Venetian war vet key to Leon’s latest

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This article was published 03/08/2024 (790 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Even when violence comes to Venice, even when violence comes to Commissario Guido Brunetti’s own police station, there is a languidness to the pace of life in the ancient canaled city.

There is still time for long intellectual discussions with his colleague Claudia Griffoni, there is still time to go home each day for lunch with his wife, there is still time for adult conversations with his aristocratic in-laws and his growing children over the appropriate goblet of wine.

When the crime comes, it comes slowly, somewhat quietly, but it grows as it always does to a peak in the final pages, which is not to say the reader should expect a shootout in the last chapter. This is American author Donna Leon’s 33rd Guido Brunetti novel and as always there’s a sense of order and civility to Venice.

It all begins with groups of bored boys forming into gangs and meeting late at night to beat each other up, break some windows, frighten some night owl tourists and then skulk off home to nurse their wounds and boast of their warrior skills on social media.

One night they get busted, parents called to the cop shop to collect them and take them home in disgrace, only one 15-year-old remaining uncollected because his single parent father turns off his phone when he goes to sleep.

The lad can’t spend the night in jail, thinks Griffoni, who walks the boy home, and finds herself — slowly, of course — in a world of hurt, set up for false accusations of sexual impropriety should she not back off and stop pursuing the youth’s criminal activity further.

We’ll get back shortly to the boy’s father, who is the crux of the plot.

Meanwhile, Brunetti notices his good friend, a recluse in the forensics unit, is troubled, and learns he’s being threatened by a neighbouring lout of a boy who the older man fears may assault him — and worse, may damage his cherished collection of historic statuettes.

But back to that father who turns his phone off at night and knows not where his son goes after dark.

His name is vaguely familiar.

Brunetti and Griffoni realize that in 2003, Dario Monforte was nationally lionized as the hero of Nasiriyah, where the real-life Italian base during the invasion of Iraq was attacked (for real) by a truck bomb.

Dozens were killed, even more injured, some having their lives changed by ghastly burns transforming them physically and condemning them to lives of pain.

Security warnings to fortify the base were repeatedly ignored, allowing the bombers to get close enough to cause horrendous carnage among the Italian men.

Monforte had suffered awful injuries when he went back into the flames, twice, to pull out two of his men. A quartermaster in charge of supplies, he hadn’t even seen any combat.

So how is it, the two detectives wonder, that such a man could be so forgotten? Why are they being told to back off?

How is it that Monforte met the prime minister, spent a year in Europe’s best burn hospitals, but was never awarded a medal?

Brunetti’s investigations always come with a subtle social message; here we hear the message through survivors of that explosive attack who suffer two decades later, forgotten, still waiting for the promised special pensions from the Italian government.

But those survivors also raise questions about the alleged heroism.

Piece by piece, Brunetti and Griffoni uncover that the U.S. bankrolled the countries supporting its invasion of Iraq, to the point that no one could possibly keep track of what portion of those endless supplies might be going out the back door.

Leon tells us that there was an even more lucrative market in priceless artifacts looted from Iraq’s museums and galleries, loot so easy to slip into the manifests no one checked of the supply flights returning home virtually empty.

Just maybe, a potential whistleblower who was thought to have died in that attack, as chronicled, did not.

Countries which enter unpopular wars and bring their own citizens home in bodybags need heroes, Brunetti concludes, and we’ll tell you no more.

Meanwhile, word comes that the miscreant youth are planning something, big — something really big.

Settle back comfortably. Have a large goblet of an Italian red wine within arm’s reach. Join these decent, erudite Venetian detectives yet again. Give yourself over completely to their world.

Retired Free Press reporter Nick Martin reckons that if he ever returns to Venice, he will try to avoid being one of those obnoxious tourists that so annoy Guido Brunetti, even though he can now afford the food and wine that were far out of reach in 1971.