Death in a Strange Country (15 page)

The scene was a blending
of cartoon cliché and every bureaucrat’s worst nightmare: in front of the
window, the top two buttons of her blouse open, stood Anita, from the Ufficio
Stranieri; a single step from her, and moving backward, stood a red-faced
Vice-Questore Patta. Brunetti caught this in a glance and dropped his briefcase
in an attempt to give Anita time to turn her back on the two men and button her
blouse. As she did this, Brunetti knelt to retrieve the papers that had spilled
from the briefcase, and Patta went to sit behind his desk: It took Anita as
long to button her blouse as it did Brunetti to stuff the papers back into his
briefcase.

When everything was back
where it should be, Patta said, using the formal ‘lei’, ‘Thank you, Signorina.
I’ll have these papers taken down to you as soon as I sign them.’

She nodded and made
towards the door. As she walked past Brunetti, she gave him a wink and an
enormous smile, both of which he ignored.

When she was gone,
Brunetti walked over to Patta’s desk. ‘I’ve just got back from Vicenza, sir. From
the American base.’

‘Yes? What did you find?’
Patta asked, face still suffused with a residual blush that Brunetti had to
force himself to ignore.

‘Nothing much. I took a
look at his apartment.’

‘Did you find anything?’

‘No, sir. Nothing. I’d
like to go back there tomorrow.’

‘Why?’

‘To speak to some of the
people who knew him.’

‘What difference will
that make? It’s clear that this is a simple case of a mugging that went too
far. Who cares who knew him or what they have to say about him?’

Brunetti recognized the
signs of Patta’s growing indignation. If left unleashed, he would work himself
up to forbidding Brunetti to continue the investigation at Vicenza. Since a
simple mugging was the most convenient explanation, it would be the one towards
which Patta would direct his hopes and, consequently, the investigation.

‘I’m sure you’re right,
sir. But I thought that, until we could find the person who did it, it wouldn’t
hurt if we could give the impression that the source of the crime lay outside
the city. You know how tourists are. Just the least little thing will frighten
them and keep them away.’

Did Patta’s rosy blush
diminish discernibly at that, or was it just his imagination? ‘I’m glad to see
you agree with me, Commissario.’ After a pause that could only be called
pregnant, Patta added, ‘For once.’ He extended a well-manicured hand and
straightened the folder at the centre of his desk. ‘Do you think there’s any
connection with Vicenza?’

Brunetti paused before he
answered, delighted at the ease with which Patta was transferring the
responsibility of the decision to him. ‘I don’t know, sir. But I don’t think it
could hurt us here if we gave the impression that there was.’

The pause with which his
superior greeted this was artistic, his hesitation against any irregularity of
procedure perfectly balanced against his desire to leave no stone unturned in
the search for truth. He pulled his Mont Blanc Meisterst
ü
ck from his breast pocket, opened
the folder, and signed the three papers there, managing to make each repetition
of the name more thoughtful and, at the same time, more decisive. ‘All right,
Brunetti, if you think this is the best way to handle it, go to Vicenza again.
We can’t have people afraid to come to Venice, can we?’

‘No, sir,’ Brunetti
answered, his voice the very pattern of earnestness, ‘we certainly can’t.’
Maintaining the same level voice, Brunetti asked, ‘Will there be anything else,
sir?’

‘No, that’s all,
Brunetti. Give me a full report on what you find.’

‘Of course, sir,’ Brunetti
said and turned towards the door, wondering what bromide Patta would find to
hurl at his departing back.

‘We’ll bring the man to
justice.’ Patta said.

‘We certainly will, sir,’
Brunetti said, only too eager to abet his superior’s use of the plural.

He went back up to his
office, leafed through the issue of
Panorama
that had been in the
briefcase, and gave Bocchese about half an hour to check the prints. At the end
of that time, he went back down to the lab, this time to find Bocchese holding
the blade of a bread-knife up against the whirling disc of the machine. When he
saw Brunetti, he switched off the machine but kept the knife in his hand,
testing the blade against his thumb.

‘Is this an extra job you’ve
got?’ Brunetti asked.

‘No. My wife asks me to
sharpen things every few months, and this is the best way to do it. If your
wife would like me to sharpen anything for her, I’d be glad to.’

Brunetti nodded his
thanks. ‘Find anything?’

‘Yes. There’s a good set
of prints on one of the bags.’

‘His?’

‘Yes.’

‘Anyone else’s?’

‘There are one or two
other prints, probably a woman’s.’

‘What about the second
bag?’

‘Nothing. Clean. Wiped
clean or handled only with gloves.’ Bocchese picked up a piece of paper and
shaved a slice from it with the bread-knife. Satisfied, he set it down on the
desk and turned to Brunetti. ‘I think the first bag had been used for something
else before the . . .’ Bocchese stopped himself, not sure what could be said
here. ‘... before the other substance was put in it.’

‘Used for what,
originally?’

‘I can’t be sure, but it
might have been cheese. There was a trace of some sort of oily residue on the
inside. And that bag had clearly been handled more than the other, had creases
in it, so I’d say it had been used for something else, then had the, uh, powder
put in it.’

When Brunetti said
nothing, Bocchese asked, ‘Aren’t you surprised?’

‘No, I’m not.’

Bocchese pulled a
wooden-handled steak-knife from a paper bag to the left of the machine and felt
its blade with his thumb. ‘Well, if there’s anything else I can do, just let me
know. And tell your wife about the knives.’

‘Yes, thanks, Bocchese,’
Brunetti said. ‘What did you do with the bags?’

Bocchese switched on the
machine, raised the knife towards it, and looked up at Brunetti. ‘What bags?’

* *
* *

9

He saw no reason to remain in the Questura since there
was little chance that he would get any new information until he returned to
Vicenza, so he put his briefcase back in the bottom of the cupboard and left
his office. As he walked from the front door, he quickly glanced both ways,
searching for someone who seemed out of place. He cut to the left, heading
towards Campo Maria Formosa and then to Rialto, using narrow back streets that
would allow him to evade anyone who might be following him as well as the
battalions of ravening tourists who invariably centred their attacks on the
area around San Marco. Each year, it grew harder to have patience with them, to
put up with their stop-and-go walking, with their insistence on walking three
abreast, even in the narrowest
calle.
There were times when he wanted to
scream at them, even push them aside, but he contented himself by taking out
all of his aggression through the single expedient of refusing to stop or in
any way alter his walking in order to allow them a photo opportunity. Because
of this, he was sure his body, back, face, elbow appeared in hundreds of photos
and videos; he sometimes contemplated the disappointed Germans, looking at
their summer videos during the violence of a North Sea storm, as they watched a
purposeful, dark-suited Italian walk in front of Tante Gerda or Onkel Fritz,
blurring, if only for an instant, the vision of sunburned, Lederhosen-clad,
sturdy thighs as they posed upon the Rialto Bridge, in front of the doors of
the Basilica of San Marco, or beside a particularly charming cat. He lived
here, damn it, so they could wait for their stupid pictures until he got past
them, or they could take home a picture of a real Venetian, probably the
closest any of them would come to making contact with the city in any
significant way. And, oh yes, wasn’t he a happy man to take home to Paola?
Especially during her first week of classes.

To avoid this, he stopped
in at Do Mori, his favourite bar, just a few steps from Rialto, and said hello
to Roberto, the grey-haired proprietor. They exchanged a few words, and
Brunetti asked for a glass of Cabernet, the only thing he felt like drinking.
With it, he ate a few of the fried shrimp that were always available at the
bar, then decided to have
a tramezzino,
thick with ham and artichoke. He
had another glass of wine and, after it, he began to feel human, for the first
time that day. Paola always accused him of becoming foul-tempered when he didn’t
eat for a long time, and he was beginning to believe she might be right. He
paid and left, cut back to Rugetta and continued towards his home.

In front of Biancat, he
stopped to study the flowers in the window. Signor Biancat saw him through the
immense glass window, smiled arid nodded, so Brunetti went inside and asked for
ten blue irises. As he wrapped them, Biancat talked about Thailand, from which
he had just returned after a week-long conference of orchid breeders and
growers. It seemed to Brunetti a strange way to spend a week, but then he
reflected that he had, in the past, gone to both Dallas and Los Angeles for
police seminars. Who was he to say that it was stranger to spend a week talking
about orchids than about the incidence of sodomy among serial killers or the
various objects used in rapes?

The stairs to his
apartment generally served as an accurate gauge of the state of his being. When
he felt good, they hardly seemed to be there; when he felt tired, his legs
counted out each of the ninety-four. Tonight, someone had clearly slipped in an
extra flight or two.

He opened the door,
anticipating the smell of home, of food, of the varied odours he had come to
attribute to this place where they lived. Instead, upon entering, he smelled
only the odour of freshly-made coffee, hardly the thing longed for by a man who
had just spent the whole day working in - yes - America.

‘Paola?’ he called and
glanced down the corridor towards the kitchen. Her voice answered him from the
other direction, from the bathroom, and then he smelled the sweet scent of bath
salts that was carried down the hall towards him on a sea of moist, warm air.
Almost eight at night, and she was taking a bath?

He walked down the hall
and stood outside the partly-open door. ‘You in there?’ he asked. The question
was so stupid that she didn’t bother to answer it. Instead, she asked, ‘You
going to wear
your grey suit?’

‘Grey suit?’ he repeated,
stepping into the steam-filled room. He saw her towel-wrapped head, floating
disembodied on a cloud of suds, as though it had been carefully placed there by
the person who had decapitated her. ‘Grey suit?’ he repeated, thinking what an
odd couple they would appear, he in his grey suit and she in her suds.

Her eyes opened, the head
turned towards him, and she gave him The Look, the one that always made him
wonder if she was looking through him to where his suitcase lay in the attic,
estimating how long it would take her to pack it for him. It was enough to
remind him that tonight was the night when they were to go to the Casinò, invited
there, with her parents, by an old friend of her family. It meant a late
dinner, hideously expensive, made worse, or better - he could never decide
which - by the fact that the family friend paid for it with his
golden,
or was it platinum, credit card. And then there always followed an hour or so
of gambling or, worse, watching other people gamble.

Having been the
investigating officer both times that the staff of the Casinò had been
discovered at various sorts of peculation and having been, in both cases, the
arresting officer, Brunetti hated the unctuous politeness with which he was
treated by the Director and the staff. If he gambled and won, he wondered if
the game had been fixed in his favour; if he lost, he had to consider the
possibility that vengeance had been taken. In neither scenario did Brunetti
bother to speculate on the nature of luck.