by Donna Leon
They laughed at the absurdity, and it was like this, easy and
comfortably united in gentle mockery of military tradition, that
Comandante Bembo found them.
"Ruffo!" a voice barked from behind Brunetti.
The boy's smile vanished and he straightened up to stand as stiff as
one of the pilings in the laguna, his heels clacking together at the
same instant as his stiff fingers snapped to his forehead in salute.
"What are you doing here?" Bembo demanded.
"I don't have a class this hour, Comandante/ Ruffo answered, staring
straight ahead.
"And what were you doing?"
"I was talking to this gentleman, sir he said, eyes still on the far
wall.
"Who gave you permission to talk to him?"
Ruffo's face was a mask. He made no attempt to answer the question.
"Well?" demanded Bembo in an even tighter voice.
Brunetti turned to face the Comandante and acknowledged his arrival
with a gentle nod. Keeping his voice mild, he asked, "Does he need
permission to speak to the police, sir?"
"He's a minor Bembo said.
"I'm not sure I follow you, sir' Brunetti said, careful to smile to
show his confusion. He could have understood if Bembo had said
something about military rank or the need to respond only to orders
from a direct superior, but to cite the boy's youth as a reason why he
should not talk to the police displayed what seemed to Brunetti an
inordinate attention to legal detail. "I'm not sure I see how Cadet
Ruffo's age is important."
"It means his parents should be with him when you talk to him."
"Why is that, sir?" Brunetti asked, curious to hear Bembo's reason.
It took a moment for Bembo to find it. Finally he said, To see that he
understands the questions you ask."
His doubts as to the boy's ability to understand simple questions
hardly spoke well of the quality of instruction on offer at the school.
Brunetti turned back to the cadet, who stood rigid, arms rod-like at
his side, his chin a stranger to his collar. "You understood what I
asked you, didn't you, Cadet?"
"I don't know, sir the boy answered, keeping his eyes on the wall.
"We were talking about his classes, sir Brunetti said, 'and Cadet Ruffo
was telling me how much he enjoyed Physics."
"Is this true, Ruffo?" the Comandante demanded, not the least
concerned that he was openly doubting Brunetti's veracity.
"Yes, sir the boy answered. "I was telling the gentleman that I had
two elective subjects and how much I liked them."
"Don't you like the required subjects?" Bembo demanded. Then, to
Brunetti: "Was he complaining about them?"
"No/ Brunetti answered calmly. "We didn't discuss them." He wondered,
as he spoke, why Bembo should be so concerned at the mere possibility
that a student had said
something negative about his classes. What else would a student be
expected to say about his classes?
Abruptly Bembo said, "You can go, Ruffo." The boy saluted and,
ignoring Brunetti's presence, walked out of the room, leaving the door
open after him.
Till thank you to let me know before you question any of my cadets
again Bembo said in an unfriendly voice.
Brunetti hardly thought it worth contesting the point, so agreed that
he would. The Comandante turned towards the door, hesitated for a
moment as though he wanted to turn back and say something to Brunetti,
but then thought better of it and left.
Brunetti found himself alone in Ruffo's room, feeling in some way
invited there as a guest and thus bound by the rules of hospitality,
one of which was never to betray the host's trust by invading the
privacy of his home. The first thing Brunetti did was to open the
front drawer of the desk and remove the papers he found there. Most of
them were notes, what appeared to be rough drafts for essays the boy
was writing; some were letters.
"Dear Giuliano," Brunetti read, entirely without shame or scruple.
"Your aunt came to see me last week and told me you were doing well in
school." The calligraphy had the neat roundness of the generation
previous to his own, though the lines wandered up and down, following
an invisible path known only to the writer. It was signed "Nonna'.
Brunetti glanced through the other papers, found nothing of interest,
and put them all back into the drawer.
He opened the doors of the closet next to Ruffo's desk and checked the
pockets of the jackets hanging there; he found nothing but small change
and cancelled vaporetto tickets. There was a laptop computer on the
desk, but he didn't even waste his time turning it on, knowing he would
have no idea what to do with it. Under the bed, pushed back against
the wall, he saw what looked like a violin case. The books were
what he would have expected: textbooks, a driver's manual, a history of
AC Milan and other books about soccer. The bottom shelf held musical
scores: Mozart's violin sonatas and the first violin part of one of the
Beethoven string quartets. Brunetti shook his head in bemusement at
the contrast between the music in the Discman and the music on the
shelf. He opened the door to the closet that must belong to Ruffo's
roommate and cast his eye across the surface of the second desk, but he
saw nothing of interest.
Struck again by the neatness of the room, the almost surgical precision
with which the bed was made, Brunetti toyed for a moment with the idea
of drugging his son Raffi and having him brought down here to be
enrolled. But then he remembered what it was that had brought him to
this room, and levity slipped away on silent feet.
The other rooms were empty or, at least, no one responded to his
knocking, so he went back towards the bathroom where the boy had been
found. The scene of crime team was at work, and the body still lay
there, now entirely covered with the dark woollen cloak.
"Who cut him down?" Santini asked when he saw Brunetti.
"Vianello."
"He shouldn't have done that," another of the technicians called from
across the room.
That's exactly what he told me," Brunetti answered.
Santini shrugged. The would have done it, too." There were
affirmative grunts from two of the men.
Brunetti was about to ask what the crew thought had happened, when he
heard footsteps. He glanced aside and saw Dottor Venturi, one of
Rizzardi's assistants. Both men nodded, as much acknowledgement of the
other's presence as either was willing to give.
Insensitive to most human feelings that were not directed towards him,
Venturi stepped up close to the body and set his medical bag by the
head. He went down on one knee and
drew the edge of the cloak from the boy's face.
Brunetti looked away, back into the showers, where Pedone, Santini's
assistant, was holding a plastic spray bottle up towards the top of the
right-hand wall. As Brunetti watched, he squirted cloud after tiny
cloud of dark grey powder on to the walls, moving carefully from left
to right and then back to his starting point to repe
at the process
about twenty centimetres below.
By the time all the walls were coated, Venturi was back on his feet.
Brunetti saw that he had left the boy's face uncovered.
"Who cut him down?" was the first thing the doctor asked.
"One of my men. I told him to," Brunetti answered and bent down to
draw the edge of the cape back across the boy's face. He rose up again
and looked at Venturi, saying nothing.
"Why did you do that?"
Appalled at the question, Brunetti ignored it, irritated that he had to
speak to a man capable of asking it. He asked, "Does it look like
suicide?"
Venturi's long pause made it obvious that he wanted to exchange
discourtesies with Brunetti, but when Santini turned to him and said,
"Well?" the doctor answered, "I won't have any idea until I can take a
look at his insides." Then, directly to Santini, "Was there a chair,
something he could stand on?"
One of the other technicians called over, "A chair. It was in the
shower."
"You didn't move it, did you?" Venturi demanded of him.
"I photographed it," the man answered, speaking with glacial clearness.
"Eight times, I think. And then Pedone dusted it for prints. And then
I moved it so it wouldn't get in his way when he dusted the shower
stall." Pointing with his chin to a wooden chair that stood in front
of one of the sinks, he added, That's it, over there."
The doctor ignored the chair. Till have my report sent to
3i you when I'm finished he said to Brunetti, then picked up his bag
and left.
When Venturi's footsteps had died away, Brunetti asked Santini, "What
does it look like to you?"
"He could have done it himself the technician answered. He pointed to
some marks that stood out from the darker grey of the coating on the
walls of the shower. There are two long swipes across the wall here,
at about shoulder height. He could have done that."
"Would that have happened?"
"Probably. It's instinct: no matter how much they want to die, the
body doesn't."
Pedone, who had been openly listening to this, added, "It's clean, sir.
No one had a fight in there, if that's what you're wondering about."
When it seemed that his partner wasn't going to add anything, Santini
continued: "It's what they do, sir, when they hang themselves. Believe
me. If there's a wall near them, they try to grab it; can't help
themselves."
"It's the way boys do it, isn't it, hanging?" Brunetti asked, not
looking down at Moro.
"More than girls, yes Santini agreed. His voice took on an edge of
anger and he asked, "What was he seventeen? eighteen? How could he do
something like that?"
"God knows Brunetti said.
"God didn't have anything to do with this, Santini said angrily, though
it was unclear whether his remark called into question the deity's
charity or his very existence. Santini went out into the hall, where
two white-coated attendants from the hospital waited, a rolled-up
stretcher leaning against the wall between them. "You can take him now
he said. He remained outside while they went in, put the boy on the
stretcher, and carried him from the room. When they were abreast of
Santini, he put up a monitory hand. They stopped, and he leaned down
to pick up the end of the dark blue military
cloak that was dragging on the ground behind the stretcher. He tucked
it under the boy's leg and told the attendants to take him out to the
boat.
Recognizing it as the temptation of moral cowardice, Brunetti pushed
aside the desire to join the others on the police boat to the hospital
and from there to the Questura. Perhaps it was the flash of terror
when he first saw the boy's body, or perhaps it was Brunetti's
admiration for the elder Moro's inconvenient honesty, but something
there was that urged Brunetti to get a more complete picture of the
boy's death. The suicides of young boys were ever more frequent:
Brunetti had read somewhere that, with almost mathematical regularity,
they increased in times of economic well-being and decreased when times
were bad. During wars, they virtually disappeared. He assumed his own
son was as subject to the vagaries of adolescence as any other boy:
carried up and down on the waves of his hormones, his popularity, or
his success at school. The idea of Raffi's ever being driven to
suicide was inconceivable, but that must be what every parent
thought.
Until evidence suggested that the boy's death had not been suicide,
Brunetti had no mandate to question anyone about
any other possibility: not his classmates, still less his parents. To
do so would be the worst sort of ghoulish curiosity as well as a
flagrant misuse of his power. Admitting all of this, he went out into
the courtyard of the Academy and, using the telefonino he had
remembered to bring with him, called Signorina Elettra's direct line at
the Questura.
When she answered, he told her where he was and asked that she check
the phone book for Moro's address, which he thought must be in
Dorsoduro, though he couldn't remember why he associated the man with
that sestiere.
She asked no questions, told him to wait a moment, then said the number
was unlisted. There elapsed another minute or two, then she gave him
the Dorsoduro address. She told him to wait, then told him the house
was on the canal running alongside the church of Madonna della Salute.
Tt's got to be the one next to the low brick one that has the terrace
with all the flowers she said.
He thanked her, then made his way back up the stairs to the dormitory
rooms on the top floor and went along the still silent corridor,
checking the names outside of the doors. He found it at the end:
moro/cavani. Not bothering to knock, Brunetti entered the room. Like
that of Ruffo, the room was clean, almost surgical: bunk beds and two
small desks opposite them, nothing left in sight to clutter up their
surfaces. He took a pen from the inside pocket of his jacket and used
it to open the drawer of the desk nearest him. With the pen he flipped
open the notebook that lay inside. Ernesto's name was on the inside of
the cover and the book was filled with mathematical formulae, written
out in a neat, square hand. He shoved the notebook to the back of the
drawer and opened the one beneath it, with much the same result, though
this one contained exercises in English.
He shoved the drawer closed and turned his attention to the closet
between the two desks. One door had Moro's name on it. Brunetti
pulled it open from the bottom with his foot.
Inside, there were two uniforms in dry cleaning bags, a denim jacket,
and a brown tweed coat. The only things he found in the pockets were
some small change and a dirty handkerchief.
A bookcase contained nothing more than textbooks. He lacked the will
to take down and examine each of them. He took one final look around
the room and left, careful to hook his pen in the handle to pull the
door sh
ut.
He met Santini on the steps and told him to check Moro's room then left
the school and went down to the edge of the Canale della Giudecca.
Turning right, he started to walk along the Riva, intending to catch a
vaporetto. As he walked, he kept his attention on the buildings on the
other side of the canal: Nico's Bar and, above it, an apartment he had
spent a lot of time in before he met Paola; the church of the Gesuati,
where once a decent man had been pastor; the former Swiss Consulate,
the flag gone now. Have even the Swiss abandoned us? he wondered.
Ahead was the Bucintoro, the long narrow boats long gone, evicted by
the scent of Guggenheim money, Venetian oarsmen gone to make space for
even more tourist shops. He saw a boat coming from Redentore and
hurried on to the imbarcndero at Palanca to cross back to the Zattere.
When he got off, he looked at his watch and realized that it really did
take less than five minutes to make the trip from the Giudecca. Even
so, the other island still seemed, as it had ever seemed, as far
distant as the Galapagos.
It took less than five minutes to weave his way back to the broad campo
that surrounded La Madonna della Salute, and there he found the house.
Again resisting the impulse to delay, he rang the bell and gave his
title and name.
"What do you want?" a woman's voice asked.
"I'd like to speak to Dottor Moro," he said, announcing at least the