CB14 Blood From A Stone (2005) (6 page)

None of them said a word.

Before he could attempt to rephrase the question, Dottoressa Crowley said, ‘It’s kind of you to put it that way, Commissario, but you don’t have to do that with us. If we’d seen anything, we’d tell you, even if it meant we had to stay here longer.’

Her husband said, ‘We asked the others when we got back last night, but no one seems to have noticed these men.’

‘Or is willing to say they do,’ added Lydia Watts.

The waiter arrived with their coffee and his
caffè
. Brunetti added sugar and drank it quickly. He stood and took a number of his business cards from his wallet and handed them around, saying, ‘If you should remember anything at all about what happened, please do get in touch with me. Phone or fax or email. Anything at all that comes to you.’ He smiled and thanked them for their time and their help, and left the hotel without bothering to get their addresses. The hotel would have them, anyway, should he need to confirm anything, not that they had said anything that he could imagine would need confirmation. A thickset, Mediterranean man with hairy hands and another, shorter, one no one could describe, but no witness who had seen either one of them fire a gun.

The mist had not cleared. In fact, it appeared to have grown thicker, so Brunetti was careful to keep the façades of the buildings on his left in sight as he walked down the
riva
. The mist caused him to pass through the rows of
bacharelle
without seeing them. This added to the uneasiness he always felt when he walked past them and their vendors, so unlike the comfortable familiarity he felt in the rest of the city. He did not bother to analyse this sensation, was aware of it only in some atavistic, danger-sensing part of his mind. Once beyond them and past the façade of the Pietà, the feeling disappeared, just as the mist was beginning to do.

Brunetti arrived at the Questura a little after nine and asked the man on the switchboard if
anyone had called with information about the dead man. He was told that no calls had come in. On the first floor he found Signorina Elettra’s office empty, which caused him some surprise. The fact that her – and his – immediate superior, Vice-Questore Giuseppe Patta, had not arrived at his place of work, on the contrary, came as no surprise whatsoever. Brunetti stopped in at the officers’ room and asked Pucetti, who was alone there, to come upstairs with him.

Once in his office, Brunetti asked the young officer where Ispettore Vianello was, but Pucetti had no idea. Vianello had come in just after eight, made a few phone calls, then left, saying he would be back before lunchtime.

‘No idea?’ Brunetti asked when they were both seated, unwilling to compromise the young man by asking him outright if he had eavesdropped on Vianello’s conversations.

‘No, sir. I was taking a call, so I couldn’t hear what he said.’ Brunetti was relieved to see that Pucetti no longer sat stiffly erect when speaking to him; sometimes he even went so far as to cross his legs. The young officer had begun to look at home in his uniform, less like some fresh-faced schoolboy dressed for Carnevale.

‘Was it about this dead man, do you know?’

Pucetti thought a moment, then said, ‘I’d guess not, sir. He seemed very relaxed about whatever it was.’

Changing topic, Brunetti said, ‘I asked when I came in, but no one’s called, which means we have no idea who he is or where he was from.’

‘Senegal, probably,’ Pucetti suggested.

‘I know. That’s likely, but we need to be sure if we want to have any hope of identifying him. He had no papers on him, and the fact that no one has called to identify him or to report that one of the
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is missing means we aren’t going to get any help from the rest of them.’ He was conscious of how dismissive that sounded of an entire class of people, ‘the rest of them’, but he had no time now to concern himself with niceties of expression. ‘So we have to find out who he was, and to do that we need someone who has contact with the others.’

‘Someone they trust?’ Pucetti asked.

‘Or fear,’ Brunetti said, not much liking the sound of that, either.

‘Who?’

‘Whom they fear is probably easier,’ Brunetti answered. ‘I’d say we start with the people who rent rooms to them. Then we try the wholesalers who sell them the bags. Then the officers here who have arrested them,’ he said, holding up a finger as he named each group.

‘It might be easier to start with us, sir. That is, those of us who have arrested them,’ Pucetti said, adding, ‘Because we’re right here, if for no other reason.’

‘Of course,’ Brunetti said. ‘That technician get the photos done yet?’

‘Not that I know of, sir,’ Pucetti answered, starting to get to his feet, ‘but I could go down to the lab and see if he’s got them.’

‘Yes. Do,’ Brunetti told him. ‘And see if
there’s any sign of Signorina Elettra while you’re down there, would you?’

Pucetti saluted and was gone. Brunetti took the paper out of his briefcase and finished reading the first section, looking in vain for any sort of editorial comment on the death. That was sure to come, he knew.

By the time he started the second section, the first page of which carried a longer, though no more informative, story about the murder, Pucetti was back, carrying in his hand a thick pile of full page photos.

Quickly Brunetti flipped through them, discarding the photos of the whole body in place and selecting those taken from each side and from front on. The man’s eyes were closed, and the solemnity of his face was such that no one who saw the photos would expect him ever to open them again.

‘Handsome devil, wasn’t he?’ Pucetti asked, looking down at the photos. ‘How old would you say he was?’

‘I doubt he was more than thirty,’ Brunetti said.

Pucetti nodded in agreement. ‘Who’d want to do something like that to one of these guys? They don’t cause any real trouble.’

‘You ever arrest one?’ Brunetti asked.

‘A couple,’ Pucetti said. ‘But that doesn’t mean they aren’t good people.’

‘Does Savarini say that?’ Brunetti asked.

Pucetti paused a moment, then finally answered, ‘That’s different.’

‘And Novello?’

‘Why wouldn’t he?’

‘Because they broke his finger the last time he was sent to arrest them.’

‘It was an accident, sir,’ said an affronted Pucetti. ‘He grabbed the big sports bag that held everything the man wanted to sell, and the guy did what anyone would do: he tried to yank it back. Savarini’s finger was in the strap, and when the
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pulled at it, he broke his finger. But it wasn’t like the guy intended to do it.’

‘So it’s not broken?’ Brunetti asked, curious to see how Pucetti would answer.

‘No, of course it’s broken. Only he didn’t mean to do it, and Savarini doesn’t bear him any ill will. I know because he told me so. Besides,’ continued an even more heated Pucetti, ‘he was one of the cops who jumped into the canal to save the one who fell in.’

‘While trying to evade arrest, if memory serves,’ Brunetti remarked.

Pucetti started to speak but stopped and gave Brunetti a long look, then asked, ‘Are you playing with me, sir?’

Brunetti laughed.

An hour later, Pucetti and Brunetti had shown the photos to most of the officers at the Questura. Halfway through the process, Brunetti began to notice an unsettling correlation between their political affiliations and their responses. Most of those he knew to be sympathetic to the current government displayed little sympathy for, indeed, little interest in, the dead man. The further left on the political spectrum, the more likely it was that people would display sympathy for the man in the photo. Only two officers, both of them women, showed real sorrow that a man so young should have been killed.

Gravini, who had been in the squad that had made the last raid on the
ambulanti
, thought he
recognized the man in the photo but also said he was sure he had never seen him among the
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he had arrested.

They were down in the officers’ squad room, so Brunetti gave an inquiring glance around and asked, ‘Do you have photos of those who have been?’

‘Rubini has all the papers in his office, sir,’ the sergeant answered. ‘Arrest reports, copies of their passports, their
permessi di soggiorno
, at least for those who have them, and copies of the letters we send them.’

‘Letters?’ interrupted Pucetti. ‘Why do we bother to send them letters?’

‘We don’t actually send them,’ Gravini answered. ‘We give them to them, saying they have forty-eight hours to leave the country.’ He snorted at the absurdity of this, then added, ‘And then we arrest them a week later and give them another copy of the same letter.’

Brunetti waited for his next comment, which he assumed would be much in line with what the old man on the vaporetto had said that morning. Gravini shrugged and said, ‘I don’t know why we bother. They aren’t hurting anyone, just trying to make a living. And no one forces people to buy the bags from them.’

Pucetti interrupted suddenly, ‘Gravini, you’re one of the ones who went into the canal, aren’t you?’

Gravini lowered his head, as if embarrassed at having been caught at some folly. ‘What was I supposed to do? He was new, the one who fell
in. It was probably the first time he’d been caught in one of our raids. He panicked, really just a kid, and he ran. What else would he do, with cops all over the place, running at him? It was over by the Misericordia, and he ran up that bridge that doesn’t have a parapet. Lost his footing or something and fell in. I could hear him screaming all the way back by the church. When we got there, he was flailing around like a madman, so I did the first thing that came into my head: I went right in after him. Didn’t realize until I was in the water that it wasn’t very deep, at least not near the sides. I don’t know what he was making all the fuss about.’ Gravini tried to make himself sound angry but without much success. ‘Ruined my jacket, and Bocchese spent a day cleaning the mud out of my pistol.’

Brunetti chose not to comment on this. ‘Any idea where you might have seen this one, then?’ he asked, tapping his forefinger on the full-face photo.

‘No, sir. It doesn’t come to me, but I know I’ve seen him somewhere.’ He took the photos and looked through the series. At last he said, ‘Can I take these, sir? And maybe show them to some of the men I’ve arrested?’

Brunetti was not sure how to refer to the other
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. ‘Colleagues’ of the dead man would sound strange, suggesting as it did an ordered world of work. He finally decided on, ‘His friends?’

‘Yes. There’s one I’ve arrested at least five times; I can ask him.’

‘But what if he sees you coming?’ Pucetti asked.

‘No, no, it’s nothing like that,’ Gravini insisted. ‘A bunch of them live in an apartment off Via Garibaldi, down near where my mother lives, so I see them when I go to visit her, when . . .’ he trailed off, seeking a way to say it. ‘Well, when we’re both off work. He says he used to be a teacher, Muhammad. I can ask him.’

‘You think he’d trust you?’ Brunetti asked.

Gravini shrugged. ‘No way to know until I ask him.’

Brunetti told Gravini to keep the photos and to show them around, perhaps ask Muhammad if he would do the same among the men with whom he worked. ‘Gravini,’ he added, ‘tell them that all we’re asking for is a name and an address. No questions after that, no trouble, nothing else.’ He wondered if the Africans would trust the word of the police and suspected that they had no reason to do so. Even though there were men like Gravini, willing to jump into a canal to save them, Brunetti feared that the prevailing attitude of the police would more closely resemble that of the old man on the vaporetto and thus not encourage cooperation.

He thanked both men and went down to Signorina Elettra’s office, where he found her at her desk. For some days, Signorina Elettra had been keeping the gloom of winter at bay with a refulgence of colour: she had begun last Wednesday with yellow shoes, Thursday with emerald green slacks and Friday with an orange
jacket. Today, to begin the week, she had decided to skip her throat – no doubt because a bright scarf would be too predictable an accessory – and had wrapped her hair in a piece of silk that seemed to be covered with parrots.

‘Lovely birds,’ Brunetti said as he came in.

She glanced up, smiled, and thanked him. ‘I think next week I might suggest to the Vice-Questore that he try the same thing.’

‘Which? Yellow shoes or the turban?’ Brunetti asked, just to show he had noticed.

‘No, his ties. They’re always so very sober.’

‘Not the tie-pins, though. They have different coloured jewels in them, don’t they?’ Brunetti asked.

‘One would hardly notice, they’re so small,’ she said. ‘I wonder if I should get him some.’

Brunetti had no idea if she meant ties or jewelled pins for them: it hardly mattered. ‘And put them down as office expenses?’ he asked.

‘Of course,’ she answered. ‘Perhaps I’d list them as “maintenance”.’ Then, turning to business, she asked, ‘What is it I can help you with, Commissario?’

Hearing her, Brunetti wondered when she had last asked anyone what she could do for them, whether himself or the Vice-Questore. ‘I’d like you to see what you can find out about the
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,’ he said.

‘It’s all in here,’ she answered, pointing at her computer. ‘Or in the Interpol files.’

‘No,’ he said, ‘not that sort of information. I want to know what people know, really know,
about them: where they live and how they live, what sort of people they are.’

‘Most are from Senegal, I believe,’ she said.

‘Yes, I know. But I want to know if they’re from the same place and if they know one another or are related to one another.’

‘And,’ she continued, ‘presumably, you’d also like to know who the murdered man is.’

‘Of course,’ he answered. ‘But I don’t think that’s going to be an easy thing to find out. No one has called about him. The only people who volunteered anything were some American tourists who were there at the time, and all they saw was a very tall man with hairy hands who they said looked “Mediterranean”, by which they mean dark. There was another man, but all they noticed about him was that he was shorter than the other. Aside from that, the shooting might as well have taken place in another city, for all we know. Or on another planet.’