Donna Leon - Blood from a stone

‘I think it would be better to ask around,’ he answered. ‘Try the people at the Gazzettino and La Nuova . They might know something. They always do a story every time we do a round-up and arrest some of them. They’ve got to know something.’

His attention wandered and he found himself wondering how Elettra endured wearing the turban. The office was warm, one of those offices on the side of the building where the radiators worked, so surely it must have become uncomfortable to wear it tight to her head all day long. But he said nothing, thinking that perhaps Paola would be able to explain.

‘I’ll see what I can find out,’ she said. ‘Are there fingerprints I could send to Lyon?’

‘I haven’t got the autopsy report yet,’ Brunetti said. ‘I’ll send the photos to you as soon as I get them.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ she said. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

On his way back to his own office, Brunetti was already running through the list of friends who might be able to help him with information. By the time he reached his desk, he had accepted the fact that there was no one he knew who could supply him with reliable information about the ambulanti , which led him to suspect that Signorina Elettra was right and they did indeed live on different planets.

He called down to the office of Rubini, the inspector in charge of the Sisyphean labour of arresting the ambulanti , and asked him to come up for a moment.

‘About last night?’ Rubini asked over the phone.

‘Yes. You hear anything?’

‘No,’ Rubini answered. ‘But I didn’t expect to.’ There was a pause, and then he asked, ‘Should I bring my files?’

‘Please.’

‘I hope you’ve got a long time, Guido.’

‘Why?’

‘There must be two metres of them.’

‘Then should I come down there?’

‘No, I’ll just bring the summaries of the ones I’ve submitted. It will still take you the rest of the morning to read them.’ Brunetti thought he heard Rubini laugh quietly but wasn’t sure. He replaced the phone.

When Rubini showed up more than ten minutes later, a stack of files in his hands, he explained that the delay was caused by his having searched for the file containing all of the photos that had been taken of the Africans who had been arrested in the last year. ‘We’re supposed to photograph them every time we arrest them,’ he explained.

‘Supposed to?’ Brunetti asked.

Rubini set a large stack of papers on Brunetti’s desk and sat down. From Murano, Rubini had been on the force for more than two decades and, like Vianello, had moved up through the ranks slowly, perhaps blocked by the same refusal to curry favour with the men in power. Tall and so thin as to seem emaciated, Rubini was in fact a passionate rower and every year was among the first ten to cross the finish line of the Vogalonga.

‘We did at the beginning, but after a while it seemed a waste of time to take the photo of a man we’d arrested six or seven times and who we say hello to on the street.’ He pushed the papers closer to Brunetti and added, ‘We call them tu by now, and they address us all by name.’

Brunetti pulled the papers towards him. ‘Why do you still bother?’

‘What, to arrest them?’

Brunetti nodded.

‘Dottor Patta wants arrests, so we go and arrest them. It makes the statistics look good.’

Brunetti had suspected this would be the answer, but he asked, ‘You think it really does any good?’

‘God knows,’ Rubini said with a resigned shake of his head. ‘It keeps the Vice-Questore off our backs for a week or two, and I suppose if we were to be serious about it, arrest them and take all their bags, they’d simply decide to go somewhere else.’

‘But?’ Brunetti asked.

Rubini crossed his legs, pulled out a cigarette and lit it without bothering to ask if he could. ‘But my men always leave them a couple of bags when they confiscate them, even though they’re supposed to take them all. After all, they’ve got to eat, these guys, whether they’re African or Italian. If we take all of their bags, they’ve got nothing to sell.’

Brunetti shoved the top of a Nutella jar towards the inspector. ‘And the bags?’ he asked.

Rubini took an enormous pull at his cigarette and let the smoke filter slowly from his nose. ‘You mean the ones we leave them or the ones we take?’

‘There’s the warehouse in Mestre, isn’t there?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Two of them by now.’ Rubini leaned forward and flicked ash into the proffered ashtray. ‘It’s all in there,’ he went on, using the hand with the cigarette to point to the files. ‘So far this year we’ve confiscated something like ten thousand bags. No matter how fast we chop them up or burn them, we keep confiscating more. Soon there won’t be enough room to store them.’

‘What’ll you do?’

Rubini crushed the cigarette and said, making no attempt to disguise his exasperation, ‘If it were my decision, I’d give them back to the vu cumprà so they wouldn’t have to pay to buy new ones all over again. But then what happens to all those people who work in the factories in Puglia where they make them?’ Abruptly he got to his feet, pointed at the files and said, ‘If there’s anything else you want to know, give me a call.’ At the door, he paused and looked back at Brunetti, and raised a hand in an expression of utter hopelessness. ‘It’s all crazy, the whole thing,’ he said, and left.

Brunetti had not read the Iliad — his laboured high school translations could hardly be considered a reading of the text — until his third year at university; the experience had been a strange one. Though he had never read the original, it was so much a part of his world and his culture that he knew even before he read it what each book would bring. He experienced no surprise at the perfidy of Paris and the compliance of Helen, knew that bold Priam was doomed and that no bravery on the part of noble Hector could save Troy from ruin.

Rubini’s files produced much the same sense of literary déjà vu . As he read through the summary of the police’s response to the arrival of the vu cumprà in Italy, he was conscious of how familiar he was with so many elements of the plot. He knew that the original street pedlars had been Moroccans and Algerians who sold illegally the handicraft articles they brought into Italy with them. Indeed, he could remember seeing their merchandise, years before: hand-carved wooden animals, glass trading beads, ornamental knives and glitzy fake scimitars. Though the report did not explain it, he assumed that their original name had been given to this wave of French-speaking itinerant salesmen in imitation of their attempts to catch the attention of their new customers with some linguistically bastardized invitation to buy.

As the Arabs were supplanted by Africans from further south, the frequency of crimes lessened: though immigration violations and selling without a licence remained, petty theft and crimes of violence virtually disappeared from the arrest records of the men who had inherited the name of vu cumprà.

The Arabs, he knew, had passed on to more lucrative employment, many of them migrating north to countries with no choice but to accept the residence permits so easily granted by an accommodating Italian bureaucracy. The Senegalesi , with no apparent propensity to crime, had originally been viewed sympathetically by many of the residents of the city, and as Gravini’s story suggested, they had earned the regard, however gruffly stated, of at least some of the officers on the street. In the last years, however, the increasing insistence with which they confronted passers-by and their apparently ever expanding numbers had worn away much of the Venetians’ original good will.

He searched, but searched in vain, for any arrests during the last few years for crimes other than violations of visa regulations or selling without a licence. There had been one rape, six years ago, but the attacker turned out to be a Moroccan, not a Senegalese. In the only arrest involving violence, a Senegalese had chased an Albanian pickpocket halfway up Lista di Spagna before bringing him to the ground with a running tackle. The African had sat on the pickpocket’s back until the police responded to the call one of his friends made on his telefonino and arrived to make the arrest. A handwritten note in the margin explained that the Albanian had turned out to be only sixteen, and so, although he had been repeatedly arrested for the same crime, he had been released the same day after being given the usual letter ordering him to leave the country within forty-eight hours.

The last file contained a speculative report on numbers: there had been days during the previous summer when an estimated three to five hundred ambulanti had lined the streets; repeated police round-ups had caused a temporary attrition, but the number was now estimated to have crept back to close to two hundred.

When he finished the report, Brunetti glanced at his watch and reached for the phone. From memory, he dialled the number of Marco Erizzo, who answered on the second ring. ‘What now, Guido?’ he asked with a laugh.

‘I hate those phones,’ Brunetti said. ‘I can’t sneak up on anyone any more.’

‘Very James Bond, I know,’ Erizzo admitted, ‘but it lets me do a lot of filtering.’

‘But you didn’t filter me,’ Brunetti said, ‘even though you knew I’d be likely to ask a favour.’ Brunetti made no attempt at small talk about Marco’s family, nor did he expect such questions: long friendship would already have alerted Marco that Brunetti’s voice was not the one he used for a social call.

‘I’m always interested in knowing what the forces of order are up to,’ Erizzo said with mock solemnity. ‘In case I can be of service to them in any way, of course.’

‘I’m not the Finanza, Marco,’ Brunetti said.

‘No jokes about them, Guido, please,’ Erizzo said in a decidedly cooler tone. ‘And try to remember never to use their name when you’re talking to me, especially if you call me on the telefonino .’

Unwilling to address himself to Marco’s unshakeable conviction that all phone calls, to make no mention of emails and faxes, were recorded, especially by the Finance Police, Brunetti instead asked, ‘It’s not as if you ever use any other telephone, is it?’

‘Not one I answer. Tell me what it is, Guido.’

‘The vu cumprà ,’ he said.

Marco wasted no time by asking the obvious question of whether this were related to last night’s killing and said instead, ‘Never been anything like it here in the city, has there, at least not since they shot that carabiniere in, when was it, 1978?’

‘Something like that,’ Brunetti agreed, aware of how long ago those awful years seemed now. ‘You know anything about them?’

‘That they take nine and a half per cent of my business away from me,’ Erizzo said with sudden heat.

‘Why so exact?’

‘I’ve calculated what I sold in bags before their arrival and after, and the difference is nine and a half per cent.’ He cut off the last syllable with his teeth.

‘Why don’t you do something about it?’

Erizzo laughed again, a sound utterly lacking in humour. ‘What do you suggest, Guido? A letter of complaint to your superiors, asking them to concern themselves with the welfare of their citizens? Next you’ll be asking me to send a postcard to the Vatican to ask them to concern themselves with my spiritual welfare.’ Bitter resignation had joined anger in Erizzo’s voice. ‘You people,’ Erizzo went on, presumably referring to the police, ‘you can’t do anything except shake them up for a day or so and let them out again. You don’t even bother to slap their wrists any more, do you?’ He paused, but Brunetti refused to venture a response into that silence.