Protecting her young, protecting her young, and who to protect Bonsuan's young, even though they were no longer young? He heard a noise from the opposite direction and looked up, hoping to see Vianello, but it was Signorina Elettra. At least, a bedraggled young woman who looked very much like Signorina Elettra. One sleeve of her jacket was gone, and through a long tear in her slacks, he could see her calf. One foot was bare, a bloody scrape across the top of her instep. But it was her hair that most surprised him, for in a wide patch just above her right ear it was cut short, no more than a few centimetres from her head. It stuck out like the hair on the tops of the ears of baby jaguars and was little longer than that.
'Are you all right?' he asked.
She raised a hand towards Brunetti. 'Come and find him. Please.' She didn't wait for him to answer but turned and made off in the direction from which she must have come. He noticed that she favoured her left foot, the one without a shoe.
Brunetti turned and saw him, dressed in jeans and a heavy woollen sweater. Over his arm he carried a second one. Behind him stood another man in civilian clothes, a hunting rifle in one hand: no doubt the Massimo that Vianello said would bring him out so quickly.
'There's a man over there by the fort, on the ground. Watch him,' Brunetti called to the man with the gun, then beckoned to Vianello and set off after Signorina Elettra.
The beach was littered with all sorts of junk, the hundreds of things that get stirred up from the bottom of the
When they came upon her, she was kneeling on the sand at the edge of the water. Lying in the shallow water just in front of her was a fishing boat. Its left side was stove in, and the water around it was covered with an expanding slick of black oil.
Hearing them approach, she looked up. ‘I don't know what happened, but he's gone.'
Vianello walked over to her, draped the sweater around her shoulders, and offered her his hand to help her to her feet. She ignored him and pulled the sweater down from her shoulders, letting it drop on the sand
Vianello squatted down beside her. Fussily, he picked up the sweater and placed it back over her shoulders, tying the arms together under her chin. 'Come with us now,' he said and got to his feet, helping her to stand beside him.
He started to speak but stopped when he heard a noise from the direction of Pellestrina. The three of them, like chickens on a perch, turned their heads in the direction of the sharp keening that announced the arrival of the Carabinieri.
Elettra began to shiver uncontrollably.
They stood on the beach and waited while the Carabinieri launch approached. It swept up in a tight curve, and the pilot killed the motor and drifted to a stop a few metres offshore. Three flak-jacketed officers at the bow held shotguns aimed at the people on the beach. When the man at the wheel recognized Vianello and called out to the others to lower their guns, they did so, though with a certain reluctance.
'Two of you come and help her,' Brunetti called out, ignoring the fact that even his rank gave him no authority over these men. 'Take her back to the hospital.' The three officers looked to their pilot for instruction. He nodded. There was no landing stage, so they would have to jump into the surf and wade ashore. While they hesitated, Signorina Elettra turned to Brunetti and said, ‘I can't go back without him.'
Before Brunetti could answer, Vianello turned to Elettra and picked her up bodily, one arm around her shoulder, the other under her knees. He walked into the water and waded out to the boat. Brunetti saw her start to protest, but her words, as well as Vianello's response, were cut off by the noise of his splashing. When Vianello reached the side of the boat, one of the Carabinieri knelt and reached over the side, taking Signorina Elettra from his arms.
He sat her upright and Brunetti saw Vianello reach into the boat and adjust the sweater over her shoulders, then the motor sprang into life again, and the boat started to move away. Vianello standing in the water and Brunetti on the beach both watched as it grew smaller, but Signorina Elettra did not turn back to them.
Vianello came back to the shore, and silently the two of them returned to Massimo and his prisoner. They found Vianello's friend sitting on the stone where Brunetti had waited earlier, his rifle lying across his knees. The bound man cried out when he saw them approach. 'Cut me loose!' He shouted it as an order. The men ignored him.
'Bonsuan's down there,' Brunetti said, indicating the doorway and the steps running down from it. It was harder to see down inside now that the light was abandoning the day.
'Massimo,' Vianello said, turning to his friend. 'Give me the flashlight.' From one of the many pockets of his hunting jacket, Massimo took a thin black flashlight and held it out to Vianello.
'Wait here,' Brunetti said to the man with the gun. They went down together, the light streaming out in front of them. As they descended the steps, Brunetti pleaded with something he didn't believe in to let them somehow find Bonsuan alive down there; wounded and stunned but alive. He had long ago abandoned his childhood habit of trying to cut a deal with whoever it was that might control these things, and so he merely asked for it to be true, offering nothing in return.
But Bonsuan, though certainly wounded, was not alive, and never again would he be stunned by anything. His last earthly shock had been the sudden explosion of pain in his chest as he turned back towards Brunetti from the steps, making his joke about still having a head and marvelling at the power of the storm.
Vianello flashed the light across his friend's face for just a moment, then let his hand fall to his side. The light illuminated his shoes, a filthy patch of ground, and Bonsuan's left shoulder, just enough to show the jagged point of wood that protruded so inappropriately from his chest.
After a minute, Vianello went back to the stairway, careful to keep the light from shining on Bonsuan's face again. Brunetti followed him. At the top, they saw that Vianello's friend hadn't moved, nor had the rifle, nor had the hog-tied man.
'Please,' the bound man pleaded, all threat, all menace gone from his voice. 'Please.'
Vianello took a knife from the back pocket of his jeans, flicked it open, and knelt down over him. Idly, Brunetti wondered if the sergeant were going to cut the man's bonds or his throat and couldn't find it in himself to care much, either way. He watched as the hand holding the knife disappeared, blocked from sight by Vianello's body. The man's body twitched, and his legs swung forward, cut free of his wrists.
He lay still for a moment, gasping with the pain it caused him to move. Motionless, he watched Vianello through narrowed eyes. The sergeant pushed the blade closed with the palm of his right hand and reached around to slip the knife back into his pocket. The bound man chose that instant to strike. He pulled his knees towards his chest, gasping at the pain it caused his stretched muscles to do it, and struck out at Vianello with his bound feet, striking him just at the hip and knocking him sprawling.
He pulled his feet back, cocking them in order to kick Vianello again, but Massimo got to his feet as the man was still in motion and walked over to him, holding the rifle upside down. The bound man sensed the presence looming over him and relaxed, stretching his feet out in front of him, away from Vianello, who was struggling to his feet. 'All right, all right. I stopped,' Spadini said and smiled. Massimo, quite casually, brought the rifle up into the air and plunged it down, smashing the butt into Spadini's nose. Brunetti could hear it break, a wet, crunching sound, like the sound of stepping on a cockroach or a water beetle.
Spadini howled and rolled away in circles to escape the man with the rifle, his hands trapped behind his back. Calmly, Massimo set the butt of the gun into a tuft of sandy grass at his feet. After he'd wiped it back and forth a half-dozen times, he inspected the butt, finding it clean enough. Ignoring the sobs of the man whose shattered nose continued to leak blood on to the sand below his head, Massimo went back to the stone by the wall and sat down again.
He glanced at Brunetti. 'I used to go fishing with Bonsuan.'
No one said anything until a Carabinieri all-terrain vehicle arrived from Pellestrina and sped across the sand towards them, careless of the destruction it caused to the dunes or to the nesting birds who could not escape its wheels
27
