Friends in High Places - [Commissario Brunetti 09]

by Donna Leon

  ‘Dolfin, Signorina,’ she answered briefly and paused, almost as if waiting to see how he responded to the name. She continued, ‘His office was just across the hall. He was always a polite young man, always very respectful to Dottor dal Carlo.’ From the sound of it, Signorina Dolfin could think of no higher praise.

  ‘I see,’ Brunetti said, tired of listening to the sort of empty compliments which death demanded be paid. ‘Would it be possible for me to speak to the Ingeniere?’

  ‘Of course,’ she said, getting to her feet. ‘You must excuse me for talking so much. It’s just that one doesn’t know what to do in the face of a tragic death like that.’

  Brunetti nodded, the most efficient way he’d ever found to acknowledge cliché.

  She led them the few steps that separated her desk from the door to the inner office. She raised her hand and tapped twice, paused a moment, and then added a third small tap, as though she had, over the years, devised a code which would tell the man inside just what sort of visitor to expect. When the man’s voice from inside called out ‘Avanti’, Brunetti saw an unmistakable gleam in her eyes, noticed the way the corners of her mouth tilted up.

  She opened the door, stepped inside and to one side to allow both men to enter, then said, ‘This is Commissario Brunetti, Dottore.’ Brunetti had glanced in as they entered and seen a large, dark-haired man behind the desk, but he kept his eyes on Signorina Dolfin as she spoke, intrigued by the change in her manner, even in the tone of her voice, far warmer and richer than when she had spoken to him.

  ‘Thank you, Signorina,’ dal Carlo said, barely glancing at her. ‘That will be all.’

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ she said and, very slowly, turned away from dal Carlo and left the office, closing the door quietly behind her.

  Dal Carlo got to his feet, smiling. He was in his late fifties, but had the taut skin and erect carriage of a younger man. His smile revealed teeth capped in the Italian manner: one size larger than necessary. ‘How pleased I am to meet you, Commissario,’ he said, extending his hand to Brunetti and, when he returned the gesture, giving it a firm, manly shake. Dal Carlo nodded to Vianello and led them to some chairs at one side of the room. ‘How may I help you?’

  Taking his seat, Brunetti said, ‘I’d like to know something about Franco Rossi.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ dal Carlo said, shaking his head a few times. ‘Terrible thing, tragic. He was a wonderful young man, an excellent worker. He would have had a very successful career.’ He sighed and repeated, ‘Tragic, tragic.’

  ‘How long had he worked here, Ingeniere?’ Brunetti asked. Vianello took a small notebook from his pocket, opened it, and started to take notes.

  ‘Let me see,’ dal Carlo began. ‘About five years, I’d say.’ Smiling, he said, ‘I can ask Signorina Dolfin. She’d be able to give you a more precise answer.’

  ‘No, that’s fine, Dottore,’ Brunetti said with a casual wave of his hand and went on: ‘What, exactly, were Signor Rossi’s duties?’

  Dal Carlo put his hand to his chin, a thinking gesture, and looked down at the floor. After a suitable time, he said, ‘He had to examine plans to see that they conformed to restorations that were performed.’

  ‘And how did he do that, Dottore?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘He looked at the blueprints here in the office and then inspected the actual place where the work had been done to see that it had been done properly.’

  ‘Properly?’ Brunetti asked, his voice filled with layman’s confusion.

  ‘That it was the same as shown on the plans.’

  ‘And if it wasn’t?’

  ‘Then Signor Rossi would report the discrepancies, and our office would initiate proceedings.’

  ‘Such as?’

  Dal Carlo looked across at Brunetti and appeared to weigh not only the question but the reason Brunetti was asking it.

  ‘Usually a fine and an order that the work performed be redone to conform to the specifications on the blueprints,’ dal Carlo answered.

  ‘I see,’ Brunetti said, nodding to Vianello to make a special point of that last answer. ‘That could be a very expensive inspection.’

  Dal Carlo looked puzzled. ‘I’m afraid I don’t understand what you mean, Commissario.’

  ‘I mean that it could cost a great deal, first to do the work and then to do it again. To make no mention of the fines.’

  ‘Of course,’ dal Carlo said. ‘The code is quite precise about that.’

  ‘Doubly expensive, then,’ Brunetti said.

  ‘Yes, I suppose so. But few people are so rash as to attempt such a thing.’

  Brunetti allowed himself a start of surprise here and looked over at dal Carlo with the small smile one conspirator gives another. ‘If you say so, Ingeniere,’ he said. Quickly, he changed topic and the tone of his voice and asked, ‘Had Signor Rossi ever received any threats?’

  Again, dal Carlo seemed confused. ‘I’m afraid I don’t understand that, either, Commissario.’

  ‘Let me be clear with you, then, Dottore. Signor Rossi had the authority to cost people a great deal of money. If he reported that illegal work had been done on a building, the owners would be liable both for fines and for the cost of further work to correct the original restorations.’ He smiled here and added, ‘We both know what building costs are in this city, so I doubt that anyone would be pleased if Signor Rossi’s inspection discovered discrepancies.’

  ‘Certainly not,’ dal Carlo agreed. ‘But I doubt very much that anyone would dare to threaten a city official who was doing no more than his duty.’

  Suddenly Brunetti asked, ‘Would Signor Rossi have taken a bribe?’ He was careful to watch dal Carlo’s face as he asked his question and saw that he was taken aback, one might even say shocked.

  Instead of answering, however, dal Carlo gave the question considerable attention. ‘I’d never thought of that before,’ he said, and Brunetti had no doubt he was telling the truth. Dal Carlo did everything but close his eyes and put his head back to give proof of further concentration. Finally he said, lying, ‘I don’t like to speak ill of him, not now, but that might be possible. Well,’ with an awkward hesitation, ‘might have been possible.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’ Brunetti asked, though he was fairly certain it was nothing more than a rather obvious attempt to use Rossi as a means to cover the tracks of his own probable dishonesty.

  For the first time, dal Carlo looked steadily into Brunetti’s eyes. Had he needed it, Brunetti could have found no surer proof that he was lying. ‘You must understand it was nothing specific I can name or describe. His behaviour had changed in the last few months. He’d become furtive, nervous. It is only now, that you ask this question, that the possibility occurs to me.’

  ‘Would it be easy to do?’ Brunetti asked, and when dal Carlo seemed not to understand, he prompted: ‘Take a bribe?’

  He all but expected dal Carlo to say he had never thought of such a thing, in which case Brunetti didn’t know if he could stop himself from laughing. They were, after all, in a city office. But the engineer restrained himself and said, eventually, ‘I suppose it would be possible.’

  Brunetti was silent for a long time, so long that dal Carlo was finally forced to ask, ‘Why are you asking these questions, Commissario?’

  At last Brunetti said, ‘We’re not completely satisfied,’ having found it always far more effective to speak in the plural, ‘that Rossi’s death was an accident.’

  This time, dal Carlo could not hide his surprise, though there was no way of knowing if it was surprise at the possibility or surprise that the police had discovered it. As various ideas played through his mind, he gave Brunetti a sly glance that reminded him of the look Zecchino had given him.

  With the idea of the young drug addict in his mind, Brunetti said, ‘We might have a witness that it was something else.’

  ‘A witness?’ Dal Carlo repeated in a loud, disbelieving voice, as though he had never heard the word.

  ‘Y
es, someone there at the building.’ Brunetti got to his feet suddenly. ‘Thank you for your help, Dottore,’ he said, extending his hand. Dal Carlo, obviously disconcerted by the strange turn the conversation had taken, pushed himself to his feet and shot out his hand. His grip was less hearty than when they had come in.

  After opening the door he finally gave voice to his surprise. ‘I find it incredible,’ he said. ‘No one would have killed him. There’s no reason for such a thing. And that building’s empty. How could anyone have seen what happened?’

  When neither Brunetti nor Vianello spoke, dal Carlo walked through the door, ignoring Signorina Dolfin, busy at her computer, and saw the two policemen to the outer door of the office. None of them bothered with farewells.

  * * * *

  21

  Brunetti slept badly that night, waking himself repeatedly with memories of the day. He realized that Zecchino had probably lied about Rossi’s murder and had seen or heard far more than he admitted; why else had he become so evasive? The endless night dragged in other things: Patta’s refusal to see his son’s behaviour as criminal; his friend Luca’s lack of sympathy for his wife; the general incompetence that handicapped his every working day. Yet it was the thought of the two young girls that most troubled him, one so reduced by life that she would consent to sex with Zecchino in that squalid place and the other trapped between grief for Marco’s death and the guilty knowledge of what had caused it. Experience had beaten any trace of the cavalier out of Brunetti, but still he could not rid himself of a grinding pity for these girls.

  Had the first one been upstairs when he found Zecchino? He had been so intent on fleeing the house that he had not gone up to the attic to see if anyone else was there. The fact that Zecchino was coming down the stairs did not mean he was going out; he could just as easily have been on his way to investigate the noise made by Brunetti’s arrival, leaving the girl behind him in the attic. At least Pucetti had provided a name for the second one: Anna Maria Ratti, who lived with her parents and brother in Castello and was an architectural student at the university.

  It was some time after he heard the four o’clock bells ring that he decided to go back to the house that morning and try to talk to Zecchino again; soon after, he fell into a peaceful sleep, waking only after Paola had left for the university and the children had gone to school.

  After he dressed, he called the Questura to tell them he would be late in arriving and went back to the bedroom to try to find his pistol. He pulled a chair over to the armadio, climbed up, and saw on the top shelf the box his father had brought back from Russia at the end of the war. The padlock was in place on the hasp on the front of the box, but he had no idea where he had put the key. He pulled the box down from the shelf, carried it over and set it down on the bed. A piece of paper was taped to the top, on it a message printed in Chiara’s clear hand: ‘Papà - Raffi and I are not supposed to know that the key is taped to the back of the painting in Mamma’s study. Baci.’

  He went and got the key, wondering if he should add something to her note; no, better not to encourage her. He unlocked the box and removed the pistol, loaded it, and slipped it into the leather holster he had clipped to his belt earlier. He put the box back in the closet and left the house.

  The calle, as had been the case both times he had come here before, was empty, and there was still no sign of activity on the scaffolding. He pulled the metal hasp free from the wood and went into the building, this time leaving the door open behind him. He made no attempt to soften his footsteps or disguise in any way the sound of his arrival. He stopped at the bottom of the steps and called up, ‘Zecchino, it’s the police. I’m coming up.’

  He waited for a moment, but no answering sound or shout came from above. Regretting that he had forgotten to bring a flashlight and glad of what little light came in from the open door behind him, he walked up to the first floor. There was still no sound from above. He went up to the second floor, then the third, and paused on the landing. He opened the shutters of two windows, providing enough light for him to see his way back to the staircase and up to the attic.

  Brunetti paused at the top. There were doors on either side of the landing and a third one at the end of a short corridor. A good deal of light filtered in from a broken shutter on his left. He waited, called out Zecchino’s name again, and then, strangely comforted by the silence, went to the first door on the right.

  The room was empty; that is, no one was inside, though there were some boxes of tools, a pair of sawhorses, and a discarded pair of lime-covered painter’s pants. The door opposite led to the same sort of cluttered emptiness. That left only the door at the end of the corridor.

  Inside, as he had hoped, he found Zecchino, and he also found the girl. In the light that sneaked down from a dirty skylight in the roof, he saw her for the first time, lying on top of Zecchino. They must have killed him first, or else he had given up and fallen under the rain of blows, and she had fought on, quite vainly, only to fall in the end on top of him.

  ‘Gesù bambino,’ Brunetti said softly as he saw them and resisted the urge to make the sign of the cross. There they were, a pair of limp figures, already shrunken in that special way death makes people look smaller. A dark halo of dried blood extended around their heads, which lay close together like puppies or young lovers.

  He could see the back of Zecchino’s head and the girl’s face, or, more accurately, what was left of her face. Both of them appeared to have been battered to death: Zecchino’s skull had lost all rotundity; her nose was gone, destroyed by a blow so violent that all that remained was a shard of cartilage lying across her left cheek.

  Brunetti turned away from them and looked around the room. A pile of stained mattresses was heaped against one wall. Beside it lay the pieces of clothing - he realized only when he looked back at the dead couple that they were half naked - which they had discarded in their haste to do whatever it was they did on those mattresses. He saw a bloody syringe and the memory rushed at him of a poem Paola had read to him once in which the poet tried to seduce a woman by telling her that their blood was mingled inside the flea that had drunk blood from both of them. At the time, he’d thought it an insane way to view the union of man and woman, but it was no more insane than the needle that lay on the floor. Beside it lay a few discarded plastic envelopes, probably not much bigger than the ones that had been found in the pocket of Roberto Patta’s jacket.

  Downstairs, he pulled out thetelefonino he had thought to carry that day and called the Questura, telling them what he had found and where to come to find him. The voice of professionalism told him to return to the room where the two young people lay and see what else he could discover. He chose to remain deaf to it and, instead, stood idly in a patch of sun in front of the building opposite while he waited for the others to come.

  They eventually did, and he dispatched them upstairs, though he resisted the temptation to tell them that, as there were no workers in the building that day, they could get on with their investigation of the scene. There was nothing to be gained from a cheap gibe, and it would make no difference to them to learn that they had been duped the last time.

  He asked who they’d called to examine the bodies and was glad to learn it was Rizzardi. He didn’t move when the men went into the building and was still standing there twenty minutes later when the pathologist arrived. They nodded at one another by way of greeting.

  ‘Another one?’ Rizzardi asked.

  ‘Two,’ Brunetti said, turning toward the building and leading the way.

  The two men made their way upstairs with little difficulty, the shutters all open now and light flooding in. At the top of the stairs they were drawn, moth-like, to the bright lights of the technicians that spilled out of the room and down the corridor, beckoning them to come and see this new proof of the fragility of the body, the vanity of hope.

  Inside, Rizzardi went over and examined the bodies from above. Then he slipped on a pair of rubber gloves and be
nt down to touch the girl’s, and then the boy’s, throat. He set his leather bag on the floor and squatted down beside the girl, then reached across her body and slowly rolled her away from the boy and on to her back. She lay, staring up at the ceiling, and one shattered hand came drifting across her body and slapped down on to the floor, startling Brunetti, who had chosen to avert his eyes.

  He came closer and stood above Rizzardi, looking down. Her short hair was hennaed a dark red and lay close to her head, greasy and dirty. He noticed that her teeth, which showed through the slit of her bloody mouth, were glistening and perfect. Blood had hardened around her mouth, though the flow from her savaged nose had apparently run into her eyes as she lay on the floor. Had she been pretty? Had she been plain?

  Rizzardi placed a hand on Zecchino’s chin and tilted his head toward the light. ‘They were both killed by blows to the head,’ he said, pointing to a place on the left of Zecchino’s forehead. ‘It’s not easy to do and requires a lot of strength. Or a lot of blows. And the dying isn’t quick. But at least they don’t feel much, not after the first few blows.’ He looked at the girl again, turned her face to the side to examine a darkening concavity at the back of her head. He looked down at two marks on her upper arms. ‘I’d say she was held while she was hit, possibly with a piece of wood, or maybe a pipe,’