A Venetian Reckoning (27 page)

'But don't you already have a
subscription?' he asked, having given it to her for Christmas.

'That's not the point, Papa.'

'What is the point, then?' he asked,
making his way down the hallway towards the kitchen. He flipped on the light
and went over to the refrigerator.

The point is winning,' she said,
following him down the hall and making Brunetti wonder if the magazine might be
a bit too American for his daughter.

He found a bottle of Orvieto, checked
the label, put it back, and pulled out the bottle of Soave they had begun with
dinner the night before. He took down a glass, filled it, and took a sip. 'All
right, Chiara, what's the contest?'

'You have to name a penguin.'

'Name a penguin?' Brunetti repeated
stupidly.

'Yes, look here,' she said, holding
the magazine out towards him with one hand and pointing down towards a photo
with the other. As she did, he saw a picture of what looked to be the fuzzy
mass that Paola sometimes emptied from the vacuum cleaner. 'What's that?' he
asked, taking the magazine and turning it towards the light

its the baby penguin. Papa. It was
born last month at the Rome Zoo, and it doesn't have a name yet So they're
offering a prize to whoever comes up with the best name for it’

Brunetti pulled open the magazine and
looked more closely at the photo. Sure enough, he saw a beak and two round
black eyes. Two yellow flippers. On the opposite page was a full-grown penguin,
but Brunetti looked in vain for some familial resemblance between the two.

‘What name?' he asked, flipping
through the magazine and watching hyenas, ibis, and elephants stream past him.

'Spot,' she said.

'What?’

'Spot’ she repeated.

'For a penguin?' he asked, flipping
back to the original article and staring at the photos of the adult birds.
Spot?

'Sure. Everyone else is going to call
him "Flipper’’ or
^‘
Waiter’’.' No one else will think of calling
him Spot'

That, Brunetti allowed, was probably
true. 'You could always save the name,' he suggested, putting the bottle back
in the refrigerator.

'What for?' she asked and took the
magazine back.

‘In case there's a contest for a
zebra,' he said.

'Oh, Papa, you're so silly
sometimes,' she said and went back towards her room, little aware of how much
her judgement pleased him.

In the living room, he picked up his
book, left ace down when he went to bed the night before. While waiting for
Paola, he might as well fight the Peloponnesian War again.

She came home an hour later, let
herself into the apartment, and came into the living room. She tossed her coat
over the back of the sofa and flopped down next to him, her scarf still around
her neck. 'Guido, you ever consider the possibility that I'm insane?'

'Often,' he said and turned a page.

'No, really. I've got to be, working
for those cretins.'

'Which cretins?' he asked, still not
bothering to look up from the book.

The ones who run the university.'

'What now?'

'They asked me, three months ago, to
give a lecture in Padua, to the English Faculty. They said it would be on the
British novel Why do you think I was reading all those books for the last two
months?'

'Because you like them. That's why
you've read them for the last twenty yean.'

'Oh, stop it, Guido,' she said,
digging a gentle elbow into his ribs.

'So what happened?'

'I went into the office today to pick
up my mail, and they told me that they'd got it all wrong, that I was supposed
to be lecturing on American poetry, but no one thought to tell me about the
change.'

'And so, which is it?'

'I won't know until tomorrow. They'll
go ahead and tell Padua about the new topic if Il Magnifico approves it’ Both
of them had always taken delight in this most wonderful of holdovers from the
academic Stone Age, the fact that the Rector of the university was addressed as
'Il Magnifico Rettore', the only thing Brunetti had learned in twenty years on
the fringes of the university that had managed to make academic life sound interesting
to him.

'What's he likely to do?' Brunetti
asked.

Toss a coin, probably.'

'Good luck,' Brunetti said, putting
down his book. 'You don't like the American stuff, do you?'

'Holy heavens, no,' she explained,
burying her face in her hands. 'Puritans, cowboys, and strident women. I'd
rather teach the Silver Fork Novel,' she said, using the English words.

The what?’ Brunetti asked.

'Silver Fork Novel,’ she repeated.
'Books with simple plots written to explain to people who made a lot of money
how to behave in polite company.'

'For yuppies?' Brunetti asked,
honesdy interested.

Paola erupted in laughter. 'No,
Guido, not for yuppies. They were written in the eighteenth century, when all the
money poured into England from the colonies, and the fat wives of Yorkshire
weavers had to be taught which fork to use.’ She was quiet for a few minutes,
considering what he said. 'But if I think about it for a minute, with a little
updating, there's no reason the same couldn't be said of Bret Easton Ellis.'
She put her face in his shoulder and gave herself up to giggles, laughing
herself weak at a joke Brunetti didn't understand.

When she stopped laughing, she took
the scarf from her neck and tossed it on the table. 'And you?’ she asked.

He put his book face down on his
knees and faced her. ‘I talked to the whore and her pimp and then to Signora
Trevisan and her lawyer.' Slowly, attentive to his story and careful to get the
details right, he told her everything that had happened that day, finishing
with Signora Trevisan's reaction to his question about the prostitutes.

'Did her brother have anything to do
with prostitutes?' Paola repeated, careful to duplicate Brunetti's exact
phrasing. 'And you think she understood what you meant?'

Brunetti nodded.

'But the lawyer misunderstood?'

'Yes, but I don't think it was
deliberate. He just didn't get it, that the question was ambiguous and didn't
mean that he had sex with them.'

'She did, though?'

Brunetti nodded again. 'She's much
brighter than he is.'

'Women usually are,' Paola said and
then asked, 'What do you think he might have had to do with them?'

‘I don't know, Paola, but her
reaction tells me that, whatever it was, she knew about it.'

Paola said nothing, waiting for him
to think it through. He took one of her hands in his, kissed the palm, and let
it fall to his bp, where she left it, waiting still.

'It's the only common thread,' he
began, talking more to himself than to her. 'Both of them, Trevisan and Favero,
had the number of the bar in Mestre, and that's the place where a pimp is
running a string of girls, and there's always a supply of new ones. I don't
know about Lotto, except that he ran Trevisan's business for him.'

He turned Paola's hand over and ran
his forefinger across the faint blue veins visible on the back. 'Not a lot, is
it?' Paola finally asked. He shook his head.

The one you talked to, Mara, what did
she ask you about the others?'

'She wanted to know if I knew
anything about a girl who died in Treviso, and she said something about girls
in a truck. I don't know what she meant.'

Like an aged carp slowly swimming
towards the light of day, a memory stirred in the recesses of Paola's mind, a
memory that had to do with a truck and with women. She rested her head against
the back of the sofa and closed her eyes. And saw snow. And that small detail
was enough to bring the memory to the surface.

'Guido, early this autumn - I think
it was when you were in Rome for the conference - a truck ran off the highway,
up near Udine, I think. I forget the details — I think it skidded on the ice
and went off a cliff or something. Anyway, there were women in the back of the
truck, and they were all killed, eight or ten of them. It was strange. The
story was in the papers one day, but then it disappeared and I never saw
anything else about it,' Paola felt his hand grip hers a bit more firmly. 'Was
she talking about that, do you think?'

'I remember something about it, a
reference to it in a report from Interpol about women who are being brought
here as prostitutes,’ Brunetti said. 'The driver was killed, wasn't he?'

Paola nodded. 'I think so.'

The Udine police would have a report;
he could call them tomorrow. He tried to remember more about the report from
Interpol, or perhaps it had been from some other agency - God alone knew where
it was filed. Time enough for all of this tomorrow.

Paola pulled gently on his hand 'Why
do you use them?'

'Hum?' Brunetti asked not really
paying attention.

'Why do you use whores?' Then, before
he could misunderstand she clarified the question, 'Men, that is. Not you.
Men.'

He picked up their joined hands and
waved them in the air, a vague, aimless gesture. 'Guiltless sex, I guess. No
strings, no obligations. No need to be polite.’

'Doesn't sound very appealing,' Paola
said and then added 'But I suppose women always want to sentimentalize sex.’

‘Yes,
you do,' Brunetti said

Paola freed her hand from his and got
to her feet. She glanced down at her husband for a moment, then went into the
kitchen to begin dinner.

23

Brunetti spent the first part of his
work day hunting through his files for the Interpol report on prostitution and
waiting for the operator to put his call through to the police in Udine. The
operator was quicker than Brunetti, and he spent fifteen minutes listening to a
captain of the carabinieri describe the accident, then ended the conversation
with a request that they fax him all of the documents relevant to the case.

It took him twenty minutes to locate
the report about the international traffic in prostitutes and a half-hour to
read it. He found it a sobering experience, and he found the last line, It is
estimated by various police and international organizations that there could be
as many as half a million women involved in this traffic', almost impossible to
believe. The report catalogued something that he,- like most police officials
in Europe, knew was going on; the shocking part was the enormity and complexity
of it.

The pattern wasn't far from what Mara
said she had experienced: a young woman from a developing country was offered
the promise of a new life in Europe — sometimes the reason was love, sweet
love, but most often the promise was work as a domestic servant, sometimes as
an entertainer. There, in Europe, she was told, she would have a chance at a
decent life, could earn enough money to send back to her family, perhaps even
some day bring her family to live with her in that earthly paradise.

Upon arrival, their various
discoveries were much like Mara's, and they learned that the work contract they
had signed before leaving was often an agreement to repay as much as $50,000 to
the person responsible for bringing them to Europe. And so they found themselves
in a foreign country, having given their passport to the person who brought
them in, persuaded that they were breaking the law by their mere presence and
thus subject to arrest and long sentences because of the debt they had incurred
by signing the contract. Even at this, many objected and showed no fear of
arrest. Gang rape usually subdued them. If not, greater violence often proved
persuasive. Some died. Word travelled. There was little resistance.

And so the brothels of the developed
world filled up with dark-haired, dark-skinned exotics: Thai women, whose
gentle modesty was so flattering to a man's sense of superiority; those
mixed-race Dominicans, and we all know how much those blacks love it; and not
least the Brazilians, those hot-blooded Cariocas, born to be whores.