Donna Leon - About Face

The next was the same: the mud was unmarked save by the tracks of some sort of animal: cat, dog, rat. None of them had any idea.

They went back to the dirt road and continued towards the third tank. It loomed above them, at least twenty metres high, a menacing cylinder back-lit by the lights of the port of San Basilio in the distance. To its left and right they saw the thousands of lights on the three cruise ships docked in the city across the laguna .

From behind them, they heard the dull hum of an approaching motor, and they all moved to the side of the road, seeking a place to hide. They ran towards the third tank and pressed themselves flat against its corroded surface as the sound grew, and grew. A light hit the ground and came towards them at alarming speed, and they pressed themselves harder against the curved metal surface.

The plane passed over them, drowning them in sound. Brunetti and Vianello covered their ears, but Pucetti did not bother. When the plane was past them, leaving them stunned in its wake, they pushed themselves away from the tank and started to circle back towards the door.

Again, standing not far from it, Vianello waved the beam across the mud in front of the door, but this time it revealed an entirely different story: tyre tracks and footprints led to and from the entrance. This door, further, was not a sloppy rectangle cut with a blowtorch and then hastily patched with a few wooden boards nailed together to discourage entrance. It was a proper, curved sliding door, the sort seen on a garage, but not the garage of a private house: the garage of a bus terminal. Or a warehouse.

Vianello went over to study the lock. His light illuminated another one above it, and then a padlock fixed through two metal circles soldered to the door and the wall of the tank. ‘I’m not good enough for the top one,’ he said as he turned away.

‘So now what?’ Brunetti asked.

Pucetti walked off to the left, staying close to the metal hull of the tank. He came back after a few steps and asked Vianello for the flashlight, then set off again with it in his hand. Brunetti and Vianello could hear his steps as he circled towards the back of the tank, then the odd clang as he banged something against the side. The sound of his footsteps was suddenly drowned out by the arrival of another plane, which again filled their universe with noise and light, and then was gone.

A minute passed before something approaching silence returned, though motors were audible in the distance and, somewhere, electrical wires hummed in the night air. Then they heard Pucetti coming back, frozen mud splintering under his feet.

‘There’s a ladder up the side,’ the young officer said, unable to contain his excitement: cops and robbers, a night out with the boys. ‘Come on; I’ll show you.’

He was gone, disappearing around the curve of metal. They went after him and found him standing near the tank, flashlight pointing up the side. When their eyes followed the beam, they saw a series of round metal crossbars, starting about two metres from the ground and going up straight to the top.

‘What happens up there?’ Vianello asked.

Pucetti backed away, keeping the beam aimed at the point where the ladder reached the top. ‘I don’t know. I can’t see.’ Both of them joined him, but they could see nothing, either, save the final crossbar a hand’s-breadth from the top.

‘Only one way to find out,’ Brunetti said, feeling quite bold. He walked back to the tank and reached towards the rungs.

‘Wait a minute, sir,’ Pucetti said. He came over to them and stuffed the flashlight into Brunetti’s pocket, then got down on one knee, then the other, and made himself into a human footstool. ‘Step up from my shoulder, sir. It’ll be easier.’

Five years ago, Brunetti’s masculinity would have scorned the offer. He raised his right foot, but when he felt the pull of cloth across his chest, he put his foot down and unbuttoned his coat, then stepped on Pucetti’s shoulder and grabbed the second and third rungs. Easily, he pulled and stepped at the same moment and ended with both feet on the first rung of the ladder. As he started climbing, he heard Pucetti, then Vianello, say something. The sound of scrabbling below drove him up and up again; and he heard a heavy thump below him as a foot banged the side of the tank.

He had watched the first Spider-Man film with the kids and had enjoyed it. He could not now shake the feeling that he too was climbing up the side of a building, clinging to the side by virtue of his special powers. He climbed ten more rungs, paused for a moment and started to look at the men below him, but thought better of it and continued towards the top.

The ladder ended at a metal platform the size of a door. Luckily, it was enclosed in a metal handrail. Brunetti crawled on to it and got to his feet, then walked to the far end to leave space for the others. He took out the flashlight and lit the way for them, first Vianello and then Pucetti, as they crawled on to the platform. Vianello got to his feet and gave a stricken look into the flashlight’s beam. Brunetti moved it quickly to Pucetti, whose face was radiant. What larks, what larks.

Brunetti turned the light on the wall of the tank and saw that a door with a metal handle stood at his end of the platform. He pressed it, and the door swung open easily on to an identical platform on the inside of the tank. He stepped inside and turned the light back so they could see well enough to join him inside.

Brunetti snapped his fingers: a moment later the sound came back, then repeated itself a few times until it dissolved. He tapped the thick plastic case of the flashlight against the railing that surrounded this platform, and after a moment that duller sharper sound was echoed back.

He shone the light down the steps ahead of them, illuminating the stairway that curved along the inner wall and towards the bottom of the tank. The beam was not strong enough to reach the end of the stairs so they could see only part of the way down: the darkness changed everything and made it impossible to calculate the distance to the bottom.

‘Well?’ Vianello asked.

‘We go down,’ Brunetti said.

To assure himself of what he sensed, Brunetti switched off the flashlight. The other men drew in their breath: darkness visible. They knew darkness, the ancients, knew it as people today could only construct it artificially so as to make themselves feel the titillation of fear. This was darkness: nothing else was.

Brunetti switched the light back on and felt the other two relax minimally. ‘Vianello,’ he said. ‘I’m going to give Pucetti the light, then you and I join arms and go down first.’ Handing the light to Pucetti, he said, ‘You shine it on our feet and follow us.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Pucetti said. Vianello reached sideways and took Brunetti’s arm.

‘Let’s go,’ Brunetti said. Vianello was on the outside, so he kept one hand on the railing, his other arm linked with Brunetti’s, just as if they were a pair of frail old pensioners out for an afternoon walk that had suddenly turned out to be more difficult than expected. Pucetti kept the light on the step immediately in front of the other men, following them by instinct as much as by sight.

All of them could see the piles of rust on the steps, and Brunetti, walking down a stairway wide enough for only one person, felt the flakes brushing free from the inner wall and was convinced he could smell them as well. They descended into the Stygian dark, and with each step the stench grew more intense. Oil, rust, metal: it became more invasive as they got closer to the bottom, or else the overpowering sense of being engulfed in limitless darkness made their other senses more acute.

Though Brunetti knew it to be impossible, he thought it was darker than when they had entered. ‘I’m going to stop, Pucetti,’ he said, so that the young man would not crash into them. He paused, Vianello perfectly in step with him. ‘Take a look around the bottom,’ he told Pucetti, who leaned against the railing and flashed the light into the darkness below.