Authors: Donna Leon
'Could we have lunch here?' the sergeant asked.
The man tilted his head towards a hallway that led away from the bar. He looked down at the glass again and returned to his careful work.
To the side of the bar was a doorway of a sort Brunetti had not seen in decades. Narrow, it was hung with a row of long strips of green and white plastic, each little more than a centimetre wide, ribbed on both sides. As he inserted his right hand to slip half of them aside, he heard the gentle clicking sound he recalled from his youth. Once these dividers had hung in the doorway of every bar and every trattoria, but during the last couple of decades, they'd all disappeared; he couldn't remember the last time he'd seen one. He held aside the still clattering strips until Vianello was through, then listened to them fall back into place.
The room they entered surprised him by its size, for it must have held thirty tables. The windows were set high in the walls, and plenty of light streamed in. Below them, fishermen's nets covered the walls, each embedded with shells, pieces of dried seaweed, and what looked like the petrified corpses of fish, crabs and lobsters. A low serving counter ran along one side of the room. In the back, a glass door, closed now, led to a pebble-covered parking lot.
Seeing that only one other table was occupied, Brunetti looked at his watch, surprised to find that it was only one thirty. There was some truth in the belief that exposure to sea air increases the appetite.
They walked across the room, pulled out chairs at a table halfway along the first row, and sat facing one another. A small vase of fresh wildflowers stood to the left of the bottles of olive oil and vinegar, and beside that was a wicker holder containing half a dozen paper-wrapped packs of grissini. Brunetti took one, ripped it open, and began to nibble at a breadstick.
The plastic strips parted and a young man in black jacket and trousers backed into the room. When he turned around, Brunetti saw that he had a plate of what appeared to be
antipasto di pesce
in each hand. The waiter nodded to the two newcomers and went to the table in the far corner, where he set the two plates down in front of a man and woman in their sixties.
The waiter came back towards their table. Brunetti and Vianello had realized that this was not the sort of place to bother with a menu, at least not this early in the season, so Brunetti smiled and said, as one always does in a new restaurant, 'Everyone says you can eat very well here.' He was careful to speak in Veneziano.
'I hope so,' the waiter said, smiling as he spoke and making no sign that he found the presence of a uniformed policeman in any way surprising.
'What can you recommend today?' Brunetti asked.
'The
antipasto di mare
is good. We've got cuttlefish milk or sardines if you'd like them, instead.'
'What else?' Vianello asked.
'There was still some asparagus in the market this morning, so there's a salad of asparagus and shrimp.'
Brunetti nodded at this; Vianello said he wouldn't have antipasto, so the waiter passed on to the
primi piatti.
'Spaghetti alle vongole, spaghetti alle cozze,
and
penne all' Amatriciana,'
he recited and then stopped.
'That's all?' Vianello couldn't help asking.
The waiter waved one hand in the air. 'We've got fifty people coming for a wedding anniversary tonight, so we've only got a few things on the menu today.'
Brunetti ordered the
vongole
and Vianello the
all' Amatriciana.
The choice of main courses was limited to roast turkey or mixed fried fish. Vianello chose the first, Brunetti the second. They ordered a half-litre of white wine and a litre of mineral water. The waiter brought them a basket of
bussolai,
the thi
ck oval breadsticks that Brunett
i especially liked.
When he was gone, Brunetti picked one up, broke it in half, and took a bite. It always surprised him how they remained so crisp in this seaside climate. The waiter brought the wine and water, set them on the table, and hurried over to remove the plates from in front of the elderly couple.
'We come out to Pellestrina and you don't eat fish,' Brunetti said, making it a statement rather than a question, though it was.
Vianello poured them each a glass of wine, picked up his, and sipped at it. 'Very good,' he said. 'It's like what my uncle used to bring back from Istria on his boat.'
'And the fish?' Brunetti asked, not letting it
go.
'I don't eat it any more,' Vianello said. 'Not unless I know it comes from the Atlantic'
Lunacy had many forms, Brunetti knew, and most of them had to be detected in the early stages. 'Why?' he asked.
‘I
joined Greenpeace, you know, sir,' Vianello said by way of answer.
'And Greenpeace doesn't let you eat fish?' he asked, trying to make a joke of it.
Vianello started to say something, stopped, took another sip of wine, and said, 'That's not true, sir.'
Neither of them spoke for a long time, and then the waiter was back, bringing Brunetti his antipasto, a small mound of tiny pink shrimp on a bed of slivered raw asparagus. Brunetti took a forkful: they'd been sprinkled with balsamic vinegar. The combination of sweet, sour, sweet, salty was wonderful. Ignoring Vianello for a moment, he ate the salad slowly, relishing it, perpetually delighted by the contrast of flavours and textures.
He set his fork on the plate and took a sip of wine. 'Are you afraid to ruin my meal by telling me what polluting horrors lie in wait for me inside the shrimp?' he asked, smiling.
'Clams are worse,' said Vianello, smiling back but with no further attempt at clarification.
Before Brunetti could ask for a list of the deadly poisons that lurked in his shrimp and clams, the waiter took his plate away, then was quickly back with the two dishes of pasta.
The rest of the meal passed amiably as they talked idly of people they'd known who had fished in the waters around Pellestrina and of a famous footballer from Chioggia whom neither of them had ever seen play. When their main courses came, Vianello could not help giving Brunetti's a suspicious glance, though he had forgone the opportunity to comment further upon the clams. Brunetti, for his part, gave silent proof of the high regard in which he held his sergeant by not repeating to him the contents of an article he had read the previous month about the methods used in commercial turkey farming, nor did he list the transmissible diseases to which those birds are prone.
5
After they'd drunk their coffee, Brunetti asked for the bill. The waiter paused, as if from a habit too strong for him to control, and Brunetti added,
‘I
don't need a receipt.' The waiter's eyes grew wide as he registered this new reality: a man who must be a policeman, willing to aid the owner of the restaurant in avoiding the tax that was imposed whenever a receipt was issued. Brunetti could see this created a dilemma, which the waiter solved by saying, 'I'll ask the boss.'
He came back a few minutes later, carrying a small glass of grappa in each hand. Placing them on the table he said, 'Fifty-two thousand.' Brunetti reached for his wallet. It was a third of what it would have cost in Venice, and the fish had been fresh, the shrimp perfect.
He took sixty thousand lire from his wallet and when the waiter reached into his pocket for change, Brunetti waved his gesture aside with a muttered,
'Grazie.'
He raised his grappa and took a sip. 'Very good,' he said. 'Please thank the owner for us.'
The waiter nodded, took the money, and turned to go.
'Are you from here?' Brunetti asked, with no attempt to make it seem an idle question.
'Yes.'
'We're out here because of the accident,' Brunetti said, indicating the general direction of the water. Then, with a smile he added, 'Though I don't imagine that's much of a surprise.'
'Not to anyone here, it's not,' the waiter said.
'Did you know them?' Brunetti asked. He pulled out another chair, motioning to the waiter to sit. The couple at the other table were long gone, the tables all set for the anniversary party, so there was little for him to do. He sat, then turned his chair slightly to face Brunetti.
‘I
knew Marco
’
he said, 'We went to the same school. He was a couple of years behind me, but we knew one another because we used to come back on the same bus from the Lido.'
'What was he like?' Brunetti asked.
'Bright,' the waiter said seriously. 'Very bright and very nice. Nothing like his father, nothing at all. Giulio never talked to anyone if he could help it, but Marco was friendly with everyone. He used to help me with my maths homework, even though he was younger.' The waiter placed the notes that were still in his hand on the table, lining the fifty up beside the ten. 'About the only thing I could ever do was add these up.' Then, with a sudden smile that revealed chalky, gray teeth, he said, 'And most of the time, if I added them, I'd get fifty. Or seventy.' He slipped the bills into his pocket and glanced back at the kitchen, from which came the sudden hiss of frying food and the clang of a pot on the stove. 'But I don't need to know maths here, beyond addition, and the boss does that.'
'Was he still in school, Marco?' 'No, he finished last year.' 'And then what?'
'Went to work with his father,' the waiter said, as though that were the only choice open to Marco or the only choice a Pellestrinotto could ever conceive of. 'They've always been fishermen, the Bottins.'
'Did Marco want to fish?'
The waiter looked at Brunetti, his surprise evident. 'What else could he do? His father had the boat, and Marco knew all about fishing.'
'Of course,' Brunetti agreed. 'You said Bottin never talked to anyone. Was there more to it than that?' Brunetti refused to allow the waiter to play dumb: he clarified his question: 'Did he have many enemies here?'
The waiter shrugged, his reluctance visible in his gesture, but before he could say anything, Vianello broke in, speaking to Brunetti with practised audacity: 'Sir, he can't answer a question like that.' The sergeant glanced protectively at the waiter. 'This is a small place; everyone's going to know he talked to us.'
Picking up the cue, Brunetti answered, 'But you said you've already got the names of a couple of people.' He sensed the waiter's interest increase, saw it in the way he pulled his feet under the chair and fought to keep h
imself from leaning forward. 'All
he'd be doing is confirming what you've already been told.'
Vianello ignored the waiter, keeping his eyes on Brunetti. 'If he doesn't want to talk, he doesn't want to talk, sir. We've already got names.'
'Which ones?' the waiter broke in.
Vianello slid his eyes across to the waiter and gave him a minimal shake of the head, a gesture he tried to hide from Brunetti.
'What names?' the waiter asked in a stronger voice. When neither of the policemen answered him, he demanded, 'Mine?'
'You've never told us your name
’
Brunetti said.
'Lorenzo Scarpa,' he said. Vianello's eyes opened and he turned to look at the waiter in badly disguised shock.
When he saw Vianello's reaction, the waiter said in a tight voice, 'It was nothing. Giulio was in here one night, at the bar, and he'd been drinking. My brother never said anything to him. Bottin just wanted to get into a fight, so he invented it, said that Sandro made him spill his wine.' He looked back and forth between the knowing faces of the two policemen.
‘I
tell you, nothing happened, and nothing ever got reported. People stopped them before anything happened. I was in the back, working. I didn't get out here until it was all over, but no one was hurt.'
'I'm sure that's true,' Vianello said with a smile he did his best to make appear amiable. 'But that's not what's been suggested might have happened.'
'What was that? Who told you?'
Vianello shook his head with apparent reluctance, as if to suggest to the waiter that he would gladly have named his informant, but with his superior sitting right there at the table across from him, there was no way he could help his friend the waiter, no matter how much he might want to.
'Was it that bastard, Giacomini? Just tell me that? Was it him?'
Again apparently unable to disguise his surprise at the name, Vianello shot the waiter a quick glance, almost as if to warn him to stop. But beyond caring about caution, the waiter went on, 'He wasn't even here, Giacomini. He just wanted to cause Sandro trouble, the bastard. And he knew there was bad blood between them because of that time off Chioggia. But he's lying; he's always been a liar.' The waiter pushed himself back from the table and got to his feet, as if to stop himself from saying anything more. Suddenly formal, all thought of his brother abandoned, he asked, 'Would you like another grappa?'
Brunetti shook his head, then got to his feet, the sergeant quickly following him. 'Thank you
’
Brunetti said, leaving it unclear if he meant for the service or for the information. He paused a moment, making it obvious that Vianello had no choice but to precede his superior from the room.