instead, said merely, 'Order a boat. I'll be down.'
When Alvise hung up, Brunetti took a look at the week's duty roster
and, seeing that Ispettore Lorenzo Vianello's name was not listed for
that day nor for the next, he called
Vianello at home and briefly explained what had happened. Before
Brunetti could ask him, Vianello said, Till meet you there.'
Alvise had proven capable of informing the pilot of Commissario
Brunetti's request, no doubt in part because the pilot sat at the desk
opposite him, and so, when Brunetti emerged from the Questura a few
minutes later, he found both Alvise and the pilot on deck, the boat's
motor idling. Brunetti paused before stepping on to the launch and
told Alvise, 'Go back upstairs and send Pucetti down.'
'But don't you want me to come with you, sir?' Alvise asked, sounding
as disappointed as a bride left waiting on the steps of the church.
'No, it's not that,' Brunetti said carefully, 'but if this person calls
back again, I want you to be there so that there's continuity in the
way he's dealt with. We'll learn more that way.'
Though this made no sense at all, Alvise appeared to accept it;
Brunetti reflected, not for the first time, that it was perhaps the
absence of sense that made it so easy for Alvise to accept. He went
docilely back inside the Questura. A few minutes later Pucetti emerged
and stepped on to the launch. The pilot pulled them away from the Riva
and toward the Bacino. The night's rain had washed the pollution from
the air, and the city was presented with a gloriously limpid morning,
though the sharpness of late autumn was in the air.
Brunetti had had no reason to go to the Academy for more than a decade,
not since the graduation of the son of a second cousin. After being
inducted into the Army as a lieutenant, a courtesy usually extended to
graduates of San Martino, most of them the sons of soldiers, the boy
had progressed through the ranks, a source of great pride to his father
and equal confusion to the rest of the family. There was no military
tradition among the Brunettis nor among his mother's family, which is
not to say that the family had never had anything to do with the
military. To their cost, they had, for it was the generation of
Brunetti's parents that had not only fought the last war but had had
large parts of it fought around them, on their own soil.
Hence it was that Brunetti, from the time he was a child, had heard the
military and all its works and pomps spoken of with the dismissive
contempt his parents and their friends usually reserved for the
government and the Church. The low esteem with which he regarded the
military had been intensified over the years of his marriage to Paola
Falier, a woman of leftish, if chaotic, politics. It was Paola's
position that the greatest glory of the Italian Army was its history of
cowardice and retreat, and its greatest failure the fact that, during
both world wars, its leaders, military and political, had flown in the
face of this truth and caused the senseless deaths of hundreds of
thousands of young men by relentlessly pursuing both their own delusory
ideas of glory and the political goals of other nations.
Little that Brunetti had observed during his own undistinguished term
of military service or in the decades since then had persuaded him that
Paola was wrong. Brunetti realized that not much he had seen could
persuade him that the military, either Italian or foreign, was much
different from the Mafia: dominated by men and unfriendly to women;
incapable of honour or even simple honesty beyond its own ranks;
dedicated to the acquisition of power; contemptuous of civil society;
violent and cowardly at the same time. No, there was little to
distinguish one organization from the other, save that some wore easily
recognized uniforms while the other leaned toward Armani and Brioni.
The popular beliefs about the history of the Academy were known to
Brunetti. Established on the Giudecca in 1852 by Alessandro Loredan,
one of Garibaldi's earliest supporters in the Veneto and, by the time
of Independence, one of his generals, the school was originally located
in a large building
on the island. Dying childless and without male heirs, Lurcdan had
left the building as well as his family palnzzo and fortune in trust,
on the condition that the income be used to support the military
Academy to which he had given the name of his father's patron saint.
Though the oligarchs of Venice might not have been wholehearted
supporters of the Risorgimento, they had nothing but enthusiasm for an
institution which so effectively assured that the Loredan fortune
remained in the city. Within hours of his death, the exact value of
his legacy was known, and within days the trustees named in the will
had selected a retired officer, who happened to be the brother-in-law
of one of them, to administer the Academy. And so it had continued to
this day: a school run on strictly military lines, where the sons of
officers and gentlemen of wealth could acquire the training and bearing
which might prepare them to become officers in their turn.
Brunetti's reflections were cut off as the boat pulled into a canal
just after the church of Sant' Eufemia and then drew up at a landing
spot. Pucetti took the mooring rope, jumped on to the land, and
slipped the rope through an iron circle in the pavement. He extended a
hand to Brunetti and steadied him as he stepped from the boat.
It's up here, isn't it?' Brunetti asked, pointing towards the back of
the island and the lagoon, just visible in the distance.
