Transient Desires (Commissario Brunetti #30)(31)

‘It might be that they’re simply transporting larger quantities,’ Vianello said, then, after a long pause, added in a milder tone, ‘All right. I’ll ask some people to have a look around.’

‘It could also mean that he’s going out into the Adriatic to get these larger quantities,’ Brunetti conceded.

‘Of?’ Vianello asked.

‘I’m afraid we have to ask the Guardia Costiera for help with this.’ A sudden smile flashed across Brunetti’s face as he recalled a friend who might be of some use to him in this matter.

Over the years, Brunetti had made many friends: some had remained friends over decades, some had moved through life with him for a time and then diverted on their separate ways, or, truth be told, he had ceased to find them interesting and had allowed attrition to do the work of separation for him. Among his friends were those Paola called, ‘Guido’s strays,’ men and women who, at first consideration, might seem out of place in the lives they had chosen or that they had stumbled into. They were not misfits, for most of them had found the place where they could fit and lived there comfortably and happily: but the world often strived unsuccessfully to understand why they were there.

Brunetti knew from experience how people could be trapped in the wrong place in life from having attended three years of Latin class with Giovanni Borioni, son of the Marchese of some place in Piemonte the name of which Brunetti could never remember. ‘Rocca Something’, Giovanni had called it to Brunetti some months after they met: this name had replaced the real one. Giovanni had lived in Venice with his mother; she legally separated from il Marchese, who remained in Torino. He had decided that a classical education would be best for his eldest son, and thus the liceo classico, and thus the Latin classes, for which Giovanni was perhaps not best suited.

Brunetti had tutored his friend Giovanni for three years, not only in Latin. After this, like il Marchese, Giovanni’s absent father, Brunetti had taken great pride in Giovanni’s graduation from liceo, had stood beside him and embraced him when his name was read out. It hardly mattered that, by the time of the happy event, Giovanni had lost all memory of ‘amo, amas, amat’. After graduation, Giovanni not only left behind his knowledge of Latin grammar but had renounced his father’s plans for him and had enrolled in the faculty of agriculture at the University of Modena. Today he was not only the Marchese but a farmer, having turned the family’s vast land holdings in Rocca Something into an experiment in biological farming. Brunetti’s children had spent weeks in the summer working for Giovanni, returning to Venice tanned and fit and even more respectful of Nature and its boundless worth than they had been before going there.

But this is to digress, for the importance of Brunetti’s friendship lay not with Giovanni himself but with his younger brother, Timoteo, a lawyer specializing in nautical law and thus a consultant to the Navy as well as to the Guardia Costiera, those forces charged with the defence of Italy’s sea borders and the waters surrounding the country.

Over the years, Brunetti had met Timoteo with some frequency; the lawyer had always been honestly curious about Brunetti’s work, insisting that his own was, ‘a boredom made of files, folders, and reports’. Brunetti, widely read in Venetian history, was equally curious about nautical law. Because it is but weak human nature to like the people who show interest in one’s work, these two men, who met rarely but communicated with some regularity, thought of the other as a good friend.

Thus it was automatic that Brunetti should call Timoteo and ask for an introduction to the person in charge of the Guardia Costiera in Venice, just as it was automatic that Capitano Ignazio Alaimo, the officer in charge of the Capitaneria di Porto, would accept a call from Commissario Guido Brunetti, after being asked to do so by his friend, Timoteo Borioni.

The mills of the gods grind exceeding slow: those of the Italian bureaucracy, however, are capable of great speed, depending upon the impulse to which they respond. In the case of a nautical lawyer who was the brother of a Marchese and himself the good friend of an admiral or two – one of whom was responsible for the added gold bar on the insignia of rank worn by Capitano Alaimo – to ask a favour of that same captain was – not to put too fine a point on it – to give an order. And thus the phone call of Commissario Guido Brunetti was passed to the Captain, who said the Commissario was certainly welcome to visit that very afternoon, if he chose. Tomorrow morning? Nothing easier. Eleven? Perfect.

Paola had once been asked by the department of Italian at Oxford, the university where she had taken her degree, to return as a guest lecturer, free to choose any English text she wanted, so long as parallels could be drawn to Italy. She had agonized over which of Henry James’ texts to use, until destiny had caused her to take Maria Edgeworth’s novel, Patronage, on vacation. Brunetti recalled lying on the beach in Sardinia, trying to read Livy, while Paola insisted upon reading out entire passages dealing with the advancement up the ladder of success made by idiots, villains, and the indolent because of the power and patronage of their parents’ friends.

At first Brunetti had feared the book would drive her into a crisis of moral and political denunciation, as vicious sons, idiot cousins, a panoply of breathtakingly incompetent men, were pushed forward by their relatives’ positions in the government, the connections of a wife’s family, or simple blackmail.

Instead, Paola had spent days reading, forced to pause only by the energy and time it took to exclaim, ‘Oh, it’s my Uncle Luca.’ ‘That’s just how Luigino got the job.’ Or, ‘He’s like the one who lost his job as ambassador because he had an affair with the wife of the Minister of Agriculture.’