Transient Desires (Commissario Brunetti #30)(67)

‘Shall we talk about the immediate situation?’ Griffoni asked briskly.

Alaimo nodded, got up, went over to his desk, and came back with a few manila folders.

He sat down and handed one to each of them, opened his own. ‘These are all the same,’ he said as they opened theirs. ‘As you look through them, I’ll add prejudicial and unverifiable information to what’s written here.’

And that, for the next quarter of an hour, is exactly what he did. The first entries in Pietro Borgato’s file listed his arrests and convictions during the years before he disappeared from Venice. Alaimo remarked only that his pattern was fairly common to young men of a certain class on the Giudecca forty years before: jobs taken and lost, fights that put someone in the hospital, theft, drugs, a withdrawn accusation of rape.

And then he was gone, and the missing years remained missing.

The next two pages began with his return to Venice a decade ago and documented the creation and expansion of his transport business and his own growing wealth in the years after his return. Alaimo added, ‘We don’t know where he got the money he brought with him when he came back, but he used it to buy his apartment, the warehouse and dock, and two small boats.’ He turned a page. ‘As you can see, he opened the transport business immediately after he got back.’

‘And in those early years?’ Brunetti asked.

Alaimo looked up from the last sheet of paper, where Borgato’s assets were listed, and added, ‘We didn’t begin to pay close attention to him until recently, when he managed to buy two more boats, very large ones, and three more properties in the city. Where’d the money come from?’

As if Brunetti had not spoken, Alaimo said, ‘About six months ago, a friend of mine in the Guardia di Finanza called me about him, and when I asked why he wanted to know, he said they were preparing an investigation of his finances. His business was growing, but so were his expenses, and still he could buy more and bigger boats.’ Alaimo smiled. ‘My friend said they were curious about this.’

Alaimo lowered the papers to his lap and looked aside at Brunetti. ‘It took me a long time, days, to convince them not to approach him, but to leave him to us.’

‘Why was that?’ Griffoni asked.

‘Because we’d charge him with human trafficking, not tax evasion.’

So there it was, finally named, Brunetti thought: human trafficking. The merchandise originated, as it had centuries before, in the poorest parts of the world: Africa, Asia, South America – places on the borders of these continents. And the traffic still went back to the colonizers, to where the bodies would be put to use or work, doing what wealthier people could still afford to pay other people to do for them: grow and harvest their food, care for their old and their young, warm their beds and submit to their desires, produce their necessities and their treats.

Or, as in the past, he mused, they could simply be sold and thus become the de facto property of whoever was willing to pay the price and run the risk of possession. They could become household staff, field hands, sex toys, perhaps even organ donors, each step stripping off successive layers of humanity from both their persons and from the souls – if Brunetti could permit himself the use of this word – of their owners.

When Brunetti’s attention returned to Alaimo, the other man was saying, ‘Once I convinced them that they could charge him after we arrested him, we came to an agreement.’

‘But for how long?’ Griffoni asked.

Alaimo bowed his head, as though he were somehow responsible for the delay. ‘We needed enough evidence to persuade a magistrate to authorize us to go ahead, but we had to be careful about getting that information.’

And choosing the right magistrate, Brunetti thought but instead asked, ‘Not to alarm him?’

‘You’re Venetian, so you know how it is: you touch the web there,’ Alaimo said, pointing his finger at a spot in front of his left shoulder and then extending his arm off to the right and pointing to another equally invisible spot. ‘And it trembles here. Especially – if I might add – on the Giudecca.’

Brunetti nodded, then asked, ‘What have you learned?’

Alaimo said nothing for a long time, but neither Brunetti nor Griffoni broke the silence: they sat and waited for Alaimo to continue. Finally he did. He tossed the papers in his hand on to the table between them, made steeples of his fingers and tapped their tips together a few times, then said, ‘This is going to sound like science fiction.’

The two commissari remained silent, motionless.

Alaimo continued. ‘One of our men fishes a lot, and since he’s got relatives in Chioggia, he goes over there to do it. He’s told us for years that he’s found a place where two currents meet, both bringing lots of fish. But he won’t tell us where it is, whether it’s out in the sea or in the laguna. There are some Chioggiotti who know the place, he says, and over the years they’ve become friends. Or at least they share the place, and no one tells anyone else about it.’

Brunetti began to wonder where this tale would lead and when it would end: sailors’ stories had a habit of following currents and not straight lines. And it certainly didn’t sound like any science fiction he’d ever heard.

‘Anyway, one of the guys who fishes there is a boat-maker,’ Alaimo continued. ‘He was talking one day about a way he’s invented to let boats escape being seen by radar: it was something about long copper panels that can be raised above a boat to cover it: like a teepee, but horizontal.’ Seeing their confusion, he went to the bookshelf behind his desk and brought back a toy model of a boat, obviously handmade, and lovingly.