacted and learning that Brunetti was a commissario of police wanting to know to whom he had spoken when writing the article, said that he was not at liberty to reveal the source of his in
formation, that the trust that must exist between a journalist and those who both speak to and read him must be both implicit and absolute. Further, to reveal his source would go against the highest principles of his profession. It took Brunetti at least three full minutes to realize that the man was serious, that he actually believed what he was saying.
‘How long have you worked for the newspaper?’ Brunetti interrupted.
Surprised to be cut off in the full flood of his exposition of his principles, goals, and ideals, the reporter paused a moment and then answered, ‘Four months. Why?’
‘Can you transfer this call back to the switchboard, or do I have to dial again?’ Brunetti asked.
‘I can transfer you. But why?’
‘I’d like to speak to your editor.’
The man’s voice grew uncertain, then suspicious, at this, the first real sign of the duplicity and underhanded dealings of the powers of the state. ‘Commissario, I want to warn you that any attempt to suppress or call into question the facts I have revealed in my story will quickly be revealed to my readers. I’m not sure if you realize that a new age has dawned in this country, that the people’s need to know can no longer be-’ Brunetti pushed down the button on his receiver and, when he got a new dial tone, redialled the central number of the newspaper. Not even the Questura should have to pay to listen to that sort of nonsense, and certainly not at long-distance rates.
When he was finally connected with the editor of the news section of the paper, he turned out to be Giulio Lotto, a man with whom Brunetti had dealt in the past when both of them had been suffering exile in Naples.