‘Do you remember the way?’ Vianello asked Brunetti, who sat in the front seat of the unmarked police car beside Pucetti. The Inspector peered out of the windows on one side of the car, then the other. ‘It all looks different.’
Brunetti remembered the directions the guard had given the other day and repeated them to Pucetti. A few minutes later, they came upon the red building; Brunetti suggested they leave the car there and proceed on foot. Vianello, not a little embarrassed, asked them if they wanted anything to drink before they set off, saying that his wife had insisted he take along a thermos of tea with lemon and sugar. When they declined, he added that he had thought to put some whisky in, patting the pocket of his down parka.
The moon was almost full that night, so they had little need of Vianello’s flashlight, and he soon put it in his other pocket. The source of the eerie glow that allowed them to see their way was hard to determine: it seemed to come as much from the flaring gas burn-off at the top of a tower not far from them as from the general radiance that slipped across the laguna from Venice, a city that had conquered darkness.
Brunetti turned and looked back towards the red building, red no more at night. Distance and proportion were meaningless: they could have been passing the place where Guarino had been found, or they could be hundreds of metres from it. Ahead he saw the hulking outlines of the storage tanks, draughtsmen on this vast, flat plain. Pucetti asked, keeping his voice low, ‘If there are new doors, how do we get in?’
By way of answer, Vianello tapped the pocket of his jacket, and Brunetti knew he had brought along his set of burglar tools, scandalous should they be found on the person of a serving police officer. Even more shocking, Brunetti knew, was the skill with which the Ispettore could use them.
Droplets of humidity clung to their coats, and suddenly they were all conscious of the smell. It was not acid, nor was it the strong tang of iron, but some combination of chemical and gas that left a film on the skin and caused a faint irritation to nose and eye. Better not to breathe it; better not to walk in it.
They came abreast of the first storage tank and circled it until they came to a door that looked to have been crudely cut into the metal with a blowtorch. They stopped a few metres short of it, and Vianello cast the beam of his flashlight on the area just in front of the door. The mud there was slick and smooth, frozen and undisturbed since the last rain, some weeks before. ‘No one’s been in there,’ Vianello said unnecessarily and switched off the light.
The next was the same: the mud was unmarked save by the tracks of some sort of animaclass="underline" cat, dog, rat. None of them had any idea.
They went back to the dirt road and continued towards the third tank. It loomed above them, at least twenty metres high, a menacing cylinder back-lit by the lights of the port of San Basilio in the distance. To its left and right they saw the thousands of lights on the three cruise ships docked in the city across the laguna.
From behind them, they heard the dull hum of an approaching motor, and they all moved to the side of the road, seeking a place to hide. They ran towards the third tank and pressed themselves flat against its corroded surface as the sound grew, and grew. A light hit the ground and came towards them at alarming speed, and they pressed themselves harder against the curved metal surface.
The plane passed over them, drowning them in sound. Brunetti and Vianello covered their ears, but Pucetti did not bother. When the plane was past them, leaving them stunned in its wake, they pushed themselves away from the tank and started to circle back towards the door.
Again, standing not far from it, Vianello waved the beam across the mud in front of the door, but this time it revealed an entirely different story: tyre tracks and footprints led to and from the entrance. This door, further, was not a sloppy rectangle cut with a blowtorch and then hastily patched with a few wooden boards nailed together to discourage entrance. It was a proper, curved sliding door, the sort seen on a garage, but not the garage of a private house: the garage of a bus terminal. Or a warehouse.
Vianello went over to study the lock. His light illuminated another one above it, and then a padlock fixed through two metal circles soldered to the door and the wall of the tank. ‘I’m not good enough for the top one,’ he said as he turned away.
‘So now what?’ Brunetti asked.
Pucetti walked off to the left, staying close to the metal hull of the tank. He came back after a few steps and asked Vianello for the flashlight, then set off again with it in his hand. Brunetti and Vianello could hear his steps as he circled towards the back of the tank, then the odd clang as he banged something against the side. The sound of his footsteps was suddenly drowned out by the arrival of another plane, which again filled their universe with noise and light, and then was gone.
A minute passed before something approaching silence returned, though motors were audible in the distance and, somewhere, electrical wires hummed in the night air. Then they heard Pucetti coming back, frozen mud splintering under his feet.
‘There’s a ladder up the side,’ the young officer said, unable to contain his excitement: cops and robbers, a night out with the boys. ‘Come on; I’ll show you.’
He was gone, disappearing around the curve of metal. They went after him and found him standing near the tank, flashlight pointing up the side. When their eyes followed the beam, they saw a series of round metal crossbars, starting about two metres from the ground and going up straight to the top.
‘What happens up there?’ Vianello asked.
Pucetti backed away, keeping the beam aimed at the point where the ladder reached the top. ‘I don’t know. I can’t see.’ Both of them joined him, but they could see nothing, either, save the final crossbar a hand’s-breadth from the top.
‘Only one way to find out,’ Brunetti said, feeling quite bold. He walked back to the tank and reached towards the rungs.
‘Wait a minute, sir,’ Pucetti said. He came over to them and stuffed the flashlight into Brunetti’s pocket, then got down on one knee, then the other, and made himself into a human footstool. ‘Step up from my shoulder, sir. It’ll be easier.’
Five years ago, Brunetti’s masculinity would have scorned the offer. He raised his right foot, but when he felt the pull of cloth across his chest, he put his foot down and unbuttoned his coat, then stepped on Pucetti’s shoulder and grabbed the second and third rungs. Easily, he pulled and stepped at the same moment and ended with both feet on the first rung of the ladder. As he started climbing, he heard Pucetti, then Vianello, say something. The sound of scrabbling below drove him up and up again; and he heard a heavy thump below him as a foot banged the side of the tank.
He had watched the first Spider-Man film with the kids and had enjoyed it. He could not now shake the feeling that he too was climbing up the side of a building, clinging to the side by virtue of his special powers. He climbed ten more rungs, paused for a moment and started to look at the men below him, but thought better of it and continued towards the top.
The ladder ended at a metal platform the size of a door. Luckily, it was enclosed in a metal handrail. Brunetti crawled on to it and got to his feet, then walked to the far end to leave space for the others. He took out the flashlight and lit the way for them, first Vianello and then Pucetti, as they crawled on to the platform. Vianello got to his feet and gave a stricken look into the flashlight’s beam. Brunetti moved it quickly to Pucetti, whose face was radiant. What larks, what larks.