Elettra began to shiver uncontrollably.
They stood on the beach and waited while the Carabinieri launch approached. It swept up in a tight curve, and the pilot killed the motor and drifted to a stop a few metres offshore. Three flak-jacketed officers at the bow held shotguns aimed at the people on the beach. When the man at the wheel recognized Vianello and called out to the others to lower their guns, they did so, though with a certain reluctance.
'Two of you come and help her,' Brunetti called out, ignoring the fact that even his rank gave him no authority over these men. 'Take her back to the hospital.' The three officers looked to their pilot for instruction. He nodded. There was no landing stage, so they would have to jump into the surf and wade ashore. While they hesitated, Signorina Elettra turned to Brunetti and said, ‘I can't go back without him.'
Before Brunetti could answer, Vianello turned to Elettra and picked her up bodily, one arm around her shoulder, the other under her knees. He walked into the water and waded out to the boat. Brunetti saw her start to protest, but her words, as well as Vianello's response, were cut off by the noise of his splashing. When Vianello reached the side of the boat, one of the Carabinieri knelt and reached over the side, taking Signorina Elettra from his arms.
He sat her upright and Brunetti saw Vianello reach into the boat and adjust the sweater over her shoulders, then the motor sprang into life again, and the boat started to move away. Vianello standing in the water and Brunetti on the beach both watched as it grew smaller, but Signorina Elettra did not turn back to them.
Vianello came back to the shore, and silently the two of them returned to Massimo and his prisoner. They found Vianello's friend sitting on the stone where Brunetti had waited earlier, his rifle lying across his knees. The bound man cried out when he saw them approach. 'Cut me loose!' He shouted it as an order. The men ignored him.
'Bonsuan's down there,' Brunetti said, indicating the doorway and the steps running down from it. It was harder to see down inside now that the light was abandoning the day.
'Massimo,' Vianello said, turning to his friend. 'Give me the flashlight.' From one of the many pockets of his hunting jacket, Massimo took a thin black flashlight and held it out to Vianello.
'Wait here,' Brunetti said to the man with the gun. They went down together, the light streaming out in front of them. As they descended the steps, Brunetti pleaded with something he didn't believe in to let them somehow find Bonsuan alive down there; wounded and stunned but alive. He had long ago abandoned his childhood habit of trying to cut a deal with whoever it was that might control these things, and so he merely asked for it to be true, offering nothing in return.
But Bonsuan, though certainly wounded, was not alive, and never again would he be stunned by anything. His last earthly shock had been the sudden explosion of pain in his chest as he turned back towards Brunetti from the steps, making his joke about still having a head and marvelling at the power of the storm.
Vianello flashed the light across his friend's face for just a moment, then let his hand fall to his side. The light illuminated his shoes, a filthy patch of ground, and Bonsuan's left shoulder, just enough to show the jagged point of wood that protruded so inappropriately from his chest.
After a minute, Vianello went back to the stairway, careful to keep the light from shining on Bonsuan's face again. Brunetti followed him. At the top, they saw that Vianello's friend hadn't moved, nor had the rifle, nor had the hog-tied man.
'Please,' the bound man pleaded, all threat, all menace gone from his voice. 'Please.'
Vianello took a knife from the back pocket of his jeans, flicked it open, and knelt down over him. Idly, Brunetti wondered if the sergeant were going to cut the man's bonds or his throat and couldn't find it in himself to care much, either way. He watched as the hand holding the knife disappeared, blocked from sight by Vianello's body. The man's body twitched, and his legs swung forward, cut free of his wrists.
He lay still for a moment, gasping with the pain it caused him to move. Motionless, he watched Vianello through narrowed eyes. The sergeant pushed the blade closed with the palm of his right hand and reached around to slip the knife back into his pocket. The bound man chose that instant to strike. He pulled his knees towards his chest, gasping at the pain it caused his stretched muscles to do it, and struck out at Vianello with his bound feet, striking him just at the hip and knocking him sprawling.
He pulled his feet back, cocking them in order to kick Vianello again, but Massimo got to his feet as the man was still in motion and walked over to him, holding the rifle upside down. The bound man sensed the presence looming over him and relaxed, stretching his feet out in front of him, away from Vianello, who was struggling to his feet. 'All right, all right. I stopped,' Spadini said and smiled. Massimo, quite casually, brought the rifle up into the air and plunged it down, smashing the butt into Spadini's nose. Brunetti could hear it break, a wet, crunching sound, like the sound of stepping on a cockroach or a water beetle.
Spadini howled and rolled away in circles to escape the man with the rifle, his hands trapped behind his back. Calmly, Massimo set the butt of the gun into a tuft of sandy grass at his feet. After he'd wiped it back and forth a half-dozen times, he inspected the butt, finding it clean enough. Ignoring the sobs of the man whose shattered nose continued to leak blood on to the sand below his head, Massimo went back to the stone by the wall and sat down again.
He glanced at Brunetti. "I used to go fishing with Bonsuan.'
No one said anything until a Carabinieri all-terrain vehicle arrived from Pellestrina and sped across the sand towards them, careless of the destruction it caused to the dunes or to the nesting birds who could not escape its wheels
27
The Carabinieri who emerged from the jeep showed little surprise at what they saw, and when Brunetti finally explained things to them, they seemed even less interested in his story. One of them went down the stairs to the bunker; when he came back, he was already talking on his telefonino, calling for an ambulance to come and pick up the body.
In the meantime, the other two had pushed Spadini into the jeep, not bothering to untie his hands and leaving him propped on the back seat like an unsteady package. Neither Brunetti nor Vianello was willing to leave Bonsuan's body unattended, so they refused the offer to accompany the others back to the Carabinieri post on the Lido. As they watched, one of the Carabinieri climbed into the back seat beside Spadini, then the other two got into the front and their jeep sped away.
Vianello's bulk no longer held out the promise of animal comfort to Brunetti, so he walked down to the edge of the water. Vianello let him go, choosing to stand to the left of the doorway leading down to the bunker. For a while, he watched the motionless Brunetti, himself watching the motionless city in the distance, visible again now that the storm had passed. Both of them were sodden and chilled but neither of them paid any particular attention to this until Massimo came back from his boat with a captain's jacket for Brunetti. He helped the Commissario remove his own jacket and held the other for him while he stuffed his arms into the sleeves. Brunetti's jacket remained on the ground. At the sound of a siren approaching from the north, Vianello turned his attention to that and abandoned his commander to his reflections.
Brunetti returned to the fort when he heard the ambulance pull up. Neither he nor Vianello went down the stairs to help the two attendants with the stretcher. When they emerged, their burden tilted awkwardly to enable them to manoeuvre it up the steps and through the narrow doorway, a blue cloth lay draped over it, its centre projecting like a narrow pyramid. The attendants went to the back of the ambulance and slid the stretcher through the doors. Before they closed them, Brunetti and Vianello climbed inside and pulled down the folding seats at either side. Silently, they rode back to Lido, and then back to Venice on a water ambulance with the equally silent Bonsuan.