were taken away to one of the camps. No one remembered which it had been, Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau; the name hardly mattered. After the war, they had returned to the city, having survived no one knew what horrors, and here they were, almost fifty years later, walking across the Campo del Ghetto, arm in arm, each with a bright yellow ribbon in her hair. For the Mariani sisters, there had been conspiracy, and certainly they had seen the proof of human evil, and yet here they walked in the rich sunshine of a peaceful afternoon in Venice, sun dappled on their flowered dresses.
Brunetti knew that he was being unnecessarily sentimental. He was tempted to go home directly, but he went back to the Questura instead, walking slowly, in no hurry to get there.
When he arrived, he found a note on his desk, ‘See me about Ruffolo. V, and went down immediately to Vianello.
The officer was at his desk, talking to a young man who sat in a chair facing him. When Brunetti approached, Vianello said to the young man, ‘This is Commissario Brunetti. He can answer your questions better than I can.’
The young man stood but made no attempt to shake hands. ‘Good afternoon, Dottore,’ he said. ‘I came because he called me,’ leaving it to Brunetti to figure out who the ‘he’ was. The boy was short, stocky, and had hands that were a few sizes too big for his body, already red and swollen, even though he couldn’t have been more than seventeen. If his hands were not enough to show that he was a fisherman, his accent, the rugged undulance of Burano, was. On Burano, you either fished or made lace; the boy’s hands excluded the second possibility.
‘Sit down, please,’ Brunetti said, drawing up a second chair for himself. Obviously the boy’s mother had trained him well, for he continued to stand until both men were seated, then took his place, sitting up straight, hands wrapped around the sides of the seat of his chair.
When he began to speak in the rough dialect of the outer islands, no Italian not born in Venice could have understood him. Brunetti wondered if the boy could, in fact, speak Italian at all. But his curiosity about dialect was soon lost when the boy continued, ‘Ruffolo called my friend again, and my friend called me, and since I told the Sergeant here that I would tell him if I heard from my friend again, I came in to tell him.’
‘What did your friend say?’
‘Ruffolo wants to talk to someone. He’s frightened.’ He stopped at that and looked sharply up at the two policemen to see if they had noticed his slip. It seemed that they had not, so he continued, ‘I mean my friend said that he sounded frightened, but all he, this friend of mine, would say is that Peppino wanted to talk to someone, but he said that a sergeant isn’t enough. He wants to talk to someone high up.’
‘Did your friend say why Ruffolo wants to do this?’
‘No, sir, he didn’t. But I think his mother told him to do it.’
‘Do you know Ruffolo?’
The boy shrugged.
‘What would frighten him?’
This time, the shrug was probably meant to mean that the boy didn’t know. ‘He thinks he’s smart. Ruffolo. He always talks big, talks about the people he met inside and about his important friends. When he called, he told me,’ the boy said, forgetting about the existence of the imaginary friend, the supposed intermediary in all of this, ‘that he wanted to give himself up but that he had some things to trade. He said that you’d be glad to get them, that it was a good trade.’
‘Did he say what that was?’ Brunetti asked.
‘No, hut he said to tell you that there are three of them, that you’d understand that.’
Brunetti did. Guardi, Monet, and Gauguin. ‘And where does he want this person to meet him?’
As if he suddenly realized that the imaginary friend was no longer there to serve as a buffer between himself and the forces of authority, the boy stopped and looked around the room, but the friend was gone; not a sign of him remained.
‘You know that catwalk that goes along the front of the Arsenale?’ the boy asked.
Both Brunetti and Vianello nodded. At least half a kilometre long, the elevated cement walkway led from the shipyards within the Arsenale to the Celestia vaporetto stop, running about two metres above the waters of the
‘He said he’d be there, at the part where there’s that little beach, the one on the Arsenale side of the bridge. At midnight, tomorrow night.’ Brunetti and Vianello exchanged a glance over the boy’s lowered head, and Vianello mouthed the word ‘Hollywood’.
‘And who does he want to meet him there?’
‘Somebody important. He said that’s why he didn’t show up on Saturday, not for just a sergeant.’ Vianello, it appeared, took this with good grace.
Brunetti allowed himself a moment’s fantasy, picturing Patta, complete with onyx cigarette holder and walking stick and, because these late nights were foggy, his Burberry raincoat, collar artfully raised, waiting on the Arsenale catwalk as the bells of San Marco boomed out midnight. Because it was his fantasy, Brunetti had Patta meet, not Ruffolo, who spoke Italian, but this simple boy from Burano, and the fantasy petered out amidst the garbled sound of the boy’s heavy dialect and Patta’s slurred Sicilian pronunciation, both whipped away from their mouths by the midnight winds from the
‘‘Will a Commissario be important enough?’ Brunetti asked.
The boy looked up at that, not certain how to take it. ‘Yes, sir,’ he said, deciding to take it seriously.
‘At midnight tomorrow night?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Did Ruffolo say, did he tell your friend, that he’d bring those things with him?’
‘No, sir, he didn’t say. He just said he’d be on the catwalk at midnight, near the bridge. By the little beach.’ It wasn’t really a beach, Brunetti remembered, more a place where the tides had driven enough sand and gravel up
