'What else?' asked Brunetti.
‘I spoke to two or three people, and all of them pretty much told me the same story. They woke up with the noise of the explosion of the gas tank at about three. By the time they got out to the pier, the boat was in flames, and before they could do anything, it had sunk.'
Vianello started walking back towards the line of low houses that was the village of Pellestrina, and Brunetti fell into step with him. "Then there was the usual nonsense,' Vianello began. 'No one bothered to call the Carabinieri, everybody thinking someone else had. So they weren't called until this morning.' Vianello stopped dead, looking at the houses, as if he couldn't believe that humans inhabited them. 'Incredible: two men get killed in an explosion, and no one calls us, no one calls anyone.'
He resumed walking. 'Anyway, the Carabinieri came out, then they called us and handed it over, said something about it being in our jurisdiction.' He waved ahead at the space between the boats. 'The divers brought them up.'
'You said the father had a wound on his head?'
'Yes. Terrible, the skull was crushed in.' 'What about the son?'
'Knife,' Vianello said. 'In the stomach. I'd say he bled to death.' Then, before Brunetti could ask, he added, 'It was like he was gutted. The knife went in low and was pulled up. His shirt was covering it when the body was brought up, but when we moved him, we saw it.' Vianello stopped walking again and looked over at the still waters of the laguna. 'He would have bled to death in minutes.' Remembering his place, he added, 'But the autopsy will decide that, I suppose.'
'Who have you spoken to?'
Vianello patted the pocket of his jacket where he kept his notebook. 'I've got their names in here: neighbours, mostly. A couple of men who have boats and who fished with them, well, who went out with them, because I don't get the impression that these men think of fishing as anything they're meant to share.'
'Did anyone tell you that?'
Vianello shook the idea away. 'No, no one said anything, at least not directly. But it was always there, this sense that they were forcing themselves to talk as though they felt some sense of loyalty or common bond because they were all fishermen, while at the same time I got the feeling they'd push anyone out of the way who tried to fish a spot where they wanted to or that they thought they had a right to.'
'Push out of the way?' Brunetti asked.
'Well, in a manner of speaking’ Vianello answered. ‘I don't know enough about the way things work out here, but that's the feeling I get: there's too many of them and too few fish left. And it's too late for most of them to learn to do anything else.'
Brunetti waited to see if Vianello had anything else to say, but when it seemed that he had finished, Brunetti said, "There used to be a restaurant off to the right here somewhere.'
Vianello nodded. ‘I had a coffee there earlier while I was talking to one of them.'
"There's no sense in my pretending I'm just a passing tourist, is there?' Brunetti asked.
Vianello smiled at the absurdity of it. 'Everyone in the village saw you get off that launch, sir. And walk back here with me. Damned by the company, if I might dare to say it'
'So we might as well go and have lunch together,' suggested Brunetti.
Vianello led the way back to the village. At the first row of houses he stopped in front of the large windows and wooden door of a restaurant. He pushed open the door and held it for Brunetti, then pulled it closed behind them.
A man in a long apron stood behind the zinc-covered bar, wiping at a squat glass with a cloth large enough to cover a small table. He nodded to Vianello then, an instant later, to Brunetti.
'Could we have lunch here?' the sergeant asked.
The man tilted his head towards a hallway that led away from the bar. He looked down at the glass again and returned to his careful work.
To the side of the bar was a doorway of a sort Brunetti had not seen in decades. Narrow, it was hung with a row of long strips of green and white plastic, each little more than a centimetre wide, ribbed on both sides. As he inserted his right hand to slip half of them aside, he heard the gentle clicking sound he recalled from his youth. Once these dividers had hung in the doorway of every bar and every trattoria, but during the last couple of decades, they'd all disappeared; he couldn't remember the last time he'd seen one. He held aside the still clattering strips until Vianello was through, then listened to them fall back into place.
The room they entered surprised him by its size, for it must have held thirty tables. The windows were set high in the walls, and plenty of light streamed in. Below them, fishermen's nets covered the walls, each embedded with shells, pieces of dried seaweed, and what looked like the petrified corpses of fish, crabs and lobsters. A low serving counter ran along one side of the room. In the back, a glass door, closed now, led to a pebble-covered parking lot.
Seeing that only one other table was occupied, Brunetti looked at his watch, surprised to find that it was only one thirty. There was some truth in the belief that exposure to sea air increases the appetite.
They walked across the room, pulled out chairs at a table halfway along the first row, and sat facing one another. A small vase of fresh wildflowers stood to the left of the bottles of olive oil and vinegar, and beside that was a wicker holder containing half a dozen paper-wrapped packs of grissini. Brunetti took one, ripped it open, and began to nibble at a breadstick.
The plastic strips parted and a young man in black jacket and trousers backed into the room. When he turned around, Brunetti saw that he had a plate of what appeared to be antipasto di pesce in each hand. The waiter nodded to the two newcomers and went to the table in the far corner, where he set the two plates down in front of a man and woman in their sixties.
The waiter came back towards their table. Brunetti and Vianello had realized that this was not the sort of place to bother with a menu, at least not this early in the season, so Brunetti smiled and said, as one always does in a new restaurant, 'Everyone says you can eat very well here.' He was careful to speak in Veneziano.
'I hope so,' the waiter said, smiling as he spoke and making no sign that he found the presence of a uniformed policeman in any way surprising.
'What can you recommend today?' Brunetti asked.
'The antipasto di mare is good. We've got cuttlefish milk or sardines if you'd like them, instead.'
'What else?' Vianello asked.
'There was still some asparagus in the market this morning, so there's a salad of asparagus and shrimp.'
Brunetti nodded at this; Vianello said he wouldn't have antipasto, so the waiter passed on to the primi piatti.
'Spaghetti alle vongole, spaghetti alle cozze, and penne all' Amatriciana,' he recited and then stopped.
'That's all?' Vianello couldn't help asking.
The waiter waved one hand in the air. 'We've got fifty people coming for a wedding anniversary tonight, so we've only got a few things on the menu today.'
Brunetti ordered the vongole and Vianello the all' Amatriciana.
The choice of main courses was limited to roast turkey or mixed fried fish. Vianello chose the first, Brunetti the second. They ordered a half-litre of white wine and a litre of mineral water. The waiter brought them a basket of bussolai, the thick oval breadsticks that Brunetti especially liked.
When he was gone, Brunetti picked one up, broke it in half, and took a bite. It always surprised him how they remained so crisp in this seaside climate. The waiter brought the wine and water, set them on the table, and hurried over to remove the plates from in front of the elderly couple.