About Face

15
The shipbuilding works and the petrochemical and other factories littering the landscape of Marghera had exercised a fascination over Brunetti’s imagination ever since he was a boy. For a period of about two years, from when he was six until a bit after his eighth birthday, his father had worked as a warehouseman for a factory producing paint and solvents. Brunetti recalled it as one of the quietest and happiest times of his childhood, with his father steadily employed and proud to maintain his family with what he earned.
But then had come the strikes, after which his father had not been taken back. Things changed then and peace fled from their home, but for some years his father kept in contact with some of his fellow workers from the factory. Brunetti could still remember these men and their stories of work and each other, their rough good humour, their jokes, and their endless patience with his volatile father. Cancer had taken them all, as it had, over the years, taken so many of the people who worked in the other factories that sprang up on the edge of the laguna, with its welcoming and oh-so-unprotected waters.
Brunetti had not been to the industrial area for years, though the plumes from its smokestacks formed an eternal backdrop for anyone arriving in the city by boat, and the highest plumes of smoke could sometimes be seen from Brunetti’s terrace. He was always struck by their whiteness, especially at night, when the smoke swirled so beautifully against the velvet sky. It looked so very harmless, so pure, and never failed to make Brunetti think of snow, first communion dresses, brides. Bones.
Over the years, all efforts to shut down the factories had met with failure, often with the violent protests of the men whose lives might have been saved, or at least prolonged, by their closure. If a man cannot provide for his family, is he any longer a man? Brunetti’s father had thought not; Brunetti could understand only now why he thought that way.
As they climbed into the car waiting for them at Piazzale Roma, Brunetti began to explain to Griffoni his phone call from Guarino and the call that was taking them out to Marghera. They crossed the causeway in a series of manoeuvres that made sense only to the driver, then doubled back towards the factories; by the time they pulled up at the main gates, Brunetti had filled her in on almost everything.
A uniformed man stepped out of a small guardhouse to the left of the gate and raised a hand to wave them through, as if familiar with the sight of police cars. Brunetti had the driver stop and ask where the others were. The guard pointed off to his left, told him to go straight ahead, over three bridges, then turn to the right after a red building. From there, they would see the other cars.
Their driver followed the directions, and as they turned at the red building, which stood isolated at a crossroads, they did indeed see a number of vehicles, including an ambulance with flashing lights; beyond the vehicles was a group of people facing the other way. The paving on the road ahead of them was broken and uneven; beyond the parked vehicles Brunetti saw four enormous metal oil-storage tanks, two on each side of the road. Their walls were gnawed through in places by rust; a square had been cut out near the top of one of them and the metal peeled back, creating a window or door. The land around them was desolate and littered with papers and plastic bags. Nothing grew.
The driver pulled up not far from the ambulance; Brunetti and Griffoni got out. Those heads that had not turned at the sound of the engine turned when the doors slammed shut.
Brunetti recognized one of them as a Carabiniere he had worked with some years before, though he had been a lieutenant then. Rubini? Rosato? Finally it came – Ribasso, and then he realized that his must have been the voice he had failed to recognize on the phone.
Beside Ribasso stood another man in the same uniform and two men and a woman whose white paper suits defined them as the crime squad. Two attendants stood beside the ambulance, a rolled-up stretcher propped beside them. Both were smoking. All of them had by now turned to watch Brunetti and Griffoni approach.
Ribasso stepped forward and extended his hand to Brunetti, saying, ‘I thought it was you on the phone, but I wasn’t sure.’ He smiled but said nothing further about the call.
‘Maybe I’m watching too many programmes about tough cops on television,’ Brunetti, who was not, said by way of explanation or apology. Ribasso patted him on the shoulder and turned to say hello to Griffoni, addressing her by name. The others took their cue from Ribasso’s manner and nodded at the newcomers, then shifted around and opened up a space large enough for Brunetti and Griffoni to join them.
About three metres away, the body of a man lay on his back at the centre of a space marked off by red and white plastic tape attached to a series of thin metal poles. Without the photo he had already seen, Brunetti might not have recognized Guarino from this distance. Part of his jaw was missing, and what remained of his face was turned away. His coat was dark, so no blood could be seen on it or on the lapels of his jacket. His shirt, however, was a different matter.
Small patches of mud had dried on the knees of his trousers and the right shoulder of his coat, and some strands of what looked like plastic fibre were stuck to the sole of his right shoe. Footsteps had churned up whorls in the frosty mud around the body, cancelling one another out.
‘He’s on his back,’ was the first thing Brunetti said.
‘Exactly,’ Ribasso answered.
‘So where was he moved from?’ Brunetti asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Ribasso said, then, failing to disguise his anger, ‘The idiots were all over the place before they called us.’
‘Which idiots?’ Griffoni asked.
‘The ones who found him,’ Ribasso said, giving in to his anger. ‘Two men in a truck who were making a delivery of copper tubing. They got lost, turned into the road up there,’ he said, waving back the way Brunetti and Griffoni had come. ‘They were about to turn around, but they saw him on the ground and came down to have a look.’
Brunetti could read some of what must have followed from the mass of footprints in the mud around the body and the two breast-like impressions left when one of them knelt beside the dead man.
‘Is it possible they turned him over?’ Griffoni asked, though it sounded as if she hardly believed it.
‘They said they didn’t,’ was the best answer Ribasso could give. ‘And it doesn’t look as though they did, though they certainly walked around enough to destroy any evidence.’
‘Did they touch him?’ Brunetti asked.
‘They said they couldn’t remember.’ Ribasso’s disgust was audible. ‘But when they called, they said there was a dead Carabiniere, so they must have taken out his wallet.’
In the face of this, nothing could be said.
‘Did you know him?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Yes,’ Ribasso said. ‘In fact, I’m the one who told him to go and talk to you.’
‘About that man he wanted to find?’
‘Yes.’ Then, after a pause, ‘I thought you’d help him.’
‘I tried to.’ Brunetti turned away from the dead man.
The woman, who seemed to be in charge of the scene of crime team, called to Ribasso, who went over and had a word with her. He then signalled to the attendants and told them they could take the body to the morgue at the hospital.
The two men tossed their cigarettes to the ground, adding them to the ones lying there. As Brunetti watched, they took the stretcher over to the dead man and lifted him on to it. Everyone stepped aside to allow them to carry him to the ambulance, where they slid the stretcher into the back. The sound of the slamming doors broke the spell that had rendered them all silent.
Ribasso stepped aside and spoke to the other Carabiniere, who went over to the car, propped himself up against the side, and pulled out a packet of cigarettes. The three technicians stripped off their paper suits, rolled them up and put them in a plastic bag, which they tossed into the back of their van. They collapsed their tripod and stashed the cameras in a padded metal case. There was a great slamming of doors and sound of engines, and then the ambulance drove off, followed by the technicians.
Into the expanding silence, Brunetti asked, ‘Why did you call Patta?’
Ribasso’s answer was preceded by an exasperated grunt. ‘I’ve dealt with him before.’ He looked back at the place where Guarino had been, then at Brunetti. ‘It was best to do it officially from the beginning. Besides, I knew he’d pass it on, maybe to someone we could work with.’
Brunetti nodded. ‘What did Guarino tell you?’
‘That you’d try to identify the man in the photo.’
‘Is this your case, too?’
‘More or less,’ Ribasso said.
‘Pietro,’ Brunetti said, taking advantage of the familiarity that had been formed between them the last time. ‘Guarino – may he rest in peace – tried that with me.’ ‘And you threatened to throw him out of your office,’ Ribasso said. ‘He told me.’
‘So don’t start,’ said a relentless Brunetti.
Griffoni’s head turned back and forth as the two men spoke. ‘All right,’ Ribasso said. ‘I said more or less because he talked with me as a friend about it.’
This seemed all Ribasso was prepared to say, so Brunetti prodded him by asking, ‘You said he was working for Nas?’ So that explained Guarino’s interest in the transport of garbage: Nas handled everything that had to do with pollution or the destruction of the physical heritage of the country. Brunetti had long considered the location of their office in Marghera, source of generations of pollution, an ironic, not an accidental, choice.
Ribasso nodded. ‘Filippo studied biochemistry: I think he joined that branch because he wanted to do something useful. Maybe important. They were glad to get him.’
‘How long ago was that?’
‘Eight, nine years. Maybe. I’ve known him only for the last five or six.’ Then, before Brunetti could ask, Ribasso added, ‘We never worked on a case together.’
‘Not this one?’ Griffoni asked.
Ribasso shifted his weight from one foot to another. ‘I told you, he would talk to me.’
‘What else did he tell you?’ Brunetti asked. Quickly, Griffoni broke in to add, ‘It can’t make any difference to him now.’
Ribasso took a few steps towards his car. He turned back to face them. ‘He told me the whole thing stank of Camorra. The man who got killed – Ranzato – he was only one of the people mixed up in it. Filippo was trying to find out how all this stuff got moved around.’
‘How much are we talking about?’ Griffoni broke in to ask. ‘Tons?’
‘Hundreds of tons, I’d say,’ Brunetti added.
‘Hundreds of thousands of tons is closer to the truth,’ Ribasso said, silencing them both.
Brunetti attempted to do the numbers, but he had no idea what weight a truck could carry and so could not do even the most basic calculation. His mind flashed to his children, for it was they and their children who would inherit the contents of those trucks.
Ribasso, as if chastened by his own words, prodded at the frosted mud with the tip of his boot, then looked at them and said, ‘Someone tried to drive him off the road a week ago.’
‘He didn’t tell me that,’ Brunetti said. ‘What happened?’
‘He avoided them. They pulled up level with him – this was out on the autostrada coming down from Treviso – and when they started to move towards him, he slammed on his brakes and pulled over and stopped. They kept going.’
‘Did you believe him?’
Ribasso shrugged and turned back to the place where Guarino’s body had been. ‘Someone got him.’
Brunetti and Griffoni rode back to Piazzale Roma in relative silence, both of them burdened by the sight of death and chilled by their long exposure to the cold and waste of Marghera. Griffoni asked Brunetti why he had failed to tell Ribasso he had identified the man in the photo Guarino had sent him, and Brunetti explained that the Captain, who must surely have known about it, had not considered it necessary to tell him anything. No stranger to the rivalry that existed between the different branches of the forces of order, she said no more.
Brunetti had called ahead, and there was a launch waiting to take them to the Questura. But even inside the warm cabin of the boat, and with the heater turned on high, they did not grow warm.
Inside his office, he stood by the radiator, reluctant to call Avisani and justifying the delay until he felt warm again. Finally he went to his desk, found the number, and dialled it.
‘It’s me,’ he said, striving to sound natural.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘The worst,’ Brunetti said, immediately embarrassed by the melodrama.
‘Filippo?’ Avisani asked.
‘I’m just back from seeing his body,’ Brunetti said. No questions came. Into the silence, he said, ‘He was shot. They found him this morning at the petrochemical complex in Marghera.’
After a long pause, Avisani said, ‘He always said it was a possibility. But I didn’t believe him. I mean, who could? But . . . it’s different. When it happens. Like this.’
‘Did he tell you anything else?’
‘I’m a journalist, remember,’ came the immediate reply, just short of anger.
‘I thought you were his friend.’
‘Yes. Yes.’ Then, in a more sober voice, Avisani said, ‘It was the usual thing, Guido: the more he found out, the more obstacles he encountered. The magistrate in charge of the case was transferred, and the new one didn’t seem very interested. Then two of his best assistants were transferred. You know what it’s like.’
Yes, Brunetti thought, he did know what it was like. ‘Anything else?’ he asked.
‘No, just that. It was nothing I could use: I’ve heard it too many times.’ The line went dead.
Like many people involved in police work, Brunetti had long ago realized that the tentacles of the various mafias penetrated deep into every aspect of life, including most public institutions and many businesses. It would be impossible to count the number of policemen and magistrates who had found themselves transferred to some provincial dead end just at the point when their investigations began to uncover embarrassing links to the government. No matter how people tried to ignore it, the evidence of the depth and breadth of penetration was overwhelming. Had the news-papers not recently proclaimed the mafias, with 93 billion Euros in yearly earnings, the third largest enterprise in the country?
Brunetti had observed the Mafia and its close relatives, the N’Dragheta and the Camorra, grow ever more powerful, moving from the dark corners of his investigations until they were now the Prime Mover in the universe of crime. Like that French nobleman in the book he had read as a boy – The Scarlet Pimpernel. He tried to recall the poem describing those who tried to find and destroy him: ‘They seek him here, They seek him there, Those Frenchies seek him everywhere.’
Or was the Lernean Hydra a better image, impossible to destroy because of its many heads? He remembered the joyous feeding frenzy of the press after the arrests of Riina, Provenzano, Lo Piccolo, the suggestion endlessly repeated that finally the government had been triumphant in its long battle against organized crime. As if the death of the president of General Motors or British Petroleum would bring those monoliths to their knees. Had no one ever heard of vice-presidents?
If anything, the arrests of those dinosaurs would give opportunities for younger men, university-trained men, better able to direct their organizations like the multinational corporations they had become. And, he could never forget, the arrests of two of those men had taken place at about the same time as the indulto, that beneficent wave of the legal wand that had set free more than 24,000 criminals, many of them the foot soldiers of the Mafia. Ah, how accommodating the law could be, when it was in the hands of those who best knew how to use it.