Death in a Strange Country (20 page)

After lunch, he had the
driver take him back to Foster’s apartment. The same two soldiers were sitting
in their Jeep in front of the apartment. They both got out when Brunetti
approached them and waited for him to draw up to them. ‘Good afternoon,’ he
said, smiling pleasantry. ‘I’d like to have another look inside the apartment
if that’s possible.’

‘Have you spoken to Major
Butterworth about this, sir?’ the one with more stripes asked.

‘No, not today. But he
gave me permission yesterday.’

‘Could you tell me why
you want to go back, sir?’

‘My notebook. I was
jotting down the names of his books yesterday, and I must have set it down on
the bookcase inside. I didn’t have it when I got on the train, and this was the
last place I’d been.’ He saw that the soldier was about to refuse, so he added,
‘You’re welcome to come inside with me if you’d like. All I want to do is
pickup the notebook if it’s there. I don’t think the apartment is going to be
any help to me, but I have notes on other things in there, and they’re
important to me.’ He was talking too much, he realized.

The two soldiers
exchanged glances, and apparently one of them decided that it would be all right.
The one he had spoken to handed his rifle to his companion and said, ‘If you’ll
come along with me, sir, I’ll let you into the apartment.’

Smiling his gratitude,
Brunetti followed him towards the front entrance and into the elevator. Neither
of them spoke during the short ride to the third floor nor while the soldier
opened the door. He stepped back and allowed Brunetti to walk past
him
into the apartment, then closed the door behind them.
         
                     
             

Brunetti went into the
living room and up to the bookcase. He made a show of looking for the notebook,
which was in his jacket pocket, even stooped down and looked behind a chair
that stood beside the bookcase. ‘That’s strange. I’m sure I had it here.’ He
pulled a few books forward and looked behind them. Nothing. He paused,
reflecting on where else he might have set it down. ‘I got myself a drink of
water in the kitchen,’ he said to the soldier. ‘I might have set it down in
there.’ Then, as if he had just thought of it, ‘Is there any chance that
someone might have come in and found it?’

‘No, sir. No one’s been
in here since you left.’

‘Good,’ Brunetti answered
with his friendliest smile, ‘then it’s got to be here.’ He preceded the soldier
into the kitchen and went to the worktop beside the sink. He looked around him,
bent down to look under the kitchen table, then stood. As he did, he placed
himself directly in front of the water heater. The screws on the front panel
which he had replaced yesterday, careful to leave them at exact verticals and
horizontals, had all been moved and were all slightly out of true. So someone
had checked and found that the bags were missing.

‘It doesn’t seem to be
here, sir.’

‘No, it doesn’t,’
Brunetti agreed in a voice into which he put real confusion. ‘Very strange. I’m
sure I had it while I was here.’

‘Could you have dropped
it in your car, sir?’ the soldier suggested.

‘The driver would have
told me,’ Brunetti said, then, as if the idea had just come to him, ‘if he
found it.’

‘Better check your
vehicle, sir.’

They left the apartment
together, the soldier careful to lock the door behind him. As they descended in
the elevator, Brunetti decided that it would be far too coincidental for him to
find the notebook hidden behind the back seat of the car. Consequently, when
they emerged from the building, he thanked the soldier for his help and went
back to his own car.

Not sure if the American
was within hearing distance and not certain about whether he understood
Italian, he played it straight and asked his driver if he had found a notebook
in the car. Obviously, he had not. Brunetti opened the back door, stuck his
hand behind the back seat, and felt around in the empty space. He found, not at
all to his surprise, nothing. He pulled himself from the car and turned back
towards the Jeep. He opened his hands in an empty, significant gesture, and
then got into the back seat and asked the driver to take him to the station.

* *
* *

12

The only train leaving Vicenza at that hour was a local
that stopped at all of the stations between Vicenza and Venice, but, since the
Intercity from Milan was not due for another forty minutes, Brunetti opted for
the local, though he hated the stop-and-go trip, with the continual change of
passengers and the great tide of students who invariably surged on and off at
Padova.

In the dining-hall, he
had picked up a copy of an English-language newspaper that lay abandoned on the
table where he sat He took it now from his inner pocket and began to read.
The
Stars and Stripes,
it announced itself in red letters, apparently a paper
published by the American military in Europe. The front page carried a story
about a hurricane that had swept its way through a place called Biloxi, a city
he believed to be in Bangladesh. No, in America, but how could that name be
explained? There was a large picture of houses and cars overturned, trees
shoved over onto one another. He turned a page and read that a pit bull had
bitten off the hand of a sleeping child in Detroit, a city he was certain was
in America. There was no picture. The Secretary of Defense had assured Congress
that all those contractors who had defrauded the government would be prosecuted
to the full extent of the law. Remarkable, the similarity between the rhetoric
of American politics and Italian. He had no doubt that the illusory nature of
that promise would be the same in both countries.

There were three pages of
cartoons, none of which made the least bit of sense to him, and six of sports
news, which made even less. In one of the cartoons, a caveman swung a club, and
on one of the sports pages, a man in a striped uniform did the same. Beyond
that, all was arcana to Brunetti. The last page carried a continuation of the
report on the hurricane, but then the train pulled into Venice station and he
abandoned the story. He left the paper on the seat beside him; perhaps someone
else could profit from it better than he.

It was after seven when
they arrived, but the sky was still light. That would end this weekend; he
thought, when the clocks were set back an hour, and it got dark earlier. Or was
it the other way, and it stayed bright longer? He hoped that it took most
people as long to figure this out each year as it did him. He crossed the
Bridge of the Scalzi and entered the rabbit warren of streets that wove their
way back towards his apartment. Few people, even at this hour, passed him,
since most went to the station or to the bus depot at Piazzale Roma by boat.
Usually as he walked, he glanced at the fronts of buildings, up at their
windows, down narrow streets, always alert to something he might not have
noticed before. Like many of his townsmen, Brunetti never tired of studying the
city, every so often delighting himself by discovering something he had never
noticed before. Over the course of the years, he had worked out a system that
allowed him to reward himself for each discovery: a new window earned him a
coffee; a new statue of a saint, however small, got him a glass of wine; and
once, years ago, he had noticed on a wall he must have passed five times a week
since he was a child a lapidary stone that commemorated the site of the Aldine
Publishing House, the oldest in Italy, founded in the fourteenth century. He
had gone right around the corner and into a bar in Campo San Luca and ordered
himself a Brandy Alexander, though it was ten in the morning and the barman had
given Brunetti a strange look when he placed the glass in front of him.

Tonight, however, the
streets failed to capture his interest; he was still back in Vicenza, still
seeing the grooves in the four screws that held the front panel of the water
heater in Foster’s apartment, each of them slightly moved from the careful
straight lines in which Brunetti had left them the day before, each giving the
lie to the soldier’s assertion that no one had been in the apartment after
Brunetti. So now they - whoever ‘they’ were - knew that Brunetti had taken the
drugs from the apartment and had said nothing about it.

He let himself into the
building and had unlocked their mailbox before he remembered that Paola would
have been home hours ago and would have checked the post. He began the ascent
to his home, grateful for the first flight, low and gentle, a remnant of the
original fifteenth-century
palazzo.
At the top, the stairs jogged off to
the left and rose up, in two steep flights, to the next floor. A door awaited
him there, which he unlocked and closed behind him. Another flight, these
dangerous and steep. They doubled back above themselves and carried him up the
last twenty-five steps to the door of his apartment. He unlocked the door and
let himself in, finally home.

There was the smell of
cooking to welcome him, one scent mingling with another. Tonight he could make
out the faint odour of squash, which meant that Paola was making
risotto con
zucca,
available only in this season, when the dark green, squat
barucca
squash were brought from Chioggia, across the
laguna.
And after
that? Shank of veal? Roasted with olives and white wine?

He hung his jacket in the
cupboard and went down the hall to the kitchen. The room was hotter than usual,
which meant the oven was on. The large frying pan on the stove revealed, when
he lifted the lid, bright orange chunks of
zucca,
frying slowly with
minced onions. He took a glass from the rack beside the sink and pulled a
bottle of Ribolla from the refrigerator. He poured a little more than a
mouthful, tasted, drank it down, then filled the glass and replaced the bottle.
The warmth of the kitchen swept up about him. He loosened his tie and went back
down the corridor. ‘Paola?’

‘I’m here, in the back,’
he heard her answering call.

He didn’t answer but went
into the long living room and then out onto the balcony. This was the best time
of day for Brunetti, for he could see, from their terrace, the sunset off in
the West. On the clearest of days, he could see the Dolomites from the small
window in the kitchen, but it was so late in the day now that they would be
hazed over and invisible. He stayed where he was, forearms propped on the railing,
studying the rooftops and towers that never ceased to please him. He heard
Paola move down the hall, back into the kitchen, heard the clang of shifted
pots, but he stayed where he was, listening to the eight o’clock bells ring out
from San Polo, then to the answering resonance of San Marco, a few seconds
late, as always, come booming across the city. When all the bells were silent,
he went back into the house, closing the door against the growing evening
chill.

In the kitchen, Paola
stood at the stove, stirring the risotto, pausing now and again to add more
boiling broth. ‘Glass of wine?’ he asked. She shook her head, still stirring.
He passed behind her, paused long enough to kiss her on the back of the neck,
and poured himself another glass of wine.

‘How was Vicenza?’ she
asked.

‘Better to ask me how was
America.’

‘Yes, I know,’ she said. ‘It’s
incredible, isn’t it?’

‘Were you ever there?’

‘Years ago. With the
Alvises.’ Seeing his puzzled look, she explained. ‘The Colonel, when he was
stationed in Padova. There was some sort of party at the officers’ club, for
Italian and American officers. About ten years ago.’

‘I
don’t remember.’

‘No, you didn’t go. It
was when you were in Naples. I think. Is it still the same?’

‘Depends on what it was
like then,’ he said, smiling.

‘Don’t be smart with me,
Guido. What was it like?’

‘It was very clean, and
everyone smiled a great deal.’

‘Good,’ she said,
stirring again. ‘Then it hasn’t changed.’

‘I wonder why it is, that
they always smile so much.’ He had noticed the same thing, each time he was in
America.

She turned away from the
risotto and stared at him. ‘Why shouldn’t they smile, Guido? Think about it.
They’re the richest people in the world. Everyone has to defer to them in
politics, and they have convinced themselves, somehow, that everything they
have ever done in their very brief history has been done for no purpose other
than to further the general good of mankind. Why shouldn’t they smile?’ She
turned back to the pan and muttered darkly as she felt the rice sticking to the
bottom. She poured more broth into it and stirred quickly for a moment.