Sea of Troubles Read Online Free PDF

manner of speaking ’ Vianello answered. ‘I don't know enough about the way things work out here, but that's the feeling I get: there's too many of them and too few fish left. And it's too late for most of them to learn to do anything else.'
    Brunetti waited to see if Vianello had anything else to say, but when it seemed that he had finished, Brunetti said, "There used to be a restaurant off to the right here somewhere.'
    Vianello nodded. ‘I had a coffee there earlier while I was talking to one of them.'
    "There's no sense in my pretending I'm just a passing tourist, is there?' Brunetti asked.
    Vianello smiled at the absurdity of it. 'Everyone in the village saw you get off that launch, sir. And walk back here with me. Damned by the company, if I might dare to say it'
    'So we might as well go and have lunch together,' suggested Brunetti.
    Vianello led the way back to the village. At the first row of houses he stopped in front of the large windows and wooden door of a restaurant. He pushed open the door and held it for Brunetti, then pulled it closed behind them.
    A man in a long apron stood behind the zinc-covered bar, wiping at a squat glass with a cloth large enough to cover a small table. He nodded to Vianello then, an instant later, to Brunetti.
    'Could we have lunch here?' the sergeant asked.
    The man tilted his head towards a hallway that led away from the bar. He looked down at the glass again and returned to his careful work.
    To the side of the bar was a doorway of a sort Brunetti had not seen in decades. Narrow, it was hung with a row of long strips of green and white plastic, each little more than a centimetre wide, ribbed on both sides. As he inserted his right hand to slip half of them aside, he heard the gentle clicking sound he recalled from his youth. Once these dividers had hung in the doorway of every bar and every trattoria, but during the last couple of decades, they'd all disappeared; he couldn't remember the last time he'd seen one. He held aside the still clattering strips until Vianello was through, then listened to them fall back into place.
    The room they entered surprised him by its size, for it must have held thirty tables. The windows were set high in the walls, and plenty of light streamed in. Below them, fishermen's nets covered the walls, each embedded with shells, pieces of dried seaweed, and what looked like the petrified corpses of fish, crabs and lobsters. A low serving counter ran along one side of the room. In the back, a glass door, closed now, led to a pebble-covered parking lot.
    Seeing that only one other table was occupied, Brunetti looked at his watch, surprised to find that it was only one thirty. There was some truth in the belief that exposure to sea air increases the appetite.
    They walked across the room, pulled out chairs at a table halfway along the first row, and sat facing one another. A small vase of fresh wildflowers stood to the left of the bottles of olive oil and vinegar, and beside that was a wicker holder containing half a dozen paper-wrapped packs of grissini. Brunetti took one, ripped it open, and began to nibble at a breadstick.
    The plastic strips parted and a young man in black jacket and trousers backed into the room. When he turned around, Brunetti saw that he had a plate of what appeared to be antipasto di pesce in each hand. The waiter nodded to the two newcomers and went to the table in the far corner, where he set the two plates down in front of a man and woman in their sixties.
    The waiter came back towards their table. Brunetti and Vianello had realized that this was not the sort of place to bother with a menu, at least not this early in the season, so Brunetti smiled and said, as one always does in a new restaurant, 'Everyone says you can eat very well here.' He was careful to speak in Veneziano.
    'I hope so,' the waiter said, smiling as he spoke and making no sign that he found the presence of a uniformed policeman in any way surprising.
    'What can