by Donna Leon
‘What kind of metal?’ Brunetti asked, suspecting that there would have to be more than the absence of something to have inspired Rizzardi’s call.
‘Copper.’ When Brunetti made no comment, Rizzardi ventured, ‘It’s not my business to tell you how to run yours, but it might be a good idea to get a crime scene team over there today or as soon as you can.’
‘Yes, I will,’ Brunetti said, glad that he was in charge of the Questura that day. ‘What else did you find?’
‘Both arms were broken, but I suspect you know that. There were bruises on his hands, but that could have resulted from the fall.’
‘Do you have any idea how far he fell?’
‘I’m not really an expert on that sort of thing: it happens so infrequently. But I had a look at a couple of books, and I’d guess it was about ten metres.’
‘Third floor?’
‘Possibly. At least the second.’
‘Can you tell anything from the way he landed?’
‘No. But it looks like he tried to push himself forward for a while after he did. The knees of his pants are scraped raw, his knees too; there’s also some scraping on the inside of one ankle that I’d say came from dragging it on the pavement.’
Brunetti interrupted the doctor here. ‘Is there any way to tell which wound killed him?’
‘No.’ Rizzardi’s answer was so immediate that Brunetti realized he must have been waiting for the question. He waited for Brunetti to go on. But Brunetti could think of nothing better to ask than a vague, ‘Anything else?’
‘No. He was healthy and would have lived a long time.’
‘Poor devil.’
‘The man in the morgue said you knew him. Was he a friend?’
Brunetti didn’t hesitate. ‘Yes, he was.’
* * * *
12
Brunetti called the office of Telecom and identified himself as a police officer. He explained that he was trying to trace a phone number but lacked the city code, as he had only the last seven digits, and asked if Telecom could give him the names of the cities where this number existed. Without thinking of verifying the authenticity of his call, without so much as the suggestion that she call him back at the Questura, the woman asked him to hang on a moment while she consulted her computer, and put him on hold. At least there was no music. She was quickly back and told him that the possibilities were Piacenza, Ferrara, Aquilea, and Messina.
Brunetti then asked to be given the names of the people for whom those four numbers were listed, at which point the woman retreated behind Telecom rules, the law of privacy, and ‘approved policy’. She explained that she needed a phone call from the police or from some other organ of the state. Patiently, keeping his voice calm, Brunetti explained again that he was a commissario of police: she could call him at the Questura of Venice. When she asked for the number, Brunetti resisted the temptation to ask if she might not be better advised to check the number in the phone book to be sure she was in fact calling the Questura. Instead, he gave her the number, repeated his name, and hung up. The phone rang almost immediately, and the woman read out four names and addresses.
The names told him nothing. The Piacenza number was a car rental agency, that of Ferrara was for joint names that could be a business office or even a shop. The other two were, presumably, private residences. He dialled the Piacenza number, waited, and when the phone was answered by a man, said he was calling from the Venice police and would like them to check their records and see if they had rented a car to or were familiar with a man called Franco Rossi from Venice. The man asked Brunetti to hold on, covered the phone, and spoke to someone else. A woman then asked him to repeat his request. After he had, he was again told to wait a moment. The moment stretched into a few minutes, but eventually the woman came back and said she was sorry to report they had no record of a client by that name.
On the Ferrara number there was only a message announcing that he had reached the office of Gavini and Cappelli and asking him to leave his name, number, and the reason for his call. He hung up.
In Aquilea he reached what sounded like an old woman who said she had never heard of Franco Rossi. The Messina number was no longer in service.
He had found no driver’s licence in Rossi’s wallet. Even though many Venetians didn’t drive, he might still have had one: the absence of roads was hardly enough to prevent an Italian from exercising his lust for speed. He called down to the drivers’ licence office and was told that licences had been given to nine Franco Rossis. Brunetti checked Rossi’s identification card from the Ufficio Catasto and gave Rossi’s date of birth: no licence had been issued to him.
He tried the number in Ferrara again, but there was still no answer. His phone rang.
‘Commissario?’ It was Vianello.
‘Yes.’
‘We’ve just had a call from the station over in Cannaregio.’
‘The one by Tre Archi?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘What is it?’
‘They responded to a call from a man who said there was a smell coming from the apartment above his, a bad smell.’
Brunetti waited; it took very little imagination to know what was coming: police commissari were not called about bad plumbing or abandoned garbage.
‘He was a student,’ Vianello said, cutting off further speculation.
‘What was it?’
‘It looks like an overdose. At least that’s what they said.’
‘How long ago did the call come in?’
‘About ten minutes.’
‘I’ll come along.’
When they left the Questura, Brunetti was surprised by the heat. Strangely enough, although he always knew the day and usually the date, he very often had to pause to recall whether it was spring or autumn. So when he felt the heat of the day, he had to shake himself free of this strange disorientation before he recalled that it was spring and that the growing heat was to be expected.
There was a different pilot that day, Pertile, a man Brunetti found antipatico. They climbed aboard, Brunetti and Vianello and the two men from the technical squad. One of them cast off and they headed out into the bacino and then quickly turned back into the Arsenale Canal. Pertile turned on the siren and sped through the dead calm waters of the Arsenale, cutting in front of a 52 vaporetto that was just pulling away from the Tana boat stop. ‘This isn’t a nuclear evacuation, Pertile,’ Brunetti said.
The pilot looked back at the men on deck, lowered one hand from the wheel, and the noise of the siren was cut off. It seemed to Brunetti that the pilot urged the boat to greater speed, but he stopped himself from saying anything. At the back of the Arsenale, Pertile swung sharply to the left and past the usual stops: the hospital, Fondamenta Nuove, La Madonna dell’Orto, San Alvise, and then turned into the beginning of the Cannaregio Canal. Just after the first boat stop, they saw a police officer standing on the riva and waving to them as they approached.
Vianello tossed him the rope, and he bent to fix it to an iron ring. When he saw Brunetti, the officer on theriva saluted, then extended a hand to help him from the boat.
‘Where is he?’ Brunetti asked as soon as his feet were again on firm ground.
‘Down this calle, sir,’ he said, turning away from Brunetti and into a narrow street that ran back from the water toward the interior of Cannaregio.
The others filed off the boat, and Vianello turned to tell Pertile to wait for them. Brunetti walking next to the officer, the others in single file behind them, they started down the narrow calle.
They didn’t have far to go, and they didn’t have any trouble in finding the right house: about twenty metres along, a small crowd of people stood clustered in front of a doorway, in which a uniformed officer stood, arms folded.
As Brunetti approached, a man broke away from the crowd but made no attempt to walk toward the policemen. He simply moved away from the others and stood still, hands on his hips, watching the police draw near. He was tall, almost cadaverous
, and had the worst drinker’s nose Brunetti had ever seen: inflamed, enlarged, pitted, and virtually blue at the end. It made Brunetti think of faces he’d once seen in a painting by some Dutch Master - was it of Christ carrying His cross? - horrible, distorted faces boding nothing but pain and evil for all who came within their malignant compass.
In a low voice, Brunetti asked, ‘That the man who found him?’
‘Yes, sir,’ answered the policeman who had met the boat. ‘He lives on the first floor.’
They approached the man, who stuffed his hands into his pockets and started to rock back and forth on his heels, as if he had important work to get on with and resented the police for keeping him from it.
Brunetti stopped in front of him. ‘Good morning, sir. Is it you who called us?’ he asked.
‘Yes, I did. I’m surprised you took the trouble to get here so fast,’ he said, his voice as filled with rancour and hostility as his breath was with alcohol and coffee.
‘You live below him?’ Brunetti asked neutrally.
‘Yeah, I’ve been there for seven years, and if that shit, my landlord, thinks he can get me out by giving me an eviction notice, I’ll tell him where he can shove it.’ He spoke with the accent of Giudecca and, like many of the natives of that island, seemed to think that scurrility was as essential to speech as air to breathing.
‘How long has he lived here?’
‘Doesn’t live here any more, does he?’ the man asked and bent over to engage in a prolonged laugh that ended in a bout of coughing.
‘How long had he lived here?’ Brunetti asked when the man stopped coughing.
The man stood upright and took a closer look at Brunetti. In his turn, Brunetti observed the white patches that peeled away from the reddened skin of the man’s face and the yellowed eyes that told of jaundice.
‘A couple of months. You’ll have to ask the landlord. I just saw him on the stairs.’
‘Did anyone come to visit him?’
‘I don’t know,’ the man said with sudden truculence. ‘I keep my business to myself. Besides, he was a student. I don’t have anything to say to people like that. Little shits, think they know everything.’
‘Did he behave like that?’ Brunetti asked.
The man considered this for a moment, surprised at having to examine a specific case to see if it conformed to his general prejudice. After a long time, he said, ‘No, but like I told you, I just saw him a few times.’
‘Give your name to the sergeant, please,’ Brunetti said and turned away, indicating the young man who had greeted the boat. He walked up the two steps that led to the front door, where he was saluted by the officer standing there. From behind him he heard the man he’d questioned call out, ‘His name was Marco.’
When Vianello approached, Brunetti asked him to see what he could learn from the people in the neighbourhood. The sergeant turned away and the officer stepped forward. ‘Second floor, sir,’ he said.
Brunetti looked up the narrow staircase. Behind him, the policeman snapped on the light, but the low-wattage bulb made little difference, as if reluctant to illuminate the general squalor. Paint and cement had flaked off the walls and been kicked into small dunes on either side by the people who used the stairs. Here and there, cigarette butts and bits of paper lay on top of or stuck out from the dunes.
Brunetti climbed the steps. The smell met him on the first landing. Close, dense, penetrating, it spoke of rot and vileness and something inhumanly unclean. As he drew closer to the second floor, the smell grew stronger, and Brunetti had a terrible moment in which he visualized the avalanche of molecules, falling over him, clinging to his clothing, cascading into his nose and throat, always carrying with it the horrible reminder of mortality.
A third policeman, looking very pale in the dim light, stood at the door to the apartment. Brunetti was sorry to see that it was closed because it meant the smell would be much worse when they opened it again. The officer saluted and stepped away very quickly, and didn’t stop until he was four steps from the door.
‘You can go downstairs,’ Brunetti said, aware that the boy must have been there for almost an hour. ‘Go outside.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ he said and saluted again before walking very quickly around Brunetti and launching himself down the stairs.
Behind him, Brunetti heard the various clumps and clatters of the technical team as they carried up their bags of tools.
He resisted the impulse to draw a deep breath; instead he drew up his courage and reached for the door. Before he could open it, however, one of the technical men called out, ‘Commissario, take this first.’ When Brunetti turned, the man was ripping open the plastic covering around a surgical mask. He handed one to Brunetti, then one to his colleague. They all slipped the elastic strings around their ears and pulled the masks up over their mouths and noses, all of them glad to breathe in the sharp odour of the chemicals with which the masks had been treated.
Brunetti opened the door, and the smell assaulted them, slicing through the chemicals. He glanced up and saw that all of the windows had been opened, probably by the police, and that the crime scene was, in a sense, contaminated. There was, however, little need to protect this scene; Cerberus himself would have fled, howling, from the smell.
His body stiff with the desire not to move, Brunetti stepped through the door, and the others crowded in after him. The living room was what he would have expected to find in the apartment of a student: indeed, it reminded him of the way his friends had lived when they were at university. A battered sofa was covered with a length of colourful Indian cloth, tossed over the back and tucked in tight under the seats and beside the arms to make it look like upholstery. A long table stood against the wall, its surface covered with papers, books, and an orange on which green mould had begun to grow. Books and an assortment of clothing covered two other chairs.
The boy was on the floor of the kitchen, sprawled on his back. His left arm was flung out behind his head, the needle that had killed him still stuck into the vein of his arm, just below the turn of the elbow. His right hand was curved around the top of his head, and Brunetti recognized the gesture his son made whenever he realized he had made a mistake or done something stupid. On the table lay what was to be expected: a spoon, a candle, and the tiny plastic envelope that had held whatever killed him. Brunetti turned his eyes away. The open window of the kitchen looked across at another window, shuttered and blind.
One of the lab men came in behind him and looked down at the boy. ‘Should I cover him, sir?’
‘No. Better leave him until the doctor’s seen him. Who’s coming?’
‘Guerriero, sir,’
‘Not Rizzardi?’
‘No, sir. Guerriero’s on duty today.’
Brunetti nodded and went back into the living room. The elastic had begun to rub against his cheek, so he removed the surgical mask and stuffed it into his pocket. The smell was worse for a while, but then it wasn’t. The second lab man went into the kitchen, carrying camera and tripod, and he heard the muted sound of their voices as they discussed how best to record this scene for the little part of history that Marco, a student at the university and dead with a needle stuck in his arm, would fill in the police archives of Venice, pearl of the Adriatic. Brunetti went over to the boy’s desk and stood looking down at a jumble of papers and books, so like the one he had created on his own desk when he was a student, so like the mess his own son left in his wake each morning when he went off to school.
On the inside cover of a history of architecture, Brunetti found his name: Marco Landi. Slowly he went through the papers on the desk, occasionally stopping to read a paragraph or a sentence. Marco, he discovered, had been working on a paper that dealt with the gardens of four of the eighteenth-century villas between Venice and Padova. Brunetti found books and photocopies of articles on landscape architecture, even some sketches of gardens that seemed to have been made by the dead boy. For a long time, Brunetti studied a large drawing o
f an elaborate formal garden, each plant and tree drawn in exact detail. He could even read the time on the enormous sundial that stood to the left of a fountain: four fifteen. At the bottom of the right side of the drawing, he noticed a pair of rabbits behind a fat oleander, peering curiously at the viewer, both of them seeming content and well fed. He replaced the drawing and picked up another, this one apparently for some other project because it showed a severely modern house, cantilevered out over an open space that could have been a canyon or a cliff. Brunetti studied the drawing, noticing the rabbits again, this time quizzically looking out from behind what appeared to be a piece of modern sculpture on the lawn in front of the house. He set it down and leafed through more of Marco’s drawings. In each of them, the rabbits appeared, sometimes almost impossible to find, so cleverly had they been hidden: once in the window of an apartment building, once peering through the windshield of a car parked in front of a house. Brunetti wondered how Marco’s professors would have greeted the appearance of the rabbits in each new assignment, whether it would have amused or annoyed them. And then he allowed himself to wonder about the boy who put them there, in every drawing. Why rabbits? And why two of them?