Both men remained silent for some time. Vio kept his head bent and shifted his phone from side to side on his lap. Brunetti tried to sort through the tangle of his own thoughts and feelings. He had no idea of what judges – should it ever come to a trial – would decide. How measure, how prove, a person’s intent? Only actions mattered, and surely they had taken them to the hospital with the clear purpose of getting them medical help.
‘Had you been drinking?’ Brunetti asked.
Vio’s surprise could not be masked. ‘No, Signore. I don’t drink if I’m going to be in the boat.’
‘Unlike most of your colleagues,’ Brunetti said neutrally.
Vio actually smiled, as though he’d not thought of this.
‘Drugs?’ Brunetti asked in the same dispassionate tone.
‘I don’t like them.’
As if talking to a friend about some trivial matter, Brunetti asked, ‘Did you ever try them?’
‘Once. When I was about fourteen. I don’t know what it was, but it made me sick, really sick. So I never did it again.’
‘Were you in charge of the boat when the accident happened?’
‘Of course,’ Vio answered, unable to hide his surprise at such a question. He must have read Brunetti’s expression, for he said, ‘Aside from two other men who work for my uncle, I’m the only one who can pilot that boat.’ Vio could have been reciting the Pythagorean Theorem, although Brunetti doubted he was familiar with it.
‘I see,’ Brunetti responded. And then, curious, he asked, ‘Doesn’t Duso know how?’
‘Yes, sir. I taught him, so he’s good.’
‘But not good enough for your uncle’s boat?’
Vio was a long time in answering the question. ‘It’s against the rules. He doesn’t have a licence, so he can’t drive anything over 40 horsepower.’ After a moment’s reflections, Vio added, ‘Besides, he could never handle that boat.’
If Brunetti were to say the same thing to Vianello, he realized, or indeed to any of the men who were familiar with boats, proposing that someone would not be allowed to drive a boat bigger than permitted by his licence, they would fall about laughing. A licence was a suggestion, not a limitation; it was a kind of non-restrictive formality, and some people piloted any boat they chose to, regardless of the power of its engine. Not the really big transport boats, Brunetti admitted to himself, but certainly the smaller ones.
‘At the Questura,’ Brunetti began, ‘you said your licence was good for all of your uncle’s boats.
Vio’s face still registered pride in his own capacities when he continued, ‘Yes. My uncle made me get them all: he said he didn’t want any trouble with the water police.’ He paused, as if uncertain whether to say what he was thinking, and then added, ‘I got them all with no trouble. First try.’ Vio’s smiled broadened as he said this, it made him look younger.
‘Good for you,’ Brunetti congratulated him. ‘How long have you worked for your uncle?’
‘Oh, I started when I was a kid. Just loading and unloading the boats.’
‘How old were you?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Fifteen. He wouldn’t take me until then.’
‘Because of school?’
Vio laughed at this, then gasped in a low breath as though the act had hurt him. ‘Oh, no. To work as an apprentice, I had to be at least fifteen. He didn’t care about the school.’ Vio’s mouth fell open after he said that. ‘I shouldn’t tell you something like that, should I?’
This time it was Brunetti who laughed. ‘I was helping my father unload boats when I was fifteen, so don’t think about it.’
‘He paid me,’ Vio said earnestly, as though this private honesty would make up for taking his nephew out of school.
Brunetti laughed again, even longer this time. ‘That’s more than my father’s boss did for me.’
‘Where did you work?’ Vio asked, his curiosity real.
‘Anywhere. Everywhere. My father got hired by the day, or maybe by the week. Usually at Marghera, but sometimes at Rialto. I guess I went along to make up for what he couldn’t do.’
‘I don’t understand,’ Vio said.
‘My father’s lungs were no good, so he really couldn’t do a day’s work, but he had a good reputation: everyone knew he wouldn’t steal anything. So the boat owners called him, and he brought me along to make sure a full day’s work got done.’ Vio seemed fascinated by what Brunetti was telling him, perhaps surprised that a policeman could also be a real person.
‘I guess my father was a bit like your uncle,’ Brunetti said, smiling.
Vio looked puzzled. After a long time and with something approaching melancholy in his voice, he said, ‘Oh, no, not at all.’ A few seconds passed and Vio raised his hand, as if to cover his mouth or push back what he’d said.
Before Brunetti could ask anything else, they were interrupted by the arrival of a nurse, who entered after knocking only once. She was old enough to be Vio’s mother, heavy-bodied and round-faced. She nodded towards Brunetti but did not speak to him.
‘I’ve brought it, Marcello, I had to look for the right size for you.’ Smiling, she held up what looked like a bulletproof vest, dark brown and apparently stiff. ‘Wear this during the day, and I guarantee you can go back to work.’ She smiled again, obviously proud of having found the vest for him. She opened it as she approached the motionless Vio and said, ‘Here it is. Why don’t you try it on and see if it helps?’ She turned to Brunetti to explain: ‘It’s stiff, Signore, so it’ll hold him straight and keep his ribs away from his lungs.’ Turning back to Vio, she held the vest up higher and shook it, as if some surprise were going to jump out.
Vio made no move to do what she said and barely glanced at the vest.
‘Come on, Marcello; try it on. I’m sure the fit is perfect: I had to keep asking to see different ones in the rehab, and I’d almost given up when they found this one.’ She waved it again, smiling at Vio encouragingly.
The young man sat up straighter and slid his legs to the side of the bed. Gingerly, he lowered one foot to the floor, then the other until finally, hands braced on the bed behind him, he stood upright.
‘Turn around and put out your right arm.’ Vio obeyed, and she slipped the vest over it. Lured by the momentum of getting dressed, he turned slightly and slipped his other arm into the vest, then turned back to show her the result. Seeing this, Brunetti found himself thinking of a similar scene, the arming of Achilles with a ‘breastplate brighter than the flame of fire’.
The nurse stepped around Vio and checked the fit at the back. ‘As I said: perfect.’ She helped Vio seal the Velcro tabs that ran up the front of the vest and could be adjusted to the body of the wearer.
She made a sudden move and pulled a handkerchief from her pocket, waving it in the air.
‘Try to take this from me,’ she said.
Brunetti winced when he saw how low she suddenly held it and what that would require Vio to do, but the young man bent obediently forward and down. As he reached out, she bent with him and lowered the handkerchief even more. Vio continued towards it and grabbed it from her hand, laughing. He held it above his head and then passed it back to her, saying, ‘It’s magic, this thing. Nothing hurts.’
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.
‘Ah, Signor Duso,’ Brunetti said. ‘Is there some way I can help you?’ He continued towards Duso with an extended hand.
Duso gave a weak smile, let go of Brunetti’s hand, cleared his throat a few times, and finally said, ‘I’d like to speak to you, Commissario.’ He looked at Brunetti, then around the room, and said, ‘I have to.’
‘Of course. What about?’
‘Marcello,’ he said, speaking in a hoarse voice, almost as if the name frightened him.
Responding to the urgent tone, Brunetti said, ‘What’s wrong?’
‘He’s afraid someone’s going to hurt him.’