Ubaldo’s admonition gave Brunetti the right to be picky, and he was, careful to select only fruit that had no sign of bruises. After five minutes, the bucket was half full. He quickly filled it and asked Ubaldo if he would like some help with the rest.
‘No,’ the former fisherman said, pausing to wipe his face with a vast white handkerchief. ‘It gives me something to do.’
Brunetti carried the bucket over to the bike. When he had the bike upright, he slipped the bucket over the handlebars and wheeled the bike closer to Ubaldo, who was still busy picking up the fallen fruit.
‘Have you seen Davide?’ Brunetti asked in mild interrogation.
Ubaldo stood upright, placed an apricot into the bucket, and said, ‘No, not for a few days. Anything important?’
‘No, I wanted to ask him something about the boat. But it can wait.’ Brunetti smiled, rose up with his foot on one pedal, and took off. He called his thanks to Ubaldo and continued down towards the bar.
When he went inside, the three men at the long table looked up at him, their faces filled with curiosity they saw no reason to disguise. One of them waved him over to their table and pushed out a chair for him. ‘Have they found him?’ the first one, Pierangelo, asked, not bothering to explain how they knew Casati was missing.
Brunetti called over to the barman and asked for a coffee before taking his seat. He raised both hands in a gesture of surrender and said, ‘I have no idea. I spoke to Federica; then she called her husband, who spoke to the Capitaneria.’ Since arriving on the island, Brunetti had spoken only Veneziano with everyone he encountered; his use of the dialect had, he hoped, logged him into the confidence of those who took him to be one of themselves.
The oldest of the men, Gianni, wore a threadbare suit jacket as evidence of his former employment as a bookkeeper for a glass factory on Murano; he had somehow come to take on the role of leader and said, ‘They’ll find him. If anyone can, they will.’
Franco – Brunetti had never been given their surnames and knew him only as the tall one with the arthritic hands – said, ‘I heard he was over on Burano with that woman. He probably tried to come back in the storm.’
Brunetti happened to be watching Gianni when the other man spoke, so he noticed the way his face tightened when he heard Franco say this. Brunetti glanced away. A moment passed before Gianni said, ‘Davide has more sense than that. He probably went out to see that his bees were safe.’ He gave an enormous shrug, as if to indicate that there was no understanding the strangeness of human behaviour or the efforts to which a person would go for things they had at heart.
Pierangelo sipped at his wine and said nothing, which were his usual contributions to any conversation. He did, however, cast a long-suffering look at Gianni and shake his head.
The barman brought Brunetti his coffee, saying, ‘That storm was nothing for someone like Davide. Remember the one when Claudio Mozza was lost? That was a storm. How long ago was it – seven, eight years?’ He pulled over an empty chair and braced his hands on the back, looking around the table for help. The man who never spoke said, ‘Eight,’ and that was that. Perhaps he was their collective memory.
‘That’s right,’ the barman said. ‘Just two days ago, Davide said the orate were running two kilometres out from Treporti. He told me all he had to do was put a net in the water, and they fought to swim into it.’ He chuckled at the memory and went on. ‘I bet that’s where he went.’
‘And this other person, Mozza? What happened to him?’ Brunetti asked. He looked from the barman to Gianni, to Franco in search of an answer.
‘They never found him,’ Gianni said. ‘They were out there for three days, even sent out a helicopter.’ He looked around, and the other men at the table nodded in confirmation. ‘They found his boat. Down by Poveglia. No one ever understood how it got there.’
‘Will they do the same thing now?’ Brunetti asked innocently.
‘There’s no need,’ the barman insisted. ‘As soon as they start looking, Davide will show up and ask what all the fuss is for.’
The barman released the back of the chair, picked up three empty glasses from the table and, without asking if they wanted anything else, went back to the counter and started to wash the glasses.
‘What he said about Davide is true: he’s one of the best,’ Gianni said to Brunetti, looking in the direction of the bar, ‘but the wind last night was bad, and he’s not a young man.’ The men near him nodded at this.
Brunetti thanked them and went over to the bar, where he paid the bill for the table and said he’d go back to the villa and see if there had been any news.
13
In deference to the sudden rise in temperature that had taken place while he was inside, Brunetti pedalled slowly back towards the villa, regretting that he had forgotten his sunglasses and the baseball cap. Life inside a city was life within the shadow of walls; out here, the sun was unrelenting and cruel.
When the bucket banged against the frame of the bike, he recalled the apricots, reached in and tested them by squeezing, pulled out a soft one and took a bite. It exploded in his mouth, filling it with sweetness such as he had not tasted since – yes – since he and his friends had come out here to steal the same fruit. He finished it with another bite and tossed the pit to the side of the road, then wiped his chin with the back of his hand. And then he ate another and another and another until he told himself to stop. Up ahead he saw water running from a public fountain. He slowed and veered over, stopped but didn’t bother to get down from the bike. He rinsed his hand, wiped his mouth and chin clean, then rinsed his hand again and wiped it dry on his jeans.
He pushed off and, consciously ignoring the ripe fruit, continued back towards the villa. From his left, he heard the approach of a powerful boat, moving fast. He turned and read the words on the side: ‘Capitaneria di Porto’. There appeared to be four men on board. He increased his speed, though the boat left him behind very quickly.
He pedalled furiously for the remaining distance and arrived at the villa to see the boat bobbing in the water near the steps. A uniformed man stood at the wheel, another one next to him. A third was tying the boat to the metal ring in the sea wall, while a fourth was just starting towards the villa.