we send them.’
‘Letters?’ interrupted Pucetti. ‘Why do we bother to send them letters?’
‘We don’t actually send them,’ Gravini answered. ‘We give them to them, saying they have forty-eight hours to leave the country.’ He snorted at the absurdity of this, then added, ‘And then we arrest them a week later and give them another copy of the same letter.’
Brunetti waited for his next comment, which he assumed would be much in line with what the old man on the vaporetto had said that morning. Gravini shrugged and said, ‘I don’t know why we bother. They aren’t hurting anyone, just trying to make a living. And no one forces people to buy the bags from them.’
Pucetti interrupted suddenly, ‘Gravini, you’re one of the ones who went into the canal, aren’t you?’
Gravini lowered his head, as if embarrassed at having been caught at some folly. ‘What was I supposed to do? He was new, the one who fell in. It was probably the first time he’d been caught in one of our raids. He panicked, really just a kid, and he ran. What else would he do, with cops all over the place, running at him? It was over by the Misericordia, and he ran up that bridge that doesn’t have a parapet. Lost his footing or something and fell in. I could hear him screaming all the way back by the church. When we got there, he was flailing around like a madman, so I did the first thing that came into my head: I went right in after him. Didn’t realize until I was in the water that it wasn’t very deep, at least not near the sides. I don’t know what he was making all the fuss about.’ Gravini tried to make himself sound angry but without much success. ‘Ruined my jacket, and Bocchese spent a day cleaning the mud out of my pistol.’
Brunetti chose not to comment on this. ‘Any idea where you might have seen this one, then?’ he asked, tapping his forefinger on the full-face photo.
‘No, sir. It doesn’t come to me, but I know I’ve seen him somewhere.’ He took the photos and looked through the series. At last he said, ‘Can I take these, sir? And maybe show them to some of the men I’ve arrested?’
Brunetti was not sure how to refer to the other
‘Yes. There’s one I’ve arrested at least five times; I can ask him.’
‘But what if he sees you coming?’ Pucetti asked.
‘No, no, it’s nothing like that,’ Gravini insisted. ‘A bunch of them live in an apartment off Via Garibaldi, down near where my mother lives, so I see them when I go to visit her, when. .’ he trailed off, seeking a way to say it. ‘Well, when we’re both off work. He says he used to be a teacher, Muhammad. I can ask him.’
‘You think he’d trust you?’ Brunetti asked.
Gravini shrugged. ‘No way to know until I ask him.’
Brunetti told Gravini to keep the photos and to show them around, perhaps ask Muhammad if he would do the same among the men with whom he worked. ‘Gravini,’ he added, ‘tell them that all we’re asking for is a name and an address. No questions after that, no trouble, nothing else.’ He wondered if the Africans would trust the word of the police and suspected that they had no reason to do so. Even though there were men like Gravini, willing to jump into a canal to save them, Brunetti feared that the prevailing attitude of the police would more closely resemble that of the old man on the vaporetto and thus not encourage cooperation.
He thanked both men and went down to Signorina Elettra’s office, where he found her at her desk. For some days, Signorina Elettra had been keeping the gloom of winter at bay with a refulgence of colour: she had begun last Wednesday with yellow shoes, Thursday with emerald green slacks and Friday with an orange jacket. Today, to begin the week, she had decided to skip her throat — no doubt because a bright scarf would be too predictable an accessory — and had wrapped her hair in a piece of silk that seemed to be covered with parrots.
‘Lovely birds,’ Brunetti said as he came in.
She glanced up, smiled, and thanked him. ‘I think next week I might suggest to the Vice-Questore that he try the same thing.’
‘Which? Yellow shoes or the turban?’ Brunetti asked, just to show he had noticed.
‘No, his ties. They’re always so very sober.’
‘Not the tie-pins, though. They have different coloured jewels in them, don’t they?’ Brunetti asked.
‘One would hardly notice, they’re so small,’ she said. ‘I wonder if I should get him some.’
Brunetti had no idea if she meant ties or jewelled pins for them: it hardly mattered. ‘And put them down as office expenses?’ he asked.
‘Of course,’ she answered. ‘Perhaps I’d list them as “maintenance”.’ Then, turning to business, she asked, ‘What is it I can help you with, Commissario?’
Hearing her, Brunetti wondered when she had last asked anyone what she could do for them, whether himself or the Vice-Questore. ‘I’d like you to see what you can find out about the
‘It’s all in here,’ she answered, pointing at her computer. ‘Or in the Interpol files.’
‘No,’ he said, ‘not that sort of information. I want to know what people know, really know, about them: where they live and how they live, what sort of people they are.’
‘Most are from Senegal, I believe,’ she said.
‘Yes, I know. But I want to know if they’re from the same place and if they know one another or are related to one another.’
‘And,’ she continued, ‘presumably, you’d also like to know who the murdered man is.’
‘Of course,’ he answered. ‘But I don’t think that’s going to be an easy thing to find out. No one has called about him. The only people who volunteered anything were some American tourists who were there at the time, and all they saw was a very tall man with hairy hands who they said looked “Mediterranean”, by which they mean dark. There was another man, but all they noticed about him was that he was shorter than the other. Aside from that, the shooting might as well have taken place in another city, for all we know. Or on another planet.’
After a thoughtful pause, she asked, ‘That’s pretty much where they live, isn’t it?’
‘Excuse me?’ he asked, confused.
‘They don’t have any contact with us, not real contact, that is,’ she began. ‘They appear like mushrooms, set out their sheets, and do business until they disappear again. It’s as if they popped out of their space capsules, then vanished again.’
‘That’s hardly another planet,’ he said.
‘But it is, sir. We don’t talk to them, or really see them.’ She noticed how he responded to this and so insisted, ‘No, I’m not trying to attack us for the way we treat them nor trying to defend them, the way my friends do, saying they’re all victims of this or that. I simply think it’s very strange that they can live among us and yet, for the entire time they aren’t on the street, selling things, remain invisible.’ She looked to see if he realized how serious she was, then added, ‘That’s why I say they live on a different planet. The only attention we pay to them on this planet, it seems, is when we arrest them.’
He considered this and had to agree with her. He remembered once, last year, an evening when he and Paola were on their way to dinner and had been caught in a sudden rainstorm, how the streets had instantly blossomed with Tamils, all carrying bouquets of collapsible umbrellas, which they tried to sell for five Euros apiece. Paola had remarked that they seemed — the Tamils — freeze dried: all one had to do was add water, and they sprang to full size. Much the same, he realized, could be said of the
He decided to accept her point and said, ‘Then that’s a way to begin: see if you can find out where it is they go when they disappear.’
‘You mean who rents to them and where?’
‘Yes. Gravini said there are some who live down in Castello near his mother. Ask him for her address or have a look in the phone book: it can’t be a very common name.’ He recalled what Gravini had said about the tenuous nature of his relationship — one could hardly call it friendship, not if it originated in one man arresting the other — with Muhammad. ‘All I want is the address. I don’t want to do anything until Gravini has had a chance to talk to the one he knows. See what you can find out about any other apartments that might be rented to them.’
‘You think there’d be contracts?’ she asked. ‘There would be copies at the Comune.’
Brunetti doubted the willingness of most landlords to offer the protection of a formal contract to Africans: they were certainly reluctant enough to give them to Venetians. Once a tenant had a contract, the law made eviction difficult, if not virtually impossible. Besides, a formal contract had to state the rent, and thus the income became visible, and taxable: any sane landlord would want to avoid that. So the Africans were probably renting —
