by Donna Leon
‘About what?’ Patta inquired quietly enough for Brunetti to suspect a trap of some kind.
‘She said her father knows a very good watchmaker on the Giudecca. I’ve got an old Omega my great-uncle . . .’
‘Giudecca?’ Patta interrupted, then asked, ‘Don’t they have a bad reputation?’
Brunetti smiled and did his best to give an easy little laugh. ‘I think that’s a bit of folklore, Dottore. Left over from my parents’ generation.’
‘You’re not trying to protect them, are you, Brunetti?’
Instead of asking – as one would when speaking to someone who knew nothing about Venice – what the Giudecchini needed to be protected from, Brunetti repeated his mini-laugh and said, ‘Of course not, Vice-Questore.’ That seemed to satisfy Patta, who turned back into his office and closed the door.
Next he tried Vianello. He went down the hall on the first floor and into the office where the Ispettore worked and saw him in the far corner, speaking with two other officers, all three of them in uniform. When he noticed Brunetti, Vianello held up a hand to signal that he would be with him quickly. Seeing a copy of that day’s Gazzettino on Vianello’s desk, Brunetti went over to Vianello’s chair and began to page through the newspaper. Attention was paid to the arrest of two politicians in Lombardy for the buying of votes; while another article reported the arrest of 138 people in a maxi-round-up of Mafia collaborators: politicians, businessmen, and lawyers, as well as one banker, all involved in a ring of loan-sharking and the sale of government contracts for road-building and maintenance. The article used two of the by-now-familiar photos of the latest autostrada bridge to collapse as well as close-ups of flaking cement pylons that, with steel support rods poking out on all sides, did not encourage a sense of security in anyone who chose to drive on an autostrada with bridges suspended on these pylons.
He slid the paper aside as useless and found, under it, La Repubblica, which he opened to the Culture section, having read more than enough about the state of the country. And what did his wondering eyes behold but a review of a new translation of the Annals of Tacitus? He had read them as a student, seeking help from what he’d thought even then a very unexciting translation, and had sensed that genius lurked behind the Latin he struggled through and the translation he plodded through.
Aware of motion beside him, Brunetti turned away from the paper and saw Vianello.
‘Il Gazzettino not good enough for you?’ Vianello asked, nodding with his chin at the newspaper Brunetti had moved aside.
‘It’s not good enough for anybody, I suspect,’ Brunetti answered.
‘Then why do you read it every day?’
‘Vox pop,’ Brunetti countered. ‘I think it really is the voice of the people here: their concerns, their preferences, their crimes.’ He looked at Vianello, who seemed unpersuaded by his defence of the newspaper.
‘Besides, they list the names of the pharmacies that are open on Sunday,’ Brunetti concluded and covered one newspaper with the other.
Vianello pulled out the chair in front of the desk and sat. ‘What is it?’
‘I’d like you to listen to something,’ Brunetti said.
Vianello, sensitive to the change in Brunetti’s voice, shifted his chair closer.
‘I was out on the Giudecca this morning,’ Brunetti began. ‘I had a look at the place where Vio’s uncle has his transport business.’ Vianello nodded. ‘But before that I spoke to the garbage man who’s in charge of the streets around it.’
‘The garbage man?’ Vianello repeated, not without a certain surprise.
‘He told me that Borgato’s got new boats but doesn’t moor them there.’ Before Vianello could ask for clarification, Brunetti explained his conversation with Cesco about the motors and their size, excessive for ordinary transport.
It took Vianello only an instant to say, ‘If he’s not a fisherman with a very big boat, then there’s no reason he’d have engines that powerful.’ Interested now, Vianello asked, ‘Is that all he said?’
Brunetti hesitated before answering. ‘That he said directly, yes, but it didn’t sound like he had any great fondness for Borgato.’
‘Doesn’t make him sound like a reliable witness.’
Brunetti shrugged this aside, knowing how few witnesses were reliable. ‘He’s intelligent and observant, and he saw men fitting the motors – he was certain they were at least 250 horsepower – on to the boats. His feelings for Borgato are irrelevant to what he saw.’
Vianello shifted back in his chair and folded his arms, saying nothing.
‘All right, all right, Lorenzo,’ Brunetti conceded. ‘Big motors on boats that belong to someone who transports cargo in the laguna,’ he continued, then added, ‘and who is rumoured to be involved in some sort of smuggling.’
‘It might be that they’re simply transporting larger quantities,’ Vianello said, then, after a long pause, added in a milder tone, ‘All right. I’ll ask some people to have a look around.’
‘It could also mean that he’s going out into the Adriatic to get these larger quantities,’ Brunetti conceded.
‘Of?’ Vianello asked.
‘I’m afraid we have to ask the Guardia Costiera for help with this.’ A sudden smile flashed across Brunetti’s face as he recalled a friend who might be of some use to him in this matter.
Over the years, Brunetti had made many friends: some had remained friends over decades, some had moved through life with him for a time and then diverted on their separate ways, or, truth be told, he had ceased to find them interesting and had allowed attrition to do the work of separation for him. Among his friends were those Paola called, ‘Guido’s strays,’ men and women who, at first consideration, might seem out of place in the lives they had chosen or that they had stumbled into. They were not misfits, for most of them had found the place where they could fit and lived there comfortably and happily: but the world often strived unsuccessfully to understand why they were there.
Brunetti knew from experience how people could be trapped in the wrong place in life from having attended three years of Latin class with Giovanni Borioni, son of the Marchese of some place in Piemonte the name of which Brunetti could never remember. ‘Rocca Something’, Giovanni had called it to Brunetti some months after they met: this name had replaced the real one. Giovanni had lived in Venice with his mother; she legally separated from il Marchese, who remained in Torino. He had decided that a classical education would be best for his eldest son, and thus the liceo classico, and thus the Latin classes, for which Giovanni was perhaps not best suited.
Brunetti had tutored his friend Giovanni for three years, not only in Latin. After this, like il Marchese, Giovanni’s absent father, Brunetti had taken great pride in Giovanni’s graduation from liceo, had stood beside him and embraced him when his name was read out. It hardly mattered that, by the time of the happy event, Giovanni had lost all memory of ‘amo, amas, amat’. After graduation, Giovanni not only left behind his knowledge of Latin grammar but had renounced his father’s plans for him and had enrolled in the faculty of agriculture at the University of Modena. Today he was not only the Marchese but a farmer, having turned the family’s vast land holdings in Rocca Something into an experiment in biological farming. Brunetti’s children had spent weeks in the summer working for Giovanni, returning to Venice tanned and fit and even more respectful of Nature and its boundless worth than they had been before going there.
But this is to digress, for the importance of Brunetti’s friendship lay not with Giovanni himself but with his younger brother, Timoteo, a lawyer specializing in nautical law and thus a consultant to the Navy as well as to the Guardia Costiera, those forces charged with the defence of Italy’s sea borders and the waters surrounding the country.
Over the years, Brunetti had met Timoteo with some frequency; the lawyer had always been honestly curious about Brunetti’s work, ins
isting that his own was, ‘a boredom made of files, folders, and reports’. Brunetti, widely read in Venetian history, was equally curious about nautical law. Because it is but weak human nature to like the people who show interest in one’s work, these two men, who met rarely but communicated with some regularity, thought of the other as a good friend.
Thus it was automatic that Brunetti should call Timoteo and ask for an introduction to the person in charge of the Guardia Costiera in Venice, just as it was automatic that Capitano Ignazio Alaimo, the officer in charge of the Capitaneria di Porto, would accept a call from Commissario Guido Brunetti, after being asked to do so by his friend, Timoteo Borioni.
The mills of the gods grind exceeding slow: those of the Italian bureaucracy, however, are capable of great speed, depending upon the impulse to which they respond. In the case of a nautical lawyer who was the brother of a Marchese and himself the good friend of an admiral or two – one of whom was responsible for the added gold bar on the insignia of rank worn by Capitano Alaimo – to ask a favour of that same captain was – not to put too fine a point on it – to give an order. And thus the phone call of Commissario Guido Brunetti was passed to the Captain, who said the Commissario was certainly welcome to visit that very afternoon, if he chose. Tomorrow morning? Nothing easier. Eleven? Perfect.
Paola had once been asked by the department of Italian at Oxford, the university where she had taken her degree, to return as a guest lecturer, free to choose any English text she wanted, so long as parallels could be drawn to Italy. She had agonized over which of Henry James’ texts to use, until destiny had caused her to take Maria Edgeworth’s novel, Patronage, on vacation. Brunetti recalled lying on the beach in Sardinia, trying to read Livy, while Paola insisted upon reading out entire passages dealing with the advancement up the ladder of success made by idiots, villains, and the indolent because of the power and patronage of their parents’ friends.
At first Brunetti had feared the book would drive her into a crisis of moral and political denunciation, as vicious sons, idiot cousins, a panoply of breathtakingly incompetent men, were pushed forward by their relatives’ positions in the government, the connections of a wife’s family, or simple blackmail.
Instead, Paola had spent days reading, forced to pause only by the energy and time it took to exclaim, ‘Oh, it’s my Uncle Luca.’ ‘That’s just how Luigino got the job.’ Or, ‘He’s like the one who lost his job as ambassador because he had an affair with the wife of the Minister of Agriculture.’
12
These thoughts did not encumber Brunetti the next morning when, accompanied by Griffoni, he was taken to the Capitaneria on a police launch, piloted by Foa, both he and the launch gleaming in the sun.
A uniformed sailor saluted their boat as it arrived and helped Griffoni and Brunetti step up to the dock in front of the bright orange Capitaneria building, which stood on the Zattere, that long, straight promenade that looked across to the Giudecca and was graced by having very few private enterprises in evidence: even the supermarket at the bottom end near San Basilio, large as it was, had only one inconspicuous door and was thus difficult to find. Brunetti told Foa he could go back to the Questura: they would take the vaporetto back.
The sailor in the white jacket slipped around them and hurried across the broad riva to the front door and pulled it open then waited for them to enter. He joined them, saying, ‘I’ll take you to Capitano Alaimo.’
Neither of them had ever been inside and so they were busy looking about them, if only to see how the other half lived. There was no question that the view from the front door was far better: the Questura had a canal and a church, but those things were to be seen from almost every street corner in Venice. Here, instead, anyone leaving the building was treated to a panorama of the entire Giudecca, from the Molino Stucky down to the other end, where some of the more menacing combat and pursuit boats of the Guardia Costiera were moored.
They continued into the palazzo, drawn by the glimmering white jacket of the sailor. They ascended a broad marble staircase; the wall they approached as they climbed the first ramp held a vast painting of what must be the battle of Lepanto. Galleons and galeasses, flying either the crescent moon of the Turks or the cross of the Europeans, filled the entire Gulf of Patras, sailing at one another in straight lines, their cannons puffing out tiny white clouds while the Madonna looked on approvingly from above at what was to ensue.
‘And we have a black and white photo of the President of the Republic,’ Griffoni said.
Brunetti thought it wiser not to comment.
At the top of the stairs, the sailor led them to the second door on the right. He knocked, waited, entered, and stood to attention just inside the door while they both entered the room. Two men in uniform sat at facing desks, busy with their computers. Behind the man on the right a map of the Laguna Nord covered most of the wall. On the left was the Southern part, showing the laguna all the way down to Chioggia.
When Brunetti withdrew his attention from the maps, he saw the sailor now standing in front of a door at the far end of the office, Griffoni beside him. He walked over to join them. The sailor looked at Griffoni, then at Brunetti, as if his gaze would suffice to keep them immobile, and leaned forward to knock.
‘Avanti,’ a male voice called from inside.
The sailor opened the door, let them pass in front of him, slapped his heels together and saluted, then closed the door behind him as he left.
A small man, almost a statue of a man in miniature, got to his feet and came around the desk. He walked quickly towards them, took Griffoni’s hand and bent to kiss it, then shook Brunetti’s, saying, ‘Please, please, come over here where we can talk.’ Because he was perfectly proportioned and had such self-assurance, Alaimo seemed no less notable than other men. He had very thick, curly dark hair clinging closely to his head. His skin showed how many years he had spent on the decks of ships: lines fanned out from the corners of both eyes, and two vertical lines cut down either side of his mouth. His eyes were pale grey and seemed out of place on his face.
Looking away from the Captain, Brunetti realized how large the office was, big enough for the Captain’s desk and, to its right, a four-person divan and three matching chairs separated from it by a low table. In answer to Alaimo’s wave, Griffoni chose a seat on the divan, which gave her a view out of the windows; Brunetti took the chair facing her but slightly to her left. Captain Alaimo ignored the other chair facing her and sat on the one at the end of the table, thus placing himself equidistant from the two police officers in a kind of human isosceles triangle. Brunetti noticed that the chair Alaimo chose was lower than his and thus allowed the Captain’s feet to touch the floor.
Brunetti glanced around the room and saw a line of gouaches showing scenes from the various eruptions of Vesuvio. One was painted from the perspective of the sea, another from a distant point that must have been to the north. Two showed giant plumes of white smoke and flame rising high above the dome of the volcano, one with a flood of magma burning its way down the slope; another showed three cane-carrying gentlemen standing on a high slope, backs to the viewer, staring off at the flames of the eruption in the distance; the last looked across a calm sea on which white-sailed vessels went about their quiet business while, in the background, a tunnel of white smoke rose up, ten times higher than the volcano itself.
Seeing that his guest was interested in the paintings, Alaimo said, ‘An ancestor of mine painted the one in the middle.’
Brunetti got immediately to his feet and, sure enough, found the name, ‘Giuseppe Alaimo’ painted at the bottom.
‘Was he a painter by profession?’ Brunetti asked. ‘It’s very fine work.’
‘No,’ Alaimo said and laughed a bit. ‘He was a doctor.’
‘Which eruption was this?’ Brunetti asked, still looking closely at the painting. ‘Do you know?’
‘There’s no year on it,’ Al
aimo said. ‘But family legend says it was 1779.’
‘One of the bad ones,’ Griffoni interrupted, allowing Brunetti to hear, for the first time, her Neapolitan accent, a faint trace of which he had detected in Alaimo’s voice.
Alaimo whipped around to look at her. ‘What?’
‘Not as bad as some of the others in the eighteenth century, and nothing special if you include the entire known history, but still bad.’
‘But you’re working here,’ Alaimo said, as if that fact ruled out what he was hearing.
‘But I come from there,’ she said, waving her hand at the paintings.
His embarrassment audible, Alaimo said, ‘I’m sorry, but I didn’t hear your surname.’
‘Griffoni,’ she offered, ‘Claudia Griffoni.’
‘Oddio,’ Alaimo exclaimed, putting his hands to his head, as if he were trying to keep it from exploding or he was going to pull his hair out. ‘I should have known. A woman as beautiful as you, Signora, could only be from Napoli.’
‘The same is true of a man as gallant as you, Capitano,’ she gave back, leaving Brunetti to wonder when a boat of the Capitaneria di Porto would be placed at Griffoni’s private disposal. He remained calm, apparently rapt in his continued study of the paintings, quite as if the melodrama were not being played out behind him.
There followed a predictable list of subjects: where in Venice can one get decent coffee? Mozzarella? The Captain had it delivered once a week, and if she’d like . . . How will they survive another winter here? Did he/she know him/her? His aunt the abbess of the Chiostro di San Gregorio Armeno. Common friends, a favourite pizzeria deep in the heart of the Spagnoli quarter, the fastest way to get to the airport.
After the briefest change of gears, they proceeded, perhaps in deference to Brunetti’s presence, to list some pleasant aspects of life in Venice.
Brunetti, because he could not see them as they spoke, was particularly sensitive to their voices, to Griffoni’s Neapolitan accent, which grew stronger with every passing sentence. He was surprised to realize that, when she gave in to the linguistic influence of Napolitano, she sounded less bright and, surprisingly, almost shockingly, more vulgar, whining her way through all she missed and culminating in the lack of a good discoteca.