by Donna Leon
He opened his eyes and looked at the young man. Why do people always ask if someone needs a glass of water? Maybe it’s because it’s what’s done in the movies.
‘No, thank you,’ Brunetti said. ‘It’s kind of you to ask. I was just thinking and I’m afraid I was distracted by my thoughts.’
‘About what?’ Duso inquired, his former resentment evaporated.
‘About the way people find it hard to change. Even when they know they should do something, or not do something, they do the wrong thing and make things worse.’
From Duso’s expression, Brunetti saw that his answer had surprised him.
‘You weren’t thinking about Marcello?’
Brunetti smiled. ‘Maybe I was.’
‘You think he has to change?’
‘Don’t you?’ Brunetti asked but then immediately went on. ‘Sorry, that’s not an answer to your question, and I shouldn’t have spoken like that. You’re not a child.’
‘Then what’s your answer?’
Brunetti put his fingers around the stem of his glass, but it was empty. ‘That he has to think about what he’s doing,’ Brunetti said. Then, to prove to Duso that he was speaking openly, he added, ‘What he’s doing with his uncle.’
‘I don’t know what that is,’ Duso said, loudly.
‘You don’t know the details: I believe that. But you know what it’s doing to him, so you know he shouldn’t be doing it. And you know it’s bad, probably very bad.’ He withheld himself from repeating what Vio had said about ‘killing’.
Duso opened his mouth to speak, but Brunetti didn’t stop. ‘You were with him in the boat when he started towards the hospital with the girls. Going slowly. Paralysed by fear of his uncle. You both knew he should have been speeding because they were both hurt, and you didn’t know how badly. What happens if the next time there’s something worse and someone dies, or gets killed?’
‘Why do you talk about a next time?’ Duso asked, sounding uncomfortable.
‘Because he’s working for his uncle again, and that can lead only to trouble.’
‘For Marcello?’
‘For Marcello, yes, but for other people, as well.’
‘What do you mean?’ Duso tried to ask forcefully, but he couldn’t carry it off and succeeded only in sounding nervous.
‘Berto,’ Brunetti began, using a different voice. ‘You told me what he said to you the night he came to your place. “We killed them. We killed them,” and you saw what doing that did to him.’
Speaking quickly, as if to get it all out as soon as he could, Duso said, ‘He’s never said anything else about it.’
Brunetti leaned forward in his chair to be closer to Duso but made no move to touch his arm. ‘Berto,’ he said again, ‘he doesn’t have to say anything else, does he?’
Duso put his locked hands between his knees and bent over them. He shook his head a few times but did not look at Brunetti.
‘They killed people, Berto. Marcello and whoever was with his uncle killed people that night. They were out at sea, on one of his uncle’s boats, and they killed people.’
‘Marcello said . . .‘ Duso began and stopped, unable to go on.
Brunetti waited, motionless.
Duso cleared his throat a few times and then continued, voice almost inaudible because his head was still lowered, ‘He told me that.’ He nodded in agreement with what he’d just said and kept on nodding a few times, like a wind-up toy until, eventually, just like a wind-up toy, he unwound and stopped moving.
‘Did he tell you about the women?’ Brunetti asked.
Duso froze, then shook his head. Brunetti suddenly noticed that the front of the boy’s shirt, light blue, thick Oxford cloth, appeared to be spotted, though not from the coffee, for all the liquid had done was make the blue a bit darker, as is the way with that colour, especially when it is Oxford cloth.
Brunetti allowed a long time to pass. He heard footsteps, probably the waiter returning. Without looking around, he held up his arm and waved whoever it was away. The footsteps retreated.
Some boats passed. A seagull got into a fight with another one over something a person on the dock tossed into the water.
Brunetti watched the young man, then turned away out of some archaic sense of decency about what one could and could not watch. He looked at the hotel that had once been a flour mill and pasta factory until – rumour had it – a disaffected employee had stabbed the owner to death. The crime was unrecorded in the police files, but this seemed not to stop people from telling and repeating, and believing, the story.
He’d been there once after the transformation into a hotel, hadn’t much liked the place, paid five Euros for a not particularly good coffee, and gone home.
‘Commissario?’ he heard Duso say and turned towards him again.
‘You wandered off again,’ Duso said. It must have been some time: the darker blue dots on his shirt had almost disappeared.
‘You see,’ Brunetti began, ‘this is very difficult for me.’ He turned a softened face to Duso and said, ‘Because I don’t want to do it, I delay and I try to think about something else.’ He waved his arm at the spectacle that faced them from the other side of the Canal, still glorious even in the diminished light.
Duso’s head turned to follow the sweep of Brunetti’s arm down past the Zitelle, all the way to the docked boats of the Guardia di Finanza.
When he turned back, Brunetti was reaching into the pocket of his jacket.
‘No, please, Commissario,’ Duso said, putting his hand on Brunetti’s arm to stop him. ‘I’ll pay for this.’
Later, Brunetti was to remember that.
26
The waiter had disappeared. Brunetti suddenly lost all patience with his own moral cowardice. And Duso’s. The drowning girls, who had thrashed in Brunetti’s imagination ever since Nieddu had told him about their deaths, seemed to encircle the table as he spoke. Duso sat silent, asking nothing, not questioning the truth of what he heard. He sat and stared across at the Giudecca as he listened. Finally Brunetti asked again, ‘Did Marcello tell you about the women?’
Duso was slow in answering, but when he did, the young man said, ‘He didn’t tell me anything, only that people died, and they killed them.’ He took a few deep breaths and added, ‘Since then, he’s been . . . strange.’ He looked at Brunetti, who nodded.
Duso opened his mouth to speak but failed to make any noise. A small boat with two young men in it skidded past them, heading towards the Zattere, seeming to hop from wave to wave, as if slamming down onto them was what it was meant to do.
When the noise was dulled, Brunetti reminded himself that his task was now to persuade Duso to – he did not mince words, at least not to himself – betray his best and oldest friend, who also happened to be the man he was in love with. And possibly a party to murder.
He asked, ‘Would you help him if you could?’
Duso stared at him as if he thought Brunetti had lost his senses.
‘Of course, I’d do anything.’
‘Good.’ How to say it? ‘We need Marcello to do one thing.’
Raising his voice, Duso said, ‘He won’t do anything to hurt his uncle.’
‘The uncle who kicks him down a ladder and involves him in human trafficking and murder?’ Brunetti asked softly, almost hissing.
Duso tried to defend his friend. ‘He took Marcello in when no one else would help. He gives him a salary that allows him to support his mother and their family. Marcello owes him everything.’
Brunetti threw up his hands and, before he thought, said, ‘One of you is crazy.’
Duso put his own hands on the arms of his chair and started to push himself to his feet.
Without thinking, Brunetti reached out and spread his palm on Duso’s chest. ‘Sit down,’ he ordered, and Duso sat. Brunetti grabbed his
arm.
‘He can owe him all he wants, but unless Marcello gets free of him, his uncle will corrupt him.’ Before Duso could protest, Brunetti leaned closer and, voice tight with anger he forced himself to control, said, ‘His uncle will have him go out on the boat another night, and they’ll bring in more girls. Or kill them – it’s all the same to Borgato. And sooner or later, Marcello will stop crying about it and then stop being able to cry about it.’ Brunetti closed his eyes until he felt his own arm move and move again, and when he looked at it, he saw Duso using his free hand to try to loosen Brunetti’s grip from his arm.
Brunetti pulled his hand away, waiting for his rage to lessen. He listened to his heart throb, propped his elbows on the table and lowered his head into his hands.
After some time, he recognized the sound of a vaporetto, arriving from the right. He raised his head and opened his eyes to look at the boat, white and slow and familiar, before allowing himself to look at Duso’s empty chair.
Instead, he saw the young man sitting there, staring at him, waiting.
Brunetti asked, ‘Will you help him?’
Duso nodded.
Brunetti took the box with the watch from his inner pocket and handed it to Duso. The younger man examined the box with little interest and placed it, unopened, on the table in front of Brunetti.
Into his silence, Brunetti said, ‘Please open the box, Berto.’
Duso did as he was told and revealed a thin watch with a metal band. ‘What’s this?’ he asked.
‘It’s a watch.’ There was no sign of recognition on Duso’s face.
Duso picked it up again. It was nothing special: metal, normal thickness, no snazzy diving meters, two hands. Brunetti told him, ‘Inside is a transmitter. It gives a radio signal that can be followed from a great distance.’
‘By whom?’ Duso asked, eyes still on the watch.
‘In this case, the Guardia Costiera. Some of their boats are equipped to do it.’
The sun had gone down, and the evening’s chill was setting in. Duso shivered but showed no eagerness to leave. ‘What do you want me to do?’
The dispassion with which Duso asked the question could have been simple curiosity as much as assent. ‘Give the watch to Marcello,’ Brunetti answered, then smiled and added, ‘Tell him this one is waterproof.’
He watched as Duso thought it through, ‘Then what?’ he asked.
‘Nothing. If he wears it, they’ll be able to track him, and the boat.’
Duso shifted around in his chair, as if suddenly aware of the drop in temperature. ‘If I give it to him, he’ll wear it.’ It was not a boast but a simple truth.
Suddenly, the younger man pulled his jacket tight over his chest and hugged himself with his arms. ‘It’s too cold here,’ he said. ‘Let’s move.’ He put the watch in the box and the box in the pocket of his jacket and got to his feet.
When the waiter brought the check, Duso slipped a bill under his saucer and stood. He started off in the direction of the calle where he lived.
Brunetti caught up with him and walked at the quick pace the younger man set. When they got to the place where Duso had turned off the last time, Brunetti slowed to a stop.
Duso faced him. His expression had tightened, and he seemed older than he had a few minutes before. ‘One condition before I agree about the watch,’ he said.
‘What’s that?’ Brunetti asked, his suspicion audible. When Duso didn’t speak, Brunetti insisted, ‘What do you want?’
‘When they go after him, I get to go with them.’
‘I can’t guarantee that,’ Brunetti said, meaning it.
Duso reached into his pocket and took out the box. ‘Then take this back,’ he said, holding it out to Brunetti.
Automatically, Brunetti put his hands behind his back. ‘I can’t.’
‘Then I won’t.’
Brunetti stood frozen. He wasn’t the one to decide this.
‘Ask them,’ Duso ordered.
There was no question about how serious he was. Brunetti stepped away, pulled out his phone and found Alaimo’s number.
The Captain answered on the second ring. ‘What is it?’ he asked.
‘He says he won’t do it unless he can go with us when it happens.’ Not until he heard himself say ‘us’ had Brunetti realized how fully he now felt himself involved in this.
There was a long silence before Alaimo asked, ‘Is he serious?’
‘Absolutely.’
The line went silent for some time, but then Alaimo said, ‘Then tell him yes.’
‘All right.’
Brunetti broke the connection and slipped the phone into his jacket pocket.
He took the two steps back to the now-shivering young man.
‘He agreed.’
‘Good,’ Duso answered and put the watch in his pocket. Suddenly his face loosened and changed back to the face that had sat across from Brunetti at the table. He put out his hand, and Brunetti shook it.
‘Thank you, Commissario,’ Duso said, his politeness restored, as well. He turned to walk away but stopped before Brunetti could call to him. He came back and asked, ‘What do I have to do?’
Slowly, thinking it through as he spoke, Brunetti said, ‘You have to convince Marcello to tell you when he’s going out with his uncle again.’ Duso started to speak, but Brunetti held up his hand. ‘He has to tell you when they’re going out at night. And give him the watch. That way, they’ll be able to trace Borgato’s boat without getting close to it.’
Duso rubbed at his face with both hands, as if trying to wake himself from a dream that had become unpleasant. ‘We message all the time, all day long,’ Duso said. ‘So he’ll tell me when he’s going.’ Duso nodded a few times, then looked at Brunetti. ‘He’ll tell me.’
Keeping his voice normal, Brunetti said, ‘Give me your number; I’ll send you mine.’ Duso recited the number while Brunetti entered it, then Brunetti sent his own number, which Duso locked into the memory of his phone.
‘You promise to let me come?’ Duso asked, placing his hand on Brunetti’s arm.
‘Yes,’ Brunetti said.
‘You swear?’
‘By all that’s holy,’ Brunetti said, telling the truth.
By the time he got home, Brunetti was chilled straight through and found that the apartment was cold. The landlord had no legal obligation to turn the heat on in the building for another week and had chosen not to do so. A disgruntled Brunetti spent some time in the shower but realized he had been defeated by his children’s beliefs about the environment and was no longer capable of enjoying a shower that lasted more than – he was sufficiently grumpy to think, ‘than a heartbeat’ but changed it to ‘five minutes’.
Wrapped in a towel, he left a trail of damp footsteps back to the bedroom and pulled on a pair of brown woollen trousers and then, remembering he’d moved it to the back of the closet at the arrival of spring, a beige woollen shirt that Paola had given him for Christmas but that had always seemed too elegant to be worn and which, therefore, had spent almost a year by itself, unworn, abandoned and unadmired. His body still radiating the heat of the water, Brunetti pulled on a white T-shirt, then the woollen shirt. Soft first in his hands, it caressed his arms as he slid them into the sleeves and seemed almost to help him fit the buttons into the buttonholes. Leaving the top two unbuttoned, he found a patterned scarf, put it around his neck and tucked the ends inside the shirt.
He paused to look in the mirror, smiled at himself and said, in purest Veneziano, ‘Son figo, son beo, son fotomodeo.’ He might be too old to have any right to think of himself as ‘figo’, and there would certainly be some dispute as to the ‘beo’, and he certainly never would be a fashion model, but he looked good and knew it.
There had been no noise from any other part of the apartment, but that did not exclude the possibility
of Paola’s presence, especially if she had given her soul over to reading. He sometimes told her that Attila could storm through the house and she’d not notice if she were reading. She had most recently disputed this by claiming that it would depend on the book.
Her door was open, so he went in. And found her on the sofa, with Henry James. She looked up at him and smiled. ‘What a beautiful shirt that is,’ she said.
‘My wife gave it to me.’
‘Did she?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good taste, I’d say.’
‘Especially in men,’ he answered, then said, ‘Let me get something to drink. I want to talk to you.’
As he passed through the door, heading for the kitchen, he heard her call from behind, ‘Bring two glasses, then.’
During the time it took him to tell Paola the story of Marcello Vio, his uncle, the two Americans in the boat, the women tossed into the sea, and Duso’s reluctant agreement to help the police, Brunetti got up three times. Once he went into the bedroom and came back wearing a thick sweater over his woollen shirt; twice he got up to turn on lights in the room. When he finished, their wine was barely touched and Paola was visibly shaken by what he’d told her.
‘How can you do this, Guido?’ she asked, her face stricken. ‘Day after day, learning about what people will do to one another.’
‘What else can I do to earn a living?’ he asked before he realized how perilous was the ice onto which this subject might lead them. If he was without work, his wife would support the family or, more unthinkable, his wife’s family would. He realized how primitive this feeling was but, as a friend of his father had often said, he had only one head, so he had only one way to think about things. ‘There’s little I’m qualified for,’ he said, dragging them both away from a consideration of economic realities.
‘Law?’ she asked, although she surely knew the answer.
‘I’d have to pass the exams again, and that would be a nightmare.’ Curious now, he wondered out loud, ‘What else could I do?’
She smiled and suggested, ‘Convert and become an Anglican, and then become a priest.’ When he snorted at this, she said, ‘People confide in you, Guido. They trust you.’