Donna Leon - Blood from a stone

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 vu cumprà. ‘Colleagues’ of the dead man would sound strange, suggesting as it did an ordered world of work. He finally decided on, ‘His friends?’

‘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 vu cumprà,’ he said.

‘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 vu cumprà: they had the same ability to appear as though out of nowhere and then as easily disappear.

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 — Brunetti found no way around the obvious pun — in nero.

‘I think it would be better to ask around,’ he answered. ‘Try the people at the Gazzettino and La Nuova. They might know something. They always do a story every time we do a round-up and arrest some of them. They’ve got to know something.’

His attention wandered and he found himself wondering how Elettra endured wearing the turban. The office was warm, one of those offices on the side of the building where the radiators worked, so surely it must have become uncomfortable to wear it tight to her head all day long. But he said nothing, thinking that perhaps Paola would be able to explain.

‘I’ll see what I can find out,’ she said. ‘Are there fingerprints I could send to Lyon?’

‘I haven’t got the autopsy report yet,’ Brunetti said. ‘I’ll send the photos to you as soon as I get them.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ she said. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

On his way back to his own office, Brunetti was already running through the list of friends who might be able to help him with information. By the time he reached his desk, he had accepted the fact that there was no one he knew who could supply him with reliable information about the ambulanti, which led him to suspect that Signorina Elettra was right and they did indeed live on different planets.

He called down to the office of Rubini, the inspector in charge of the Sisyphean labour of arresting the ambulanti, and asked him to come up for a moment.

‘About last night?’ Rubini asked over the phone.

‘Yes. You hear anything?’

‘No,’ Rubini answered. ‘But I didn’t expect to.’ There was a pause, and then he asked, ‘Should I bring my files?’

‘Please.’

‘I hope you’ve got a long time, Guido.’

‘Why?’

‘There must be two metres of them.’

‘Then should I come down there?’

‘No, I’ll just bring the summaries of the ones I’ve submitted. It will still take you the rest of the morning to read them.’ Brunetti thought he heard Rubini laugh quietly but wasn’t sure. He replaced the phone.

When Rubini showed up more than ten minutes later, a stack of files in his hands, he explained that the delay was caused by his having searched for the file containing all of the photos that had been taken of the Africans who had been arrested in the last year. ‘We’re supposed to photograph them every time we arrest them,’ he explained.

‘Supposed to?’ Brunetti asked.

Rubini set a large stack of papers on Brunetti’s desk and sat down. From Murano, Rubini had been on the force for more than two decades and, like Vianello, had moved up through the ranks slowly, perhaps blocked by the same refusal to curry favour with the men in power. Tall and so thin as to seem emaciated, Rubini was in fact a passionate rower and every year was among the first ten to cross the finish line of the Vogalonga.

‘We did at the beginning, but after a while it seemed a waste of time to take the photo of a man we’d arrested six or seven times and who we say hello to on the street.’ He pushed the papers closer to Brunetti and added, ‘We call them tu by now, and they address us all by name.’

Brunetti pulled the papers towards him. ‘Why do you still bother?’

‘What, to arrest them?’

Brunetti nodded.

‘Dottor Patta wants arrests, so we go and arrest them. It makes the statistics look good.’

Brunetti had suspected this would be the answer, but he asked, ‘You think it really does any good?’

‘God knows,’ Rubini said with a resigned shake of his head. ‘It keeps the Vice-Questore off our backs for a week or two, and I suppose if we were to be serious about it, arrest them and take all their bags, they’d simply decide to go somewhere else.’

‘But?’ Brunetti asked.

Rubini crossed his legs, pulled out a cigarette and lit it without bothering to ask if he could. ‘But my men always leave them a couple of bags when they confiscate them, even though they’re supposed to take them all. After all, they’ve got to eat, these guys, whether they’re African or Italian. If we take all of their bags, they’ve got nothing to sell.’

Brunetti shoved the top of a Nutella jar towards the inspector. ‘And the bags?’ he asked.

Rubini took an enormous pull at his cigarette and let the smoke filter slowly from his nose. ‘You mean the ones we leave them or the ones we take?’

‘There’s the warehouse in Mestre, isn’t there?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Two of them by now.’ Rubini leaned forward and flicked ash into the proffered ashtray. ‘It’s all in there,’ he went on, using the hand with the cigarette to point to the files. ‘So far this year we’ve confiscated something like ten thousand bags. No matter how fast we chop them up or burn them, we keep confiscating more. Soon there won’t be enough room to store them.’

‘What’ll you do?’

Rubini crushed the cigarette and said, making no attempt to disguise his exasperation, ‘If it were my decision, I’d give them back to the vu cumprà so they wouldn’t have to pay to buy new ones all over again. But then what happens to all those people who work in the factories in Puglia where they make them?’ Abruptly he got to his feet, pointed at the files and said, ‘If there’s anything else you want to know, give me a call.’ At the door, he paused and looked back at Brunetti, and raised a hand in an expression of utter hopelessness. ‘It’s all crazy, the whole thing,’ he said, and left.

7

Brunetti had not read the Iliad — his laboured high school translations could hardly be considered a reading of the text — until his third year at university; the experience had been a strange one. Though he had never read the original, it was so much a part of his world and his culture that he knew even before he read it what each book would bring. He experienced no surprise at the perfidy of Paris and the compliance of Helen, knew that bold Priam was doomed and that no bravery on the part of noble Hector could save Troy from ruin.

Rubini’s files produced much the same sense of literary déjà vu. As he read through the summary of the police’s response to the arrival of the vu cumprà in Italy, he was conscious of how familiar he was with so many elements of the plot. He knew that the original street pedlars had been Moroccans and Algerians who sold illegally the handicraft articles they brought into Italy with them. Indeed, he could remember seeing their merchandise, years before: hand-carved wooden animals, glass trading beads, ornamental knives and glitzy fake scimitars. Though the report did not explain it, he assumed that their original name had been given to this wave of French-speaking itinerant salesmen in imitation of their attempts to catch the attention of their new customers with some linguistically bastardized invitation to buy.

As the Arabs were supplanted by Africans from further south, the frequency of crimes lessened: though immigration violations and selling without a licence remained, petty theft and crimes of violence virtually disappeared from the arrest records of the men who had inherited the name of vu cumprà.

The Arabs, he knew, had passed on to more lucrative employment, many of them migrating north to countries with no choice but to accept the residence permits so easily granted by an accommodating Italian bureaucracy. The Senegalesi, with no apparent propensity to crime, had originally been viewed sympathetically by many of the residents of the city, and as Gravini’s story suggested, they had earned the regard, however gruffly stated, of at least some of the officers on the street. In the last years, however, the increasing insistence with which they confronted passers-by and their apparently ever expanding numbers had worn away much of the Venetians’ original good will.