Transient Desires (Commissario Brunetti #30)(44)
The nurse looked at Brunetti, a man closer to her in age and experience, and said, ‘They never listen.’
Brunetti smiled at her and said, ‘Brava, Signora.’
Vio leaned back against the bed and asked the nurse, ‘Can I keep it on?’
‘Yes. Wear it to sleep in tonight and wear it to the X-rays tomorrow morning. And then wear it all day for the first few days you’re home.’
‘Does this mean I’ll be able to go home sooner?’ Vio asked.
‘Of course you’ll get home soon,’ she said, smiling.
‘Good,’ Vio said. ‘I have to get back to work.’
The nurse reached over and touched his arm, saying, ‘Don’t rush things, Marcello.’ She waited until he was back under the covers again, then said goodbye to both of them.
‘Does it hurt less?’ Brunetti asked.
Vio tilted his head to one side and gave a minimal nod: he was a real man and pain didn’t matter to real men. ‘Yes, and I’ll try to be careful,’ he said. When he saw a look of real concern on Brunetti’s face, he added, ‘It’s not bad at all. I broke my foot once, and that was bad.’
‘Yes, feet are awful,’ Brunetti answered, thinking that Vio needed a bit of sympathy. Even if it was for a previous injury, it might help. He thrust around for a topic they might have in common. ‘I guess you’re lucky to have steady work to go back to.’
Vio’s face went blank. ‘Why?’ he asked, then added, ‘I don’t understand.’
‘My friends are always telling me their kids can’t find work, no matter what they do.’
Vio’s surprise was painted on his face. ‘I didn’t know that,’ he finally said.
‘Some of them have been out of school for years and haven’t even managed to get an interview.’
‘That’s too bad,’ Vio said with real sympathy. ‘A man needs to work.’
‘I think so, too,’ Brunetti answered, happy to speak to Vio with no ulterior motive. He decided not to suggest that a woman needed work, as well, and asked, instead, ‘Your friends are luckier?’
‘There’s always work if you’re willing to take it,’ Vio began. ‘The boats need men to fix them or load them, and you see the guys delivering freight all over the city: carrying it from the boats, stacking it up outside the supermarkets. There’s lots of jobs doing restoration, but Bosnians and Albanians have taken over the heavy work. If you know someone who has a company, or maybe someone in your family does, you can still get a job, even if it’s just hauling rubble to the boats or bringing the cement to the construction site.’ Vio rested his head against his pillow and closed his eyes. ‘And places like Ratti, and Caputo, they always need men to deliver the stoves and washing machines and connect them.’ He shifted in the bed and looked as though he were going to name more jobs available to young men not locked in chains by their university degrees and incapable of even so much as imagining that these jobs existed. But before he could continue, his eyes closed and his breath began its even, long rasp as he sank into sleep.
Brunetti watched Vio, thinking how much he looked like a large boy, face washed smooth by sleep and the relative absence of pain. Brunetti felt a sudden chill rise up from his past and remind him that, without the secure widow’s pension his mother had begun to receive when he was still a teenager, he would surely have thought himself lucky to find one of those jobs or to be recommended for one by some old friend of his father. Just last week, he’d read that Veritas had advertised three jobs as garbage men and had received almost two thousand applications, most of them from university graduates.
The country of Dante, Michelangelo, Leonardo, Galileo and Columbus, and two thousand men competed for jobs as garbage men. ‘O tempora, o mores,’ he whispered under his breath and left the room silently.
Outside the hospital, Brunetti called Vianello to see what his friends on the Giudecca might have said about Pietro Borgato. As it turned out, not much. From what Vianello had managed to discover without giving any sign he was trying to learn anything, Borgato was considered a hard man and an equally hard worker. His ex-wife, who was from a small town in Campania, still lived there with one of their two daughters. The other lived with her husband in Venice. His nephew worked for him, but there was general agreement that Marcello would not take over the business, for no better reason than that his uncle judged him incapable of running it. No one Vianello had spoken to dissented from this judgement. There was a general belief that Marcello was a good boy, alas, in a world where good boys were not suited to running a business like his uncle’s, or like his uncle ran his business. When it was clear that this was all Vianello had to report, Brunetti thanked him and ended the call.
The officer at the reception window of the Questura saluted when he saw Brunetti but left his hand in the air, extended to stop him. ‘There’s someone waiting to talk to you, Commissario. He’s Venetian, so I told him to wait over there.’ He pointed to the other side of the large entrance hall.
Brunetti turned in time to see Filiberto Duso getting to his feet from one of the four chairs that stood in front of a faded photo of a previous Questore no one in the Questura had ever bothered to look at carefully.
The young man took a few steps towards Brunetti, stopped, then moved towards him again.