Transient Desires (Commissario Brunetti #30)(21)

Brunetti realized he had enjoyed dealing with the young lawyer, had taken pleasure sparring with him and seeing how good the younger man would some day be at it. He had appreciated his manners, even as the two of them took their first jabs at one another. The young man thought quickly, did not descend into sarcasm, was relentlessly polite.

They are so fragile, young people, Brunetti reflected, their self-assurance such a thin layer. They’d grown up more than a generation after Brunetti and his contemporaries, and many of them had had feathered nests to live in, constructed and padded by their successful parents, themselves the heirs of the people who created the great financial Boom of the Sixties.

Brunetti had gone to university with their parents. He still remembered the envy he had felt for some of them, with their jackets from Duca D’Aosta, the store long since disappeared from Frezzeria and moved out to Mestre, of all places. And their Fratelli Rossetti shoes, new with every changing season, and how he’d longed for a pair of tasselled brown loafers, which he’d wear without socks when he’d saved up enough money to buy them. And now he had a pair and didn’t much like them any more and wore them with socks.

He leaned forward in his chair and said, ‘Signor Duso?’

There was no response.

‘Signor Duso?’ Brunetti repeated in a normal voice.

Duso opened his eyes, saw his open hand, and snatched it back before sitting up. He pulled the sleeves of his jacket down and straightened his tie. ‘Sì, Commissario?’ he inquired, almost managing to keep his voice steady.

‘I wonder if we could continue?’ Brunetti asked. ‘You were telling us about Saturday night,’ he added, knowing this was not the case. But phrasing it this way might make it easier for Duso to continue with the story.

Duso put both hands on the table, fingers threaded together, and stared down at them. ‘Marcello and I went to Campo Santa Margherita to see if we could meet some girls.’

‘Marcello Vio?’ Brunetti asked.

Duso nodded and said, ‘Yes. We do it every couple of weeks, and Saturday was probably going to be the last time it would be warm enough for us to stay outside.’

‘Are you usually successful?’

‘Most of the time,’ he said, head still lowered and attention given to his hands. ‘Some of them were in class with me or are still studying, so I know them, or we meet girls that Marcello knows and then we go out; or we meet tourists; sometimes we go swimming.’

‘And the girls you met on Saturday night, were they girls you knew?’

He shook his head. ‘No. We started talking to them. I speak English; Marcello does, although only a little, but it didn’t matter to the girls.’

He paused and Brunetti wondered if this was the moment when Duso was going to begin building a case against the two young women and explain how they had insisted that they go out into the laguna at night, how romantic it would be; no, go faster, please go faster. And maybe the girls had suggested that they find a beach somewhere?

‘Why was that?’ Griffoni asked, perhaps because she didn’t want to listen to what she thought Brunetti was expecting.

‘Well, they’d just got here and they’d been walking around the city all day, and from the way they talked, I knew they were interested in the city, and then one of them said she’d love to see the canals at night.’ He thought about this and added, ‘It was after midnight by then.’

‘But you went out into the laguna, didn’t you?’ Griffoni asked.

‘That was after,’ he said simply.

‘After what?’ she asked.

‘We spent about an hour riding around in the city, but after that Marcello told me he was bored and hungry and wanted to go to that bar over at the Tolentini that’s open until two. I explained this to the girls, and they laughed and said they had lots of food with them.’

‘At one in the morning?’ Griffoni asked.

As if she hadn’t spoken, Duso went on. ‘We went out to the Punta della Dogana and sat on the steps.’ He relaxed a bit as he talked about this. ‘They had everything with them: salami, and ham and cheese, and two loaves of bread, and olives, and tomatoes. Enough food for all of us, and a bottle of wine.

‘I asked them why, and they said they were going to take it back to their room that night if they didn’t find a nice place in the city where they could eat.’ He looked across at Brunetti and said, ‘So we had a picnic.’

Duso’s smile broadened and he said, ‘When we were done, they made us collect everything: all the papers and scraps and napkins and bags. We had to collect it all in one of the plastic bags, and the one called JoJo put it under the seat at the back and told us we had to throw it in the garbage the next morning.’ He pulled his bottom lip into his mouth and closed his eyes. When he opened them, he said, ‘She made us promise.’

‘And then what did you do?’ Griffoni asked.

‘We went out . . . into the laguna.’

‘Where in the laguna?’ Brunetti asked, not that it made much difference.

‘We were heading towards Sant’Erasmo.’

‘That’s quite a distance,’ Brunetti remarked. ‘At night.’

‘I know, I know. That’s what I told Marcello, but he said we were already on the way, and he was going to swing around the island and go back that way.’ Duso shrugged, saying, ‘I don’t know why.