A Venetian Reckoning (31 page)

The truck went off the road; its shipment
was destroyed. Surely, the purchaser would want to know if it had been his
cargo scattered out there in the snow, and there would be no better way to find
out than to call the shipper. Brunetti shivered involuntarily at the
possibility that people might, think of those girls as a shipment, their sudden
deaths as a loss of cargo.

He paged ahead to the date of
Trevisan's death. Two calls had been made from the office on the day after
Trevisan's death, both to the Belgrade number. If the first calls had been made
to report a loss of cargo, could these later calls mean that, with Trevisan's
death, the business passed to new hands?

25

Brunetti tried to quiet his
uneasiness by hunting through the papers that had accumulated on his desk
during the last two days. He found that Lotto's widow had, indeed, been
interviewed and had said she spent the night of Lotto's death in the civil
hospital, at the bedside of her mother, who was dying of cancer. Both of the
ward sisters verified that she had been there all through the night. Vianello
had interviewed her, and he had gone on, with his usual precision, to ask about
the nights of both Trevisan's and Favero's deaths. She was in the hospital the
first night, at home the second. Both nights, however, her sister from Torino
was with her, and so Signora Lotto ceased to have a place in Brunetti's
imagination.

Suddenly he found himself wondering
if Chiara was still engaged in her hare-brained attempt to get information
from Francesca, and as he thought about it, he was overcome with something akin
to disgust. He could allow himself the luxury of righteous indignation about
men who used teenagers as whores, yet he had felt no equal repugnance to turn
his own child into a spy. Until now.

His phone rang and he answered it
with his name.

It was Paola, voice wildly out of
pitch, calling his name. In the background, he heard even wilder noises, high
voiced.

•What is it, Paola?’

'Guido, come home. Now. It's Chiara,’
Paola cried, voice raised to be heard over the wailing that came from somewhere
else in the house.

‘What's happened? Is she all right?’

‘I don't know, Guido. She was in the
living room, and then she began to scream. She's in her room, and the door's
locked.' He could hear the panic in Paola's voice, like an undercurrent that
pulled at her, and then at him.

‘Is she all right? Did she hurt
herself?' he asked.

‘I don't know. But you can hear her.
She's hysterical, Guido. Please come home. Please. Now.'

'I'll be there as soon as I can,' he
said and put the phone down. He grabbed his coat and ran from his office,
already calculating the fastest way to get home. Outside, there was no police
launch tied up to the
embattadero
in
front of the Questura, so he turned to the left and started to run, coat
flapping wide behind him. He turned the corner and started up the narrow
calle,
trying
to decide whether to go across the Rialto Bridge or to take the public gondola.
In front of him, three young boys walked arm in arm. As he approached them, he
shouted out,
'Attenti',
voice so loud as to remove all politeness from
the call. The boys scattered to the sides and Brunetti hurried past them. By
the time he got to Campo Santa Maria Formosa, he was winded and had to slow to
a shambling trot Near the Rialto, he got caught in foot traffic and found
himself, at one point, shoving past a tourist by pushing her knapsack roughly
out of the way. Behind him, he heard the girl call out in angry German, but
Brunetti ran on.

Out from under the underpass and into
Campo San Bartolomeo, he cut off to the left, deciding to take the gondola and
avoid the bridge, heavy now with late-afternoon traffic. Luckily, a gondola was
pulled up at the stop, two old ladies standing at the back. He ran across the
wooden landing and stepped down into the gondola. 'Let's go,' he called to the
gondoliere who stood in the back, leaning against his oar. 'Police, take me
across.'

Casually, as if he did this every day
of the week, the gondoliere in the front pushed against the railing of the
steps leading down to the boat, and the gondola slipped backwards into the
Grand Canal. The one in the back shifted his weight and leaned into his oar;
the gondola turned and started across the canal. The old women, strangers,
grabbed at one another in fear and sat down on the low seat that ran across the
back of the boat.

'Can you take me to the end of Calle
Tiepolo?' Brunetti asked the man in front.

'You really police?' the gondoliere
asked.

'Yes,' he said, digging into his
pocket and showing them his warrant card.

'All right.' Saying this, he turned
to the women in the back and said, in Veneziano, 'We've got a detour, Signore.'

The old women were too frightened by
what was happening to say anything.

Brunetti stood, blind to the boats,
blind to the light, blind to anything but their slow passage across the canal.
Finally, after what seemed hours, they pulled up at the end of Calle Tiepolo,
and the two gondoliere held the boat steady while Brunetti climbed up to the
embankment. He shoved 10,000 lire into the hand of the man in front and turned
up the
calle,
running.

Brunetti had got his wind back in the
gondola and raced up the
calle
towards
home, then up the first three flights of stairs. He took the fourth and fifth
quickly, gasping, legs throbbing. He heard the door above him open, and he
looked up to see Paola at the door, holding it open for him.

'Paola,' he began.

Before he could say anything more,
she shouted down at him, 'I hope you'll be happy to see what your little
detective found out for you. I hope you'll be happy to see the world you're
taking her into with your questions and your investigations.’ Her face was
flushed and she was explosive with rage.

He let himself into the apartment and
shut the door behind him. Paola turned away from him and walked down the hall.
He called her name, but she ignored him and went into the kitchen, slamming the
door. He went down to Chiara's door and stood outside it. Silence. He listened
for sobs, for some sound that she was in there. Nothing. He went back up the
hall and knocked on the kitchen door. Paola opened it and glared at him,
stony-eyed.

Tell me about this’ he said. Tell me
what's going on.'

He had often seen Paola angry, but he
had never seen her like this, shaking with rage or with some deeper emotion.

Instinctively Brunetti kept his
distance from her, and keeping his voice calm, repeated, Tell me what's going
on.'

Paola gritted her teeth and sucked
air through them. The tendons in her neck were strained and stood out in her
flesh. He waited.

Her voice, when it came, was so tight
as to be almost inaudible. 'She came home this afternoon and said she had
something she wanted to watch on the VCR. I was busy in my study, so I told her
to go and watch it herself but keep the volume down.' Paola stopped speaking
for a moment and looked at him steadily. Brunetti said nothing.

She pulled more air in through her
teeth and continued. 'After about a quarter of an hour, she started to scream.
When I came out of the study, she was in the hall, hysterical. You heard her. I
tried to hold her, to talk to her, but she couldn't stop screaming. She's in
her room now.’

'What happened?'

'She brought home a tape, and she
watched it.' 'Where did she get the tape?' 'Guido,' she began, still breathing
heavily but more slowly now, ‘I'm sorry for what I said.’

‘It doesn't matter. Where did she get
the tape?' 'From Francesca.'

Trevisan?' ‘Yes.'

'Did you see it?' She nodded. 'What
is it?'

This time she shook her head from
side to side. Awkwardly; she raised an arm and pointed back towards the living
room.

'Is she all right?'

'Yes. She let me into her room a
couple of minutes ago. I gave her some aspirin and told her to lie down. She
wants to talk to you. But you have to look at the tape first.'

Brunetti nodded and turned towards
the living room, where the television and VCR were. 'Should you be with her, Paola?'

‘Yes,' Paola said and turned back down
the corridor towards Chiara's room.

In the living room, Brunetti found
the television and VCR both turned on, a tape in place, played out to the end.
He pushed the rewind button and straightened up, waiting and listening to the
snake-like hiss of tape from the machine. He thought of nothing, concentrated
on emptying his mind of all possibility.

The faint click brought him back. He
pushed the play button and moved away from the screen, seating himself on a
straight-backed chair. There were no credits, no introductory graphic, no
sound. The luminous grey disappeared, and the screen showed a room with two
windows high up on one wall, three chairs, and a table. The lighting came from
the windows and he thought, from some source of light that stood behind whoever
held the camera, for it was evident from the faint unsteadiness of the picture
that the camera was hand-held.

A noise came from the television, and
the camera panned over to reveal a door, which opened, allowing three young men
to push into the room, laughing and joking and shoving at one another. When
they were just inside the room, the last one turned and reached back through
the door. He pulled a woman into the room, and three other men crowded in
behind her.

The first three appeared to be in
their early teens, two others were perhaps Brunetti s age, and the last, the
one who followed the woman into the room, was perhaps in his thirties. All wore
shirts and pants that had a faintly military look, and all wore thick-soled
boots that laced up above the ankle.

The woman appeared to be in her late
thirties or early forties and was wearing a dark skirt and sweater. She wore no
make-up, and her hair hung loose and tangled, as though it had been pulled free
from a bun or a kerchief. Though the film was in colour, it was impossible to
tell the colour of her eyes save that they were dark, and terrified.

Brunetti could hear the men talking,
but he couldn't understand what they said. The three youngest ones laughed at
something one of the older ones said, but the woman turned to him and stared at
him after he spoke, as if unable, or unwilling, to believe what she had heard, with
unconscious modesty, she folded her hands across her chest and lowered her
head.

For a long moment, no one spoke and
no one moved, and men a voice called out, very close to the camera, but none of
the people in the screen had spoken. It took Brunetti a moment to realize that
it must have been the cameraman who spoke. From the tone, it must have been a
command or some sort of encouragement. When he spoke, the woman's head shot up
and she looked towards the camera, but not into the lens, a bit to the left, at
the person who held it. The voice near the camera spoke again, this time
louder, and this tune the men moved in response to it.

Two of the young ones came up on
either side of the woman and grabbed her by the arms. The one in his thirties
came up to her and said something. She shook her head from side to side, and he
punched her. He didn't slap her; he punched her just in front of the ear. And
then, quite calmly, he took a knife from his belt and slit her sweater open,
all down the front. She started to scream, and he hit her again, then pulled
the sweater free from her body, leaving her naked from the waist up. He ripped
a sleeve from the sweater and, when she opened her mouth to speak to him or to
scream, he shoved it into her mouth.

He spoke to the two men who held her,
and they lifted her up on to the table. He gestured to the two older ones. They
moved quickly around the table and grabbed her feet pinning her legs to the
table. The one with the knife used it again, this time to slash her skirt from the
hem to the waistband. He peeled it away from her, as if breaking open a new
book to the centre pages.

The cameraman spoke again, and the man
with the knife moved around to the other side of the table; his body had been
blocking the lens. He set the knife down on the edge of the table and unzipped
his pants. He wore no belt. He clambered up on to the table and lay on top of
the woman. The two men who held her legs had to back off a way so as not to be
kicked by him as he thrust into her. He lay on top of her for a few minutes,
then climbed down the other side of the table. One of the young ones went next,
and then the other two.