Free Friends in High Places by Donna Leon Page A

‘Yes,’ Brunetti said, ‘let’s go.’
     
    They stopped in the officers’ room and picked up Vianello’s copy of that day’s Gazzettino, which gave the address of the building in Santa Croce. They also picked up Bonsuan, the chief pilot, and told him they wanted to go over to Santa Croce. On the way, the two men standing on the deck of the police boat studied a street directory and found the number, on a calle that led off of Campo Angelo Raffaele. The boat took them toward the end of the Zattere, in the waters beyond which loomed an enormous ship, moored to the embankment and dwarfing the area beside it.
     
    ‘My God, what’s that?’ Vianello asked as their boat approached.
     
    ‘It’s that cruise ship that was built here. It’s said to be the biggest in the world.’
     
    ‘It’s horrible,’ Vianello said, head back and staring at its upper decks, which loomed almost twenty metres above them. ‘What’s it doing here?’
     
    ‘Bringing money to the city, Sergeant,’ Brunetti observed drily.
     
    Vianello looked down at the water and then up to the rooftops of the city. ‘What whores we are,’ he said. Brunetti did not see fit to demur.
     
    Bonsuan pulled to a stop not far from the enormous ship, stepped off the boat, and began tying it to the mushroom-shaped metal stanchion on the embankment, so thick it must have been intended for larger boats. As he got off, Brunetti said to the pilot, ‘Bonsuan, there’s no need for you to wait for us. I don’t know how long we’ll be.’
     
    ‘I’ll wait if you don’t mind, sir,’ the older man answered, then added, ‘I’d rather be here than back there.’ Bonsuan was only a few years short of retirement and had begun to speak his mind as the date began to loom, however distantly, on the horizon.
     
    The agreement of the others with Bonsuan’s sentiments was no less strong for remaining unspoken. Together, they turned from the boat and walked back toward the campo, a part of the city Brunetti seldom visited. He and Paola used to eat in a small fish restaurant over here, but it had changed hands a few years ago, and the quality of the food had rapidly deteriorated, so they’d stopped coming. Brunetti had had a girlfriend who lived over here, but that had been when he was still a student, and she had died some years ago.
     
    They crossed the bridge and walked through Campo San Sebastiano, toward the large area of Campo Angelo Raffaele. Vianello, leading the way, turned immediately into a calle on the left, and up ahead they saw the scaffolding attached to the fa ç ade of the last building in the row, a four-storey house that looked as if it had been abandoned for years. They studied the signs of its emptiness: the leprous paint peeling away from the dark green shutters; the gaps in the marble gutters that would allow water to pound down on to the street and probably into the house itself; the broken piece of rusted antenna hanging out a metre from the edge of the roof. There was, at least for people born in Venice - which means born with an interest in the buying and selling of houses - an emptiness about the house which would have registered on them even if they had not been paying particular attention.
     
    As far as they could tell, the scaffolding was abandoned: all the shutters were tightly closed. There was no evidence that work was being conducted here, nor was there any sign that a man had injured himself fatally, though Brunetti was not at all sure how he thought that fact would be indicated.
     
    Brunetti stepped back from the building until he was leaning against the wall of the one opposite. He studied the entire fa ç ade, but there was no sign of life. He crossed the calle, turned, and this time studied the building that faced the scaffolding. It too showed the same signs of abandonment. He looked to his left: the calle ended in a canal, and beyond it was a large garden.
     
    Vianello had, at his own pace, duplicated Brunetti’s