by Donna Leon
Alaimo raised a monitory hand at this point and said, ‘That’s not important, Claudia.’
She turned to Alaimo and asked, ‘May I say anything?’
Alaimo ignored her question, stepped forward and took Brunetti’s hand. They moved automatically to the places they had taken the last time they were in the room.
When they were seated, Alaimo took the initiative of host and began, ‘I was equally . . . hesitant the other day.’ He turned to Brunetti and smiled. ‘I knew your name, Guido, and your reputation, but Claudia had never worked on anything that involved us, so all I knew of her was what she showed me that day.’ He let them consider that for a moment and then went on. ‘The very convincing portrait she painted of a person – once I mentioned my sainted aunt, that is, and raised her suspicions – whom I would not, in my wildest dreams, think of trusting.’
Brunetti, sitting opposite Griffoni, saw the blush that crept across her cheeks. Having always believed her beyond shame and capable of anything, Brunetti was surprised to see it there. And relieved.
Alaimo must have seen it, too, for he turned to her and put up a hand in a calming gesture. ‘If you thought I was lying to encourage your trust, Claudia, you were wise to be cautious.’
He paused, smiled, hesitated a bit longer and then said, ‘I behaved the same way and for the same reason. Your mention of Vio and Duso, and then so casually of Vio’s uncle, sounded like a fishing expedition to me.’
‘Was I that obvious?’ Griffoni asked.
The question seemed to embarrass the Captain. ‘Only when it became obvious that I’d said something to alarm you: I had no idea what or how. The more you talked, the more you were a person I didn’t want to be involved with.’ Another pause. Another smile. ‘You set off loud alarms by naming Vio and his uncle.’
Alaimo suddenly tossed both hands in the air. He looked at Brunetti, then at Griffoni, and then went on, speaking in an entirely different voice: no more playfulness, no more jokes, flirtatiousness dismissed. ‘I’ve been paying attention to them for a long time. That’s why when Claudia behaved as she did, I sent you away promising to ask around. I didn’t want the police to alarm them by showing interest in them.’
It seemed that Alaimo had finished, but he added, his voice a bit warmer, ‘It’s a good thing I’d heard about you, Guido, because it was enough to make me call a few friends in Naples and ask about . . .’ he turned to Griffoni, smiling, ‘you.’
‘I passed the test, I hope.’
‘It was decided when I spoke to Enrico.’
Griffoni raised an inquisitive eyebrow, and Alaimo nodded and smiled. ‘Enrico Luliano,’ he said.
Griffoni froze. She started to speak but failed to produce any sound. Brunetti asked, sounding as casual and uninterested as he could, ‘Who’s he? The name sounds faintly familiar to me.’
Alaimo removed his glance from Griffoni and looked at Brunetti. ‘A magistrate. A very good one.’
Griffoni suddenly shifted around, crossed her legs the other way, and said, her voice sounding perhaps a bit too steady to Brunetti, ‘With two bodyguards and three different apartments where to choose to sleep, at random.’
‘Doesn’t sound like a very attractive life,’ Brunetti said, trying to make it sound ironic but failing.
‘Shall we talk about the immediate situation?’ Griffoni asked briskly.
Alaimo nodded, got up, went over to his desk, and came back with a few manila folders.
He sat down and handed one to each of them, opened his own. ‘These are all the same,’ he said as they opened theirs. ‘As you look through them, I’ll add prejudicial and unverifiable information to what’s written here.’
And that, for the next quarter of an hour, is exactly what he did. The first entries in Pietro Borgato’s file listed his arrests and convictions during the years before he disappeared from Venice. Alaimo remarked only that his pattern was fairly common to young men of a certain class on the Giudecca forty years before: jobs taken and lost, fights that put someone in the hospital, theft, drugs, a withdrawn accusation of rape.
And then he was gone, and the missing years remained missing.
The next two pages began with his return to Venice a decade ago and documented the creation and expansion of his transport business and his own growing wealth in the years after his return. Alaimo added, ‘We don’t know where he got the money he brought with him when he came back, but he used it to buy his apartment, the warehouse and dock, and two small boats.’ He turned a page. ‘As you can see, he opened the transport business immediately after he got back.’
‘And in those early years?’ Brunetti asked.
Alaimo looked up from the last sheet of paper, where Borgato’s assets were listed, and added, ‘We didn’t begin to pay close attention to him until recently, when he managed to buy two more boats, very large ones, and three more properties in the city. Where’d the money come from?’
As if Brunetti had not spoken, Alaimo said, ‘About six months ago, a friend of mine in the Guardia di Finanza called me about him, and when I asked why he wanted to know, he said they were preparing an investigation of his finances. His business was growing, but so were his expenses, and still he could buy more and bigger boats.’ Alaimo smiled. ‘My friend said they were curious about this.’
Alaimo lowered the papers to his lap and looked aside at Brunetti. ‘It took me a long time, days, to convince them not to approach him, but to leave him to us.’
‘Why was that?’ Griffoni asked.
‘Because we’d charge him with human trafficking, not tax evasion.’
So there it was, finally named, Brunetti thought: human trafficking. The merchandise originated, as it had centuries before, in the poorest parts of the world: Africa, Asia, South America – places on the borders of these continents. And the traffic still went back to the colonizers, to where the bodies would be put to use or work, doing what wealthier people could still afford to pay other people to do for them: grow and harvest their food, care for their old and their young, warm their beds and submit to their desires, produce their necessities and their treats.
Or, as in the past, he mused, they could simply be sold and thus become the de facto property of whoever was willing to pay the price and run the risk of possession. They could become household staff, field hands, sex toys, perhaps even organ donors, each step stripping off successive layers of humanity from both their persons and from the souls – if Brunetti could permit himself the use of this word – of their owners.
When Brunetti’s attention returned to Alaimo, the other man was saying, ‘Once I convinced them that they could charge him after we arrested him, we came to an agreement.’
‘But for how long?’ Griffoni asked.
Alaimo bowed his head, as though he were somehow responsible for the delay. ‘We needed enough evidence to persuade a magistrate to authorize us to go ahead, but we had to be careful about getting that information.’
And choosing the right magistrate, Brunetti thought but instead asked, ‘Not to alarm him?’
‘You’re Venetian, so you know how it is: you touch the web there,’ Alaimo said, pointing his finger at a spot in front of his left shoulder and then extending his arm off to the right and pointing to another equally invisible spot. ‘And it trembles here. Especially – if I might add – on the Giudecca.’
Brunetti nodded, then asked, ‘What have you learned?’
Alaimo said nothing for a long time, but neither Brunetti nor Griffoni broke the silence: they sat and waited for Alaimo to continue. Finally he did. He tossed the papers in his hand on to the table between them, made steeples of his fingers and tapped their tips together a few times, then said, ‘This is going to sound like science fiction.’
The two commissari remained silent, motionless.
Alaimo continued. ‘One of our men fishes a lot, and since he’s got
relatives in Chioggia, he goes over there to do it. He’s told us for years that he’s found a place where two currents meet, both bringing lots of fish. But he won’t tell us where it is, whether it’s out in the sea or in the laguna. There are some Chioggiotti who know the place, he says, and over the years they’ve become friends. Or at least they share the place, and no one tells anyone else about it.’
Brunetti began to wonder where this tale would lead and when it would end: sailors’ stories had a habit of following currents and not straight lines. And it certainly didn’t sound like any science fiction he’d ever heard.
‘Anyway, one of the guys who fishes there is a boat-maker,’ Alaimo continued. ‘He was talking one day about a way he’s invented to let boats escape being seen by radar: it was something about long copper panels that can be raised above a boat to cover it: like a teepee, but horizontal.’ Seeing their confusion, he went to the bookshelf behind his desk and brought back a toy model of a boat, obviously handmade, and lovingly.
Alaimo put it down on the table and pulled two letters, still in their envelopes, from a pile on his desk. He set them, long-side down, on either side of the model, then tilted them until the tops met above the boat. And there it was, a horizontal teepee.
Alaimo went on, pointing as he spoke. ‘This man told him that if radar came from the side, as from another ship, the rays would slide up the copper.’ He approached the side of the boat with an outstretched finger, then, a few centimetres before touching it, his finger went up and away from the panel and continued into the air beyond it.
‘See?’ he asked them, ‘the radar beams are deviated and keep going into the sky, showing nothing, so, it’s as if the boat weren’t there. If it’s dark, there’s no need for the patrol boat to give itself away by using a searchlight because the radar hasn’t detected anything in the water.’
He disassembled his radar shield and moved the model boat closer to the centre of the table.
‘Tell us more,’ Brunetti said.
‘If the mother boat stays outside the twelve-mile limit, in international waters, we can’t touch it. What we think happens is that the smaller boats – and they’d have these copper panels – go out to the bigger boat. A ship, really. And they pick up the women.’
He paused and then added, bitterly, ‘The cargo. There’s probably more than one boat going out to get them, and they can each make a few runs every night.’
He waited for questions, but none came.
‘Where do they take them?’ Brunetti asked.
‘We don’t know. We’ve gone out at night and found the big ships, but we don’t have the manpower to stay out there with them all the time, and they have every right to be there. Because we can’t board them, we don’t know what’s on them.’
‘What do you do?’
‘We come back to port and go home and go to bed.’
‘What could change that?’ Griffoni asked.
‘Ah,’ Alaimo let out on a prolonged sigh. ‘We need to know when and where the transfer will be made, and we need to know where they plan to land.’
‘And have people in place, waiting for them?’ Griffoni asked.
‘Se Dio vuole,’ Alaimo said.
Griffoni made a noise, half gasp and half laugh. ‘If God wills,’ she said. ‘Every woman in my family says that. About the olive harvest, about the time a train will arrive, about whether someone will get well, or a baby be born healthy.’ She thought about this for a moment and added, ‘And now, you say it about whether we’ll manage to arrest these men.’
‘That’s why I’m interested in him.’
‘Borgato?’ Brunetti asked.
‘No, Marcello Vio,’ Alaimo said and gave a smile that frightened Brunetti.’ ‘He’s the weak link.’
24
After hearing that, Brunetti spoke at length to Alaimo, with Griffoni attentive to what he said. It took time and some repeating to recount what Duso had told him about the upsetting night-time visit from his best friend. After that, to explain Vio’s tortured state, Brunetti repeated Captain Nieddu’s account of the African women who had been thrown from the boat and his conjecture that Vio had been aboard the boat that carried Blessing to shore.
Alaimo’s expression did not change as he listened to these stories, although his face grew discernibly paler. As Brunetti continued, Alaimo shifted himself backwards in his chair, as if in response to his body’s instinct to distance itself from what was being said.
After finishing, Brunetti backtracked to provide the detail of the telefonino Nieddu said she gave to the woman.
‘Do you have any idea how many phones she might have given away?’
‘No. None,’ he said, but then he remembered how the telling of the story had shaken her, and he added, ‘Probably a lot.’
Silence fell again. Brunetti thought about what a strange people we are: often judged to be superficial, emotional, and self-involved, sometimes untrustworthy, usually polite. And yet, in those horrid days, still recent in memory, doomed always to be there, how many doctors and nurses had died; how many others had, knowing this, returned from retirement to go into the hospitals and themselves be gathered up into the numbers of the uncountable dead? Nieddu’s gesture came of the same mysterious, irresistible urge to make things better for other people. For a relative, for a stranger: the urge to make things better was in our marrow. He lowered his head and rubbed at his face with both hands as if suddenly tired of all this talk, talk, talk.
Turning to Alaimo, Griffoni asked, as though eager to get back to what she thought important, ‘What use do you want to make of the weak link?’
The Captain gave her a grateful look. ‘If he’s back on the Giudecca, he’s probably gone back to work with his uncle.’
‘But he’s got a broken rib,’ Griffoni objected.
‘He’s from the Giudecca,’ Alaimo said in response.
‘Oh, stop it, Ignazio,’ she snapped. ‘All this crap about the Giudecchini being real men makes me sick. Every man a Rambo who can leap over buildings, when in reality the only men you see there are some old geezers playing Scopa in the bars and talking about how the government should be run, and all we need is a strong leader to tell the people what to do.’
Alaimo smiled at her and nodded. ‘But the old geezers don’t live in fear, and I’m afraid Borgato’s nephew does: and I think many of his neighbours, as well.’
‘What else have you heard?’ Brunetti asked.
From the speed with which Alaimo answered, it was evident that he had been waiting for the question. ‘Borgato’s boats go out at night – not his transport boats, but the passenger boats – those two Mira 37’s he’s got, with the big engines. Stripped down, they could run rings around his transport boats and carry tons of contraband.’ Then, more soberly, he added, ‘Tons of anything.’
He looked at Griffoni and said, ‘You keep telling me not to talk about the Giudecca, but everyone knows everyone there. And people know his boats are going out, but if we were foolish enough to ask about it, they’d tell us they don’t know anything. The best they might say is that he’s probably going fishing.’ His voice was tight with disgust he proved incapable of disguising.
‘No one would mention the two motors with at least 250 horsepower: I can’t even calculate how many more times stronger that is than a motor on a boat that transports mineral water or boxes of detergent to the supermarkets. He could move . . .’ he went on, growing more outraged as he spoke, ‘ . . . this building, for God’s sake, if someone put it on a big enough raft.’
He looked directly at Brunetti, aiming the next remark at him. ‘And he’s managed over the years to persuade every one of his neighbours to sell him their docking places along the riva where he has his warehouse.’
‘That’s impossible,’ Brunetti shot back before he thought about it. ‘No one ever sells their docking place. They’ve
been in families for generations.’
Alaimo held up his empty hands, as though he were trying to show his ignorance of this reality. ‘It took him three years to persuade them all.’
‘How many were there?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Six.’
‘That’s impossible,’ Brunetti repeated.
This time Alaimo smiled as he continued. ‘That’s what every Venetian I’ve told about it says. It’s impossible. But still it’s true.’
‘Didn’t anyone complain?’
‘If they did, they probably would have complained to you, not to us. We deal with problems at sea; you’re supposed to take care of problems on land.’
‘So he’s got the whole canal?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Almost.’
‘Who held out?’
‘No one,’ Alaimo said. ‘There’s another space, but it’s part of a contested estate.’
‘On the Giudecca?’ Griffoni asked, then put her hand over her mouth, looked at Brunetti, and said, ‘Excuse me, Guido.’ She paused; Brunetti saw her scuttle around for a way to explain her casual assumption that no one on the Giudecca could have an estate worth enough to contest. In the end, she didn’t bother, and he decided to act as though he found that a reasonable opinion for her to have and let it pass.
‘All right,’ Brunetti said. ‘We agree he’s a bad guy and,’ he paused for a moment before inserting the next word, ‘probably mixed up in human trafficking.’ He folded his hands together and stuck them between his knees, leaned forward and continued, ‘But we don’t have anything tangible: no evidence, no credible witnesses, no one who can give us specific information about where he does it.’ He sat up and pulled his hands apart.
‘The money?’ Griffoni surprised them both by asking.
‘What?’ Alaimo asked.
‘He must sell these women.’ Her voice was harsh, brittle. ‘Girls. Who buys them, and how do they pay him? And if it’s not cash, how does he explain its arrival?’
‘It could go to another country,’ Alaimo suggested.