About Face

‘Industrial, chemical, or. .’ Brunetti began.

Guarino finished the list for him. ‘. . or medical, often radiological.’

‘And took it where?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Some of it went to the ports, and from there to whatever Third World country would take it.’

‘And the rest?’

Before answering, Guarino pushed himself upright in his chair. ‘The garbage gets left on the streets in Naples. There’s no more room for it in the landfills or the incinerators down there because they’re busy burning what comes down from the North. Not only from Lombardia and the Veneto, but from any factory that’s willing to pay to have it taken away and no questions asked.’

‘How many shipments like this did Ranzato make?’

‘I told you, he wasn’t very good at keeping records.’

‘And you couldn’t. .’ Brunetti began. He shied away from using the word ‘force’ and settled for ‘. . encourage him to tell you?’

‘No.’

Brunetti remained silent. Guarino spoke again. ‘One of the last times I spoke to him, he said he almost wished I could arrest him so he could stop doing what he was doing.’

‘Stories were all over the papers by then, weren’t they?’

‘Yes.’

‘I see.’

Guarino’s voice softened. ‘By then we’d become, well, not friends, not really, but something like friends, and he talked to me openly. In the beginning, he was afraid of me, but towards the end he was afraid of them and what they would do to him if they found out that he was talking to us.’

‘It seems they did.’

Either his words or his tone stopped Guarino, who gave Brunetti a sharp look. ‘Unless it was a robbery,’ he said, dead level, signalling that the best measure of their friendship was in seeming trust.

‘Of course.’

Brunetti, though by disposition a compassionate man, had little patience with retrospective protestations of remorse: most people — however much they might deny it — had an idea of what they were getting into when they got into it. ‘He must have known from the beginning who, or at least what, they were,’ Brunetti said. ‘And what they wanted him to do for them.’ Despite all of Guarino’s assurances, Brunetti judged that Ranzato had known perfectly well what was being carried on his trucks. Besides, all this talk of regret was exactly what people wanted to hear. Brunetti had always been bemused by people’s willingness to be charmed by the penitent sinner.

‘That might be true, but he didn’t tell me that,’ the Maggiore answered, reminding Brunetti how protective he had himself become of some of the people he used as — and had forced into becoming — informants.

Guarino continued. ‘He said he wanted to stop working for them. He didn’t tell me what made him decide, but whatever it was, it was clear — at least to me — that it disturbed him.’ He added, ‘That’s when he spoke about wanting to be arrested. So it could stop.’

Brunetti forbore to suggest that it did stop. Nor did he bother to observe that the perception of personal danger very often set people on the path of virtue. Only an anchorite could have remained ignorant of the ‘emergenza spazzatura’ that had captured the nation’s attention in the last weeks of Ranzato’s life.

Did Guarino look embarrassed? Or was he perhaps irritated at Brunetti’s hard-heartedness? To keep the conversation going, Brunetti asked, ‘What was the date when you last spoke to him?’

The Major shifted to one side, and took out a small black notebook. He opened it and licked his right forefinger, then flipped quickly through its pages. ‘It was the seventh of December. I remember because he said his wife wanted him to go to Mass with her the next day.’ Suddenly, Guarino’s hand fell away and the notebook slapped against his thigh. ‘Oddio,’ he whispered.

Guarino suddenly grew pale. He closed his eyes and pressed his lips together. For an instant, Brunetti thought the man might faint. Or weep. ‘What is it, Filippo?’ he asked, pulling his feet back and putting them on the floor, leaning forward, one hand half-raised.

Guarino closed the notebook. He rested it on his knees and kept his eyes on it. ‘I remember. He said his wife’s name was Immacolata, and she always went to Mass on the eighth, her name-day.’

Brunetti had no idea why this information should prove so upsetting to Guarino until the other man said, ‘He told me it was the one day of the year she asked him to come to Mass with her, and receive Communion. So he was going to go to Confession the next morning, before the Mass.’ Guarino picked up the book and slipped it back into his pocket.

‘I hope he went,’ Brunetti said before he realized he had spoken.

5

Neither man knew what to say after that. Brunetti got up and went to stand by the window, as much to give himself a moment’s calm as to provide the same to Guarino. He would have to tell Paola what he had said, how it had slipped out without a conscious thought.

He heard Guarino clear his throat and say, just as if he and Brunetti had come to some gentleman’s agreement no longer to discuss Ranzato or what he might have known, ‘I told you: because he was killed, and because the only link we have to the man he worked for is the link to San Marcuola, we need your help. You people here in Venice are the only ones who can tell us if there’s someone who lives there who might be involved in. . well, in something like this.’ It did not sound like a finished statement, so Brunetti remained silent. After a moment, Guarino went on, ‘We don’t know who we’re looking for.’

‘Was it just the one man this Signor Ranzato worked for?’ Brunetti asked, turning back to face him. ‘He was the only one he told me about,’ Guarino answered.

‘That’s not the same thing, is it?’

‘I think it is, yes. Remember, I told you we’d become, if not friends, then at least close. We talked about things.’

‘For instance?’

‘I told him how lucky he was to be married to someone he loved so much,’ Guarino said in a voice that was steady except for the word ‘loved’.

‘I see.’

‘I meant it, too,’ Guarino said with what Brunetti considered defensive self-revelation. ‘It wasn’t one of those things you tell them to get them to trust you.’ He waited to be sure that Brunetti understood the distinction, then went on, ‘Maybe that’s how things were at the beginning, but as time passed, well, they changed between us.’

‘Did you ever meet his wife? Or see her?’

‘No. But her photo was on his desk,’ Guarino said. ‘I’d like to talk to her, but we can’t contact her or give any sign that we were ever in touch with him.’

‘If they killed him, then they already know that you were, wouldn’t you say?’ Brunetti asked, unwilling to be merciful.

‘Perhaps,’ Guarino agreed with some reluctance, then changed it to ‘probably.’ His voice grew a bit stronger. ‘But those are the rules. We can’t do anything that might put her at risk.’

‘Of course,’ Brunetti said and stopped himself from observing that that had already been amply taken care of. He returned to his desk. ‘I don’t know how much we’ll be able to help you, but I’ll ask around and have a look at the files. I have to tell you now that no one comes to mind.’ It was implicit, in his use of the term ‘ask around’, that whatever was done beyond the usual search through the files would be done at the casual, private level: men talking to their informers, hinting, chatting in the bars. ‘However,’ Brunetti added, ‘Venice isn’t the best place to search for information about trucking.’

Guarino glanced at him, seeking sarcasm but finding none. ‘I’ll be grateful for whatever information you can give me,’ he said. ‘We’re at a loss. It’s always this way when we try to work someplace where we don’t know. .’