Transient Desires (Commissario Brunetti #30)(10)
Brunetti and his family did not eat clams, or mussels or, in fact, any sort of shellfish that came from local waters. Chiara could, and did, attribute this to her vegetarianism, which excluded fish of any sort. He could still remember her, when she was twelve, pushing away a plate of spaghetti alle vongole, saying, ‘They were alive once.’ She still refused to eat them, but now her reason had grown more informed, and she spurned them, saying, ‘They’re deadly.’ Her family, accepting that she had the family trait of verbal excess, appeared to pay little heed to her opinion, but still they did not eat shellfish.
Brunetti reached the bridge of the Lavraneri, crossed it and approached the guard house. As he drew near, the carabiniere inside slid back the window and said, ‘Sì, Signore?’
‘I’m here to see Captain Nieddu.’
‘And your name, Signore?’ he asked neutrally.
‘Brunetti,’ he answered.
The man shifted in his seat and turned to his left to point towards the gate in a high wire fence, beyond which began a gravel path that passed between two rows of roses trimmed almost to the ground. ‘The office is at the end. I’ll call and tell the Captain you’re on your way.’
Brunetti thanked him and started towards the path. The gate clicked open in front of him and closed automatically after he passed through. As he walked between the roses, he wondered if it was right to cut them back so much in the autumn, and that led him to consider just how little he knew about plants and how to care for them. Behind the roses was an equally long bed of grass and, behind that, another long rectangle of dark earth that had been turned over and raked. Presumably, taller flowers would be planted there in the spring.
He had to remind himself that this was a Carabiniere station. At the end of the rows of flowers stood a two-storey brick building and behind it a brick wall. The wall had suffered more weathering and must be older than the building.
He rang the bell to the right of a metal door and stepped back two paces so that he would be clearly visible from the spy hole in the door. He pulled out his wallet and removed his warrant card. It was only then that he realized he perhaps should not have reached for anything in his pocket, but it was too late to do anything except hold up the card to whoever looked through the hole.
He heard a noise from inside, and the door was pulled open, revealing a very tall woman in her thirties with shoulder-length dark hair. She wore her uniform jacket: he saw the single bar under the three stars on her lapels. So she was a primo capitano, then, and probably outranked most of the men in the unit.
As he stepped forward, he put out his hand, saying, ‘Good morning, Laura. I’m pleased to meet you.’
‘The pleasure is mine,’ the woman answered in that same deep voice. She stepped back beyond the edge of the open door, saying, ‘We can go to my office and talk there.’ She smiled at last, and he found that almost as attractive as her voice. Her eyes were green; a number of tiny wrinkles spread out from the sides without doing her any damage. Her uniform jacket fitted her closely, making Brunetti wonder where the carabinieri of his youth – fat, moustached, wrinkled – had gone.
She led the way down a corridor, her trousers hiding her legs. Brunetti looked to the side and into the first open door they passed, and then, like a tailor in a competitor’s atelier, he slowed his pace and glanced inside every open door, although he had no idea what it was he was looking for. What he got to see was pretty much what he saw at the Questura: uniformed officers sitting behind computers at desks piled with papers and file folders. The desks also held photos of women and men, children, cats and dogs, one of a man in shorts on a beach, holding up a fish almost as long as he. The walls were covered with the usual plaques and maps, photos of the President of the Republic, in one office a crucifix, and in another the lion flag of San Marco.
She stopped at the last door on the right and turned into the room. No surprises here, either, save that the desk was less littered than the ones he’d seen on the way down the corridor. Computer, keyboard, a book that looked like a volume from the standard compilation of penal law. The In box seemed to hold one thin file: the Out box was full.
She closed the door after him, went behind the desk and sat; Brunetti took the chair closer to the desk and, before he sat, pointed to the In box and said, ‘You have both my compliments and my envy.’
This time she gave him a broader smile. ‘Begin with flattery, Guido. It always works.’
‘I didn’t intend it as that,’ Brunetti said, then added, ‘Although the technique isn’t unknown to me.’
The noise she made might have been a stifled laugh. She leaned forward, extracted a file from the Out box, and passed a few pages to him.
As he expected, they contained the photos Signorina Elettra had sent of the two men who had taken the injured young women to the hospital, enlarged almost to life size. These were clipped to some pages of standard-sized paper covered with pencilled lines of brief notes printed in a neat, clear hand. Before he began reading, Brunetti glanced at Captain Nieddu but said nothing. He found it interesting that the notes were not computer-produced and thus, being handwritten, were certainly unrecorded and unofficial. She didn’t comment on this, and Brunetti turned to examining the file.
He moved the photos aside and began to read. Brunetti was expecting evidence linking the men to the victims, but the text he read sounded – he couldn’t stop himself from thinking – like a bullet outline of a B-grade buddy film. Young men born in the same week, twenty-four years before, one the son of a successful lawyer, the other the son of an odd-job man who cleaned the container tanks at one of the chemical companies at Marghera. Nine years before, away from work and drunk, the odd-job man had driven his car off the road and into a cement pillar. And survived, with reduced mental and physical capacities, not described. The last note was a single, chilling, ‘Institutionalized’.