Transient Desires

by Donna Leon

  ‘Papà,’ she said and smiled. ‘You’re setting up one of your traps, aren’t you?’ She put her elbows on the table and her chin in her hands as she looked across at him. ‘Next you’re going to ask for a definition of slavery, and I’m not going to be able to give you an adequate one, and every time I try, you’re going to point out holes as big as melons in what I say.’

  She sat up straighter and pushed out her left arm to support the barrel of an invisible rifle, her right arm pulling back so she could put her finger on the trigger. She took aim at something in the air above Brunetti’s head, pulled the trigger and gave an energetic ‘BAM’ before her arm jerked up and back with the power of the recoil.

  She turned quickly to her right side, raised the gun higher and shouted, ‘There’s another one. A Bad Definition!’ She sighted along the barrel as the second Bad Definition floated towards the table. Another ‘BAM,’ another falling victim, this one noisy when she set down the rifle and slammed her hand on the table to make the sound of the falling Bad Definition.

  Brunetti watched in silence, shocked only as parents can be by legitimate protest from their children. He lowered his head to the table, pressed his right cheek against the tablecloth, and muttered, in English, ‘How sharper than a serpent’s tooth. . .’ but before he could say more, Chiara, joined by Paola and Raffi, united in finishing the line for him . . .‘is it to have a thankless child.’

  Order, or something resembling it, was restored by the arrival of dessert.

  The next morning, Brunetti arrived at the Questura punctually at nine. Although he had no information to give Patta, he thought it would be politic to go to his office and seek his advice about the case. It was always easier to take charge of Patta when he believed he was in charge. When he entered Signorina Elettra’s office, Brunetti found her behind a copy of Il Sole 24 Ore, which she had long maintained was the only newspaper worth reading. He had no idea why she would read the financial newspaper, for she had never given evidence of an interest in the accumulation of wealth, although she did seem familiar with the major national and international companies and spoke well or ill, but always knowledgeably, of the various officials and officers of those companies as they followed one another into and out of the courtrooms – seldom the prisons – of the Northeast.

  ‘Good morning, Signorina,’ he said. ‘Is the Vice-Questore in his office?’

  ‘Ah,’ she began, using the tone she reserved to announce Vice-Questore Patta’s absence from the Questura. ‘I’m afraid Dottor Patta won’t be in until tomorrow afternoon.’ Brunetti stood in front of her desk, smiling to show that no explanation was necessary.

  She folded the newspaper closed and set it aside before asking, ‘Is there some way I might be of help?’

  Brunetti did not hesitate to take advantage of the situation. ‘Commissario Griffoni and I spoke to a Capitano Alaimo at the Guardia Costiera two days ago,’ he began, pleased to see Signorina Elettra drag a notebook towards her. ‘I’d like you to have a look.’

  ‘At?’ she asked, looking up, already curious.

  ‘Anything you can find,’ he began, ‘that might be interesting to us. All I know is that he’s Neapolitan.’

  From long experience, Brunetti knew that Signorina Elettra viewed a piece of information much in the way a shark viewed a leg dangling from a surfboard.

  ‘I’ll start with his performance record, then,’ she said. She was not crouched on one knee, palms resting on the surface of the track, but the faster rhythm of her speech seemed to suggest to Brunetti that he hasten from her office.

  Before he did, however, she informed him that she had received a call from the hospital in Mestre, requesting that the commissario in charge of the investigation of the accident in the laguna involving the two young American women give them a call. Signorina Elettra told Brunetti that she had taken the liberty of assuring the person who called that Commissario Brunetti would certainly call as soon as he could. He nodded his thanks.

  In the corridor, he dialled Griffoni’s number and, when she answered, asked, ‘Coffee?’

  When Griffoni came into the bar, she stopped at the counter and gave her order to Bamba, the Senegalese immigrant who had pretty much taken over the work of Sergio, the proprietor, then came back to slip into the booth opposite Brunetti.

  Before he could bring her up to date, Bamba came to the table and set a coffee in front of Brunetti and a pot of hot water in front of Griffoni. ‘We don’t have any verbena, Dottoressa, so I brought you these,’ he said, placing a saucer with four or five tea bags of different varieties in front of her. He nodded and went back to his place behind the counter.

  ‘No coffee?’ Brunetti asked, tearing open the envelope and pouring in the sugar.

  Hand poised over the saucer, Griffoni said, ‘If I had any more, I’d take wing and fly back to my office: wouldn’t even have to use the stairs.’

  ‘The window’s too small,’ Brunetti said. ‘You’d never fit in.’

  ‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ she said, dropping one of the bags into the hot water. Then she asked, ‘What did you learn yesterday?’

  He told her about his conversations with Borgato and his nephew, she laughing with delight as he described his costume and mouse-like behaviour. Then he told her what he had learned from Duso, but she surprised him by asking no questions. Further, she seemed impatient for him to finish.

  He stopped speaking and asked, ‘What is it you want to tell me?’

  She smiled. ‘Am I that obvious?’

  Brunetti nodded, as if to give right of precedence to a person who arrived at a narrow calle just as he did.

  ‘I had a look for Borgato, to find out where he was during those years he was gone,’ she said, struggling to sound calm.

  ‘And?’ Brunetti encouraged her.

  ‘He never changed his residence, was always registered at his address here,’ she said. ‘So I began thinking of the traces I might leave if I were living somewhere and not resident there.’

  ‘And what did you come up with?’ Brunetti asked, happy to help her towards her revelation.

  ‘Something a Venetian would never think of,’ she answered.

  ‘Do I get three guesses?’

  ‘It wouldn’t help, Guido, believe me.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because Venetians don’t drive, and more importantly, because you don’t drive too fast or go through stop signs or get into automobile accidents.’

  Brunetti’s face was blank for a moment and then lit up with a smile.

  ‘While we feckless Neapolitans do all of those things,’ she went on. ‘And more, so I’d naturally think of them,’ she said, lifting Brunetti’s spirit with her casual joke about the customs of Neapolitans.

  ‘You found him? Oh, wonderful. Where?’

  ‘Castel Volturno,’ she said, then added, though it hardly needed saying, ‘home of the Nigerian Mafia.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘He was in an accident – ran into the back of a car that was stopped at a red light – fourteen years ago. Then he was stopped for running a red light in Villa Literno, about ten kilometres from Castel Volturno. That was twelve years ago, and then for speeding on a state highway near Cancello, ten kilometres away. That was ten and a half years ago. Since then, there’s been nothing, and he never had any real trouble with the police.’

  ‘That’s a sign,’ Brunetti interrupted to say.

  Griffoni nodded. ‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’ she asked.

  ‘I am if you’re thinking he’s involved with the Nigerians, in which case the police would leave him alone.’

  ‘Who else could he have worked for?’ Griffoni asked. ‘They’re the only employers in that area,’ she said, then added, ‘and the only work is crime.’

  Neither of them spoke for some time, until Griffoni tired of the silence and ask
ed, ‘What do we do?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Brunetti said immediately. ‘I think we assume he’s involved with them and continue to learn whatever else we can about him.’

  After a long time, Griffoni said, ‘I’ve never known you to say there’s nothing we can do.’

  It troubled Brunetti to hear it put like that, but that made it no less true. He’d read and heard – every police officer in the country had – about the Nigerian mafia for years: impenetrable, vicious, omnipresent in the area around Castel Volturno. A colleague of Brunetti’s had spent a year there and then taken early retirement rather than endure a second. He refused to speak of the experience, save to say that the city was in ‘another country’.

  ‘The only thing we can do for the moment is learn as much as we can about him,’ he said. ‘We need more than the fact that he lived in Castel Volturno: he’s not a criminal because he lived there. Until we find a link . . .‘ he began and decided to repeat himself, ‘there’s nothing we can do.’

  Brunetti knew Griffoni well enough to read her frustration and anger simply by looking at her hands, which were clenched tightly in her lap.

  ‘I’m still interested in the accident with the Americans. It was Borgato’s boat,’ he said.

  Silence fell between them until Brunetti said, ‘I called the hospital.’

  That surprised her into asking, ‘And?’

  ‘I spoke to one of the doctors, who didn’t seem to know much. He passed me to a nurse, who said she thought the girl was awake.’

  Griffoni failed to restrain her surprise and said, ‘I hope they know what’s going on and this isn’t some sort of mix-up.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  She picked up her cup, looked at it as though surprised to see it in her hand, and set it back in the saucer. ‘When I called them yesterday morning, I was told she was still unconscious.’

  ‘Then she might have woken up,’ Brunetti said, although well he knew the danger of putting trust in the information a hospital released on the phone.

  ‘What will you do?’ Griffoni asked.

  ‘I’ll go and at least talk to her father,’ Brunetti said. ‘When did you last actually see her?’

  ‘Two days ago, on my way home; she was unconscious then, too. The nurse told me she was being given painkillers, and that might be the cause.’ It did not sound as though Griffoni believed what she had been told.

  ‘How long were you there?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘An hour, perhaps less.’ Seeing Brunetti’s surprise at this, she said, ‘Her father was there, and I told him to go down to the cafeteria and have something to eat while I sat with her.’

  She poured more tea into her cup and took a sip. A few drops of colourless tea had fallen on the table. Griffoni stuck her finger into them and drew them into circles, wiped her fingers on her napkin, then said, ‘The assistant surgeon was on duty, but he couldn’t tell me much. He said the only thing to do was wait and see what happens, that she’ll wake up when she’s ready.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Brunetti asked.

  Looking across at him, Griffoni said, ‘It means they don’t have any idea of what’s going on.’ She lifted her cup to her lips, sipped, and put it down again.

  ‘He told me they did what they could for her nose,’ she said.

  ‘Meaning?’

  Griffoni ran the first fingers of her right hand across her eyebrow. ‘He told me the cut above the eye was easy and will be pretty much invisible in six months. They taped it closed.’

  She looked out the window at the people passing on the riva. ‘Then he told me that they moved her nose back in place and taped it. They can’t operate until she’s conscious again.’ She spoke hurriedly, not wanting to linger over this.

  Brunetti continued to look at Griffoni’s eyebrow, recalling the photo he had seen of the girl’s face. Unconscious of his gaze, she raised her hand and placed it over both eyes, as though the gesture would ward off imagination. Keeping it there, she continued. ‘It’s all they could do, at least for the moment.’ She uncovered her eyes and looked at him with a face wiped clean of all emotion, then said, ‘Later I found myself thinking it was like having an archaeologist tell you how he repaired a Greek vase.’ Griffoni paused, then added, ‘God, surgeons are strange.’ She looked down at the table and shook her head, as if unable to believe what the doctor had said.

  She looked up at Brunetti and took him prisoner with the power of her gaze. ‘I couldn’t believe it when he kept talking about it. We were at the nurses’ station – it was after her father came back and I was leaving – and he wanted to draw me a picture to make it clear just what they’d done.’

  ‘Does he have an idea of how she’ll look?’

  ‘I asked,’ Griffoni answered. ‘He told me there might be a small difference in the arch in the middle of the eyebrow, but taping the wound was something they did often, and it would be covered by her eyebrow, anyway. He said the nose was different and might not look the same. But then he smiled and said that she could have it repaired surgically in a year or so, and she’ll look like she did before the accident.’

  She lifted the teapot and tilted it over her cup, but it was empty. She set it down and pushed out of the booth. ‘Let’s go back,’ she said to Brunetti, then she went over to the counter and exchanged a few words with Bamba while paying their bill. Unlike his employer, Sergio, the Senegalese barman rang up the correct sum and gave the receipt to Griffoni: Sergio was more likely to take the cash, say thank you, and not bother giving a receipt, the older man being of a mind that any member of the Guardia di Finanza lurking outside would hesitate to stop and question a police officer about whether he’d been given the slip of paper that proved he had paid the bill and thus the tax on it.

  Brunetti stopped and asked Bamba how his wife and daughter were and was informed that his daughter Pauline had the best marks in her class in mathematics and geography, and his wife went in three mornings a week to clean the homes of two old people in their building.

  ‘Good, that you’re all busy,’ Brunetti said.

  Griffoni added, ‘And good that you’re all here.’

  Bamba smiled at her and made as if to touch her arm, but stopped and set his hand on the counter. ‘Thank you, Dottoressa,’ he said, giving her a look Brunetti had never seen in Bamba’s eyes.

  He had no idea what strings Griffoni had managed to pull with her friends in Rome, but the immigration office, after sitting for some years on Bamba’s application for permission to have his wife and daughter join him, had granted the request within two months of the conversation a weeping Bamba had had with Griffoni the day after his last appointment with the immigration office.

  Brunetti had once asked her what she’d done to hurry things along, and she had categorically denied having interfered in what she called, ‘the slow grinding down of hope,’ a phrase she often used to describe the function of the bureaucracy of the Ministry of the Interior charged with processing requests for immigration. They were silent on their way back to the Questura.

  21

  When he approached the Ospedale dell’Angelo, Brunetti was struck by its resemblance to a cruise ship becalmed in a soccer field. From a distance, a glass wall appeared: six, seven floors high, seeming to slant backwards as they rose. The ends had an unsettling resemblance to the prows of the massive ships that once plied the waters in front of San Marco, occasionally crashing into the riva or coming close enough to fill the front page of the Gazzettino for days.

  Brunetti approached the shape with a certain timidity, as though, as soon as he stepped aboard, it would break free of its moorings and set off, giving in to some atavistic desire to slide itself into the laguna and, like the frog in the fairy tale, be transformed by the kiss of the water back into its true, princely self.

  He freed himself from these fantasies and went to the Information de
sk, where a young man at a computer quickly found Signorina Watson’s name, gave him the floor and room number, and told him the elevators were to his left.

  Brunetti hardly needed to be told, for he saw signs and arrows pointing to the different clinics and wards. It would be, he realized, difficult to become lost; how different from the old, comfortable, confusing Ospedale Civile in the city, with buildings spread out in no apparent pattern and many signs contradictory or confusing. Instead of the many-pillared cloister with its dozing cats, Ospedale dell’Angelo had pathways threading through what appeared to be a rainforest and an almost palpable cleanliness about everything that met the eye.

  He arrived quickly at the third floor and, after showing his warrant card to the nurse at the desk, asked where he would find Mr. Watson and his daughter. He followed her directions to the room. The door was open, so he stopped there and looked inside. Two beds, the near one empty, a man sitting on the opposite side of the other bed. He might have been Brunetti’s age, but he had gained more weight and lost more hair getting there. His bulk put the chair at possible risk of collapse: he was deeply intent on the phone he held in his hand, fingers tapping out a message. What was it? ‘Come and save my daughter’?

  Brunetti’s glance moved to the small figure lying under the blankets. In the centre of the face, a white plastic triangle was taped over her nose. Another tape ran the length of her left eyebrow: one perpendicular strip of tape secured it under the plastic covering, another anchored it to her forehead. Her eyes were closed, her mouth open. The skin above and below her left eye was almost black, radiating out to a circle of yellow, and some swelling remained. Her lips were open and pink.

  A transparent plastic bag hung suspended from a metal rack, and from it, a pale liquid ran to a needle taped to her arm. A second bag hung below the other; the tube disappeared under the covers.

  As if he’d been tapped on the shoulder, the man on the other side of the bed looked up and towards Brunetti. He blinked and dropped his phone, leaned forward in his chair, his hands on the arms, and pushed himself to his feet, hands raised, ready to confront whatever danger Brunetti might represent.