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 stories, 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.’
Alaimo smiled at her and nodded. ‘But the old geezers don’t live in fear, and I’m afraid Borgato’s nephew does: and I think many of his neighbours, as well.’
‘What else have you heard?’ Brunetti asked.
From the speed with which Alaimo answered, it was evident that he had been waiting for the question. ‘Borgato’s boats go out at night – not his transport boats, but the passenger boats – those two Mira 37’s he’s got, with the big engines. Stripped down, they could run rings around his transport boats and carry tons of contraband.’ Then, more soberly, he added, ‘Tons of anything.’
He looked at Griffoni and said, ‘You keep telling me not to talk about the Giudecca, but everyone knows everyone there. And people know his boats are going out, but if we were foolish enough to ask about it, they’d tell us they don’t know anything. The best they might say is that he’s probably going fishing.’ His voice was tight with disgust he proved incapable of disguising.
‘No one would mention the two motors with at least 250 horsepower: I can’t even calculate how many more times stronger that is than a motor on a boat that transports mineral water or boxes of detergent to the supermarkets. He could move . . .’ he went on, growing more outraged as he spoke, ‘ . . . this building, for God’s sake, if someone put it on a big enough raft.’
He looked directly at Brunetti, aiming the next remark at him. ‘And he’s managed over the years to persuade every one of his neighbours to sell him their docking places along the riva where he has his warehouse.’
‘That’s impossible,’ Brunetti shot back before he thought about it. ‘No one ever sells their docking place. They’ve been in families for generations.’
Alaimo held up his empty hands, as though he were trying to show his ignorance of this reality. ‘It took him three years to persuade them all.’
‘How many were there?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Six.’
‘That’s impossible,’ Brunetti repeated.
This time Alaimo smiled as he continued. ‘That’s what every Venetian I’ve told about it says. It’s impossible. But still it’s true.’
‘Didn’t anyone complain?’
‘If they did, they probably would have complained to you, not to us. We deal with problems at sea; you’re supposed to take care of problems on land.’
‘So he’s got the whole canal?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Almost.’
‘Who held out?’
‘No one,’ Alaimo said. ‘There’s another space, but it’s part of a contested estate.’
‘On the Giudecca?’ Griffoni asked, then put her hand over her mouth, looked at Brunetti, and said, ‘Excuse me, Guido.’ She paused; Brunetti saw her scuttle around for a way to explain her casual assumption that no one on the Giudecca could have an estate worth enough to contest. In the end, she didn’t bother, and he decided to act as though he found that a reasonable opinion for her to have and let it pass.
‘All right,’ Brunetti said. ‘We agree he’s a bad guy and,’ he paused for a moment before inserting the next word, ‘probably mixed up in human trafficking.’ He folded his hands together and stuck them between his knees, leaned forward and continued, ‘But we don’t have anything tangible: no evidence, no credible witnesses, no one who can give us specific information about where he does it.’ He sat up and pulled his hands apart.
‘The money?’ Griffoni surprised them both by asking.
‘What?’ Alaimo asked.
‘He must sell these women.’ Her voice was harsh, brittle. ‘Girls. Who buys them, and how do they pay him? And if it’s not cash, how does he explain its arrival?’
‘It could go to another country,’ Alaimo suggested.
She nodded. ‘Fair enough. But it’s no use to him there.’ She considered her own words for a moment and then said, ‘It doesn’t matter where it goes, does it?’ Before either of them could speak, she went on. ‘He can’t put it in the bank. He can’t buy more boats or property because, if he continues to spend more than he earns, sooner or later the Guardia di Finanza will see the red flags and take a closer look at him.’
‘Then what does he do with it?’ Alaimo asked.
Griffoni held her hands up protectively in front of herself and said, ‘I have no idea.’ Then, with a smile, added, ‘What to do with too much money is not a problem I anticipate having, so I’ve never given it much thought.’
‘Why don’t we?’ Brunetti asked.
‘What?’ Alaimo asked.
‘Give it some thought,’ Brunetti answered.
‘I think we can be sure he’s not spending it to take care of widows and orphans,’ Griffoni said coldly.
‘He’s divorced,’ Alaimo added. ‘And he doesn’t seem to have a companion.’
‘Of which sex?’ Griffoni asked.
Brunetti turned to her suddenly. ‘That’s a strange thing to say.’
‘I suppose it is,’ she conceded, ‘but he sounds like a very strange man.’
‘Why?’ Alaimo asked.
‘Because he’s a homophobe, for one thing,’ she said, turning to Brunetti. ‘You told me what Duso said.’ Then she added, ‘Imagine what he thinks of Duso’s friendship with his nephew.’
‘He could just as easily be spending it on drugs,’ Alaimo interrupted, but they could hear that he didn’t really believe this.
Brunetti’s memory flashed back to something Paola had read to him early in their marriage, decades ago. He no longer remembered why she was reading the book: had she been teaching the American novel that year? She’d read him a scene in which a man secretly watched a woman lying on a bed in the building opposite. She had a secret hoard of gold coins, and as he watched, she pulled the coins close to and on to her naked body. With a start, he remembered the erotic rush he’d felt as Paola, golden-haired and lying on the sofa, read him the scene.
‘Would you accept women as a reason?’ Alaimo turned to Brunetti and asked, as though he believed their united male vote would settle the matter. Brunetti failed to speak; Alaimo shrugged.
‘Maybe it’s money,’ Brunetti said, surprising them.
‘What?’ Alaimo asked, as if reluctant to abandon a sexual motive for Borgato’s actions.
‘Just that. Greed. Money. Maybe he simply wants it, more and more of it.’ Brunetti considered the idea as though one of the others had offered it. ‘There are people like that. I’ve known one or two. It’s the motive for everything they do.’
As if speaking from far away or through a bad connection, Griffoni asked lazily, ‘Does it matter?’ When neither of the men answered, she said, ‘Really?’ Still neither man spoke, so she said, ‘It doesn’t matter why he does this; it matters only that he does it, and our main concern is that he can be caught while doing it.’
She looked back and forth between them, waiting for one of them to say something, and when they did not, she spoke into their radiating silence, ‘Which brings us back to the weak link.’
Somehow, Griffoni had become the master of the hunt: the two men pulled their chairs closer to the table and they began to plan just how to bring Pietro Borgato down.