Donna Leon - Beastly Things

‘Yes. Why do you ask?’

She waved at him and Vianello, as though their presence, or their appearance, were sufficient answer, but then said, ‘Because he seemed troubled, not only sad.’ Before Brunetti could point out that she had said nothing about this, she went on. ‘I know, I know, I said he was pleasant and friendly. But under it, he was troubled by something. I thought it was the jacket, or that we didn’t have the shoes he wanted, but it was more than that.’

Someone as observant as she didn’t need to be nudged, and so Brunetti and Vianello remained silent, waiting.

‘Usually, when people are waiting for me to bring them something – a different size or a different colour – they look around at different shoes or get up and walk around, go and look at the belts. But he just sat there, staring at his feet.’

‘Did he seem unhappy?’ Brunetti asked.

This time, it took her a moment to answer. ‘No, now that you ask me about it, I’d say he looked worried.’

BRUNETTI AND VIANELLO decided to have lunch together, but both cringed at the idea of eating anywhere within a radius of ten minutes of San Marco.

‘How’d this happen?’ Vianello asked. ‘We used to be able to eat well anywhere in the city, well, just about anywhere. And it was usually good and didn’t cost an eye from your head.’

‘How long ago was “used to”, Lorenzo?’ Brunetti asked.

Vianello slowed to consider this. ‘About ten years.’ But then he added, his surprise audible, ‘No, it’s a lot more than that, isn’t it?’

They were passing in front of the place where the Mondadori bookstore used to be, only a few hundred metres from the arched entrance to Piazza San Marco, still undecided where to go for lunch. A sudden surge in the wave of milling tourists engulfed them, forcing them against the windows of the shop. Ahead of them, near the Piazza, the pastel wave defied tidal patterns and flowed both ways. Blind, slowly urgent towards no goal, it appeared to have no beginning and no end as it seeped from and into the Piazza.

Vianello turned to Brunetti and placed a hand on his forearm. ‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘I can’t go across the Piazza. Let’s take the boat.’ They took the right turn and struggled down towards the embarcadero . Long lines snaked away from the ticket office, and the floating docks lay low in the water from the weight of the people standing on them, waiting for the arriving vaporetti.

A Number One approached from the right, and the line moved forward a step or two, though there was nowhere for it to go, save into the water. Brunetti took his warrant card from his wallet and slipped around the bar that blocked the entrance to the passageway reserved for disembarking passengers. Vianello followed. They hadn’t gone four steps when a marinaio shouted at them from the landing ahead of them, waving them back and away.

Ignoring him, the two men approached, Brunetti holding out his card. ‘ Scusi, Signori ,’ the workman said when he saw it, stepping back to allow them on to the floating dock. He was young, like most of them these days, short and dark but speaking Veneziano. ‘They all try to sneak in this way, and I have to shout them back. Some day I’m probably going to hit one of them.’ The smile with which he said this belied the possibility.

‘The tourists?’ Brunetti asked, surprised that they would show such initiative.

‘No, it’s us, Signore,’ the man said, obviously meaning Venetians. ‘The tourists are like sheep, really: very gentle, and all you have to do is tell them where to go. The bad ones, really the worst, are the old ladies: they complain about the tourists, but most of them are riding for free, if they’re old enough, or not paying for a ticket anyway, if they’re younger.’ As if to prove him right, an old woman appeared behind Brunetti and Vianello and, ignoring all three of them, pushed past them and planted herself directly in front of the point where passengers would disembark.

The sailor who worked on the boat tied it to the bollard then waited with his hand on the sliding gate while he asked the old woman to step aside to let the passengers off; she ignored him. He asked her again, and still she stood there. Finally, giving in to the pressure and muttering of the people blocked behind him, he slid the gate open, and the mass surged forward. The old woman, like a piece of flotsam, was moved to one side by pressure and blows from shoulders, arms, and backpacks.

She responded in kind, though verbally, letting fly a long stream of abuse in Veneziano that had the accent of Castello, towards which the boat was headed. She condemned the ancestry of tourists, their sexual habits and state of personal hygiene, until finally the path was free, the deck clear, and she could walk into the cabin and take a seat, surrounding herself with a cloud of muttered complaints against the bad manners of these foreigners who came to ruin the lives of decent Venetian folk.

When the boat had left the dock, Brunetti slipped the doors to the cabin closed, cutting off the sound of her voice. Finally Vianello said, ‘She’s a nasty old cow, but she has a point.’

It wasn’t a point Brunetti could bear talking about or listening to, so fundamental had it become as a subject of small talk in the city. ‘You decide where we can go?’ he asked, quite as if Vianello’s response to the tourist mass had not interrupted their conversation.

‘Let’s go out to the Lido and eat fish,’ the Inspector said with all the enthusiasm of a boy playing hooky.

Andri was only a ten-minute walk from the landing at Santa Maria Elisabetta, and the owner, a schoolmate of Vianello’s, found them a table in the crowded restaurant. Without being asked, he brought them a half-litre of white wine and a litre of mineral water, and told Vianello he should have the salad with shrimp, raw artichoke and ginger and then the zuppe di pesche. Vianello nodded; Brunetti nodded.

‘So, Mestre,’ Brunetti said.

Before Vianello could speak, the owner was back with some bread. He set it on the table, asked if they’d like some artichoke bottoms, and was gone as soon as they said yes.

‘I don’t want to get into some territorial squabble about this,’ Vianello finally said. ‘You know the rules better than I do.’

Brunetti nodded. ‘I think I’ll use Patta’s tactic of simply assuming that because I want to do something, I have the right to do it.’ He poured them each some wine and some water and took a long drink of water. He opened a package of grissini and ate one of them, then another, suddenly aware of how hungry he was. ‘But for the sake of correctness, I’ll call them and say we’re coming out to ask if anyone in the shoe shop recognizes the man in the photo.’

Vianello helped himself to a package of breadsticks.

The owner came back with the artichokes, set them down, and hurried away. It was one o’clock, and the place was full. Both men were happy to see that it seemed to be full of local people: three tables were crowded with dust-covered workmen with thick clothing and heavy boots.

‘You think there are places where everyone cooperates?’ Vianello asked.

Brunetti finished his first artichoke and set his fork down. ‘Is that a rhetorical question, Lorenzo?’ he asked, sipping at his wine.

The Inspector tore off some bread and wiped up the olive oil from his plate. ‘These are good. I like them without garlic.’ Apparently, it had been a rhetorical question.

‘We go out in a car, be back in no time.’

The owner replaced their empty plates with the salad: slivers of artichoke, quite a large number of tiny shrimp, sprinkled with slivers of ginger.

‘If no one at the shop recognizes him, then we ask the guys there to give us a hand,’ Brunetti said.