Transient Desires

by Donna Leon

  ‘Scusi, Signore,’ Brunetti began. ‘Sono qua per . . .’ hoping to calm the other man by explaining why he was there.

  The man took two slow steps towards him and stopped. ‘Who are you. A doctor?’ he asked in English.

  Brunetti answered in the same language ‘No, I’m not a doctor, Mr Watson,’ he said, realizing it would be best to tell him immediately who he was. ‘I’m Commissario Guido Brunetti, from the police. I’ve come to visit your daughter.’

  The man’s expression changed from curiosity to something harder.

  ‘Why are you here?’ the American asked, coming one step closer. ‘What do you want?’

  The words would have been aggressive had he not sounded so curious.

  ‘To see if there’s been any improvement in her condition, sir.’

  The man glanced towards his daughter, as if he hoped to catch her listening to their conversation, but she was not. In a voice he forced to sound calm, Watson said, ‘You can see. There’s none.’ His voice choked off the last word.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Brunetti said, conscious of how useless it sounded.

  Before Brunetti could say anything more, the other man stepped back to where he had been sitting, bent and picked up his phone, and put it in his pocket. He came around the bottom of the bed to Brunetti and held out his hand. ‘Alex Watson,’ he said. His grip was firm but quick, the sort of handshake Americans often gave: eager to establish friendship but reluctant to give any indication they wanted it to continue. He had reddish blond hair that had begun to whiten with age and very pale blue eyes that reminded Brunetti of a Border Collie’s, although the man had none of that animal’s restrained nervousness.

  Brunetti took Watson’s hand and repeated his name, leaving off the title.

  Watson looked at his daughter and closed his eyes for a long time, then turned to Brunetti and said, ‘Perhaps we could talk in the corridor. I don’t want to disturb her.’

  With a brief nod, Brunetti turned and went into the corridor. Two white-jacketed women stood a few doors down, talking in soft voices.

  ‘Have the doctors told you what’s going on?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘They say now that she’s in a coma. When they called me to tell me about the accident, they said only that she was unconscious.’ He remained silent for a long time and then said, ‘Now it’s a coma.’

  Brunetti nodded and made a noise, which Watson must have interpreted as a request to continue. ‘They say it sometimes happens with head injuries. Brain injuries, that is.’ Brunetti heard how difficult it was for Watson to speak the words the doctors had actually used.

  Watson walked over to one of the windows that looked out on a parking lot. He braced his hands against the windowsill and lowered his head for a moment, then pushed himself upright. ‘I spoke to one of the doctors through a translator.’

  ‘What did the doctor say?’

  ‘Something about a piece of bone – I think he said it a was really a fragment. But he didn’t tell me how big it is, or I didn’t understand.’ Before Brunetti could ask Watson if he remembered the Italian so he might translate, Watson said, ‘It’s not the translator’s fault. I’m having a hard time remembering what people tell me. When I talk to my wife, I try to repeat what the doctors tell me. She does speak Italian, but she can’t be here.’

  Brunetti’s expression must have revealed his surprise, for Watson said, ‘She’s in the middle of chemotherapy, in Washington, and she can’t be in a hospital, any hospital, because her immune system is . . . it’s not working very well.’

  Brunetti nodded to acknowledge hearing this and, after a pause, asked, ‘Is that all they’ve told you, Signor Watson?’

  ‘They said the only thing they can do is wait and see what happens.’ Brunetti noticed motion and glanced down to see Watson’s hands, clenching and unclenching repeatedly.

  ‘I’ve been told that she and Ms Petersen are friends at university,’ Brunetti said, trying to re-establish the normality of their conversation.

  Watson opened his mouth in surprise. ‘Yes. They live in the same dormitory.’

  ‘So you don’t know her well?’

  ‘No,’ Watson answered, shaking his head several times, as if he’d forgotten it was moving. ‘She stayed with us in Rome last year.’ His face softened and he added, ‘She’s got a lot more sense than some of the girls who went to high school with Lucy.’ In evidence, he offered, ‘She helped my wife with the cooking. Made Lucy help keep their room clean while they were staying with us.’ Then, voice wavering, Watson added, speaking as though it were a declaration of love, ‘Lucy’s never been the neatest girl in the world.’

  Before Watson could spin entirely out of control, Brunetti said, ‘Neither is my daughter,’ and smiled.

  The truce of shared parenthood descended, and both remained silent for some time.

  Deciding to make a clean break with their preliminary talk, Brunetti asked, ‘Did JoJo tell you what happened that night?’

  Watson turned his back to the window and half sat on the sill as though suddenly in need of support. After a moment, he nodded and went on. ‘They were in a piazza with a lot of other kids, and they met two young men, Italians, who asked them if they’d like a drink.

  ‘When they went into a bar, JoJo had a gingerino, and Lucy had a Coke. Then the boys both had apple juice and they all started to laugh about that.’ Watson paused here, and a smile removed a decade from his face. He stopped, and Brunetti saw him cast his attention towards the door to his daughter’s room.

  Brunetti let a good deal of time pass and then asked, ‘Did she tell you about the accident?’

  Watson nodded. ‘She said it took her some time to remember, but then it started coming back.’ Brunetti said nothing, and Watson went on. ‘The fact these guys didn’t drink reassured them both, so they accepted their invitation to go out in their boat. Everything was fine until they were out in the open water, when the one at the motor kept going faster and faster until JoJo asked him to slow down. But he didn’t understand. Though I don’t know how much there is to understand, really, if a girl starts shouting at you while you’re speeding in a boat.’ Brunetti heard the tight breath of anger slipping back into Watson’s voice but said nothing.

  ‘She said she asked the other guy to tell him to slow down, but he just shrugged.’

  ‘What else did she say?’

  ‘She grabbed his arm and tried to pull him away from the motor, but it was impossible. She stood up to move back to where Lucy was sitting, and that’s when they hit something and she fell over.

  ‘When she sat up – she doesn’t know how much time had passed, Lucy was still lying on her stomach and the other one – not the driver – was kneeling next to her, talking to her.’ Watson kept nodding his head, as though that would force him to remember what he’d been told.

  ‘JoJo said her arm started to hurt then, really hurt. No one spoke except the guy who was trying to talk to Lucy.’ He stopped and bit at his lip, as though he had to punish himself for saying her name.

  ‘The other guy started the motor, and they began moving again; it seemed very slow to JoJo, but she said she wasn’t sure because her arm hurt so much and she was cold. She said a lot of water had splashed into the boat when they stopped.’

  ‘Does she remember being taken to the hospital?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘No. She said she might have fainted from the pain because the boat kept hitting waves and she and Lucy were knocked around in the bottom of the boat.’ He paused here and added, ‘She thinks her mind kept going in and out: things were real, and then they weren’t. At one point, she thinks she heard one of them say, “He’ll kill me. He’ll kill me,” but she isn’t sure because of the pain and the fear.’ Watson stopped.

  ‘Nothing else?’ Brunetti asked softly.

  ‘She woke up in the hospital, but Lucy wasn’t there. Aft
er a while, the policewoman came, and things began to make sense.’

  Then, as if his senses had suddenly been restored, Watson asked, ‘Who took them there?’

  ‘The men who were in the boat,’ Brunetti told him, since it would soon be common knowledge.

  ‘Who are they?’

  Brunetti took it upon himself to answer, ‘What they seemed to be, sir: two young men, both Venetians, who had . . .‘

  ‘I know that,’ Watson said shortly. ‘JoJo told me. But you know who they are?’

  ‘Yes,’ Brunetti answered. ‘I’ve spoken to both of them.’

  ‘Without telling anyone?’ he asked, moving towards anger. Brunetti saw that all signs of amiability had disappeared. ‘What did they tell you?’ Watson demanded, seeming to grow larger as he spoke.

  ‘I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to tell you that, sir, not while the investigation is still in progress.’ Brunetti spoke calmly, in what he tried to make sound like a friendly voice.

  ‘So they took them to the hospital? And then what did they do?’

  Brunetti realized there was no use in lying to him. ‘They left, sir. One of them was badly injured himself.’

  ‘I don’t care about him,’ Watson shot back. He was silent for a moment, and then anger drove him to repeat Brunetti’s words. ‘“They left them.” Just dumped them there and left. . .’ Watson began, his anger now unleashed, ‘and left them there like they were . . . .’ Watson stopped and looked around the corridor, as though the words he wanted were hiding from him. But then he found it, and it burst from him, ‘. . . like trash.’ He raised his hands in fists but did no more than bring them down at his sides.

  ‘Did you ask them about drugs? About alcohol?’ Watson demanded.

  Brunetti shook his head.

  ‘You didn’t ask them?’ Watson all but shouted.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir. We did question them, but I’m not at liberty to discuss this with anyone who isn’t involved in the investigation.’

  The man nodded, but Brunetti saw the tightening of his jaw as he fought back words. Brunetti wondered how well he’d succeed in controlling himself if it had been Chiara on that boat, Chiara in the bed in the room opposite them, and suddenly he felt admir­­ation for Watson’s powers of restraint.

  The man looked at Brunetti and then at the door to the room. He nodded a few more times, then said, ‘I think I need to get back.’ He turned away from Brunetti and went into the room, closing the door quietly behind him.

  22

  Because it was almost five when Brunetti left the hospital, he decided to go home directly but to do so on the tram, which he had never ridden. Il Gazzettino had, for years, kept him informed of the tram’s many malfunctions, derailments, and crashes as well as the frequent breakdowns of no known origins. But he had never taken it, and he wanted to, so he looked at the schedule of the buses going to the centre of Mestre, where he assumed he could connect to the tram, and took the 32H to Piazzale Cialdine, where the Number One tram stopped on its way between the cities.

  ‘Is this for the tram that goes to Piazzale Roma?’ he asked an elderly woman who stood at the stop, a COIN shopping bag in her hand. Ah, how his mother had aspired to being able to shop in COIN, but she had succeeded only in looking in the windows. The woman smiled, moving her wrinkles closer together, then said, ‘It should.’

  That too, was a statement his mother had favoured: his father should be home at eight, the plumber should come that afternoon, there should be enough money for his school books. ‘Dovrebbe,’ he repeated, and the woman smiled and shrugged. ‘I just missed one, so at least we know they’re running,’ she said, generously allowing him to be a part of her certainty.

  No sooner had she said that than a Number One tram slid into the stop on the other side of the street: people got off, people got on. Brunetti recalled a story his mother had told him of the only trip she ever made to what she always referred to as ‘Italy’, meaning to anywhere else in Italy, aside from Mestre, where she’d been twice. She’d gone to a cousin’s wedding, more than fifty years before, had taken a train for the only time in her life, had ridden on a tram, and had met the ‘Torinesi,’ those members of her family who had emigrated to Torino to work in the Fiat factory and who had, in the doing – at least according to his mother – grown rich, rich enough to have earned the name, ‘Torinesi,’ which word was always used in reference to them and was, for her, a synonym for ‘rich’. And he had married one, Brunetti reflected, and now had two children his own mother would consider ‘Torinesi’.

  He felt a hand on his arm and turned suddenly towards it. The old woman moved back half a step and said, ‘It’s here, signore.’

  The woman’s hand had pulled him back to Piazzale Cialdine and to the tram, which stood, doors open, in front of them. He smiled and thanked her, took her arm and helped her step up into the tram. She lowered herself into an aisle seat while Brunetti thanked her again and moved to the front, the better to see the traffic that came towards them. Ahead of them, he could see the single rail on which the tram ran, amazed that this could be possible.

  They glided: every acceleration and deceleration a fluid change of speed. They slipped past the motionless lines of cars and on to Il Ponte della Libertà. To the right stretched the horror of Marghera, smokestacks stretching out endlessly; then the shipyard and the half-finished carapace of yet another cruise ship: how perverse, that they were built here – how even more perverse that they were still built anywhere – so close to the city they savaged with their every passage in and out.

  It seemed to Brunetti that they slipped into Piazzale Roma and slid to a stop. He moved back and helped the woman to step down and wished her a pleasant evening. She patted his arm but said nothing.

  All Gaul was divided into three parts, the first of which were those who commuted out of the city to work on the mainland; the second were those who commuted the other way for the same reason; and the third were people like Brunetti, who lived and worked in the city and who did not ordinarily take the tram. Walking towards the bridge that would take him into Santa Croce, he felt as if he had exchanged his routine with one of the Venetians working out on the mainland and was only now back on familiar ground.

  As he walked along the Canale del Gaffaro, Brunetti was struck to see so few people on the street, but then he remembered the acqua alta. The moon was not full, there had been no rain in the north, nor strong wind behind the tide coming in from the Adriatic, yet two days ago the water had risen relentlessly to the knees of the people who walked in Piazza San Marco. Within minutes, those photos made the orbit of the planet, and within a few more, the cancellation of hotel and B&B reservations had flown back to the city to fall upon the already-bowed heads of the owners of those rejected empty rooms.

  Brunetti was of two minds: he felt a residual sympathy for the people who would lose income, but most of those earning the income were doing so at his cost and the cost of the other residents: rents impossible for normal people, fast food on offer where once normal people could buy what they needed, masks, and blah blah blah. Brunetti had recently vowed no longer to enter into this discussion nor comment on tourism or cruise ships because there was no longer anything to say, add, proclaim, or hope. Like acqua alta, tourism came when it wanted, could be stopped by nothing, and would gradually destroy the city.

  He pulled out his phone and hunted through the numbers he had filed under Vio’s name, stopped at Filiberto Duso’s and pressed his number.

  At the second ring, Duso answered, ‘Sì?’

  ‘Signor Duso,’ Brunetti said in a friendly voice. ‘It’s Commissario Brunetti.’

  ‘Good evening, Commissario,’ the young man answered.

  Brunetti remained silent, a tactic he used with people inex­perienced in the methods of the police.

  After what seemed like a long time, Duso said, ‘What is it you’d like, Commissari
o?’

  ‘I’ve just got back to the city and wondered if you’d have time to talk to me again,’ he said, hoping to sound jovial.

  ‘Where are you?’

  Brunetti gave a laugh and said, ‘Since I’m asking the favour, Signor Duso, I’ll gladly come to wherever’s convenient for you.’

  ‘I’m at home,’ Duso said.

  ‘Ah, near to Nico’s,’ Brunetti enthused. ‘Perhaps we could meet there for a coffee. What I have to say will take only a minute.’

  ‘Can’t we do it on the phone, then?’ Duso inquired.

  ‘I’d rather talk face to face, if you don’t mind,’ Brunetti answered.

  After a long hesitation, which Brunetti imagined the other man spent trying to find a way to worm his way out of this, Duso said, unable to disguise his reluctance, ‘All right, then. How long will it take for you to get there?’

  ‘Ten minutes,’ Brunetti answered, already quickening his pace.

  Duso was standing in front of Nico’s gelateria, gazing down at the ice cream displayed in the metal containers behind the glass case in front of the bar. As he came down the bridge, Brunetti slowed to watch the young man. It was obvious that he had no interest whatsoever in the ice cream. Quite the opposite: he shifted restlessly from foot to foot, as though only force of will kept him anchored there.

  Duso turned to his right and looked in the direction of the Gesuati church, one of the two directions from which Brunetti could arrive. He stuffed his hands in his pockets, then ran one hand through his hair and turned around to look in the direction of San Basilio.

  When he saw Brunetti, he started walking towards him. As they got closer, Duso remembered to smile, almost remembered how to do it.

  The two men stopped and shook hands. Duso’s nervousness conveyed itself to his hand: first he grasped Brunetti’s too tightly, then he dropped it as though his own hand had been burned by the contact.