Transient Desires (Commissario Brunetti #30)(38)

Silence settled on the room and remained in control until Brunetti asked, ‘Do you know where he went when he left the city?’

‘No,’ Griffoni answered. ‘I haven’t looked for any change of residence, but if he wanted to rent a place to live, he’d have to do that.’

‘If he worked, there’d be records,’ Brunetti said. ‘He’d pay taxes.’ Then, before she could point it out, he added, ‘Unless he worked in black.’

Griffoni suggested, ‘If he worked anywhere, it would probably be on a boat: fishing, transport.’

‘So that means Trieste,’ Brunetti continued, running his mind along the coastline of Italy, ‘or Ancona, Bari, Brindisi, the ports in Sicily, Naples, Civitavecchia, and Genova.’

‘I’ll check for residence first,’ Griffoni said. ‘That’ll be easier than trying to find where he might have worked.’ She started to speak, paused, then said, ‘Guido, I’m not sure I understand why we’re going to all of this trouble about him.’

‘Borgato?’

‘Yes.

‘I’m not sure I understand it myself,’ Brunetti confessed. ‘But the whole thing puzzles me, and I suppose that means it interests me.’

Again, she paused, and again she went ahead. ‘You sound like you’re tired of watching crime shows on television and want to change the channel so you can look at a different series, with bigger thrills.’

‘For the love of God, don’t wish that on me,’ Brunetti said, laughing. She looked up at him directly then – eager, smiling – the familiar Claudia, back at work. ‘When Borgato returned to Venice,’ Brunetti continued, speaking normally again, ‘he had enough money to buy a warehouse and two boats, so he must have earned it wherever he was during those years. So check his finances: bank records, loans, anything.’

Griffoni slid the manila cover towards her, pulled a pen from Brunetti’s side of the desk, and wrote down a few things, paused a moment, and added something else. Suddenly she got to her feet, leaving the papers and keeping the folder in her hand. ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ she said and left.

Because Paola was meeting with colleagues for dinner, the family was on its own, cast off by the mother to go out and hunt and gather for themselves. The children had cadged an invitation from their grandparents, and Brunetti had resigned himself to making himself a pasta with the sauce Paola had left in the refrigerator for him. He was prepared to grate the parmigiano fresh.

No one was there when he arrived, and he went immediately to Paola’s study, which over the years had come to serve as his reading room. Paola had sent him a message that afternoon to tell him the new translation of Tacitus had arrived and was on her desk, as indeed it proved to be. He grabbed it up and had a quick look at the blurbs on the back cover, all enthusiastic. Book still in his hands, he kicked off his shoes, lay down on the sofa, and started to read.

Brunetti had always preferred to read while horizontal. His habit was probably the result of the poverty of his family: a child who loved reading and who was raised in a house that was heated minimally, if at all, during the winter would perforce develop the habit of reading in bed. Even now, in a far grander house – and a far warmer one – he still concentrated better on books that were propped on his chest.

He ignored the introduction as well as the notes from the translator and decided to open the book at random to get a taste of what awaited him. Thus he found himself reading the story of Sejanus, chief of the Praetorian Guard, the man the Emperor Tiberius referred to as ‘the partner of my labours,’ little realizing that his partner was busy – as many subsequent historians asserted – with the labour of clearing his own way to the throne of the Caesars, first by murdering Tiberius’ only son while keeping in his sights his two grandsons.

A phrase caught Brunetti’s attention, and he went back and read it again, and then again. ‘I give only one example of the falsity of gossip and hearsay, and I urge my readers to beware of incredible tales, however widely they might be believed and instead to believe the unvarnished truth.’

Brunetti let the open book fall on to his stomach and stared out the window at rooftops and windows that reflected the setting sun. Two thousand years ago, the bulk of the population illiterate, most news was transmitted by word of mouth, and Tacitus was warning his readers to be careful about believing what they heard and to trust only unvarnished truth. ‘Whatever that is,’ a voice whispered to Brunetti’s inner ear. Had Tacitus been a prophet as well as an historian, Brunetti wondered, by so well anticipating the consequences of television and social media?

Brunetti returned to the world of two thousand years before and read on. Unfortunately, the following few years were missing from the original text, although Sejanus must certainly have continued to plot and perfect his flattery of Tiberius. When the text resumed after that gap, Sejanus had fallen, and his memory, and family, were in the process of being destroyed.

But why, Brunetti wondered, should he believe the story as Tacitus tells it? Did his sources tell him the truth? Did they even know the truth? Almost a century had passed between these events and the time Tacitus wrote of them. Much could have been lost from the common memory, or distorted, or deliberately obscured.

Brunetti’s thoughts moved to the newspapers he read and those others that were available at the news-stands. Each day, they reported the news and made their readers aware of the events the editors judged to be of political, economic, medical or social importance. And how different those explanations were, how conflicting their interpretations. Only the sports pages were reliable: the scores given could be checked and authenticated, as could the rankings in the various leagues. But wait a minute. If the news gave the sum written on a player’s contract, it did not report accurately how much the player would actually receive. Endorsements, interviews, marketing, even his appearance at a dinner or a party, the cars he was given, the shoes, the clothing: how to calculate this? Where was the ‘unvarnished truth’?