CB19 A Question of Belief (2010) Read Free Page A

of his aunt, but the impulse, it seemed, had been left in the Questura and Brunetti, having no particular desire to continue that conversation, did not pursue it.
    Outside, both men paused involuntarily under the whip of the sun. The Questura was less than two minutes’ walk, but in the heat that appeared to have increased while they wereinside, it might have been half a city away. The sun blasted down on the pavement along the canal. Tourists sat under the umbrellas in front of the trattoria on the other side of the bridge. Brunetti studied them for a moment, seeking some sign of motion. Could it be that the heat had dried them out, and they were no more than empty shells, like locusts? But then a waiter took a tall glass of some dark liquid to one of the tables, and the guest moved his head slowly to watch his arrival.
    They set off. Bodies of water, Brunetti knew, were meant to cool the places where they were found, but the flat, dark green surface of the canal seemed only to reflect and redouble the light and heat. Instead of relief, it provided humidity. They trudged on.
    ‘I had no idea he was an engineer,’ Vianello said.
    ‘Me neither.’
    ‘Hydraulic engineer at that,’ Vianello added with undisguised admiration. The door to the Questura was only a few steps away. The guard, understandably, had retreated inside.
    Brunetti wiped his face with the sleeve of his shirt, marvelling that he had been so foolish as to wear a long-sleeved shirt that day. ‘How long’s he been around?’ Brunetti asked, moving off towards the stairs.
    ‘I’m not sure. Three, four years. I figure he was illegal for most of that, before he got his papers. He always used to disappear when I came in wearing my uniform.’ Vianello smiled at the memory. ‘Tall guy like that. Remarkable, he’d be there one minute, but then he simply wasn’t, like he’d evaporated or something.’
    ‘I’m going to, soon,’ Brunetti said as they got to the first floor.
    ‘What?’
    ‘Evaporate.’
    ‘Let’s hope he doesn’t,’ Vianello said.
    ‘Who? Bambola?’
    ‘Yes. Sergio can’t work all those hours. And you have to admit the place looks better. Just in a day.’
    ‘His wife’s been sick,’ Brunetti said. ‘Good thing he found him.’
    ‘Lousy work, running a bar,’ Vianello said. ‘You’re there all day, never know what sort of trouble you’re going to have with the people who come in, and you always have to be polite.’
    ‘Sounds like working here,’ Brunetti said.
    Vianello laughed and turned down towards the officers’ squad room, leaving Brunetti to confront the second flight of steps on his own.

3
    Two days later, sitting at his desk, Brunetti wondered at the possibility of making some sort of deal with the criminals in the city. Could they be induced to leave people alone until the end of this heat spell? That presupposed some sort of central organization, but Brunetti knew that crime had become too diversified and too international for any reliable agreement to be possible. Once, when crime had been an exclusively local affair, the criminals well known and part of the social fabric, it might have worked, and the criminals, as burdened by the unrelenting heat as the police, might even have been willing to cooperate. ‘At least until the first of September,’ he said out loud.
    Too assailed by the heat to consider the papers on his desk, Brunetti allowed himself to continue his idle train of thought: how to convince the Romanians to stop picking pockets, the Gypsies to stop sending their children to break into homes? And that was only in Venice. On the mainland, the requests would have been far more serious, asking the Moldavians to stop selling thirteen-year-olds and the Albanians to stopselling drugs. He considered for a moment the possibility of persuading Italian men – men like him and Vianello – to stop wanting young prostitutes or cheap drugs.
    He sat, conscious of the faint slithering sensation as