Beastly Things

18

BRUNETTI WOKE A few times in the night, thinking about what Paola had asked him and trying to imagine what it might mean, what she was up to, for he knew she was up to something. He knew the signs from long exposure and long experience: once she started on one of what he thought of as her missions, she grew intense, sought specific information rather than concepts or ideas, and seemed to lose her sense of irony and humour. Over the years, she had had attacks of zeal, and they had often led to trouble. Brunetti sensed that another one was on the way.

Each time he woke, he had but to sense the presence of the inert lump beside him to marvel anew at her gift of plunging into sleep, no matter what was happening around her. He thought of the nights he had spent lying awake and worrying about his family or his job or his future or the future of the planet, or simply kept awake by the inability to digest his dinner. While beside him rested a monument to peace and tranquillity, motionless, barely breathing.

He woke again a bit before six and decided it was useless to try to go back to sleep. He went down to the kitchen and made himself coffee, heated milk to pour into it, and went back to bed.

Having finished the Agamemnon and in need of a break before continuing that familiar family saga, Brunetti did what he often did in such circumstances: he picked up the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius and, much in the way devout Christians were said to consult the Bible, opened it at random. It was rather like playing a slot machine, he had to admit: sometimes what came up was sententious pap that led to nothing and certainly provided no riches. But sometimes the words came at him like a stream of coins, flooding out of the trough in the slot machine and splashing across his feet.

He opened to Book Two and found this: ‘Failure to read what is happening in another’s soul is not easily seen as a cause of unhappiness: but those who fail to attend to the motions of their own soul are necessarily unhappy.’ He looked up from the book and out the window, where the curtain was only half drawn; he was conscious of the light, not from the approaching dawn, but from the ambient illumination with which the city was filled.

He considered the words of the wise emperor, but then he thought of Patta, of whom many things could be said, among which was the undeniable fact that he was happy. Yet if ever man had been made who was unconscious of the motions of his own soul, that man was Vice-Questore Giuseppe Patta.

In no way deterred by the failure of the book to spin up a winning combination, Brunetti opened to Book Eleven. ‘No thief can steal your will.’ This time he closed the book and set it aside. Again, he gave his attention to the light in the window and the statement he had just read: neither provided illumination. Government ministers were arrested with frightening frequency; the head of government himself boasted, in the middle of a deepening financial crisis, that he didn’t have financial worries and had nineteen houses; Parliament was reduced to an open shame. And where were the angry mobs in the piazzas? Who stood up in Parliament to discuss the bold-faced looting of the country? But let a young and virginal girl be killed, and the country went mad; slash a throat and the press was off and running for days. What will was left among the public that had not been destroyed by television and the penetrant vulgarity of the current administration? ‘Oh, yes, a thief can steal your will. And has,’ he heard himself say aloud.

Brunetti, trapped in the mixture of rage and despair that was the only honest emotion left to the citizenry, pushed back the covers and got out of bed. He stayed under the shower for a long time, indulging in the luxury of shaving there without giving a thought to the consumption of water, the energy expended to heat it, nor yet to the fact that he was using a disposable razor. He was tired of taking care of the planet: let it take care of itself for a change.

He went back to the bedroom and dressed in a suit and tie, but then he remembered where it was he and Vianello were going that morning and replaced the suit in the closet and put on a pair of brown corduroy trousers and a heavy woollen jacket. He searched around on the floor of the closet until he found a pair of Topsiders with thick rubber waffle soles. He had little idea of the proper attire for a slaughterhouse, but he knew a suit was not it.

It was seven-thirty before he left the house, stepping out into an early morning crispness that gave promise of clean air and growing warmth. These really were the best days of the year, with the mountains sometimes visible from the window in the kitchen, the nights cool enough to summon a second blanket from the closet.

He walked, stopped to get a newspaper – La Repubblica and not either of the local papers – and then in Ballarin for a coffee and a brioche. The pasticceria was busy, but not yet crowded, so most people could still find a place to stand at the bar. Brunetti took his coffee to the small round table, placed the paper to the left of his cup, and studied the headlines. A woman about his age, with hair the colour of marigolds, set her cup not far from his, studied the same headlines while sipping at her coffee, looked at him, and said, speaking Veneziano, ‘It makes a person sick, doesn’t it?’

Brunetti held up his brioche and tilted it in the equivalent of a shrug. ‘What can we do?’ had come from his lips before he remembered the words of Marcus Aurelius. The thief, it seemed, had stolen his will during the short time since he had left his home. Thus, as if he had intended his first remark as a rhetorical flourish, he looked at her directly and said, ‘Other than to vote, Signora.’

She looked at him as if she had been stopped on the street by one of the patients from Palazzo Boldù, some raving lunatic who would now reveal the Secret of the Ages. Disgust at his own moral cowardice swept Brunetti, forcing him to add, ‘And throw small coins at them if we see them on the street.’

She considered this and, seeming gratified that this man had so quickly come to his senses, set her cup in her saucer and carried it over to place it on the bar. She smiled at him, wished him good day, paid, and left.

At the Questura, he went directly to the officers’ room, but none of the day shift had arrived. In his own office, he checked for new files, but his desk was as he had left it the day before. He used his new computer to check the other newspapers, but they had no further information about the murdered man nor about the progress of the case, nor had they bothered to print the photo that had been sent to them. Interest in the dead man had been supplanted by the news that the decomposing body discovered in a shallow grave near Verona two days before had turned out to be that of a woman who had been missing for three weeks. She was young, and her photo showed her to have been attractive, so her death had blotted out the other.

Vianello’s entrance cut short his reflections. ‘Foa’s assistant’s waiting,’ he said, then by way of explanation, ‘He’s not on till the afternoon. There’s a car at Piazzale Roma.’ Brunetti saw that the Inspector, too, had given some thought to their destination and was wearing a pair of much-laundered jeans, a brown leather jacket, and a pair of shoes that looked as if they were made for walking in rough country.

Brunetti glanced over the surface of his desk, wondering if there was anything he should be taking with him, but he could think of nothing. Cowardly delay: his search was no more than cowardly delay. ‘Right. Let’s go,’ he said and started down towards the boat.

It took them an hour to get to Preganziol, what with the seemingly stationary agglomeration of cars and buses at Piazzale Roma and the dense traffic on the Ponte della Libertà and in the outskirts of Mestre. Traffic didn’t begin to move at a steady pace until they passed under the autostrada and started north on Highway 13.

They passed the entrances to Villa Fürstenberg and Villa Marchesi and then found themselves running parallel to the train tracks. They slowed to go through Mogliano Veneto, and then passed another villa; the name sped by too fast for Brunetti to read it. Their driver looked neither right nor left: the villa could have been a circus tent or an atomic reactor, and still he would not have taken his eyes from the road. They crossed a small stream, passed another villa, and then the driver turned to the right and into a narrow two-lane road, eventually drawing to a stop in front of what looked like an industrial park.

The world in front of them was a world of cement, chain-link fences, anonymous buildings, and moving trucks. The buildings for the most part were naked: unpainted, flat-roofed rectangles with very few windows; each was surrounded by an apron of stained cement, and most of those were surrounded by fences. The only brightness came from the lettering on some of the trucks and an open-sided kiosk where workers stood, drinking coffee and beer.

The driver turned to speak to Brunetti. ‘This is it, sir,’ he said, pointing to a gate in the metal fence around one of the buildings. ‘Here on the left.’ Only then, seeing him full face, did Brunetti notice the smear of a broad, glossy scar that could have been caused only by a burn; it began above his left eye and widened as it ascended until it disappeared, broad as three fingers, under the brim of his hat.

Brunetti opened the door. As soon as he was outside, he heard the noise: a distant growling sound that might have come from New Year’s noisemakers or from the exultation of passionate lovers, or even from a badly played oboe. Brunetti, however, knew what it was, and if he had not, the iron-strong smell would have told him what went on behind those gates.

Vezzani had called Brunetti while he was in the car: the Director was not there, so he had explained to his assistant that two officers from Venice were on their way. She would meet them. When Brunetti conveyed this message to Vianello, the Inspector repeated, ‘she’ and shrugged.

The driver sounded the horn a few times: Brunetti doubted that it would be heard. But after a few seconds, and as in a film, a new sound began, rougher and more mechanical than the other, and the two sides of the gate began to open inwards.

Brunetti waited until the gates had stopped moving to decide whether to get back into the car or to walk through the gate. The metallic odour grew stronger. The gates and the noise of the mechanism propelling them stopped at the same moment, leaving audible only the original sound, now louder. One high-pitched squeal that must have come from a pig rose above all the other noises, then ended as quickly as it had begun, as though the sound had run into a wall. Yet this in no way diminished the level of noise: perhaps it resembled the noise from a playground of excited children let out to play, but there was nothing playful in the sound. And no one was going to be let out.

Brunetti turned towards the car just as Vianello got out of the back seat and walked over to join him. Brunetti was vaguely conscious that something was odd, and it was only when he glanced down and saw that the ground was covered with gravel that he realized Vianello’s footsteps were obliterated by the sounds coming from beyond the open gates.

‘I told the driver to go and get a coffee and that we’d call him when we’re finished,’ the Inspector said. Then, in answer to Brunetti’s expression, he added, neutrally, ‘The smell.’

As they walked towards the gate, Brunetti was amazed that he could feel the gravel slide beneath his feet while he could not hear the sound his feet made. When they passed through the gate, a door opened in the building just to their right, a large rectangle built from cement blocks, roofed with aluminium panels. A small woman paused a moment in the doorway, then came down the two steps and walked towards them, her footsteps also eliminated by the sounds that came from behind her.

Her dark hair was cut close to her head, suggesting a boyishness that was quickly dispelled by her full bosom and the tight-waisted skirt she wore. Her legs, Brunetti noticed, were good, her smile relaxed and welcoming. When she reached them, she raised her hand and offered it, first to Vianello, who was closer to her, and then to Brunetti, then tilted her head back to get a better view of the two men, each so much taller than she.

She indicated the building and turned towards it, not bothering to waste words against the noise.

They followed her up the steps and into the building, where the noise grew less, and even less again when the woman reached behind them to close the door. They now stood in a small vestibule about two metres by three, cement-floored, utterly utilitarian. The walls were white plasterboard, without decoration. The only object in the room was a video camera suspended from the ceiling and aimed at the door, where they were standing. ‘Yes,’ she said, watching the relief on both their faces, ‘it’s quieter in here. If not, we’d all be driven mad.’ She was close to thirty, but not yet there, and had the easy grace of a woman at home in her body and with no anxieties about it.

‘I’m Giulia Borelli,’ she said, ‘I’m Dottor Papetti’s assistant. As I explained to your colleague, Dottor Papetti is in Treviso this morning. He’s asked me to help you in any way we can.’ She gave a small smile, the sort one gives to visitors or prospective clients. How many women would work at a slaughterhouse? Brunetti asked himself.

Then, with a look of open curiosity, she asked, ‘You’re really the police from Venice?’ Her voice was curiously deep for so small a woman, musical with the cadence of the Veneto.

Brunetti said that they were. Closer to her, he saw the freckles sprayed across her nose and cheeks; they added to the general impression of health. She ran the fingers of her right hand through her hair. ‘If you come to my office, we can talk,’ she said.

The iron-rich odour had diminished here, as well. Would air conditioning do that? Brunetti wondered, and, if so, what would happen in the winter, when this part of the building was heated? He and Vianello followed her through a door and into a corridor that led to the back of the building. He was aware that his senses had been both battered and starved since he left the car. His hearing and sense of smell had been overloaded with sensation, shocked into a state where they might not be capable of registering any new smell or sound, while his sense of sight had been heightened by the blank room and corridor.

Signorina Borelli opened a door, then stepped back to let them go in ahead. This room, too, was close to naked. There was a desk with a computer and some papers on it, a chair behind it and three in front, and nothing else. More unsettling, there were no windows: all light came from multiple neon strips in the ceiling that created a textureless, dull illumination that deprived the room of any sense of depth.

She went behind the desk and sat, leaving them to take their places in front. ‘Your colleague said you wanted to talk about Dottor Nava,’ she said in a level voice. She leaned forward, body bent towards them.

‘Yes, that’s correct,’ Brunetti answered. ‘Could you tell me when he came to work here?’ he asked.

‘About six months ago.’

‘And his duties?’ Brunetti asked, continuing to evade the use of either the present or the past tense and hoping he did so naturally. Vianello took out his notebook and began to write.

‘He inspects the animals that are brought in.’

‘For what purpose?’ Brunetti asked.

‘To see if they’re healthy,’ she answered.

‘And if they’re not?’

Signorina Borelli seemed surprised at the question, as though the answer should be self-evident. ‘Then they aren’t slaughtered. The farmer takes them back.’

‘Any other duties?’

‘He inspects some of the meat.’ She sat back and raised one arm to point behind her to the left. ‘It’s refrigerated. Obviously, he can’t inspect it all, but he does look at samples and decides if it’s safe for human consumption.’

‘And if it’s not?’

‘Then it’s destroyed.’

‘How?’

‘It’s burned.’

‘I see,’ Brunetti said.

‘Any other duties?’

‘No, only those two things.’

‘How many days a week is he here?’ Brunetti asked, as if he had not already had this information from the dead man’s wife.

‘Two. Monday and Wednesday mornings.’

‘And the other days? What does he do?’

If she was puzzled by the question, she did not hesitate to answer it. ‘He has a private practice. Most of the examining veterinarians do.’ She smiled and shrugged, then said, ‘It would be hard to live on what they earn here.’

‘But you don’t know where?’

‘No,’ she said regretfully, then said, ‘But it’s probably in our files, on his application. I could easily find out for you.’

Brunetti held up a hand both to acknowledge and decline her offer. In a friendly voice, he asked, ‘Could you give me a clearer idea of how things work here? That is, how is it that he inspects animals on only two days?’ He spread his hands in a gesture of confusion.

‘It’s quite simple, really,’ she said, using an expression most commonly chosen to begin an explanation of something that was not simple. ‘Most farmers get their animals here the day before the slaughtering, or the same day. That saves them the cost of keeping and feeding and watering the animals while they wait. Dottor Nava inspects them on Monday and Wednesday, and they’re processed after that.’ She paused to see if Brunetti was following, and Brunetti nodded. He was, as well, mulling over the verb ‘processed’.

‘And if he doesn’t see them?’ Vianello broke in to ask, also using the deliberately deceptive present tense.

She raised her eyebrows, either at the discovery that the Inspector could speak or at the question itself. ‘That’s never happened before. Luckily, his predecessor has agreed to come in and do the inspections and continue with them until Dottor Nava comes back.’

Imperturbable, Brunetti asked, ‘And the name of his predecessor?’

She could not disguise her surprise. ‘Why do you want to know that?’

‘In case it becomes necessary to speak to him,’ Brunetti answered.

‘Meucci. Gabriele Meucci.’

‘Thank you.’

Signorina Borelli straightened up, as though she thought that would be the end of it, but Brunetti asked, ‘Could you give me the names of the other people Dottor Nava is in contact with here?’

‘Aside from me and the Director, Dottor Papetti, there’s the chief knacker, Leonardo Bianchi. He might know other people, but we’re the ones he deals with most frequently.’

She smiled, but the wattage was now dimmer. ‘I think it’s time you explained why you’re asking all these questions, Commissario. Perhaps I watch too much television, but usually this kind of conversation takes place when someone has died and the police are trying to get information about him.’

Her glance went back and forth between the two men. Vianello kept his head bent over his notebook, leaving it to his superior to answer.

‘We have reason to believe that Dottor Nava has been the victim of violence,’ Brunetti said, unable to resist the bureaucrat’s need to release information in small portions.

Just then, as if to draw attention to the phrase, a shrill noise penetrated whatever acoustical insulation was meant to protect this room from the reality beyond it. Unlike the previous long cry, this one was not drawn out, only three short blasts like the ones that on the vaporetti were a command to abandon ship. There were three more cries, muffled this time, and then the animal making them was forced to abandon ship, and the noises stopped.

‘Is he dead?’ Signorina Borelli asked, visibly shaken.

Confused for an instant by the object of her curiosity, it took Brunetti a moment to answer. ‘We think so, yes.’

‘What does that mean: you think so?’ she demanded, looking back and forth between them. ‘You’re the police, for heaven’s sake. If you don’t know, then who does?’

‘We still don’t have a positive identification,’ Brunetti said.

‘Does that mean you’re going to ask me to make one?’ she asked, voice hot with the outrage ignited by Brunetti’s last remark.

‘No,’ Brunetti said calmly. ‘We’ve already found a person to do that.’

She leaned forward suddenly, her head extended like a snake about to strike, and said, ‘You’re cold-hearted, aren’t you? You tell me he’s been the victim of violence, but the fact that you’re here means he’s dead, and the fact that you’re asking all these questions means someone killed him.’ She wiped at her eyes as she spoke and seemed to have trouble finishing some of her words.

Vianello looked up from his notebook and studied Signorina Borelli’s face.

She propped her elbows on the desk and lowered her face into her upraised palms. ‘We find a good man, and this happens to him,’ she said. Brunetti had no idea how to interpret ‘good’, and there was no hint in her voice. Did she judge Nava to be a competent man or a decent one?

After a short time, and still not completely in control, she said, ‘If you have more questions, you’ll have to ask Dottor Papetti.’ She slapped both palms on the desk, and the noise seemed to calm her. ‘What else do you want?’

‘Would it be possible to look at your facility?’

‘You don’t want to,’ she said without thinking.

‘I beg your pardon?’ Brunetti said.

‘You don’t want to see what we do here.’ She sounded entirely calm and reasonable. ‘No one does. Believe me.’

Few remarks could have as effectively steeled Brunetti’s intention to see what went on here.

‘We do,’ he said and got to his feet.