A Sea of Troubles

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.