Transient Desires (Commissario Brunetti #30)(68)

Alaimo put it down on the table and pulled two letters, still in their envelopes, from a pile on his desk. He set them, long-side down, on either side of the model, then tilted them until the tops met above the boat. And there it was, a horizontal teepee.

Alaimo went on, pointing as he spoke. ‘This man told him that if radar came from the side, as from another ship, the rays would slide up the copper.’ He approached the side of the boat with an outstretched finger, then, a few centimetres before touching it, his finger went up and away from the panel and continued into the air beyond it.

‘See?’ he asked them, ‘the radar beams are deviated and keep going into the sky, showing nothing, so, it’s as if the boat weren’t there. If it’s dark, there’s no need for the patrol boat to give itself away by using a searchlight because the radar hasn’t detected anything in the water.’

He disassembled his radar shield and moved the model boat closer to the centre of the table.

‘Tell us more,’ Brunetti said.

‘If the mother boat stays outside the twelve-mile limit, in international waters, we can’t touch it. What we think happens is that the smaller boats – and they’d have these copper panels – go out to the bigger boat. A ship, really. And they pick up the women.’

He paused and then added, bitterly, ‘The cargo. There’s probably more than one boat going out to get them, and they can each make a few runs every night.’

He waited for questions, but none came.

‘Where do they take them?’ Brunetti asked.

‘We don’t know. We’ve gone out at night and found the big ships, but we don’t have the manpower to stay out there with them all the time, and they have every right to be there. Because we can’t board them, we don’t know what’s on them.’

‘What do you do?’

‘We come back to port and go home and go to bed.’

‘What could change that?’ Griffoni asked.

‘Ah,’ Alaimo let out on a prolonged sigh. ‘We need to know when and where the transfer will be made, and we need to know where they plan to land.’

‘And have people in place, waiting for them?’ Griffoni asked.

‘Se Dio vuole,’ Alaimo said.

Griffoni made a noise, half gasp and half laugh. ‘If God wills,’ she said. ‘Every woman in my family says that. About the olive harvest, about the time a train will arrive, about whether someone will get well, or a baby be born healthy.’ She thought about this for a moment and added, ‘And now, you say it about whether we’ll manage to arrest these men.’

‘That’s why I’m interested in him.’

‘Borgato?’ Brunetti asked.

‘No, Marcello Vio,’ Alaimo said and gave a smile that frightened Brunetti.’ ‘He’s the weak link.’





24


After hearing that, Brunetti spoke at length to Alaimo, with Griffoni attentive to what he said. It took time and some repeating to recount what Duso had told him about the upsetting night-time visit from his best friend. After that, to explain Vio’s tortured state, Brunetti repeated Captain Nieddu’s account of the African women who had been thrown from the boat and his conjecture that Vio had been aboard the boat that carried Blessing to shore.

Alaimo’s expression did not change as he listened to these stor--ies, although his face grew discernibly paler. As Brunetti continued, Alaimo shifted himself backwards in his chair, as if in response to his body’s instinct to distance itself from what was being said.

After finishing, Brunetti backtracked to provide the detail of the telefonino Nieddu said she gave to the woman.

‘Do you have any idea how many phones she might have given away?’

‘No. None,’ he said, but then he remembered how the telling of the story had shaken her, and he added, ‘Probably a lot.’

Silence fell again. Brunetti thought about what a strange -people we are: often judged to be superficial, emotional, and self-involved, sometimes untrustworthy, usually polite. And yet, in those horrid days, still recent in memory, doomed always to be there, how many doctors and nurses had died; how many others had, knowing this, returned from retirement to go into the hospitals and themselves be gathered up into the numbers of the uncountable dead? Nieddu’s gesture came of the same mysterious, irresistible urge to make things better for other people. For a relative, for a stranger: the urge to make things better was in our marrow. He lowered his head and rubbed at his face with both hands as if suddenly tired of all this talk, talk, talk.

Turning to Alaimo, Griffoni asked, as though eager to get back to what she thought important, ‘What use do you want to make of the weak link?’

The Captain gave her a grateful look. ‘If he’s back on the Giudecca, he’s probably gone back to work with his uncle.’

‘But he’s got a broken rib,’ Griffoni objected.

‘He’s from the Giudecca,’ Alaimo said in response.

‘Oh, stop it, Ignazio,’ she snapped. ‘All this crap about the Giudecchini being real men makes me sick. Every man a Rambo who can leap over buildings, when in reality the only men you see there are some old geezers playing Scopa in the bars and talking about how the government should be run, and all we need is a strong leader to tell the people what to do.’