Dressed for Death (26 page)

Did Vianello raise his eyes to
the ceiling at that? Brunetti thought so but didn’t ask. ‘Anything else,
Sergeant?’

‘You have to be there at one?’

‘Yes.’

‘There’s no train that late. You’ll
have to take the bus out and walk down from the station and through the tunnel.’

‘What about getting back to
Venice?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Depends on what happens, I
suppose.’

‘Yes, I suppose.’

‘I’ll see if I can find anyone
who wants to be in the back of the car,’ Vianello said.

‘Who’s on night duty this week?’

‘Riverre and Alvise.’

‘Oh,’ Brunetti said simply, but
the sound spoke volumes.

‘That’s who’s on the roster.’

‘I guess you better put them in the
houses.’ Neither one of them wanted to say that, put in the back of a car,
either one of them would simply fall asleep. Of course, there was equal
possibility of that if they were put in a house, but perhaps the owners would
be sufficiently curious to help keep them awake.

‘What about the others? Do you
think you’ll be able to get volunteers?’

‘There’ll be no trouble,’
Vianello assured him. ‘Rallo will want to come, and I’ll ask Maria Nardi. Her
husband is on some sort of training programme in Milano for a week, so she
might like to do it. Besides, it’s overtime. Isn’t it?’

Brunetti nodded, then added, ‘Vianello,
make it clear to them that there might be some danger involved.’

‘Danger? In Mestre?’ Vianello
asked with a laugh, dismissing the idea, then added, ‘Do you want to carry a
radio?’

‘No, I don’t think so, not with
four of you so close.’

‘Well, two of us, at any rate,’
Vianello corrected him, saving Brunetti the embarrassment of having to speak
slightingly of the lower orders.

‘If we’re going to be up all
night with this, then I suppose we ought to be able to go home for a while,’
Brunetti said, looking at his watch.

‘Then I’ll see you there, sir,’
Vianello said and stood.

Just as Vianello had said, there
was no train that would get Brunetti to the Mestre station at that hour, so he
contented himself with taking the Number One bus and getting out, the only
passenger at that hour, across from the Mestre train station.

He walked up the steps into the
station then down again through the tunnel that cut under the train tracks and
came up on the other side. He emerged on a quiet, tree-lined street, behind him
the well-lit parking lot, filled now with cars parked there for the night. The
street in front of him was lined on both sides with parked cars; light filtered
down on to them from the few street lights above. Brunetti stayed on the right
side of the street, where there were fewer trees and, consequently, more light.
He walked up to the first corner and paused, looking all round him. About four cars
down, on the other side of the street, he saw a couple in a fierce embrace, but
the man’s head was obscured by the woman’s, so he could not tell if it was
Vianello or some other married man having a stolen hour.

He looked down the street to the
left, studying the houses that lined it on both sides. At the front of one,
about half-way down the block, the dim grey light of a television filtered out
through the lower windows; the rest were dark. Riverre and Alvise would be at
the windows of two of those houses, but he felt no desire to look up in their
direction: he was afraid they might take it as a signal of some sort and come
rushing to his aid.

He turned into the street,
looking for a light-blue Panda on the right-hand side. He walked to the end of
the street, seeing no car that fitted that description, turned, and came back.
Nothing. He noticed that, up at the corner, there was a large rubbish bin, and
he crossed to the other side, thinking again of those pictures he had seen of
what little remained of Judge Falcone’s vehicle. A car turned into the road,
coming from the roundabout, and slowed, heading towards Brunetti. He backed
between the protection of two parked cars, but it drove past and went into the
parking lot. The driver got out, locked his door, and disappeared into the
tunnel to the station.

After ten minutes, Brunetti
walked down the same street again, this time looking into each of the parked
cars. One of them had a blanket on the floor in the back, and, conscious of how
hot it was even out here in the open, Brunetti felt a surge of sympathy for
whoever had been drafted in to he under that blanket.

Half an hour passed, at the end
of which Brunetti decided that Crespo wasn’t going to show up. He went back to
the road junction and turned left, down to where the couple in the front seat
were still engaged in their exchange of intimacies. When he got to the car,
Brunetti rapped with his knuckles on the hood, and Vianello pulled himself away
from a red-faced Officer Maria Nardi and got out of the car.

‘Nothing,’ Brunetti said, looking
down at his watch. ‘It’s almost two.’

‘All right,’ Vianello said, his
disappointment audible. ‘Let’s go back.’ He ducked his head into the car and
said to the female officer, ‘Call Riverre and Alvise and tell them to follow us
back.’

‘What about the man in the car?’
Brunetti asked.

‘Riverre and Alvise drove out
with him. They’ll just come out and meet at the car and drive home.’

Inside the car, Officer Nardi
spoke on the radio, telling the two other officers that no one had shown up,
and they were going back to Venice. She looked up at Vianello. ‘All right,
Sergeant. They’ll be out in a few minutes.’ Saying that, she got out of the car
and opened the back door.

‘No, stay there,’ Brunetti said, ‘I’ll
sit in the back.’

‘That’s all right, Commissario,’
she said with a shy smile, then added, ‘Besides, I’d like the chance to have a
bit of distance between me and the sergeant.’ She got in and closed the door.

Brunetti and Vianello exchanged a
glance over the roof of the car. Vianello’s smile was sheepish. They climbed
in. Vianello leaned forward and turned the key. The engine sprang to life and a
small buzzer sounded.

‘What’s that?’ Brunetti asked.
For Brunetti, as for most Venetians, cars were alien territory.

‘Seat-belt warning,’ Vianello
said, pulling his down across his chest and latching it by the gear shift.

Brunetti did nothing. The buzzer
continued to sound.

‘Can’t you turn that thing off,
Vianello?’

‘It’ll go off by itself if you’ll
put your seat belt on.’

Brunetti muttered something about
not liking to have machines tell him what to do, but he latched his seat belt,
and then he muttered something about this being more of Vianello’s ecological
nonsense. Pretending not to hear, Vianello put the car into gear, and they
pulled away from the kerb. At the end of the street, they waited a few minutes
until the other car drew up behind them. Officer Riverre sat at the wheel,
Alvise beside him, and when Brunetti turned to signal to them, he could see a
third form in the back, head leaning against the seat.

The streets were virtually empty
at this hour, and they were quickly back on to the road that led to the Ponte
della Liberta.

‘What do you think happened?’
Vianello asked.

‘I thought it had been set up to
threaten me in some way, but maybe I was wrong and Crespo really wanted to see
me.’

‘So what will you do now?’

‘I’ll go and see him tomorrow and
see what kept him from coming tonight.’

They pulled on to the bridge and
saw the lights of the city ahead of them. Flat black water stretched out on
either side, speckled by lights on the left from the distant islands of Murano
and Burano. Vianello drove faster, eager to get to the garage and then home.
All of them felt tired, let down. The second car, following close behind them,
suddenly pulled out into the centre lane, and Riverre sped past them, Alvise
leaning out the window and waving happily to them.

Seeing them, Officer Nardi leaned
forward and put her hand on Vianello’s shoulder and started to speak. ‘Sergeant,’
she began and then stopped abruptly as her eyes were pulled up to the rear-view
mirror, in which a pair of blinding lights had suddenly appeared. Her fingers
tightened on his shoulder and she had time only to shout out, ‘Be careful,’
before the car behind them swerved to the left, pulled abreast and then ahead
of them, and then quite deliberately crashed into their left front fender. The
force of the impact hurled them to the right, slamming them into the guard rail
at the side of the bridge.

Vianello pulled the wheel to the
left, but he reacted too slowly, and the rear of the car swung out to the left,
carrying them into the middle of the road. Another car coming from behind them
at an insane velocity cut to their right and slipped into the space now opened
up between them and the guard rail, and then their rear slammed into the guard
rail on the left, and they were spun in another half circle, coming to rest in
the middle of the road, facing back towards Mestre.

Dazed, not aware of whether he
was in pain or not, Brunetti stared through the shattered windshield and saw
only the radiant refraction of the headlights that approached them. One set
swished past them on the right and then another. He turned to the left and saw
Vianello slumped forward against his seat belt. Brunetti reached down and
released his own, shifted around in his seat, and grabbed Vianello’s shoulder. ‘Lorenzo,
are you all right?’

The sergeant’s eyes opened and he
turned to face Brunetti. ‘I think so.’ Brunetti leaned down and un-snapped the
other seat belt; Vianello remained upright.

‘Come on,’ Brunetti said,
reaching for the door on his side. ‘Get out of the car or one of those maniacs
will slam into us.’ He pointed through what was left of the windshield at the
lights that kept approaching from the direction of Mestre.

‘Let me call Riverre,’ Vianello
said, leaning forward towards the radio.

‘No. Cars have passed. They’ll
report it to the Carabinieri in Piazzale Roma.’ As if in proof of his words, he
heard the first whine of a siren from the other end of the bridge and saw the
flashing blue lights as the Carabinieri sped down the wrong side of the bridge
to reach them.

Brunetti got out and leaned down
to open the back door. Officer Junior Grade Maria Nardi lay on the back seat of
the car, her neck bent at a strange and unnatural angle.

* * * *

Chapter Twenty

The
aftermath of the incident was both predictable and depressing. Neither of them
had noticed what kind of car hit them, not even the colour or general size,
though it must have been a large one to have thrust them to the side with such
force. No other cars had been close enough to them to see what happened, or, if
they had been, no one reported it to the police. It was clear that the car,
after hitting them, had merely continued into Piazzale Roma, turned, and sped
back across to the mainland even before the Carabinieri had been alerted.

Officer Nardi was pronounced dead
at the scene, her body taken to the
ospedale civile
for an autopsy that
would merely confirm what was clearly visible from the angle at which her head
rested.

‘She was only twenty-three,’
Vianello said, avoiding Brunetti’s glance. ‘They’d been married six months. Her
husband’s away on some sort of computer training course. That’s all she kept
talking about in the car, how she couldn’t wait until Franco got home, how much
she missed him. We sat like that for an hour, face to face, and all she did was
talk about her Franco. She was just a kid.’

Brunetti could find nothing to
say.