Death in a Strange Country (38 page)

Ambrogiani’s absence
could mean nothing. Or anything.

As he did whenever he was
overcome by nervousness, Brunetti walked. He turned left and walked along the
water until he came to the bridge that took him to Sant’ Elena, crossed it, and
walked around this farthest part of the dry, finding it no more interesting
than he ever had in the past. He cut back through Castello, along the wall of
the Arsenate, and back towards Santi Giovanni e Paolo, where all of this had
begun. Intentionally, he avoided the
campo,
refusing to look at the
place where Foster’s body had been pulled out of the water. He cut directly
towards the Fondamente Nuove and followed the water until he had to turn away
from it and head back into the city. He passed the Madonna dell’ Orto, noticed
that work was still being done on the hotel, and suddenly found himself in
Campo del Ghetto. He
sat on a bench and watched the people going past
him. They had no idea, none at all. They distrusted the government, feared the
Mafia, resented the Americans, but they were all generalized, unfocused ideas. They
sensed conspiracy, as Italians always have, but they lacked the details, the
proofs. They had learned enough, from long centuries of experience, to know
that the proof was there, amply, but those same brutal centuries had also
taught the people that whatever government happened to be in power would always
succeed in hiding any and all proof of its evildoing from its citizens.

He closed his eyes, sank
lower on the bench, glad of the sun. When he opened them, he saw the two
Mariani sisters walking across the campo. They must be in their seventies now,
both of them, with their shoulder-length hair, high heels, and bright carmined
lips. No one any longer remembered the facts, but everyone remembered the
story. During the war, the Christian husband of one of them had denounced her
to the police, and both of them were taken away to one of the camps. No one
remembered which it had been, Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau; the name hardly
mattered. After the war, they had returned to the city, having survived no one
knew what horrors, and here they were, almost fifty years later, walking across
the Campo del Ghetto, arm in arm, each with a bright yellow ribbon in her hair.
For the Mariani sisters, there had been conspiracy, and certainly they had seen
the proof of human evil, and yet here they walked in the rich sunshine of a
peaceful afternoon in Venice, sun dappled on their flowered dresses.

Brunetti knew that he was
being unnecessarily sentimental. He was tempted to go home directly, but he
went back to the Questura instead, walking slowly, in no hurry to get there.

When he arrived, he found
a note on his desk, ‘See me about Ruffolo. V, and went down immediately to
Vianello.

The officer was at his
desk, talking to a young man who sat in a chair facing him. When Brunetti
approached, Vianello said to the young man, ‘This is Commissario Brunetti. He
can answer your questions better than I can.’

The young man stood but
made no attempt to shake hands. ‘Good afternoon, Dottore,’ he said. ‘I came
because he called me,’ leaving it to Brunetti to figure out who the ‘he’ was.
The boy was short, stocky, and had hands that were a few sizes too big for his
body, already red and swollen, even though he couldn’t have been more than
seventeen. If his hands were not enough to show that he was a fisherman, his
accent, the rugged undulance of Burano, was. On Burano, you either fished or
made lace; the boy’s hands excluded the second possibility.

‘Sit down, please,’
Brunetti said, drawing up a second chair for himself. Obviously the boy’s
mother had trained him well, for he continued to stand until both men were
seated, then took his place, sitting up straight, hands wrapped around the
sides of the seat of his chair.

When he began to speak in
the rough dialect of the outer islands, no Italian not born in Venice could
have understood him. Brunetti wondered if the boy could, in fact, speak Italian
at all. But his curiosity about dialect was soon lost when the boy continued, ‘Ruffolo
called my friend again, and my friend called me, and since I told the Sergeant here
that I would tell him if I heard from my friend again, I came in to tell him.’

‘What did your friend
say?’

‘Ruffolo wants to talk to
someone. He’s frightened.’ He stopped at that and looked sharply up at the two
policemen to see if they had noticed his slip. It seemed that they had not, so
he continued, ‘I mean my friend said that he sounded frightened, but all he,
this friend of mine, would say is that Peppino wanted to talk to someone, but
he said that a sergeant isn’t enough. He wants to talk to someone high up.’

‘Did your friend say why
Ruffolo wants to do this?’

‘No, sir, he didn’t. But
I think his mother told him to do it.’

‘Do you know Ruffolo?’

The boy shrugged.

‘What would frighten him?’

This time, the shrug was
probably meant to mean that the boy didn’t know. ‘He thinks he’s smart.
Ruffolo. He always talks big, talks about the people he met inside and about
his important friends. When he called, he told me,’ the boy said, forgetting
about the existence of the imaginary friend, the supposed intermediary in all
of this, ‘that he wanted to give himself up but that he had some things to
trade. He said that you’d be glad to get them, that it was a good trade.’

‘Did he say what that
was?’ Brunetti asked.

‘No, hut he said to tell
you that there are three of them, that you’d understand that.’

Brunetti did. Guardi,
Monet, and Gauguin. ‘And where does he want this person to meet him?’

As if he suddenly
realized that the imaginary friend was no longer there to serve as a buffer
between himself and the forces of authority, the boy stopped and looked around
the room, but the friend was gone; not a sign of him remained.

‘You know that catwalk
that goes along the front of the Arsenale?’ the boy asked.

Both Brunetti and
Vianello nodded. At least half a kilometre long, the elevated cement walkway
led from the shipyards within the Arsenale to the Celestia vaporetto stop, running
about two metres above the waters of the
laguna.

‘He said he’d be there,
at the part where there’s that little beach, the one on the Arsenale side of
the bridge. At midnight, tomorrow night.’ Brunetti and Vianello exchanged a
glance over the boy’s lowered head, and Vianello mouthed the word ‘Hollywood’.

‘And who does he want to
meet him there?’

‘Somebody important. He
said that’s why he didn’t show up on Saturday, not for just a sergeant.’
Vianello, it appeared, took this with good grace.

Brunetti allowed himself
a moment’s fantasy, picturing Patta, complete with onyx cigarette holder and
walking stick and, because these late nights were foggy, his Burberry raincoat,
collar artfully raised, waiting on the Arsenale catwalk as the bells of San
Marco boomed out midnight. Because it was his fantasy, Brunetti had Patta meet,
not Ruffolo, who spoke Italian, but this simple boy from Burano, and the
fantasy petered out amidst the garbled sound of the boy’s heavy dialect and
Patta’s slurred Sicilian pronunciation, both whipped away from their mouths by
the midnight
winds from the
laguna.

‘‘Will a Commissario be
important enough?’ Brunetti asked.

The boy looked up at
that, not certain how to take it. ‘Yes, sir,’ he said, deciding to take it
seriously.

‘At midnight tomorrow
night?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Did Ruffolo say, did he
tell your friend, that he’d bring those things with him?’

‘No, sir, he didn’t say.
He just said he’d be on the catwalk at midnight, near the bridge. By the little
beach.’ It wasn’t really a beach, Brunetti remembered, more a place where the
tides had driven enough sand and gravel up against one of the walls of the
Arsenate to allow a place where plastic bottles and old boots could wash up and
be covered with slimy seaweed.

‘If your friend speaks to
Ruffolo again, tell him I’ll be there.’

Satisfied that he had
done what he came for, the boy got to his feet, nodded his head awkwardly to
both men, and left the office.

‘Probably going to go and
look for a phone so he can call Ruffolo and tell him the deal’s on,’ Vianello
said.

‘I hope so. I don’t want
to spend an hour standing out there waiting for him if he doesn’t show up.

‘Would you like me to
come along, sir?’ Vianello volunteered.

‘Yes, I think I would,’
Brunetti said, realizing he was not the stuff of heroes. But then he added,
more practically, ‘But It’s probably a bad idea. He’ll have friends planted at
either end of the catwalk, and there’s no place at either end where you could
be without being seen. Besides, there’s no meanness in Ruffolo. He’s never been
violent.’

‘I could go down there
and ask if I could stay in one of the houses.’

‘No, I don’t think it’s a
good idea. He’d think of that, and his friends will probably be wandering
around there, watching out for just that.’ Brunetti tried for a moment to form
a mental image of the area around the Celestia stop, but all he could remember
were anonymous blocks of public housing, an area almost completely devoid of
shops or bars. In fact, if it were not for the presence of the
laguna,
there
would be no telling it was in Venice, all of the apartments were so new,
utterly without character or individuality. Might as well be in Mestre or
Marghera.

‘What about the other
two?’ Vianello asked, meaning the other two men involved in the robbery.

‘I imagine they want a
part of Ruffolo’s deal. Or else he’s a lot smarter now man he was two years
ago, and he managed to get tine paintings away from them.’

‘Maybe they got the
jewellery,’ Vianello suggested.

‘Possibly. But it’s more
likely that Ruffolo’s the spokesman for all three.’

‘Doesn’t make any sense,
does it?’ Vianello asked. ‘I mean, they got away with it, they’ve got the
paintings and the jewellery. What’s the advantage to them, if they just give
up, give it all back?’

‘Maybe the paintings are
too hard to sell.’

‘Come on, sir. You know
the market as well as I do. You look hard enough, you can find a buyer for
anything, no matter how hot it is. I could sell the Pieta if I could get it out
of Saint Peter’s.’

Vianello was right. It
didn’t make any sense. Ruffolo was hardly the type to reform, and there was
always a market for paintings, no matter where they came from. The moon had
just turned full, he remembered, and he thought of what a clear target he would
be, dark jacket outlined against the pale wall of the Arsenate. He dismissed
the idea as ridiculous.

‘Well, I’ll go along and
see what Ruffolo has to offer,’ he said, sounding to himself like one of those
nitwit heroes in a British film.

‘If you change your mind,
sir, let me know tomorrow. I’ll be home tomorrow night. All you have to do is
call.’

‘Thanks, Vianello. But!
think it will be all right. I appreciate it, really I do.’

Vianello waved his hand
and went back to the papers on his desk.

If he had to be a
midnight hero, even if it was a day away, Brunetti saw no reason to stay in his
office any longer.

When he got home, Paola
told him that she had spoken to her parents that afternoon. They were well,
enjoying what her mother persisted in believing was Ischia. Her father’s only
message to Brunetti was that he had begun to take care of that matter for him
and that it ought to be fully resolved by the end of the week. Though Brunetti
was convinced it was a matter that would never be fully resolved, he thanked
Paola for the information and told her to extend his greetings to her parents
the next time they called.

Dinner was a strangely
tranquil meal, chiefly because of Raffaele’s behaviour. He seemed, though
Brunetti was astonished when he found himself thinking the word, he seemed
cleaner, though it had never occurred to Brunetti that he might have been
dirty. His hair had been recently cut, and the jeans he wore had a discernible
crease down the front of both legs. He listened to what his parents said
without objecting and, very strangely, did not fight Chiara for the last
helping of pasta. When the meal was over, he protested at being told it was his
turn to do the dishes, which reassured Brunetti, but then he did them without
sighs and grumbles of dissatisfaction, and that silence caused Brunetti to ask
Paola, ‘Is anything wrong with Raffi?’ They were sitting on the sofa in the living
room, and the silence that came in from the kitchen filled the entire room.