A Sea of Troubles

'What was he like?' Brunetti asked.

'Bright,' the waiter said seriously. 'Very bright and very nice. Nothing like his father, nothing at all. Giulio never talked to anyone if he could help it, but Marco was friendly with everyone. He used to help me with my maths homework, even though he was younger.' The waiter placed the notes that were still in his hand on the table, lining the fifty up beside the ten. 'About the only thing I could ever do was add these up.' Then, with a sudden smile that revealed chalky, gray teeth, he said, 'And most of the time, if I added them, I'd get fifty. Or seventy.' He slipped the bills into his pocket and glanced back at the kitchen, from which came the sudden hiss of frying food and the clang of a pot on the stove. 'But I don't need to know maths here, beyond addition, and the boss does that.'

'Was he still in school, Marco?' 'No, he finished last year.' 'And then what?'

'Went to work with his father,' the waiter said, as though that were the only choice open to Marco or the only choice a Pellestrinotto could ever conceive of. 'They've always been fishermen, the Bottins.'

'Did Marco want to fish?'

The waiter looked at Brunetti, his surprise evident. 'What else could he do? His father had the boat, and Marco knew all about fishing.'

'Of course,' Brunetti agreed. 'You said Bottin never talked to anyone. Was there more to it than that?' Brunetti refused to allow the waiter to play dumb: he clarified his question: 'Did he have many enemies here?'

The waiter shrugged, his reluctance visible in his gesture, but before he could say anything, Vianello broke in, speaking to Brunetti with practised audacity: 'Sir, he can't answer a question like that.' The sergeant glanced protectively at the waiter. 'This is a small place; everyone's going to know he talked to us.'

Picking up the cue, Brunetti answered, 'But you said you've already got the names of a couple of people.' He sensed the waiter's interest increase, saw it in the way he pulled his feet under the chair and fought to keep himself from leaning forward. 'All he'd be doing is confirming what you've already been told.'

Vianello ignored the waiter, keeping his eyes on Brunetti. 'If he doesn't want to talk, he doesn't want to talk, sir. We've already got names.'

'Which ones?' the waiter broke in.

Vianello slid his eyes across to the waiter and gave him a minimal shake of the head, a gesture he tried to hide from Brunetti.

'What names?' the waiter asked in a stronger voice. When neither of the policemen answered him, he demanded, 'Mine?'

'You've never told us your name’ Brunetti said.

'Lorenzo Scarpa,' he said. Vianello's eyes opened and he turned to look at the waiter in badly disguised shock.

When he saw Vianello's reaction, the waiter said in a tight voice, 'It was nothing. Giulio was in here one night, at the bar, and he'd been drinking. My brother never said anything to him. Bottin just wanted to get into a fight, so he invented it, said that Sandro made him spill his wine.' He looked back and forth between the knowing faces of the two policemen. ‘I tell you, nothing happened, and nothing ever got reported. People stopped them before anything happened. I was in the back, working. I didn't get out here until it was all over, but no one was hurt.'

'I'm sure that's true,' Vianello said with a smile he did his best to make appear amiable. 'But that's not what's been suggested might have happened.'

'What was that? Who told you?'

Vianello shook his head with apparent reluctance, as if to suggest to the waiter that he would gladly have named his informant, but with his superior sitting right there at the table across from him, there was no way he could help his friend the waiter, no matter how much he might want to.

'Was it that bastard, Giacomini? Just tell me that? Was it him?'

Again apparently unable to disguise his surprise at the name, Vianello shot the waiter a quick glance, almost as if to warn him to stop. But beyond caring about caution, the waiter went on, 'He wasn't even here, Giacomini. He just wanted to cause Sandro trouble, the bastard. And he knew there was bad blood between them because of that time off Chioggia. But he's lying; he's always been a liar.' The waiter pushed himself back from the table and got to his feet, as if to stop himself from saying anything more. Suddenly formal, all thought of his brother abandoned, he asked, 'Would you like another grappa?'

Brunetti shook his head, then got to his feet, the sergeant quickly following him. 'Thank you’ Brunetti said, leaving it unclear if he meant for the service or for the information. He paused a moment, making it obvious that Vianello had no choice but to precede his superior from the room.

Outside, Brunetti walked for a few minutes until they stood at the edge of the water, where they were safely away from the restaurant and all of the houses. Looking in the general direction of Venice, he put one foot up on the sea wall and reached down to flick a pebble from inside the sole of his shoe.

'Well?' he asked.

'All news to me’ Vianello said with a small smile. 'No one was willing to tell me a thing.'

'That's what I assumed’ Brunetti said then added, knowing that Vianello would be pleased to hear it, 'You played that very well.'

'It wasn't very hard, was it?' the sergeant asked by way of answer.

'I'd like to know how bad their fight was, especially as he was so eager to convince us it was nothing.' Brunetti continued to gaze off towards the invisible city, but it was clear his remarks were meant for Vianello.

'He was pretty insistent, wasn't he, sir?'

Brunetti had thought so at the time, but now he began to wonder if perhaps the waiter had been smarter than he'd thought and had dropped Giacomini's name and the story of the fight with Bottin in order to deflect them from something else. 'You think he was trying to lead us away from something, Sergeant?'

'No, I think he was genuinely worried’ Vianello answered, as if he'd already considered and dismissed the same possibility. Then, with a scorn typical of those born on the major Venetian islands, he added, 'Pellestrinotti aren't bright enough for something like that, anyway.'

'We're not allowed to say things like that any more, Sergeant,' Brunetti said mildly.

'Regardless of whether they're true?' the sergeant asked.

'Because they're true,' Brunetti answered.

Vianello reflected for a moment upon this and then asked, 'What now, sir?'

'I think we go and see what else we can learn about the fight between Sandro Scarpa and Giulio Bottin.' Brunetti turned away from the laguna and back towards the rows of low houses.

Vianello fell into step beside him, saying, 'There's a kind of general store behind the restaurant. The sign said it opened at three, and someone told me that Signora Follini always opens on time.' He led the way to the left of the restaurant and into a sandy courtyard lined on two sides by doors and on the other left open to provide a long view towards the sea wall and, beyond it, the Adriatic. Because of the height of the distant sea wall, they could not see the water on that side of the island, but there was a sharp scent of iodine in the air and a general moistness that spoke of the presence of the sea.

Brunetti had not been out here for years, perhaps for more than a decade, not since the kids were smaller and he and Paola and his brother Sergio and his family used to crowd together into Sergio's boat on Sunday afternoons, saying they wanted to explore the islands but knowing themselves to be, all the while, in search of good restaurants and fresh fish. He remembered sunburnt, cranky children, asleep in the bottom of the boat like puppies, drugged by too much sun and the endless tedium of adult conversation. He remembered Sergio erupting from the water and hurling himself over the side of the boat, both legs lashed red by an enormous jellyfish that had trailed up against him in the clear waters. And he remembered, with a surge of recalled joy, making love with Paola in the bottom of the boat one August afternoon when Sergio had taken all the children to pick blackberries on one of the smaller islands.

A bell pealed out as Vianello opened the door to the small shop. They went in, uniformed officer first to announce the reason for their visit.

From another room a woman's voice called out, 'Un momento,' followed by the sound of a closing door and then a sharper, smaller sound, something being set down on a hard surface. After that, silence. Brunetti took a look around the shop and saw dusty rows of boxes of rice, double packs of flypaper, an object that looked like an umbrella stand filled with brooms and mops, and a low shelf upon which lay four copies of yesterday's Gazzettino. Everything smelled faintly of old paper and dried legumes.