Donna Leon - Blood from a stone

‘I know. But it’s also not proven that, if I started smoking again and smoked three packs a day, I’d die of lung cancer. But the likelihood is pretty high.’

‘You think so? In this case?’

The sincerity of Brunetti’s question was so patent that Vianello answered in a much calmer tone. ‘I don’t know. I’m not an expert on these things. I just know what I read, and I know this report was commissioned by the UN, and the people who wrote it are climatologists from all over the world. So it’s good enough for me, at least until I read something more persuasive.’

‘You think there’s anything to do?’ Brunetti asked. Vianello’s knitted brows caused him to clarify by adding, ‘About this, I mean.’

‘There doesn’t seem to be. It’s probably too late.’

‘Too late for what?’ Brunetti asked, suddenly very interested in what his inspector had to say.

‘To avoid the consequences of what we’ve done in the last half-century.’

‘That’s a gloomy prospect,’ Brunetti said, surprised to hear Vianello speak so seriously about this. For years, people at the Questura had kidded Vianello about his interest in the environment, but Brunetti had always put it on the same level as his own children’s insistence that they not drink mineral water that came in plastic bottles or that they carefully collect all of their waste paper and take it to the ecological bins at Rialto. This, however, was a far more sombre vision than he had ever heard from Vianello.

‘Is there really nothing we can do?’ Brunetti asked.

Vianello shrugged.

For a moment, it looked as though Vianello were going to get up and leave; Brunetti feared that he would. He was very curious to hear Vianello’s answer and so prodded. ‘Well?’

‘Live life and try to do our jobs, I think,’ Vianello said after some time. Then, as if the subject had never been raised, he asked, ‘What about this black guy? How do we find out who he is if your Don Alvise decides not to tell us?’

Accepting that the subject of global warming was closed, Brunetti answered Vianello’s question. ‘Gravini says he knows one of the Africans; he lives down by his mother in Castello. He’s going to see if he can get anything from him. And I’ve asked Signorina Elettra to ask around to see if she can find the people who rent to them.’

‘Good idea. He’s got to have lived somewhere.’ Then, realizing just how silly that sounded, Vianello added, ‘That is, here in the city, if he didn’t have anything on him except a pair of keys.’

‘Did you read the autopsy report?’ Brunetti asked, surprised at himself for having forgotten to ask Vianello about it on the way to Don Alvise’s.

‘No.’

‘It says he was in his late twenties and in good health, and that either of two of the shots would have killed him.’

‘God, what a world,’ Vianello answered. He looked across at Brunetti, pulled his lips together in a gesture of confusion, and added, ‘It’s strange, that we don’t know anything at all about them, or about Africa, isn’t it?’

Brunetti nodded but said nothing.

‘Enough that they’re black, huh?’ Vianello asked with an ironic raising of his eyebrows.

Brunetti ignored Vianello’s tone and added, ‘We don’t look like Germans, and Finns don’t look like Greeks, but we all look like Europeans.’

‘And?’ Vianello asked, obviously not much impressed by Brunetti’s observation.

‘There must be someone who knows more about them,’ Brunetti said.

It was at this point that Signorina Elettra came into the office, carrying a sheet of paper Brunetti hoped would shed light on the identity of the vu cumprà. Even as he heard this term reverberating in his mind, he told himself to substitute it with ambulante.

‘I found two of them,’ she said, nodding a greeting to Vianello. He stood and offered her his chair, pulled the other one over and moved his parka to the back, then sat down again.

‘Two what?’ asked an impatient Brunetti.

‘Landlords,’ she said, then explained, ‘I called a friend of mine at La Nuova.’ She saw their response to the name of the newspaper and said, ‘I know, I know. But we’ve been friends ever since elementary school, and Leonardo needed the job.’ Having excused her friend’s choice of employer, she added, ‘Besides, it allows him to meet some of the famous people who live here.’ That was too much for Vianello, who let out a deep guffaw. She waited a moment and joined him. ‘Pathetic, isn’t it? Famous for living here? As if the city were contagious.’

Brunetti had often reflected on this, finding it especially strange in foreigners, this belief that some cachet adhered to their address, as if living in Dorsoduro or having a palazzo on the Grand Canal could elevate the tone of their discourse or the quality of their minds, render the tedium of their lives interesting or transmute the dross of their amusements into purest gold.

If he thought about it, he felt happiness in being Venetian, not pride. He had not chosen where to be born or what dialect his parents spoke: what pride to be taken in those things? Not for the first time, he felt saddened by the vanity of human wishes.

‘. . over near Santa Maria Materdomini,’ he heard Signorina Elettra saying when he tuned back into her conversation with Vianello.

‘Bertolli?’ Vianello asked. ‘The one who used to be on the city council?’

‘Yes, Renato. He’s a lawyer,’ Signorina Elettra said.

‘And the other one?’ Vianello asked.

‘Cuzzoni. Alessandro,’ she said, then waited to see if the name meant anything to either of them. ‘He’s originally from Mira, but he lives here now and has a shop.’

‘What sort of shop?’

‘He’s a jeweller, but most of the stuff he sells is factory made,’ she said with the easy dismissal of a woman who would never wear a piece of machine-made jewellery.

‘Where’s the shop?’ Brunetti asked, not because he was particularly interested but to show them that he really was listening.

‘Off Ventidue Marzo. On that calle that goes up towards the Fenice, down from the bridge.’

Brunetti sent his memory walking towards Campo San Fantin, down the narrow calle towards the bridge, past the antique shop. ‘Opposite the bar?’ he asked.

‘I think so,’ she answered. ‘I haven’t checked the address, but it’s the only one there, I think.’

‘And these two rent to extracomunitari?’ Brunetti asked.

‘That’s what Leonardo tells me. No long-term contracts, no questions about how many people will eventually live in the apartment, and everything paid in cash.’

‘Furnished or unfurnished?’ Vianello asked.

‘Either, I think,’ Signorina Elettra replied. ‘If you can call it furnished. Leonardo said they did a story once, about two years ago, about one of the apartments they were living in. He said you wouldn’t believe the place: seven of them sleeping in the same room, roaches all over the place. He said the kitchen and bathroom were unlike anything he’d ever seen, and when I asked him what it was like, he made it clear that I didn’t want to know.’

‘And was one of these two the landlord?’ Brunetti asked.

‘I don’t know, and he didn’t say. But Leonardo told me they probably rent to extracomunitari.’

‘Did he know where the apartments are?’ Brunetti asked.

‘No. As I say, he’s not even absolutely sure that they do rent to them, but he says he’s heard their names when people talk about who’s willing to rent to extracomunitari.’

‘Is this his office?’ Brunetti asked, looking at the address listed for Renato Bertolli and trying to calculate where it might be.

‘Yes. I checked it in Calli, Campielli e Canali, and I think he’s got to be just before the fabbro, the one who makes keys.’ This was enough for Brunetti. He had been over there a few times, about five years ago, to have a metal banister made for the final flight of stairs leading to their apartment. He knew the area, though it seemed a strangely out of the way location for a lawyer’s office.

‘I’m not sure how to approach them,’ Brunetti said, taking the paper and waving it gently in the air. ‘If we ask about the apartments, they’ll worry that we’ll report them to the Finanza. Anyone would.’ It did not for an instant occur to him that either man would be declaring the rent on the apartments and thus paying taxes on the money. ‘Can you think of anyone who might be able to get them to talk to us?’

‘I’ve some friends who are lawyers,’ Signorina Elettra said cautiously, as if admitting to some secret vice. ‘I could ask if anyone knows them.’

‘You, Vianello?’ Brunetti asked.

The inspector shook his head.

‘What about the other one, Cuzzoni?’ Brunetti asked.

This time both Signorina Elettra and Vianello shook their heads. Seeing Brunetti’s disappointment, she said,’ I can check at the Ufficio del Catasto and see what apartments they own. Once we know where they live, then we just have to check if there are rental contracts for their other apartments.’

Brunetti’s uncle, who lived near Feltre, used to go hunting, and with him went Diana, an English setter whose greatest joy, aside from gazing adoringly at his uncle as he stroked her ears, was to chase birds. In the autumn, when the air changed and the hunting season began, a wild restiveness came over Diana, who knew no peace until the day his uncle could finally take down his shotgun and open the door that led to the woods behind his home.

Looking at Signorina Elettra poised on the edge of her chair, Brunetti was struck by how much she resembled Diana: there were the same liquid dark eyes, the flared nostrils, and the badly restrained nervousness at the thought of prey that was to be seized and brought back. ‘Can you find everything with that thing?’ he asked, not needing to name her computer.

She turned towards him and she sat up straighter. ‘Perhaps not everything, sir. But many things.’

‘Don Alvise Perale?’ he asked. He sensed, rather than saw, Vianello’s start of astonishment, but when he turned to look at him, Brunetti saw that the inspector had managed not to display his surprise. Brunetti permitted himself a half-smile, and after a moment Vianello was forced to shake his head in rueful appreciation of Brunetti’s inability to trust anyone fully.

He remembered that Diana needed no encouragement or explanation: a flutter of motion and she was off, like the wind. Signorina Elettra wasted no time with questions or clarifications. ‘The ex-priest, sir?’

‘Yes.’

She rose to her feet in a single graceful motion. ‘I’ll go and see what I can find.’

‘It’s almost eight, Signorina,’ he reminded her.

‘Just a quick look,’ she said and was gone.

When the door closed behind her, Vianello said, ‘Don’t worry, sir. She doesn’t have a bed here. So she’ll go home eventually.’

10

Brunetti found a seat at the back of the cabin, on the left-hand side of the vaporetto, so his view was of San Giorgio and the façades on the Dorsoduro side of the canal. He studied them as he headed up towards San Silvestro, but his attention was far removed from Venice, even from Europe. He considered the mess that was Africa, and he considered the endless historical argument of whether it was caused by what had been done to the Africans or by what they had done to themselves. It was not a subject upon which he believed himself sufficiently expert to comment, nor one where he thought there was much hope that people would arrive at the kind of consensus that passes for historical truth.

His memory filled with images: Joseph Conrad’s battleship, firing round after futile round into the jungle in an attempt to force it to submit to peace; shoals of bodies washed up on the shores of Lake Victoria; the shimmering surface of a Benin bronze; the yawning pits where so many of the earth’s riches were mined. No one of these things was Africa, he knew, any more than the bridge under which the boat was passing was Europe. Each was a piece in a puzzle no one could understand. He remembered the Latin words he had once seen on a sixteenth-century map to mark the limit of Western exploration of Africa: Hic scientia finit: Knowledge Stops Here. How arrogant we were, he thought, and how arrogant we remain.

At home he found peace, or perhaps it is more accurate to say that he found a truce that seemed to be holding. Chiara and Paola talked as usual at dinner, and if the way Chiara packed away two helpings of pasta with broccoli and capers and then two baked pears was any indication, her appetite had returned to normal. Taking this as a good sign, he allowed himself to stretch out on the sofa in the living room after dinner, the smallest of small glasses of grappa on the table beside him, his current book propped on his stomach. For the last week, he had been rereading Ammianus Marcellinus’ history of the later Roman Empire, a book which Brunetti enjoyed chiefly for its portrait of one of his greatest heroes, the Emperor Julian. But even here he found himself drawn into Africa, with the account of the siege of the town of Leptis in Tripolis and of the perfidy and duplicity of both attackers and defenders. Hostages were killed, men were condemned to have their tongues cut out for speaking the inconvenient truth, the land was laid waste by pillage and slaughter. He read to the end of the twenty-eighth book but then closed it and decided that an early night would be better than this reminder of how little mankind had changed in almost two millennia.

In the morning, after the children had left for early classes, he and Paola spoke about Chiara, but neither of them was sure what her apparent return to normal behaviour implied. He also repeated his concern about the source of the opinion she had expressed.

‘You know,’ Paola said, after listening to him, ‘all these years the kids have been in school, I’ve listened to their friends’ parents respond to their kids’ bad grades. It’s always the fault of the teacher. No matter what the subject, no matter who the student: it is always the fault of the teacher.’

She dipped a corner of a biscuit in her caffè latte, ate it, and continued. ‘Never once have I heard anyone say, “Yes, Gemma’s really not very bright, so I understand why she didn’t do well in mathematics” or, “Nanni is a bit of a dope, you know, especially at languages.” Not a bit of it. Their children are always the best and the brightest, are perceived as spending every waking moment bent over their books, and into the lambent clarity of their minds no teacher has ever been capable of adding even the dimmest light or glimmer of improvement. Yet these are the same kids who come home with Chiara or Raffi and talk of nothing but pop music and films, seem to know nothing about anything except pop music and films and, when they can tear their attention away from pop music and films, do nothing except call one another on their telefonini or send SMS’s to each other, the grammar and syntax of which I most sincerely hope to be spared.’