by Donna Leon
‘We’d like to speak to you, Dottore,’ Brunetti said in a neutral voice, choosing to delay an explanation of who they were or the purpose of their visit. He glanced aside at Vianello and saw that the Inspector, in response to the doctor’s fear, had managed somehow to transform himself into a thug. His entire body had become more compact and was angled forward, as though waiting only the command to launch itself at the man. His hands, curved just short of fists, dangled beside his thighs as though longing to be given weapons. The habitual geniality of his face had vanished, replaced by a mouth he seemed unable to close and eyes forever in search of his opponent’s weakest point.
The doctor’s hands, palms outward, rose in front of his chest; he patted at the air, as if to test if it were strong enough to keep these men from him. The doctor smiled: Brunetti recalled a description he had read once of a flower on a corpse, something like that. ‘There’s got to be some mistake, Signori. I’ve done everything you told me to. You must know that.’
Suddenly all bedlam was let out on the other side of the door. It started with a thump, a loud roar, and then a high-pitched woman’s scream. A chair fell over or was pushed over, another woman screamed an obscenity, then everything was drowned out by a chorus of hysterical barks and growls. There followed a series of yelps, and then all animal noise stopped for a moment and was replaced by an exchange of obscenities in two equally shrill voices.
Brunetti pulled the door open. The old woman stood barricaded behind a fallen chair, her ancient dog trembling in her arms, as she hurled epithets at another woman on the other side of the room. This woman, hatchet-faced and thin as a rail, stood behind two now wildly barking dogs with unusually large, squarish heads. They barked as hysterically as the two women screamed, the only differences being their lower pitch and the trickles of saliva that hung suspended from their lips. For the first time in his career, Brunetti wanted to pull his pistol and fire a shot into the air, but he had forgotten to wear his pistol, and he knew the noise of the shot would deafen every creature in the room.
Instead, he crossed to the two dogs, grabbing one of the magazines as he passed the table. He rolled it into a cylinder, then bent and smacked one of the large dogs across the nose. Given the lightness of Brunetti’s blow, the dog’s howl was disproportionately loud, and his quick retreat behind the legs of his owner as surprising as it was ignominious. His fellow dog looked up at Brunetti and started to bare his teeth, but a threatening thrust of the rolled magazine sent him to cower beside the other dog.
The thin-faced woman changed target and began to hurl her obscenities at Brunetti, ending in a loud boast that she would call the police and have him arrested. After this, she stopped shouting, sure that she now had the upper hand. Even the two dogs relaxed into this new legal certainty and began to growl, though they remained safely behind the woman’s legs.
The still-thuggish Vianello chose this moment to walk into the room, his warrant card shoved in the woman’s direction. ‘I’m the police, Signora, and according to the law of 3 March 2009, you have the obligation to carry muzzles with you if you take these dogs into a public place.’ He looked around the room, assessing it and her presence in it with the dogs. ‘This is a public place.’
The old woman with the dog in her arms said, ‘Officer’, but Vianello silenced her with a look.
‘Well?’ he demanded in his roughest voice. ‘Do you know what the fine is?’
Brunetti was sure Vianello didn’t, so he doubted that the woman did.
One of the large dogs suddenly began to whine; she yanked violently at its leash, silencing it instantly. ‘I know. But I thought that in here, inside …’ She waved vaguely at the walls with the hand that did not hold the leashes. Her voice trailed away. She bent down and patted the head of the first dog, then the other. Their long tails thumped against the wall.
Seeing how automatic her gesture was and the dogs’ easy, affectionate response to it must have disarmed Vianello, for he said, ‘All right for this time, but be careful in the future.’
‘Thank you, officer,’ she said. The dogs came out from behind her, wiggling towards Vianello until she pulled them back.
‘What about what she said to us?’ the old woman demanded.
‘Why don’t you sit down, ladies, while we finish talking to the doctor?’ Brunetti suggested and went back into the doctor’s office.
The advantage had been lost: that was obvious to Brunetti as soon as he saw the fat man. He stood by the open window of his office, taking a deep pull from the cigarette he held in his nicotine-stained hand. He looked at the returning men with eyes in which all trace of fear had been replaced by strong dislike. Brunetti suspected it originated not from embarrassment at the fear he had displayed as from what he had discovered them to be.
He continued to draw on the cigarette, saying nothing, until it was a stub that came close to burning his fingers. He shifted it to the very tips of his fingers, took one last long pull, then tossed it out the window. He closed the window but remained standing in front of it.
‘What do you want?’ he asked in the same high voice.
‘We’re here to talk to you about your successor, Dr Andrea Nava,’ Brunetti said.
‘I can’t help you, then, Signori,’ Meucci said, sounding uninterested.
‘Why is that, Doctor?’ Brunetti inquired.
It looked as though Meucci had to fight back a smile as he answered, ‘Because I never met him.’
Brunetti, in turn, fought back his surprise at this and asked, ‘You didn’t have to explain anything to him: who the people at the macello were, how things worked, where his office was, supplies, timetables?’
‘No. The Director and his staff saw to all of that, I imagine.’ Meucci reached into the left pocket of his jacket and pulled out a battered box of Gitanes and a plastic lighter. Flicking it alive, he lit the cigarette, took a deep drag, and turned to open the window behind him. Cool air swept in, spreading the smoke around the room.
‘Did you have to leave him written instructions?’ Brunetti asked.
‘He wasn’t my responsibility,’ Meucci said. For a moment, Brunetti imagined that the other man could not know Nava was dead and so casually say such a thing. But then he realized that Meucci must know – who in Venice could not, especially someone who had formerly held the man’s job?
‘I see,’ Brunetti answered. ‘Could you tell me what your duties were?’
‘Why do you want to know that?’ Meucci asked, not bothering to hide his irritation.
‘So as to understand what it was Dottor Nava did,’ Brunetti answered blandly.
‘Didn’t they tell you that out there?’
‘Out where?’ Brunetti inquired mildly and glanced aside at Vianello, as if to suggest he remember Meucci’s question.
Meucci tried to disguise his surprise by turning to throw his half-finished cigarette out the window. ‘At the slaughterhouse,’ he forced himself to answer when he turned back to Brunetti.
‘When we were there, do you mean?’ Brunetti asked pleasantly.
‘Weren’t you?’ was the only thing the doctor could think to ask.
‘Surely you know that already, Dottore,’ Brunetti said with a small smile and pulled his notebook from his pocket. He opened it and made a note, then looked at the doctor, who already had another lighted cigarette in his hand.
‘What can you tell me about Dottor Nava?’ Brunetti asked.
‘I told you I never met him,’ Meucci said, anger held in check, but just barely.
‘That’s not what I’m asking, Dottore,’ Brunetti said, gave another tiny smile, and made another note.
Brunetti’s prod seemed to work, for Meucci said, ‘After I left the macello, I had nothing further to do with it.’
‘Or with anyone working there?’ Brunetti asked with mild curiosity.
Meucci hesitated only a moment before he said, ‘No.’
Brunetti made another note.
This time, Meucci slammed the wi
ndows closed after tossing away his cigarette. Turning back to Brunetti he asked, ‘Do you have permission to be here, asking me these questions?’
‘Permission, Dottore?’ Brunetti asked, raising his eyebrows.
‘An order from a magistrate.’
Surprise took possession of Brunetti’s face. ‘Why, no, Dottore, I don’t.’ Then, with a relaxed smile, he added, ‘It never occurred to me to get one. In fact, I thought of the Doctor as a colleague of yours, so I thought you would be able to tell me more about him. But now that you’ve made it clear that there was never any contact between you, I’ll leave you to get to your patients.’ Because he had never relaxed enough to sit down, Brunetti could not emphasize his departure by getting to his feet. Instead, he put the cap on his pen and returned notebook and pen to his pocket, thanked the doctor for his time, and left the office.
In the waiting room, the large dogs stood up when the two men came in; the third one slept heavily on. Brunetti took his notebook from his pocket and waved it in the air as they walked in front of the dogs, but they did no more than wag their tails at them. The two women ignored them.
24
‘MAYBE HE’S SUCH a bad liar because animals can’t tell the difference,’ Vianello suggested as they started back towards the Questura. To make it absolutely clear, he added, ‘If you can lie to them or not, that is.’
They walked for some time before Brunetti said, ‘Chiara’s always telling me they have other senses and can read our moods. They even use dogs to detect cancer, I think.’
‘Sounds strange to me.’
‘The more I live, the more most things sound strange to me,’ Brunetti observed.
‘What did you think of him?’ the Inspector asked with a flick of his head back towards Meucci’s office.
‘There’s no question he was lying, but I’m not sure what he was lying about.’
‘He lies a lot,’ Vianello said.
This caused Brunetti to stop. ‘You didn’t tell me you knew him.’
Vianello looked surprised that Brunetti would take him so seriously. ‘No,’ he said, starting to walk again, ‘I meant that I know his type. He lies to himself, I’m sure, about smoking, probably tells himself he doesn’t smoke much at all.’
‘And the stains on his fingers?’
‘Gitanes,’ Vianello answered. ‘They’re famous for being strong, so only a few of them would be enough to cause it.’
‘Of course,’ Brunetti agreed. ‘What else is he lying about?’
‘He’s probably convinced himself that he doesn’t eat much; that he’s fat because he has some hormonal disorder, or thyroid condition, or dysfunction of some gland we have in common with the animals, so he’d know about it.’
‘They’re all possible, aren’t they?’ Brunetti, who didn’t believe it for an instant, inquired.
‘Anything’s possible,’ Vianello answered with heavy emphasis on the second word. ‘But it’s far more likely that he’s fat because he eats too much.’
‘And was he lying about Nava?’
‘That he didn’t know him?’
‘Yes.’
At the foot of a bridge, Vianello turned to Brunetti. ‘I think so. Yes.’ Brunetti remained silent, encouraging the Inspector to continue. ‘It’s not so much that he was lying about knowing him – though I think he was – as that he was lying about everything about the macello. I got the feeling that he wanted to distance himself in every way possible.’
Brunetti nodded. What Vianello said merely put into words his own sense of their meeting with Meucci.
‘And you?’ Vianello asked.
‘It’s hard to believe they never met,’ Brunetti said. ‘They’re both veterinarians, so they’d go to the same professional meetings. And if Nava was qualified to take on a job like that, then there must be some common background.’ As Vianello started up the bridge, Brunetti added from behind him, ‘And Nava must have had questions about the job.’
He fell into step beside the Inspector, saying, ‘It’s obvious he already knew we’d been to the macello and talked to people there. So why did he deny knowing it?’
‘How stupid does he think we are?’ Vianello burst out.
‘Probably very,’ Brunetti said, almost without thinking. Being underestimated, he had learned – however unflattering it might be – always conveyed an advantage. If the person doing the underestimating wasn’t very bright to begin with – and Brunetti had a sense that Meucci was not – that increased the advantage.
He took his phone from his pocket and dialled Signorina Elettra’s number. When she answered, he said, ‘I wonder if your friend Giorgio could take an interest in a veterinarian named Gabriele Meucci?’
Giorgio. Giorgio: the man at Telecom, though surely not the man who came to install the phone. Giorgio, who appeared not to have a surname, nor a history, nor any human characteristics other than a slavish need to fulfil Signorina Elettra’s every whim and an ability to retrieve or trace any phone call she requested, regardless of country of origin, name of caller, or destination. Did one light a candle to Giorgio; did one send him a case of champagne at Christmas? It hardly mattered to Brunetti, who wanted only to continue to believe in the existence of Giorgio, for to doubt Giorgio’s existence created the possibility that the illegal, invasive buccaneering in the telephone records of private citizens and state organizations that had been going on for more than a decade had not been Giorgio’s doing but, instead, had had its detectable – and flagrantly criminal – origin in emails originating from a computer traceable to the office of the Vice-Questore of the city of Venice.
‘I have to speak to him about something else,’ she said blandly. ‘I could certainly ask.’
‘So kind,’ Brunetti said and flipped closed his phone.
He glanced aside at Vianello and saw a thoughtful expression on his face. ‘What is it?’ Brunetti asked.
‘It’s like what’s in those psychological profiles of serial killers.’
Not willing to admit that Vianello had lost him, Brunetti limited himself to a mere ‘In what way?’
‘The psycho-people say they start by hurting animals and then go on to killing them, and then it’s fires and hurting people, and the next thing you know, they’ve killed thirty people and buried them in the back garden and never feel regret or remorse for any of it.’
‘And your point?’ Brunetti asked.
‘That’s what’s happened to us. We started by having her find a phone number for us, when she was supposed to be working for Patta. Then we asked her for another number, and then for some information about the person whose phone it was, and then if they’d made a call to some other number. And now we’ve got her looting the records of Telecom and breaking into bank accounts and tax records.’ The Inspector stuffed his fists into the pockets of his jacket. ‘If I think about what would happen if …’ He broke off, unwilling to give it voice.
‘And?’ Brunetti asked, waiting for the comparison with serial killers, who certainly did not show this sort of compunction.
‘And we like doing it,’ Vianello said. ‘That’s the frightening part.’
Brunetti waited a full minute for the waves created by Vianello’s last remark to abate and for the air around them to grow perfectly still, and then he said, ‘I think we should stop and have a coffee before we go back to work.’
As they approached the Questura, they saw Foa kneeling on the wooden prow of the police launch, cleaning the windscreen with a chamois cloth. Vianello called out a friendly greeting and Foa said, addressing Brunetti, ‘I’ve checked the charts, sir.’
Brunetti resisted the urge to say that it was about time that he had; instead he asked, ‘And what do they tell you? Us?’
With the ease of a young man who spent most of his time on boats, Foa got to his feet and, bracing his hands on the top of the windscreen, flipped himself over it effortlessly, landing upright on the deck. ‘There was a neap tide that night, Commissario,’ he said, pulling a sheet of paper
from his pocket.
Brunetti recognized a map of the area around the Giustinian Hospital. Holding it towards them, Foa said, ‘The tide turned at three twenty-seven that morning, and they found him at six, so if Dottor Rizzardi’s right and he was in the water for about six hours, then he wouldn’t have gone far from where he went in. Not unless he got slowed down by something.’ Then, before either could comment or question, he added, ‘That’s assuming he drifted back the way he came, which he probably did.’
‘And in the slack tide?’ Brunetti asked.
‘It’s longest with the neap tide, sir, so the water would have been still a long time,’ Foa said. The pilot tapped at a point on the map. ‘This is where they found him.’ Then he moved his finger back and forth along Rio del Malpaga. ‘My guess is that he went in somewhere on either side of that spot.’ Foa shrugged. ‘Unless he was snagged for a while on something, as I said: a bridge, a mooring cable, a piling. Unless that happened, then I’d guess he went in not more than a hundred metres from where they found him.’
Over the bent head of the pilot, Vianello and Brunetti exchanged a glance. A hundred metres, Brunetti thought. How many water doors would there be? How many calli coming to a dead end at the water? How many unlit angles where a boat could stop and unburden itself of its cargo?
‘You have a girlfriend, don’t you, Foa?’
‘A fiancée, sir,’ Foa answered promptly.
Brunetti all but heard Vianello’s teeth grinding together as he stopped himself from saying that one did not exclude the other. ‘Good. And you have your own boat, don’t you?’
‘Yes, sir, a sandolo.’
‘With a motor?’
‘Yes, sir,’ Foa answered with mounting confusion.
‘Good, then what I want the two of you to do is take a camera and go up and down Rio del Malpaga, taking photos of all the water gates.’ He pulled the map towards him and pointed to the place Foa had indicated. ‘And then go back and walk in front of the houses – both sides of the canal – and find the street numbers of the buildings where the gates are, then give the list to Signorina Elettra.’