Transient Desires (Commissario Brunetti #30)(73)

Brunetti ignored the tone and answered the question: ‘So I believe you’re a judge of Marcello’s . . .’ Brunetti sat back in his chair and folded his arms. He looked down towards the church of the Redentore, built in thanks for the ending of the plague, almost five hundred years ago. That wasn’t done any more, making a change in the city, pledging something new. They just went back to business.

‘Excuse me, Commissario,’ he heard Duso say. ‘Are you all right? Would you like a glass of water?’

He opened his eyes and looked at the young man. Why do people always ask if someone needs a glass of water? Maybe it’s because it’s what’s done in the movies.

‘No, thank you,’ Brunetti said. ‘It’s kind of you to ask. I was just thinking and I’m afraid I was distracted by my thoughts.’

‘About what?’ Duso inquired, his former resentment evaporated.

‘About the way people find it hard to change. Even when they know they should do something, or not do something, they do the wrong thing and make things worse.’

From Duso’s expression, Brunetti saw that his answer had surprised him.

‘You weren’t thinking about Marcello?’

Brunetti smiled. ‘Maybe I was.’

‘You think he has to change?’

‘Don’t you?’ Brunetti asked but then immediately went on. ‘Sorry, that’s not an answer to your question, and I shouldn’t have spoken like that. You’re not a child.’

‘Then what’s your answer?’

Brunetti put his fingers around the stem of his glass, but it was empty. ‘That he has to think about what he’s doing,’ Brunetti said. Then, to prove to Duso that he was speaking openly, he added, ‘What he’s doing with his uncle.’

‘I don’t know what that is,’ Duso said, loudly.

‘You don’t know the details: I believe that. But you know what it’s doing to him, so you know he shouldn’t be doing it. And you know it’s bad, probably very bad.’ He withheld himself from repeating what Vio had said about ‘killing’.

Duso opened his mouth to speak, but Brunetti didn’t stop. ‘You were with him in the boat when he started towards the hospital with the girls. Going slowly. Paralysed by fear of his uncle. You both knew he should have been speeding because they were both hurt, and you didn’t know how badly. What happens if the next time there’s something worse and someone dies, or gets killed?’

‘Why do you talk about a next time?’ Duso asked, sounding uncomfortable.

‘Because he’s working for his uncle again, and that can lead only to trouble.’

‘For Marcello?’

‘For Marcello, yes, but for other people, as well.’

‘What do you mean?’ Duso tried to ask forcefully, but he couldn’t carry it off and succeeded only in sounding nervous.

‘Berto,’ Brunetti began, using a different voice. ‘You told me what he said to you the night he came to your place. “We killed them. We killed them,” and you saw what doing that did to him.’

Speaking quickly, as if to get it all out as soon as he could, Duso said, ‘He’s never said anything else about it.’

Brunetti leaned forward in his chair to be closer to Duso but made no move to touch his arm. ‘Berto,’ he said again, ‘he doesn’t have to say anything else, does he?’

Duso put his locked hands between his knees and bent over them. He shook his head a few times but did not look at Brunetti.

‘They killed people, Berto. Marcello and whoever was with his uncle killed people that night. They were out at sea, on one of his uncle’s boats, and they killed people.’

‘Marcello said . . .‘ Duso began and stopped, unable to go on.

Brunetti waited, motionless.

Duso cleared his throat a few times and then continued, voice almost inaudible because his head was still lowered, ‘He told me that.’ He nodded in agreement with what he’d just said and kept on nodding a few times, like a wind-up toy until, eventually, just like a wind-up toy, he unwound and stopped moving.

‘Did he tell you about the women?’ Brunetti asked.

Duso froze, then shook his head. Brunetti suddenly noticed that the front of the boy’s shirt, light blue, thick Oxford cloth, appeared to be spotted, though not from the coffee, for all the liquid had done was make the blue a bit darker, as is the way with that colour, especially when it is Oxford cloth.

Brunetti allowed a long time to pass. He heard footsteps, probably the waiter returning. Without looking around, he held up his arm and waved whoever it was away. The footsteps retreated.

Some boats passed. A seagull got into a fight with another one over something a person on the dock tossed into the water.

Brunetti watched the young man, then turned away out of some archaic sense of decency about what one could and could not watch. He looked at the hotel that had once been a flour mill and pasta factory until – rumour had it – a disaffected employee had stabbed the owner to death. The crime was unrecorded in the police files, but this seemed not to stop people from telling and repeating, and believing, the story.

He’d been there once after the transformation into a hotel, hadn’t much liked the place, paid five Euros for a not particularly good coffee, and gone home.