A Sea of Troubles

move in muttered prayer or protest.

The door opened and the three men came back, their shoulders dark and their heads wet with the rain. Joyously, like children let out of school early, they cried out, 'It's raining, it's raining,' then fell silent when they sensed the charged atmosphere in the room.

'What's wrong?' one of them asked, putting the question to no one in particular.

Brunetti said, in an entirely normal voice, 'They told me about Bottin and Spadini.'

The man he addressed looked around the bar for confirmation and found it in the averted eyes and continuing silence. He shook his arms, spraying water around him, then went to the bar and said, 'Give me a grappa, Piero.'

The barman set it down in front of him without speaking.

Talk gradually resumed, but quietly. Brunetti signalled to the waiter and pointed to the old man beside him. He brought a glass of white wine for the old man, who took it and drank it down like water, replacing the glass loudly on the bar. Brunetti nodded, and the waiter refilled it. Turning to face him, Brunetti asked, 'Targhetta?'

'His nephew’ the old man said and swallowed the second glass. 'Spadini's?'

The man looked at Brunetti and held his glass out to the waiter, who filled it again. Instead of drinking it, the old man set it on the bar and stared into it. He had the rheumy eyes of the habitual drinker, the man who woke up to wine and went to sleep with it on his tongue.

'Where's Targhetta now?' Brunetti asked, folding the paper, as if this were the least interesting question he could think of.

'Fishing, probably, with his uncle. I saw them at the dock a half-hour ago.' His lips puckered in a fisherman's disapproval, and Brunetti waited for him, like Bonsuan, to say something about the bora and not liking the feel of the air, but instead he said, 'Probably took that woman again. Bad luck, having a woman on a boat'

Brunetti's hand tightened on the paper. 'What woman?' he forced himself to ask in a neutral voice.

'That one he's been fucking. The one from Venice.'

'Ah,' Brunetti said, forcing his hand to release the paper and pick up his glass of wine. He took a sip, nodded his approval at the old man and then at the waiter. He made himself look at the newspaper again, as if utterly uninterested in this woman from Venice and what Carlo was doing to her, concerned only with yesterday's soccer results.

Light flashed at the windows, and after a moment thunder followed, so loud as to set the bottles at the back of the bar rattling. The door opened and another man slipped in, wet as an otter. When he paused at the open door, all sound inside the bar was drowned by the sound of the rain, battering down, exploding from the gutters. Another flash of light streamed in, and everyone in the bar braced themselves for the explosion that must follow. When it came it lingered for long seconds and, just as it began to roll away, was replaced by the fierce shriek of the bora, sweeping down from the north. Even inside the bar, they were aware of the sudden drop in temperature.

'Where would they be?' Brunetti asked the old man.

He drank the wine and gave Brunetti an inquisitive look. Brunetti nodded at the waiter, and again the glass was filled. Before he touched it, the old man said, 'They haven't been out long. Probably try to get away from this.' With his chin, he indicated the door and, beyond it, the lightning, wind and rain that had turned the day to chaos.

'How?' Brunetti asked, reining in his rising fear and careful to make it sound as if he was only mildly curious about the ways of the laguna and the men who fished upon its waters.

The old man turned his attention to the man to his right, the first to come in from the rain. 'Marco,' he asked, 'where would Vittorio go?'

Brunetti was conscious of the strained silence as all of the fishermen waited to see who would be the next to follow the old man in breaking ranks by talking to the policeman.

The man questioned looked down into his glass, and some instinct prevented Brunetti from signalling the waiter to fill it. Instead, he stood quietly and waited for an answer.

The man addressed as Marco looked at the old man. After all, it was he who had asked the question. If the policeman heard the answer, it wasn't his fault, ‘I think he'd try for Chioggia.'

A man at a far table said, in quite an ordinary voice ’He'd never make it, not with the bora, and not with the tide behind it. If he went anywhere near the Porto di Chioggia, he'd be taken out to sea.' No one objected, no one spoke; the only sounds were of the rain and wind, now a single, overwhelming noise.

From another table, a man's voice said, 'Vittorio's a bastard, but he'll know what to do.'

Another half-rose to his feet and flung out his hand in the direction of the door. 'No one knows what to do in that.' His angry tones were immediately answered by another bolt of lightning, closer now, swiftly followed by a cascade of thunder.

When the sound diminished to the mere pounding of rain, a man near the door said, 'If it gets worse, he'd probably try to run ashore down at the Riserva.' Brunetti had spent a good deal of time studying the map, having things on it pointed out to him by Bonsuan, so he knew this had to be the Riserva di Ca' Roman, a barren oblong of sandy soil that hung like a pendant drop from the southern end of the long, thin finger of Pellestrina.

'Run aground?' Brunetti asked him.

The man began to answer, but his voice was lost in a tremendous crash of thunder that seemed to shake the entire building. When silence finally returned, he tried again. 'There's no place to dock, but he could probably run his boat up on to the beach.'

'Why not come back here?'

The old man shook his head wearily, either at the impossibility of such a feat in weather like this or at the ignorance of a person who would have to ask it. 'No chance. If he tried to turn in the canal, the wind and tide could turn him over. Only thing he can do is try to run on to Ca' Roman. Back in '27’ he began, making it sound as though he'd seen that storm, too, 'that's what happened to Elio Magrini. Flipped him over like a turtle. They never found him, and what was left of the boat wasn't worth salvaging.' He raised his glass, perhaps to the memory of Elio Magrini, and emptied it in a single long swallow.

During all of this, Brunetti had been considering possibilities: with the wind coming from the north-west and the retreating tide pushed along by it, the narrow spit of land that led down to Ca' Roman would be awash, perhaps already completely under water. He and Bonsuan could get there only by boat, and if what the old man said was true, that would mean running the police launch aground.

'You really think she's gone out with him? In this?' Brunetti asked in his best man of the world voice.

The puff of wind the old man shot out of his compressed lips expressed disgust, not only at the foolishness of Signorina Elettra, but at that of all women. Adding nothing, the old man pushed himself away from the bar and went to sit at one of the tables.

Brunetti placed a few thousand lire on the bar, put the tape recorder back in his pocket, and started for the door. Just before he reached it, it banged open from outside, but no one came in: only wind and rain battered it repeatedly against the wall. Brunetti stepped out into the rain, careful to pull the door shut behind him.

He was instantly wet; it happened so quickly that he had no time to worry about it or to think about protecting himself from the rain. One moment he was dry, the next soaked through, his shoes filled with water, as though he'd stepped into a lake. He set off back towards the pier and, perhaps, Bonsuan. After a few seconds he had to raise a hand above his eyes to block the power of the wind that drove rain into them, blinding him. His progress was slowed by the added weight of water that bore him down, pulling at his shoes and jacket.

Once he stepped out from the shelter of the buildings that lined the laguna side of the road, the wind pounded at him, as if trying to batter him to the ground. Luckily, a row of street lights ran along the pier, and in the dim light they managed to cast through the sudden darkness of the day, he made his way towards the launch. He moved ahead slowly, or he might have fallen when his foot hit the metal stanchion to which the boat was moored.

He grabbed at its mushroom top with both hands, leaned towards the vague shape he thought was the boat, and called Bonsuan's name. When there was no response, he bent and felt for the mooring line, but when he found it, it was slack in his grasp, for the wind had driven the boat tight against the side of the pier. He stepped on to the boat and, blinded by a sudden gust of rain, stumbled against the door of the cabin.