A Sea of Troubles

The Carabinieri who emerged from the jeep showed little surprise at what they saw, and when Brunetti finally explained things to them, they seemed even less interested in his story. One of them went down the stairs to the bunker; when he came back, he was already talking on his telefonino, calling for an ambulance to come and pick up the body.

In the meantime, the other two had pushed Spadini into the jeep, not bothering to untie his hands and leaving him propped on the back seat like an unsteady package. Neither Brunetti nor Vianello was willing to leave Bonsuan's body unattended, so they refused the offer to accompany the others back to the Carabinieri post on the Lido. As they watched, one of the Carabinieri climbed into the back seat beside Spadini, then the other two got into the front and their jeep sped away.

Vianello's bulk no longer held out the promise of animal comfort to Brunetti, so he walked down to the edge of the water. Vianello let him go, choosing to stand to the left of the doorway leading down to the bunker. For a while, he watched the motionless Brunetti, himself watching the motionless city in the distance, visible again now that the storm had passed. Both of them were sodden and chilled but neither of them paid any particular attention to this until Massimo came back from his boat with a captain's jacket for Brunetti. He helped the Commissario remove his own jacket and held the other for him while he stuffed his arms into the sleeves. Brunetti's jacket remained on the ground. At the sound of a siren approaching from the north, Vianello turned his attention to that and abandoned his commander to his reflections.

Brunetti returned to the fort when he heard the ambulance pull up. Neither he nor Vianello went down the stairs to help the two attendants with the stretcher. When they emerged, their burden tilted awkwardly to enable them to manoeuvre it up the steps and through the narrow doorway, a blue cloth lay draped over it, its centre projecting like a narrow pyramid. The attendants went to the back of the ambulance and slid the stretcher through the doors. Before they closed them, Brunetti and Vianello climbed inside and pulled down the folding seats at either side. Silently, they rode back to Lido, and then back to Venice on a water ambulance with the equally silent Bonsuan.

At the Questura, Brunetti initiated the process of formally charging Spadini with the murder of Bonsuan. At best, and Brunetti knew this, the evidence linking him with the murders of the Bottins and of Signora Follini was no more than circumstantial: though he could be shown to have motive, no evidence had yet been found to link him directly with either crime. He would certainly have alibis, and they would certainly turn out to be, all of them, from fishermen, all of whom were guaranteed to swear that Spadini had been with them when the two men were murdered and when Signora Follini drowned.

Brunetti told the morgue attendants not to touch the wooden stake that had killed Bonsuan, and he ordered that a technician be sent to take fingerprints from it before it was removed from his body. It was unlikely that, this time, Spadini would find someone able to provide him an alibi.

His thoughts turned to Bonsuan's widow and to their three daughters, now fatherless. Men go about their business of killing one another, often in defence of their honour, that most meretricious of baubles, leaving women to pay the price. The thought of a fifth woman, Signorina Elettra, came into his mind, and he wondered what grief all of this would cost her.

Pushing this away, he got up from his desk and, hardly conscious of the thought of honour, went to speak to Bonsuan's widow.

Later, at home, he explained as much as he could to Paola. 'All she kept saying was that he had less than a year, that all he wanted to do was go fishing and enjoy his grandchildren.' The words clung to him, like the fiery robes that had destroyed Creon's daughter: no matter how he twisted and turned, trying to pull free of them, they stuck to him, burning.

Brunetti and Paola sat talking on the terrace, the children huddled like anchorites in their rooms, preparing for the year-end exams. To the west, the light was long gone away from all of them, leaving behind only sound and the memory of form and line.

'What will she do?' Paola asked

'Who? Anna?' he asked, thinking still of Bonsuan's widow.

'No. She has her family. Elettra.'

Startled by the question, he answered, 'I don't know. I hadn't thought.'

'Is he dead, the young man?' she asked.

'They're looking for him,' was the only answer Brunetti could give.

'Who?'

'The Guardia di Finanza sent two boats out, and we've got a launch looking for him.'

'And?' Paola asked, familiar with this sort of answer.

'I doubt it. Not after a storm like this.'

Paola could think of nothing to say to this and so asked, instead, 'And the uncle?'

Brunetti had spent the last hours considering this. 'I doubt we'll get anyone on Pellestrina to say they know anything about the murders there. Even with someone like Spadini, they still won't talk.'

'God, and we say it's Southerners who are crippled by ideas about omerta,' Paola exclaimed. When Brunetti didn't respond to this, she asked, 'What about Bonsuan?'

'There's no way he can get out of that. He'll get twenty years,' Brunetti said, thinking how little difference it seemed to make.

Neither of them spoke for a long time.

At last, turning her thoughts to life, Paola asked, 'Will Elettra get over it?'

‘I don't know,' Brunetti demurred, then added, surprising himself, ‘I don't really know her that well.'

Paola gave this a great deal of thought and finally answered, 'We never know them well, do we?'

'Who?'

'Real people.'

'What do you mean, 'real people'?'

'As opposed to people in books,' Paola explained. 'They're the only ones we ever really know well, or know truly.' Again she gave him a moment to consider, then said, 'Maybe that's because they're the only ones about whom we get reliable information.' She glanced at him, then added, as she would to a class, just to see if they were following, 'Narrators never lie.'

'And my perception of you?' he asked, voice close to indignation, driven towards anger by the seeming irrelevance of this conversation or by the circumstances in which she'd chosen to begin it. 'Isn't that true?'

She smiled. 'As real as mine of you.'

His response was immediate. ‘I don't like that answer.'

'That's neither here nor there, my dear.' They lapsed into silence. After a long time, she reached across to him and placed her hand on his arm. 'She'll be all right so long as she's still sure that her friends love her.'

It did not occur to Brunetti to question her use of the word 'love'.

'We do.'

‘I know,' Paola said and went to check on the children.