by Donna Leon
When he arrived at Orthopaedics, he found a nurse standing outside the door, lounging at the top of the stairs, smoking a cigarette. As he approached, she stabbed out the cigarette in a paper cup she held in her other hand and opened the door, heading back into the ward.
‘Excuse me,’ Brunetti said, walking quickly through the door close behind her.
She tossed the paper cup into a metal wastepaper basket and turned to look at him. ‘Yes?’ she asked, barely glancing at him.
‘I’ve come for Franco Rossi,’ he said. ‘The porter told me he was here.’
She looked at him more closely, and her professional opacity softened, as if his proximity to death made him worthy of better treatment. ‘Are you a relative?’ she asked.
‘No, a friend.’
‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ she said, and in her tone there was nothing of her profession, only the sincere acknowledgement of human grief.
Brunetti thanked her and then asked, ‘What happened?’
She moved off slowly and Brunetti walked along with her, assuming she was leading him toward Franco Rossi, his friend Franco Rossi. ‘They brought him in here Saturday afternoon,’ she explained. ‘They could see downstairs when they examined him that both arms were broken, so they sent him up here.’
‘But it said in the paper that he was in a coma.’
She hesitated, then suddenly began to walk faster, toward a pair of swinging doors at the end of the corridor. ‘I can’t say anything about that. But he was unconscious when they brought him up.’
‘Unconscious from what?’
She paused again, as if considering how much she could tell him. ‘He must have hit his head when he fell.’
‘How far was it that he fell? Do you know?’
She shook her head and pushed a door open with her hand, holding it to allow him to pass through and into a large open area at one side of which there was a desk, empty now.
When he sensed that she was not going to answer his question, he asked, ‘Was there much damage?’
She started to speak and then said, ‘You’ll have to ask one of the doctors.’
‘Is that what caused his death, the wound to his head?’
He didn’t know if he was imagining it, but it seemed that she drew herself up straighter with his every question, as her voice became more professional and less warm. ‘That’s something else you’ll have to ask the doctors.’
‘But I still don’t understand why he was brought up here,’ Brunetti said.
‘Because of his arms,’ she said.
‘But if his head . . .’ Brunetti started to say, but the nurse turned away from him and toward another swinging door to the left of the desk.
Just as she reached it, she turned and called back over her shoulder, ‘Perhaps they could explain things to you downstairs. In Emergency. Ask for Dottor Carraro,’ and she was gone.
He did as she suggested and went quickly downstairs. In the Emergency Room he explained to the nurse that he was a friend of Franco Rossi, a man who had died after being seen in the ward, and asked if he could speak to Dottor Carraro. She asked his name and told him to wait while she spoke to the doctor. He went over to one of the plastic chairs that lined one wall and sat, suddenly grown very tired.
After about ten minutes, a man in a white jacket pushed his way through the swinging doors that led to the treatment room and walked a few steps toward Brunetti before he stopped. Standing with his hands jammed into the pockets of his jacket, it was obvious that he expected Brunetti to come toward him. He was short, with the swinging, aggressive walk many men of his stature adopt. He had wiry white hair that he wore slicked to his head with oily pomade, and reddened cheeks that spoke of drink rather than good health. Brunetti rose politely to his feet and walked over toward the doctor. He stood at least a head taller than the other man.
‘Who are you?’ Carraro asked, looking up at the other man and showing a lifetime’s resentment at having to do so.
‘As the nurse may have told you, Dottore, I’m a friend of Signor Rossi,’ Brunetti began by way of introduction.
‘Where’s his family?’ the doctor asked.
‘I don’t know. Have they been called?’
The doctor’s resentment turned to irritation, no doubt provoked by the thought that there existed a person so ignorant as to think he had nothing better to do than sit around making phone calls to the relatives of dead people. He didn’t answer and, instead, asked, ‘What do you want?’
‘I’d like to know the cause of Signor Rossi’s death,’ Brunetti answered in an equable voice.
‘What business is it of yours?’ the doctor demanded.
They were understaffed at the hospital, Il Gazzettino often reminded its readers. The hospital was overcrowded, so many doctors ended up working long hours.
‘Were you on duty when he was brought in, Dottore?’ Brunetti asked by way of reply.
‘I asked you who you were,’ the doctor said in a louder voice.
‘Guido Brunetti,’ he answered calmly. ‘I learned that Signor Rossi was in the hospital from the newspaper, and I came to see how he was. The porter told me he’d died, and so I came here.’
‘What for?’
‘To learn the cause of his death,’ Brunetti said, and then added, ‘among other things.’
‘What other things?’ the doctor demanded, his face suffusing with a colour it would not take a doctor to realize was dangerous.
‘To repeat myself, Dottore,’ Brunetti said with an unctuously polite smile, ‘I’d like to know the cause of death.’
‘You said you were a friend, right?’
Brunetti nodded.
‘Then you have no right to know. No one but the immediate family can be told.’
As if the doctor hadn’t spoken, Brunetti asked, ‘When will the autopsy be performed, Dottore?’
‘The what?’ Carraro asked, emphasizing the patent absurdity of Brunetti’s question. When Brunetti made no response, Carraro turned on his heel and started to walk away, his swagger bespeaking his professional contempt for the layman and his stupidity.
‘When will the autopsy be held?’ Brunetti repeated, this time omitting Carraro’s title.
The doctor wheeled around, not without a hint of the melodramatic in his gesture, and walked quickly back towards Brunetti. ‘There will be whatever the medical direction of this hospital decides, Signore. And I hardly think you’ll be asked to take any part in that decision.’ Brunetti was not interested in the heat of Carraro’s anger, only in what could have caused it.
He pulled out his wallet and took his warrant card from it. He held it by a corner and extended it toward Carraro, careful to hold it at such a height that the other man had to tilt his head far back to see it. The doctor grabbed the card, lowered it, and studied it with some attention.
‘When will the autopsy be held, Dottore?’
Carraro kept his head lowered over Brunetti’s warrant card, as if reading the words there could make them change or take on some new significance. He turned it over and looked at the back, found it as empty of useful information as his mind of the proper response. At last, he looked up at Brunetti and asked, the arrogance in his voice replaced by suspicion, ‘Who called you?’
‘I don’t think it’s important why we’re here,’ Brunetti began, deliberately using the plural and hoping to suggest a hospital filled with policemen requisitioning records, X-rays, and patient charts, questioning nurses and other patients, all bent on discovering the cause of Franco Rossi’s death. ‘Isn’t it enough to know that we are?’
Carraro handed the card back to Brunetti and said, ‘We don’t have an X-ray machine down here, so when we saw his arms, we sent him to Radiology and then Orthopaedics. It was the obvious thing to do. Any doctor would have done the same thing.’ Any doctor in the Ospedale Civile, Brunetti reflected, but said nothing.
‘Were they broken?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Of course they were, both of them, the ri
ght in two places. We sent him up there to have them set and cast. There was nothing else we could do. It was standard procedure. As soon as that was taken care of, they could have sent him somewhere else.’
‘Neurology, for example?’ Brunetti asked.
By way of answer, Carraro did no more than shrug his shoulders.
‘I’m sorry, Dottore,’ Brunetti said with oily sarcasm, ‘I’m afraid I didn’t hear your answer.’
‘Yes, they could have.’
‘Did you observe any damage that would suggest he should be sent to Neurology? Did you make mention of it on your records?’
‘I think so,’ Carraro said evasively.
‘You think so or you know so?’ Brunetti demanded.
‘I know so,’ Carraro finally admitted.
‘Did you make note of damage to the head? As if from a fall?’ Brunetti asked.
Carraro nodded. ‘It’s on the chart.’
‘But you sent him to Orthopaedics?’
Carraro’s face coloured again with sudden anger. What would it be, Brunetti wondered, to have your health in the hands of this man? ‘The arms were broken. I wanted to get them attended to before he went into shock, so I sent him to Orthopaedics. It was their responsibility to send him to Neurology.’
‘And?’
Under Brunetti’s eyes, the doctor was replaced by the bureaucrat, retreating at the thought that any suspicion of negligence was more likely to fall on his shoulders than on those who had actually treated Rossi. ‘If Orthopaedics failed to send him on for further treatment, that’s not my responsibility. You should be talking to them.’
‘How serious was the injury to his head?’ Brunetti asked.
‘I’m not a neurologist,’ Carraro answered instantly, just as Brunetti had thought he would.
‘A moment ago, you said you noted the injury on his chart.’
‘Yes, it’s there,’ Carraro said.
Brunetti was tempted to tell him that his own presence there had nothing to do with a possible charge of malpractice, but he doubted that Carraro would believe him or, even if he did, that it would make a difference. He’d dealt with many bureaucracies in his career, and bitter and repeated experience had taught him that only the military and the Mafia, and perhaps the Church, were as likely as the medical profession to fall into the instant goosestep of mutual protection and denial, regardless of the cost to justice, truth, or life.
‘Thank you, Dottore,’ Brunetti said with a finality the other man clearly found surprising. ‘I’d like to see him.’
‘Rossi?’
‘Yes.’
‘He’s in the morgue,’ Carraro explained, his voice as cool as the place itself. ‘Do you know the way?’
‘Yes.’
7
MERCIFULLY, BRUNETTI’S PATH took him outside and along the main courtyard of the hospital, and so he had a brief glimpse of sky and blossoming trees; he wished he could somehow store up the beauty of the plump clouds glimpsed through the pink blossoms and take it with him. He turned into the narrow passageway that led to the obitorio, vaguely troubled to realize how familiar he was with the way to death.
At the door, the attendant recognized him and greeted him with a nod. He was a man who, through decades of dealing with the dead, had taken on their silence.
‘Franco Rossi,’ Brunetti said by way of explanation.
Another nod and the man turned away from the door, leading Brunetti into the room where a number of white-sheeted forms lay on hip-high tables. The attendant led Brunetti to the far side of the room and stopped by one of the tables, but he made no effort to remove the cloth. Brunetti looked down: the raised pyramid of the nose, a dropping off at the chin, and then an uneven surface broken by two horizontal lumps that must be the plaster-cast arms, and then two horizontal tubes that ended where the feet jutted off to the sides.
‘He was my friend,’ Brunetti said, perhaps to himself, and pulled the cloth back from the face.
The indentation above the left eye was blue and destroyed the symmetry of the forehead, which was strangely flattened, as if it had been pushed in by an enormous palm. For the rest, it was the same face, plain and unremarkable. Paola had once told him that her hero, Henry James, had referred to death as ‘the distinguished thing’, but there was nothing distinguished about what lay under Brunetti’s gaze: it was flat, anonymous, cold.
He pulled the cloth back over Rossi’s face, distracted by the desire to know how much of what lay there was Rossi; and if Rossi was no longer there, why what was left deserved so much respect. ‘Thank you,’ he said to the attendant and left the room. His response to the greater warmth of the courtyard was completely animal: he could almost feel the hair on the back of his neck smooth itself down. He thought about going to Orthopaedia to see what sort of justification they might engage in, but the sight of Rossi’s battered face lingered, and he wanted nothing so much as to get out of the confines of the hospital. He gave in to this desire and left. He paused again at the desk, this time showing his warrant card, and asked for Rossi’s address.
The porter found it quickly and added the phone number. It was a low number in Castello, and when Brunetti asked the porter if he knew where it was, he said he thought it must be down by Santa Giustina, near the shop that used to be the Doll Hospital.
‘Has anyone been here to ask for him?’ Brunetti asked.
‘No one while I’ve been here, Commissario. But his family will have been called by the hospital, so they’ll know where to go.’
Brunetti looked at his watch. It was almost one, but he doubted that the usual summons to lunch would be heeded by Franco Rossi’s family, if he had one, that day. He knew that the dead man worked in the Ufficio Catasto and had died after a fall. Beyond that, he knew only what little he had inferred from their one brief meeting and even briefer phone conversation. Rossi was dutiful, timid, almost a cliché of the punctilious bureaucrat. And, like Lot’s wife, he had turned solid when Brunetti suggested he step out on to the terrace.
He started down Barbaria delle Tolle, heading in the direction of San Francesco della Vigna. On his right, the fruit vendor, the one with the wig, was just closing, draping a green cloth over the open boxes of fruit and vegetables in a gesture Brunetti found disturbingly reminiscent of the way he had pulled the cloth over Rossi’s face. Around him, things went on as normal: people hurried home to lunch and life went on.
The address was easy to find, on the right side of the campo, two doors beyond what had now become yet another real estate agency. ROSSI, FRANCO, was engraved on a narrow brass plaque next to the doorbell for the second floor. He pressed the bell, waited, then pressed it again, but there was no answer. He pressed the one above but got the same result, and so he tried the one below it.
After a moment, a man’s voice answered through the speakerphone, ‘Yes, who is it?’
‘Police.’
There was the usual pause, then the voice said, ‘All right.’
Brunetti waited for the click that would open the large outer door to the building, but instead he heard the sound of footsteps, and then the door was pulled open from within. A short man stood in front of him, his size not immediately apparent because he stood at the top of the high step the residents no doubt hoped would raise their front hall above the level of acqua alta. The man still held his napkin in his right hand and looked down at Brunetti with the initial suspicion he was long accustomed to encountering. The man wore thick glasses, and Brunetti noticed a red stain, probably tomato sauce, to the left of his tie.
‘Yes?’ he asked without smiling.
‘I’ve come about Signor Rossi,’ Brunetti said.
At Rossi’s name, the man’s expression softened and he leaned down to open the door more fully. ‘Excuse me. I should have asked you to come in. Please, please.’ He moved aside and made room for Brunetti on the small landing then extended his hand as if to take Brunetti’s. When he noticed that he still held his napkin, he quickly hid it behind his back. He
leaned down and pushed the door closed with his other hand then turned back to Brunetti.
‘Please, come with me,’ he said, turning back toward a door that stood open halfway down the corridor, just opposite the stairs that led to the upper floors of the building.
Brunetti paused at the door to allow the man to enter before him, then followed him in. There was a small entrance, little more than a metre wide, up from which rose two steps, further evidence of the Venetians’ eternal confidence that they could outwit the tides that gnawed away perpetually at the foundations of the city. The room to which the steps led was clean and neat and surprisingly well lit for an apartment located on a piano rialzato. Brunetti noticed that at the back of the apartment a row of four tall windows looked across to a large garden on the other side of a wide canal.
‘I’m sorry. I was eating,’ the man said, tossing his napkin on to the table.
‘Don’t let me stop you,’ Brunetti insisted.
‘No, I was just finishing,’ the man said. A large helping of pasta still lay on his plate, an open newspaper spread out to its left. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he insisted and gestured Brunetti into the centre of the room, to a sofa that stood facing the windows. He asked, ‘May I offer you something? Un’ ombra?’
There was nothing Brunetti would have liked better than a small glass of wine, but he refused. Instead, he put out his hand and introduced himself.
‘Marco Caberlotto,’ the man answered, taking his hand.
Brunetti sat on the sofa, and Caberlotto sat opposite him. ‘What about Franco?’ he asked.