Transient Desires (Commissario Brunetti #30)(23)

‘I see,’ Brunetti said.

When he looked over at Duso, the young man was wide-eyed, staring at the wall behind Brunetti’s head. He opened his mouth to speak, stopped, opened it again, and finally said, ‘I saw her face when I set her down.’





9


‘Where did you go after that?’ Griffoni broke the silence to ask.

Duso turned his head and glanced at her before looking down at the table in front of him. He said nothing.

Brunetti watched the young man’s face, saw his lips contract and relax and his eyes blink. He appeared distracted, his attention pulled away from the room where they sat.

Brunetti and Griffoni exchanged a glance but remained silent for some time, until Griffoni asked, ‘Could you tell us where you went next, Signor Duso?’

‘Oh, sorry,’ Duso said. ‘Could you repeat the question, Dottoressa?’

‘Where did you go then? After you put the young women on the dock of the hospital.’ She gave him a small encouraging nod but did not smile.

Duso blinked again a few times, as though he’d had to come back from reverie and needed a moment to clear his head. Finally he said, ‘Marcello started down towards the Arsenale, going fast. He kept saying he had to get the boat back.’ Hearing this, Brunetti wondered what damage the boat had suffered but did not think this the time to ask Duso.

The young man continued. ‘We put our sweaters back on. They were soaked, but they kept out the wind. I sat next to him: I still wanted to try to keep him warm. But I kept falling asleep.’

‘Where did you go?’

‘Towards the Arsenale, but then he turned in somewhere, and we went past the Church of the Greci and were in the Bacino, and then he really speeded up. The next thing I remember is pulling up in front of his uncle’s boathouse.’

‘On the Giudecca?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Yes.’

Brunetti didn’t ask any more about that; he could find out later where it was. ‘What did you do?’

‘Marcello said we had to moor the boat and cover it after we cleaned it,’ Duso explained, then added, ‘Marcello had stiffened up all over, so I had to clean it.’

Hearing the mounting irritation in his voice, there for the first time, Griffoni asked, ‘What time would it have been, Signor Duso, when he asked you to cover the boat?’

‘Around four, I guess,’ Duso said after a pause to consider.

‘Thank you,’ Brunetti answered, then asked, ‘Could you tell me what you did then?’

‘I went to Palanca and waited for the vaporetto, only I fell asleep in the embarcadero. The marinaio had to wake me up when the boat came.’

Brunetti imagined this was hardly the first time that a crew working the night shift had had to wake someone sleeping on the benches inside an embarcadero. He nodded and asked, ‘Did you go home?’

‘Yes. Of course,’ Duso said, then added, with a touch of self-pity, ‘There was nowhere else to go.’

‘And the next day?’ Griffoni asked.

‘I slept until noon and went down to Nico’s for a coffee and a brioche.’

Brunetti resisted the impulse to observe that this explanation managed to leave a good deal of the day unexplained. ‘And what else?’

‘I went home again and back to bed.’

‘Until?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Until about eight that night.’

‘What did you do then?’ Griffoni asked.

‘I went out into the kitchen and ate the leftovers my mother had sent back with me on Saturday.’

‘And then?’ she inquired.

‘I went back to bed.’

Knowing that the records of his phone calls could be easily found, Brunetti inquired, ‘Did you speak to Signor Vio?’

Duso’s face registered the sound of his friend’s name. ‘No.’

‘He didn’t call?’

Duso placed his hands palms up on the table and read the runes in them. The message must have told him that there was no danger in revealing the truth here. ‘He called three or four times, but I didn’t answer.’ He closed his eyes and sat silent.

Brunetti recalled a remark attributed to Stalin: ‘No man, no problem.’ Said like that, it sounded bleak and merciless, but daily life allowed for many substitutions: ‘no contact’, ‘no email’, ‘no phone call’. Fading memory, our ever-willing helper, would take care of all of the details, and the problem would dissolve.

‘Why is that, Signor Duso?’ Griffoni asked.

Duso opened his eyes and looked at her. ‘I didn’t want to know anything.’

‘Did you call the hospital?’ she asked.

He went silent on them again, but neither Griffoni nor Brunetti extended the possibility of a different question: they sat equally silent, determined to wait him out for an answer. Finally he said, ‘No, I didn’t.’

He stopped speaking, but, again, they waited him out.

‘On Monday, I went to work,’ Duso finally said. ‘Someone had the Gazzettino, and I read the story. All it said was that the girls had been left at the hospital in the night and were being treated there, and that one of them was being sent to Mestre for surgery.’

‘Was that enough for you?’ Griffoni asked blandly.