A Sea of Troubles Read online

  ‘Indeed,’ Brunetti replied. ‘I came to ask about him. Is he in?’

  ‘No, not yet. He called about an hour ago and said he was at a meeting and would probably not be in until after lunch.’

  ‘Ah,’ Brunetti said, surprised not at the message but at the fact that Patta had bothered to call to leave it. ‘When he comes in, please tell him I’ve gone to Pellestrina.’

  ‘To meet Vianello?’ she asked with her usual effortless omniscience.

  He nodded. ‘It looks like one of the men in the boat was murdered.’ He stopped there, wondering if she already knew all of this.

  ‘Pellestrina, eh?’ she asked, with an intonation that turned the question into a statement.

  ‘Yes. Nothing but trouble, aren’t they?’

  ‘Not as bad as the Chioggotti,’ she said with a shudder that was neither delicate nor artificial.

  Chioggia, a mainland city the guidebooks never tired of calling ‘the faithful daughter of Venice’, had indeed remained loyal to her throughout the reign of La Serenissima. It was only now that animosity existed, violent and constant, as the fishermen of the two cities fought over ever-diminishing catches in waters which increasingly suffered the impositions of the Magistrato alle Acque, as larger and larger portions of the laguna were closed to fishing.

  The idea had occurred to Brunetti, as it would to any Venetian, that these deaths had something to do with this competition. In the past there had been fights, and shots had been fired in anger, but nothing like this had happened. Boats had been stolen and burned, men had been killed in collisions on the water, but no one had yet been murdered in cold blood.

  ‘Una brutta razza,’ Signorina Elettra said, with the scorn that people whose families had been Venetian since the Crusades reserve for non-Venetians, regardless of their origin.

  Brunetti exercised discretion and correctness in not giving voice to his agreement and left her to Veblen’s analysis of the problems and inescapable corruptions of wealth. In the officers’ room he found only one pilot, Rocca, and told him he needed to be taken out to Pellestrina. The pilot’s face brightened at the news: it was a long run, and the day was glorious, a brisk wind coming from the west.

  Brunetti stood on deck all the way out, gazing at the islands they passed: Santa Maria della Grazia, San Clemente, Santo Spirito, even tiny Poveglia, until he saw to their left the buildings of Malamocco. Though Brunetti had spent a great deal of his youth on boats and in the laguna, he had never fully mastered the art of piloting and so had never burned into his memory a map of the most direct routes between various points in the laguna. He knew that Pellestrina lay ahead of them, in the middle of this narrow spit of land, and he knew that the boat had to stay within the rows of slanting wooden pilings, but had they strayed into the expanse of water on their right, he would have found it embarrassingly difficult to get them safely back to Venice.

  Rocca, his young face radiating simple pleasure at being outside and in motion on this beautiful day, called back to his superior, ‘Where are we going, sir?’

  ‘To the port. Vianello and Montisi are there. We should see them.’

  On their left were trees; and the occasional car swept by. Ahead he began to make out the forms of boats, what seemed to be a long row of them, facing towards a cement-walled pier. He cast his eye along their blunt sterns, but he saw no sign of the police launch. They reached an opening in the line of boats, and beyond it, on the shore a few metres away, he saw Vianello, standing in the sun, one hand raised to shade his eyes.

  Brunetti waved and Vianello started to walk to the right, towards the end of the line of moored boats, signalling for them to follow him. When they finally reached the open space at the end of the line of boats, Rocca pulled the launch up and Brunetti jumped on to the riva, momentarily surprised to feel its solidity under his feet.

  ‘Has Montisi gone back?’ he asked.

  ‘One of their neighbours came on board the boat and identified them. It’s who we thought: Giulio Bottin and his son, Marco. I sent him back to the hospital with them.’ Vianello nodded toward Rocca, who was busy with a rope, mooring the boat to a metal stanchion. ‘I can go back with you, sir.’

  ‘What else?’ asked Brunetti.

  ‘I spoke to two or three people, and all of them pretty much told me the same story. They woke up with the noise of the explosion of the gas tank at about three. By the time they got out to the pier, the boat was in flames, and before they could do anything, it had sunk.’

  Vianello started walking back towards the line of low houses that was the village of Pellestrina, and Brunetti fell into step with him. ‘Then there was the usual nonsense,’ Vianello began. ‘No one bothered to call the Carabinieri, everybody thinking someone else had. So they weren’t called until this morning.’ Vianello stopped dead, looking at the houses, as if he couldn’t believe that humans inhabited them. ‘Incredible: two men get killed in an explosion, and no one calls us, no one calls anyone.’

  He resumed walking. ‘Anyway, the Carabinieri came out, then they called us and handed it over, said something about it being in our jurisdiction.’ He waved ahead at the space between the boats. ‘The divers brought them up.’

  ‘You said the father had a wound on his head?’

  ‘Yes. Terrible, the skull was crushed in.’

  ‘What about the son?’

  ‘Knife,’ Vianello said. ‘In the stomach. I’d say he bled to death.’ Then, before Brunetti could ask, he added, ‘It was like he was gutted. The knife went in low and was pulled up. His shirt was covering it when the body was brought up, but when we moved him, we saw it.’ Vianello stopped walking again and looked over at the still waters of the laguna. ‘He would have bled to death in minutes.’ Remembering his place, he added, ‘But the autopsy will decide that, I suppose.’

  ‘Who have you spoken to?’

  Vianello patted the pocket of his jacket where he kept his notebook. ‘I’ve got their names in here: neighbours, mostly. A couple of men who have boats and who fished with them, well, who went out with them, because I don’t get the impression that these men think of fishing as anything they’re meant to share.’

  ‘Did anyone tell you that?’

  Vianello shook the idea away. ‘No, no one said anything, at least not directly. But it was always there, this sense that they were forcing themselves to talk as though they felt some sense of loyalty or common bond because they were all fishermen, while at the same time I got the feeling they’d push anyone out of the way who tried to fish a spot where they wanted to or that they thought they had a right to.’

  ‘Push out of the way?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘Well, in a manner of speaking,’ Vianello answered. ‘I don’t know enough about the way things work out here, but that’s the feeling I get: there’s too many of them and too few fish left. And it’s too late for most of them to learn to do anything else.’

  Brunetti waited to see if Vianello had anything else to say, but when it seemed that he had finished, Brunetti said, ‘There used to be a restaurant off to the right here somewhere.’

  Vianello nodded. ‘I had a coffee there earlier while I was talking to one of them.’

  ‘There’s no sense in my pretending I’m just a passing tourist, is there?’ Brunetti asked.

  Vianello smiled at the absurdity of it. ‘Everyone in the village saw you get off that launch, sir. And walk back here with me. Damned by the company, if I might dare to say it.’

  ‘So we might as well go and have lunch together,’ suggested Brunetti.

  Vianello led the way back to the village. At the first row of houses he stopped in front of the large windows and wooden door of a restaurant. He pushed open the door and held it for Brunetti, then pulled it closed behind them.

  A man in a long apron stood behind the zinc-covered bar, wiping at a squat glass with a cloth large enough to cover a small table. He nodded to Vianello then, an instant later, to Brunetti.

  ‘Could we have lunch here?’ the
sergeant asked.

  The man tilted his head towards a hallway that led away from the bar. He looked down at the glass again and returned to his careful work.

  To the side of the bar was a doorway of a sort Brunetti had not seen in decades. Narrow, it was hung with a row of long strips of green and white plastic, each little more than a centimetre wide, ribbed on both sides. As he inserted his right hand to slip half of them aside, he heard the gentle clicking sound he recalled from his youth. Once these dividers had hung in the doorway of every bar and every trattoria, but during the last couple of decades, they’d all disappeared; he couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen one. He held aside the still clattering strips until Vianello was through, then listened to them fall back into place.

  The room they entered surprised him by its size, for it must have held thirty tables. The windows were set high in the walls, and plenty of light streamed in. Below them, fishermen’s nets covered the walls, each embedded with shells, pieces of dried seaweed, and what looked like the petrified corpses of fish, crabs and lobsters. A low serving counter ran along one side of the room. In the back, a glass door, closed now, led to a pebble-covered parking lot.

  Seeing that only one other table was occupied, Brunetti looked at his watch, surprised to find that it was only one thirty. There was some truth in the belief that exposure to sea air increases the appetite.

  They walked across the room, pulled out chairs at a table halfway along the first row, and sat facing one another. A small vase of fresh wildflowers stood to the left of the bottles of olive oil and vinegar, and beside that was a wicker holder containing half a dozen paper-wrapped packs of grissini. Brunetti took one, ripped it open, and began to nibble at a breadstick.

  The plastic strips parted and a young man in black jacket and trousers backed into the room. When he turned around, Brunetti saw that he had a plate of what appeared to be antipasto di pesce in each hand. The waiter nodded to the two newcomers and went to the table in the far corner, where he set the two plates down in front of a man and woman in their sixties.

  The waiter came back towards their table. Brunetti and Vianello had realized that this was not the sort of place to bother with a menu, at least not this early in the season, so Brunetti smiled and said, as one always does in a new restaurant, ‘Everyone says you can eat very well here.’ He was careful to speak in Veneziano.

  ‘I hope so,’ the waiter said, smiling as he spoke and making no sign that he found the presence of a uniformed policeman in any way surprising.

  ‘What can you recommend today?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘The antipasto di mare is good. We’ve got cuttlefish milk or sardines if you’d like them, instead.’

  ‘What else?’ Vianello asked.

  ‘There was still some asparagus in the market this morning, so there’s a salad of asparagus and shrimp.’

  Brunetti nodded at this; Vianello said he wouldn’t have antipasto, so the waiter passed on to the primi piatti.

  ‘Spaghetti alle vongole, spaghetti alle cozze, and penne all’ Amatriciana,’ he recited and then stopped.

  ‘That’s all?’ Vianello couldn’t help asking.

  The waiter waved one hand in the air. ‘We’ve got fifty people coming for a wedding anniversary tonight, so we’ve only got a few things on the menu today.’

  Brunetti ordered the vongole and Vianello the all’ Amatriciana.

  The choice of main courses was limited to roast turkey or mixed fried fish. Vianello chose the first, Brunetti the second. They ordered a half-litre of white wine and a litre of mineral water. The waiter brought them a basket of bussolai, the thick oval breadsticks that Brunetti especially liked.

  When he was gone, Brunetti picked one up, broke it in half, and took a bite. It always surprised him how they remained so crisp in this seaside climate. The waiter brought the wine and water, set them on the table, and hurried over to remove the plates from in front of the elderly couple.

  ‘We come out to Pellestrina and you don’t eat fish,’ Brunetti said, making it a statement rather than a question, though it was.

  Vianello poured them each a glass of wine, picked up his, and sipped at it. ‘Very good,’ he said. ‘It’s like what my uncle used to bring back from Istria on his boat.’

  ‘And the fish?’ Brunetti asked, not letting it go.

  ‘I don’t eat it any more,’ Vianello said. ‘Not unless I know it comes from the Atlantic.’

  Lunacy had many forms, Brunetti knew, and most of them had to be detected in the early stages. ‘Why?’ he asked.

  ‘I joined Greenpeace, you know, sir,’ Vianello said by way of answer.

  ‘And Greenpeace doesn’t let you eat fish?’ he asked, trying to make a joke of it.

  Vianello started to say something, stopped, took another sip of wine, and said, ‘That’s not true, sir.’

  Neither of them spoke for a long time, and then the waiter was back, bringing Brunetti his antipasto, a small mound of tiny pink shrimp on a bed of slivered raw asparagus. Brunetti took a forkful: they’d been sprinkled with balsamic vinegar. The combination of sweet, sour, sweet, salty was wonderful. Ignoring Vianello for a moment, he ate the salad slowly, relishing it, perpetually delighted by the contrast of flavours and textures.

  He set his fork on the plate and took a sip of wine. ‘Are you afraid to ruin my meal by telling me what polluting horrors lie in wait for me inside the shrimp?’ he asked, smiling.

  ‘Clams are worse,’ said Vianello, smiling back but with no further attempt at clarification.

  Before Brunetti could ask for a list of the deadly poisons that lurked in his shrimp and clams, the waiter took his plate away, then was quickly back with the two dishes of pasta.

  The rest of the meal passed amiably as they talked idly of people they’d known who had fished in the waters around Pellestrina and of a famous footballer from Chioggia whom neither of them had ever seen play. When their main courses came, Vianello could not help giving Brunetti’s a suspicious glance, though he had forgone the opportunity to comment further upon the clams. Brunetti, for his part, gave silent proof of the high regard in which he held his sergeant by not repeating to him the contents of an article he had read the previous month about the methods used in commercial turkey farming, nor did he list the transmissible diseases to which those birds are prone.

  5

  AFTER THEY’D DRUNK their coffee, Brunetti asked for the bill. The waiter paused, as if from a habit too strong for him to control, and Brunetti added, ‘I don’t need a receipt.’ The waiter’s eyes grew wide as he registered this new reality: a man who must be a policeman, willing to aid the owner of the restaurant in avoiding the tax that was imposed whenever a receipt was issued. Brunetti could see this created a dilemma, which the waiter solved by saying, ‘I’ll ask the boss.’

  He came back a few minutes later, carrying a small glass of grappa in each hand. Placing them on the table he said, ‘Fifty-two thousand.’ Brunetti reached for his wallet. It was a third of what it would have cost in Venice, and the fish had been fresh, the shrimp perfect.

  He took sixty thousand lire from his wallet and when the waiter reached into his pocket for change, Brunetti waved his gesture aside with a muttered, ‘Grazie.’ He raised his grappa and took a sip. ‘Very good,’ he said. ‘Please thank the owner for us.’

  The waiter nodded, took the money, and turned to go.

  ‘Are you from here?’ Brunetti asked, with no attempt to make it seem an idle question.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We’re out here because of the accident,’ Brunetti said, indicating the general direction of the water. Then, with a smile he added, ‘Though I don’t imagine that’s much of a surprise.’

  ‘Not to anyone here, it’s not,’ the waiter said.

  ‘Did you know them?’ Brunetti asked. He pulled out another chair, motioning to the waiter to sit. The couple at the other table were long gone, the tables all set for the anniversary party, so there was little for him to do.
He sat, then turned his chair slightly to face Brunetti.

  ‘I knew Marco,’ he said. ‘We went to the same school. He was a couple of years behind me, but we knew one another because we used to come back on the same bus from the Lido.’

  ‘What was he like?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘Bright,’ the waiter said seriously. ‘Very bright and very nice. Nothing like his father, nothing at all. Giulio never talked to anyone if he could help it, but Marco was friendly with everyone. He used to help me with my maths homework, even though he was younger.’ The waiter placed the notes that were still in his hand on the table, lining the fifty up beside the ten. ‘About the only thing I could ever do was add these up.’ Then, with a sudden smile that revealed chalky, gray teeth, he said, ‘And most of the time, if I added them, I’d get fifty. Or seventy.’ He slipped the bills into his pocket and glanced back at the kitchen, from which came the sudden hiss of frying food and the clang of a pot on the stove. ‘But I don’t need to know maths here, beyond addition, and the boss does that.’

  ‘Was he still in school, Marco?’

  ‘No, he finished last year.’

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘Went to work with his father,’ the waiter said, as though that were the only choice open to Marco or the only choice a Pellestrinotto could ever conceive of. ‘They’ve always been fishermen, the Bottins.’

  ‘Did Marco want to fish?’

  The waiter looked at Brunetti, his surprise evident. ‘What else could he do? His father had the boat, and Marco knew all about fishing.’

  ‘Of course,’ Brunetti agreed. ‘You said Bottin never talked to anyone. Was there more to it than that?’ Brunetti refused to allow the waiter to play dumb: he clarified his question: ‘Did he have many enemies here?’

  The waiter shrugged, his reluctance visible in his gesture, but before he could say anything, Vianello broke in, speaking to Brunetti with practised audacity: ‘Sir, he can’t answer a question like that.’ The sergeant glanced protectively at the waiter. ‘This is a small place; everyone’s going to know he talked to us.’