by Donna Leon
‘What is it?’ he asked.
‘They were positive.’
What did he mean? The results of his tests? The samples? ‘I don’t understand,’ Brunetti admitted.
‘Both of them, the boy and the girl. They were positive.’
‘Dio mio!’ Brunetti exclaimed, understanding at last.
‘It’s the first thing we check with addicts. He was much farther along than she was; the virus had really taken hold. He was already far gone, couldn’t have lived another three months. Didn’t you notice?’
Yes, Brunetti had noticed, but he hadn’t understood, or perhaps he had been unwilling to look too closely or to understand what he saw. He had paid no real attention to how thin Zecchino was or to what that might mean.
Instead of answering Rizzardi’s question, Brunetti asked, ‘What about the girl?’
‘She wasn’t as bad; the infection wasn’t as far advanced. That’s probably why she was strong enough to try to fight them off.’
‘But what about these new medicines? Why weren’t they taking any?’ Brunetti demanded, as if he thought Rizzardi would have an answer.
‘I don’t know why they weren’t, Guido,’ Rizzardi said patiently, remembering that he was speaking to a man with children little younger than the two victims. ‘But I saw no sign in their blood, or anywhere inside them, that either one of them was taking anything. Drug addicts usually don’t.’
Neither of them chose to say anything further about that. Instead, Brunetti asked, ‘What about the bite? Tell me.’
‘There was a lot of flesh caught between her teeth, so whoever it was she bit has a nasty wound.’
‘Is it contagious like that?’ Brunetti asked, amazed that, after years of information and talk and articles in the papers and magazines, he had no clear idea.
‘Theoretically, yes,’ Rizzardi answered. ‘There are cases in the literature where it seems to have been spread that way, though I’ve never had first-hand knowledge of it. I suppose it could happen that way. But the disease isn’t like it was years ago: the new medicines control it pretty well, especially if they start taking them in the early stages.’
Brunetti listened, wondering about the possible consequences of ignorance like his own. If he, a man who read widely and had a reasonably broad knowledge of what was happening in the world, had no idea of how contagious a bite could be and still had a sort of primitive, atavistic horror that the disease could be passed on in this manner, then it would not surprise him in the least if the fear were widespread.
He pulled his attention back to Rizzardi. ‘But how bad is the bite?’
‘I’d say he’s got a chunk missing from his arm.’ And before Brunetti could ask, he said, ‘There were hairs in her mouth. Probably from the forearm.’
‘How big was it?’
After a moment’s thought Rizzardi said, ‘About the size of a dog’s bite, perhaps a cocker spaniel.’ Neither of them commented on the bizarre comparison.
‘Enough to go to a doctor about?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Maybe, maybe not. If it becomes infected, then yes.’
‘Or if they knew she was positive,’ Brunetti continued. ‘Or came to realize it after.’ Anyone aware that he’d been bitten by an infected person would flee, terrified, to anyone who could tell him whether the disease had been passed on to him, Brunetti was sure. He considered the consequences: doctors would have to be called, hospital emergency rooms notified, contact made even with pharmacies where the killer might go in search of antiseptics or dressings.
‘Is there anything else?’ Brunetti asked.
‘He would have been dead before the end of the summer. She might have lasted another year, but not much longer.’ Rizzardi stopped for a moment and then added, in an entirely different voice, ‘Do you think they leave scars on us, Guido, the things we have to say or do?’
‘Sweet Jesus, I hope not,’ Brunetti answered in a soft voice, said he’d be in touch with Rizzardi when he had an identification of the girl, and hung up.
22
HE CALLED DOWN to the officers’ squad room and told them to be alert for any new reports of a girl gone missing, about seventeen, and to start checking back through the records to see if any had been reported in the last few weeks. Even as he spoke to them, however, he knew it was entirely possible that no one would report her: many kids had become disposable, their parents not at all concerned at prolonged absences. He wasn’t sure about her age, but seventeen would be his guess. He hoped she wasn’t any younger. If she was, Rizzardi would probably know, but he didn’t want to.
He went down to the men’s room and washed his hands, dried them, and washed them again. Back at his desk, he took a piece of paper from his drawer and wrote in bold capital letters the headline he wanted to see in tomorrow’s papers: ‘Killer’s Victim Takes Vengeance With Fatal Bite’. He looked down at it, wondering, like Rizzardi, what sort of scars these things would leave on him, drew an insert mark between ‘Vengeance’ and ‘With’ and added, ‘From Beyond the Grave’ on the line above. He studied this for a moment but decided the additional phrase made the line too long to fit in one column and so crossed it out. He pulled out the dog-eared notebook in which he kept names and phone numbers and again dialled the office number of the crime reporter of Il Gazzettino. His friend, flattered that Brunetti had liked the other story, agreed to see that this one got into next morning’s edition. He said he loved Brunetti’s headline and would make sure it appeared as written.
‘I don’t want you to get in any trouble,’ Brunetti said in response to the man’s eager compliance. ‘There’s no risk, is there, if you print it?’
The man laughed outright. ‘Trouble for printing something that’s not true? Me?’ Still laughing, he started to say goodbye, when Brunetti stopped him.
‘Is there any way you could get this into La Nuova, as well?’ he asked. ‘I want it in both papers.’
‘Probably. There’s someone over there who’s been hacking into our computer for years. It saves them the cost of a reporter. So I’ll just type this in, and they’ll use it, especially if I make it sound really lurid. They can’t resist blood. But they won’t use your headline, I’m afraid,’ he said with real regret. ‘They always change them, at least one word.’
Content with what he had got, Brunetti resigned himself to this, thanked his friend, and hung up.
In order to give himself something to do, or perhaps just to keep himself moving and away from his desk, he walked downstairs to Signorina Elettra’s office, where he found her, head bent over a magazine.
She looked up at the sound of his footsteps, ‘Ah, you’re back, Commissario,’ she said, beginning to smile. When she saw the expression he brought into the office with him, her smile dissolved. She closed the magazine, opened a drawer, and pulled a folder from it. Leaning forward, she passed it up to him. ‘I heard about the two young people,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry.’
He didn’t know if he was meant to thank her for her condolences or not. Instead, he nodded as he accepted the folder, then pulled open the cover. ‘The Volpatos?’ he asked.
‘Uh huh,’ she answered. ‘You’ll see from what’s in there that they’ve got to be very well protected.’
‘By whom?’ he asked, glancing down at the first page.
‘Someone in the Guardia di Finanza, I’d say.’
‘Why?’
She stood and leaned over her desk. ‘On the second page,’ she prompted. When he turned to it, she pointed to a row of numbers. ‘The first number’s the year. Then comes the total of their declared wealth: bank accounts, apartments, stocks. And the third column is what they declared as income for those same years.’
‘So,’ he said, commenting on the obvious, ‘each subsequent year, they should earn more, as they certainly own more.’ That much was evident from the expanding list of properties.
He continued to study the lists. Instead of growing larger each year, the third number decreased, even though the Volp
atos acquired more apartments, businesses, and houses. Relentlessly, they continued to acquire more and pay less.
‘Have they ever been audited by the Finanza?’ he asked, holding in his hands a fiscal red flag so large and incarnadine as to be easily visible as far away as the central offices of the Guardia di Finanza in Rome.
‘Never,’ she said, shaking her head and sitting back down. ‘That’s why I say they’ve got to be protected by someone.’
‘Did you get copies of their tax returns?’
‘Of course,’ she answered simply, making no attempt to disguise her pride. ‘Those numbers for what they earn every year are repeated on all of them, but they manage to prove that they’ve spent a fortune on capital improvements to their properties, year after year, and they seem incapable of selling a single piece of property at a profit.’
‘Who do they sell them to?’ Brunetti asked, though years of similar experiences had made him familiar with this particular script.
‘So far, among other sales, they’ve sold two apartments to city councillors and two to officers of the Guardia di Finanza. Always at a loss, especially the one that got sold to the colonel.
‘And,’ she continued, flipping over a page and pointing to the top line, ‘it seems they’ve also sold two apartments to a Dottor Fabrizio dal Carlo.’
‘Ah,’ Brunetti sighed. He looked up from the paper and asked, ‘Did you by any chance . . .?’
Her smile was a benediction. ‘It’s all there: his tax records, a list of the houses he owns, his bank accounts, his wife’s, everything.’
‘And?’ he asked, resisting the impulse to look down at the paper and wanting her to have the pleasure of telling him.
‘Only a miracle could protect him from an audit,’ she said, tapping the papers with the fingers of her left hand.
‘Yet no one’s noticed,’ Brunetti said calmly, ‘all these years: not dal Carlo and not the Volpatos.’
‘That’s not likely to happen, not while prices like these,’ she said, turning back to the front page, ‘are available to city councillors.’ After a pause, she added, ‘And to colonels.’
‘Yes,’ he agreed, closing the file with a tired sigh, ‘and to colonels.’ He tucked the folder under his arm. ‘What about their phone?’
She came close to smiling. ‘They don’t have one.’
‘What?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Not that I can discover. Not in either of their names and not at the address where they live.’ Before Brunetti could ask, she supplied possible explanations. ‘Either it’s because they’re too cheap to pay a phone bill, or else they’ve got a telefonino listed in someone else’s name.’
It was hard for Brunetti to imagine that anyone could, today, exist without a telephone, especially people who were involved in the purchase and sale of properties, the lending of money and all the contacts with lawyers, municipal offices, and notaries those things would entail. Besides, no one could be so pathologically frugal as not to have a phone.
Seeing one avenue of possible investigation eliminated, Brunetti turned his attention back to the murdered couple. ‘If you can,’ he said, ‘see what there is to find out about Gino Zecchino, would you?’
She nodded. She already knew the name.
‘We don’t know who the girl is yet,’ he began, and the possibility struck him that they might never know. He refused to give voice to this thought, however, and said only, ‘Let me know if you find anything.’
‘Yes, sir,’ she said, watching as he left the office.
Upstairs, he decided to add to the scope of the disinformation that was to appear in the newspapers the next morning and spent the next hour and a half on the phone, often consulting the pages of his notebook or occasionally calling a friend for the phone numbers of men and women scattered on both sides of the law. With cajolery, the promise of some future favour, and sometimes with open menace, he convinced a number of people to speak loudly and speak widely of this strange case of the killer who had been doomed to a slow and horrible death by the bite of his victim. Generally there was no hope, usually no therapy, but sometimes, just sometimes, if the bite was treated in time by an experimental technique that was being perfected in the Immunology Laboratory of the Ospedale Civile and dispensed at the Emergency Room, then there was a chance that the infection could be stopped. Otherwise, there was no escape from death, the headline would quickly be proven true, and the victim would indeed Take Vengeance With a Fatal Bite.
He had no idea if this would work, knew only that this was Venice, city of rumour, where an uncritical populace read and believed, listened and believed.
He dialled the central number for the hospital and was about to ask for the office of the Director when he thought better of it and, instead, asked to speak to Dottor Carraro in Pronto Soccorso.
The call was finally put through and Carraro all but barked his name into the receiver; a man too busy to be disturbed, the lives of his patients at risk if he lingered on the phone, kept there by whatever stupidity he was about to be asked.
‘Ah, Dottore,’ Brunetti began, ‘how nice to speak to you again.’
‘Who is this?’ asked the same rude, impulsive voice.
‘Commissario Brunetti,’ he said and waited for the name to register.
‘Ah, yes. Good afternoon, Commissario,’ the doctor said, a sea change audible.
When the doctor seemed disposed to say no more, Brunetti said, ‘Dottore, it seems I might be able to be of some help to you.’ He stopped, giving Carraro the opportunity to enquire. When he failed to, Brunetti went on, ‘It seems we’ve got to decide whether to pass the results of our investigation on to the examining magistrate. Well, that is,’ he corrected himself with an officious little laugh, ‘we’ve got to give our recommendation, whether to continue and begin a criminal investigation. For culpable negligence.’
He heard no more than Carraro’s breathing at the other end. ‘Of course, I’m persuaded that there’s no need of that. Accidents happen. The man would have died anyway. I don’t think there’s any need to cause you any trouble about this, to waste police time in investigating a situation where we’re going to find nothing.’
Still silence. ‘Are you there, Dottore?’ he asked in a hearty voice.
‘Yes, yes, I am,’ Carraro said in his new, softer voice.
‘Good. I knew you’d be happy to hear my news.’
‘Yes, I am.’
‘While I have you on the line,’ Brunetti said, managing to make it clear he had not just thought of it, ‘I wonder if I could ask you a favour.’
‘Of course, Commissario.’
‘In the next day or so, a man might come into the Emergency Room with a bite on his hand or his arm. He’ll probably say it’s a dog bite, or he might try to say his girlfriend did it to him.’ Carraro remained silent. ‘Are you listening, Dottore?’ Brunetti asked, voice suddenly much louder.
‘Yes.’
‘Good. The instant this man comes in, I want you to call the Questura, Dottore. The instant,’ he repeated, and gave Carraro the number. ‘If you’re not there, I expect you to leave word for whoever takes your place that he is to do the same thing.’
‘And what are we supposed to do with him while we wait for you to get here?’ Carraro asked with a return to his normal tone.
‘You are to keep him there, Dottore, lying to him and inventing some form of treatment that will take long enough for us to get to the hospital. And you are not to allow him to leave the hospital.’
‘And if we can’t stop him?’ Carraro demanded.
Brunetti had little doubt that Carraro would obey him, but he thought it best to lie. ‘We’ve still got power to examine the hospital records, Dottore, and our investigation of the circumstances surrounding Rossi’s death isn’t over until I say so.’ He allowed steel to penetrate his voice with the last phrase, that hollow lie, paused a moment, and then said, ‘Good, then, I look forward to your cooperation.’
After that, there was n
othing for the men to do except exchange pleasantries and say goodbye.
That left Brunetti at a loose end until the papers came out the next morning. But it also left him restless, something he always dreaded because the feeling spurred him to rashness. It was difficult for him to resist the urge to, as it were, put the cat among the pigeons and stir things up. He went downstairs, to Signorina Elettra’s office.
The sight of her, elbows on her desk, chin propped up on her fists, head bent over a book, led him to ask as he came in, ‘Am I interrupting anything?’ She looked up, smiling, and shook away the very idea with a sideways motion of her head.
‘Do you own your apartment, Signorina?’
Accustomed as she was to Brunetti’s sometimes odd behaviour, she displayed no curiosity and answered ‘Yes,’ leaving it to him, if he pleased, to explain the question.
He’d had time to think about it, and so he added, ‘I suppose it doesn’t matter, though.’
‘It does to me, sir, quite a bit,’ she remarked.
‘Ah, yes, I’m sure it does,’ he said, realizing the confusion that would result from his remark. ‘Signorina, if you’re not busy, I’d like you to do something for me.’
She reached for a pad and pencil, but he stopped her.
‘No,’ he said, when he saw what she was doing, ‘I want you to go and talk to someone.’
He had to wait more than two hours for her to come back, and when she did, she came directly up to his office. She entered without knocking and approached his desk.
‘Ah, Signorina,’ he said, inviting her to take a seat. He sat next to her, eager, but silent.
‘You’re not in the habit of giving me a Christmas present, are you, Commissario?’ she asked.
‘No,’ he answered. ‘Am I about to begin to do so?’
‘Yes, sir,’ she said emphatically. ‘I’ll expect a dozen, no, two dozen white roses from Biancat and, I think, a case of prosecco.’
‘And when would you like this present to arrive, Signorina, if I might ask?’