by Donna Leon
Brunetti straightened up. The other man walked over to the caravan from which Rocich had emerged the last time and stamped his foot on the bottom step: once, twice, three times. Then he backed off two steps. Brunetti joined him. The man pulled a telefonino from the pocket of his leather jacket and punched in a number. Brunetti heard a phone ring twice, then it was answered with a single, shouted word. The man answered with two and broke the connection. He turned to Brunetti and gave a wolfish smile, as if to offer this as his next move in whatever game they were playing.
The door to the Rocich caravan opened and the same short man emerged. He came down the steps and paused at the bottom. Brunetti felt, as if it were heat radiating from a furnace, rage emanating from the man. Nothing, however, showed on his face, as impassive as the last time.
He walked the two steps to them and asked something of the other man, who answered him quickly. Rocich began to object, or so it sounded to Brunetti, but he was cut off. As their dialogue continued, Brunetti, who gave every appearance of paying no attention at all, and who could in fact follow only the way the men moved and the rising and falling tones of their voices, felt the rage in Rocich grow.
Brunetti folded his arms and spread a look of infinite boredom across his face. He turned away from the men and let his eye roam up the hill, then, chin still raised, he took a quick glance at the caravan, where again he detected signs of motion, this time behind both of the windows, now only a few metres away. He turned his head to the other side and looked out at the road that passed the camp, pursed his lips impatiently, then looked quickly back at the caravan, where he could now distinguish what looked like two heads at the windows.
Tanovic broke away and walked back to his caravan. He walked up the stairs and went inside, closing the door softly. That left Brunetti and Rocich.
'Signor Rocich, I'm sorry about the death of your daughter’
The man spat on the ground, but he turned his head away before he did it.
'Signor Rocich, I'm the one who found her body. I took her out of the canal,' Brunetti said, almost as if he hoped this would establish some sort of a bond with the man, though well he knew the impossibility of that.
'What you want, money?' Rocich asked.
'No. I'd like to know what your daughter was doing in Venice that night.'
The man shrugged.
'Did you know she was there?'
He repeated the shrug.
'Signor Rocich, was your daughter alone?'
The difference in their heights was such that the man had to bend his head back to meet Brunetti's eyes. When he did, it was only by force of will that Brunetti prevented himself from taking a step backward and out of the radiant circle of this man's almost incandescent anger. Brunetti had encountered rage as a response to a loved one's death many times before, but this was different, for the rage was directed at Brunetti himself and not at the fate that had cost the child her life.
He had told the man in charge that he wanted to speak to Signor and Signora Rocich both, but he realized now that any attempt on his part to speak to. the woman, anything in fact that called attention to her or suggested any interest in her, would probably be paid for in ways Brunetti did not want to think about.
The man spat on the ground again, then looked down as if he wanted to see how close he had managed to come to Brunetti's shoe. While Rocich's gaze was lowered, Brunetti looked boldly across at the caravan, where half of a woman's face was now visible behind the door.
Brunetti raised his voice and asked, 'Do you have a doctor here?'
Obviously the question confused Rocich, who said, 'What?'
'A doctor? Do you have a doctor?' 'Why you ask?'
Brunetti put on an air of irritated patience. 'Because I want to know. I want to know if you have a doctor, if you have a family doctor.' Again, the word 'family' slipped into his conversation and into his mind. Before Rocich could refuse, Brunetti said. 'There are records, Signor Rocich. I don't want to have to waste more time looking for them.'
'Calfi, he doctor for all,' Rocich answered, waving a hand backwards over the entire camp.
Brunetti went to the unnecessary trouble of pulling out his notebook and writing down the doctor's name.
Rocich couldn't let it go. 'Why you want?'
'Your daughter was sick when she died,' he said. True enough. 'And the police doctor wants to see the blood records of the people here.'
He wondered how much of this Rocich understood. Apparently enough for him to ask, 'Why?'
'Because when the doctor checks all the blood types he will see who she got the disease from,' Brunetti lied.
Rocich's response was involuntary. His eyes widened, and his head whipped around towards the door of the caravan, but by the time he looked, no one was standing at the door or at the window and the caravan gave every evidence of being empty. When Rocich looked back at
Brunetti, the nomad's expression was blank. ‘I no understand,' he said.
'It doesn't matter,' Brunetti said, 'whether you do or you don't. But we want to check.'
Rocich turned away from him then and went back up the stairs of the caravan. He went inside and closed the door. Brunetti had the driver take him back to Piazzale Roma.
25
'You think he believed you?' Paola asked Brunetti that evening as they sat in the living room, the children in their rooms and the house quiet with the late-night stillness that encourages people to abandon the day and go to bed.
‘I don't know what he believed,' Brunetti said, taking another sip of the plum liqueur that one of his paid informants had given him for Christmas the year before. The man, who owned three fishing boats in Chioggia, had proven a very useful source of information on the traffic in contraband cigarettes coming in from Montenegro, and so Brunetti and his colleagues in the Guardia di Finanza never expressed any curiosity about the source of the seemingly endless supply of distilled liqueurs -all in unmarked bottles - with which he brightened the holiday season of numerous members of the forces of order.
'Tell me again exactly what you said to him’ Paola asked but then interrupted herself, holding up her glass: 'You think he makes this himself?'
'I've no idea’ Brunetti admitted. 'But it's certainly better than anything I've ever bought that had a tax stamp on it.'
'Pity, then’ Paola said.
'Pity what?'
'That he doesn't make it legally'
'So he could make more of it?' Brunetti asked, really not understanding.
'Something like that, I suppose’ Paola said. 'Or that we could buy it openly and eliminate your sense that you owe him a favour every time he gives it to you.'
'He's been paid enough’ Brunetti said, giving no explanation of what that might mean. 'Besides, you know how hard it is to open a business, especially one where he'd have to get the licences to produce alcohol. No, he's better doing it the way he does.'
'Protected by the police?' she asked, using the vocal equivalent of a poke with a stick.
'And the Guardia di Finanza’ Brunetti added complacently. 'Don't forget them.'
She emptied her glass, set it on the table, and said, this time employing the voice she used when she had been bested, 'All right. But going back to this Gypsy, tell me again exactly what you said to him.'
Brunetti cradled the small glass between his hands. 'That she had a disease when she died. Which is true enough’ he added, realizing that it was only with Paola that he could feel comfortable talking about this. 'And that a doctor would be able to tell who she got the disease from by looking at blood types.' Brunetti had spoken impulsively, hoping that Rocich would somehow have heard enough garbled talk about disease transmission to have some vague inkling that it was possible to trace the source of a disease in this manner. And that he knew what sort of disease the girl had or was likely to have had.
'But how could anyone believe something like that?' Paola asked, making no attempt to disguise her scepticism.
Brunetti could onl
y shrug. 'There's no telling what people will believe.'
Paola considered this for some time, then said, 'You're probably right. God knows what's percolating in the heads of most people.' She gave a weary shake of her own. 'I've got students who think you can't get pregnant the first time you have sex.'
'And I've arrested people who think you can get AIDS from hairbrushes,' Brunetti added.
'So what will you do?'
'No one's claimed the body,' Brunetti said, not by way of answer to her question; more just to say it and see what she thought. 'Or at least no one had yesterday, when I spoke to Rizzardi.'
'What's her family waiting for?'
'God knows,' Brunetti answered. Her family.
'What will happen?'
Brunetti had no answer. The idea that a parent could know that their child was lying dead, no matter where, and not rush to the body was one he found impossible to comprehend. This was the basis of Hecuba's final lament, he knew: ‘I, homeless, childless, and the one to lay you in your grave, you so young and miserably dead.' He had read that just last night and had been forced to put the book aside, the play unfinished.
He would have to call Rizzardi's office again to see if the child's body had been taken away. He knew the urge to do it immediately was futile: no one would be at the morgue at this hour, and it was hardly a matter about which he could disturb the pathologist at home.
'Guido?' Paola asked. 'Are you all right?'
'Yes, yes,' he said, dragging his spirit back to their conversation. 'I was thinking about the girl.' He still lacked the courage to tell Paola he had been dreaming about the child, as well.
'What will happen?'
'If?'
'If no one claims her.'
'I don't know,' he admitted. It had happened in the past, when bodies found in the water had not been identified: then it became the responsibility of the city to see to burying them, a mass said over their nameless corpse in the hope that they were Catholic and perhaps in the added hope that this would make some difference.
In this case, however, where the dead person had been identified and yet remained unclaimed, Brunetti had no idea how to proceed: indeed, he had no idea if a correct procedure existed. Even this heartless state had not been able to imagine people who would not claim their dead. He had no idea of the child's religion. He knew that Muslims buried their dead quickly, and Christians would certainly have done it by now, yet still she rested unburied in her drawer in the hospital's morgue.
Brunetti set his glass on the table and stood. 'Shall we go to bed?' he asked, suddenly feeling very tired.
‘I think we'd better,' Paola agreed. She raised a hand, inviting him to take it and help her to her feet. She had never done this before, and he was unable to disguise his surprise. Seeing this, she said, 'You are my shield and buckler, Guide' Usually, she said such things as jokes, but tonight she sounded serious.
'Against what?' he asked as he drew her towards him.
'Against my sense that it's all a dreadful mess and there's no hope for any of us,' she said calmly and led him to their bed.
The first thing he did when he got to the Questura the next morning was call Rizzardi and ask about the body of the girl.
'She's still here’ the pathologist answered. ‘I had a call from some woman in the social services, saying that it was not their responsibility, and we had to take care of it'
'What does that mean?'
'We informed the Treviso police. They said they'd send someone to the camp to speak to the parents.'
'But do you know if they did?' Brunetti asked.
Rizzardi answered, 'All I'm sure of is that we - the hospital administration, that is - sent the parents a letter, telling them that the child's body was here and that they could come and get her.' The doctor paused for a moment, then added, 'The letter gave the name of the company that takes care of it.'
'Of what?'
'Moving the dead.'
'Oh.'
'First to Piazzale Roma by boat, then in a hearse to wherever they have to go on the mainland.'
Brunetti had nothing to say to this.
Finally Rizzardi said, 'But no one's come in here to get her.'
Brunetti stared at the wall of his office and tried to understand what he had just been told. Into his silence, Rizzardi said, 'It's never happened before, not that I know of. I've spoken to Giacomini - he's the only magistrate I could think of who might know about something like this - and he said he'd look into it and see what the procedure is.'
'When did you talk to him?' Brunetti asked.
'Yesterday afternoon.'
'And?'
'And he's a busy man, Guido.' As he heard the mounting impatience in Rizzardi's voice, the fear came to Brunetti that the doctor, who spent his days surrounded by the silent dead, would say that the girl was not going anywhere or that he would somehow speak lightly of the situation. He could not abide the thought of that possibility, not in a man of whom he thought so highly, so he said, 'Let me know when you hear, Ettore, all right?' and, without waiting for an answer, replaced the phone.
He sat quietly for some time, looking first at the papers on his desk, reading the words and reading them again, waiting for them to make some sort of sense. But they remained letters and words on paper and nothing more. The wall offered no more than the papers. He knew Giacomini, a serious man: surely he would find the proper way to proceed.
Brunetti remembered having written down the name of the doctor: Calfi. Rocich had seemed too surprised to have had time to lie. He called down to the officers' room and asked for Pucetti. When the younger man answered, Brunetti said, 'I'd like you to find me the address and phone number of a doctor named Calfi. Somewhere out by the nomad camp. I don't know his first name.'
'Yes, sir,' Pucetti said and hung up.
Brunetti waited. He should have thought of the doctor long before this, as soon as Rizzardi had told him the results of the autopsy. A doctor would have treated them all: the girl, the mother, the other children, perhaps even Rocich himself. How else would the man have known the doctor's name?
After only a few minutes, Pucetti called back with the doctor's first name, Edoardo; his address, in Scorze; and the phone number of his surgery.
Brunetti dialled the number and, after seven rings, got a recorded voice asking him to describe his problem and leave his name and number, and the doctor would call him back. 'Describe my problem,' Brunetti said while he waited for the machine to click to recording mode. 'Dottor Calfi, this is Commissario Brunetti from Venezia. I'd like to ask you some questions about patients of yours. I'd be very grateful if you would call me here at the Questura.' Brunetti gave his direct number and hung up.
Which of the family were his patients? Did he know that the girl was infected with gonorrhoea? Did her parents know? Had he any idea how she might have contracted the disease? As Brunetti ran through the list of questions he wanted to ask, his thoughts turned to the doctor who had cared for his family when he and his brother were children. As he recalled him, his mother slipped back into his memory, for she had always stayed with him those few times he had been sick as a child. She had always brought him mugs of hot water, lemon and honey, telling him it was nature's best way to fight a cold, or flu, or just about anything that went wrong with him. To this day, it was the remedy he insisted on using with his own children.
His reflections were interrupted by a call from Signorina Elettra, who, with thinly veiled contempt for the ease with which the Department of Public Instruction allowed its files to be 'accessed', told Brunetti that both of the Fornari children were excellent students, the son already accepted at the Bocconi Business School in Milano. He thanked her for the information, got up, and went down to the officers' room in search of Vianello, who had chosen to accompany one of his informants the day before when she spoke to a magistrate and had thus been unable to accompany Brunetti to the nomad camp.
When Brunetti turned into the final flight of steps, he saw
Vianello at the bottom. 'You coming up?' Brunetti asked.
'Yes’ the Inspector answered, starting up the steps towards him. 'I'd like to know what happened when you went out there.'
As they walked slowly back to Brunetti's office, he told Vianello about his visit to the camp, concluding with his phone call to the doctor. Vianello listened closely and, when he was finished, complimented Brunetti for having thought to call the tow trucks.
Brunetti was flattered that Vianello saw the humour, as well as the ingenuity, of this.
'And you think she heard you?' Vianello asked.
'She must have’ Brunetti answered. 'She was standing just behind the door: we were less than two metres from her.'
'If she understands Italian.'
'One of the children was there, too’ Brunetti explained. 'They're more likely to speak it.'
Vianello grunted in acknowledgement and followed
Brunetti into the office. As he took his seat, the Inspector said tiredly, 'There are times when I find myself wishing we had more tow trucks’
To do what?' Brunetti asked.
'Move them somewhere else.'
Brunetti stopped himself from staring, but he did say, 'I've known you to say kinder things, Lorenzo.' At Vianello's shrug, he added, 'I've never heard you say you don't like them.'
‘I don't.' Vianello shot back, voice entirely level.
Surprised to hear not so much the statement as the heat with which Vianello gave it, Brunetti didn't bother to disguise his reaction.
Vianello stretched his legs out in front of him and appeared to study his shoes for a moment, then looked at Brunetti and said, 'All right: what I said is an exaggeration. It's not that I particularly dislike them, more that I don't particularly like them.'
'It still sounds strange to hear you say it,' Brunetti insisted.
'And if I said I didn't like white wine? Or spinach? Would that sound strange?' Vianello asked, his voice moving up a notch. 'And would your voice have that same air of disappointment that I'm not thinking the proper thoughts or feeling the proper sentiments?' Brunetti declined to answer, and Vianello went on. 'So long as I say that I don't like a thing, an object, or even a movie or a book, it's perfectly all right to say it. But as soon as I say I don't like Gypsies, or Finns or people from Nova Scotia, for God's sake, all hell breaks loose.'