Death in a Strange Country (10 page)

From beside the stove, he
took the large wooden cutting board and carried it to the table. He sat and
lifted the kitchen towel spread across the board and exposed the half-wheel of
golden polenta that lay, suit warm and now grown firm, beneath it She brought a
salad and the bottle of wine, pouring them both more before she sat down.

‘No, I don’t think it’s
that,’ he said, and spooned liver and onions onto his plate, then added a broad
wedge of polenta. He speared a piece of liver with his fork, pushed onions on
top of it with his knife, and began to eat. As was his habit, he said nothing until
his plate was empty. When the liver was gone and he was mopping the juice up
with what remained of his second helping of polenta, he said; ‘I
think
she might know, or have some idea about, who killed him. Or why he was killed.’

‘Why?’

‘If you’d seen her look
when she saw him. No, not when she saw that he was dead and that it was really
Foster, but when she saw what killed him she was on the edge of panic. She got
sick.’

‘Sick?’

‘Threw up.’

‘Right there?’

‘Yes. Strange, isn’t it?’

Paola thought for a while
before she answered. She finished her wine, poured herself another half-glass. ‘Yes.
It’s a strange reaction to death. And she’s a doctor?’ He nodded. ‘Makes no
sense. What could she be afraid of?’

‘Anything for dessert?’

‘Figs.’

‘I love you.’

‘You mean you love figs,’
she said and smiled.

There were six of them,
perfect and moist with sweetness. He took his knife and began to peel one. When
he was done, juice running down both hands, he cut it in half and handed the
larger piece to her.
 
                    
                     
   

He crammed most of the
other into his mouth and wiped at the juice that ran down his chin. He finished
the fig, ate two more, wiped at his mouth again, cleaned his hands on his
napkin, and said, ‘If you give me a small glass of port, I’ll die a happy man.’

Getting up from the
table, she asked, ‘What else could she be afraid of?’

‘As you said, that she
might be suspected of having something to do with it. Or because she did have
something to do with it.’

She pulled down a squat
bottle of port, but before she poured it into two tiny glasses, she took the
plates from the table and placed them in the sink. When that was done, she
poured them both glasses of port and brought them back to the table. Sweet, it
caught up with the lingering taste of fig. A happy man. ‘But I don’t think ifs
either of those.’

‘Why?’

He shrugged. ‘She doesn’t
seem like a murderer to me.’

‘Because she’s pretty?’
Paola asked and sipped at her port.

He was about to answer
that it was because she was a doctor, but then he remembered what Rizzardi had
said, that the person who killed the young man knew where to put the knife. A
doctor would know that. ‘Maybe,’ he said, then changed the subject and asked, ‘Is
Raffi here?’ He looked at his watch. After ten. His son knew he was supposed to
be home by ten on school nights.

‘Not unless he came in
while we were eating,’ she answered.

‘No, he didn’t,’ Brunetti
answered, sure of the answer, unsure of how he knew.

It was late, they’d had a
bottle of wine, glorious figs, and perfect port. Neither of them wanted to talk
about their son. He’d still be there and still be
theirs in the morning.
     
                     
                     

‘Should I put those in
the sink for you?’ he asked, meaning the dishes but not meaning the question.
     
                     
                     
                   

‘No. I’ll do it. You go
and tell Chiara to go to bed.’ The dishes would have been less trouble.
     
     

‘Fire out?’ he asked when
he walked into the living room.
 
                     
                     
                 

She didn’t hear him. She
was hundreds of miles and years away from him. She sat slouched low in
the
chair, her legs stretched out before her. On the arm of the chair were two
apple cores, a packet of biscuits on the floor beside her.

‘Chiara,’ he said, then
louder, ‘Chiara.’

She glanced up from the
page, not seeing him for a moment, then registering that it was her father. She
looked immediately down at the page, forgetting him.
         
                     
                     
     

‘Chiara, it’s time to go
to bed.’
 
                     
       

She turned a page.

‘Chiara, did you hear me?
It’s time to go to bed.’

Still reading, she pushed
herself up from the chair with one hand. At the bottom of a page, she paused
long enough to look up from the book and give him a kiss, then she was gone,
finger in the page. He lacked the courage to tell her to leave the book behind.
Well, if he got up to the night, he could turn her light off.

Paola came into the
living room. She bent and turned off the light beside the chair, picked up the
apple cores and the packet of biscuits, and went back into the kitchen.
Brunetti switched off the light and went down the corridor towards the bedroom.

* *
* *

6

Brunetti got to the Questura at eight the next morning,
stopping to get the papers on the way. The murder had made the eleventh page of
the
Corriere,
which gave it only two paragraphs, had not made it into
La
Repubblica,
understandable enough on a day that was the anniversary of one
of the bloodier terrorist bombings of the Sixties, but had made it to the front
page of the second section of
Il Gazzettino,
just to the left of a
story, this one with a photo, about three young men who had died when their car
slammed into a tree on the state highway between Dolo and Mestre.

The article said that the
young man, whose name was given as Michele Fooster, was the apparent victim of
a robbery. Drugs were suspected, though the article, in the manner of the
Gazzettino,
didn’t bother to specify what they were suspected of. Brunetti sometimes
reflected that it was a good thing for Italy that a responsible Press was not
one of the requirements for entry into the Common Market.

Inside the main door of
the Questura, the usual human line snaked its way out of the Ufficio Stranieri,
crowded with badly dressed and poorly shod immigrants from Northern Africa and
newly freed Eastern Europe. Brunetti could never see that line without a surge
of historical irony: three generations of his own family had fled Italy,
seeking their fortunes in places as far apart as Australia and Argentina. And
now, in a Europe transformed by recent events, Italy had become the El Dorado
of new waves of still poorer, still darker immigrants. Many of his friends
spoke of these people with contempt, disgust, even anger, but Brunetti could
never see them without superimposing upon them the fantasy image of his own
ancestors, standing in similar lines, themselves badly dressed, ill-shod,
making a hash of the language. And, like these poor devils here, willing to
clean the mess and raise the children of anyone who would pay them.

He went up the steps to
his fourth-floor office, saying good-morning to one or two people, nodding to
others. When he reached the office, he
checked to see if there were any
new papers
on his desk. Nothing had arrived yet, so he considered
himself free to do with the day whatever he saw fit. And that was to reach for
his phone and ask to be connected with the Carabinieri station at the American
base in Vicenza.

This number proved
considerably easier to find and, within minutes, he was speaking to Maggiore
Ambrogiani, who told Brunetti that he had been put in charge of the Italian
investigation into Foster’s murder.

‘Italian?’ Brunetti
asked.

‘Well, Italian as
different from the investigation that the Americans will conduct themselves.’

‘Does that mean there are
going to be problems of jurisdiction?’ Brunetti asked.

‘No, I don’t think so,’
the Maggiore answered. ‘You people in Venice, the civil police, are in charge
of the investigation there. But you’ll need the permission or help of the
Americans for anything you might want to do out here.’

‘In Vicenza?’

Ambrogiani laughed. ‘No,
I don’t want to give mat impression. Only here, on the base. So long as you are
in Vicenza, the city, then we’re in charge, the Carabinieri. But once you come
onto this base, they take over, and it’s the Americans who will help you.’

‘You make it sound as if
you have some doubts about that, Maggiore,’ Brunetti said.

‘No, no doubts. Not at
all.’

‘Then I’ve misinterpreted
your tone.’ But he thought that he hadn’t, not at all. ‘I’d like to come out
there and speak to the people who knew him, worked with him.’

‘They’re Americans, most
of them,’ Ambrogiani said, leaving it to Brunetti to infer the possibilities of
difficulty with language.

‘My English is all right.’

‘Then you should have no
trouble talking to them.’

‘When would it be
possible for me to come there?’

‘This morning? This
afternoon? Whenever you please, Commissario.’

From his bottom drawer,
Brunetti grabbed a railway timetable and flipped through it, looking for the
Venice-Milan line. There was a train leaving in an hour. ‘I
can take the
nine-twenty-five.’

‘Fine. I’ll send a car to
meet you.’

‘Thank you, Maggiore.’

‘A pleasure, Commissario.
A pleasure. I look forward to meeting you.’

They exchanged
courtesies, and Brunetti replaced the receiver. The first thing he did was go
across to the cupboard that stood against the far wall. He opened it and began
to hunt through the things piled and tossed on the bottom: a pair of boots,
three light bulbs in separate boxes, an extension cord, a few old magazines,
and a brown leather briefcase. He pulled out the briefcase and dusted it off
with his hand. Carrying it back to his desk, he put the newspapers inside, then
added a few files he had still to read. From his front drawer, he took a
two-week-old copy of
Panorama
and
threw it in.

The ride was a familiar
one, along the route to Milan, through a checkered pattern of cornfields burned
to painful darkness by the summer drought. He sat on the right side of the
train to avoid the slanting sun that still burned through, even though it was
September and the ferocity of the summer was gone. At Padova, the second stop,
scores of university students crowded off the train, carrying their new text
books as though they were magic talismans that would carry them to a sure,
better future. He remembered mat feeling, that yearly renewal of optimism that
used to come to him while he was at the university, as if each year’s virgin
notebooks carried with them the promise of a better year, a brighter destiny.

At Vicenza, he got down
from the train and looked along the platform for someone in uniform. Seeing no
one, he went down the steps, through the tunnel that ran under the tracks, and
up into the station. In front of it he saw the dark blue sedan marked ‘Carabinieri’,
parked in an arrogant, unnecessary diagonal in front of the station, the driver
engaged equally in a cigarette and the pink pages of the
Gazzettino dello
Sport.

Brunetti tapped on the
back window. The driver turned his head languidly, stabbed out his cigarette,
and reached back to unlock the door. As he opened the door, Brunetti thought
about how different things were here in the North. In Southern Italy, any
Carabiniere who heard an unexpected noise from the back of his car would
immediately be on the floor of the car or crouched on the pavement beside it,
gun in hand, perhaps already firing at the source of the noise. But here, in
sleepy Vicenza, all he did was reach, without question, to allow the stranger into
his car.