'We come out to Pellestrina and you don't eat fish,' Brunetti said, making it a statement rather than a question, though it was.
Vianello poured them each a glass of wine, picked up his, and sipped at it. 'Very good,' he said. 'It's like what my uncle used to bring back from Istria on his boat.'
'And the fish?' Brunetti asked, not letting it go.
'I don't eat it any more,' Vianello said. 'Not unless I know it comes from the Atlantic'
Lunacy had many forms, Brunetti knew, and most of them had to be detected in the early stages. 'Why?' he asked.
‘I joined Greenpeace, you know, sir,' Vianello said by way of answer.
'And Greenpeace doesn't let you eat fish?' he asked, trying to make a joke of it.
Vianello started to say something, stopped, took another sip of wine, and said, 'That's not true, sir.'
Neither of them spoke for a long time, and then the waiter was back, bringing Brunetti his antipasto, a small mound of tiny pink shrimp on a bed of slivered raw asparagus. Brunetti took a forkfuclass="underline" they'd been sprinkled with balsamic vinegar. The combination of sweet, sour, sweet, salty was wonderful. Ignoring Vianello for a moment, he ate the salad slowly, relishing it, perpetually delighted by the contrast of flavours and textures.
He set his fork on the plate and took a sip of wine. 'Are you afraid to ruin my meal by telling me what polluting horrors lie in wait for me inside the shrimp?' he asked, smiling.
'Clams are worse,' said Vianello, smiling back but with no further attempt at clarification.
Before Brunetti could ask for a list of the deadly poisons that lurked in his shrimp and clams, the waiter took his plate away, then was quickly back with the two dishes of pasta.
The rest of the meal passed amiably as they talked idly of people they'd known who had fished in the waters around Pellestrina and of a famous footballer from Chioggia whom neither of them had ever seen play. When their main courses came, Vianello could not help giving Brunetti's a suspicious glance, though he had forgone the opportunity to comment further upon the clams. Brunetti, for his part, gave silent proof of the high regard in which he held his sergeant by not repeating to him the contents of an article he had read the previous month about the methods used in commercial turkey farming, nor did he list the transmissible diseases to which those birds are prone.
5
After they'd drunk their coffee, Brunetti asked for the bill. The waiter paused, as if from a habit too strong for him to control, and Brunetti added, ‘I don't need a receipt.' The waiter's eyes grew wide as he registered this new reality: a man who must be a policeman, willing to aid the owner of the restaurant in avoiding the tax that was imposed whenever a receipt was issued. Brunetti could see this created a dilemma, which the waiter solved by saying, 'I'll ask the boss.'
He came back a few minutes later, carrying a small glass of grappa in each hand. Placing them on the table he said, 'Fifty-two thousand.' Brunetti reached for his wallet. It was a third of what it would have cost in Venice, and the fish had been fresh, the shrimp perfect.
He took sixty thousand lire from his wallet and when the waiter reached into his pocket for change, Brunetti waved his gesture aside with a muttered, 'Grazie.' He raised his grappa and took a sip. 'Very good,' he said. 'Please thank the owner for us.'
The waiter nodded, took the money, and turned to go.
'Are you from here?' Brunetti asked, with no attempt to make it seem an idle question.
'Yes.'
'We're out here because of the accident,' Brunetti said, indicating the general direction of the water. Then, with a smile he added, 'Though I don't imagine that's much of a surprise.'
'Not to anyone here, it's not,' the waiter said.
'Did you know them?' Brunetti asked. He pulled out another chair, motioning to the waiter to sit. The couple at the other table were long gone, the tables all set for the anniversary party, so there was little for him to do. He sat, then turned his chair slightly to face Brunetti.
‘I knew Marco’ he said, 'We went to the same school. He was a couple of years behind me, but we knew one another because we used to come back on the same bus from the Lido.'
'What was he like?' Brunetti asked.
'Bright,' the waiter said seriously. 'Very bright and very nice. Nothing like his father, nothing at all. Giulio never talked to anyone if he could help it, but Marco was friendly with everyone. He used to help me with my maths homework, even though he was younger.' The waiter placed the notes that were still in his hand on the table, lining the fifty up beside the ten. 'About the only thing I could ever do was add these up.' Then, with a sudden smile that revealed chalky, gray teeth, he said, 'And most of the time, if I added them, I'd get fifty. Or seventy.' He slipped the bills into his pocket and glanced back at the kitchen, from which came the sudden hiss of frying food and the clang of a pot on the stove. 'But I don't need to know maths here, beyond addition, and the boss does that.'
'Was he still in school, Marco?' 'No, he finished last year.' 'And then what?'
'Went to work with his father,' the waiter said, as though that were the only choice open to Marco or the only choice a Pellestrinotto could ever conceive of. 'They've always been fishermen, the Bottins.'
'Did Marco want to fish?'
The waiter looked at Brunetti, his surprise evident. 'What else could he do? His father had the boat, and Marco knew all about fishing.'
'Of course,' Brunetti agreed. 'You said Bottin never talked to anyone. Was there more to it than that?' Brunetti refused to allow the waiter to play dumb: he clarified his question: 'Did he have many enemies here?'
The waiter shrugged, his reluctance visible in his gesture, but before he could say anything, Vianello broke in, speaking to Brunetti with practised audacity: 'Sir, he can't answer a question like that.' The sergeant glanced protectively at the waiter. 'This is a small place; everyone's going to know he talked to us.'
Picking up the cue, Brunetti answered, 'But you said you've already got the names of a couple of people.' He sensed the waiter's interest increase, saw it in the way he pulled his feet under the chair and fought to keep himself from leaning forward. 'All he'd be doing is confirming what you've already been told.'
Vianello ignored the waiter, keeping his eyes on Brunetti. 'If he doesn't want to talk, he doesn't want to talk, sir. We've already got names.'
'Which ones?' the waiter broke in.
Vianello slid his eyes across to the waiter and gave him a minimal shake of the head, a gesture he tried to hide from Brunetti.
'What names?' the waiter asked in a stronger voice. When neither of the policemen answered him, he demanded, 'Mine?'
'You've never told us your name’ Brunetti said.
'Lorenzo Scarpa,' he said. Vianello's eyes opened and he turned to look at the waiter in badly disguised shock.
When he saw Vianello's reaction, the waiter said in a tight voice, 'It was nothing. Giulio was in here one night, at the bar, and he'd been drinking. My brother never said anything to him. Bottin just wanted to get into a fight, so he invented it, said that Sandro made him spill his wine.' He looked back and forth between the knowing faces of the two policemen. ‘I tell you, nothing happened, and nothing ever got reported. People stopped them before anything happened. I was in the back, working. I didn't get out here until it was all over, but no one was hurt.'
'I'm sure that's true,' Vianello said with a smile he did his best to make appear amiable. 'But that's not what's been suggested might have happened.'