A Sea of Troubles

Donna Leon

A Sea of Troubles

for Rudolf C. Bettschart and Daniel Keel

Soave sia il vento Tranquilla sia Vonda Ed ogni elemento Benigno risponda Ai vostri desir.

Gentle be the breeze,

calm be the waves,

and every element respond kindly

to your desires.

Cost fan tutte

Mozart

A Sea of Troubles

Donna Leon has lived in Venice for many years and previously lived in Switzerland, Iran, Saudi Arabia and China, where she worked as a teacher. Her previous novels featuring Commissario Brunetti have all been highly acclaimed, most recently A Noble Radiance, Fatal Remedies and Friends in High Places, which won the 2000 Crime Writers' Association Silver Dagger for Fiction.

By the same author

Death at La Fenice

Death in a Strange Country

The Anonymous Venetian

A Venetian Reckoning

Acqua Alta

The Death of Faith

A Noble Radiance

Fatal Remedies

Friends in High Places

1

Pellestrina is a long, narrow peninsula of sand that has, over the course of the centuries, been turned into habitable ground. Running north and south from San Pietro in Volta to Ca' Roman, Pellestrina is about ten kilometres long, but never more than a couple of hundred metres wide. To the east, it faces the Adriatic, a sea not known for the sweetness of its temper, but the west side rests in the Lagoon of Venice and is thus protected from wind, storm and wave. The earth is sandy and infertile, so the people of Pellestrina, though they sow, are able to reap little. This makes small difference to them; indeed, most of them would no doubt scoff at the very idea of earning a living, however rich, from the earth, for the people of

Pellestrina have always taken theirs from the sea.

Many stories are told about the men of Pellestrina, the endurance and strength that have been forced upon them in their attempt to wrest a living from the sea. Old people in Venice remember a time when the men of Pellestrina were said to spend the nights, winter or summer, sleeping on the dirt floors of their cottages instead of in their beds so as to more easily push themselves out into the early morning and make the tide that would carry them into the Adriatic and thus to the fish. Like most stories that are told about how much tougher people were in the olden days, this is probably apocryphal. What is true, however, is the fact that most people who hear it, if they are Venetian, believe it, just as they would believe any tale that spoke of the toughness of the men of Pellestrina or of their indifference to pain or suffering, their own or that of others.

During the summer Pellestrina comes alive, as tourists arrive from Venice and its Lido or across from Chioggia on the mainland to eat fresh seafood and drink the crisp white wine, just short of sparkling, that is served in the bars and restaurants. Instead of bread, they are served bussolai, hard oval pretzels whose name, perhaps, comes from the bussola, or compass, that has the same shape. Along with the bussolai there is fish, often so fresh it was still alive when the tourists set out to make the long and inconvenient trip to Pellestrina. As the tourists

pulled themselves from their hotel beds, the gills of the orate still fought against the alien element, the air; as the tourists filed on to an early morning vaporetto at Rialto, the sardelle still thrashed in the nets; as they climbed down from the vaporetto and crossed Piazzale Santa Maria Elisabetta, looking for the bus that would take them to Malamocco and the Alberoni, the cefalo was just being hauled out of the sea. The tourists often leave the bus for a while at Malamocco or the Alberoni, have a coffee, then walk on the sandy beach for a while and look at the enormous jetties that stretch out into the waters of the Adriatic in an attempt to prevent the waters from sweeping into the laguna.

The fish are all dead by then, though the tourists could not be expected to know that, or much care, so they get back on the bus, sit in it for the short ferry ride across the narrow canal, then continue by bus or on foot down toward Pellestrina and their lunch.

In winter things are vastly different. Too often the wind tears across the Adriatic from the former Yugoslavia, carrying before it rain or light snow, biting into the bones of anyone who tries to stay out in it for any length of time. The crowded restaurants of the summer are closed and will remain that way until late spring, leaving the tourists to fend for and feed themselves.

What remain unchanged, lined up in long rows on the inner side of the thin peninsula, are scores of vongolari, the clam-fishing boats that work all year, regardless of tourists, rain, cold and heat, regardless too of all the legends told about the noble, hard-working men of Pellestrina and their constant battle to win a living for their wives and children from the merciless sea. Their names sing out: Concordia, Serena, Assunta. They sit there, fat and high-nosed, looking very much like the boats painted in picture books for children. One longs, walking past in the bright summer sun, to reach up and pat them, stroke their noses, as it were, just as one would with a particularly winsome pony or an especially endearing Labrador.

To the unschooled eye the boats all look much the same, with their iron masts and the metal scoop at the prow that protrudes up into the air when the boat is docked. Rectangular and framed, these scoops all have the same grade of what looks like chicken wire strung across them, though it is far stronger than any chicken wire ever made, as it has to resist the pressure of rocks dug up on the seabed or chance encounters with the heavy and unforeseen obstacles that litter the bottom of the laguna. They also have, of course, to resist the seabed itself as they ram into and then under the nesting clams, dragging along the sea bottom and then to the surface kilos of shells, large and small, trapped within the rectangular tray, water and sand cascading out and back into the laguna.

The observable differences between the boats are insignificant: a clam scoop smaller or larger than that on the next boat; life buoys in need of paint or shining bright and smooth; decks so clean they gleam in the sunlight or stained with rust in the corners, where they touch the sides of the boat. The Pellestrina boats, during the day, ride in pleasant promiscuity one beside the next; their owners live in similar propinquity in the low houses that stretch from one side of the village to the other, from the laguna to the sea.

At about 3.30 on a morning in early May, a small fire broke out in the cabin of one of these boats, the Squallus, owned and captained by Giulio Bottin, resident at number 242 Via Santa Giustina. The men of Pellestrina are no longer solely dependent upon the power of the tides and winds and thus are no longer obliged to sail only when they are favourable, but the habits of centuries die hard, and so most fishermen rise and sail at dawn, as if the early morning breezes still made some difference to their speed. There remained two hours before the fishermen of Pellestrina - who now sleep in their homes and in their beds - had to get up, so they were at their deepest point of sleep when the fire broke out on the Squallus. The flames moved, at quite a leisurely pace, along the floor of the boat's cabin to the wooden sides and the teak control panel at the front. Teak, a hard wood, burns slowly, but it also burns at a higher temperature than softer woods, and so the fire that spread up the control panel and from it to the roof of the cabin and out on to the deck moved with frightening speed once it reached those softer woods. The fire burned a hole in the deck of the cabin, and burning pieces of wood fell below into the engine room where one fell on to a pile of oil-damp rags, which flared instantly into life and passed the fire gracefully towards the fuel line.

Slowly, the fire worked at the area around the narrow tube; slowly it burned away the surrounding wood and then, as the wood turned to ash and fell away, a small piece of solder melted, opening a gap that allowed the flame to enter the pipe and move with blinding speed down towards the engines and to the dual fuel tanks which supplied them.

None of the people sleeping in Pellestrina that night had any idea of the motion of the flames, but all of them were rocked awake when the fuel tanks on the Squallus exploded, filling the night air with a glaring burst of light and, seconds later, with a thud so loud that, the next day, people as far away as Chioggia claimed they heard it.

Fire is terrifying anywhere, but for some reason it seems more so at sea or, at least, on the water. The first people who looked out of their bedroom windows said later that they saw the boat shrouded in heavy, oily smoke that rose up as the fire was extinguished by the water. But by then the flames had had time to slip through the Squallus to the boats moored on either side of it and set them smouldering, and the exploding fuel had splashed in deadly arcs, not only to the decks of the boats moored beside it, but out on to the levee in front, where it set three wooden benches ablaze.

After the blast from the Squallus's fuel tanks, there followed a moment of stunned silence, then Pellestrina exploded into noise and action. Doors flew open and men ran out into the night; some of them wore trousers pulled on over pyjamas, some wore only pyjamas, some had taken the time to dress, two were entirely naked, though no one paid any attention to that fact, so urgent was the need to save the boats. The owners of the boats moored alongside the Squallus jumped from the dock on to the decks at almost the same instant, though one had had to pull himself from the bed of his cousin's wife and had come twice as far as the other. Both of them yanked fire extinguishers from their stanchions on the deck and began to spray at the flames that had followed the burning oil.

The owners of boats moored further from the now empty space where the Squallus had once floated churned their engines to life and began frantically backing away from the burning boats. One of them, in his panic, forgot to cast off the mooring rope and yanked a metre-long strip of wood from the railing of his boat. But even as he looked back and saw the splintered wood floating where he had been moored, he didn't stop until his boat was a hundred metres from land and safe from the flames. .

As he watched, those flames gradually lessened on the decks of the other boats. Two more men, each carrying a fire extinguisher, arrived from the nearby houses. Jumping on to the deck of one of the boats, they began spraying the flames, which were quickly controlled and then finally quelled. At about the same time the owner of the other boat, which had not been as heavily sprayed with fuel, managed to get the flames under control and then extinguished them with the thick white froth. Long after there was no more sign of fire, he continued spraying back and forth, back and forth, until the froth was gone and he lowered the empty fire extinguisher to the deck.

By then, more than a hundred people were clustered along the levee, shouting to the men on the boats that had managed to back out into the harbour, to one another, and to the men who had conquered the flames on their boats. Expressions of shock and concern flew from every lip, anxious questions about what had been seen, what could have started the fire.

The first to ask the question that was to silence them all, the silence slowly rippling out from her like infection from a uncleaned wound, was Chiara Petulli, the next-door neighbour of Giulio Bottin. She was standing at the front of the crowd, not more than two metres from the large metal stanchion from which dangled the scorched cable that had once held the Squallus safely in place. She turned to the woman next to her, the widow of a fisherman who had died in an accident only the year before, and asked, 'Where's Giulio?'

The widow looked around. She repeated the question. The person next to her picked it up and passed it on until, in a matter of moments the question had been passed through the entire crowd, asked but not answered.

'Arid Marco?' Chiara Petulli added. This time everyone heard her question. Though his boat lay in the shallow waters, its scorched masts just breaking the surface, Giulio Bottin was not there, nor was his son Marco, eighteen years old and already part owner of the Squallus, which lay burnt and dead at the bottom of the harbour of Pellestrina on this suddenly chill springtime morning.

2

The whispers started then, as people tried to remember when they had last seen Giulio or Marco. Giulio usually played cards in the bar after dinner; had anyone seen him last night? Marco had a girlfriend down in S. Pietro in Volta, but the girl's brother was in the crowd and said she'd gone to the movies on the Lido with her sisters. No one could think of a woman who would be with Giulio Bottin. Someone thought to look in the courtyard beside the Bottin house; both their cars were there, though the house was dark.

A curious reluctance, a kind of delicacy in the face of possibility, kept the people in the crowd from speculating where they might be. Renzo Marolo, who had lived next door for more than thirty years, found the courage to do what no one else was willing to do and took the spare key from where everyone in the village knew it to be, under the pot of pink geraniums on the windowsill to the right of the front door. Calling ahead of him, he opened the door and stepped into the familiar house. He switched on the lights in the small living room and, seeing no one there, went and looked in the kitchen, though he couldn't have explained why he did so, as the room was dark, and he didn't bother to turn the light on. Then, still calling out the names of the two men in a kind of unmusical voluntary, he went up the single flight of steps to the upper floor and down the hall to the larger of the two bedrooms.

'Giulio, it's me, Renzo,' he called, paused a moment, then stepped into the bedroom and switched on the light. The bed was empty and unslept in. Unsettled by this, he went across the hall and turned on the light in Marco's room. Here, too, though a pair of jeans and a light sweater lay folded on a chair, both bed and room were empty.

Marolo went back downstairs and outside, closing the door quietly behind him and replacing the key. To the waiting people, he said, 'They aren't here.'

As a group, somehow comforted by the fact that there were a number of them, they moved back towards the water, where most of the inhabitants of Pellestrina were gathered on the edge of the pier. Some of the boats that had found safety in the deeper water pulled slowly back, taking their accustomed places. When all of them were again moored to the riva, the single empty space left by the sunken Squallus seemed larger than it had when there had been only the two damaged boats on either side. From the middle of the empty slot, the masts of the Squallus poked through the water at a crazy angle.

Marolo's son, sixteen-year-old Luciano, came and stood beside his father. Off in the distance, a waterfowl cried out. 'Well, Papa?' the boy asked.

Renzo had watched his son grow up in the shadow or, to use a more nautical metaphor, in the wake of Marco Bottin, who had always been two years ahead of him at school and was thus to be admired and emulated.

Luciano had thrown on a pair of cut-off jeans when his father's shouts woke him but had had no time to put on a shirt. He stepped closer to the water, turned and signalled to his cousin Franco, who stood at the front of the crowd, an enormous flashlight in his left hand. Franco stepped forward reluctantly, shy about putting himself so conspicuously under the scrutiny of the assembled Pellestrinotti.

Luciano kicked off his sandals and knifed into the water just to the left of the sunken prow of the Squallus. Franco stepped forward and played the light into the water below, where his cousin's body moved with fishlike ease. A woman stepped forward, then another, and then the entire first rank of people moved to the edge of the pier and stared down. Two men holding flashlights pushed their way through and added their beams to Franco's.

After what was little more than a minute but seemed an eternity, Luciano's head broke the surface of the water. Shaking his hair back out of his eyes, he shouted up to his cousin, 'Shine it back towards the cabin,' and was gone, ducking under the water as quickly as a seal.

All three lights moved along the hulk of the Squallus. Occasionally they caught a flash of white from one of the soles of Luciano's feet, the only part of his body that was not tanned to near-blackness. They lost him for an instant, then his head and shoulders burst from the water, and he was gone again. Twice more he shot up and filled his lungs, diving back towards the wreck. At last he surfaced and lay on his back for a moment, pulling in great, rasping lungfuls of air. When they saw this, the people holding the flashlights moved the beams away from him, letting him float there illuminated only by the curiosity of the onlookers and the faint paling of the sky.

Luciano suddenly slipped over on to his stomach and paddled like a dog, a motion strangely awkward in such a powerful swimmer, to the edge of the embankment. He reached the ladder nailed to the wooden embankment wall, and started to pull himself up the rungs.

The crowd parted in front of the ladder and at just that instant the sun emerged from the waters of the Adriatic. Its first rays, rising above the sea wall and cutting across the narrow peninsula, caught Luciano as he paused at the top of the ladder, transforming this fisherman's son into a godlike presence that had arisen gleaming from the waters. There was a collective intake of breath, as in the presence of the numinous.

Luciano shook his head, and water spattered to both sides. Then, looking at his father, he said, 'They're both in the cabin.'

3

The boy's announcement caused little surprise among the people standing at the side of the pier. Someone not of that place might have responded differently to the revelation that two people were lying dead in the waters below them, but the people of Pellestrina had known Giulio Bottin for fifty-three years; many of them had known his father; still others had known his grandfather. The men of the Bottin family had, and had always, been hard, merciless men, whose characters had perhaps been formed, surely influenced, by the brutality of the sea. If violence befell Giulio, there were few who would be surprised to learn of it.

Some had noticed a difference in Marco, perhaps caused by the fact that he was the only one of the Bottin who had ever remained in school more than a few years or who had ever learned from books more than to read a few words or set down a crabbed signature. There had also been the influence of his mother, dead now for five years. Originally from Murano, she had been a soft, loving woman who had married Giulio twenty years ago, some said because she had been involved with her cousin Maurizio, who had left her to go to Argentina, others because her father, a gambler, had borrowed heavily from Giulio and had repaid the loan by giving away his daughter in marriage. The events leading to their marriage had never been made clear, or perhaps there simply was no story to tell. But what had always been evident to everyone in the village was the almost total lack of love or sympathy between husband and wife, so perhaps the stories were merely a way of making sense of that absence of feeling.

Regardless of how she may have felt about her husband, Bianca had adored her son, and people, always quick to gossip, had said that this was the reason for Giulio's behaviour towards him: cold, hard, unforgiving, but completely in the tradition of the Bottin men towards their sons. At this point in the story, most people threw up their hands and said those two should never have married, but then someone else was sure to say that then there would have been no Marco and remember how happy he had made Bianca, and just one look at him and you'd know what a good boy he is.

No one would say that in the present tense again, not now, not with Marco lying dead at the bottom of the harbour in the burnt-out wreckage of his father's boat.

Gradually, as there came to be more light, there came to be fewer people, as they slipped back to their homes. Soon most of them had disappeared, but then the men returned and were seen briefly crossing the square towards their boats. Bottin and his son were dead, but that was no reason to miss a day's clam harvest. The season was already short enough, what with the laws controlling what they could do, and where, and when.

Within half an hour, the only boat remaining at the pier was the one to the left of the sunken Squallus: the gas tank had exploded with such force that a metal stanchion had been blown through the side of the Anna Maria, about a metre above the waterline. The captain, Ottavio Rusponi, had at first thought he would risk it and follow the other boats to the clam beds, but when he studied the clouds and held his left hand up to sense the wind, he decided not to, not with the rising wind from the east.

It wasn't until eight that morning, when Captain Rusponi called his insurance agent to report the damage to his boat, that anyone thought of calling the police, and it was the agent, not the captain, who did so. Later, those questioned about their failure to notify the authorities would claim that they thought someone else had done it. The failure to report the deaths of the two Bottin men would be taken by many as a suggestion of the esteem in which the family was held by the rest of the citizens of Pellestrina.

The Carabinieri were slow in getting there, coming down in a launch from their station on the Lido. There obviously had been some confusion when the deaths were reported, for the Carabinieri who came were in uniform, and no provision had been made to bring along anyone who could dive down to the wreckage, for no one had explained to them where the bodies were. The subsequent discussion was juridical as well as jurisdictional, no one being quite sure which arm of the law was meant to deal with a suspicious death in water. At last it was decided that the city police should be summoned to investigate, along with divers from the Vigili del Fuoco. Not the least of the reasons for this decision was the fact that the two Carabinieri who worked as divers were that day engaged in the illegal underwater collection of pottery shards from a newly discovered dumping ground behind Murano, a place where unsuccessful or badly fired pottery had been dumped during the sixteenth century. The passage of centuries had transformed junk into potsherds; by the same alchemy, the worthless had been rendered valuable. The site had been discovered two months before and reported to the Sopraitendenza ai I Beni Culturali, which had added it to the list of sites of archaeological value where diving was prohibited. By night, watch was meant to be kept on it, as well as on the other places in the laguna where the waters covered relics of the past. By day, however, it was not unknown for a boat bearing the markings of some agency of the law to anchor in the area. And who would question the presence of the industrious divers who gave every appearance of being there on official business?

The Carabinieri returned in their boat to the Lido, and after more than an hour, a police launch pulled into the waters behind the fleet of Pellestrina, now all safely berthed along the pier and all the captains home.

The pilot of the launch slowed as he approached a boat with the markings of the Fire Department that was already anchored and bobbing in the water just behind the only empty space in the long line of docked boats. He slipped his engine into reverse for an instant, to bring the boat to a stop. Sergeant Lorenzo Vianello walked to the side of the boat and looked down into the waters that filled the empty space, but the sun glistened brightly and all he could see were the tilted masts sticking out of the surface. 'Is that it?' he called to the two black-suited divers who stood on the deck of the Fire Department launch.

One of the divers called across something Vianello couldn't make out and then went back to the business of pulling on his left flipper.

Danilo Bonsuan, the police pilot, came out of the small cabin at the front of the police launch and glanced down at the sunken boat. He raised a protective hand to cut the sun's glare and looked down to where Vianello was pointing. 'That's got to be it’ he said. 'The man who called said it caught fire and sank.' He looked at the boats on either side of the empty space, and saw that their sides and decks were scarred and blackened by flames.

Beside them, the two divers fiddled with their masks, pulling tight the straps that held their oxygen canisters to their backs. They slipped the mouthpieces in, took a few exploratory breaths, and walked to the side of their boat. Vianello, tall and broad shouldered, stood beside his shorter colleague, still looking down into the water.

Indicating the two divers, he asked Bonsuan, 'Would you go into that water?'

The pilot shrugged. 'It's not too bad out here. Besides, they're covered,' he said, nodding with his chin towards the black-suited divers.

The first diver stepped over the side of the boat and, facing outward, the back of his rubber fins placed carefully on the rungs of the exterior ladder, walked down into the water, followed immediately by the other.

'Aren't they supposed to jump in backwards?' Vianello asked.

'That's only on Jacques Cousteau,' Bonsuan said and went back into the cabin. He came out a moment later, a cigarette cupped in one hand. 'What else did they tell you?' he asked the sergeant.

'A call came in from the Carabinieri on the Lido’ Vianello began. Bonsuan interrupted him with an antiphonal, 'sons of bitches', but the sergeant pretended not to hear and continued, 'They said there were two bodies in a sunken boat and we should get some divers out here to have a look.'

'Nothing else?' Bonsuan asked.

Vianello shrugged, as if to ask whether much more could be expected from Carabinieri.

Silently, they watched the bubbles burst on the surface in front of their boat. Gradually, the tide pulled the boat backwards; Bonsuan let it drift for a few minutes but then went back into the cabin, fired the engine to life, and pulled the boat back into place directly behind the gap in the line of boats. He cut the engine and came back out on deck. He reached down and picked up a rope. Effortlessly, he tossed it towards the Fire Department boat, looping it around a stanchion the first time, and tied their own boat to the other. Below them, they could see motion, but it was no more than gleams and flashes, and they could make no sense of it. Bonsuan finished his cigarette and tossed the butt overboard, like most Venetians utterly careless about what he threw into the water. The two men watched the filter float, then dance, in the fizzing bubbles before freeing itself and drifting away.

After about five minutes, the divers surfaced and pulled back their masks. Graziano, the more senior, called up to the men on the police boat, 'There's two of them down there.'

'What happened?' Vianello asked.

Graziano shook his head. 'No idea. It looks like they drowned when the boat went down.'

'They're fishermen,' Bonsuan said in disbelief. 'They wouldn't get trapped in a sinking boat.'

Graziano's business was to dive into the water, not to speculate on what he found there, so he said nothing. When Bonsuan remained silent, the man bobbing on the surface beside Graziano asked, 'Do you want us to bring them up?'

Vianello and Bonsuan exchanged a glance. Neither of them had any idea of what had happened to take the two men down with their boat, but neither of them wanted to make a decision of this sort and thus run the risk of destroying whatever evidence might be down there with them.

Finally Graziano said, 'The crabs are there already.'

'OK, get them out,' Vianello said.

Graziano and his partner pulled on their masks, slipped the mouthpieces into place, and, like a pair of eider ducks, upended themselves and disappeared. The pilot went down the cabin steps, pulled open one of the seats along the side, and took out some complicated rigging from the end of which hung a double canvas sling. He came up the steps and back to Vianello's side. He raised the rope, slung it over the side of the boat, and lowered it into the water.

A minute later Graziano and his partner bobbed to the surface, the body of a third man dangling limp between them. With motions so practised it made Vianello uneasy to watch them, they eased the arms of the dead man into the sling Bonsuan tossed down; one of them dived under the water to run a rope between the man's legs, then attached it to a hook on the front of the sling.

He waved to Bonsuan and the pilot and Vianello hauled the dead man up, amazed at how heavy he was. Vianello caught himself thinking that this was why it was called dead weight, but he forced himself, embarrassed, away from that thought. Slowly the body lifted out of the water, and the two men had to lean out from the deck to prevent it from banging against the side. They were not entirely successful, but finally they dragged him over the railing and laid him on the deck, his sightless eyes staring up at the sky.

Before they could take a closer look, they heard splashing below them. Quickly, they loosened the sling and threw it over the side again. Even more careful this time to keep the second body from the side of the boat, they hauled it up on to the deck and stretched it out beside the other.

Two crabs still clung to the hair of the first corpse, but Vianello was too horrified by the sight to do anything except stare. Bonsuan reached down and pulled them off, casually tossing them over the side of the boat into the water.

The divers climbed up the ladder on the side of the police boat and stepped over the gunwale and on to the deck. They unhooked their oxygen tanks and set them carefully down, pulled off their masks, then the black rubber hoods that covered their heads.

On the deck of the police launch, the four men looked at the bodies that lay at their feet. Vianello went into the cabin, and when he emerged he had two woollen blankets in his hands. He stuffed one under his elbow, signalled to Bonsuan, and shook out the first one. The pilot caught the other end, and together they lowered it over the body of the older man. Vianello took the second blanket, and together they repeated the process with the son.

It was only then, when they were fully covered and hidden from sight, that Graziano's partner, the youngest living person on the boat, said, 'No crab did that to his face.'

4

Vianello had seen the crushed fragments of bone showing through the bloodless wound on the older man's head, though his quick glance had discerned no sign of violence on the son's body. Nodding in acknowledgement of the diver's remark, he took out his telefonino, called the Questura, and asked to speak to his immediate superior, Commissario Guido Brunetti. While he waited, he watched the two divers climb on to their own boat. Brunetti finally answered, and the sergeant said, 'I'm out here on Pellestrina, sir. It looks like one of them was killed.' Then, to avoid any ambiguity, given the fact that the men had died in what appeared to be an accident, he continued, 'That is, murdered.' 'How?' Brunetti asked.

'The older one was hit on the head, hard enough to do a lot of damage. I don't know about the other one, the son.'

'Are you sure who they are?' his superior asked.

Vianello had been expecting the question. 'No, sir. That is, no one's given us a positive identification, but the man who called the Carabinieri said they were the owners of the boat, Giulio Bottin and his son, so we just assumed that's who they were.'

'See if you can get someone to confirm that.'

'Yes, sir. Anything else?'

'Just the usual. Ask around, see what people say and what they volunteer about them.' Before Vianello could ask, Brunetti added, 'Don't act as though it's anything more than an accident. And talk to the divers, tell them they aren't to say anything.'

'How long do you think that will last?' Vianello asked, looking across to the deck of the other boat, where the two divers, now stripped of their diving gear, were putting on their normal uniforms.

'Ten minutes, I'd guess,' Brunetti said, with a soft explosion of breath that, in other circumstances, might have been a laugh.

'I'll send them back to the Lido, then,' Vianello said. 'That will at least slow things down.' Before Brunetti could comment, the sergeant asked, 'What do you want to do, sir?'

'I want to keep this quiet as long as we can, that they were killed. Start asking around, but gently, and I'll come out. If there's a boat free, I should be there in an hour, maybe less.'

Vianello was relieved. 'Good, sir. Do you want Bonsuan to take the bodies to the hospital?'

'Yes, as soon as you get an identification. I'll call and tell them he's coming in.' Suddenly there was nothing more to be said or ordered. Repeating that he'd be there as soon as he could, Brunetti hung up.

He looked at his watch again, and saw that it was past eleven: surely his superior, Vice-Questore Giuseppe Patta, should be in his office by now. He walked downstairs without bothering to call ahead and went into the small anteroom that led to the Vice-Questore's much larger office.

Patta's secretary, Signorina Elettra Zorzi, sat at her desk, a book open in front of her. He was surprised to see her reading a book in the office, accustomed as he was to seeing her with magazines and newspapers. Because she had her chin propped on her cupped palms and her fingers pressed over her ears, it was not until she sensed his presence and sat up that he noticed she had cut her hair. It was shorter than usual, and if the roundness of her face and the vermilion of her lips had not declared her femininity, he would have judged the cut severe, almost masculine.

He didn't know how to acknowledge her new hairstyle and, like everyone else in a city where it had not rained for three months, he was tired of asking when it would rain, so he asked, nodding towards the book, 'Something more serious than usual?'

'Veblen,' she answered, 'The Theory of the Leisure Class.' He was flattered that she didn't bother to ask if he was familiar with the book.

'Isn't that a bit heavy?'

She agreed, then said, ‘I used not to be able to get any serious reading done here, what with the constant interruptions.' She pursed her lips as her eyes travelled round her office in an arc that encompassed phone, computer, and the door to Patta's office. 'But things have improved, so I can start to make better use of my time.'

"That's good to know,' Brunetti said. Looking at the book, he added, ‘I was fascinated by his view of lawns.'

She smiled up at him. 'Yes, and sports.'

He couldn't resist, 'And next, when you finish that?'

‘I haven't decided.' A smile blossomed. 'Perhaps I could ask the Vice-Questore's advice.'

'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 Bonsuan 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 Bonsuan 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.'

Picking up the cue, Brunetti answered, 'But you said you've already got the names of a couple of people.' He sensed the waiter's interest increase, saw it in the way he pulled his feet under the chair and fought to keep himself from leaning forward. 'All he'd be doing is confirming what you've already been told.'

Vianello ignored the waiter, keeping his eyes on Brunetti. 'If he doesn't want to talk, he doesn't want to talk, sir. We've already got names.'

'Which ones?' the waiter broke in.

Vianello slid his eyes across to the waiter and gave him a minimal shake of the head, a gesture he tried to hide from Brunetti.

'What names?' the waiter asked in a stronger voice. When neither of the policemen answered him, he demanded, 'Mine?'

'You've never told us your name’ Brunetti said.

'Lorenzo Scarpa,' he said. Vianello's eyes opened and he turned to look at the waiter in badly disguised shock.

When he saw Vianello's reaction, the waiter said in a tight voice, 'It was nothing. Giulio was in here one night, at the bar, and he'd been drinking. My brother never said anything to him. Bottin just wanted to get into a fight, so he invented it, said that Sandro made him spill his wine.' He looked back and forth between the knowing faces of the two policemen. ‘I tell you, nothing happened, and nothing ever got reported. People stopped them before anything happened. I was in the back, working. I didn't get out here until it was all over, but no one was hurt.'

'I'm sure that's true,' Vianello said with a smile he did his best to make appear amiable. 'But that's not what's been suggested might have happened.'

'What was that? Who told you?'

Vianello shook his head with apparent reluctance, as if to suggest to the waiter that he would gladly have named his informant, but with his superior sitting right there at the table across from him, there was no way he could help his friend the waiter, no matter how much he might want to.

'Was it that bastard, Giacomini? Just tell me that? Was it him?'

Again apparently unable to disguise his surprise at the name, Vianello shot the waiter a quick glance, almost as if to warn him to stop. But beyond caring about caution, the waiter went on, 'He wasn't even here, Giacomini. He just wanted to cause Sandro trouble, the bastard. And he knew there was bad blood between them because of that time off Chioggia. But he's lying; he's always been a liar.' The waiter pushed himself back from the table and got to his feet, as if to stop himself from saying anything more. Suddenly formal, all thought of his brother abandoned, he asked, 'Would you like another grappa?'

Brunetti shook his head, then got to his feet, the sergeant quickly following him. 'Thank you’ Brunetti said, leaving it unclear if he meant for the service or for the information. He paused a moment, making it obvious that Vianello had no choice but to precede his superior from the room.

Outside, Brunetti walked for a few minutes until they stood at the edge of the water, where they were safely away from the restaurant and all of the houses. Looking in the general direction of Venice, he put one foot up on the sea wall and reached down to flick a pebble from inside the sole of his shoe.

'Well?' he asked.

'All news to me’ Vianello said with a small smile. 'No one was willing to tell me a thing.'

"That's what I assumed’ Brunetti said then added, knowing that Vianello would be pleased to hear it, 'You played that very well.'

'It wasn't very hard, was it?' the sergeant asked by way of answer.

'I'd like to know how bad their fight was, especially as he was so eager to convince us it was nothing.' Brunetti continued to gaze off towards the invisible city, but it was clear his remarks were meant for Vianello.

'He was pretty insistent, wasn't he, sir?'

Brunetti had thought so at the time, but now he began to wonder if perhaps the waiter had been smarter than he'd thought and had dropped Giacomini's name and the story of the fight with Bottin in order to deflect them from something else. 'You think he was trying to lead us away from something, Sergeant?'

'No, I think he was genuinely worried’ Vianello answered, as if he'd already considered and dismissed the same possibility. Then, with a scorn typical of those born on the major Venetian islands, he added, 'Pellestrinotti aren't bright enough for something like that, anyway.'

'We're not allowed to say things like that any more, Sergeant,' Brunetti said mildly.

'Regardless of whether they're true?' the sergeant asked.

'Because they're true,' Brunetti answered.

Vianello reflected for a moment upon this and then asked, 'What now, sir?'

'I think we go and see what else we can learn about the fight between Sandro Scarpa and Giulio Bottin.' Brunetti turned away from the laguna and back towards the rows of low houses.

Vianello fell into step beside him, saying, 'There's a kind of general store behind the restaurant. The sign said it opened at three, and someone told me that Signora Follini always opens on time.' He led the way to the left of the restaurant and into a sandy courtyard lined on two sides by doors and on the other left open to provide a long view towards the sea wall and, beyond it, the Adriatic. Because of the height of the distant sea wall, they could not see the water on that side of the island, but there was a sharp scent of iodine in the air and a general moistness that spoke of the presence of the sea.

Brunetti had not been out here for years, perhaps for more than a decade, not since the kids were smaller and he and Paola and his brother Sergio and his family used to crowd together into Sergio's boat on Sunday afternoons, saying they wanted to explore the islands but knowing themselves to be, all the while, in search of good restaurants and fresh fish. He remembered sunburnt, cranky children, asleep in the bottom of the boat like puppies, drugged by too much sun and the endless tedium of adult conversation. He remembered Sergio erupting from the water and hurling himself over the side of the boat, both legs lashed red by an enormous jellyfish that had trailed up against him in the clear waters. And he remembered, with a surge of recalled joy, making love with Paola in the bottom of the boat one August afternoon when Sergio had taken all the children to pick blackberries on one of the smaller islands.

A bell pealed out as Vianello opened the door to the small shop. They went in, uniformed officer first to announce the reason for their visit.

From another room a woman's voice called out, 'Un momento,' followed by the sound of a closing door and then a sharper, smaller sound, something being set down on a hard surface. After that, silence. Brunetti took a look around the shop and saw dusty rows of boxes of rice, double packs of flypaper, an object that looked like an umbrella stand filled with brooms and mops, and a low shelf upon which lay four copies of yesterday's Gazzettino. Everything smelled faintly of old paper and dried legumes.

After the promised moment, a woman emerged, pushing aside the white cotton curtain that separated the shop from the rooms behind it. She wore a short green dress with a scooped neck, and shoes with heels uncomfortably high for a woman who stood behind a counter all day. 'Buon giorno,' she said in their direction, stopping just in front of the curtain. She stood silently for a moment, and Brunetti saw that she was a woman in the most recent flower of her youth, though its apparent blossoming had been much repeated, no doubt at ever shorter intervals.

Her hair was dandelion blonde, though it seemed brighter still because of the deep tan of her skin. Brunetti had once taken a three-day seminar in advanced methods of suspect identification, two hours of which had concerned the means criminals use to disguise their appearance. He had been, quite frankly and perhaps because he spent so much of his life observing women, fascinated by the varieties of plastic surgery by which a face could be transformed and identity disguised. He noted some of those techniques on display here, and it occurred to him that the police could have used this woman's face as an exhibit, for the signs of the work done were so easily detectable.

Her eyes had a faint Oriental cast to them, and she was doomed forever to respond to life with a small smile that parted her lips in perpetual happy anticipation. A butcher could have sharpened his knives on the long line of her jaw. Her nose, pert and upturned, would have done wonders for the face of a woman thirty years her junior. On hers, it struck a note of visual dissonance, placed as it was over a broad, thick-lipped mouth. Brunetti judged her to be a few years older than himself.

'May I help you?' she asked, moving behind the low counter.

'Yes, Signora Follini’ Brunetti answered, stepping forward. 'I'm Commissario Guido Brunetti. I'm here to investigate the accident that took place this morning.' He started to reach for his wallet to show her his warrant card, but she waved him away impatiently.

She glanced at Vianello then returned her attention to Brunetti.

'Accident?' she asked neutrally.

Brunetti shrugged. 'Until we have reason to believe it was something else, that's how it's being treated,' he answered.

She nodded but offered nothing further.

'Did you know them, Signora?'

'Bottin and Marco?' she asked unnecessarily.

'Yes.'

'They came in here,' she said, as if that were enough.

'As customers, you mean?' he asked, though in a place as small as Pellestrina, eventually everyone would be her customer.

'Yes.'

'And beyond that? Were they friends of yours?'

She paused and thought for a moment. 'Perhaps you could say Marco was a friend.' She put special emphasis on the word 'friend', as if to suggest the interesting possibility that they had been more than that, then added, 'But definitely not his father.'

'And why was that?' Brunetti asked.

This time it was her turn to shrug. 'We didn't get along.'

'About anything in particular?'

'About everything in particular,' she said, smiling at the speed of her own response. Her smile, which exposed perfect teeth and permitted the appearance of only two small wrinkles at the corners of her mouth, gave Brunetti a suggestion of what she might have been had she not decided to devote her middle years to the reacquisition of her earlier ones.

'And why was that?' he asked.

'Our fathers had a fight when they were young men, about fifty years ago,' she said, her delivery this time so deadpan that Brunetti had no idea if she was being serious or making fun of the way things were supposed to be in small villages.

‘I doubt that either you or Giulio could have been much affected,' Brunetti said, then added, 'You couldn't even have been born at the time.'

He had spoken with the excessive sincerity of flattery. Her smile this time created pairs of wrinkles, though very small ones. Paola had taught a class in the sonnet last year, and Brunetti remembered one - he thought it was

English - that said something about the denial of age, a form of deceit that had always seemed particularly pathetic to Brunetti.

'But didn't you have to deal with him, the older Bottin?' Brunetti asked. 'After all, this is a small village: people here must see one another every day.'

She actually put the back of her hand to her forehead when she answered, 'Don't tell me about that. I know, I know. From long experience, I know what people in small villages are like. All they need is the tiniest thing, and they invent lies about everyone.' Her studied performance of this lament raised in Brunetti's mind a certain curiosity as to the whereabouts, or the actual existence, of Signor Follini. She glanced at Vianello and opened her mouth to continue.

'And Signor Bottin?' Brunetti cut her off by asking. 'Did they invent lies about him, as well?'

Seemingly unoffended by Brunetti's interruption, she said with some asperity, 'The truth would have sufficed.'

'The truth about what?'

Her expression showed him just how eager she was to tell him, but then he saw the precise moment when the discretion that is learned from life in small villages returned to her.

'Oh, the usual things,' she said with an airy wave of the hand, and Brunetti knew it was useless to try to get anything more from her.

Nevertheless, he asked, 'What things?'

After a long pause which she clearly was using to choose examples as meaningless as she could make them, she said, That he was unkind to his wife and harsh with his son.'

'I would guess those things could be said about most men.'

'I doubt they're said about you, officer,' she said, leaning forward over the counter suggestively.

Vianello chose this moment to interrupt. The pilot said we had to get back, sir,' he said in a quiet voice, though loud enough for her to hear.

'Yes, of course, Sergeant,' Brunetti answered in his most official tone. Turning back to Signora Follini and giving her a brief smile, he said, 'I'm afraid that's all for now, Signora. If we have any further questions, someone will come out again.'

'Not you?' she asked, attempting to sound disappointed.

'Perhaps’ Brunetti answered, 'if it's necessary.'

He thanked her for her time and, Vianello preceding, they left the store. Vianello turned left and then right, already familiar with the few streets that made up the centre of Pellestrina.

'And not a moment too soon, Sergeant’ Brunetti said with a laugh.

'I thought it best to try to get us out by means of cunning, sir.'

'And if that hadn't worked?'

‘I had my gun’ Vianello answered, patting his holster.

Ahead of them loomed the sea wall, and on impulse Brunetti crossed the narrow road that led down to the end of the peninsula and started up the steps cut into the side of the wall. At the top, he moved aside to make room for Vianello on the narrow cement walkway that ran off in both directions.

Beyond them stretched the quietly moving waters of the Adriatic; dotted in the middle distance were tankers and cargo ships. And beyond those lay the open wound of the former Yugoslavia.

'It's strange, isn't it, sir, the way women like that seem absurd if they have "un lifting" but when they're richer or more famous, they don't?'

Brunetti considered two friends of his wife's known for their frequent disappearances to Rome and for their subsequent transformations. Because they were wealthy, the work was better done than it had been on the face of Signora Follini, so the results were less obvious and thus more successful. To him, however, the desire that prompted them was the same and no less pathetic.

He made a noncommittal noise and asked, 'What did the people you spoke to tell you? Anything about her?'

'No, sir. You know how it is in places like this: no one is willing to say anything that might be repeated to the person they said it about.'

'So much for police secrecy,' Brunetti said with a wry shake of his head.

'But you can understand it, can't you, sir? If it ever gets to trial, we have to say how we got a name in the first place or why we began to investigate a particular person. The trial goes on and what happens, happens. But they still have to live here, among people who see them as informers.'

Brunetti knew better than to give Vianello his standard lecture about civic duty and the responsibility of the citizen to help the authorities in their investigation of crime. The fact that this was a murder, a double murder, would make not the least bit of difference to anyone who lived here: the highest civic duty was to live in peace and not be harassed by the state. A person was much safer trusting family and neighbours. Beyond that ring of safety lay the dangers of bureaucracy and officialdom and the inevitable consequences of being embroiled with either.

Leaving Vianello to his own reflections, Brunetti stood a while longer, looking out at the sea. The ships were a bit further along in their journeys towards their destinations. They were alone in that, it seemed to him.

6

Reflecting that his distaste for what Vianello had just told him in no way altered its truth, Brunetti decided there was little purpose in their remaining in Pellestrina any longer, so he suggested they start back to Venice. Vianello displayed no surprise at this and they turned back down the steps, across the road, and through the narrow village until they were once again on the side facing Venice, where the police boat awaited them. On the trip across the laguna, Vianello gave him the names of the people he had questioned and a quick summary of the banalities they had given him. Bottin's brother, he had learned, lived in Murano, where he worked in a glass factory; the only other people related to him, the family of his late wife, lived on that island as well, though no one had seemed able to tell him what they did there.

The people to whom Vianello had spoken had not been uncooperative in any way: they had all answered whatever questions he put to them. But no one had volunteered any information beyond that contained in the simplest, most direct response. There had been no extraneous detail, no release of the tide of gossip in which all social life swims. They had been clever enough not to answer in bare monosyllables and managed to suggest that they were doing everything they could to recall whatever might be of use to the police. And all the while, Vianello had known what they were doing, and it was likely that they knew he knew.

The launch turned left into the main canal leading back towards San Marco just as Vianello finished giving his account, and spread before them was the sight that had welcomed most arriving eyes ever since the great centuries of the Serenissima. Bell towers, domes, cupolas - all disported themselves for the eyes of the passengers and crew of the arriving boat, each one seeming to jostle the others aside, in the manner of small children, the better to catch the attention of the approaching visitors. The only difference between what the two policemen saw and what would have been visible to those who followed the same channel five hundred years ago was the flock of construction cranes which loomed above the city and, on top of every building, television antennae of every height and configuration.

Seeing the cranes, stark and angular,, Brunetti was struck by how seldom he ever saw them in motion. Two of them still towered above the hollow shell of the opera theatre, as motionless as all attempts to rebuild it. Thinking of the proud boast blazoned across the front page of II Gazzettmo the day after the fire, that the theatre would be rebuilt where it was and as it was, within two years, Brunetti didn't know whether to laugh or weep, a decision he had had far more than two years to consider. Popular belief, itself interchangeable with truth, had it that the motionless cranes cost the city ten million lire a day, and popular imagination had long since abandoned any attempt to calculate the final cost of restoration. Years passed, the money seeped away, and yet the cranes stood motionless, rising silently above the endless yammering and legal squabbling about who would get to perform the reconstruction.

Both of them stopped talking and watched the city draw near. No city is more self-regarding than Venice: cheap and vulgar self-portraits lined the sides of many streets; almost every kiosk peddled garish plastic gondolas; hacks whose berets falsely proclaimed them to be artists sold horrible pastels at every turn. At every step she pandered to the worst and flashed out the meretricious. Added to this was the terrible aftermath of all of these dry weeks: narrow calli that stank of urine, both dog and human; a thin layer of dust that was forever underfoot, no matter how many times the streets were swept. And yet her beauty remained unblemished, just as it remained supreme.

The pilot cut to the right and drew up in front of the Questura. Brunetti waved his thanks and jumped on to the embankment, quickly followed by Vianello.

'And now, sir?' the sergeant asked as they passed through the tall glass doors.

'Call the hospital and check when they're going to do the autopsies. I'll set Signorina Elettra to work on the Bottins.' Before Vianello could ask, he added, 'And on Sandro Scarpa, and while she's at it, Signora Follini.'

At the top of the first flight of steps, Brunetti turned off towards Patta's office, and Vianello went down to the uniformed men's office.

'Still thrashing it out with Veblen?' Brunetti asked as he came into Signorina Elettra's small office.

She picked up an envelope and used it to mark her place, then set the book aside. 'It's not easy reading. But I couldn't find it in translation.'

‘I could have lent you mine,' Brunetti offered.

'Thank you, sir. If I had known you had it...' she began, then let the sentence drop. She wouldn't have asked her superior to bring her a book to read at work.

'Has the Vice-Questore come in yet?'

'He was here for a half-hour after lunch, but then he said he had to go to a meeting.'

One of the things Brunetti liked about Signorina Elettra was the merciless accuracy of her speech. Not, 'had to go to a meeting', but the more precise, 'said he had to go to a meeting'.

'Are you free, then?'

'As the air itself, sir,' she said, folding her hands in front of her like a diligent pupil and sitting up very straight in her chair.

'The murdered men were Giulio Bottin and his son, Marco. Both are from Pellestrina and both are fishermen. I'd like you to find whatever you can about them.'

'Everywhere, sir?'

Assuming this to mean everywhere she had access to with her computer or through her network of friends and connections, he nodded. 'And Sandro Scarpa, also of Pellestrina and probably a fisherman. See if the name Giacomini comes up in anything about them; I don't have a first name. And a Signora Follini, who runs the store there.'

At the name, Signorina Elettra raised her eyebrows in an open avowal of interest.

'You know her?' Brunetti asked.

'No, not really, no more than to say hello to.'

Brunetti waited for her to add something to this but when she did not, he went on, 'I don't know if it's a married name or not.' Signorina Elettra shook her head to indicate she had no clearer idea. 'I guess she's about fifty,' Brunetti offered, then couldn't resist adding, 'Though you'd probably have to drive bamboo shoots under her fingernails to get her to admit it.'

She looked up, startled, and said, 'That's a very unkind thing to say.'

‘Is it any less unkind if it's true?' he asked.

She considered for a moment and then answered, 'No, probably more so.'

In defence of his remark, he said, 'She flirted with me,' putting ironic emphasis on 'me' to suggest the absurdity of the woman's behaviour.

Signorina Elettra glanced at him quickly. 'Ah,' was the only thing she allowed herself to say and then just as quickly asked, 'Any other names, sir?'

'No, but see if you can find if they owned the boat free and clear.' He thought for a moment, exploring possibilities. 'And see if any sort of insurance claim was ever made on it.'

She nodded each time he spoke but didn't bother to write any of this down.

'Do you know anyone out there?' he asked suddenly.

‘I have a cousin who has a house in the village,' she answered modestly, disguising any pleasure she might have felt in finally being asked this question.

'In Pellestrina?' he asked, with interest.

'Actually, she's my father's cousin. She shocked the family, ages ago, by marrying a fisherman and moving out there. Her eldest daughter married a fisherman, too.'.

'And do you visit them?'

'Every summer,' she said. 'I usually spend a week there, sometimes two.'

'How long have you been doing this?' he asked, his mind running well ahead of his question.

She permitted herself to smile. 'Ever since we were kids. And I have even gone fishing on her son-in-law's boat.'

'You? Fishing?' Brunetti asked, as astonished as if she'd said she had taken up Sumo wrestling.

'I was younger then, sir,' she said, then, casting into the deep waters of memory, she added, 'I think it might have been the season Armani tried navy blue.'

He conjured her up then, wide-cut slacks, no doubt a mixture of silk and cashmere, cut low on the hip like the ones sailors wore. Not a white cap, certainly not that, but a captain's hat, brim covered in gold braid. He abandoned this vision, returned to her office, and asked, 'You still go out there?'

'I hadn't made plans yet to go out this summer, sir, but if you ask it like that, I suppose I can.'

Brunetti had had no idea at all of asking her to go and had inquired out of simple curiosity, wondering if she knew someone who would be willing to talk to them openly. 'No, nothing like that, Signorina,' he said. 'I was just surprised at the coincidence.' Even as he spoke, however, he was considering what she had just told him: a cousin in Pellestrina, a cousin married to a fisherman.

She interrupted his thoughts by saying, 'I hadn't made any other plans for vacation, you know, sir, and I really do love it there.'

'Please, Signorina,' he said, forcing himself to sound convinced and, he hoped, convincing, 'it's hardly anything we could ask of you.'

'No one's asking, sir. I'm merely trying to decide where to go for the first part of my vacation.'

'But I thought you just came back from...' he began, but she stopped him with a glance.

'There are so few days I manage to take,' she said modestly, and at the words, he blotted from his memory the postcards that had arrived at the Questura from Egypt, Crete, Peru and New Zealand.

Before she could suggest anything, he said, ‘I hardly think any of this is proper, Signorina.'

She gave him a look that combined shock and injury. 'I'm not sure it's anyone's business where I choose to spend my vacation, sir.'

'Signorina,' he began by way of protest, but she cut him short with her most efficient voice.

'We can discuss this again at some other time, sir, but first let me see what I can find out about those people.' She turned her head to one side, as if hearing a sound Brunetti could not. ‘I think I remember something about the Bottins, a few years ago. But I'll have to think about it.' She gave him a broad smile. 'Or I can ask my cousin.'

'Of course,' Brunetti agreed, not at all pleased at the way she had outmanoeuvred him. Habitual caution made him ask, 'Do they know you work here?'

'I doubt it’ she answered. 'Most people really aren't interested in other people or what they do, not unless it bothers or affects them in some way.' Brunetti had concluded much the same thing, through years of experience. He wondered if her belief was theoretical or practical; she seemed so young and so untender.

She looked up at him and said, 'My father never approved of the fact that I left the bank, so I doubt he's told anyone where I'm working. I imagine most of my family still think I work there. If they bother to think about it at all, that is.'

Brunetti had become aware of what his enthusiasm had led her to contemplate, and again he protested. 'Signorina, this is not a good idea. These two men were murdered.' Her glance was cool, uninterested. 'And you're really not a member of the police, not officially, that is.' As he had seen done in countless films, she turned up her palm, bent her fingers, and examined her nails, as though they were the most interesting thing in the room. With her thumbnail, she flicked an invisible speck from another nail, then glanced in his direction to see if he was finished.

'As I was saying, sir, I think I'll be on vacation next week. The Vice-Questore will be gone, so I don't think he'll be much inconvenienced by my absence.'

'Signorina’ Brunetti said, his voice calm and official, 'there could be a certain measure of danger involved here.' She didn't answer. 'You don't have the skills,' he said.

'Would you rather send Alvise and Riverre?' she asked drily, naming the two worst officers on the force. Then she repeated, 'Skills?'

He began to speak, but she cut him off again. 'What skills do you think I'm going to need, Commissario: to fire a gun or restrain a suspect or jump from a third-floor window?'

He refused to answer, not wanting to provoke her further and reluctant to admit he was responsible in any way for her hare-brained idea.

'What sort of skills do you think I've been using here since I was hired? I don't go out and arrest people, but I send you to the people you should arrest, and I give you the evidence that will help convict them. And I do it, sir, by asking people questions and then thinking about what they tell me and using that to go and ask other questions of other people.' She paused but he said nothing, merely nodded to show that he was listening to what she said.

'If I do it with this,' she said, waving a red-nailed hand above her computer keyboard, 'or I go out to Pellestrina to spend time with people I've known for years, there's really little difference.'

When he saw that she had stopped, he said, 'I'm concerned about your safety, Signorina.'

'How gallant,' she said, stunning him with her tone.

'And I don't have the authority to send you out there. It would be completely irregular.' He marvelled at the realization that he didn't have the authority to stop her.

'But I have the authority to grant myself a week's vacation, sir. There's nothing irregular about that.'

'You can't do that,' he insisted.

'Our first fight,' she said with a falsely tragic face, and he was forced to smile.

'I really don't want you to do this, Elettra,' he said.

'And the first time you've used my name.'

'I don't want it to be the last,' he shot back.

'Is that a threat to fire me or a warning that someone out there might kill me?'

He thought about his answer for a long time before he gave it. 'If you'll promise not to go out there, I'll promise never to fire you.'

'Commissario,' she said, returning to her usual formality, 'tempting as that offer is, you must understand that Vice-Questore Patta would never let you fire me, not even if I were discovered to be the person who killed those two men. I make his life too comfortable.' Brunetti was forced to admit, at least to himself, the truth of this.

'If I charge you officially with insubordination?' he asked, though both of them knew his heart wasn't in it.

As if he had not spoken, she continued, "I'll need some way to keep in touch with you.'

'We can give you a telefonino,' he said, caving in.

'It'll be easier for me to use my own,' she said. 'But I'd like to have someone there, just in case what you say is true and there is some danger.'

'Some of our men will be sent out to investigate. We can tell them you're there.'

Her answer was instant. 'No. I don't trust them not to talk to me if they see me or, if you tell them to ignore me, make such a production of it that they'll call attention to me in any case. I don't want anyone here to know what I'm doing. If possible, I don't want them even to know I'm there. Except you and Sergeant Vianello.'

Did her reluctance, he wondered, result from information he didn't have about the people who worked in the Questura or from a scepticism about human nature even more profound than his own? 'If I assign myself the investigation, then I'll be the one to go out to talk to people, just Vianello and I.'

'That would be best.'

'How long are you planning on staying out there?'

'I can stay as long as I usually do, I suppose: a week, perhaps a bit more. It's not as if the people in the village are going to see me get down from the orange bus and come up to tell me the name of the person who did it, is it, sir? I'll just go out and stay with my cousin and see what's new and what people are talking about. Nothing at all unusual about that.'

There was little left to settle. 'Would it be too melodramatic if I asked if you'd like to take a gun with you?' he asked.

'I think it would be far more melodramatic if I accepted, sir,' she said, and turned away, as glad as he to be finished with all of this. 'I'll start seeing what I can find about the Bottins, shall I?' she asked, reaching out to swing the screen of her computer towards her.

7

'You're going to let her do what?' Paola protested that night after dinner, when he had finished telling her about his trip to Pellestrina and his subsequent conversation - he wanted to call it a confrontation but thought that was an exaggeration - with Signorina Elettra in the office. 'You're going to let her go out to Pellestrina and play detective? Alone? Unarmed? With a killer running around? Are you out of your mind, Guido?'

They were still sitting at the table, the children gone off to do whatever it is dutiful and obedient children do after dinner in order to avoid their share of the housework. She set her glass, still half full of Calvados, back on the table and stared across at him. 'I repeat: are you out of your mind?'

"There was no way I could stop her’ Brunetti insisted, conscious of how weak the admission made him sound. In his recounting of the incident, he had omitted to mention that the original idea had come from him and had given Paola a modified version in which Signorina Elettra insisted on her own initiative that she take a more active part in the investigation. Brunetti heard himself emerging from his telling of the tale as the hapless boss, outwitted by his secretary and too indulgent to endanger her career by imposing upon her the necessary discipline.

Long experience with the prevarications of men in positions of power led Paola to suspect that what she heard was at some variance with the truth. She saw no profit, however, in questioning his account of the incident when it was only the results that interested her.

'So you're going to let her go?' she repeated.

‘I told you, Paola,' he said, thinking it would be better to wait until this was over before he poured himself another Calvados, 'it's not at all a case of letting her; it's a case of not being able to stop her. If I hadn't given in, she would have taken a week of vacation and gone out there on her own anyway to start asking questions.'

'Then is she the one who's out of her mind?' Paola demanded.

Though there were many questions Brunetti would have liked answered about Signorina Elettra, this was not among them. Rather than say that, he gave in to his baser nature and poured himself another drop of Calvados.

'What does she think she's going to be able to do?' Paola asked.

He set his glass down untouched. "The way she explained it to me, she hopes to employ the same tactics and techniques she does with her computer: ask questions, listen to the answers, then ask more questions.'

'And what if, while she's asking one of these questions, someone decides to stick a knife into her stomach the way they did with that fisherman's son?' Paola demanded.

'That's exactly what I asked her,' Brunetti said, which was certainly true in intention if not in fact.

'And?'

'She's convinced that the fact that she's been going out there every summer for years is enough.'

'To what - shroud her in a cloak of invisibility?'Paola rolled her eyes and shook her head in astonishment.

'She's not a fool, Paola,' Brunetti said in Signorina Elettra's defence.

‘I know that, but she's only a woman.'

He had been leaning forward to pick up his glass when she spoke, but her remark stopped him cold. "This from the Rosa Luxemburg of feminism?' he asked. 'She's only a woman?'

'Oh, fight fair, Guido,' Paola said with real anger. 'You know what I mean. She'll be out there with a telefonino and her wits, but someone else is out there with a knife, and this someone has already murdered two people. Those aren't odds I'd want to give to anyone I cared about.'

He registered her last remark and let it pass for the moment. 'Perhaps you should have talked to her, instead of me.'

'No,' Paola said, ignoring his sarcasm. 'I doubt that would have done any good.' Paola had met Signorina Elettra only twice, both times at official dinners given by Patta for members of the Questura staff. Each time, though they had been introduced to one another and had managed to speak for a few moments, they had been seated at different tables, something Brunetti had always viewed as a conscious decision on Patta's part to keep the two women from talking about him.

Ever practical, Paola leaped over theory and recrimination and set herself to deal with reality. 'Is there any way you can see that someone could be put there to keep an eye on her?'

'I'm not sure at this point that that will be necessary.'

'When and if it does become necessary, it will be too late to do anything about it,' Paola said, and he was forced to agree, though he didn't tell her this.

'Well?' she insisted.

‘I spoke to Vianello to see if there's anyone on the force who lives out there.' He shook his head to indicate the answer. 'Besides, she was very insistent that she doesn't want anyone except me and Vianello to know where she is and what she's doing.' Before Paola could ask, he explained. 'She said no one in her family knows what she does, though I find that hard to believe. I'd agree it's unlikely that her relatives on Pellestrina know, especially if she sees them only once a year, but I'm sure that some members of her family must pay attention to what she does.'

'And if they do know or someone asks her about it, or someone finds out she works at the Questura?' Paola asked.

'Oh,' he said instantly, 'I'm sure she'd be able to invent something to explain it. She's an excellent liar; I've listened to her do it for years.'

'But what if she's in danger?' Paola asked, bringing him back to earth.

‘I certainly hope she isn't.'

"That's not an answer, Guido, and it's not enough.'

'There's nothing we can do. She's decided this and I don't think she can be stopped.'

'You sound very cavalier about it, I must say.'

Brunetti was uncertain of how his wife would respond to any revelation of his feelings for another woman, so he made no attempt to defend himself.

'It would be terrible if anything happened to her,' Paola said.

Biting back the confession that it would break his heart, Brunetti reached forward and picked up his Calvados.

The next morning, Brunetti got to the Questura after nine, delayed by phone calls to three different informers, calls he was always careful to make from public phones and only to their telefonini. Though all had read about the crime, none of them could give him any information about the Bottins or their murder. All promised to call him if they heard anything, but none was optimistic because the crime had taken place so far away. As far as his Venetian contacts were concerned, it might as well have taken place in Milan.

The subject of his discussion with Paola was not in her office when he got there, so he went up to his own and read quickly through the newspapers. The national papers had understandably not bothered with the Bottins, but Il Gazzettino had given them half of the first page of the second section. In the hyperventilated style the local paper reserved for crimes of violence, the article began by asking if the Bottin men had felt some sort of strange premonition or if they had known, when they woke up the previous morning, that it would turn out to be the last day of their lives. Since these questions had become, by now, the paper's opening trope in any account of any violent death, Brunetti muttered, 'Probably not.'

The story repeated the facts Brunetti had already learned: the father had died from a blow to the head, the son from a knife wound. Both had been dead when the boat was set on fire and sunk. The newspaper account told him nothing new, though it did contain small photos of the two dead men. Bottin had the rough-featured look of a man who had spent too much time in the open. His expression showed the usual sullen hostility to be seen in photos on official documents. Marco, on the other hand, was smiling, two deep dimples visible just at the corners of his mouth. While the father was dark, his neck short and thick, Marco seemed made of finer, lighter materials. His fineness of feature would probably have disappeared, Brunetti realized, after two decades on the sea, but there was an easy grace about the tilt of Marco's head that made Brunetti curious about his mother and about the forces that had led him to share in the brutality of his father's fate.

8

Signorina Elettra didn't come into his office until more than two hours after he arrived. When he saw her, Brunetti found it impossible to resist the impulse to approach her, and he raised himself from his chair. Propriety, however, restrained him. 'Good morning,' he said casually, hoping, by the ordinariness of his greeting, to carry them back to simpler times, before she'd got the idea - no, he'd be honest here - before he'd given her the idea of going out to Pellestrina.

'Good morning, sir,' she said in an entirely normal way. He saw in her hand a few sheets of paper.

'The Bottins?' he asked.

She held them up. 'Yes. But very little, really,'

she said apologetically. 'I'm still working on the others.'

'Let me see’ he said, as he sat down, very carefully keeping his tone level.

She placed the papers in front of him, then turned and made towards the door. Brunetti watched her leave, the narrowness of her back exaggerated by a light blue sweater with thin white vertical stripes. He remembered, then, asking her, some years ago, about the new millennium and what her plans and hopes for it were. Her plans, she'd answered, were to see how well baby blue, the announced colour of the new decade, suited her, and her only hope was that it would. When pressed, she'd admitted that she did have one or two other little things to hope for, but she hardly thought they were worth talking about, and that had been the end of that. Well, it suited her, baby blue, and Brunetti found himself wishing that, whatever other hopes she might have had, they'd all been granted her.

The Bottins, when he looked through the papers, were revealed as rather unexceptional men: they owned both the house on Pellestrina and the Squallus jointly, though they had separate bank accounts. Both owned cars, though Marco was also sole owner of a house on Murano, left to him by his mother.

Beyond the realm of the financial, Giulio began to stand out: he was known to the Carabinieri on the Lido and was the subject of a number of denuncie, three of them resulting from fights in bars and one from an incident that had taken place between two boats on the laguna, though the other boat had not been Scarpa's. Bottin seemed, however, to have lived a charmed life so far as the police were concerned, for, however well known he was to them, formal charges had never been made against him, which suggested a lack of evidence or reluctance on the part of witnesses to testify. Marco had never been reported to the police.

Brunetti searched for a report of whatever had happened between the boats on the laguna, but no details were provided. He stopped himself from calling Signorina Elettra to ask her who might be able to provide this information, hoping she'd somehow forget about going.

Instead, he called down to the squad room and asked for Bonsuan to be sent up to his office.

The pilot knocked on the door a few minutes later, came in without bothering to salute or acknowledge Brunetti's rank, and took the seat Brunetti pointed out to him. He sat with his feet flat on the floor in front of him, his hands grasped around the arms of his chair, almost as if long exposure to the sea had made him eternally expectant of some sudden shift of tide or current. Brunetti could see the short stump of Bonsuan's little finger, the last two joints lost in some long-forgotten boating accident.

'Bonsuan,' Brunetti began, 'do you have any friends who are fishermen?'

Bonsuan showed no curiosity. 'Fishermen, yes. Vongolari, no.' The heat with which he answered surprised Brunetti, as did the distinction he drew.

'What's wrong with the vongolari?' he asked.

"They're figli di puttane, every one of them.'

Brunetti had heard a similar opinion of the clam fishermen from Vianello, among others, but he'd never heard it expressed with such disgust.

'Why?'

'Because they're hyenas,' Bonsuan answered. 'Or vultures. They suck up everything with their damned vacuum cleaner scoops, rip up the breeding beds, destroy whole colonies.' Bonsuan paused, pulled himself forward in his chair, then went on. 'They don't think about the future. The clam beds have fed us for centuries and could feed us for ever. They just dig and dig like wild animals, destroying everything.'

Brunetti remembered his lunch on Pellestrina. 'Vianello won't eat them any more, clams.'

'Ah, Vianello’ Bonsuan said dismissively. 'He does it for health reasons.' On Bonsuan's lips, this sounded like an obscenity.

Not quite sure how he was meant to respond, Brunetti asked, 'Is it safe to eat them, then?'

Bonsuan shrugged. 'At my age, it's safe to eat anything.' He paused, then went on, 'No, I suppose it isn't safe to eat some of them. The bastards dig them up right in front of Porto Marghera, and God knows what's been pumped or dumped into the water there. I've seen the bastards, anchored there at night, with no lights, scooping them up, not fifty metres from the sign saying that the waters are contaminated and fishing's forbidden.'

'But who'd eat them?' Brunetti asked, thinking again of the clams he'd eaten on Pellestrina.

'No one who knew’ the pilot answered. 'But who does know? Who knows where anything in the market comes from any more? A pile of clams is a pile of clams.' Bonsuan looked up at him then, smiled, and added, 'No passports. No health cards.'

'But isn't there some control, doesn't someone check them?'

Bonsuan smiled at such innocence from one no longer young but did not deign to answer.

'No, tell me, Bonsuan’ Brunetti insisted. 'Aren't there health inspectors?' Even as he spoke, Brunetti realized how little he knew about this subject. He'd fished in the laguna since he was a boy, but he knew nothing at all about the business of fishing there.

'There are all sorts of inspectors, Dottore’ Bonsuan answered. Holding up his right hand, he counted them out on his fingers. 'There are inspectors who are supposed to make random checks of the fish that are already on sale in the market: are they really fresh when they're being sold as fresh? There are the inspectors who are supposed to check whether there are any dangerous substances in the fish: heavy metals or poisons or chemicals - all those things that flood into the laguna from the factories. Then there are the inspectors from the Magistrato alle Acque, whose job it is to see that the fishermen fish only where they're supposed to.' He closed his hand into a fist and added, "These are the ones I know about, but I'm sure, if you looked, you could find all sorts of other inspectors. But that doesn't mean anything gets inspected or, if it does, that whatever they find gets reported.'

'Why not?' Brunetti asked.

Bonsuan's smile was compassion itself. Instead of speaking, however, he contented himself with rubbing his thumb across the end joint of his first three fingers.

'But who pays?' Brunetti asked.

'Use your imagination, Dottore. Anyone who does something they don't want people to know about or something that would hurt their business if people found out about it: someone with a boat or a fish stall at Rialto, or a business that ships contaminated flounder to Japan or some other country hungry for fish.'

'Are you sure about this, Bonsuan?'

'Does that mean am I sure this happens or do I know the names of the people who do it?'

'Both.'

Bonsuan gave his superior a long, reflective look before he answered. ‘I suppose, if I thought about it, I could come up with the names of people, friends of mine who work in the laguna, who I think might have given money to see that someone overlooked something. And I suppose, if I asked around a bit, I could come up with the names of the people they gave it to.' He stopped.

'But?'

'But two of my nephews are fishermen, have their own boats. And I retire in two years.'

When Brunetti realized that was all the answer Bonsuan was willing to volunteer, he asked, 'What does that mean?'

'It means my life is on the laguna, not here at the Questura; at least it won't be two years from now.'

Brunetti found it a reasonable enough stance. But he tried, nevertheless. 'But if these fish are contaminated in some way, then isn't it dangerous for people to eat them?'

'Does that mean what I think it does, sir?' Bonsuan asked quietly.

'What?'

"That you're appealing to my duty as a citizen to help get rid of a public danger? It sounds to me like you're asking me to act like I'm Greenpeace and tell you who these people are so that you can stop them from doing something that's dangerous to people and the environment.'

Though there was not a hint of sarcasm in the way he spoke, Brunetti could not help but feel that Bonsuan's remark made a fool of him. 'Yes, I suppose it's something like that,' he admitted unwillingly.

Bonsuan moved around in the chair, pulled himself upright, and placed his palms flat on his knees, though his feet were still firmly braced in anticipation of a sudden wave. 'I'm not an educated man, sir,' he began, 'so I'm sure my thinking on this isn't very clear, but I don't see what difference it makes.' Brunetti chose not to interrupt, so the pilot went on. 'Remember when there was talk of closing the chemical plants because of the pollution they caused?' He glanced across at Brunetti and waited for an answer.

'Yes.' Of course he remembered. Investigators had, a few years ago, found all manner of toxic material seeping, pouring, flooding into the laguna from the various chemical and petrochemical plants on the mainland. There'd even been a list in the papers of the workers who had died from cancer during the last ten years, a number so high as to soar off the charts of all probability. A judge had ordered the plants closed, declaring them a danger to the health of the people who worked there, leaving moot the question of the damage they did to the people who lived around them. And within a day there had been a mass protest and the threat of violence from the workers themselves, the very men who handled, breathed in, got splashed by the toxins that were said to be killing them. They demanded that the factories be kept open, that they continue to be allowed to work, and insisted that the long-term possibility of disease was less dangerous than the immediate one of unemployment. And so the plants remained open, the men continued to work, and very little more was said or written about this other tide that flowed into the laguna.

Bonsuan had gone silent, and so Brunetti prompted him. 'What about it?'

'Clara has a patient,' Bonsuan began, naming his daughter, a doctor with an office in Castello. 'He's got some rare form of lung cancer. Never smoked a cigarette in his life. His wife doesn't smoke, either.' He waved his right hand in the general direction of the mainland. 'But he's worked out there for twenty years.'

Bonsuan stopped; Brunetti asked, 'And?'

'And though Clara's got statistics that say this form of cancer is found only in people who have had long exposure to one of the chemicals they use out there, he still refuses to believe it could have been caused by the place where he works. His wife says it's God's will, and he says it's just bad luck. Clara gave up talking to him about it when she saw that it didn't make any difference to them what it was that was going to kill him. She says there's no way she could make him believe his work had anything to do with it.'

This time, Bonsuan didn't bother to wait for Brunetti to ask for clarification. 'So I don't think it makes any difference if someone warns people that the clams are dangerous, or the fish or the shrimp. They're going to say that their parents always ate them and they lived to be ninety or they're going to say that you can't worry about everything. Or they're going to get angry that you're trying to take people's jobs away from them. But the one thing you're not going to do is stop people from doing what they want to do, whether it's eat fish that glows in the dark or pay a bribe so they can go on catching and selling it.'

This, Brunetti realized, was the longest speech he'd heard Bonsuan give in all the years he'd known him. Because the pilot had begun it by mentioning his nephews and the fact of his imminent retirement, Brunetti refused to believe that his explanation was completely truthful.

'When you retire,' Brunetti began, 'are you going to work with your nephews?'

'I've got a pilot's licence,' Bonsuan answered. 'I can't afford to buy a taxi. I don't think I'd like the work, anyway. They're another bunch of greedy bastards.'

'And you know the laguna,' Brunetti suggested.

'And I know the laguna.'

Resigned, Brunetti asked, 'Is there anything you can tell me?'

Bonsuan, he knew, was not as tough as he appeared to be. Over the years, Brunetti had occasionally seen him discard the carapace he wore, abandon the disguise of dour old sea dog who was never surprised by the crimes of men. 'It might help, you know,' Brunetti added, doing his best to make it sound as if he was suggesting, rather than pleading.

Bonsuan pushed himself to his feet. Before he turned to the door, he said, 'It's not a question of which fishermen do this, sir; it's more a question of which ones don't.' He aimed his right hand in the general direction of his forehead in what Brunetti supposed was meant to be a salute, then added, 'It's too big for you, and it's too big for us.' He said good morning and left the office.

This left Brunetti little wiser than before he asked the pilot to come up. He realized now how foolish he had been to hope that appeals to loyalty to the police or the public good would have any effect when in competition with tribe or, worse, family. He supposed it was a step towards civilization, the ability to think of tribe or family rather than of the self, but it seemed such a tiny step. As always, when he caught himself making these sweeping generalizations about human behaviour, usually when he needed some justification for criticizing the behaviour of someone he knew, he ended up asking himself if, in the same circumstances, he'd behave any differently. The usual conclusion he came to, that he probably would not, put an end to his reflections and left him feeling slightly uncomfortable with an ever-judgmental self. After all, there was very little evidence that public institutions or government took even the least interest in the public good.

He reflected on his brief conversation with Bonsuan. Certainly, over the years, he'd read numerous accounts of the violence in those waters: boats running aground or into one another; men fallen or knocked overboard and then either saved or drowned; shots fired from boats that were not seen, coming from men whose identity was never discovered. For the most part, however, the laguna was generally perceived as a benign presence by the people who lived their lives surrounded by it, many of whom owed their lives and fortunes to it.

In the face of his growing curiosity, he abandoned the superstitious idea that he could somehow influence Signorina Elettra's decision and called down to her to ask if she would check the files of the Gazzettino for the last three years and see what she could find about the laguna, fishermen, and the vongolari, specifically anything that had to do with acts of violence among the fishermen themselves and between them and the police. He knew he'd read more than one article, but because reports of violence on the water often were made to the harbour police or the Carabinieri, he had paid little attention to them.

Child of its waters, Brunetti still idealized the laguna as a peaceful place. Did people in India, he wondered, think of Mother Ganges in this manner, as the liquid source of all life, the giver of food and bringer of peace? He'd recently read an article in one of Paola's English magazines on the pollution of the Ganges and the way it was now, in many places, irreversibly fouled, sure to carry disease, if not death, to the people who bathed in or drank its waters, while a lethargic government concerned itself with posturing and empty phrases. He contemplated this but before he could begin to bask in a sense of European superiority, he recalled Vianello's refusal to eat molluscs and Bonsuan's explanation of the forces that allowed them to be dredged from the bottom of the laguna.

From his lower drawer he took out the phone book. Feeling not a little foolish, he opened it at the Ps and, quickly turning the pages, found 'Police'. The sub-listings, for San Polo, Railway and Frontier, were not very promising. Nor did he think there would be much joy on offer from the Postal Police or the Highway Police. He shut the directory, dialled the switchboard downstairs, and asked the operator to whom calls about trouble in the laguna were directed. The man on duty explained that it depended what sort of problem got called in: accidents were reported to the Capitaneria di Porto; crimes were dealt with either by the Carabinieri or, and here the operator's voice grew a bit strained, by themselves.

'I understand,' Brunetti said. 'But who goes out to investigate?'

'It depends, sir,' the operator said, his voice a study in discretion. 'If we don't have a boat available, then we call the Carabinieri and they go-'

Brunetti knew too well why the Carabinieri divers had been unavailable to examine the wreck of the Squallus, so he merely made a note of this, believing it wiser not to comment.

'And in the last few years ...' Brunetti began, then stopped himself and said, 'No, forget it. I'll wait for Signorina Elettra.'

Just as he hung up, he thought he heard the operator's voice, disembodied by distance, say, 'We're all waiting for her', but he couldn't be sure.

Like all Italians, Brunetti had grown up hearing Carabinieri jokes: Why are two Carabinieri always sent to investigate? One to write and one to read. He understood that the Americans told the same jokes about Poles, and the English told them at the expense of the Irish. During his career, Brunetti had seen much to prove the truth of this piece of folk wisdom, but it was only in recent years that anything had weakened his faith in a second belief: that, however stupid, however dim they might be, the Carabinieri were rocklike in their honesty.

Becalmed, he could invent nothing with which to busy himself, and so he pulled towards him a sheaf of unread papers and reports and began to glance through them, skimming the texts, paying little attention save to find the place at the end where he was meant to initialize them before passing them on to the next reader. When the kids were younger, he'd been told that the homework they did had all to be collected by their school, put into an archive and kept for ten years. He couldn't remember now who'd told him, though he did remember having visualized, at the time, an enormous archive, as large as the city, itself, where all official papers were stored. The Roman historians he so loved had often described an Italian peninsula densely, in parts impenetrably, covered in trees: oak, beech, chestnut; all gone now, of course, cut down to clear land for farming or to build boats. Or, he thought sadly, to be turned into paper to add to the already stored documents that, if unchecked, might some day cover the entire peninsula once again. He'd consigned his fair share of papers to that archive in his time, he thought, as he put his initials on another sheet and set it aside. He glanced at his watch and, reluctant to be perceived as nagging at Signorina Elettra for the information he'd requested, decided to go home for lunch.

9

He found Paola at the kitchen table, head bent over a copy of either Panorama or Espresso, the two weekly magazines to which she subscribed. Her custom was to let back issues pile up for at least six months before reading them, for she insisted that this was sufficient time to put things into proper perspective and thus allow the current pop star to die of an overdose and lapse into well-merited obscurity; to permit Gina Lollobrigida to launch and abandon yet another career, to wipe the slate clean of all talk of plans for the current political riforma and replace it with an entirely new one.

Glancing down, he saw a photo of two men wearing the distinctive white coats of chefs and the red and white banded hoods of Father Christmas. On the page to their left was a heavily laden table: the evergreens and red candles told him that Paola's reading had finally taken her as far as the end of last year.

'Oh, good,' he said as he bent to kiss the top of her head. 'Does this mean we're having goose for lunch?' When she ignored him, he added, 'Bit hot for that, isn't it? Though whatever it is, it smells wonderful.'

She looked up and smiled. 'Would that goose were what they suggested for Christmas dinner,' she added, tapping at one of the pages with a disapproving forefinger. ‘I can't believe these people.'

As this was a frequent response to her reading of these magazines, Brunetti turned his attention to a bottle of Pinot Grigio which he took out of the refrigerator. Pulling two glasses from the cabinet behind, he filled them halfway. As he set Paola's beside her, he made an inquisitive noise.

She chose to construe this as a sign of interest and replied, 'They're telling us that we should abandon all new ideas about eating and return to the way our parents and grandparents ate.' Brunetti, who had had enough of nouvelle cuisine to last a lifetime, could not have agreed more strongly. Knowing that Paola, a more adventurous eater, differed from him in this, he kept his opinion to himself.

'Listen to what they suggest as a way to begin a Christmas dinner in the style of our grandparents.' She picked up the magazine and shook it angrily, as if the attempt would shake some sense into it.' "Goose liver with small pear tarts al Taurasi - whatever or whoever that is - with pineapple flavoured with limoncello.' She looked up at Brunetti, who had the presence of mind to shake his head in what he thought was a damning fashion.

Encouraged, she went on, 'Then listen to this. "Sartu - whatever that is - of rice with slices of eggplant with eggs and tiny meatballs di annecchia with a sauce of San Marsano tomatoes."' Overcome with disgust at this final excess, she tossed the magazine on to the table, where it closed, thus providing Brunetti with a sight of the prosperous female breasts which served both magazines as a sort of obligatory cover logo. 'Where do they think our grandparents lived - at the court of Louis the Fourteenth?' she demanded.

Brunetti, who knew that at least one of Paola's great-grandparents had served at the court of the first king of Italy, again chose silence as a response.

Pushing the magazine farther away, she asked, 'Why is it so difficult for them to remember what a poor country Italy was, and not so long ago?'

This seemed something more than a rhetorical question, and so Brunetti answered, ‘I think people prefer to remember happy times, well, happier times, and if they can't remember them, then to change the memories and make them happier.'

'Old people seem to,' Paola agreed. 'If you listen to the old women at Rialto, all you hear is how much better things were in the past, how much better they lived, even with less.'

'Or maybe it's because most of the journalists are young, so they really don't remember how things were.'

She nodded. 'And we certainly have no sense of historical memory, not as a society, that is. I had a look at Chiara's history book last week, and it frightened me. In the chapters on this century, it just glides right past the Second World War. Mussolini makes a walk-on appearance in the Twenties, then he's led astray by the wicked Germans, and then it's all over and Rome is free again. Though not before our valiant troops fought like lions and died like heroes.'

'We were never taught anything at all about it in school, not that I can remember,' Brunetti said, pouring himself another half-glass of wine.

'Well,' Paola said after taking a sip of her own, 'when we were in school, the Right was in power, so they'd hardly want an honest discussion of Fascism. And once they formed their alliance with the Left, it would be inconvenient to talk about Communism.' Another sip. 'And since we changed sides during the war, I suppose they have to be careful who they present as the bad guys or the good guys.'

'Who's "they"?' Brunetti asked.

'The people who write the history books. Or, rather, the politicians who decide who will write the history books, at least the ones that get used in the schools.'

'And the idea of simple historical truth?' Brunetti asked.

'You spend most of your time reading history, Guido: that should be enough to show you there is no such thing.'

He had only to call to mind the difference between the Protestant and Catholic histories of the Papacy to see how right she was. But that was religion, where everyone is expected to lie; here, they were talking about living memory: people were still alive who had taken part in the events they were talking about; the fathers of most of his friends had fought in the war.

'Maybe it's harder to distinguish the truth when you know it from your own experience,' he suggested, then, seeing her confusion, he added, 'If it's just records of people you never knew, from hundreds of years ago, then you can be honest, or at least you're more likely to be honest.'

'Like the Church's account of the Inquisition?' she inquired.

He grinned at his defeat and asked, 'If not goose, what are we having?'

Gracious in her victory, she said, ‘I thought we'd eat the food of our forefathers.'

'Specifically?' 1

"Those involtini you like so much, with prosciutto and artichoke hearts in the centre.'

‘I doubt that any ancestor of mine ever ate such a thing,' he confessed.

'There's polenta to go with them. To preserve historical truth.'

Both children were present at lunch, but they were curiously subdued, concerned with the last weeks of school and the final exams of the year. Raffi, who hoped to begin university in the autumn, had become something of a phantom during the last months, emerging from his room only for meals or to ask his mother's help with a difficult translation from the Greek. His romance with Sara Paganuzzi was kept alive, it seemed, only by means of late night phone calls and occasional before-dinner meetings in Campo San Bortolo. Chiara, who was coming into the full inheritance of her mother's beauty more with every passing month, was still so caught up in the mysteries of mathematics and celestial navigation that she remained ignorant of the power her beauty was likely to give her.

When lunch was finished, Paola moved out on to the terrace, taking their coffee and luring her husband along with her. The early afternoon sun was so hot that Brunetti removed his tie before he joined her, the first sure sign that summer was on the way.

They sat in easy silence. Voices drifted towards them from a terrace to their left; occasionally one of the sheets hung to dry from the window of the apartment beneath them snapped in the freshening breeze which, alas, held no promise of rain.

'I'm probably going to spend a fair amount of time out in Pellestrina’ Brunetti said.

'When?'

'Starting this week, even as early as tomorrow.'

'To keep an eye on her?' Paola asked, without renewing her objections to Signorina Elettra's decision to go out to Pellestrina.

'Partly, though I'm not sure when she plans to get there.'

'What else?'

'To talk to people and see what they say.'

'Will they talk to you if they know you're a policeman?'

'Well, they can't refuse to talk to me, not really, though they can refuse to tell me the truth, or say they can't remember anything about the Bottins. That's the usual technique.'

'Then why talk to them?' Paola asked.

'Because of what they don't tell me or what they lie to me about.' He closed his eyes and lay back in the sun, letting it beat down on his face for the first time that year. After a long time, he said, 'I guess it makes me like one of those historians or forces me to behave the way they do.' He waited for Paola to ask for clarification, and when she did not, he glanced at her to see if she'd fallen asleep. But she had not. She sat beside him, attentive, waiting for him to continue.

'I've got to listen to all of the variant accounts, weigh the evidence, adjusting my response according to who profits from the different versions.'

'And keeping in mind that everyone is lying to you?'

'Or is likely to be lying to me’ he agreed. 'And then?'

'And then I see what Signorina Elettra has been told.'

'And then?' she repeated. 'I've no idea.'

'And you'll be back at night?' 'I should be. Why?'

She gave him a long look then, surprised at his question. 'In case I finally decide to run off with the postman. I'd like to know you'll still be here to feed the kids.'

Late in the afternoon, Signorina Elettra called up to Brunetti and told him that Vice-Questore Patta wanted to see him in his office. Brunetti seldom greeted such a summons with pleasure, but he was so bored with the reading and initialling of reports that he welcomed even this opportunity to escape. Quickly he went downstairs and into Signorina Elettra's office.

She greeted him with a smile. 'He wants to tell you who will be in charge while he's away.'

'Not me, I hope’ Brunetti said; it would complicate his plans to spend time in Pellestrina.

'No, he's already spoken to Marotta’ she said, naming a commissario from Turin who had been assigned to the Venice Questura earlier in the year.

'Am I meant to be offended?' Brunetti asked. Marotta was by far his junior and a non-Venetian, so his appointment could be intended as nothing but a calculated insult.

'Probably. Or at least I think he'd like you to be.'

'Then I'll do my best to appear so’ Brunetti said. 'I'd hate to disappoint him just as he's going off on vacation.'

'It's not a vacation, sir’ she said in a voice laden with reprimand. 'It's a conference about new methods of crime prevention’ she insisted, making no mention of the details of the invitation.

'In London’ Brunetti added.

'In London’ she confirmed.

'In English’ Brunetti said.

'Yes’ she agreed in that language.

'Which the Vice-Questore speaks as well as he speaks Finnish.'

'Probably better than Finnish. He can say, "Bond Street", "Oxford Street", and "The Dorchester".'

'And "The Ritz"‘ Brunetti suggested. 'Don't forget that.'

'You've discussed this with him?' she asked.

'Which, the conference or his English?'

'The conference and who should go.'

‘I didn't want to waste the time. He told me a few weeks ago that he was going, and before I could raise the question of the language, he told me that his wife had agreed to go along as interpreter.'

'He never told me that’ Signorina.. Elettra said, barely disguising her surprise and, he thought, irritation. 'Does she speak English?'

'As well as he’ Brunetti said and turned to knock at Patta's door.

The Vice-Questore, as always when in the act of mistreating Brunetti - to whom the invitation had been addressed - cast himself in the role of the injured party. To create the proper visual setting for this, he chose to remain seated at his desk, putting himself lower than Brunetti.

'Where have you been for the last few days?' he asked as soon as he saw Brunetti, who recognized the technique of the pre-emptive strike. Patta himself, wearing a grey suit Brunetti had never seen before, looked as though he'd been spending the last few days getting ready for his trip to London. His greying hair was freshly cut, and his face wore the early summer glow that comes from the careful attention of tanning lamps. As ever, Brunetti was struck by how absolutely right Patta looked for the job of senior police official; senior anything, for that matter.

'We had a call from Pellestrina, sir. Two men were murdered on their boat.' Brunetti tried his best to sound uninterested. 'The call came to us, so I had no choice but to go out and have a look.'

'That's out of our jurisdiction,' Patta said, though they both knew this was not true.

'The Carabinieri were also called,' Brunetti said with a small smile meant to display both relief and agreement with Patta's objection. 'So it's entirely likely that the case will be given to them.'

Something about the way Brunetti spoke made Patta suspicious, the way a dog is when he hears an unfamiliar tone in a familiar voice. 'Does it look like a simple case?'

'I've no idea, sir. Things like this usually turn out to be the result of either jealousy or greed.'

'If that's the case, then it might be a simple thing to solve. Perhaps we could keep it.'

'Oh, I've no doubt that it will be a simple case, sir. In fact, some of the people out there have already given us the name of a man who had trouble with one of the victims.'

'And?' Patta demanded, eager now that it sounded easy. The quick solution of a murder would be a coup for the Questura of Venice. Brunetti could almost see him writing the headline:

'QUICK ACTION BY VICE-QUESTORE SOLVES MURDER CASE.'

'Well, sir, with you away next week, I thought it might be better if the Carabinieri handled it.' Brunetti paused, waiting to see if Patta would pick up on his comment and discuss the hierarchy of command during his absence.

'And let them get the credit?' Patta demanded, making no attempt to hide his indignation and with no reference to the following week. 'If this is as simple as you say,' he began, raising a hand to stop Brunetti's protest, 'men it's definitely something we should investigate. The Carabinieri will make a complete hash of it.'

'But, sir,' Brunetti objected weakly, 'I'm not sure we can spare anyone to go out there.' One of Brunetti's favourite characters had always been Iago, whose skill he had long admired and often sought to emulate. Clasping Iago's image, as it were, to his bosom, Brunetti went on, 'Perhaps Marotta could take it. It would be good to send someone who couldn't possibly have any involvement with the people there. He's from Turin, isn't he, sir?' When Patta nodded, Brunetti went on, 'Good, then there's no chance that he'd know or be related to anyone in Pellestrina.'

Patta had had enough. 'Oh, for God's sake, use your head, Brunetti. If we send un torinese out there, no one will say a word to him. It's got to be someone local.' As if as an afterthought, Patta added, 'Besides, Marotta'll be taking my place during my absence, and he can't go running off to the ends of the laguna to interview people who don't know how to speak anything but dialect.' If these people also believed that the earth was flat as well as the centre of the universe, Patta's contempt for them could not have been more audible.

Ignoring Patta's remark and not at all certain that he should risk it, Brunetti nevertheless asked, 'But who, sir?'

'There are times when you're incredibly blind, Commissario.' Patta spoke so condescendingly that Brunetti could but admire his superior's self-restraint in not having said 'stupid'. 'You're Venetian. You've already been out there.'

With the exercise of equal self-restraint, Brunetti stopped himself from raising his hands to display shock and astonishment. It was a gesture he'd often seen in silent films from the Twenties and one he'd always wanted to use. Instead, voice deeply serious, he said, 'I'm not sure, sir.' A small goad, he had often noticed, worked on Patta far more effectively than a stronger impetus.

'Well, I am. It's a simple case, and we can use all the good publicity we can get, especially after those fools in the magistratura let all of the mafiosi out of prison.' The papers had been filled with little else for the last few days. Fifteen Mafia leaders, all condemned to life imprisonment, had been ordered to be released when a minor legal irregularity was discovered in the processing of their appeal. One of them, the papers never ceased to report, had confessed to the murders of fifty-nine people. And now all of them were free. Brunetti recalled Signorina Elettra's words, 'As free as air.'

'I'm not sure the two cases are related, sir,' Brunetti objected.

'Of course they're related’ Patta said, voice raised angrily. 'Any sort of bad publicity reflects on all of us.'

Was that all it was for Patta, Brunetti wondered, bad publicity? These laughing monsters are set free to return to feast on the bodies of their enemies, and all Patta can see is bad publicity?

Before principle could spur Brunetti to protest, Patta continued, 'I want you to go out there and settle this. If you've already got the name of someone, see what you can find out about him. Get this taken care of quickly.' Patta picked up a file from his desk, opened it, took his Mont Blanc from his breast pocket, and began to read. Good sense prevented Brunetti from raising an objection to Patta's peremptory commands or to the rudeness of his dismissal. He'd got what he had come for: the case was his. But not for the first time he left Patta's office feeling cheapened by having so easily manipulated the other man, by having again donned the cap and bells of the fool in order to achieve what he knew to be his by right. Marotta's temporary assignment had never been discussed, which meant Patta had been deprived of the opportunity to gloat over what he would perceive as a victory. But at least Brunetti had been spared the need to pretend to be offended by the decision. Command was the last thing he sought, but this was a piece of information he chose never to reveal, by word or deed, to his superior. Incapable by both nature and inclination of worshipping at the altar of the bitch goddess, Success, Brunetti had more modest desires. He was a man of short views, interested in the here, the now, the concrete. He left larger goals and desires to others, contenting himself with smaller ones: a happy family, a decent life, the attempt to do his job as well as he could. It seemed to him little enough to ask of life, and he settled for those hopes.

10

The next morning, Brunetti and Vianello left for Pellestrina a little after nine. Though both knew they were engaged in the investigation of two savage murders, the glory of the day once again conspired to lighten their hearts and fill them with a schoolboy sense of adventure and fun. No office to be stuck in, no Patta calling to demand instant progress, and no fixed times to be anywhere; even Bonsuan, grumbling at the helm that they'd be slowed down by cross-tides, couldn't dim their mood. The morning did not disappoint. The trees in the Giardini were covered with new leaves, and occasionally a sudden breeze set them shimmering, their undersides twinkling in the light reflected from the water.

As they approached the island of San Servolo, Bonsuan arched the boat in a wide curve to the right and took them past Santa Maria della Grazie and San Clemente. Even the thought that these islands had been used for centuries to isolate the sick in mind and body from the rest of the population of Venice did nothing to dampen Brunetti's spirits.

Vianello surprised him by saying, 'Soon there'll be no more chance to go blackberrying.'

Confused, thinking that the rush of the wind might have caused him to misunderstand, Brunetti leaned towards him and asked, 'What?'

'There,' Vianello said, pointing off to their right to the larger island that lay in the farther distance. 'Sacca Sessola. We used to go out there when we were kids to pick blackberries. It was abandoned even then, so they grew like crazy. We'd pick kilos in a day, eat until we were sick with them.' Vianello raised his hand to shade his eyes from the sun. 'But someone told me it's been sold, auctioned off to a university or some company, and they're going to make it into a convention centre or something like that.' Brunetti could hear his sigh. 'No more blackberries.'

'But more tourists, I suppose,' Brunetti said, referring to the deity currently worshipped by those who ran the city.

'I'd rather have blackberries.'

Neither of them spoke until they saw the single campanile of Poveglia on their right, when Vianello asked, 'How are we going to do this, sir?'

‘I think we should try to find out more about the waiter's story, about his brother and anything that might have come of that argument. See if you can find the brother and see what he says, and I'll go back and talk to Signora Follini.'

'You're a brave man, Commissario,' Vianello said, deadpan.

'My wife has promised to call the police if I'm not home by dinnertime.'

'I doubt that even we would be any good against Signora Follini.'

'I'm afraid you might be right, Sergeant, but still, a man must do his duty.'

'Like John Wayne.'

'Precisely. After I've spoken to her, I'll try the other bar: I think there was one up the street from the restaurant, on the other side.'

Vianello nodded. He'd seen it, but it had been closed the day they were there. 'Lunch?' he asked.

'Same place,' Brunetti answered. 'If you don't mind having to pass over the clams and fish.'

'Believe me, sir, I don't mind in the least.'

'But it's the food we grew up with,' Brunetti surprised himself by insisting. 'You must mind not eating it any more.'

'I told you, sir,' Vianello said, turning to look him in the face as he spoke, one hand holding his hat down against a sudden gust of wind, 'everything I've read tells me not to eat them.'

'But you've still got to miss them, want to eat them,' Brunetti insisted.

'Of course I miss them. I wouldn't be human if I didn't. People who stop smoking always miss cigarettes. But I think they'll kill me, really I do.' Before Brunetti could question or ridicule, he continued, 'No, not one plate of them and not fifty plates of them. But they're loaded with chemicals and heavy metals. God knows how they live themselves. I just don't want to eat them; the idea makes me faintly sick.'

'Then how can you miss them?'

'Because I'm Venetian, and they're what I grew up eating, as you said. But they weren't poisoned then. I loved them, loved eating them, loved my mother's spaghetti with clam sauce, her fish soup. But now I know what's in them, and I just can't eat them.' Aware that he still hadn't satisfied Brunetti's curiosity, he said, 'Maybe it's what Indians feel about eating cows.' He thought about it for a while, then corrected himself. 'No, they never eat them to begin with, so they can't stop, can they?' He considered the question further, finally gave up. ‘I can't explain what it's like, sir. I suppose I could eat them if I wanted to; it's just that I don't want to.'

Brunetti started to say something, but Vianello asked, 'Why does it confuse you so much? You wouldn't react like this if someone stopped smoking, would you?'

Brunetti considered this. 'I suppose not.' He laughed. 'It's probably because it's about food, and I find it hard to believe that anyone could stop eating something as good as clams, regardless of the consequences.'

That seemed to settle the issue, at least for the moment. Bonsuan gave the engine full throttle, and its noise blocked out any further attempt to talk. Occasionally they passed boats on either side, anchored in the water, men sitting idly with fishing rods in their hands, engaged more in contemplation than in the attempt to catch fish. Hearing the speed of the approaching boat, most of the men looked up, but when they saw that it was a police boat they returned their attention to the water.

Too soon, as far as Brunetti was concerned, they saw the long dock of Pellestrina. A narrow gap showed the place where the Squallus still lay on the bottom, the masts emerging from the water at the same crazy angle. Bonsuan took them to the end of the pier, cut the motor, and glided silently until they were less than a metre from the riva, when he suddenly shot the motor into reverse for a few seconds, then as quickly shut it down. The boat drifted silently to the dock. Vianello tossed a mooring rope around the metal stanchion, easily pulling the boat into place. With quick precision, he knotted the rope and dropped it on deck.

Bonsuan leaned out of the cabin and said, 'I'll wait for you.'

'That's all right, Bonsuan,' Brunetti said. 'I've no idea when we'll finish; we can take the bus back to the Lido and the boat from there.'

'I'll wait for you,' Bonsuan repeated as if Brunetti had never spoken or he hadn't heard what his superior said.

Since Bonsuan's duties were those of a pilot only, Brunetti could hardly ask him to move among the population of Pellestrina, asking for information about the murder of the Bottins. Nor did he want to order him to return to the Questura, even though the boat might be needed there. He compromised by asking, 'What'll you do all day?'

Bonsuan turned and pulled open the lid of the locker to his left. He bent down and pulled out three fishing rods and a small plastic-covered pail. 'I'll be out there,' he said, indicating the water to their right. He looked directly at Brunetti and said, 'If you like, I could go and have a coffee in the bar after I'm done fishing.'

'That might be a good idea,' Brunetti agreed and stepped up on to the pier.

He and Vianello walked towards the clustered houses of the small village. Brunetti looked down at his watch. 'It's after eleven now. I'll meet you at the restaurant.'

When they reached what passed as the centre of Pellestrina, Brunetti turned to his left and approached Signora Follini's store, while Vianello continued on ahead, intending to stop at the restaurant and see if the waiter could tell him where to find his brother.

Signora Follini was already standing behind the counter, talking to an old woman. Signora Follini glanced up when he came in and started to smile. But as Brunetti watched, he saw her suddenly remember the presence of the other woman and change the smile into a formal acknowledgement of the arrival of a stranger who had no claim to anything beyond civility.

'Buon giorno,' Brunetti said.

Signora Follini, today wearing an orange dress with large bands of ivory-coloured lace at neck and waist, returned his greeting but immediately turned her attention back to the old woman, who was watching Brunetti. She looked at him, eyes the clouded grey of advancing age, but no less keen for that. If she had teeth, she hadn't bothered to wear them that day. She was short, at least a head shorter than Signora Follini, and she was entirely dressed in black. Looking at her, Brunetti thought that the word 'swathed' would be more appropriate, for it was difficult to distinguish just what it was she wore. A long skirt came to well below her knees, and some sort of woollen coat was buttoned tightly over that. Wrapped around her shoulders and covering her head was a crocheted woollen scarf the ends of which hung down almost to her waist.

Her clothing declared her widowhood as indisputably as would a hand-held placard or a giant letter pinned to her breast. The South was full of women like this, shrouded in black and destined to pass, cloud-like, through the remaining years of their lives, the limits of their behaviour as strictly delineated as those of peasant women in Bengal or Peru. But that was the South, and this was Venice, where widows wore bright colours, went dancing if and with whom they pleased, married again if they so chose.

He felt her eyes on him, nodded, and said, 'Good morning, Signora.'

She ignored him and turned back to Signora Follini. 'And a package of candles and half a kilo of flour,' Brunetti thought she said, though her dialect was so strong he wasn't sure. Here he was, less than twenty kilometres from his own home, and he found it hard to understand the natives.

He moved towards the back of the store and started to examine the goods on the shelves. He picked up a can of Cirio tomatoes and, out of curiosity, turned it over to look at the sell-by date. It had expired two years before. He set the can carefully back into the ring of dust that had surrounded it and moved towards the soap powder.

He glanced back at the counter, but the widow was still there. He heard her talking to Signora Follini, but her voice was too low for him to hear what she was saying, not that he was sure he'd understand her if he could. A thin film lay on top of the irregularly stacked boxes of detergent; one had been chewed open at a corner, and a small mound of tiny white and blue beads had spilled out on to the shelf.

His watch told him he'd been inside the store for more than five minutes. Signora Follini had added nothing to the candles and flour, which sat on the counter in front of the old woman, but still they stood there and still they talked.

He retreated further into the back of the shop and directed his attention to a row of bottles of pickles and olives that stood at the height of his chest. One bottle of what appeared to be mushrooms caught his attention because of a small oval of white mould that had edged from beneath the lid and begun to make its way slowly down the side of the bottle. Next to it stood a tiny can that had no label. It sat there, looking curiously lost and useless, yet faintly menacing.

Brunetti heard the bell and turned towards the counter. The old woman was gone, and with her had disappeared the candles and flour. He walked towards the front of the store and said again, 'Buon giorno.'

She smiled in response, but the smile had little warmth; perhaps the old woman had taken some of it with her or had left behind a cool warning about how women with no visible husbands were meant to behave in the presence of strange men.

'How are you today, Signora?'

'Fine, thank you,' she answered with some formality. 'How can I help you?' On his previous visit, she would have asked this with the clear suggestion that what she would be willing to provide contained at least the promise of sensuality. This time, however, the list suggested by her voice went no further than dried peas, salt and a bottle of anchovies.

Brunetti gave her his warmest smile. 'I've come back to speak to you, Signora,' he began, wondering if this would cause her to respond. When it did not, he went on, ‘I wanted to ask if you'd remembered anything else about the Bottins that might be useful to us.' Her face remained expressionless. 'You suggested, the last time we spoke, that you knew at least the son very well, and I wondered if you'd thought of anything else that might be important.'

She shook her head but still didn't speak.

'By now I suppose it's common knowledge that they were murdered,' he began and waited.

'I know,' she finally said.

'But what people don't know is that it was a particularly vicious crime, especially what was done to Marco.'

She nodded at this, to acknowledge either that she had heard him or that even this detail was now known to the people of Pellestrina.

'And so we need to learn as much about them as possible so that we can begin to get an idea of who would want to do this.' When she didn't respond, he asked, 'Do you understand, Signora?'

She looked up and met his eyes. Her mouth remained frozen in the smile the surgeons had given her, but Brunetti could not mistake the sadness in her eyes. 'No one would want to do Marco any harm. He was a good boy.'

She stopped here and glanced away from him, towards the empty back of the store.

'And his father?' Brunetti asked.

'I can't tell you anything,' she said in a tight voice. 'Nothing.'

Something in Brunetti responded to the nervousness in her voice. 'Nothing you tell me will be repeated, Signora.'

The immobility of her features made her expression impossible to read, but he thought he sensed her relax.

'They couldn't have wanted to kill Marco,' she said.

'They?' he asked.

The nervousness swept back. 'Whoever it was,' she said.

'What sort of man was he, Giulio?' Brunetti asked.

Her sculpted chin moved back and forth in absolute denial of any further information.

'But, Signora . . .' Brunetti began but was interrupted by the sound of the bell. He saw her eyes shoot in the direction of the door. She stepped back from the counter and said, 'As I've told you, Signore, you'll have to buy matches at the tobacco shop. I don't sell them.'

'Sorry, Signora. When I saw the candles you sold the old lady, I thought you'd be selling them, too,' he answered seamlessly, paying no attention to the sound of footsteps behind him.

Brunetti turned away from the woman and moved towards the door. As is the custom in small villages, he nodded in acknowledgement of the presence of the two men who stood there and, while paying no evident attention to them, registered every detail of their appearance. As he approached the door, they stepped to either side of it, a motion that filled Brunetti with a vague sense of menace, though the men made it clear that they took as little interest in him as he did in them.

The little bell tinkled as he opened the door, and when he stepped into the sunlight, his back gave an answering shiver as he heard the door close gently behind him.

He turned to the right, his mind absorbing the faces and forms of the two men. Though he recognized neither, Brunetti knew too well the type of men they were. They might have been related, so similar were the red, roughened complexions of their faces and so similar their thick, hardened bodies. But both of these things might just as easily have come from years of heavy work outside. The younger man had a narrow face, and dark hair slicked back with some sort of oily pomade. The older wore his in the same fashion, but as it was much thinner, it ended up looking as if it had been painted on to his skull, though a few greasy locks managed to dangle limply on the collar of his shirt. Both wore jeans that gave signs of heavy wear and the thick boots common to men who did heavy work.

The men had studied Brunetti with eyes framed by a multitude of small lines, the lines that came with years of life in the sun, and both had given him the sort of attention that is usually given to prey: motionless, watchful, eager to make a move. It was this sense of contained aggression that had set off alarms in Brunetti's body, regardless of the fact that the Signora was there as a witness, regardless of the fact that the men probably knew he was a policeman.

He walked down the narrow street and into the tobacco shop. It was as dim and grimy as Signora Follini's store, another place where failure had come to nest.

The man behind the counter raised his attention from the magazine he was reading and looked at him from behind thick glasses. 'Yes?' he asked.

'I'd like some matches,' Brunetti said, maintaining Signora Follini's story.

The man pulled open a drawer beneath the counter and asked, 'Box or booklet?'

'Box, please,' Brunetti said, reaching into his pocket for some small change.

The man set a small box of matches in front of Brunetti and asked for two hundred lire. As Brunetti placed the coins on the counter, the man asked, 'Cigarettes?'

'No,' Brunetti answered. 'I'm trying to stop. But I like to have matches in case I can't stand it any more and ask someone to give me one.'

The man smiled at that. 'Lot of people trying to stop,' he said. "They don't want to, not really, most of them, but they think it's good for them, so they try.'

'And do they succeed?'

'Beh,' the man exclaimed in disgust. 'They manage it for a week or two, or a month, but sooner or later they're all back in here, buying cigarettes.'

'Doesn't say much for people's willpower, does it?' Brunetti asked.

The man picked up the coins and dropped them one by one into the wooden cash drawer. 'People are going to do what they want to do, no matter what you tell them and no matter how bad they know it is for them to do it. Nothing can stop them; not fear or law or promises.' He saw Brunetti's expression and added, 'You spend a lifetime selling cigarettes, and that's one thing you learn. Nothing will ever stop them, not if they want to badly enough.'

11

The tobacconist's words lingered with Brunetti as he walked towards the restaurant: he wondered if they would some day apply to Vianello and the clams or whether the sergeant would turn out to be one of those rare men who have the strength of character to stop themselves from doing what they want to do. As for himself, Brunetti believed he was not particularly strong-willed and knew he often manipulated situations so that he could avoid having to make the decision to do something he didn't want to do.

Two years ago, when Paola had finally nagged him into having a complete physical exam, he had told the doctor not to bother with the tests for cholesterol and diabetes, leaving it to the doctor to infer that the tests were not necessary because he'd recently had them done. In truth, Brunetti had not wanted to know the results because he had not wanted to have to do whatever he would have to do if the results were bad. Whenever he thought of his deceit and the possible consequences to his family, he told himself he had never felt healthier in his life and to stop worrying about it.

And three years ago, when an Albanian suspect had been arrested for having beaten the two eleven-year-old prostitutes who helped to support him, Brunetti had done nothing to prevent his being assigned for questioning to a detective who had a daughter the same age and another whose fifteen-year-old daughter had been assaulted by another Albanian. Nor had he ever enquired as to just what happened during the examination, though the suspect had quickly confessed to the crimes.

Before he could examine his conscience further, he reached the restaurant and went in. From behind the counter, where he was making coffee for a few men standing at the bar, the owner acknowledged his arrival with a nod. 'Your officer is in the back,' he said. All of the men at the counter turned to look at Brunetti, and he felt the same intense stare he'd been given by the two men in the store. Ignoring it, he moved to the curtained doorway, pushed aside the strips of plastic, and went into the dining room.

Vianello sat at the same table, a bottle of mineral water and a half-litre of white wine in front of him. As Brunetti pulled out the chair opposite him, Vianello leaned forward and poured some water, then some wine, into the glasses at Brunetti's place.

Brunetti drank down the glass of water, surprised at how thirsty he was, curious as to whether it could be a delayed response to the fear - he admitted that it was fear - he had felt when he turned his back on the two men. Looking across at Vianello, he asked, 'Well?'

"The waiter, Lorenzo Scarpa, hasn't been back to work since we were here. The boss says he called and said he had to go and take care of a friend, but he didn't say where the friend lived, and he didn't give any idea of how long he'd be gone.' Brunetti asked nothing about this, so Vianello continued. ‘I went to his place - the boss gave me his address - but his neighbours can't remember seeing him for a few days, say they don't have any idea where he is.'

'And the brother, Sandro?'

'Surprisingly enough, he's still here. Well, he's been here. His boat is still out, left before dawn this morning and still isn't back.'

'What could that mean?'

'Anything, really,' Vianello said. "That the fish are running and he doesn't want to stop or that he's had engine trouble. The boss here seemed to think it's nothing more than a run of good luck, lots of fish.'

Vianello sipped at his wine, then went on. 'Signora Bottin died of cancer five years ago. Her relatives have had nothing to do with Giulio or Marco since she died.'

'Why?' Brunetti asked.

"That house on Murano. They disputed her will, but as it had been left to her by her parents and Bottin agreed that it should go to the son entirely, there was really no case they could make for it'

'And since then?'

'There's been no contact between them, it seems.'

'Where'd you learn this?'

"The owner of the bar. He seemed to think it was innocent enough to tell me at least this much.'

Brunetti wondered what new dispute would now result about ownership but asked, instead, 'And this Giacomini the waiter told us about?'

Vianello pulled out his notebook and flipped it open. 'Paolo Giacomini, another fisherman. The owner says he lives in Malamocco, but for some reason he keeps his boat here. He's known as a troublemaker, someone who likes to cause bad blood between people.'

'And the trouble between Scarpa and Bottin?'

'No one would tell me anything about it except that there was some sort of run-in between them a year or so ago. Either they collided or came close and got their nets tangled. Whatever it was, there's been bad feeling between them ever since.'

'We can try the police in Chioggia,' Brunetti suggested.

'Probably the best thing, if it happened there,' Vianello agreed. 'If that's where the denuncia was made, perhaps they can tell us something. I get the feeling that these people take care of things in their own way. And they've all taken a vow of silence where Bottin is concerned. No one can remember anything about him; certainly no one has a bad word to say about him.'

'Yet Signora Follini told me that, whatever happened, it happened because of him, not because of the son.'

'So now what do we do?' Vianello asked.

'First we have lunch,' Brunetti answered, 'then we go and see if we can find this Giacomini.'

The meal passed off pleasantly enough, in part because Brunetti made no comment upon Vianello's choices and in part because he restrained himself from having clams, though he did eat an enormous platter of coda di rospo which the owner assured him had been caught that morning. The owner had not succeeded in replacing Lorenzo Scarpa and had to wait on tables himself, so the meal took a long time to arrive, a situation worsened by the entrance of a string of Japanese tourists just as Brunetti and Vianello ordered.

Their guide seated them at two long tables against the walls, where they seemed quite happy to wait for their meal while smiling and bowing to one another, the guide, Brunetti and Vianello, and the owner. Their behaviour was so exquisitely restrained and polite that Brunetti was amazed that anyone should ever speak badly of them. When he and Vianello were finished, they paid their bill, again in cash, received no receipt and got to their feet. Automatically, Brunetti bowed in the direction of the Japanese, waited for Vianello to do the same and for the Japanese to respond, then led his sergeant out to the bar section, where they had coffee but refused grappa.

It had grown still warmer while they were inside, and they rejoiced in the heat of the day. It brought back the sense of boyish freedom they'd experienced when they set out that morning. Back at the police launch, they found no sign of Bonsuan, though a string of fish was hanging in the water from a stanchion on the other side of the boat.

Neither of them much minded having to wait, and they were happy enough to sit on a wooden bench that looked across the waters in the general direction of Venice, though all they could see was the water of the laguna, a few boats moving across it, and the topless, endless sky.

'Where do you think he's gone?' Brunetti asked.

'Bonsuan or Scarpa?' 'Bonsuan.'

'He's probably in some bar, learning more in five minutes than we have in two days.'

'Wouldn't surprise me in the least,' Brunetti said, removing his jacket and turning his face up to the sun. Vianello was prevented from doing the same only by the fact that he was wearing uniform.

After about ten minutes, Brunetti was awakened from a semi-doze by Vianello's voice, saying, 'Here he comes.'

He opened his eyes, looked to the right, and saw Bonsuan, wearing his dark uniform slacks and a white shirt with a large black stain on one shoulder, walking in their direction. When the pilot reached them, Brunetti moved to the left, making a space for him on the bench between them.

'And?' he asked when Bonsuan sat down. ‘I decided to have trouble with the engine,' the pilot answered.

'Decided?' Vianello asked.

'That way I'd have to ask someone for help.'

'What did you do?'

‘I sawed through one of the distributor wires with a file and left it hanging, then tried to start up. Couldn't. So I opened the engine again, saw what was wrong, and went into the village to see if someone would give me a piece of wire.'

'And?' Brunetti asked.

'And I found a man I know from the Army, when I did my military service. His son has a boat out here, and my friend takes care of the engines for him. He came along with me, saw the wire, went back to his workshop and found me a piece, then came back and helped me change it.'

'Did he realize what you'd done?' Vianello asked.

'Probably. I was hoping to get someone who didn't know much about engines, well, as much as I do. But Fidele probably saw what I'd done. Doesn't matter. I took him down to the bar to thank him and he was willing to tell me about them.'

'The Bottins?' Brunetti asked. 'Yes.'

'What did he say?'

Brunetti found it interesting, the way Bonsuan distanced himself from the information he'd managed to obtain. It was what Brunetti wanted or what Vianello wanted. It was probably no more than Bonsuan's way of remaining loyal to the other fisherman, the tribe he was so soon going to rejoin.

'Anything you're looking for, it was the father,' Bonsuan finally explained.

'Who told you that?' Vianello asked.

At the same time Brunetti asked, 'What did he do?'

Bonsuan answered both questions with the same shrug, then said, 'No one told me anything exact, but it was clear that no one liked him. Usually they pretend they do, at least they do when they're talking to foreigners like me. But not with Bottin. I figure it's something he did, but that's just a feeling. I don't have any idea what it could have been, but it was as if they didn't consider him one of them any more.'

'Because of the way he treated his wife?' Brunetti asked.

'No,' Bonsuan said with a sudden shake of his head. 'She was from Murano, so she didn't count’ and with that, he dismissed her humanity as easily as the possibility.

There was a long silence. Three cormorants came whizzing past them and splashed down a good distance from shore. They swam around for a while, seemed to confer among themselves as to where the fish might be, then, so smoothly as hardly to disturb the surface of the water, disappeared below it, leaving no trace. Automatically, curious, Brunetti began to hold his breath when he saw them slip under the water, but he was forced to expel it and take three long breaths before the first of them popped up, corklike, quickly followed by the other two.

'Let's go over to Malamocco’ he said, getting to his feet.

The engine of the launch sprang instantly to life. Vianello cast off, and Bonsuan swung them out from the pier and in a broad circle back the way they had come. Hugging the narrow peninsula on his right, he headed towards Malamocco. As they approached the canal that led out into the Adriatic, Brunetti leaned forward to tap Bonsuan on the shoulder. The pilot turned to him, and Brunetti pointed off to the left, where he saw smoke billowing up in the far distance. 'What's that?' he asked.

Covering his eyes with his left hand, Bonsuan followed Brunetti's gesture and said, 'Marghera.'

Seeing nothing of interest, Bonsuan turned his attention back to the waters ahead.

Suddenly, he switched the engine into neutral and then just as quickly into reverse, forcing the boat to glide to a halt. Brunetti, who had been trying to distinguish the source of the smoke, turned when he felt the abrupt change in the motor's rhythm.

'Maria Vergine,' escaped his lips as he saw an enormous ship looming, endlessly high, endlessly threatening, to their right. 'What is it?' he asked Bonsuan. Though they were a few hundred metres away, his perspective was still at an upward slant, and all he could see was the side of the hull, the Plimsoll line, and the left side of the glassed-in control deck, soaring as distant and high as a church tower.

'A tanker,' Bonsuan answered. He might as well have said, 'A rapist' or 'An arsonist', so fierce was his tone.

Their own engine silent, they were enveloped in the roar that issued from the tanker. The universe became noise, a force that battered against them as fiercely as the shock waves from an explosion. Involuntarily, all of them pressed their hands to their ears and kept them there until the tanker had passed them and was continuing up the Canale dei Petroli towards the factories on the mainland. The waves from its wake hit them then, and they were forced to grab at the railings to keep their balance as the launch bobbed up and down and back and forth, the three of them dancing like fools on the deck.

Both hands clenched on the railing in front of him, Brunetti leaned forward and took a deep breath. His gaze fell to the waters below them, and he saw small, button-sized blobs on the surface. There were only a few, and he could not be sure that they had not been there before he saw the ship.

Bonsuan switched the engine back into life. Silent, they continued towards Malamocco.

12

The trip proved useless, as there was no sign of Giacomini at the address the owner of the restaurant had provided. It was too late in the day to continue to Chioggia, so Brunetti decided to contact the police by phone and told Bonsuan to take them back to the Questura.

Whether it was the sight of the tanker or the small dark blobs they had seen on the water, something had darkened their spirits, and they said little on the way back. The light continued to single out the myriad beauties of the city, especially to those who approached it, as people were meant to do, from the sea. It was late afternoon, and the sun still bore down on them; Vianello said something about having forgotten to put on sun screen. Brunetti ignored him.

As they pulled up to the Questura, Brunetti saw that Pucetti was on guard duty that afternoon, and the sight of the young officer gave him the idea. Pucetti saluted as they stepped off the boat. Brunetti told Vianello to call the Chioggia police to see if they had any details on the incident between Scarpa and Bottin and said he'd wait for him in his office but wanted to have a word with Pucetti first.

'Pucetti,' Brunetti began, 'how long are you assigned to guard duty?'

'All this week, sir. Then next week I have night patrol.'

'Would you be interested in a special assignment?'

The young man's face lit up. 'Oh, yes, sir.'

Brunetti appreciated his not complaining about guard duty: having to stand there all day with little to do but open the door or break up the occasional altercation between people waiting in long lines outside the various offices.

'Good, let me go and check the schedules,' Brunetti said and started to walk away. He had taken only two steps when he turned back towards Pucetti. 'Did you ever work as a waiter?'

'Yes, sir,' he answered. 'My brother-in-law has a pizzeria in Castello, and I work there sometimes on the weekends.' Again Pucetti pleased him by asking no questions.

'Good. I'll be back.'

He went immediately to Signorina Elettra's office, where he found her arranging a spray of forsythia in a blue Venini vase. 'Is that yours?' he asked, pointing to the vase.

'No, sir. It belongs to the Questura. The other one, the one I used to use, was stolen last week, so I had to replace it.'

'Stolen?' he asked. 'From the Questura?'

'Yes. One of the janitors left it in the washroom after he washed it out, and it disappeared.'

'From the Questura?'

'I'll be more careful with this one,' she said, slipping a curved branch into place. Brunetti had a friend who worked for Venini and so knew the cost of such a vase: no less than three million.

'How is it that the Questura came to buy this one?' he asked, careful of his phrasing.

'Office equipment,' she answered. She put the last branch in place and stepped aside to allow him to lift it for her. With a languid hand, she pointed to a spot on the windowsill, and Brunetti set it gently down just where she indicated.

'Is Pucetti smart enough for you?' he asked.

'That sweet young man with the moustache?' she asked in a voice that ignored the fact that Pucetti was probably no more than five years younger than she. 'The one with the Russian girlfriend?' she added.

'Yes. Is he bright enough for you?'

'To do what with?' she asked.

'To be out on Pellestrina.'

'Doing what?'

'Working in a restaurant but keeping an eye on you.'

'May I ask how you are going to bring this about?'

"The waiter who gave us the first information about Bottin has disappeared. He called the owner and gave him some story about having to go and take care of a sick friend, and there's been no sign of him since then. So they need a waiter.'

'What does Pucetti have to say about this?' she asked, sitting down behind her desk.

'I haven't asked him yet. I wanted to ask you first.'

'That's very kind of you, sir.'

'He'd be there to protect you, so I wanted to be sure you thought he was capable of doing that.'

She considered this for a moment and said, 'Yes, I think he'd be a good choice.' She glanced at the forsythia, then back at Brunetti. 'Shall I take care of scheduling him?'

'Yes,' Brunetti answered but then couldn't resist the temptation to ask, 'How will you do it?'

'He'll be put on something I think I'll call "Ancillary Duty".'

'What does that mean?'

'It means anything I want it to mean.'

‘I see,' Brunetti said and then asked, 'What about Marotta? Isn't he in charge next week? Isn't it his decision?'

'Ah, Marotta,' she said with barely disguised contempt. 'He never wears a tie to work.' So much, thought Brunetti, for Marotta's chances of permanent promotion at the Venice Questura.

'While you're here, sir,' she said, pulling open a drawer and taking from it a few sheets of paper, 'let me give you this. It's everything I could find out about those people. And the autopsy report.'

He took the papers, and went back to his office. The autopsy, performed by a pathologist at the hospital whose name Brunetti did not recognize, stated that Giulio Bottin had died as the result of any one of three blows to his forehead and skull, the pattern of bone shattering consistent with the use of a cylindrical object of some sort, a metal pipe or pole, perhaps. His son had bled to death, the blade having sunk so deep as to nick the abdominal aorta. The absence of water in their lungs and the fact that Giulio Bottin would have taken some time to die made it unlikely that they had been killed soon before the sinking of the boat.

Brunetti had just finished reading the autopsy report when Vianello knocked and came in. ‘I called Chioggia, sir,' the sergeant said, not bothering to sit down, 'but they had no details whatsoever.'

Brunetti set the papers aside. 'As you said, they don't seem to be the sort of people who expect the police to solve their problems for them.'

He half expected Vianello to ask if anyone did, any more, but the sergeant made no reply. Brunetti took this opportunity to tell Vianello about his plan to send Pucetti to Pellestrina.

'What about recommendations?' Vianello asked.

'Pucetti said he worked in his brother-in-law's pizzeria. He can call the place in Pellestrina and say he's heard they're looking for a waiter, then recommend Pucetti. All in the family.'

'What if someone recognizes him?' Vianello asked, echoing Brunetti's own fear.

'Not likely to happen, is it?' Brunetti asked by way of response, conscious as he did of how much he sounded like Signorina Elettra.

Reading the signs of Brunetti's reluctance, Vianello didn't object; excusing himself without asking for new orders, he went downstairs.

Brunetti returned to the papers Signorina Elettra had given him. If the Alessandro Scarpa Brunetti was curious about was in his thirties -which distinguished him from the other Alessandro Scarpa who lived on Pellestrina, who was eighty-seven - then he had been arrested three years before for threatening a man with a knife. The other man had, the next day, changed his story and retracted the accusation, so there was nothing in the police files against Scarpa, though the Maresciallo of Carabinieri on the Lido said that Scarpa was known to cause trouble when he drank.

No information could be gathered about anyone with the surname Giacomini.

Signora Follini, it turned out, was a horse of a different colour. Follini was not her married name, for Signora Follini, though she had often enjoyed the company of men, had yet to do so under benefit of clergy. Her given name was Luisa, and she had been born on Pellestrina fifty-two years before.

Her familiarity with the police, or perhaps it would be more exact to say theirs with her, began when she was nineteen, when she was arrested for soliciting. A first offender, she had been reprimanded and released, only to be arrested for the same offence at least three times during the next year. There was a long gap then, suggesting either that Luisa Follini had come to some accommodation with the local police or had moved from the area. She did not reappear in Pellestrina until twelve years ago, when she had been arrested under the still-stringent drug laws for possession, use and attempted sale of heroin as well as for prostitution.

Luckily for her, she had been accepted at a drug rehabilitation centre near Bologna, where she had spent three years, returning to Pellestrina, it seemed, cured of both her addiction to heroin and her occupation. Her parents had died during her absence, and she had taken over the small store they owned in the village, where she had remained until the present time.

Reading the report, Brunetti remembered that her dress had had long sleeves, and he wondered where the money for her surgery had come from and when she had had the operations done. Who had paid for them? The small store he had seen could in no way provide for the work evident in her face; nor, for that fact, could casual prostitution or the sale of heroin in a place as small as Pellestrina.

He thought back to the two occasions he had spoken with her. The first time, she had been flirtatious and wryly theatrical about the limitations of living in a place like Pellestrina. With the history she trailed behind her, she would surely know the full cost of that, he reflected. But she had given no sign of the nervous energy of the addict. Nor had her nervousness the second time seemed related to drugs: it had been the nervousness of fear, and it had peaked with the entrance of those two men.

He had no idea how late she would keep her store open. He pulled out the phone book and checked the listings for Pellestrina. Follini, Luisa was given. He dialled the number, and the phone was picked up on the third ring. She answered, giving her name.

'Signora,' he began, 'this is Commissario Brunetti. I spoke to you earlier.' He heard a soft click as the receiver was replaced.

He put the phone book back in the drawer, put the file to the left of his desk, and went downstairs to talk to Pucetti.

13

Pucetti could barely contain his delight at the assignment. At the mention of Signorina Elettra's name he smiled, and at Brunetti's explanation that it would be his chief duty to protect her, he seemed almost to glow. When the young officer asked whose idea it was to send her there, Brunetti hedged and answered, instead, that he hoped Pucetti's girlfriend would have no objection to the special assignment, that is, Ancillary Duty.

That night after dinner he told Paola about Pucetti, hoping she would agree that this would, if not assure, then at least increase Signorina Elettra's safety.

'What an odd couple they are,' Paola said.

'Who?'

'Signorina Elettra and Pucetti.'

'They're hardly a couple’ Brunetti protested.

'No, I know that. But I mean, as people; it's so odd that people like that, so bright, should be working for the police.'

Not a little indignant, Brunetti said, ‘I work for the police, as well. I hope you haven't forgotten that.'

'Oh, don't be such a thin-skinned baby, Guido’ she said, putting her hand on his arm. 'You know exactly what I mean. You're a professional, with a law degree, and you joined the police when things were different, when it was a respectable thing to do with your life.'

'Does that mean it isn't any more?'

'No, I suppose it's still respectable’ she began, then, seeing his expression, hastily said, ‘I mean of course it's a respectable choice; you know I mean that. But it's just that the best people, people like you, aren't joining it any more. In ten years, it will be filled with Pattas and Alvises, the ambition-maddened and the hopelessly stupid.'

'Which is which?' Brunetti asked.

She laughed at that. 'Well might you ask.' They were drinking verbena tisane out on the terrace, the children safely returned to their books. Four very plump clouds, pink with the reflected light of evening, formed a distant backdrop to the campanile of San Polo; the rest of the sky was clear and promised another day of glory.

She returned to the subject. 'Why do you think it is that so few really worthwhile people join now?'

Instead of answering, he asked a question. 'It's the same for you, isn't it? What sort of new colleagues are you getting at the university?'

'God, we sound like Pliny the Elder, don't we, sitting around and grumbling about how disrespectful youth is and how everything is going to hell?'

'People have always said that. It's one of the few constants in the histories I read: every age sees the one before it as the golden age when men were virtuous, women pure, and children obedient.'

'Don't forget "respectful",' Paola suggested. 'The children or the women?' 'Both, I suppose.'

Neither of them spoke for a long time, not until the clouds had drifted to the south and served to frame the campanile of San Marco.

Brunetti broke the silence by asking, 'Who'd join now?' He let the question lie, and when Paola didn't bother to answer, he went on, 'It happens too often: we work to arrest them, then when we do, the lawyers get their hands on the case, or the judges, and they end up getting off. I've seen it happen dozens of times, and I'm seeing it happen more and more often. There's that woman who got married in Bologna last week. Two years ago she stabbed and killed her husband. Sentenced to nine years. But she's out on appeal after three months in jail, and now she's married again.'

Ordinarily, Paola would have made some ironic comment on the bravery of the new husband, but she waited to see if he was finished. When he went on, what he said shocked her. ‘I could retire, you know.' Still she didn't say anything. 'I've got the years in service. Well, almost. I suppose what I mean is I could retire in two years.'

Paola asked, 'Is that what you want to do?'

He sipped at his tisane and found it had grown cold. He tipped the cold tea out into the large terracotta tub that held the oleander, poured a fresh cup, added honey, and said, 'Probably not. Not really. But it costs so much at times to watch what happens and not be able to do anything to stop it.' Brunetti leaned back in his chair and stretched his legs out in front of him, his cup held between both hands. 'I'm over-reacting, I know, to this thing with the woman getting married, but every once in a while I read something or something happens, and I just can't stand it'

'Didn't the papers say he beat her?' Paola asked.

‘I know someone in Bologna. He did the original questioning. She said nothing about that until she spoke to a lawyer. She'd been having an affair with the guy she married.'

'None of that was in the papers, so I suppose none of it was mentioned at her trial,' Paola said.

'No, there was no proof of the affair. But she killed the husband, maybe during an argument, as she said, and now she's married to the other guy, and nothing will happen to her.'

'Happily ever after?' Paola suggested.

"That's only a small case,' he began but instantly corrected himself, 'No, no one's murder is small. I mean it was a single case, and maybe there'd been an argument. But it happens all the time: men kill ten, twenty people, and then some clever lawyer, or more often, some incompetent judge, gets them out. And they don't hesitate a minute till they go back to doing what they do best, killing people.'

Paola, who had long experience of listening to him in these moments, had never heard Brunetti so distressed or angry about the conditions under which he worked.

'What would you do if you retired?'

'That's just it: I have no idea. It's too late to try to take the law exams; I'd probably have to go back to university and start all over again.'

'If there is one thing I recommend you don't do,' she interrupted, 'it is to think about going back to university.' Her shudder of horror at the thought was no less real for being consciously manufactured.

They considered the question for a while, but neither came up with anything. Finally Paola said, 'Didn't the noble Romans always go back to their farms and devote themselves to the improvement of the land and the writing of letters to friends in the city, lamenting the state of the Empire?'

'Umm,' Brunetti agreed. 'But I'm afraid I'm not noble.'

'And thank God you're not a Roman’ Paola added.

'Nor do we have a farm.'

'I suppose that means you can't retire’ she concluded and asked for another cup of tisane.

The weekend passed quietly. Brunetti had no clear idea of when Signorina Elettra planned to go out to Pellestrina. He thought of calling her at home, even looked up her number in the phone book, something he'd never done before. He found the listing, a low number in Castello that would put her home, he calculated, somewhere near Santa Maria Formosa. While he had the page open, he checked for other Zorzis and found at least two who lived within a few numbers of her address: family?

She had given him the number of her telefonino, but he'd left it in the office, and so short of calling her at home, he had no way of knowing what she was doing until Monday morning, when he would or would not see her at her desk at the Questura.

On Saturday evening, Pucetti called to tell him he was already on Pellestrina and already at work, though he had seen no sign of Signorina Elettra. His brother-in-law, Pucetti explained, after discovering that he and the owner of the restaurant in Pellestrina had many acquaintances in common, had secured Pucetti the chance to work at least until the owner could find out if Scarpa was coming back.

On Sunday afternoon Brunetti went into the room that had, over the course of years, been transformed from spare bedroom to junk room. On top of a wardrobe in one corner he found the hand-painted chest that had somehow come to him from his Uncle Claudio, the one who had always wanted to be a painter. Large enough to house a German Shepherd, the chest was entirely covered with brightly coloured flowers of confused species, assembled in gaudy promiscuity. For some reason it held maps, all thrown inside with much the same confusion as prevailed on the top and sides of the box.

Brunetti began by shifting them from one side to the other as he hunted for the map he wanted. Finally, when this proved futile, he began the slow, inescapable process of removing them one by one. The more he looked, the more it wasn't there. At last, after he had shifted most of the nations and continents of the world, he found the map of the laguna he had used, years ago, when he and his schoolfriends spent weekends and holidays exploring the weaving channels that surrounded the city.

He dropped the other maps back into the box and took the map of the laguna out on to the terrace. Careful of the long-dried tape that held parts of it together, he opened it slowly and stretched it out on the table. How tiny the islands looked, surrounded by the vast expanse of palude. For kilometres in every direction, the capillaries and veins of the channels spread, pumping water in and out twice a day, as regular as the moon itself. For a thousand years, those few canals at Chioggia, Malamocco and San Nicolo had served as aortas, keeping the waters clean, even at the height of the Serenissima's power, when hundreds of thousands of people had lived there, their waste added to the waters every day.

Brunetti caught himself before this thought could take its familiar course. He recalled what Paola had said two nights ago, of the disgruntled Roman, life blighted by displeasure with the present, ever longing for the better past he knew was lost, and he pulled his thoughts away from history and turned them to geography.

The immensity of the area depicted on the map reminded him how lost he was in it and how ignorant of how things were organized upon its waters, even in relation to the jurisdiction of crimes. If cases were given out, rather in the manner of party favours, to the first comer, then how could one expect to find consistent records of what had happened there?

He assumed that large fish were taken from the Adriatic; where then did the clams and shrimp come from? He had no idea what places in the laguna could legitimately be used for fishing, though he assumed that all of the shallow waters lying just off the coast of Marghera would be closed. Yet if what Bonsuan said, and Vianello believed, was true, then even that area was still fished.

He sometimes went to Rialto with Paola to buy fish and recalled the sign often placed on the gleaming skins of the fish on display: 'Nostrani’ as if the claim that the fish was 'Ours' somehow imbued it with health and goodness, washed it clean of even the thought of contamination. He'd seen the same sign on cherries, peaches, plums, and again, he realized, the same magic was meant to work: the fact that the fruit was Italian was enough to sweep it clean of all taint of chemical or pesticide and render it pure as mother's milk.

He'd once read a book that traced the history of what people ate, and so he knew that his ancestors, far from having enjoyed an Edenic diet both safe and healthy, had ingested vast quantities of chemicals and poisons with every bite and had risked tuberculosis, and worse, with every sip of milk.

Dissatisfied by his own dissatisfaction, he folded the map and took it back into the apartment. 'Paola,' he called towards the back of the apartment, 'let's go get a drink.'

The first thing he learned on Monday morning was that, despite his plans, he was in charge while Patta was gone. Marotta, it turned out, had been summoned back to Turin for a week to testify in a case.. He had not been directly involved, had merely been in charge of a squad of detectives when two of them had made the arrest of six suspects in an arms trafficking case. It was highly unlikely that he would be called to testify, he probably could have refused to go, but as it meant a trip home at government expense as well as a living allowance for the time he was there, he accepted, leaving a note for Brunetti explaining that his presence was essential to the successful prosecution of the case and that he was sure Vice-Questore Patta would approve of his decision to designate Brunetti as his own acting commander.

Repeatedly he called down to Signorina Elettra's office during the course of the morning, but as it was her habit not to overburden the Questura with her presence when her superior was absent, he wasn't certain whether she had decided to sleep until noon or to go out to Pellestrina. At eleven, his phone rang, and he was greatly relieved to hear her voice.

'Where are you, Signorina?' he asked, rather than demanded.

'On the beach of Pellestrina, sir, the side that faces the sea. Did you know they'd removed the grounded ship?' When he didn't answer, she went on, ‘I was surprised not to see it there. My cousin said they hauled it off last year. I miss it.'

'When did you get there, Signorina?'

'I came out before lunch on Saturday because I wanted to have as much time here as possible.'

'What did you tell your cousin?'

He heard the sharp cry of a seagull. 'That I was sorry I hadn't been out for so long but I wanted to get away from the city for a while,' she said, then paused and the gull had something else to say. When it was finished, she went on, ‘I told Bruna I'd had "una storia" that ended badly and wanted to get away from anything that would remind me of him.' In a softer voice, she added, 'Well, that's true enough,' and Brunetti found himself immediately curious about who he was and why it had ended.

'How long did you tell her you'd be there?'

'Oh, I was vague about that; at least a week, probably more, depending on how I felt. But I already feel better; the sun's wonderful, and the air is completely different from the city. I could stay here for ever.'

The bureaucrat in him spoke before he could help it. ‘I certainly hope you don't mean that.'

'Just a figure of speech, sir.'

'What are you going to do?'

'Walk on the beach and see who I meet. Go and have a coffee at the bar and see what's new. Talk to people. Go fishing.'

'Just a normal vacation on Pellestrina?' Brunetti asked.

'Exactly,' she said, to which the gull made no comment. With the promise to call him again, she broke the connection.

14

As she slipped the telefonino back into the left pocket of her jacket, Elettra Zorzi was glad she'd thought to bring the suede, instead of the wool. The pockets were deeper and thus more securely held the tiny Nokia, little bigger than a pack of cigarettes. And it was a better match for the navy blue slacks, though she wasn't really happy with the way it looked with the Topsiders she'd brought along to wear on the beach. She'd never liked the combination of leather and suede, wished now she'd bought that pair of fawn-coloured suede loafers she'd seen in the Fratelli Rossetti sale.

The gull called out again, but she ignored it. When it continued to squawk at her, she turned and walked directly at it until it took off and flew away down the beach in the direction of the Riserva of Ca' Roman. Like most Venetians, she tolerated gulls but loathed pigeons, which she viewed as a source of constant trouble, their nests blocking drainpipes and their constant droppings turning marble into meringue. She thought of the tourists she'd often seen in San Marco, pigeons hopping about on their heads and outstretched arms, and she shivered: flying rats.

She continued down the beach, away from the village, glad of the feel of the sun on her back, intent on nothing more than reaching San Pietro in Volta and having a coffee before turning back to Pellestrina. She lengthened her stride, aware at every step of how long she'd been sitting at a desk and how much her body rejoiced in this simple act of walking on the beach in the sun.

Her cousin Bruna, when she'd called last week, had not seemed at all surprised at her suggestion that she come out for a week or so. When she asked why Elettra was free at such short notice, she decided to tell at least part of the truth and explained that she and her boyfriend had planned for months to go to France for two weeks, but their sudden separation had ended those plans, leaving her with the impossibility of changing her request for vacation time. Bruna had shown no sign of taking offence at being only second choice and had insisted she come out immediately, to leave all thought of him behind in the city.

Though she'd been on Pellestrina only two days, it had pretty much worked. Her ex-boyfriend was a doctor, one of her sister's friends, and she'd probably known for months that he was wrong: too serious, too ambitious, and, she had to admit even this, too greedy. She had feared that being on her own again would be painful; instead, she had begun to realize, she felt rather like that gull: it hadn't liked the way it was treated, so it had taken flight and soared away.

She walked down to the water's edge and stooped to pull off her shoes and roll up the bottoms of her slacks. She could stand the water only for seconds before she danced back on to the sand, then flopped down and rubbed at one, then the other, foot. When they felt like feet again, she hooked two fingers into the backs of her shoes and walked along, barefoot, free, remembering what it was like to be happy.

Soon enough she ran out of sand and had to climb the steps to the top of the sea wall. Boats went about their boaty business to her right, and soon the small village of San Pietro in Volta appeared on her left.