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.
He searched, but searched in vain, for any arrests during the last few years for crimes other than violations of visa regulations or selling without a licence. There had been one rape, six years ago, but the attacker turned out to be a Moroccan, not a Senegalese. In the only arrest involving violence, a Senegalese had chased an Albanian pickpocket halfway up Lista di Spagna before bringing him to the ground with a running tackle. The African had sat on the pickpocket’s back until the police responded to the call one of his friends made on his telefonino and arrived to make the arrest. A handwritten note in the margin explained that the Albanian had turned out to be only sixteen, and so, although he had been repeatedly arrested for the same crime, he had been released the same day after being given the usual letter ordering him to leave the country within forty-eight hours.
The last file contained a speculative report on numbers: there had been days during the previous summer when an estimated three to five hundred ambulanti had lined the streets; repeated police round-ups had caused a temporary attrition, but the number was now estimated to have crept back to close to two hundred.
When he finished the report, Brunetti glanced at his watch and reached for the phone. From memory, he dialled the number of Marco Erizzo, who answered on the second ring. ‘What now, Guido?’ he asked with a laugh.
‘I hate those phones,’ Brunetti said. ‘I can’t sneak up on anyone any more.’
‘Very James Bond, I know,’ Erizzo admitted, ‘but it lets me do a lot of filtering.’
‘But you didn’t filter me,’ Brunetti said, ‘even though you knew I’d be likely to ask a favour.’ Brunetti made no attempt at small talk about Marco’s family, nor did he expect such questions: long friendship would already have alerted Marco that Brunetti’s voice was not the one he used for a social call.
‘I’m always interested in knowing what the forces of order are up to,’ Erizzo said with mock solemnity. ‘In case I can be of service to them in any way, of course.’
‘I’m not the Finanza, Marco,’ Brunetti said.
‘No jokes about them, Guido, please,’ Erizzo said in a decidedly cooler tone. ‘And try to remember never to use their name when you’re talking to me, especially if you call me on the telefonino.’
Unwilling to address himself to Marco’s unshakeable conviction that all phone calls, to make no mention of emails and faxes, were recorded, especially by the Finance Police, Brunetti instead asked, ‘It’s not as if you ever use any other telephone, is it?’
‘Not one I answer. Tell me what it is, Guido.’
‘The vu cumprà,’ he said.
Marco wasted no time by asking the obvious question of whether this were related to last night’s killing and said instead, ‘Never been anything like it here in the city, has there, at least not since they shot that carabiniere in, when was it, 1978?’
‘Something like that,’ Brunetti agreed, aware of how long ago those awful years seemed now. ‘You know anything about them?’
‘That they take nine and a half per cent of my business away from me,’ Erizzo said with sudden heat.
‘Why so exact?’
‘I’ve calculated what I sold in bags before their arrival and after, and the difference is nine and a half per cent.’ He cut off the last syllable with his teeth.
‘Why don’t you do something about it?’
Erizzo laughed again, a sound utterly lacking in humour. ‘What do you suggest, Guido? A letter of complaint to your superiors, asking them to concern themselves with the welfare of their citizens? Next you’ll be asking me to send a postcard to the Vatican to ask them to concern themselves with my spiritual welfare.’ Bitter resignation had joined anger in Erizzo’s voice. ‘You people,’ Erizzo went on, presumably referring to the police, ‘you can’t do anything except shake them up for a day or so and let them out again. You don’t even bother to slap their wrists any more, do you?’ He paused, but Brunetti refused to venture a response into that silence.
‘There’s nothing I can do about them, Guido. The only thing I can hope is that they don’t lay down their sheets in front of one of my shops, the way they do in front of Max Mara, because if they do, the only thing that will happen is that I’ll lose more money. The politicians don’t want to hear about them, and you guys can’t — or won’t — do anything.’
Brunetti again thought it expedient not to express an opinion. He persisted, ‘But what do you know about them?’
‘Probably not much more than anyone else in the city,’ Erizzo said. ‘That they’re from Senegal, they’re Muslims, they mostly live in Padova, some of them here, they don’t cause much trouble, and the bags are of good quality and the prices are right.’
‘How do you know about the quality of the bags?’ Brunetti asked, hoping to divert his friend from his anger.
‘Because I’ve stopped on the street and looked at them,’ he said. ‘Believe me, Guido, even Louis Vuitton himself, if there is such a person, couldn’t tell the difference between the real ones and the ones these guys are selling. Same leather, same stitching, same logo all over the place.’
‘Do they sell imitations of your bags?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Of course,’ Erizzo snapped.
Brunetti chose to ignore the warning in his friend’s tone and went on, ‘Someone told me that the factories are in Puglia. Do you know anything about that?’
Voice no warmer, Erizzo said, ‘That’s what I’ve been told. The factories are the same. They work for the legitimate companies during the day, then they turn the fake ones out at night.’
‘“Fake” doesn’t have much meaning any more, not if it’s the same factories, I’d say,’ Brunetti observed, trying to lighten the mood that had come over their conversation.
There was to be no jollying Marco. ‘I suppose so,’ was his only comment.
‘Do you have any idea of who’s behind it?’ Brunetti persisted.
‘Only an idiot wouldn’t be able to figure that out, it’s so big and so well organized.’ Then, in a voice grown minimally less cool, Erizzo added, ‘They’ve got only one problem.’
‘What?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Distribution,’ Erizzo surprised him by answering.
‘Huh?’
‘Think about it, Guido. Anyone can produce. That’s the easy part: all you need is raw materials, a place to assemble them, and enough people who are willing to work for what you pay them. The real problem is finding a place to sell whatever it is you’ve made.’ Brunetti remained silent, so he proceeded, ‘If you sell it in a shop, you’ve got all sorts of expenses: rent, heat, light, a bookkeeper, salespeople. Worst of all, you’ve got to pay taxes.’ Brunetti wondered when he had ever had a conversation with Marco in which the subject of taxes had not been mentioned.
‘That’s what I do, Guido,’ his friend went on, voice veering back towards anger. ‘I pay taxes. I pay them on my shops, and for my employees, and on what I sell, and on what I manage to keep. And my employees pay taxes on what they earn. And some of it stays here, in Venice, Guido, and what they earn they spend here.’ The warmth in Marco’s voice was not that of friendship or returning intimacy.
‘You tell me how the city profits from what the vu cumprà earn,’ Marco demanded. ‘You think any of that money stays here?’ Even though it was a rhetorical question, Erizzo paused, as if daring Brunetti to answer. When he did not, Erizzo said, ‘It all goes south, Guido.’ There was no need for him to say more about the destination of this money.
‘How do you know that?’ Brunetti demanded.
Brunetti heard him take a deep breath. ‘Because no one bothers them, that’s why. Not the Guardia di Finanza, and not the Carabinieri, and not you people, and because they seem to come into this country pretty much as they please, and no one bothers to stop them at the borders. That means that no one wants to be bothered or that someone doesn’t want them to be bothered.’ The pause after this last sentence was so long that Brunetti thought Marco had finished, but his voice came back, ‘And if I thought you had the stomach to listen to any more of this, I’d add that they also enjoy the protection of everyone who refuses to see them as illegal immigrants who spend their days breaking the law while the police stroll back and forth in front of them.’
Brunetti was at a loss about how to deal with his friend’s rage, so he let a long time pass before he said, voice calm, ‘Longest definition I’ve ever heard of “distribution”.’ Before Marco could react, he added, ‘Also the most illuminating.’
Marco paused for an equally long time, and Brunetti could almost hear the wheels of friendship spinning about in search of the road they had left. ‘Good,’ Marco finally said, and Brunetti thought he heard in that monosyllable the same relief that they had come back to firm ground. ‘I’m not sure all of this is true, but at least it makes sense.’
Was this the historian’s plight, Brunetti wondered, never to know what was true but only what made sense? Or the policeman’s? He drew himself away from these reflections and started to thank Marco, but before he could say more than the other man’s name, Marco said, ‘I’ve got another call. I’ve got to go.’ And then silence.
The call had gained Brunetti no new information, but it had strengthened his belief that the ambulanti enjoyed the protection of — for a moment, he was at a loss how best to express this, even to himself — the protection of ‘forces that function at variance with those of the state’ was the euphemism he finally summoned.
He took a notebook and opened it to the centre page, where he found the phone number he wanted. Adding one to each of the digits in it and embarrassed at this simple code, he dialled. When a man answered on the fifth ring, Brunetti said only, ‘Good morning, I’d like to speak to Signor Ducatti.’ When the man told him he must have dialled a wrong number, Brunetti apologized for disturbing him and hung up.
Immediately Brunetti regretted that he had not gone down to the bar at the bridge for a coffee before phoning: now he was trapped in his office until Sandrini called him back. To pass the time, he took some papers from his in tray and began to read through them.
It was more than half an hour before his phone rang. He answered with his name, and the same voice that had told him he had dialled a wrong number said, ‘What is it?’
‘I’m very well, Renato,’ Brunetti answered. ‘Thanks for asking.’
‘Tell me what you want, Brunetti, and let me get back to the office.’
‘Just stepped out to make a phone call, did you?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Tell me what you want,’ the man said with badly suppressed anger.
‘I want to know if your father-in-law’s — what shall I call them — if his business associates had anything to do with last night?’
‘You mean the dead nigger?’
‘I mean the dead African,’ Brunetti corrected him.
‘That all?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ll call you,’ he said and hung up.
If Renato Sandrini were better behaved, perhaps Brunetti’s conscience would have troubled him about blackmailing and intimidating him. As it was, the man’s consistent rudeness, as well as the arrogance that characterized his public behaviour, made it almost pleasant for Brunetti to exercise his power over him. Twenty years ago, Sandrini, a criminal lawyer in Padova, had married the only daughter of a local Mafia boss. Children followed, as did an enormous amount of very well-paid defence work. The repeated success of Sandrini’s defences had turned him into something of a local legend. As the size of his legal practice increased, so too did that of his wife, Julia, until, at forty, she had come to resemble a barrel, though a barrel with very expensive taste in jewellery and an alarmingly possessive love for her husband.
None of this would have worked to Sandrini’s disadvantage, nor to Brunetti’s advantage, were it not for a fire in a hotel on the Lido that had filled some of the rooms with smoke and caused four people to be taken to the hospital, unconscious. There, it was discovered that the man in room 307, who had given his name as Franco Rossi, carried the carta d’identità, as well as the credit cards, of Renato Sandrini. Luckily, he had regained consciousness in time to prevent the hospital from calling his wife to alert her to his condition, but not before the police had been called to report the disparity in names that appeared on the documents. All of this would have passed as an easily overlooked clerical error were it not for two things: the other person in the room with Sandrini was a fifteen-year-old Albanian prostitute, and the police report containing this information landed the following morning on the desk of Guido Brunetti.
Caution prevented him from approaching Sandrini until he had spoken at some length with the prostitute and her pimp and had obtained both videotaped and written statements from them. They were willing to talk only because they believed the man in question to be Franco Rossi, a wholesaler of fitted carpets from Padova. Had they had the least idea of who Sandrini was — more importantly, had they had any idea of the identity of his father-in-law — both would surely have preferred prison to having had the long conversations with the pleasant commissario from Venice.
It had taken only one meeting with Sandrini for Brunetti to persuade the lawyer that it might be wiser, given the rather Victorian ideas of some members of the Mafia as to the sanctity of the marriage vows, to give the occasional piece of information to the pleasant commissario from Venice. To date, Brunetti had maintained his promise never to ask Sandrini to compromise his professional relationship with his clients, but he knew the promise was a false one and that he would grind information out of Sandrini mercilessly should it serve his own purposes.
Brunetti placed the files into his out tray and, strangely cheered by the consideration of his own perfidy, went home for lunch.
8
If he had thought to leave uncertainty and unease behind him at the Questura, he was much mistaken, for he found both within the walls of his home. Here they manifested themselves in the aura of moral outrage which both Paola and Chiara carried about with them, much in the fashion of Dante’s usurers, passing through eternity with their money bags hung round their necks. He assumed that both his wife and his daughter believed themselves in the right. When, after all, had a person involved in an argument believed themselves to be in the wrong?
He found his family at table. He kissed Paola’s cheek and ruffled Chiara’s hair, but she pulled her head quickly aside, as if unwilling to be touched by a hand that had rested on her opponent’s shoulder. Pretending not to have noticed, he took his place and asked Raffi how school was. His son, in a manifestation of male solidarity in the face of female moodiness, said things were fine, then began a long explanation of the arcana of a computer program he was using in his chemistry class. Brunetti, far more interested in his linguine with scampi than in anything to do with computers, smiled and asked what he did his best to make sound like relevant questions.
Conversation chugged along through a plate of sole fried with artichoke bottoms and a rucola salad. Chiara pushed her food around on her plate, leaving much of it uneaten, an unmistakable sign that this situation was affecting her deeply.
Upon learning that there was no dessert, she and Raffi evaporated; Brunetti set his empty glass down and said, ‘I have the feeling I ought to have one of those blue helmets the UN peacekeepers wear when there’s danger they might be caught in crossfire.’
Paola poured them both a bit more wine, the Loredan Gasparini his father-in-law had sent him as a birthday present, one he would like to be able to drink in happier circumstances. ‘She’ll get over it,’ Paola said and set the bottle on the table with an authoritative clunk.
‘I have no doubt of that,’ Brunetti answered calmly. ‘I just don’t want to have to eat my lunch in this atmosphere until that happens.’
‘Oh, come on, Guido. It’s not that bad,’ Paola said in a voice that suggested she would be quite happy, if given sufficient provocation, to divert her irritation towards him. ‘She’ll realize what she’s done in a few days.’
‘And then?’ he asked. ‘Apologize?’
‘For starters,’ Paola said.
‘And then what?’
‘Think about what she said and what that says about her as a person.’
‘It’s been a day,’ he said. ‘And she’s not over it.’
Paola allowed a long time to pass before she asked, ‘What does that mean?’
He tried to find a way of saying what he wanted to say without angering her. ‘That I think you’ve offended her,’ he finally offered.
‘Her?’ Paola said with false incredulity. ‘How?’
He poured some more wine into his glass but left it on the table. ‘By assaulting her without giving her a chance to explain.’
Her look was long and level. ‘“Assaulting?”’ she repeated. ‘Does that mean there’s some explanation or justification for ideas like hers, that the death of a man can be dismissed with a cavalier “only”, and that her listener is somehow obliged to let the remark pass unobserved? Or that to object to it is to “assault” the person who made it?’
‘Of course not,’ he said, trained by Paola herself to recognize and dismiss the argumentun ad absurdum. ‘I’m not saying that.’
‘Then what are you saying?’
‘That you might have been better advised to see where she got these ideas and try to reason with her.’
‘Rather than assaulting her, as you put it?’ she asked, beginning to show her anger.
‘Yes,’ he answered calmly.
‘I’m not in the habit of attempting to reason with racial prejudice,’ she said.
‘Then what do you want to do with it, beat it with a stick?’
He saw her start to answer, then bite it back. She took a sip of her wine, then another, then set the glass down. ‘All right,’ she finally said. ‘Perhaps I was a little too severe with her. But it was so embarrassing, to hear her say those things and to think I might have been responsible, in some way, for her having said them.’
‘Are we talking about Chiara here, or about you?’ he surprised her by asking.
She pursed her lips, glanced across at the window that looked off to the north, nodded in acknowledgement of the accuracy of his question, and said, ‘You’re right.’
‘I’m not interested in being right,’ Brunetti said.
‘What are you interested in, then?’
‘Living in peace in my own home.’
‘I suppose that’s pretty much all anyone wants,’ she said.
‘If only it were that simple, huh?’ he asked, got to his feet and leaned over to kiss her on the head, then went back to the Questura and to the investigation of the death of the man who was only a vu cumprà.
The African’s death, or at least the cause of it, was catalogued in the print-out of the autopsy report that lay on Brunetti’s desk. The speed with which it had arrived surprised Brunetti, and he flipped to the back to see if Rizzardi had given a reason. His surprise grew when, instead of the pathologist’s name, he found a blank where the name of the responsible pathologist should have appeared. Deciding to waste no time in attempting to figure out why Rizzardi might have failed to fill this in, he began to read.
The victim was estimated to have been in his late twenties, and although there was evidence he had been a heavy smoker, he was in excellent health, as were his organs. He was 1.82 metres tall and weighed 68 kilos. A set of his fingerprints had been forwarded to Lyon for possible identification.
In total, five bullets had struck him, a number which corresponded to the number of sounds the Americans had heard. Either of two of them would have sufficed to kill him: one had severed his spine, and one had perforated the left ventricle of the heart. The remaining three had pounded into his torso; one had lodged in the liver, while two had simply buried themselves in his flesh without damaging any organs. The fact that all five shots had struck him spoke to Brunetti of proximity as much as marksmanship, for from what the Americans had described, the killers had been little more than a metre from their victim. The angles of the paths of the bullets suggested that one man was taller than the other; the fact that the bullets had lacked the force to emerge from the body suggested that the guns were of low calibre. The bullets had been extracted and sent to the lab for analysis, though a layman’s guess was that the gun that fired them would turn out to be a.22, a weapon Brunetti knew was not unknown to paid killers.
‘Layman,’ Brunetti said aloud, setting the report to one side. Rizzardi, who had worked in Naples a decade ago, had probably seen more signs of violent death than anyone else in the city, so he would hardly have used such a term when writing an autopsy report.
The report had arrived by email, which meant that the photos would be on view in Signorina Elettra’s computer. Brunetti, however, had no desire to see them: the sight of wounds had always caused him pain and disgust. It was only the idea of the motivation that had caused them that interested him. He admitted to himself that he had little real knowledge of Africa, thought of the continent as a vague, amorphous mass where things went wrong and people suffered and starved while they lived amidst a wealth of natural resources that had been strewed about them with nature’s most prodigal hand.
He had read of the colonial past of the continent, but the closer history moved towards the present, the less interest he took in it. But this, he realized, was true of his interest in history in general.
Brunetti gazed out of the window of his office at the crane that still, after years, towered over the casa di riposo of San Lorenzo. A man who made his living selling counterfeit bags. A man who had been executed by a pair of professional killers. The first could be said of all of the vu cumprà: that was what they did, sell bags. The second, however, most decidedly could not: in the cases he could recall of violent death involving extracomunitari, none had been Africans, neither the victims nor the killers.
Brunetti tried to consider the factors that might bear on the murder and could come up with nothing more helpful than the man’s origins and past behaviour or something he might be involved in now. As for his past, Brunetti admitted he knew nothing, not even the man’s country of origin, though Senegal was a safe guess. And for the present, he imagined possibilities only to exclude them immediately: jealous husbands did not in general send killers to vindicate their honour; and the wholesalers of the bags, so far as Brunetti knew, hardly needed the example of murder to keep their employees in line. The Africans were surely only too grateful for any chance of work to risk losing their jobs through attempting to cheat their employers. Beyond these thoughts, the possibilities stretched out, both unknown and unlimited.
He took a copy of that week’s staff assignments and flipped it over. On the back he began a list of the things they needed to know about the dead man: ‘Name, nationality, profession, criminal record, how long in Italy, address, family, friends.’ He thought about how to begin to penetrate the mystery of the man’s existence, remembered someone who might be able to help him, picked up the phone and called down to the officers’ room.
As he had hoped, Vianello answered.
‘You free?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Two minutes,’ Brunetti said and added, ‘We’ll need a boat.’
It took him more than that time to put on his overcoat and find a spare pair of gloves, which were stuffed into the pockets of a down vest that had been forgotten in his closet. He went down to the entrance hall.
Vianello was waiting at the front door, wearing so many layers of sweaters and vests under his coat as to seem almost twice his normal size. ‘We’re not going to Vladivostok, you know,’ Brunetti said in greeting.
‘Nadia’s got flu, the kids have colds, and I don’t want to get sick and have to stay at home.’
‘Who’s with them?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Nadia’s mother. You know how close she lives, so she’s in and out all day.’ Vianello waved the officer on duty aside and pulled open the front door, allowing a gust of frigid air to sweep around them and into the hall. He stuffed his gloved hands into the pockets of his parka and stepped outside.
The pilot stood on deck, no more of his face visible than a small triangle of eyes and nose swaddled in the fur-lined hood of his jacket. Stepping on board, Brunetti said, ‘Could you take us over to San Zan Degolà?’ before hurrying down the steps and into the cabin.
Vianello followed him inside, allowing the double doors to slap closed behind him. The cabin was cold, but at least they were out of the wind that buffeted the doors. When he was seated opposite Brunetti, Vianello asked, ‘What’s over there?’
‘Don Alvise.’
At the mention of the former priest’s name, Vianello nodded in immediate understanding. Alvise Perale had for years been a parish priest in Oderzo, a small, torpid town north of Venice. In his time as parroco of the local church, he had dedicated his considerable energies not only to the spiritual well-being of his parishioners but also to the material well-being of the many people whom the currents of war, revolution, and poverty had washed up on the banks of the Livenza river. Among these people were Albanian prostitutes, Bosnian mechanics, Romanian gypsies, Kurdish shepherds, and African shopkeepers. To Don Alvise, regardless of their nationality or religion, they were all children of the god he worshipped and thus worthy of his care.
His parishioners responded to his activities with mixed feelings: some believed he was right to divide the wealth of the Church with these poorest of the poor, but others preferred to worship a less open-handed god and eventually protested to their bishop when Don Alvise invited a family from Sierra Leone to move into the rectory with him. In his letter to Don Alvise, ordering him to tell the family to leave, the bishop explained his motives by stating that ‘some of these people worship stones’.
Upon receipt of this letter, Don Alvise went to the local bank and withdrew the bulk of the money from the parish account. Two days later and before responding to the bishop’s letter, he used the money to buy a small apartment in the nearby town of Portogruaro, title to which was given to the father of the family from Sierra Leone. That same evening, Don Alvise wrote to his bishop, explaining that he saw no other course open to him than to renounce his vocation, for to continue to live it as he thought it should be lived was clearly to create perpetual strife with his superiors. In closing, he added, in the most respectful terms, that he would prefer the company of people who worshipped stones to that of people who had them in place of hearts.
The many friends he had accumulated over the years rose to his aid, and within weeks he had a position as a social assistant in Venice, the city of his birth, where he was given charge of a hostel that provided lodging and food for people claiming political asylum in Italy. Though he was a civil servant and no longer a member of the clergy, the people with whom he worked persisted in using his honorific in addressing him, and so he was never referred to as ‘Signor Perale’ but always as ‘Don Alvise’. He could wear jeans, he could grow a moustache that any macho would envy, he could even be seen in the company of women: nothing could take the title from him. Don Alvise he had been and Don Alvise he would remain.
Brunetti had met him some years before, when he was investigating the disappearance of a woman from Kosovo who was believed to be involved in the drug trade. The woman had never been found, but he and Don Alvise had remained in friendly contact since then, each occasionally able to do the other a favour or provide information that could be of use in the pursuit of their different goals.
Brunetti knew that there was an official, governmental structure that would provide him with information about the extracomunitari; the Questura certainly had ample documentation on them. But he knew that Don Alvise’s information, though it could not be considered in any way official, would be far more accurate. Perhaps the difference lay in the fact that, to the public administration, these people were problems, while to Don Alvise they were people with problems.
As the boat made its way slowly up the Grand Canal, Brunetti explained to Vianello why he wanted to see the former priest. ‘They trust him,’ he said, ‘and I know he helps find houses for a lot of clandestini.’