Transient Desires (Commissario Brunetti #30)(80)

‘Cold. But the kids loved it and keep nagging me about when we can do it again.’

‘Kids,’ Brunetti said the word the same way parents sometimes spoke it: a combination of dismissal and adoration.

There was a sudden vibration as a message slid into Alaimo’s phone. He bent over it and then looked up and said, ‘The crew is there. They have to hide the cars and the van and then get to the place where we think they’ll land.’

‘Won’t there be . . . ?’ Brunetti started to ask.

‘People to meet them?’ Alaimo asked.

‘Yes.’

‘That’s why they’ll leave the vehicles. They’ll go downriver on foot.’

Only then did Brunetti think to ask, ‘Who are they?’

‘Commandos, from the Navy Special Forces. They’ve scouted the place, too. They’re used to high risk night-time operations.’

Brunetti considered these words while thinking about what they were all going to be doing. They sounded bad when the person who said them had some experience of their reality. ‘Risk for whom?’ He asked.

It took Alaimo a while to find an answer, but even that couldn’t take the menace out of it. ‘Everyone.’





28


Brunetti leaned against the padded back of the seat and pulled the jacket closer around him, still not zipping it up. He found the pulsing of the engine, both the sound of it and the easy bobbing of the boat, comforting. His thoughts turned to the dinner he had left and the woman he had left at the boat stop. Although he had not thought the call would come that evening, he had still drunk only two glasses of wine and had turned down the offer of grappa. He wished now that he had had a coffee, even two, before getting on this boat, only to be comforted and rocked by . . .

‘Guido, Guido,’ he heard someone call him, and he was immediately awake. And it was then that he remembered his gun. Safe in the metal box in their wardrobe, where he always kept it when it was in the house, the key equally safe on the key ring in his pocket. He looked to the right. The two sailors were still asleep, and the third was still engrossed in whatever he saw on his phone.

He looked at Alaimo, who was standing in the doorway. ‘There’s no question about it: they’re heading for Cortellazzo.’

‘How far are we from them?’ Brunetti asked.

‘About two kilometres,’ Alaimo said in a normal voice.

Brunetti had no trouble hearing him. There was no hum, although the boat seemed still to be nodding its way through the waves. ‘What’s wrong?’ he asked, nervous at the lack of noise.

‘It’s the electric motor,’ Alaimo said.

‘Oddio, what a difference.’

‘Borgato’s little more than a kilometre from the estuary.’

‘Do we follow him?’

‘We can. It depends on the squad.’ Alaimo held up his phone as though he wanted it to speak to Brunetti. ‘They’ve been in touch. They’ve found two empty vans parked close to the access road, and they can hear voices ahead of them.’

‘How big is your squad?’

‘Four, plus Claudia and Captain Nieddu.’

Immediately concerned by the mention of their names, Brunetti asked, ‘These Navy guys are good?’

‘These guys are good,’ Alaimo confirmed and disappeared up the stairs.

Brunetti ran his hands across his face and scratched at his head, then got up and left the cabin. A cold wind hit him in the face and made his eyes water. He moved to the side of the boat and looked behind them: the black was absolute, punctuated only by tiny specks of light so small it was impossible to calculate their distance. The light from the control panel was so dim that it cast only the faintest glow of the bodies of the two men standing in front of it, Alaimo and the pilot.

Brunetti moved over to put himself between but slightly back from them. On the right side of the panel in front of the other men, equally spaced white rings radiated out from the centre. A bar of light swept round from sharp north to declining west, passing over and flicking at the same white blip of light.

Alaimo leaned down and pointed to the white dot. ‘That’s Borgato’s boat,’ he said softly.

In the same barely audible voice, Alaimo asked the pilot, ‘What do you think, Crema?’

‘I’d say about ten minutes until he enters the river, sir, then another ten or so to get up to where he’s going.’

Alaimo nodded and pulled out his phone. He tapped in a message and kept his eyes on the screen until an answer slipped in. However soft the vibration, Brunetti still heard it, marvelling at the lack of any competing sound. Alaimo spent a moment pushing keys on his phone until he seemed satisfied. ‘Turn off the sound on your phone,’ he said, as though Brunetti were an enlisted man. Brunetti obeyed.

‘You too, Crema,’ Alaimo added.

‘It’s already off, sir,’ the pilot said softly.

‘I don’t want even the sound of a message coming in,’ Alaimo said. He put the phone in his pocket and asked the pilot, ‘You think you can follow them?’

‘If they’re going to offload at the place you showed me on the map, sir, I can. But if he goes any farther, one of the sailors will have to lie on the front and keep testing the depth with an oar.’

That was in some movie, Brunetti thought but kept it to himself. He moved a bit to the side and leaned forward to look across the prow of the boat. He thought about himself lying there, perhaps anchoring himself to some bit of protruding metal, testing the depth of the water, as he had done as a young boy, out in the laguna.