Transient Desires (Commissario Brunetti #30)(4)

Whatever nourishment had been hidden in that tramezzino failed to make itself felt, nor did it nudge Brunetti with a return of energy sufficient to diffuse his general unease.

He stopped at the bottom of the stairs in front of the cork board on the wall to his left. The Minister of the Interior was concerned that too many people were using their official cars for purposes that were not work-related, he read.

‘Shocking,’ Brunetti muttered to himself, doing his best to sound scandalized. ‘Especially here.’

The memory of the peculiar lack of joy of last night’s dinner brought Brunetti to a stop. He recalled speaking to two of his old friends who had taken early retirement and now found themselves, it seemed, able to talk only of the sweet antics of their grandchildren.

No one passed in the corridor, the stairs remained empty, he heard a phone ring in the distance, then it stopped. He moved away from the wall and turned, berating himself for laziness and disregard for his obligations and responsibilities. He took out his phone and, standing just metres from her office, called Signorina Elettra and told her he’d just had a call from one of his informers, who needed to see him immediately.

Luckily, when Brunetti called him, and then another informer, who had also been of use to him in the past, both men were free and said they could meet him. Although both men lived in Venice, they never met Brunetti there for fear of the possible consequences of being seen with someone known to be a policeman, and so he was to meet the first in Marghera and the second in Mogliano.

The meetings did not go particularly well. He differed over payment with both of them: the first one had no new information but wanted to be put on a monthly salary. Brunetti refused flatly and wondered if the man would next ask for an extra month’s salary at Christmas.

The second was a burglar who had abandoned his calling – although not his contacts – with the birth of his first child and had taken a job delivering milk and dairy products to supermarkets. He met Brunetti between deliveries and gave him the name of the distributor who served as the redistribution point for the eyeglass frames continually stolen by employees from the fac-tories producing them in the Veneto. Brunetti explained that, because the information was of no practical use to him and would be passed on to a friend at the Questura in Belluno, fifty Euros was more than fair. The man shrugged, smiled, and agreed, so Brunetti handed him an extra ten, which widened his smile. He thanked Brunetti and climbed back into his white delivery truck, and that was the end of it.

Brunetti spent the evening with his family, had dinner with them, attentive to what they said and what they ate. After dinner, he took a small glass of grappa out on to the terrace and sipped at it while he looked off to the bell tower of San Marco. At ten o’clock, a ringing church bell told him it was time to take his glass inside and begin to think about going to bed.

Although he had done next to nothing all day, he was tired and, to his surprise, realized that he still had not shaken off the sadness left by the evening spent with his former classmates. He went down the corridor and stopped at the door to Paola’s study. Intent on her reading, she had not heard him coming, but the radar of long love made her look up and, after a moment’s thought, smile. He felt his spirit warm and said, ‘I’m going to bed now.’

She closed her book and got to her feet. ‘What a very good idea,’ she said and smiled again.





3


Brunetti arrived even later at the Questura the following morning, went to Signorina Elettra’s office, and found her seated some distance from her desk, chair pushed back and to one side, computer dark and ignored. She looked up when he came in; he noticed she had some papers in one hand.

‘Am I disturbing you, Signorina?’

She smiled. ‘Of course not, Commissario. I was having a look at something you might find interesting.’ As evidence, she held up the papers. ‘It’s about those young women in the laguna,’ she said. He nodded to acknowledge that he knew about the incident, not mentioning that his source was Il Gazzettino.

‘I’ve just received Claudia’s full report. She was on duty that night and answered the call.’ Signorina Elettra held the papers towards him. ‘Would you like to have a look?’ Her tone made it clear that this was a suggestion and not a question.

Brunetti reached for the papers, which she tucked into a manila folder. He thanked her and went up to his office to read them.

A little after three in the morning of Sunday, one of the guards at the Ospedale Civile stepped out on to the ambulance dock at the rear of the hospital for a cigarette and found two young women, both injured, lying unconscious on the wooden dock where the ambulances arrived. He’d ducked back inside and run to Pronto Soccorso, calling ahead for two gurneys. The injured women were taken immediately to the Emergency Room.

Brunetti looked at the photos taken in the ward before he read more, and what he saw shocked him. One of them appeared to have been badly beaten. Her nose was pressed against her right cheek and there was a long bloody cut above her left eye. The left side of her face was swollen.

There was also a photo of the second victim. Her face showed no signs of an attack: the report stated that neither of them had wounds on their hands that spoke of having resisted one, although the second young woman’s left arm was broken in two places.

Both wore wet jeans and sweaters and might have spent some time in the water. One had lost her left tennis shoe; neither carried identification of any kind.