Blood from a stone - Donna Leon

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.’

‘The Senegalesi?’ Vianello asked. ‘I always thought they were a sort of closed community. And I think they’re Muslim, most of them.’

Brunetti had heard the same, but Don Alvise was the only person he could think of at the moment who might be able to help, and he knew that the former priest cared little what god a person chose to worship. ‘Maybe,’ he temporized. ‘That is, maybe he knows them or some of them.’ When Vianello did not offer agreement, Brunetti asked, ‘Can you think of anyone else?’

Vianello didn’t answer.

The launch turned left into Rio di San Zan Degolà. Brunetti got to his feet and, lowering his head as he left the cabin, went up on deck. ‘Up there, before the bridge,’ he told the pilot, who pulled the boat to the side of the canal, flipped the motor into reverse, and drew silently up to the moss-covered steps. Brunetti studied them for a moment, but before he could decide whether to risk stepping from the bobbing boat, the pilot walked around behind him and, towrope in hand, jumped up on to the riva and pulled the front of the boat tight to the wall. He tied the end of the rope to a metal ring in the pavement and leaned across to offer Brunetti, and then Vianello, a hand.

Brunetti suggested the officer go and get himself a coffee and said they shouldn’t be more than half an hour. As the officer headed for a bar that stood to the right, Brunetti led Vianello around to the left of the façade of the church and down a narrow calle.

‘Calle dei Preti,’ the ever-observant Vianello read. ‘Seems the right place for him to live.’

Brunetti, turning left at the end of the street and heading back towards the Grand Canal, said, ‘Well, almost, except that we’re on the Fontego dei Turchi.’

‘He probably helps them, too,’ Vianello began, ‘so it’s probably just as good a name.’

Brunetti remembered the door, a heavy green portone with twin brass handles in the shape of lions’ heads. He rang the bell and waited. When a voice from the answerphone asked who it was, he gave his name, and the door snapped open, allowing them to enter a long narrow courtyard with a capped well at one end, wooden doors lining both sides. Without hesitating, Brunetti went to the second door on the left, which was open. At the top of the first flight of steps was another open door, where a short, stooped figure stood waiting for them as they climbed to the top.

‘Ciao, Guido,’ Perale said, taking Brunetti by the elbows and rising up on his toes to kiss him on both cheeks.

Moved by real affection for the man, Brunetti embraced him and took his right hand in both of his. Turning away from the priest, he said, ‘This is Lorenzo Vianello, my friend.’

No stranger to the forces of order, Don Alvise recognized a policeman when he saw one but extended his hand and shook Vianello’s warmly. ‘Welcome, welcome. Come inside,’ he said, pulling on Vianello’s hand to bring him into the apartment.

He turned just inside the door and closed it after them, then asked for their coats, which he hung on two hooks on the back of the door. He was at least a head shorter than Brunetti, though his stoop made him appear shorter still. His mop of grey hair looked a stranger to both comb and barber, lopped off unevenly on the sides and growing well below his collar at the back. He wore glasses with black plastic frames and lenses so thick they distorted his eyes. His nose resembled nothing so much as a lump of clay that had been pressed on to his face, and his mouth, lurking under the macho moustache, was small and round as a baby’s.

His appearance would have made him faintly ridiculous, even grotesque, were it not for the aura of sweetness that radiated from his every word and glance. He seemed a man who gazed on all he saw with approval and affection, who began every interchange with deep and abiding regard for the person in front of him.

He led them into a room which, because of the desk that stood at an angle in a corner, might have been an office, were it not for the bed set against one wall and the long board above it that served as a shelf and on which lay a few pairs of faded jeans, a pile of sweaters, and neatly folded underwear. Don Alvise pulled the chair behind the desk around in front and set it beside the single chair that stood there. He gestured to them and went to the desk and sat on it, though he had to give a little hop to get up, and his feet hung in the air as he sat.

‘How may I help you, Guido?’ he asked when his guests were seated.

‘It’s about the man who was murdered last night,’ Brunetti answered.

Don Alvise nodded, ‘I thought it would be,’ he said.

‘I thought you might know him or know about him.’ Brunetti kept his eyes on the priest’s as he spoke, looking for some flicker of recognition, but he saw none. He stopped there, waiting for the priest to answer his unspoken question.

‘You didn’t bring a photo,’ Perale said.

Brunetti gave him a long look before he answered. ‘I didn’t think it would be necessary. If people know that you knew him, they would have told you about it.’ Some impulse of charity, as well, had kept him from bringing the photo.

Don Alvise said, ‘That’s true.’

Brunetti allowed a pause to elapse before he said, ‘And?’

Like a small child under examination or observation, Perale looked down at the floor and began to bang his heels, one after the other, softly against the front of the desk. One two, one two, one two, his feet counted out, while his face remained hidden from the other men. Finally he looked at Brunetti and said, ‘I have to think about this and ask some questions before I say anything to you.’

‘Before you say anything or before you can say anything?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Isn’t it the same thing?’ the priest asked innocently.

Brunetti was uncertain how to greet the priest’s prevarication. ‘Come on, Don Alvise,’ he finally said then, laughing, added, ‘you weren’t a Jesuit when I first met you. Don’t start acting like one now.’

Tension and reticence vanished; ease slipped back into the room to take up its place among the three men. ‘All right, Guido, I understand. But I still need to speak to some people before I can talk to you.’

‘And if they tell you not to talk to me?’

Again, the small feet began to tap out their rhythm, as if their certainty could help Don Alvise resolve his own lack of it. ‘Then I’ll have to think about it,’ he said.

‘For whatever it’s worth,’ Brunetti said, ‘the Immigration Police aren’t involved in this, and, no matter what you tell me, they won’t be.’

The drumming stopped and the priest looked over at him. ‘Doesn’t that depend on what I tell you?’ he asked.

Brunetti decided to risk it. ‘If I give you my word that, no matter what you tell me, I won’t tell them, will you believe me?’

The tiny mouth broadened into a smile and Don Alvise said, ‘Guido, if you gave me your word that politicians are honest men, I’d believe you.’ Then, seeing Brunetti and Vianello’s astonishment, he added, ‘Though I’d still keep my hand on my wallet in their company.’

Brunetti decided to leave it at that. He knew that Don Alvise would tell him what he decided was wisest for him to know, and there would be no changing that. He could do nothing more than trust in the former priest’s wisdom. Having decided that, Brunetti got to his feet, and the three men exchanged polite farewells before Brunetti and Vianello left.

9

‘He always that sly?’ Vianello asked as they stepped outside.

‘Sly?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Clever. Whatever you want to call it.’ To explain his tone, which was something approaching anger, Vianello said, ‘He knows who the man is. Anyone could see that, and yet he gives you this runaround that he has to ask people before he can tell you.’ He let out an angry puff of breath which both men could see in the cold air. ‘If he knows him, or knew him, he has to tell you,’ he insisted. ‘That’s the law.’

Surprised to find Vianello, of all people, thinking in such legalistic terms, Brunetti temporized. ‘Well, he does and he doesn’t.’

‘Why doesn’t he?’ Vianello asked.

Instead of answering directly, Brunetti swerved across the calle towards a bar. ‘I need a coffee,’ he said as he pushed open the door. The overheated air wrapped around them and, as if on cue, the espresso machine let out a jet of steam that imitated Vianello’s angry huffing of a few moments ago.

At the bar, Brunetti glanced at Vianello and, at his nod, ordered two coffees.

While they waited, he said, ‘He doesn’t have to tell me if he believes what he says will put someone else in danger.’ Before Vianello could cite the law at him, Brunetti added, ‘That is, he knows he has to, legally, but that wouldn’t mean anything to him, not if he thought the information could cause someone harm.’

‘But you promised him not to go to the Immigration Police,’ Vianello insisted. ‘Doesn’t he believe you?’

‘The danger might come from somewhere else,’ Brunetti said.

‘Where?’ asked Vianello.

The coffees came, and they busied themselves with ripping open envelopes of sugar and spilling the contents into the tiny cups. After his first sip, Brunetti set his cup back in the saucer and said, ‘I’ve no idea. But for the moment, all I can do is wait to see what he tells me, or what he doesn’t tell me. And if he doesn’t tell me, then I’ve got to find the reason he won’t.’

Vianello did no more than wave his coffee cup in Brunetti’s direction by way of interrogation.

Brunetti went on. ‘Whatever he does — whether he gives me an answer or not — he’s still giving me information. And now that I have that, I can start thinking about what to do.’

Vianello shrugged and together they left the bar to go back to the launch.

The pilot had kept the motor running all the time they were gone, so they found the cabin comfortably warm. Brunetti had no idea whether it was the warmth or the boost given by the coffee and the sugar, but something lifted his spirits and allowed him to take joy in the beauty of the trip back to the Questura. Palazzi swept by on both sides, the drunken promiscuity of their styles competing for his attention: here a severe Gothic window, there a façade of parti-coloured mosaic, on the left the water-flooded atrium of Ca’ d’Oro, and opposite it the yawning space, deserted now, where Paola had that morning bought fish.

That thought turned his mind to his family and to the tension that had seeped into him during lunch. What to do about Chiara? For a moment, he thought of taking her to the morgue at the hospital and showing her the black man’s corpse, evidence of what could happen when you thought of them as ‘only’ vu cumprà. But this would be nothing more than cheap melodrama, and there was surely no guarantee that Chiara would agree with him that one thing led to the other. And did he know — know for certain — that the one thing had led to the other? This in turn took his thoughts back to Don Alvise.

Palazzo Ducale approached from the left, and its beauty pulled him to his feet. ‘Come on,’ he said to Vianello and went back up on deck. The cold hit him like a blow and the wind pushed tears from his eyes, distorting his vision and transforming the palazzo into a shimmering, shivering form suspended in the light reflected from the dancing waves.

Vianello came up the stairway and stood beside Brunetti. The flags on the tall poles in front of the basilica flapped wildly in the wind; boats and gondolas tied to the moorings bounced up and down and side to side, creating a series of booms so loud they could be heard above the wind. The Piazza seemed filled with huddled, bent shapes; the tourists kept their heads down, as protected from glory as they were from the wind.

Had it been better once, he wondered, when all of this was new and La Serenissima controlled the seas? Or had it been just as easy then to arrange the murder of some nameless Moor, certain that his insignificance and anonymity would serve to protect his killers? He closed his eyes for a moment, and when he opened them again, the palazzo had given way to the Bridge of Sighs and then to the façades of the hotels that lined the riva. The cold ate at him, worse here on the open water, but he stayed on deck until they docked at the Questura, when he thanked the pilot and asked Vianello to come up to his office with him.

The last part of the ride had chilled both of them to the bone, and it was more than five minutes before they felt sufficiently warm to remove their overcoats. As he was putting his own in the armadio, Brunetti said, ‘Wicked. It’s colder than I can remember its ever being at this time of year.’

‘Global warming,’ Vianello said, tossing his own coat over the back of one of the chairs in front of Brunetti’s desk and sitting down in the other.

Completely at a loss, Brunetti waited until he too was seated before he asked, ‘What do you mean, “global warming”? Isn’t that supposed to make it hotter?’

Vianello, still rubbing his hands together for warmth, said, ‘It is, or it will. That’s little, but it’s certain. But it will also make a mess of all the seasons. Remember how much it rained in the autumn and last spring?’ At Brunetti’s nod, Vianello said, ‘It’s all tied together. It has to do with ocean and air currents.’

Because Vianello sounded so certain, Brunetti asked, ‘Where did you get all this?’

‘I read the UN Report on Global Warming. Well, some of it. It’s all in there. The cherry on the cake is that the last place that will feel the influence — well, at least if all these scientists know what they’re talking about — you know which country, well, which continent will suffer the least and suffer last?’

Brunetti was still entirely lost and shook his head to admit it.

‘North America. That means the Americans. They’re protected on both sides by enormous bodies of water, and the currents are favourable to them, so while the rest of us are choking on their gases or dying from the heat, they’ll be able to go on the same as ever.’

Brunetti was alarmed by Vianello’s tone, which he found uncharacteristically heated. ‘Aren’t you being a bit severe, Lorenzo?’

‘Severe? Severe because they’ll shorten my life and kill my children?’

Too late Brunetti registered that he had once again stepped up and taken a seat on Vianello’s hobby horse: the ecology of the planet. Keeping his voice moderate, he said, ‘None of this is proven, you know, Lorenzo.’

‘I know. But it’s also not proven that, if I started smoking again and smoked three packs a day, I’d die of lung cancer. But the likelihood is pretty high.’