Donna Leon - Blood from a stone

‘That’s the most disgusting, heartless thing I’ve ever heard said at this table, and I am ashamed to have raised a child capable of saying it,’ she said.

Raffi, who had tuned in only when his radar registered his mother’s tone, dropped his fork. Chiara’s mouth fell open in a mirror of her mother’s expression, and for much the same reason: shock and horror that a person so fundamental to her happiness could be capable of such speech. Like her mother, she dismissed even the possibility of diplomacy and demanded, ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘It’s supposed to mean that vu cumpràs are not only anything. You can’t dismiss them as if their deaths don’t matter.’

Chiara heard her mother’s words; more significantly, she felt the force of her mother’s tone, and so she said, ‘That’s not what I meant.’

‘I’ve no idea what you meant, Chiara, but what you said was that the dead man was only a vu cumprà. And you’d have to do a lot of explaining to make me believe that there’s any difference between what those words say and what they mean.’

Chiara set her fork down on her plate and asked, ‘May I go to my room?’

Raffi, his own fork motionless in his hand, turned his head back and forth between them, confused that Chiara had said what she did and stunned by the power of his mother’s response.

‘Yes,’ Paola said.

Chiara stood, quietly pushed her chair back under the table, and left the room. Raffi, who was familiar with his mother’s sense of humour, turned to her, waiting for the one-line remark he was sure would come. Instead, Paola got to her feet and picked up her daughter’s plate. She placed it in the sink, then went into the living room.

Raffi finished his radicchio, resigned himself to the fact that there would be no dessert that night, set his knife and fork neatly parallel on his plate, then took it over to the sink. He went back to his room.

Brunetti returned to this scene half an hour later. Comforted by the scents that filled the entire apartment, he was eager to see his family and talk of things other than violent death. He went into the kitchen and, instead of the family he expected to see eating dessert and eagerly awaiting his return, he found an all-but empty table and dishes stacked in the sink.

He went searching for them in the living room, wondering if there was something interesting on television, impossible as he knew that to be. He found only Paola, lying on the sofa, reading. She looked up when he came in and said, ‘Would you like to eat something, Guido?’

‘Yes, I think I would. But first I’d like a glass of wine and for you to tell me what’s wrong.’ He went back into the kitchen and got a bottle of Falconera and two glasses. He opened the wine, dismissed all the nonsense about leaving it unpoured long enough to breathe, and went back into the living room. He sat down near her feet, set the glasses on the table in front of the sofa, and poured out two large glasses. He leaned towards her and handed her one, then used the same hand to take her left foot. ‘Your feet are cold,’ he said, then pulled a balding old afghan down from the back of the sofa and covered them.

He took a sip large enough to complement the size of the glass and said, ‘All right, what is it?’

‘Chiara complained that you were late, and when I told her it was because someone had been killed, she said that it was only a vu cumprà.’ She kept her voice dispassionate, reportorial.

‘Only?’ he repeated.

‘Only.’

Brunetti took another drink of wine, rested his head on the back of the sofa, and swirled the wine around in his mouth. ‘Hummm,’ he finally said. ‘Not nice at all, is it?’

Though he couldn’t see Paola, he felt the sofa move as she nodded.

‘You think she heard it in school?’ he asked.

‘Where else? She’s too young to be a member of the Lega.’

‘So is it something her friends bring in from their parents, or is it something the teachers give them?’ he asked.

‘It could be either, I’m afraid,’ she said. ‘Or both.’

‘I suppose so,’ Brunetti agreed. ‘What did you do?’

‘I told her what she said was disgusting and that I’m ashamed she’s my daughter.’

He turned, smiled, held his glass up and saluted her. ‘Always prone to moderation, aren’t you?’

‘What was I supposed to do, send her to some sort of sensitivity training class or give her a sermon on the brotherhood of man?’ Brunetti heard her rage and disgust rekindle as she went on, ‘It is disgusting, and I am ashamed of her.’

Brunetti was pleased she did not bother to assert that their daughter had never heard such things in their home, that they were in no way responsible for this sort of distortion of mind. Heaven alone knew what was suggested by the conversations he and Paola had in front of the children; no one knew what they could have inferred over all those years. He liked to think he was a moderate person, brought up, like most Italians, without racial prejudice, but he was honest enough to accept that this belief was probably yet another national myth. It is easy to grow up without racial prejudice in a society in which there is only one race.

His father hated Russians, and Brunetti had always thought he did so with good reason, if three years as a prisoner of war is a good reason. For his own part, he had an instinctive distrust of southerners, though it was a feeling that caused him no little discomfort. He was far less troubled by his own distrust of Albanians and of Slavs.

But African blacks? That was an almost entirely unfamiliar category for him, and since he was completely ignorant about them, he doubted that he could have infected his children with his prejudices. More likely it was something, like head lice, that Chiara had picked up in school.

‘Do we sit here and castigate ourselves as negligent parents and then punish ourselves for that by not eating dinner?’ he finally asked.

‘I suppose we could,’ she said, her remark entirely devoid of humour.

‘I don’t like the idea of that,’ he said. ‘Either one or the other.’

‘All right,’ she finally said. ‘I’ve been sitting alone in here a long time, which takes care of the castigating, so I suppose we can at least eat dinner in peace.’

‘Good,’ he said, finishing his wine and leaning forward to take the bottle.

As they ate, some tacit agreement having been made not to discuss Chiara’s remark further that evening, Brunetti told her what was said to have happened in Campo Santo Stefano: two men, though no one seemed to have paid much attention to them, appeared out of the darkness and slipped back into it after shooting the African at least five times. It was an execution, not a murder, and certainly there was nothing random about it. ‘He didn’t have a chance, poor devil,’ Brunetti said.

‘Who would want to do something like that? And to a vu cumprà?’ Paola asked. ‘And why?’

These were the questions that had accompanied Brunetti on his walk home. ‘Seems to me that it’s either because of something he did after he got here or something he did before,’ Brunetti said, though he knew this was merely to state the obvious.

‘That doesn’t help much, does it?’ Paola asked, but it was an observation, not a criticism.

‘No, but it’s a place to begin to divide the things we might be looking for.’

Paola, always comfortable when presented with an exercise in logic, said, ‘Begin by examining what you know about him. Which is?’

‘Absolutely nothing,’ Brunetti answered.

‘That’s not true.’

‘What?’

‘You know he was a black African, and you know he was working as a vu cumprà, or whatever we’re supposed to call them now.’

‘Venditore ambulante or extracomunitario,’ Brunetti supplied.

‘That’s about as helpful as “Operatore ecologico”,’ she answered.

‘Huh?’

‘Garbage man,’ Paola translated. She got to her feet and left the room. When she came back, she had a bottle of grappa and two small glasses. As she poured, she said, ‘So let’s just call him a vu cumprà to save time and confusion, all right?’

Brunetti thanked her for the grappa with a nod, took a sip, and asked, ‘What else do you think we know?’

‘You know that none of the others stayed to try to help him or to help the police in any way.’

‘I’d guess they saw he was dead when he fell.’

‘Would it have been that obvious?’

‘I think so, yes.’

‘And so you know it was an execution,’ Paola went on, ‘not the result of a fight or an argument that provoked it suddenly. Someone wanted him dead and either sent people to do it or came and did it himself.’

‘I’d say he sent people,’ Brunetti offered.

‘How can you tell?’

‘It has that feel about it, the work of professionals. They appeared out of nowhere, executed him, and disappeared.’

‘So what does that tell you about them?’

‘That they’re familiar with the city.’

She gave him a questioning glance, and he elaborated, ‘To know which way to leave. Also to know where he was.’

‘Does that mean Venetian?’

Brunetti shook his head. ‘I’ve never heard of a Venetian who works as a killer.’

Paola considered this and then said, ‘It wouldn’t take all that long to learn at least that much about the city. Some of the Africans are pretty much always there, in Santo Stefano, so all they’d have to do is walk around for a day or so to find them. Or ask someone.’ She closed her eyes and considered the geography of the area and finally said, ‘Afterwards, getting away would be easy. All they’d have to do is go back towards Rialto, or up towards San Marco, or over the Accademia.’

When she stopped, Brunetti continued, ‘Or they could go into San Vidal and then cut back towards San Samuele.’

‘How many places could they get a vaporetto?’ she asked.

‘Three. Four. And then they could have gone either way.’

‘What would you do?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know. But if I wanted to leave the city, I’d probably go up towards San Marco and cut in towards the Fenice and then to Rialto.’

‘Did anyone see them?’

‘An American tourist. She saw one of them, said he was a man about my age and size, wearing an overcoat, a scarf, and a hat.’

‘Half the city,’ Paola said. ‘Anything else?’

‘That there were other people from her group there and they might have seen something. I’m going to talk to them tomorrow morning.’

‘How early?’

‘Early. I have to leave here before eight.’

She leaned forward and poured him another small glass of grappa. ‘American tourists at eight in the morning. Here, take this: it’s the least you deserve.’

5

The morning dawned unpleasantly. A thick mist hung suspended in the air, eager to cling to anything that passed through it. By the time Brunetti got to the imbarcadero of the Numero Uno, the shoulders of his overcoat were covered by a thin film of droplets, and he pulled in dampness with every breath. The approaching vaporetto slipped silently from fog so thick Brunetti could barely make out the form of the man waiting to moor it and slide back the metal gate. He stepped on board, looked up and saw its radar screen turning, and wondered what it was like out on the laguna.

He took a seat in the cabin and opened that morning’s Gazzettino, but he learned from it considerably less than he had the night before. In possession of few facts, the writer opted for sentiment and spoke of the terrible cost the extracomunitari had to pay for their desire for a chance at bare survival and to earn enough money to send back to their families. No name was given for the dead man, nor was his nationality known, though it was assumed he was from Senegal, the country from which most of the ambulanti came. An elderly man got on at Sant’ Angelo and chose to sit next to Brunetti. He saw the newspaper and mouthed out the headline, then said, ‘Nothing but trouble once you start letting them in.’

Brunetti ignored him.

Brunetti’s silence spurred the man to add, ‘I’d round them up and send them back.’

Brunetti gave a grunt and turned the page, but the old man failed to take the hint. ‘My son-in-law has a shop in Calle dei Fabbri. Pays his rent, pays his help, pays his taxes. He gives something to the city, gives work. And these people,’ he said, making a gesture that stopped just short of slapping the offending page, ‘what do they give us?’

With another grunt, Brunetti folded his newspaper and excused himself to go and stand on deck, though they were only at Santa Maria del Giglio and he had another two stops before he got off.

The Paganelli was a narrow hotel, slipped in, like an architectural dash separating two capital letters, between the Danieli and the Savoia amp; Jolanda. At the desk he said he was there to meet the Doctors Crowley and was told they were already in the breakfast room. He followed the clerk’s gesture down a narrow corridor and entered a small room that held six or seven tables, at one of which the Crowleys sat. With them were another elderly couple and, between them, a woman whose appearance gave evidence of considerable assistance.

When Doctor Crowley saw Brunetti, he got to his feet and waved at him; his wife looked up and smiled a greeting. The other man at the table rose and stayed standing as Brunetti approached. One of the women smiled in Brunetti’s direction; the other did not.

The people presented to him as the Petersons were tiny, bird-like people, dressed in colours as inconspicuous as those of sparrows. She had iron grey hair that capped her head in a tight perm; he was entirely bald, his head covered with deep, sun-hardened furrows running from front to back. The woman who had not smiled, introduced as Lydia Watts, had lustrous red hair and lips the same colour. Brunetti saw her push back a vagrant curl with a hand that no surgery and no art could make look the same age as her face and hair.

The table was covered with the aftermath of breakfast: coffee cups and teapots and fragments of buttered rolls. There were two empty bread baskets and an equally empty platter that might have held meat or cheese.

After Brunetti shook hands with all of them, Dr Crowley pulled over a chair from a neighbouring table and offered it to Brunetti. He sat and when the doctor did too, looked around the table at the assembled Americans. ‘I’m grateful that you agreed to speak to me this morning,’ he said in English.

Dottoressa Crowley answered, ‘It’s only right, isn’t it, to tell you what we saw, if it can help?’ There were nods of agreement from the others.