A Question of Belief

18

The next day, if anything, was hotter, and Brunetti woke shortly after six to damp sheets and a muddled sense of having been awake often in the night. In the absence of the representatives of the Water Police, he permitted himself the luxury of a long shower, first hot and then cold and then hot again. Worse, he allowed himself to shave in the shower, an act of ecological excess which would have earned him the loud condemnation of both his children.

He didn’t bother with coffee at home but stopped in the first bar he passed, then went into Ballarin for a cappuccino and a brioche. He had picked up the papers at his edicola and laid the second section of Il Gazzettino on the round table in the pasticceria. Sipping, he studied the headline, ‘Courthouse Clerk Found Murdered’. Well, that was fair enough. The article was surprisingly clear: it gave the time of the discovery of the body and the probable cause of death.

But then it slipped into what Brunetti thought of as ‘Gazzettino Mode’. The victim’s fellow workers spoke of his many virtues, his seriousness, his devotion to the cause of justice, his poor mother, a widow who had now to bear the death of her only son. And then, as ever, there came the sly insinuation — oh so carefully draped in the sober garb of innocent speculation — about what might have caused this terrible crime. Could the victim have been involved in some practice that had brought his death upon him? Had his job at the Tribunale provided him with access to information that had proven dangerous? Nothing was stated, but everything was implied.

Brunetti refolded the paper, paid, and continued through the growing heat to work. When he got there, well before eight, he made a list of things he needed to check: the first was the autopsy, which should have been done the previous day. Then there was the question of the relatives on Fontana’s side: perhaps Vianello had managed to find them. He also needed to know the names of the people involved in the various cases where Judge Coltellini had so long delayed her decisions. And how was it that Fontana and his mother were asked to pay Signor Puntera such a derisory rent?

He went to his open window, where the curtain hung limp, dead, and consulted with the façade of the church of San Lorenzo about how best to begin.

Suddenly overcome with impatience, Brunetti called the Ospedale Civile and learned that Dottor Rizzardi would be there all morning. He asked that the doctor be told he was on his way, and left the Questura. By the time he reached Campo SS. Giovanni e Paolo, his jacket and shirt were glued to his back, and the sides of his feet rubbed uncomfortably against the inside of his shoes. To traverse the open campo was to question his own sanity at having decided to walk.

He went to Rizzardi’s office but was told that the doctor was still in the morgue. The very word dispersed some of the heat; the air that swirled around him when he pushed open the door drove off the rest of it. His shirt and jacket still clung to him, but the sensation was now coolly sinister instead of irritating.

Rizzardi, he was relieved to see, stood at a sink, already washing his hands. The fact that the sinks in the room were so deep and their fronts so low had always filled Brunetti with a vague uneasiness, but he had never wanted to ask about it.

‘I thought I’d come over,’ Brunetti said. He glanced around: three draped figures lay in a row to Rizzardi’s left. ‘I wanted to ask you about Fontana.’

‘Yes,’ Rizzardi said, wiping his hands on a thin green towel. Carefully, he wiped each finger on one hand separately, then transferred the towel to the other hand and repeated the task. ‘He was killed by three blows to the head, so if anyone over there is thinking he died in a fall, they can forget about it: he didn’t fall three times.’ The doctor stopped drying his hands. ‘There’s a bruise on his left temple suggesting that he was hit there, perhaps even with a fist.’

‘Was it the statue?’ Brunetti asked.

‘That killed him?’ Rizzardi asked. When Brunetti nodded, the doctor said, ‘Beyond question. There was blood and brain matter on it, and the shape of the wounds perfectly matches the configuration of the head of the statue.’ Brunetti shied away from asking where the statue had ended up. Rizzardi folded the towel in half horizontally and laid it over the edge of the sink. ‘One reconstruction could be that someone hit him — that would account for the bruise — and he fell against the statue.’ Rizzardi bent down and held his hand about forty centimetres above the ground. ‘The head of the lion is only about this high, so he would have fallen against it with some force.’

He stood up, adding, ‘Then all he’d have to do is lift his head again and hit it against the statue. It would have been easy enough.’

‘How long would it have taken him to die?’ Brunetti asked.

‘From what I saw, any of the blows could have killed him, but it would have taken some time for the blood to fill the brain and block off body function.’

‘No chance at all?’

‘Of what?’

‘If he’d been found sooner?’

Rizzardi turned and leaned back against the sink, crossed his ankles, then folded his arms across his chest. Because Rizzardi was wearing only a light cotton shirt and trousers under his cotton gown, Brunetti, almost painfully conscious of the cold, wondered if he was trying to keep himself warm by standing like that. He watched Rizzardi process his question as if he were reviewing the information that would provide an answer.

‘No,’ the doctor said. ‘Not likely. Not after the second, and third, blows. There are marks — really a faint bruising — on both sides of the chin and neck where he was held.’ To illustrate, Rizzardi held his hands up and made as if to crush something between them. ‘But either the killer was wearing gloves or he covered his hands with something, I’d say.’

‘How do you know?’

‘The bruises. If he’d been barehanded, the bruises would have been deeper, cleaner at the edges, but there was a kind of padding effect. If he’d been barehanded, the nails would have broken the skin, no matter how short they were.’ He raised his hands, as if to repeat the gesture, but let them fall to his sides.

He pulled off his lab coat and draped it over the sink, aligning it perfectly with the towel. ‘There’s something else,’ Rizzardi said.

His voice caught Brunetti’s attention.

‘Semen.’ As he said this, Rizzardi turned his eyes in the direction of the three draped forms, but since it was also the same direction as the door to the refrigerated room where bodies were kept, Brunetti ignored the gesture.

He had read historic accounts of the spontaneous ejaculation of hanged men; perhaps this was a similar case. Or perhaps he had been with a woman before returning home. Given his mother’s character, it would make sense that Fontana, poor thing, would keep such things far from her.

When Brunetti’s silence had gone on sufficiently long, Rizzardi said, ‘It was in his anus.’

‘Oddio,’ Brunetti exclaimed as the pieces of reality scrambled around in his mind and came out looking like something else entirely.

‘Enough to identify the man?’

‘If you find the man,’ Rizzardi answered.

‘Will the sample tell us anything about him?’ Brunetti asked.

What does a shrug sound like, and does it sound the same when it is heard above the hum of a refrigerator? Whatever it was, that was what Brunetti thought he heard when Rizzardi raised and dropped his shoulders. ‘Blood type, but for anything else, you need a sample from the other man.’

‘How long will it take to know the blood type?’ Brunetti asked.

‘It shouldn’t take long,’ Rizzardi began. ‘But. .’

‘But this is August,’ Brunetti finished for him.

‘Exactly. So it could take a week.’

‘Or more?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘Can you hurry them up?’

‘I’m sure that, even as we speak, every police officer in this country is asking the same question of every medico legale, and that doctor is asking it of the laboratory.’

‘I suppose that means you can’t?’ Brunetti asked.

Rizzardi took a few steps away from the sink and stopped at the head of one of the draped figures. A sudden chill radiated out from the centre of Brunetti’s still-damp back. ‘I once sent DNA samples to the lab,’ the doctor said. ‘It was for a case in Mestre — and there were no results for two weeks.’

‘I see,’ Brunetti said. He turned slightly, making the gesture seem an entirely casual one, and took a few steps towards the door to the corridor. He gave a short cough that could have been brought on by the cold, and said, ‘Ettore, I want to ask you something and I want you to believe I have a good reason to ask.’

Rizzardi’s glance was level. ‘What? Or who?’

‘Signorina Montini. Elvira.’

Brunetti waited. Absently, Rizzardi reached a hand towards one end of the draped figure, and Brunetti felt his chest tighten, but all the doctor did was straighten out a wrinkle in the cloth. Keeping his eyes on the draped form, Rizzardi said, ‘She’s the best worker here. She’s done me a lot of favours over the years. More than a decade.’

‘I admire your loyalty, Ettore, but she might be involved with someone she shouldn’t be involved with.’

‘Who?’

Brunetti shook his head. ‘I’m not sure yet.’

‘But you will be?’

‘I think so, yes.’

‘Will you promise me something?’ Rizzardi asked, finally looking at him. In all these years, Rizzardi had never asked him a favour.

‘If I can.’

‘Will you warn her if there’s time?’

Brunetti had no idea what that might come to mean — what trimming of the law, what compromise of the rules. ‘If there’s time. Yes.’

‘All right,’ Rizzardi said, his face relaxing, but not by much. ‘It’s been about a year since her colleagues started to notice that something was wrong, or at least that long that they’ve spoken to me about it. She’s moody, unhappy, or sometimes overly happy, but the mood never lasts more than a few days. In the past, her work was always perfect: she was the model the other people in the lab set their standards by.’

‘And now?’

Rizzardi turned away from the draped form and, keeping it between himself and Brunetti, started to walk towards the door. Just short of it, he stopped, and turned back to meet Brunetti’s glance. ‘But now she comes in late, or doesn’t come in at all. And she makes mistakes, mixes up samples, drops things. Nothing she’s done has ever been serious enough to cause a patient harm, but people are beginning to suspect that’s next. One of the men who works with her told me it’s as if she doesn’t have the courage to quit and wants to get herself fired.’ Rizzardi stopped.

‘What’s she like?’ Brunetti asked.

‘She’s a good woman. Introverted, lonely, not very attractive. But good. At least that’s what I’d say. But who knows anything?’

‘Indeed,’ Brunetti confirmed. ‘Thanks for telling me.’ Then, feeling obliged to honour a promise he did not understand, he added, ‘I’ll do what I can.’

‘Good,’ Rizzardi said and opened the door. He went out, leaving the door open, and Brunetti was quick to follow him into the greater warmth of the corridor.

Brunetti walked slowly towards the exit, past the bar filled with people wearing pyjamas or street clothing. When he reached the grassy courtyard that had once been the monks’ cloister, he went and sat on the low wall on the far side. Like a diver coming up to the surface, Brunetti needed to acclimatize himself to the greater temperature before daring to go out under the sun again. As he sat, his thoughts turned to the dead Fontana, recalibrating everything. He would never know the man’s feelings for his mother: for any man, they were never simple. But his attentions to Judge Coltellini now had to be viewed in a different light or from a different angle. This was no case of star-crossed love, nor spurned affections. What was it Signorina Elettra had said? That he seemed grateful to her, the way a supplicant was grateful to the Madonna when his prayer was answered? But if his answered prayer had nothing to do with the magic of romance, then what did it have to do with? Brusca’s words floated back to him: if you eliminate sex, sex, sex, you are left with money, money, money.

A grey cat came across the grass and jumped up beside him. He put out a hand, and the cat pressed its head against it. He rubbed it behind the ears, and the cat flopped against him. For a few minutes, he rubbed the cat’s ears until it surprised him by falling asleep. Brunetti moved it gently aside, said, ‘I told you not to wear your fur’, and started back towards the Questura.

Signorina Elettra seemed pleased to see him, but did not smile. ‘I’m sorry your vacation was cut short, Commissario,’ she said as he came in.

‘So am I. My family is draped in sweaters and lighting a fire at night.’

‘You went to Alto Adige, didn’t you?’

‘Yes, but I didn’t make it past Bolzano.’

She shook her head at the shame of this, then asked, ‘What may I do for you?’

‘Did you find the names of the people involved in the cases in those papers?’ he asked.

‘Not until this morning, I’m afraid,’ she said, pointing to some papers on her desk. Brunetti recognized the court documents he had been sent. ‘I was going to bring them up later.’

Brunetti glanced at his watch and saw that it was not yet eleven. ‘Then good thing I came here.’

She slid the papers towards him. ‘Two of the cases involve Signor Puntera,’ she said, pointing to the ones he had circled in pencil and red pen.

‘Signor Puntera,’ Brunetti said. ‘How very interesting.’ He nodded for her to proceed.

‘The first is a claim on the part of the family of a young man who was injured in an accident in one of Signor Puntera’s warehouses.’

‘Here?’

‘Yes. He’s still got two warehouses, over near the Ghetto. They’re used to store supplies for one of his companies that does building restoration.’

‘What happened?’

‘This young man — it was only his third day on the job, poor devil — was carrying bags of dry cement out to a boat in the canal behind the warehouse. Another worker was in the boat, stacking them. When the first one didn’t come back for some time, the man in the boat went to look for him and found him on the floor, well, found his feet. He’d been buried under a landslide of bags of cement.’

‘What happened?’

‘Who knows?’ she asked rhetorically. ‘No one saw. The defence claims he must have yanked one out from the bottom of the pile or that he hadn’t stacked them correctly in the first place. There was one of those little tractors in the warehouse, loading pallets of bags of sand, and the plaintiff’s lawyer says the driver must have dislodged something from the other side of the pile. The driver denies it and says he was on the other side of the warehouse all morning.’

‘What happened to him?’

‘He fell on his face and was buried under the bags. Some of them opened, and sand poured around him. He broke a leg and an arm, but the lack of oxygen was much worse.’

‘How bad is he?’

‘His lawyer says he’s like a child.’

‘Maria Vergine,’ Brunetti whispered, feeling the boy’s astonishment, his terror, his awful sense of being buried.

‘His lawyer,’ Brunetti repeated. ‘Who brought the case?’

‘His parents. He’s going to need lifetime care, and they don’t want him to be in a state hospital.’ Brunetti nodded: no parent would want this for a child. Or for themselves. Or for the man next door.

‘What else?’

‘His lawyer told me that, at the beginning, Puntera made the family a private offer if they’d withdraw the case. They refused, and so it went to court, but things have gone wrong with the case from the beginning. Things like delays and postponements.’

‘I see,’ Brunetti said. He looked at the paper and saw that the accident had taken place more than four years before. ‘And until it’s settled in court, where is he?’

‘He’s in the hospital in Mestre, but his family takes him home on weekends.’

‘What will happen?’ Brunetti asked, though there was no reason she should know.

She shrugged. ‘Sooner or later, they’ll accept his offer. There’s no way of knowing when this will be settled — civil cases are backed up for eight years as it is — so eventually they’ll give in. People like this can’t go on paying for lawyers for years.’

‘And the boy?’

‘The lawyer says it will be a mercy for them all if he dies, a mercy for him, too.’

Brunetti let some time pass, then asked, ‘And the other case?’

‘The warehouses again. He doesn’t own them: he rents them. And the landlord wants him out and the space back so that he can turn them into apartments.’

‘Quickly,’ Brunetti begged the surrounding air, ‘please, someone tell me a story I’ve never heard in Venice before.’

Ignoring him, she went on, ‘So the longer the case is delayed, the longer he can continue to use the warehouses.’

‘How long has this case been going on?’

‘Three years. At one time, he had his workers go down and protest about the eviction in front of Cà Farsetti, right in front of the entrance the mayor generally uses.’

‘And His Honour? What tactic did he employ with them?’

‘Do you mean how did he appease the workers while making it clear that his sympathies were entirely with their employers?’

Brunetti held up his hands in awe, as if the Cumaen Sibyl herself had spoken. ‘Never have I heard the man’s political philosophy so accurately expressed.’

‘This time our dear mayor avoided the situation,’ Signorina Elettra explained. ‘Someone must have told him there were only five workers outside: hardly worth his trouble.’

‘What did he do?’

‘He used the side entrance.’

‘More proof of his genius,’ Brunetti said. ‘And the case?’

‘It would seem that Puntera has found a larger place in Marghera and will transfer everything there next year.’

‘And until then?’

‘The case will probably drag its way through the courts,’ she said, as though this were the most natural thing in the world.

Out of curiosity, he said, ‘There were other cases listed on those papers. Did you find out anything about them?’

‘No, Dottore. I haven’t had the time,’ she said.

‘Let them go for now,’ Brunetti decided. ‘If you speak to your friend at the Tribunale again, would you try to find out if he knows anything about Fontana’s private life?’

‘From the little I saw of him in the café the other day,’ she said in a serious voice, ‘I’d be surprised if he had one.’

‘Perhaps secret is a better word to use than private,’ Brunetti said. She glanced up but said nothing, and so he continued, ‘Rizzardi found evidence to suggest he was gay.’

He watched the surprise register, and then he saw her go through the same process of reassessment as she cast her memory back to her brief meeting with Fontana. ‘ “Oh, thou who hast eyes and sees not,” ’ she said, lowering her face into her hands and shaking her head. ‘Of course, of course.’

Brunetti remained silent to allow her to run through all the possibilities. When she raised her head, he asked, ‘This being the case, what do you make now of his adoration of Judge Coltellini?’

Instead of answering him, she cupped her chin in her palm and pressed her fingers against her lower lip, a habit she had when she wanted to drift off into thought. He left her to it and moved over to her window, but the air was dead there, as well.

‘Either she knew something about him and wasn’t telling anyone, or she had done him a favour and he wanted to pay her back in some way,’ he heard her say from behind him. He said nothing, hoping she would continue.

‘It seemed like some exaggerated form of gratitude,’ she added.

‘Could it have been mixed up with the fact that she was a judge?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Perhaps. He sounded like a person who had come from a simple background. So it might have been that the friendship — though I’m not sure that’s the right word for it — with a judge was a sort of social promotion or proof of his status.’ After a pause, she added, ‘Something his mother would like.’

‘Do people still think this way?’ Brunetti asked, turning towards her.

‘Many people think of little else, I’d say,’ came her quick response.

Brunetti remembered that he still had to ask Vianello if he had had any success in finding relatives on the Fontana side of the dead man’s family. Before leaving Signorina Elettra’s office, though, he said, ‘I’d like you to see if there’s any sort of link between Judge Coltellini and Puntera.’

She looked at him with something close to admiration. ‘Ah, yes, I should have thought of that. The rent. Of course.’

He turned to leave but recalled that he had to find a way for his mother-in-law to contact Gorini. ‘I’d also like you to find out how people go about discovering Signor Gorini’s services — whatever they may be — in the first place.’

She made a gracious waving gesture that ended with both hands indicating her computer screen, as if that would explain it all.

Brunetti was uncertain how useful this suggestion would be to his mother-in-law; nevertheless, he thanked her and went back to his office.