A Sea of Troubles

The man tilted his head towards a hallway that led away from the bar. He looked down at the glass again and returned to his careful work.

To the side of the bar was a doorway of a sort Brunetti had not seen in decades. Narrow, it was hung with a row of long strips of green and white plastic, each little more than a centimetre wide, ribbed on both sides. As he inserted his right hand to slip half of them aside, he heard the gentle clicking sound he recalled from his youth. Once these dividers had hung in the doorway of every bar and every trattoria, but during the last couple of decades, they'd all disappeared; he couldn't remember the last time he'd seen one. He held aside the still clattering strips until Vianello was through, then listened to them fall back into place.

The room they entered surprised him by its size, for it must have held thirty tables. The windows were set high in the walls, and plenty of light streamed in. Below them, fishermen's nets covered the walls, each embedded with shells, pieces of dried seaweed, and what looked like the petrified corpses of fish, crabs and lobsters. A low serving counter ran along one side of the room. In the back, a glass door, closed now, led to a pebble-covered parking lot.

Seeing that only one other table was occupied, Brunetti looked at his watch, surprised to find that it was only one thirty. There was some truth in the belief that exposure to sea air increases the appetite.

They walked across the room, pulled out chairs at a table halfway along the first row, and sat facing one another. A small vase of fresh wildflowers stood to the left of the bottles of olive oil and vinegar, and beside that was a wicker holder containing half a dozen paper-wrapped packs of grissini. Brunetti took one, ripped it open, and began to nibble at a breadstick.

The plastic strips parted and a young man in black jacket and trousers backed into the room. When he turned around, Brunetti saw that he had a plate of what appeared to be antipasto di pesce in each hand. The waiter nodded to the two newcomers and went to the table in the far corner, where he set the two plates down in front of a man and woman in their sixties.

The waiter came back towards their table. Brunetti and Vianello had realized that this was not the sort of place to bother with a menu, at least not this early in the season, so Brunetti smiled and said, as one always does in a new restaurant, 'Everyone says you can eat very well here.' He was careful to speak in Veneziano.

'I hope so,' the waiter said, smiling as he spoke and making no sign that he found the presence of a uniformed policeman in any way surprising.

'What can you recommend today?' Brunetti asked.

'The antipasto di mare is good. We've got cuttlefish milk or sardines if you'd like them, instead.'

'What else?' Vianello asked.

'There was still some asparagus in the market this morning, so there's a salad of asparagus and shrimp.'

Brunetti nodded at this; Vianello said he wouldn't have antipasto, so the waiter passed on to the primi piatti.

'Spaghetti alle vongole, spaghetti alle cozze, and penne all' Amatriciana,' he recited and then stopped.

'That's all?' Vianello couldn't help asking.

The waiter waved one hand in the air. 'We've got fifty people coming for a wedding anniversary tonight, so we've only got a few things on the menu today.'

Brunetti ordered the vongole and Vianello the all' Amatriciana.

The choice of main courses was limited to roast turkey or mixed fried fish. Vianello chose the first, Brunetti the second. They ordered a half-litre of white wine and a litre of mineral water. The waiter brought them a basket of bussolai, the thick oval breadsticks that Brunetti especially liked.

When he was gone, Brunetti picked one up, broke it in half, and took a bite. It always surprised him how they remained so crisp in this seaside climate. The waiter brought the wine and water, set them on the table, and hurried over to remove the plates from in front of the elderly couple.

'We come out to Pellestrina and you don't eat fish,' Brunetti said, making it a statement rather than a question, though it was.

Vianello poured them each a glass of wine, picked up his, and sipped at it. 'Very good,' he said. 'It's like what my uncle used to bring back from Istria on his boat.'

'And the fish?' Brunetti asked, not letting it go.

'I don't eat it any more,' Vianello said. 'Not unless I know it comes from the Atlantic'

Lunacy had many forms, Brunetti knew, and most of them had to be detected in the early stages. 'Why?' he asked.

‘I joined Greenpeace, you know, sir,' Vianello said by way of answer.

'And Greenpeace doesn't let you eat fish?' he asked, trying to make a joke of it.

Vianello started to say something, stopped, took another sip of wine, and said, 'That's not true, sir.'

Neither of them spoke for a long time, and then the waiter was back, bringing Brunetti his antipasto, a small mound of tiny pink shrimp on a bed of slivered raw asparagus. Brunetti took a forkful: they'd been sprinkled with balsamic vinegar. The combination of sweet, sour, sweet, salty was wonderful. Ignoring Vianello for a moment, he ate the salad slowly, relishing it, perpetually delighted by the contrast of flavours and textures.

He set his fork on the plate and took a sip of wine. 'Are you afraid to ruin my meal by telling me what polluting horrors lie in wait for me inside the shrimp?' he asked, smiling.

'Clams are worse,' said Vianello, smiling back but with no further attempt at clarification.

Before Brunetti could ask for a list of the deadly poisons that lurked in his shrimp and clams, the waiter took his plate away, then was quickly back with the two dishes of pasta.

The rest of the meal passed amiably as they talked idly of people they'd known who had fished in the waters around Pellestrina and of a famous footballer from Chioggia whom neither of them had ever seen play. When their main courses came, Vianello could not help giving Brunetti's a suspicious glance, though he had forgone the opportunity to comment further upon the clams. Brunetti, for his part, gave silent proof of the high regard in which he held his sergeant by not repeating to him the contents of an article he had read the previous month about the methods used in commercial turkey farming, nor did he list the transmissible diseases to which those birds are prone.

5

After they'd drunk their coffee, Brunetti asked for the bill. The waiter paused, as if from a habit too strong for him to control, and Brunetti added, ‘I don't need a receipt.' The waiter's eyes grew wide as he registered this new reality: a man who must be a policeman, willing to aid the owner of the restaurant in avoiding the tax that was imposed whenever a receipt was issued. Brunetti could see this created a dilemma, which the waiter solved by saying, 'I'll ask the boss.'

He came back a few minutes later, carrying a small glass of grappa in each hand. Placing them on the table he said, 'Fifty-two thousand.' Brunetti reached for his wallet. It was a third of what it would have cost in Venice, and the fish had been fresh, the shrimp perfect.

He took sixty thousand lire from his wallet and when the waiter reached into his pocket for change, Brunetti waved his gesture aside with a muttered, 'Grazie.' He raised his grappa and took a sip. 'Very good,' he said. 'Please thank the owner for us.'

The waiter nodded, took the money, and turned to go.

'Are you from here?' Brunetti asked, with no attempt to make it seem an idle question.

'Yes.'

'We're out here because of the accident,' Brunetti said, indicating the general direction of the water. Then, with a smile he added, 'Though I don't imagine that's much of a surprise.'

'Not to anyone here, it's not,' the waiter said.

'Did you know them?' Brunetti asked. He pulled out another chair, motioning to the waiter to sit. The couple at the other table were long gone, the tables all set for the anniversary party, so there was little for him to do. He sat, then turned his chair slightly to face Brunetti.

‘I knew Marco’ he said, 'We went to the same school. He was a couple of years behind me, but we knew one another because we used to come back on the same bus from the Lido.'