A Sea of Troubles

'Arson?' he asked.

'Probably’ she answered. 'How else can they build on it?' It was a peculiarity of the law that undeveloped land upon which the construction of houses was forbidden lost that protection as soon as the trees on it ceased to exist. And what more efficient means of removing trees than fire?

Neither of them much wanted to follow up this subject, and so Brunetti asked, 'What's wrong?'

One of the things Brunetti had always loved about Paola was what he persisted, in the face of all her objections to the term, in thinking of as the masculinity of her mind, and so she did not bother to feign confusion. Instead, she said, ‘I find your interest in Elettra strange. And I suppose if I were to think about it a bit longer, I'd probably find it offensive.'

It was Brunetti who echoed, innocently, 'Offensive?'

'Only if I thought about it much longer. At the moment, I find it only strange, worthy of comment, unusual.'

'Why?' he asked, setting his glass on the table and pouring some more Calvados.

She turned and looked at him, her face a study in open confusion. But she did not repeat his question; she attempted to answer it. 'Because you have thought about little except her for the last week, and because I assume your trip to Burano today had something to do with her.'

Other qualities he had always admired in Paola were the fact that she was not a snoop and that jealousy was not part of her makeup. 'Are you jealous?' he asked before he had time to think.

Her mouth dropped open and she stared at him with eyes that might as well have been stuck out on stalks, so absolute was her attention. She turned away from him and said, addressing her remarks to the campanile of San Polo, 'He wants to know if I'm jealous.' When the campanile did not respond, she turned her eyes in the direction of San Marco.

As they sat, the silence lengthening between them, the tension of the scene drifted away as if the mere mention of the word 'jealousy' had sufficed to chase it off.

The half-hour struck, and Brunetti finally said, 'There's no need for it, you know, Paola. There's nothing I want from her.'

'You want her safety.'

'That's for her, not from her,' he insisted.

She turned towards him then and asked, without any trace of her usual fierceness, 'You really believe this, don't you, that you don't want anything from her?'

'Of course,' he insisted.

She turned away from him again, studying the clouds, higher now and moving off towards the mainland.

'What's wrong?' he finally asked into her expanding silence.

'Nothing's really wrong. It's just that we're at one of those points where the difference between men and women becomes evident.'

'What difference?' he asked.

'The capacity of self-deceit,' she said, but corrected herself and said, 'Or rather, the things about which we choose to deceive ourselves.'

'Like what?' he asked, striving for neutrality.

'Men deceive themselves about what they do themselves, but women choose to deceive themselves about what other people do.'

'Men, presumably?' he asked.

'Yes.'

If she had been a chemist reading the periodic table of the elements, she could not have sounded more certain.

He finished his Calvados but did not pour any more. A long time passed in silence, during which he considered what she had said. 'Sounds like men get a better deal,' he finally replied.

'When don't they?'

By the next morning, Brunetti had transformed Paola's observation that he had thought about little except Signorina Elettra during the last week, which was true, into an assertion that she had reason for jealousy, which was hardly the same thing. Fully persuaded that Paola had no cause for jealousy, his concern for Signorina Elettra continued uppermost in his mind, blunting his ordinary instinct to be suspicious of and curious about everyone involved in a case. Odd tinglings, if they could be called that, thus went unanswered, and some of the finer threads leading out from the investigation remained unfollowed.

Marotta returned and took over the handling of the Questura. Because murder was such a rare occurrence in Venice, and because Marotta was an ambitious man, he asked for the files on the Bottin murders and, after having read them, said he would take charge of the case himself.

When he failed to find the number of Signorina Elettra's telefonino, Brunetti spent a half-hour at the computer, attempting to get into the records at TELECOM, only to give up and ask Vianello if he could obtain the number. When he had it, he thanked the sergeant and went up to his own office to make the call. It rang eight times, then a voice came on, telling him the user of the phone had turned it off but he could, if he chose, leave a voice message. He was about to give his name when he remembered the look she'd given the young man for whom he now had a name and, instead, calling her Elettra and using the intimate tu, said it was Guido and asked her to call him at work.

He called down to Vianello and asked him to have another look with the computer, this time for anything he could find out about a certain Carlo Targhetta, perhaps resident on Pellestrina. Vianello's voice was a study in neutrality as he repeated the name, which made it clear to Brunetti that the sergeant had spoken to Pucetti and knew full well who the young man was.

He took a blank piece of paper from his drawer and wrote the name Bottin in the centre, then the name Follini off on the left. Spadini's name was next, at the bottom. He drew a line connecting Spadini and Follini. To the right of Spadini's name, he wrote that of Sandro Scarpa, the waiter's brother, said to have had a fight with Bottin, whose name he connected to Scarpa's. Below that he wrote the name of the missing waiter. And then he sat and looked at these names, as if waiting for them to move around on the paper or for new lines to point out interesting connections among them. Nothing appeared. He picked up the pen again and wrote Carlo Targhetta's name, sticking it into an inconspicuous corner and conscious that he wrote it in smaller letters than those he'd used for the other names.

Still nothing happened. He opened the front drawer, slipped the paper inside, and went downstairs to see what Vianello had discovered.

Vianello, in the meantime, had been larking around in the files of the various agencies of government in an attempt to see if Carlo

Targhetta had done his military service or if he had ever had any trouble with the police. Quite the opposite, it seemed, or so he told Brunetti when he came into Signorina Elettra's office, where the sergeant was using the computer.

'He was in the Guardia di Finanza,' Vianello said, surprised at the news.

'And now he's a fisherman,' Brunetti added.

'And probably earning a hell of a lot more doing that,' remarked Vianello.

Though this was hardly in question, it did seem a strange career change, and both of them wondered what could have prompted it. 'When did he stop?' Brunetti asked.

Vianello pressed a few keys, studied the screen, pressed some more, and then said, 'About two years ago.'

Both of them thought of it, but Brunetti was the first to mention the coincidence. 'About the same time that Spadini lost his boat.'

'Uh huh,' Vianello agreed and hit a key that wiped the screen clean. 'I'll see if I can find out why he left,' he said and summoned up a fresh screenful of information. For a number of seconds, new letters and numbers flashed across the screen, chasing one another into and out of existence. After what seemed like an inordinately long time, Vianello said, 'They're not saying, sir.'

Brunetti leaned down over the screen and started to read. Much of it was numbers and incomprehensible symbols, but near the bottom he read, 'Internal use only, see relevant file,' after which there followed a long string of numbers and letters, presumably the file in which the reason for Carlo Targhetta's departure was to be