A Venetian Reckoning (24 page)

'Yes, I think so, too,' Brunetd
agreed ‘We sent our daughter to the sisters until she finished middle school'

'How old is she?' Mara asked, closing
the locket and putting it back inside her blouse.

'Fourteen.' Brunetti sighed. 'It’s a
difficult age,' he said before he remembered what Mara had told him only
moments before.

She, luckily, seemed to have
forgotten it, too, and said only, 'Yes, it's hard. I hope she's a good girl.'

Brunetti smiled, proud to say it.
'Yes, she is. Very good.'

'Do you have other children?' 'A son,
he's seventeen.'

She nodded, as if she knew more than
she wanted to know about seventeen-year-old boys.

A long moment passed. Brunetti waved
a hand around the room. 'Why this?' he asked.

Mara shrugged. 'Why not?'

'If you've got a child in Brazil,
this is a long way to come to work,' He smiled when he said it, and she took no
offence.

‘I make enough money to send to my
aunt, enough to pay for the school, and good food, and new uniforms whenever
she needs them.
^’
Her voice was tight with pride or anger, Brunetti
couldn't tell which.

'And in Sao Paulo, couldn't you make
money there? So that you wouldn't have to be away from her?'

‘I left school when I was nine
because someone had to take care of the other children. My mother was sick for
a long time, and I was the only girl. Then, after my daughter was born, I got a
job in a bar.’ She saw his look and answered, 'No, it wasn't that kind of
place. All I did was serve drinks.’

When it seemed she was going to say
nothing else, Brunetti asked, 'How long did you keep that job?'

'Three years. It paid our rent and
for our food, for me and Ana and for my aunt, who took care of her. But it
didn't pay for much else.' She stopped again, but, to Brunetti, her voice had
taken on the rhythms of story-telling.

'And then what?'

'And then Eduardo, my Latin Lover,’
she said bitterly and crushed at one of the butts on the floor with her toe,
reducing it to fragments of paper and tobacco.

'Eduardo?’

'Eduardo Alfieri. At least that's
what he told me his name was. He saw me in the bar one night, and he stayed
after closing and asked me if I wanted to go for a coffee. Not a drink, mind
you, for coffee, like I was a respectable girl he was asking for a date.’

'And what happened?'

'What do you think happened?' she
asked, voice bitter for the first time. 'We had that coffee, and then he came
back to the bar every night, always asking me out for coffee when it closed,
always respectful, always polite. My grandmother would have approved of him, he
was so respectful. It was the first time a man had ever treated me as something
other than something to fuck, so I did what any girl would do, I fell in love
with him.’

'Yes,’ Brunetti said. 'Yes.'

'And he said he wanted to marry me,
but I would have to come to Italy for that and meet his family. He told me he
would arrange everything, a visa and a job when I got here. He told me it would
be no trouble to learn Italian.’ She gave a rueful grin then. "That's
probably the only true thing he told me, the bastard.’

'What happened?'

'I came to Italy. I signed all the
papers and I got on Alitalia and, the first thing you know, I was in Milan, and
Eduardo was there to meet me at the airport' The look she gave Brunetti was
level and open. 'You've heard this a thousand times, I suppose?'

'Something like it yes. Trouble with
the papers?'

She smiled, almost with humour, at the
memory of her former self, her former innocence. 'Exactly. Trouble with the
papers. Bureaucracy. But he was going to take me to his apartment and
everything would be all right I was in love, so I believed him. That night he
asked me to give him my passport so he could take it the next day, when he went
to get the papers for the marriage.' She reached for a cigarette but then put
it back in the pack. 'Do you think I could have a coffee?' she asked.

Again Brunetti went to the door and
tapped on it, this time asking Gravini to bring some coffee and sandwiches.

When he went back to his seat, she
was smoking again, ‘I saw him once more, only once. He came back that night and
told me that there was serious trouble with my visa, and he couldn't marry me
until it was sealed. 1 don't know when I stopped believing him and realized
what was going on.'

‘Why didn't you go to the police?'
Brunetti asked.

Her astonishment was unfeigned.
"The police? He had my passport, and then he showed me that one of the
papers I'd signed - he'd even gone to the trouble to have my signature
notarized, said we'd have less trouble in Italy if I did — it said that he'd
lent me 50 million lire.'

'And then?' Brunetti asked.

'He told me that he'd found me a job
in a bar, and all I had to do was work there until the money was paid back’

'And?'

'Eduardo took me to see the man who
owned the bar, and the man said I could have a job. It paid, I think, a million
lire a month, but then the man explained that he would have to take money out
for the room where I could live over the bar. I couldn't live anywhere else
because I didn't have a passport or a visa. And he said he'd have to take out
for the food and for the clothing he'd give me. Eduardo never brought my
suitcases, so all I had was the clothes I was wearing. It worked out that I
would be making about 50,000 lire a month.

I couldn't speak the language, but I
could count; I knew that when that got sent back to my aunt, it would be less
than thirty dollars. That's not a lot for an old woman and a baby to live on,
not even in Brazil.'

There was a knock and then the door
opened. Brunetti went over and took a tin tray from Gravini. As he went back
to Mara, she pulled the third chair between them and motioned to Brunetti to
set the tray down there. They both stirred sugar into their coffee. He nodded
down at the sandwiches that lay on the plate, but she shook her head.

'Not until I finish,' she said, and
sipped at her coffee. 'I wasn't stupid; I knew the choices I had. So I went to
work at the bar. It was hard the first couple of times, but then I got used to
it. That was two years ago.'

'What happened between then and now?
To bring you to Mestre?' Brunetti asked.

'I got sick. Pneumonia, I think. I
hate this cold weather,' she said, shivering unconsciously at the there thought
of it 'While I was in the hospital, the bar burned down. Someone said it was
arson. I don't know. I hope it was. But when it was time for me to get out,
Franco', she said, nodding off to her left, as if she knew Franco was in the
next cell, came and paid the bill and brought me back here. I've been working for
him ever since.' She finished her coffee and set the cup back on the tray.

It was a story Brunetti had heard
more times than he cared to remember, but this was the first time he'd heard it
told with not even a trace of self-pity, with no attempt to turn the teller
into an unwilling victim of overwhelming forces.

'Did he', Brunetti asked, nodding his
head towards the same wall, though Franco, as it happened, was lodged behind
the opposite one, 'have anything to do with the bar in Milan or the one where you
work now? Or with Eduardo?'

She stared down at the floor. 'I
don't know.' Brunetti said nothing and she finally added, 'I think he bought
me. Or bought my contract.' She looked up then and asked, 'Why do you want to
know?'

Brunetti saw no reason to lie to her.
'We found the phone number of the bar where you're working now in the course of
another investigation. We're trying to find out how they're related.'

'What's the other investigation?' she
asked.

'I can't tell you that,' Brunetti
said. 'But, so far, it has nothing to do with you or Eduardo or anything about
that.'

'Can I ask you a question?' she said.

Whenever Chiara asked him that, Brunetti
was in the habit of telling her that she couldn't very well ask him an answer
but, instead, he said, 'Of course.'

'Does it have anything to do with...'
she began and then paused, looking for the right word. 'Well, with some of us
who have died?'

'I don't know who you mean by
"us",' Brunetti said.

'Whores,' she explained.

'No.' His answer was instant and she
believed him. 'Why do you ask?'

'No special reason. We hear things.'
She reached out and picked up a sandwich, bit delicately at one end, and men brushed
absently at the crumbs that cascaded down the front of her blouse.

'What sort of things do you hear?'

'Just things,' she said, taking
another bite.

'Mara,' he began, not certain what
tone to use. 'If there's something you'd like to tell me, or ask me, it will
rest between us.' Then, before she could speak, he added, 'Not if it's about a
crime. But if you just want to tell me something or find out about something,
it's between us.'

'Not official?'

'No, not official.'

'What's your name?' she asked.

'Guido,' he answered.

She smiled at the thought that he had
used his own name. 'Guido the Plumber?' He nodded.

She took another bite and, still
chewing, said, 'We hear things,' then looked down and brushed at the new
crumbs. 'You know, the word travels, when things happen. So we hear things, but
it's hard, ever, to be sure where we heard it or who said it.'

'What is it you heard, Mara?'

'That someone had been killing us.'
As soon as she said it, she shook her head. 'No, that's wrong. Not killing us.
But we've been dying.'

‘I don't understand the difference,'
Brunetti said.

'There was that young one. I can't
remember her name, the little Yugoslavian. She killed herself in the summer and
then Anja, the one from Bulgaria, she got it out in the field. I didn't know
the little one, out I did know Anja. She'd go with anyone.'

Brunetti remembered these crimes and
remembered that the police had never even discovered the victims' names.

'And then that truck.' She paused and
looked at him. The conjunction of words struck a chord, but Brunetti could
produce no clear memory.

When he said nothing, she continued,
'One of the girls said she'd heard - she couldn't remember where — that the
girls were coming down here. I forget from where.’

'To work as prostitutes?’ he asked
and immediately regretted the question.

She pulled back from him and stopped
speaking. The expression in her eyes changed as veils were lowered, ‘I don't
remember.’

Her voice told Brunetti that he had
lost her, that his question had severed the fine thread that held them together
momentarily.

'Did you ever say anything about
this?’ he asked.

'To the police?’ she finished the
question for him with a snort of disbelief. She tossed the remnant of sandwich
she still held down on to the tray. 'Are you going to charge me with anything?’
she asked.

'No,' Brunetti said.

Then can I go?' The woman he'd spoken
to was gone, replaced by the whore who had taken him back to her room.

'Yes, you're free to go whenever you
want' Before she could get to her feet Brunetti asked, 'Is it safe for you to
leave before he does?' — again nodding towards the wall behind which Franco was
not

'Him,' she said, purring out her
cheeks with contempt

Brunetti went over to the door, and
tapped on it "The signorina is leaving now,' he said, when Gravini opened
the door.

She picked up her jacket, passed in
front of Brunetti, and left without saying a word. When she was gone, Brunetti
looked at Gravini. 'Thanks for the coffee,' he said, taking back the file which
Gravini was still holding.

'It's nothing, dottore.'

'If you'll get the tray, I'll talk to
the man now.'