A Sea of Troubles

'Where's he living?'

'In one of the houses. Cousin of the owner or something.'

'Can we get in touch with him?'

'No. He didn't want to bring his telefonino; said he was afraid someone might call and leave a message that would compromise him.'

'We could have issued him one, then none of his friends would know the number,' Brunetti said with undisguised irritation.

'Didn't want that, either. Said you never know.'

'Never know what?' Brunetti demanded.

'He didn't say. But I imagine he thinks someone at the Questura might mention that he'd been issued a phone for use on some special assignment, or someone might make a call to it, or someone might be listening to all of our calls.'

'Isn't that a bit paranoid?' Brunetti asked, though he had himself, more than once, contemplated the third possibility.

'I think it's always safer to assume that everything you say is overheard.'

'That's no way to live,' Brunetti said hotly, believing this.

Vianello shrugged. 'So what shall we do?'

Brunetti remembered Rizzardi's comments about 'rough sex'. 'I'd like to find out who she was seeing.' He caught Vianello's glance and added, 'Signora Follini, that is.'

'I still think the best way is to ask Bonsuan to ask his friend. These people aren't going to tell us anything, at least not directly.'

'I had a woman tell me that Signora Follini was still tempting the local men to sin,' Brunetti said, disgust mingled with amusement.

'Presumably one of the ones who was tempted was either her husband or the man next door.'

'Two doors down.'

'Same thing.'

Brunetti decided to return to the boat to ask Bonsuan to speak to his friend. That proved unnecessary, as the pilot, whom they ran into upon leaving the bar, had been invited to the man's home for lunch, and then they had spent the rest of the afternoon sipping grappa and talking about their old days in the Army. After they'd relived the Albanian campaign and toasted the three Venetians who had not returned with them, their talk turned to their current lives. Bonsuan had been very careful to set the record straight about where his loyalties might lie, declaring his intention of retiring from the police as soon as he could.

As the three policemen walked slowly towards the boat, Bonsuan explained that it had proven relatively straightforward, and he had emerged, the bottle of grappa almost finished, with the name of Luisa Follini's lover.

'Vittorio Spadini’ he said, not without pride in his achievement. 'He's from Burano. A fisherman. Married, three children, the sons are fishermen and the daughter's married to one.'

'And?' Brunetti asked.

Perhaps as a result of the grappa or perhaps because of the recent talk of retiring, Bonsuan answered, 'And that's probably more than you and Vianello would get if you stayed here a week.' Surprised to hear himself speak like this, he added, 'Sir', but the time between the answer and the title had been prolonged.

Silence fell, broken only when Bonsuan added, 'But he's not fishing much any more. He lost his boat about two years ago.'

Brunetti thought of Signora Boscarini's husband and asked, 'In a storm?'

Bonsuan dismissed the idea with a quick shake of his head. 'No, worse. Taxes.' Before Brunetti could ask how taxes could be worse than a storm, Bonsuan explained. "The Guardia di Finanza hit him with a bill for three years' false declarations of what he earned. He tried to fight it for a year, but in the end he lost. You always do. They took his boat.'

Vianello broke in to ask, 'Why is that worse than a storm?'

'Insurance,' Bonsuan answered. 'Nothing can insure you against those bastards from the Finanza.'

'How much was it worth?' Brunetti asked, again made aware of just how little he knew about this world of boats and the men who went to sea in them.

'They wanted five hundred million. That was fines and what they calculated he owed them, but no one has that much cash, so he had to sell the boat.'

'My God, are they worth that much?' Brunetti asked.

Bonsuan gave him a puzzled glance. 'If they're as big as his was, they're worth much more; they can cost a billion.'

Vianello broke in. 'If they wanted five hundred million for three years, that probably means he cheated them out of twice that, three times.'

'Easily,' Bonsuan agreed, not without a hint of pride at the cleverness of the men who fished the laguna. 'Ezio told me Spadini thought he'd win. His lawyer told him to fight the case, but he probably did that just to make his own bill bigger. In the end, Spadini had no choice: they came and took it. If he had come up with enough cash to pay the fine, too many questions would have been asked,' he said, leaving the others to assume that the money was there, hidden in secret investments or accounts, like so much of the wealth of Italy. He glanced at Vianello and added, 'Someone told me that the judge was one of the Greens.'

Vianello shot him a glance but said nothing.

Bonsuan went on, 'That he had a grudge against all of the vongolari because of what they do to the laguna.'

At this, Vianello finally said, his voice dangerously tight, 'Danilo, cases like this, about taxes, don't come up before judges.' Before Bonsuan could answer, he added, 'Whether they belong to the Greens or not.' Then, turning to Brunetti but obviously aiming his remarks at Bonsuan, Vianello added, 'Next we're probably going to be told about the way the Greens take vipers up in helicopters and drop them in the mountains to repopulate the species.' Then to Bonsuan he said, his voice more aggressive than Brunetti could ever remember it, 'Come on, Danilo, aren't you going to tell us how friends of yours have found dead vipers in bottles up in the mountains or how they've seen people tossing them out of helicopters?'

Bonsuan looked at the sergeant but didn't bother to answer, his silence resonant with his conviction of the futility of attempting to reason with fanatics. Brunetti had, over the course of the years, heard many people speak of these mysterious, malevolent helicopters, piloted by mad ecologists bent on restoring some perverted idea of 'nature', but it had never occurred to him that anyone could actually believe in them.

They had reached, not just an impasse, but the boat. Bonsuan turned away from them and busied himself with the mooring ropes. Vianello, perhaps in an attempt to soften the effect of his remarks, went to the back and began to untie the second rope. Brunetti left them to it, busy with calculations of the surprising sums that had just been referred to. When Bonsuan had the rope coiled, Brunetti followed him aboard and called to him as the pilot went up the steps towards the wheel, 'You'd have to catch a lot of fish to afford a boat like that.'.

'Clams,' Bonsuan instantly corrected him. "That's where the money is. No one's going to take a shot at you over fish, but if they catch you digging up their clams and ruining their beds, then there's no telling what they'll do.'

'Is that what he did, ruin the beds?' Brunetti asked.

‘I told you it's what they all do,' Bonsuan answered. "They'll dig anywhere, and every year there are fewer clams. So the price goes up.' He looked from Brunetti to Vianello, who was standing on the dock, listening. With a brusque beckoning gesture, the pilot waved towards the sergeant and said, 'Come on, Lorenzo.' Vianello tossed his end of the rope around one of the stanchions on the side of the boat and jumped on board.

'But if he's lost his boat’ Brunetti said, pretending to ignore the successful conclusion of peace negotiations, and bringing the conversation back from the general to the particular, 'what does he do now?'

'Fidele said he's working for one of his sons, runs one of his boats for him’ Bonsuan said, pulling out dials on the panel in front of him. 'It's a much smaller boat, and there's only two of them on it.'