Death in a Strange Country

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Death in a Strange Country

[Commissario Brunetti 02]

By Donna Leon

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Volgi intorno lo squardo, oh sire, e vedi qual strage orrenda nel tuo nobil regno, fa il crudo mostro. Ah mira allagate di sangue quelle pubbliche vie. Ad ogni passo vedrai chi geme, e l’alma gonfia d’atro velen dal corpo esala.

Gaze around you, oh sire, and see what terrible destruction the cruel monster has wrought in your noble kingdom. Look at the streets swamped in blood. At every step you see someone groaning, the spirit leaving a corpse swollen with horrible poison.

Idomeneo

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1

The body floated face down in the murky water of the canal. Gently, the ebbing tide tugged it along towards the open waters of the laguna that spread out beyond the end of the canal. The head bumped a few times against the moss-covered steps of the embankment in front of the Basilica of Santi Giovanni e Paolo, lodged there for a moment, then shifted free as the feet swung out in a delicate balletic arc that pulled it loose and set it again drifting towards the open waters and freedom.

Close by, the bells of the church chimed four in the morning, and the waters slowed, as if ordered to do so by the bell.

Gradually, they slowed even more, until they reached that moment of utter stillness that separates the tides, when the waters wait for the new tide to take over the day’s work. Caught in the calm, the limp thing bobbed on the surface of the water, dark-clad and invisible. Time passed in silence and then was broken by two men who walked by, chatting in soft voices filled with the - easy sibilance of the Venetian dialect. One of them pushed a low cart loaded with newspapers which he was taking back to his newsstand to begin the day; the other was on his way to work in the hospital that took up one entire side of the vast open campo.

Out in the laguna, a small boat puttered past, and the tiny waves it raised rippled up the canal and toyed with the body, shifting it back up against the embankment wall.

As the bells chimed five, a woman in one of the houses that overlooked the canal and faced onto the campo flung open the dark-green shutters of her kitchen and turned back to lower the flaming gas under her coffee pot. Still not fully awake, she spooned sugar into a small cup, flipped off the gas with a practised motion of her wrist, and poured a thick stream of coffee into her cup. Cradling it in her hands, she walked back to the open window and, as she had every morning for decades, looked across at the giant equestrian statue of Colleoni, once the most fearsome of all Venetian military leaders, now her nearest neighbour. For Bianca Pianaro, this was the most peaceful moment of the day, and Colleoni, cast into eternal bronze silence centuries ago, the perfect companion for this precious, secret quarter-hour of silence.

Glad of its sharp warmth, she sipped at her coffee, watching the pigeons that had already begun to peck their way towards the base of the statue. Idly, she glanced directly below her, to where her husband’s small boat bobbed in the dark-green water. It had rained in the night, and she looked to see if the canvas tarpaulin that covered the boat was still in place. If the tarpaulin had been pulled free by the wind, Nino would have to go down and bail the boat out before he went to work. She leaned out, providing herself a clear view of the bow. At first, she thought it was a bag of rubbish, swept from the embankment by the night’s tide. But it was strangely symmetrical, elongated, with two branches sweeping out on either side of the central trunk, almost as if it were...

‘Oh, Dio,’ she gasped and let her coffee cup fall into the waters below, not far from the strange shape floating face down in the canal. ‘Nino, Nino,’ she screamed, turning back towards their bedroom. ‘There’s a body in the canal.’

It was this same message, ‘There’s a body in the canal’, that woke Guido Brunetti twenty minutes later. He shifted up onto his left shoulder and pulled the phone onto the bed with him. ‘Where?’

‘Santi Giovanni e Paolo. In front of the hospital, sir,’ answered the policeman who had called him as soon as the call came into the Questura.

‘What happened? Who found him?’ Brunetti asked, swinging his feet out from beneath the covers and sitting up on the edge of the bed.

‘I don’t know, sir. A man named Pianaro called to report it.’

‘So why did you call me?’ Brunetti asked, making no attempt to hide the irritation in his voice, the clear result of the time indicated on the glowing face of the clock beside the bed: five-thirty-one. ‘What about the night shift? Isn’t anyone there?’

‘They’ve all gone home, sir. I called Bozzetti, but his wife said he wasn’t home yet.’ As he spoke, the young man’s voice grew more and more uncertain. ‘So I called you, sir, because I know you’re working day shift.’ Which, Brunetti reminded himself, began in two and a half hours. He said nothing.

‘Are you there, sir?’

‘Yes, I’m here. And it’s five-thirty.’

‘I know, sir,’ the young man bleated. ‘But I couldn’t find anyone else.’

‘All right. All right. I’ll go down there and have a look. Send me a launch. Now.’ Remembering the hour and the fact mat the night shift had already gone off duty, he asked, ‘Is there anyone who can bring it?’

‘Yes, sir. Bonsuan just came in. Shall I send him?’

‘Yes, right now. And call the rest of the day shift. Tell them to meet me there.’

‘Yes, sir,’ the young man responded, his relief audible at having someone take charge.

‘And call Doctor Rizzardi. Ask him to meet me there as quickly as he can.’

‘Yes, sir. Anything else, sir?’

‘No, nothing. But send the launch. Right now. And tell the others, if they get there before I do, to close things off. Don’t let anyone get near the body.’ Even as they spoke, how much evidence was being, destroyed, cigarettes dropped on the ground, shoes scuffed across the pavement? Without saying anything further, he hung up.

Beside him in the bed, Paola moved and looked up at him with one eye, the other covered by a naked arm against the invasion of light. She made a noise that long experience told him was an inquisitive one.

‘A body. In a canal. They’re coming to get me. I’ll call.’ The noise with which she acknowledged this was an affirmative one. She rolled onto her stomach and was asleep immediately, certainly the only person in the entire city uninterested in the fact that a body had been found floating in one of the canals.

He dressed quickly, decided not to spend the time shaving, and went into the kitchen to see if there was time for coffee. He opened the lid of the Moka Express and saw about an inch of coffee left over from the night before. Though he hated reheated coffee, he poured it into a saucepan and put it on a high flame, standing over it and waiting for it to boil. When it did, he poured the almost-viscous liquid into a cup, spooned in three sugars, and downed it quickly.

The bell to the apartment sounded, announcing the arrival of the police launch. He glanced at his watch. Eight minutes before six. It must be Bonsuan; no one else was capable of getting a boat here that quickly. He grabbed a wool jacket from the cupboard by the front door. September mornings could be cold, and there was always the chance of wind at Santi Giovanni e Paolo, so near to the open waters of the laguna.

At the bottom of the five flights of stairs, he pulled open the door to the building and found Puccetti, a recruit who had been with the police for fewer than five months.

‘Buon giorno, Signor Commissario,’ Puccetti said brightly and saluted, making far more noise and motion than Brunetti thought seemly at that hour.

Brunetti answered with a wave and headed down the narrow calle on which he lived. At the edge of the water, he saw the police launch moored to the landing, blue light flashing rhythmically. At the wheel, he recognized Bonsuan, a police pilot who had the blood of countless generations of Burano fishermen in his veins, blood that must certainly have been mixed with the waters of the laguna, carrying an instinctive knowledge of the tides and currents that would have allowed him to navigate the canals of the city with his eyes closed.

Bonsuan, stocky and heavy-bearded, acknowledged Brunetti’s arrival with a nod, as much an acknowledgement of the hour as of his superior. Puccetti scrambled onto deck, joining a pair of uniformed policemen already there. One of them flicked the mooring cable free of the piling, and Bonsuan backed the boat quickly out into tine Grand Canal, then swung it sharply around and back up towards the Rialto Bridge. They swept under the bridge and swung into a one-way canal on the right. Soon after that, they cut to the left, then again to the right. Brunetti stood on the deck, collar raised against the wind and the early-morning chill. Boats moored on either side of the canals bobbed in their wake, and others, coming in from San Erasmo with fresh fruit and vegetables, pulled to the side and hugged the buildings at the sight of their flashing blue light.

Finally, they turned into the Rio dei Mendicanti, the canal that flowed beside the hospital and out into the laguna, just opposite the cemetery. The proximity of the cemetery to the hospital was probably accidental; to most Venetians, however, particularly those who had survived treatment at the hospital, the location of the cemetery was a silent comment upon the proficiency of the hospital staff.

Halfway down the canal, clustered on the right, Brunetti saw a small group of people drawn up close to the edge of the embankment. Bonsuan stopped the boat fifty metres from the crowd in what Brunetti knew would be, by now, an entirely vain attempt to keep any evidence at the site free from the effects of their arrival.

One of the officers approached the boat and held out a hand to Brunetti to help him climb ashore. ‘Buon giorno, Signor Commissario. We got him out, but, as you can see, we’ve already got company.’ He gestured to nine or ten people crowding around something on the pavement, their bodies obscuring it from Brunetti’s sight.

The officer turned back towards the crowd, saying as he walked, ‘All right. Move back. Police.’ At the approach of the two men, not at the command, the crowd pulled back.

On the pavement, Brunetti saw the body of a young man lying on his back, eyes open to the morning light. Beside him stood two policemen, uniforms soaked to their shoulders. Both of them saluted when they saw Brunetti. When their hands returned to their sides, water trickled to the ground beneath them. He recognized them, Luciani and Rossi, both good men.

‘Well?’ Brunetti asked, looking down at the dead man.

Luciani, the senior of the two, answered. ‘He was floating in the canal when we got here, Dottore. A man in that house,’ he said, pointing to an ochre building on the other side of the canal, ‘called us. His wife saw him.’

Brunetti turned and looked across at the house. ‘Fourth floor,’ Luciani explained. Brunetti cast his eyes up, just in time to see a form pull back from the window. As he stared at the building and at those beside it, he noticed a number of dark shadows at the windows. Some retreated when he looked at them, others did not.

Brunetti turned back to Luciani and nodded to him to continue. ‘He was near the steps, but we had to go in and pull him out. I put him on his back, to try to revive him. But there was no hope, sir. It looks like he’s been dead a long time.’ He sounded apologetic, almost as if his failure to breathe life back into the young man had somehow added to the finality of his death.

‘Did you check the body?’Brunetti asked.

‘No, sir. When we saw that there was nothing we could do, we thought it would be best to leave him for the doctor.’

‘Good, good,’ Brunetti muttered. Luciani shivered, either with cold or the awareness of his failure, and small drops of water fell to the pavement below him.

‘You two get yourselves off home. Have a bath, get something to eat. And drink something against the chill.’ Both men smiled at this, grateful for the suggestion. ‘And take the launch. Bonsuan will take you home, both of you.’

The men thanked him and pushed their way through the crowd, which had grown larger in the few minutes Brunetti had been there. He gestured to one of the uniformed men who had come with him on the launch and told him, ‘Move these people back, then get their names and addresses, all of them. Ask them when they got here, if they heard or saw anything strange this morning. Then send them home.’ He hated the ghouls who always gathered at the scenes of death and could never understand the fascination so many of them had with it, especially in its more violent manifestations.

He looked again at the face of the young man on the pavement, now the object of so many pitiless stares. He was a handsome man, with short blond hair made darker by the water that still puddled around him. His eyes were a clear, limpid blue, his face symmetrical, nose narrow and fine.

Behind him, Brunetti heard the voices of the police as they began to move the crowd back. He called Puccetti over to him, ignoring the new salute the young man gave him. ‘Puccetti, go over to that row of houses on the other side of the canal and see if anyone heard or saw anything.’

‘For what time, sir?’

Brunetti thought for a moment, considering the moon. It had been new two nights ago: the tides would not have been strong enough to carry the body very far at all. He would have to ask Bonsuan about last night’s tides. The hands of the dead man were strangely shrivelled and white, a sure sign he had been in the water for a long time. Once he knew how long the young man had been dead, he’d leave it to Bonsuan to calculate how far he could have drifted. And from where. In the meantime, there was Puccetti. ‘Ask them for any time last night. And get some barriers set up. Send those people home if you can.’ Little chance of that, he knew. Venice had few events like this to offer its citizens; they would leave only reluctantly.

He heard the sound of another boat approaching. A second white police launch, blue light pulsing round, pulled into the canal and stopped at the same mooring Bonsuan had used. This one also carried three men in uniform and one in civilian clothing. Like sunflowers, the faces of the crowd turned from the sun of their attention, the dead man, and swirled around towards the men who jumped down from the boat and approached the crowd.

At their head walked Doctor Ettore Rizzardi, the Coroner for the city. Unperturbed by the stares he was receiving. Doctor Rizzardi approached and extended his hand in a friendly fashion to Brunetti. ‘Buon di, Guido. What is it?’

Brunetti stepped aside so that Rizzardi could see what lay at their feet. ‘He was in the canal. Luciani and Rossi pulled him out, but there was nothing they could do. Luciani tried, but it was too late.’

Rizzardi nodded and grunted at this. The shrivelled skin of the hands told him how late it had been for any help.

‘It looks like he’s been in there for a long time, Ettore. But I’m sure you can tell me better.’

Taking this compliment as no more than his due, Rizzardi turned his full attention to the corpse. As he bent over the body, the whispers of the crowd grew even more sibilant. He ignored them, placed his bag carefully in a dry spot near the body, and stooped down over the corpse.

Brunetti wheeled around and walked towards the people who stood in what had now become the front rank of the crowd.

‘If you’ve given your names and addresses, you can go. There’s nothing more to see. So you can go, all of you.’ An old man with a grizzled beard bent sharply to the left to look past Brunetti and see what the doctor was doing over the body. ‘I said you can go.’ Brunetti spoke directly to the old man. He straightened up, glanced at Brunetti with complete lack of interest, then bent back down, interested only in the doctor. An old woman yanked angrily at the leash of her terrier and went off, visibly outraged by yet more evidence of police brutality. The uniformed men moved slowly among the crowd, turning them gently with a word or a hand on the shoulder, gradually forcing them to move away, abandoning the area to the police, The last to leave was the old man with the beard, who moved only as far as the iron railing enclosing the base of the statue of Colleoni, against which he leaned, refusing to abandon the campo or his rights as a citizen.

‘Guido, come here a moment,’ Rizzardi called from behind him.

Brunetti turned and went to stand beside the kneeling doctor, who held back the dead man’s shirt. About five inches above his waist, on the left side, Brunetti saw a horizontal line, jagged at the edges, flesh strangely greyish-blue. He knelt beside Rizzardi in a chill pool of water to get a closer look. The cut was about as long as his thumb and now, probably because of the body’s long immersion, gaped open, curiously bloodless.

‘This isn’t some tourist who got drunk and fell into a canal, Guido.’

Brunetti nodded in silent agreement. ‘What could do something like that?’ he asked, nodding towards the wound.

‘A knife. Wide-bladed. And whoever did it was either very good or very lucky.’

‘Why do you say that?’ Brunetti asked.

‘I don’t want to poke around in there too much, not until I can open him up and see it properly,’ Rizzardi said. ‘But if the angle is right, and that’s indicated by what I can see from here, then he had a clear path right to the heart. No ribs in the way. Nothing. Just the least little push, the least little bit of pressure, and he’s dead.’ Rizzardi repeated, ‘Either very good or very lucky.’

Brunetti could see only the width of the wound; he had no idea of the path it would have followed within the body. ‘Could it have been anything else? I mean, other than a knife?’

‘I can’t be sure until I get a closer look at the tissue inside, but I doubt it.’

‘What about drowning? If it didn’t get his heart, could he still have drowned?’

Rizzardi sat back on his heels, careful to pull the folds of his raincoat under him to keep them from the water below. ‘No, I doubt it. If it missed the heart, there wouldn’t have been enough damage to keep him from pulling himself out of the water. Just look at how pale he is. I think that’s what happened. One blow. The right angle. Death would have been almost immediate.’ He pushed himself to his feet and delivered the closest thing the young man was to get to a prayer that morning. ‘Poor devil. He’s a handsome young man, and he’s in excellent physical shape. I’d say he was an athlete or at least someone who took very good care of himself.’ He bent back over the body and, with a gesture that seemed curiously paternal, he moved his hand down across his eyes, trying to force them closed. One refused to move. The other closed for a moment, then slowly slid open and stared again at the sky. Rizzardi muttered something to himself, took a handkerchief from his breast pocket, and placed it across the face of the young man.

‘Cover his face. He died young,’ muttered Brunetti.

‘What?’

Brunetti shrugged. ‘Nothing. Something Paola says.’ He looked away from the face of the young man and studied, for the briefest of instants, the façade of the basilica and allowed himself to be calmed by its symmetry. ‘When can you tell me something exact, Ettore?’

Rizzardi gave a quick look at his watch. ‘If your boys can take him out to the cemetery now, I can get to him later this morning. Give me a call after lunch, and I’ll be able to tell you exactly. But I don’t think there’s any doubt, Guido.’ The doctor hesitated, not liking to have to tell Brunetti how to do his job. ‘Aren’t you going to check his pockets?’

Though he had done it many times in his career, Brunetti hated this first invasion of the privacy of the dead, this first awful imposition of the power of the State on the peace of the departed. He disliked having to go through their diaries and drawers, to page through their letters, finger their clothing.

But since the body had already been moved from where it had been found, there was no reason to leave it untouched until the photographer could record where it lay in the precise posture of death. He squatted beside the young man and reached a hand into his trouser pocket. At the bottom he found a few coins and placed them beside the body. In the other there was a plain metal ring with four keys attached. Unasked, Rizzardi bent down to help shift the body to its side so that Brunetti could reach into the back pockets. One held a sodden yellow rectangle, clearly a train ticket, and the other a paper napkin, equally sodden. He nodded to Rizzardi, and they lowered the body back to the ground.

He picked up one of the coins and held it out to the doctor.

‘What is it?’ asked Rizzardi.

‘American. Twenty-five cents.’ It seemed a strange thing to find in the pocket of a dead man in Venice.

‘Ah, that could be it,’ the doctor said. ‘An American.’

‘What?’

‘Why he’s in such good shape,’ Rizzardi answered, entirely unconscious of the bitter incongruity of the tense. ‘That might explain it. They’re always so fit, so healthy.’ Together, they looked at the body, at the narrow waist that showed under the still-open shirt.

‘If he is,’ Rizzardi said, ‘the teeth will tell me.’

‘Why?’

‘Because of the dental work. They use different techniques, better materials. If he’s had any dental work done, I’ll be able to tell you this afternoon if he’s American.’

Had Brunetti been a different man, he might have asked Rizzardi to take a look now, but he saw no need to hurry, nor did he want to disturb that young face again. ‘Thanks, Ettore. I’ll send a photographer out to take some pictures. Do you think you can get his eyes closed?’

‘Of course. I’ll have him looking as much like himself as I can. But you’ll want his eyes open for the pictures, won’t you?’

Just by a breath, Brunetti stopped himself from saying he never wanted those eyes open again and, instead, answered, ‘Yes, yes, of course.’

‘And send someone to take the fingerprints, Guido’

‘Yes.’

‘All right. Then call me about three.’ They shook hands briefly, and Doctor Rizzardi picked up his bag. Without saying goodbye, he walked across the open space towards the monumental open portal of the hospital, two hours early for work.

More officers had arrived while they were examining the body, and now there must have been eight of them, formed in an outward-facing arc about three metres from the body. ‘Sergeant Vianello,’ Brunetti called, and one of them stepped back from the line and came to join him beside the body.

‘Get two of your men to take him to the launch, then take him out to the cemetery.’

While this was being done, Brunetti returned to his examination of the front of the basilica, letting his eyes flow up and around its soaring spires. His eyes shifted across the campo to the statue of Colleoni, perhaps a witness to the crime.

Vianello came up beside him. ‘I’ve sent him out to the cemetery, sir. Anything else?’

‘Yes. Is there a bar around here?’

‘Over there, sir, behind the statue. It opens at six.’

‘Good. I need a coffee.’ As they walked towards the bar, Brunetti began to give orders. ‘We’ll need divers, a pair of them. Get them busy in the water where the body was found. I want them to bring up anything that could be a weapon: a knife, blade about three centimetres wide. But it might have been something else, even a piece of metal, so have them bring up anything that might have made a wound like that. Tools, anything.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Vianello said, trying to write this in his notebook while walking.

‘Doctor Rizzardi will give us a time of death this afternoon. As soon as we have it, I want to see Bonsuan.’

‘For the tides, sir?’ Vianello asked, understanding immediately.

‘Yes. And start calling the hotels. See if anyone is missing from his room, especially Americans.’ He knew the men disliked this, the endless calls to the hotels, pages and pages of them on the police list. And after they’d called the hotels, there remained the pensions and hostels, more pages of names and numbers.

The steamy warmth of the bar was comforting and familiar, as were the smells of coffee and pastry. A man and woman standing at the counter glanced at the uniformed man, then went back to their conversation. Brunetti asked for espresso, Vianello for caffè corretto, black coffee with a substantial splash of grappa. When the barman put their coffees in front of them, both spooned in two sugars and cradled the warm cups in their hands for a moment.

Vianello downed his coffee in one gulp, set the cup back on the counter, and asked, ‘Anything else, sir?’

‘See about drug dealing in the neighbourhood. Who does it, and where? See if there’s anyone in the neighbourhood with a record of drug arrests or street crimes: selling, using, stealing, anything. And find out where they go to shoot up, any of those calle that dead-end into the canal, if there’s a place where syringes turn up in the morning.’

‘You think it’s a drug crime, sir?’

Brunetti finished his coffee and nodded to the barman for another. Without being asked, Vianello’ shook his head in a quick negative. ‘I don’t know. It’s possible. So let’s check that first.’

Vianello nodded and wrote in his notebook. Finished, he slipped it into his breast pocket and began to reach for his wallet.

‘No, no,’ Brunetti insisted. ‘I’ll get it. Go back to the boat and call about the divers. And have your men set up barricades. Get the entrances to the canal blocked off while the divers work.’

Vianello nodded his thanks for the coffee and left. Through the steamy windows of the bar, Brunetti saw the ebb and flow of people across the campo. He watched as they came down from the main bridge that led to the hospital, noticed the police at their right, and asked the people standing around what was going on. Usually, they paused, looking from the dark uniforms that still milled around to the police launch that bobbed at the side of the canal. Then, seeing nothing at all out of the ordinary beyond that, they continued about their business. The old man, he saw, still leaned against the iron railing. Even after all his years of police work, he could not understand how people could so willingly place themselves near the death of their own kind. It was a mystery he had never been able to penetrate, that awful fascination with the termination of life, especially when it was violent, as this had been.

He turned back to his second coffee and drank it quickly. ‘How much?’ he asked.

‘Five thousand lire.’

He paid with a ten and waited for his change. When he handed it to Brunetti, the barman asked, ‘Something bad, sir?’

‘Yes, something bad,’ Brunetti answered. ‘Something very bad.’

* * * *

2

Because the Questura was so near, it was easier for Brunetti to walk to his office than go back on the launch with the uniformed men. He went the back way, passing the Evangelical church and coming up on the Questura from the right side of the building. The uniformed man at the front entrance opened the heavy glass door as soon as he saw Brunetti, who headed for the stairway that would take him to his office on the fourth floor, passing beside the line of foreigners seeking residence and work permits, a line that extended halfway across the lobby.

His desk, when he reached his office, was just as he had left it the day before, covered with papers and files sprawled across it in no particular order. The ones nearest to hand contained personnel reports, all of which he had to read and comment upon as part of the Byzantine process of promotion through which all State employees had to go. The second pile dealt with the last murder in the city, the brutal, crazed beating to death of a young man that had taken place a month ago on the embankment of the Zattere. So savagely had he been beaten that the police were at first sure it was the work of a gang. Instead, after only a day, they had discovered that the killer was a frail wisp of a boy of sixteen. The victim was homosexual, and the killer’s father a known Fascist who had instilled in his son the doctrines that Communists and gays were vermin who deserved only death. So, at five one bright summer morning, these two young men had come together in a deadly trajectory beside the waters of the Giudecca Canal. No one knew what had passed between them, but the victim had been reduced to such a state that the family had been denied the right to see his body, which had been consigned to them in a sealed coffin. The piece of wood which had been used to beat and stab him to death sat in a plastic box inside a filing cabinet on the second floor of the Questura. Little remained to be done, save to see that the psychiatric treatment of the killer continued and he was not allowed to leave the city. The State made no provision for psychiatric treatment for the family of the victim.

Instead of sitting at his desk, Brunetti reached into one of the side drawers and pulled out an electric razor. He stood at his window to shave, staring out at the facade of the church of San Lorenzo, still covered, as it had been for the last five years, with the scaffolding behind which extensive restoration was said to be taking place. He had no proof that this was happening, for nothing had changed in all these years, and the front doors of the church remained forever closed.

His phone rang, the direct line from outside. He glanced at his watch. Nine-thirty. That would be the vultures. He switched off the razor and walked over to his desk to answer the phone.

‘Brunetti.’

‘Buon giorno, Commissario. This is Carlon,’ a deep voice said and went on, quite unnecessarily, to identify himself as the Crime Reporter for the Gazzettino.

‘Buon giorno, Signor Carlon.’ Brunetti knew what Carlon wanted; let him ask.

‘Tell me about that American you pulled out of the Rio dei Mendicanti this morning.’

‘It was officer Luciani who pulled him out, and we have no evidence that he was American.’

‘I stand corrected, Dottore,’ Carlon said with a sarcasm that turned apology to insult. When Brunetti didn’t respond, he asked, ‘He was murdered, wasn’t he?’ making little attempt to disguise his pleasure at the possibility.

‘It would appear so.’

‘Stabbed?’

How did they learn so much, and so quickly? ‘Yes.’

‘Murdered?’ Carlon repeated, voice heavy with feigned patience.

‘We won’t have any final word until we get the results of the autopsy that Doctor Rizzardi is conducting this afternoon.’

‘Was there a stab wound?’

‘Yes, there was.’

‘But you’re not sure the stab wound was the cause of death?’ Carlon’s question ended with an incredulous snort

‘No, we’re not,’ Brunetti replied blandly. ‘As I explained to you, nothing will be certain until we have the results of the autopsy.’

‘Other signs of violence?’ Carlon asked, displeased at how little information he was getting.

‘Not until after the autopsy,’ Brunetti repeated.

‘Next, are you going to suggest he might have drowned, Commissario?’

‘Signor Carlon,’ Brunetti said, deciding that he had had enough, ‘as you well know, if he was in the water of one of our canals for any length of time, then it is far more likely that disease would have killed him than that he would have drowned.’ From the other end, only silence. ‘If you’ll be kind enough to call me this afternoon, about four, I’ll be glad to give you more accurate information.’ It was Carlon whose reporting had caused the story of the last murder to become an exposé of the private life of the victim, and Brunetti still felt enormous rancour because of it.

‘Thank you, Commissario. I’ll certainly do that. One thing - what was the name of that officer again?’

‘Luciani, Mario Luciani, an exemplary officer.’ As all of them were when Brunetti mentioned them to the Press.

‘Thank you, Commissario. I’ll make a note of that. And I’ll be sure to mention your cooperation in my article.’ With no further ado, Carton hung up.

In the past, Brunetti’s dealings with the Press had been relatively friendly, at times more than that, and at times he had even used the Press to solicit information about a crime. But in recent years, the ever-strengthening wave of sensationalistic journalism had prevented any dealings with reporters that were more than purely formal; every speculation he might voice would be sure to appear the following day as an almost direct accusation of guilt. So Brunetti had become cautious, providing information that was severely limited, however accurate and true reporters might know it to be.

He realized that, until he heard from the lab about the ticket in the man’s pocket or until he got the report on the autopsy, there was very little hecould do. The men in the lower offices would be calling the hotels now, and they would inform him if they turned up something. Consequently, there was nothing for him to do but continue to read and sign the personnel reports.

An hour later, just before eleven, the buzzer on his intercom sounded. He picked up the receiver, knowing too well who it would be. ‘Yes, Vice-Questore?’

Momentarily surprised at being directly addressed, having hoped, perhaps, to have found Brunetti absent or asleep, his superior, Vice-Questore Patta, took a moment to respond. ‘What’s all this about the dead American, Brunetti? Why wasn’t I called? Have you any idea of what this will do to tourism?’ Brunetti suspected that the third question was the only one in which Patta took any real interest

‘What American, sir?’ Brunetti asked, voice filled with feigned curiosity.

‘The American you pulled out of the water this morning.’

‘Oh,’ Brunetti said, this time with polite surprise. ‘Is the report back so soon? He was American, then?’

‘Don’t be cute with me, Brunetti,’ Patta said angrily. ‘The report isn’t back yet, but he had American coins in his pocket, so he’s got to be an American.’

‘Or a numismatist,’ Brunetti suggested amiably.

There followed a long pause which told Brunetti the Vice-Questore didn’t know the meaning of the word.

‘I told you not to be smart, Brunetti. We’re going to work on the assumption that he’s an American. We can’t have Americans being murdered in this city, not with the state of tourism this year. Do you understand that?’

Brunetti fought back the impulse to ask if it would be all right to kill people of other nationalities - Albanians, perhaps? - but, instead, said only, ‘Yes, sir.’

‘Well?’

‘Well what, sir?’

‘What have you done?’

‘Divers are searching the canal where he was found. When we find out when he died, we’ll have them search the places from where he might have drifted, assuming he was killed somewhere else. Vianello is checking for drug use or dealing in the neighbourhood, and the lab is working on the things we found in his pockets.’

‘Those coins?’

‘I’m not sure we need the lab to tell us they’re American, sir.’

After a long silence that said it would not be wise to bait Patta any further, his superior asked, ‘What about Rizzardi?’

‘He said he’d have the report to me this afternoon.’

‘See that I’m sent a copy of it,’ he ordered.

‘Yes, sir. Will there be anything else?’

‘No, that’s all.’ Patta replaced his phone without saying anything else, and Brunetti went back to reading the reports.

When he finished with them, it was after one. Because he didn’t know when Rizzardi would call, and because he wanted to get the report as quickly as possible, he decided not to go home for lunch, nor spend the time going to a restaurant, though he was hungry after the long morning. He decided to go down to the bar at the foot of Ponte dei Greci and make do with a few tramezzini.

When he walked in, Arianna, the owner, greeted him by name and automatically placed a wine glass on the counter in front of him. Orso, her ancient German shepherd, who had developed a special fondness for Brunetti over the course of the years, hauled himself arthritically to his feet from his regular place beside the ice-cream cooler and tottered over to him. He waited long enough for Brunetti to pat him on the head and pull gently at his ears and then collapsed in a heap at his feet. The many regulars in the bar were accustomed to stepping over Orso and tossing him bits of crusts and sandwiches. He was especially fond of asparagus.

‘What would you like, Guido?’ Arianna asked, meaning tramezzini and automatically pouring him a glass of red wine.

‘Give me a ham and artichoke, and one with shrimp.’ Fan-like, Orso’s tail began to beat softly against his ankle. ‘And one asparagus.’ When the sandwiches came, he asked for another glass of wine and drank it slowly, thinking of the way things would be complicated if the dead man did turn out to be American. He didn’t know if there would be questions of jurisdiction, decided not to think about that.

As if to prevent him, Arianna said, ‘Too bad about the American.’

‘We’re not sure that he is, not yet.’

‘Well, if he is, then someone is going to start crying “terrorism”, and that’s not going to do anyone any good.’ Though she was Yugoslavian by birth, her thinking was entirely Venetian: business first and above all.

‘There are lots of drugs in that neighbourhood,’ she added, as if talking about it could make drugs be the cause. He remembered that she also owned a hotel, so the very thought of the mere rumour of terrorism was bound to fill her with righteous panic.

‘Yes, we’re checking that, Arianna. Thanks.’ As he spoke, a stalk of asparagus worked itself loose from his sandwich and fell to the floor at Orso’s nose. And, when that one was gone, another. It was difficult for Orso to get to his feet, so why not let him eat takeaway?

He placed a ten-thousand-lire note on the counter and pocketed his change when she handed it to him. She hadn’t bothered to ring it up on the cash register, so the sum would go unreported and, therefore, untaxed. He had, years ago, ceased caring about this perpetual fraud committed against the State. Let the boys from the Finance Police worry about that. The law said she had to ring it up and give him a receipt; if he left the bar without it, both of them were liable to fines of as much as hundreds of thousands of lire. The boys from Finance often waited outside bars, shops, and restaurants, watching through the windows as business took place, then stopped emerging clients and demanded to be shown their receipts. But Venice was a small town, and all the men from Finance knew him, so he’d never be stopped, not unless they brought in extra police from outside the city and had what the Press had taken to calling a ‘blitz’, staking out the entire commercial centre of the city and, in a day, taking in millions of lire in fines. And if they stopped him? He’d show them his warrant card and say he’d stopped to use the toilet. Those same taxes paid for his salary; this was true. But that no longer made any difference to him, nor, he suspected, to the majority of his fellow citizens. In a country where the Mafia was free to murder when and whom it pleased, the failure to produce a receipt for a cup of coffee was not a crime that interested Brunetti.

Back at his desk, he found a note telling him to call Doctor Rizzardi. When Brunetti did, he found the Coroner still at his office on the cemetery island.

‘Ciao, Ettore. It’s Guido. What have you got?’

‘I took a look at his teeth. All the work is American. He has six fillings and one root canal. The work stretches back over years, and there’s no doubt about the technique. It’s all American.’

Brunetti knew better than to ask him if he was sure.

‘What else?’

‘The blade was four centimetres wide and at least fifteen long. The tip penetrated the heart, just as I thought. It slipped right between the ribs, didn’t even scrape them, so whoever did it knew enough to hold the blade horizontally. And the angle was perfect.’ He paused for a moment, then added, ‘Since it was on the left side, I’d say that whoever did it was right-handed or at least used his right hand.’

‘What about his height? Can you tell anything?’

‘No, nothing definite; But he had to be close to the dead man, standing face to face.’

‘Signs of a struggle? Anything under his nails?’

‘No. Nothing. But he’d been in the water about five or six hours, so if there was anything to begin with, it’s likely it would have been washed away.’

‘Five or six hours?’

‘Yes. I’d say he died about midnight, one o’clock.’

‘Anything else?’

‘Nothing particular. He was in very good shape, very muscular.’

‘What about food?’

‘He ate something a few hours before he died. Probably a sandwich. Ham and tomato. But he didn’t drink anything, at least not anything alcoholic. There was none in his blood, and from the look of his liver, I’d say he drank very little, if at all.’

‘Scars? Operations?’

‘He had a small scar,’ Rizzardi began, then paused and Brunetti heard the rustle of papers. ‘On his left wrist, half-moon shaped. Could have been anything. Never been operated on for anything. Had his tonsils, his appendix. Perfect health.’ Brunetti could tell from his voice that this was all Rizzardi had to give him.

‘Thanks, Ettore. Will you send a written report?’

‘Does His Superiorship want to see it?’

Brunetti grinned at Rizzardi’s title for Patta. ‘He wants to have it. I’m not sure he’s going to read it.’

‘Well, if he does, it’s going to be so filled with medical school jargon that he’ll have to call me to interpret it for him.’ Three years ago, Patta had opposed Rizzardi’s appointment as Coroner because the nephew of a friend of his was just then finishing medical school and was in search of a government job. But Rizzardi, with fifteen years’ experience as a pathologist, had been appointed instead, and ever since then he and Patta had conducted guerrilla warfare against one another.

‘I’ll look forward to reading it, then,’ Brunetti said.

‘Oh, you won’t be able to understand a word of it. Don’t even try, Guido. If you have any questions, call me and I’ll explain it to you.’

‘What about his clothing?’ Brunetti asked, though he knew this was none of Rizzardi’s responsibility.

‘He was wearing jeans, Levi’s. And he had one Reebok, size eleven.’ Before Brunetti could say anything, Rizzardi continued, ‘I know, I know. That doesn’t mean he’s American. You can buy Levi’s and Reeboks anywhere today. But his underwear was. I’ve sent it over to the lab boys, and they can tell you more, but the labels were in English and said “Made in USA”.’ The doctor’s voice changed, and he displayed a curiosity that was unusual for him. ‘Have your boys heard anything from the hotels? Any idea of who he was?’

‘I haven’t heard anything, so I guess they’re still calling.’

‘I hope you find out who he is so you can send him home. It’s no good thing, to die in a strange country.’

‘Thanks, Ettore. I’ll do my best to find out who he is. And send him home.’

He set the phone down. An American; He had carried no wallet, no passport, no identification, no money aside from those few coins. All of that pointed to a street crime, one that had gone horribly wrong and ended in death instead of robbery. And the thief had a knife and had used it with either luck or skill. Street criminals in Venice had some luck, but they seldom had any skill. They grabbed and ran. In any other city, this might be taken for a mugging that had gone wrongs but here in Venice this sort of thing simply didn’t happen. Skill or luck? And if it was skill, whose skill was it and why was it necessary that skill be employed?

He called down to the main office and asked if they had had any luck with the hotels. The first-and second-class hotels had only one missing guest, a man in his fifties who had not returned to the Gabriele Sandwirth the previous night. The men had begun to check the smaller hotels, one of which had an American man who had checked out the previous night but whose description didn’t fit.

It was possible, Brunetti realized, that he could have been renting an apartment in the city; in that case, days could pass before he was reported missing, or he simply might not be missed.

He called the lab and asked to speak to Enzo Bocchese, the Chief Technician. When he came on the phone, Brunetti asked, ‘Bocchese, have you got anything on the things in his pockets?’ It wasn’t necessary to specify whose pockets.

‘We used the infra-red on the ticket. It was so soaked that I didn’t think we’d be able to get anything. But we did.’

Bocchese; terribly proud of his technology and the things he could do with it, always needed to be prompted, and then praised. ‘Good. I don’t know how you do it, but you always manage to find something.’ Would that this were even close to the truth. ‘Where was it from?’

‘Vicenza. Round trip to Venice. Bought yesterday arid cancelled for the trip from Vicenza. I’ve got a man coming from the station to see if he can tell us anything, from the cancellation, about what train it was, but I’m not sure he can.’

‘What class was it, first or second?’

‘Second.’

‘Anything else? Socks? Belt?’

‘Rizzardi tell you about the clothes?’

‘Yes. He thinks the underwear is American.’

‘It is. No question. The belt — he could have bought that anywhere. Black leather with a brass buckle. The socks are synthetic. Made in Taiwan or Korea. Sold everywhere.’

‘Anything else?’

‘No, nothing.’

‘Good work, Bocchese, but I think we don’t need more than the ticket to be sure.’

‘Sure of what, Commissario?’

‘That he’s American.’

‘Why?’ the technician asked.

‘Because that’s where the Americans are,’ Brunetti replied. Any Italian in the area knew of the base in Vicenza, Caserma Something-or-Other, the base where thousands of American soldiers and their families lived, even now, so many years after the end of the war. If he was right, this would certainly raise the spectre of terrorism, and there were certain to be questions of jurisdiction. The Americans had their own police out there, and the instant someone so much as whispered ‘terrorism’, there could well be NATO and possibly Interpol. Or even the CIA, at the thought of which Brunetti grimaced, thinking of how Patta would bask in the exposure, the celebrity that would follow upon their arrival. Brunetti had no idea of what acts of terrorism were supposed to feel like, but this didn’t feel like one to him. A knife was too ordinary a weapon; it didn’t call attention to the crime. And there had been no call to claim the murder. Surely, that might still come, but it would be too late, too convenient.

‘Of course, of course,’ Bocchese said. ‘I should have thought of that.’ He paused long enough for Brunetti to say something, but when he didn’t, Bocchese asked, ‘Anything else, sir?’

‘Yes. After you speak to the man from the railways, let me know if he can tell you anything about the train he might have taken.’

‘I doubt he can, sir. It’s just an indentation in the ticket. We can’t pull up anything that might identify a train. But I’ll call you if he can tell us. Anything else?’

‘No, nothing. And thanks, Bocchese.’

After they hung up, Brunetti sat at his desk and stared at his wall, considering the information and the possibilities. A young man, in perfect physical shape, comes to Venice on a round-trip ticket from a city where there is an American military base. He had American dental work, and he carried American coins in his pocket.

Brunetti reached for the phone and dialled the operator. ‘See if you can get me the American military base in Vicenza.’

* * * *

3

As he waited for the call to be put through, Brunetti found the image of that young face, eyes splayed open in death, came back into his memory. It could have been any one of the faces he had seen in the photos of the American soldiers in the Gulf War: fresh, clean-shaven, innocent, glowing with that extraordinary health that so characterized Americans. But the face of the young American on the embankment had been strangely solemn, set apart from his fellows by the mystery of death.

‘Brunetti,’ he said, answering the buzzing intercom.

‘They’re very hard to find, those Americans,’ the operator said. ‘There’s no listing in the Vicenza phone book for American base, or for NATO, or for the United States. But I found one tinder Military Police. Wait just one minute, sir, and I’ll put the call through.’

How strange, Brunetti thought, that a presence so strong should be all but unfindable in the phone book. He listened to the usual clicks of a long-distance call, heard it ring at the other end, and then a male voice said, ‘MP station, may I help you, sir or madam?’

‘Good afternoon,’ Brunetti said in English. ‘This is Commissario Guido Brunetti of the Venice police. I’d like to speak to the person in charge of the police there.’

‘May I ask what this is in connection with, sir?’

‘It’s a police matter. May I speak to the person in charge?’

‘Just one moment, sir.’

There was a long pause, the sound of muffled voices at the other end, then a different voice spoke. ‘This is Sergeant Frolich. May I help you?’

‘Good afternoon, Sergeant. This is Commissario Brunetti of the Venice police. I’d like to speak to your superior officer or to whoever is in charge.’

‘Could you tell me what this is in connection with, sir?’

‘As I explained to your colleague,’ Brunetti said, keeping his voice level, ‘this is a police matter, and I’d like to speak to your superior officer.’ How long would he have to go on repeating the same formula?

‘I’m sorry, sir, but he’s not at the station right now.’

‘When do you expect him back?’

‘Couldn’t say, sir. Could you give me some idea of what this is about?’

‘A missing soldier.’

‘I beg your pardon, sir.’

‘I’d like to know if there’s been any report out there of a missing soldier.’

The voice suddenly grew more serious. ‘Who did you say this was, sir?’

‘Commissario Brunetti. Venice police.’

‘Do you have a number where we can call you?’

‘You can call me at the Questura in Venice. The number is 5203222, and the city code for Venice is 041, but you’ll probably want to check the number in the phone book. I’ll wait for your call. Brunetti.’ He hung up, certain they would now check the number and call him back. The change in the sergeant’s voice had indicated interest, not alarm, so there was probably no report of a missing soldier. Not yet.

After about ten minutes, the phone rang, and the operator told him it was the American base in Vicenza calling. ‘Brunetti,’ he said when he heard the line open.

‘Commissario Brunetti,’ a different voice said, ‘this is Captain Duncan of the Military Police at Vicenza. Could you tell me what it is you want to know?’

‘I’d like to know if you’ve had a report of a missing soldier. A young man, in his mid-twenties. Light hair, blue eyes.’ It took him a moment to do the calculation from metres to feet and inches. ‘About five feet, nine inches tall.’

‘Could you tell me why the Venice police want to know about this? Has he gotten into trouble there?’

‘You could say that, Captain. We found the body of a young man floating in a canal this morning. He had a round-trip ticket from Vicenza in his pocket, and his clothing and dental work are American, so we thought of the base and wondered if he came from there.’

‘Did he drown?’

Brunetti remained silent so long that the other repeated the question. ‘Did he drown?’

‘No, Captain, he didn’t. There were signs of violence.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘He was stabbed.’

‘Robbed?’

‘It would appear so, Captain.’

‘You sound like you have some doubt about that.’

‘It looks like robbery. He has no wallet, and all of his identification is missing.’ Brunetti went back to his original question. ‘Could you tell me if you’ve had a report of someone who is missing, who hasn’t shown up for work?’

There was a long pause before the Captain replied. ‘Can I call you back in about an hour?’

‘Certainly.’

‘We’ll have to contact the individual duty stations and see if anyone is missing from work or their barracks. Could you repeat the description, please?’

‘The man we found appears to be in his mid-twenties, has blue eyes, light hair, and is about five feet, nine inches tall.’

“Thank you, Commissario. I’ll get my men working on this immediately, and we’ll call you as soon as we learn anything.’

‘Thank you, Captain.’ Brunetti said and broke the connection.

If the young man did turn out to be an American soldier, Patta would be apoplectic with the need to find the killer. Patta, he knew, was incapable of viewing it as the taking of a human life. To him, it could be no more or less than a blow against tourism, and in protection of that civic good Patta was certain to grow ferocious.

He left his desk and walked down the flight of stairs that led to the larger offices where the uniformed men worked. Entering, he saw that Luciani was there, looking none the worse for his early-morning soaking. Brunetti shivered at the thought of entering the waters of the canals, not because of the cold but because of the filth. He’d often joked that falling into a canal was an experience he’d prefer not to survive. And yet, as a boy, he’d swum in the waters of the Grand Canal, and older people he knew talked of the way that, in the poverty of their youth, they had been forced to use the salt waters of the canals and of the laguna for cooking, this in the days when salt was an expensive and heavily taxed commodity, and Venetians were a poor people, tourism unknown.

Luciani was talking on the phone when Brunetti entered the office and waved him over to his desk. ‘Yes, Uncle, I know that,’ he said. ‘But what about his son? No, not the one that was in trouble in Mestrino last year.’

As he listened to his uncle’s answer, he nodded to Brunetti and signalled with an open palm that he should wait until the conversation was finished. Brunetti sat and listened to the rest of the conversation. ‘When was the last time he worked? At Breda? Come on, Uncle, you know he’s not able to keep any job that long.’ Luciani went silent and listened for a long time, then said, ‘No, no, if you hear anything about him, maybe that he suddenly has a lot of money, let me know. Yes, yes, Uncle, and give Aunt Luisa a kiss for me.’ There followed a long series of those bi-syllabic ‘ciaos’ without which Venetians seemed incapable of ending a conversation.

When he hung up, Luciani turned to Brunetti and said, ‘That was my Uncle Carlo. He lives over near Fondamente Nuove, back a bit from Santi Giovanni e Paolo. I asked him about the neighbourhood - about who sells drugs, who uses. The only one he knows about is that Vittorio Argenti.’ Brunetti nodded in recognition of the name. ‘We’ve had him here a dozen times. But my uncle said he took a job at Breda about six months ago, and now that I think about it, it’s been about that long since we’ve seen him in here. I can check the records, but I think I would have remembered if we’d pulled him in for anything. My uncle knows the family, and he swears they’re all convinced that Vittorio’s changed.’ Luciani lit a cigarette and blew out the match. ‘From the way my uncle spoke, it sounds like he’s convinced, too.’

‘Aside from Argenti, is there anyone else in the neighbourhood?’

‘He seems to have been the principal one. There’s never been much drug traffic in that part of the city. I know the rubbish man, Noe, and he’s never complained of finding syringes on the street in the morning, not like San Maurizio,’ he said, naming a part of the city notorious for drug use.

‘What about Rossi? He find anything?’

‘Pretty much the same, sir. It’s a quiet neighbourhood. Occasionally, there’s a robbery or a break-in, but there’s never been much in the way of drugs, and there’s never been any violence,’ he said, then added, ‘before this.’

‘What about the people in those houses? Did they hear or see anything?’

‘No, sir. We spoke to all the people who were in the campo this morning, but no one heard or saw anything suspicious. And the same thing for the people in the houses.’ He anticipated Brunetti’s next question. ‘Puccetti said the same thing, sir.’

‘Where’s Rossi?’

With no hesitation, whatsoever, Luciani answered, ‘He’s gone out to get a coffee, sir. Ought to be back in a few minutes if you want to talk to him.’

‘What about the divers?’

‘They were in there for more than an hour. But they didn’t bring up anything that could be a weapon. The usual mess: bottles, cups, even a refrigerator, and a screw driver, but there’s nothing that even comes close.’

‘What about Bonsuan? Did anyone talk to him about the tides?’

‘No, sir. Not yet. We don’t have a time of death yet.’

‘About midnight.’ Brunetti supplied.

Luciani flipped open a logbook that lay on his desk and ran one thick finger down a column of names, ‘He’s taking a boat to the station right now. Delivering two prisoners to the Milan train. Want me to have him go up to your office when he gets back?’

Brunetti nodded, and then they were interrupted by the return of Rossi. His story was just as Luciani had said: no one in the campo that morning nor in the houses facing it had seen or heard anything at all unusual.

In any other city in Italy, the fact that no one had seen or heard anything would be no more than an indication of their distrust of the police and a general unwillingness to help them. Here, however, where the people were generally law-abiding and most of the police themselves Venetians, it meant no more than that they had seen or heard nothing. If there were any serious involvement with drugs in that neighbourhood, sooner or later they would hear about it. Someone would have a cousin or a boyfriend or a mother-in-law who would make a phone call to a friend who just happened to have a cousin or a boyfriend or a mother-in-law who worked for the police, and so the word would reach him. Until that time, he would have to take it as given that there was little traffic in drugs in that part of the city, that it was not the place where a person would go to take or buy drugs, especially not a foreigner. All of that would seem to rule out drugs as having played a part in the crime, at least if it were related in any way to that neighbourhood.

‘Send Bonsuan up to see me when he gets back, please,’ he told them and went back to his office, careful to use the stairs in the rear of the building that avoided taking him anywhere near Patta’s office. The longer he could avoid talking to his superior, the happier he would be.

In his office, he finally remembered to call Paola. He had forgotten to tell her that he wouldn’t be home for lunch, but it was years since she was surprised or bothered by that. Instead of conversation, she read a book during the meal, unless the children were there. In fact, he had begun to suspect that she enjoyed her quiet lunches alone with the authors she taught at the university, for she never objected if he was delayed or kept from coming.

She answered on the third ring. ‘Pronto.’

‘Ciao, Paola. It’s me.’

‘I thought it might be. How are things?’ She never asked a direct question about his work or about what kept him from meals. It was not that sire took no interest, only that she found it better to wait for him to talk about it. Eventually, she came to learn it all, anyway.

‘I’m sorry about lunch, but I was making phone calls.’

‘That’s all right. I spent it with William Faulkner. Very interesting man.’ Over the course of the years, they’d come to treat her lunchtime visitors as real guests, had evolved jokes about the table manners of Doctor Johnson (shocking), the conversation of Melville (scurrilous), and the amount Jane Austen drank (stunning).

‘I’ll be back for dinner, though. All I have to do is talk to a few people here and wait for a call from Vicenza.’ When she said nothing, he added, ‘From the American military base there.’

‘Oh, it’s like that, is it?’ she asked, telling him, with the question, that she had already learned about the crime and the probable identity of the victim. The barman told the postman, who told the woman on the second floor, who called her sister, and, first thing, everyone in the city knew about what had happened, long before a word appeared in the newspapers or on the evening news.

‘Yes, it’s like that,’ he agreed.

‘What time do you think you’ll be back?’

‘Before seven.’

‘All right. I’ll get off the phone now, in case your call comes.’ He loved Paola for many reasons, not the least of which was the fact that he knew this to be her real motive for getting off the phone. There was no secret message, no hidden agenda in what she said; she merely wanted to free the line so that his work would be easier and he would be home sooner.

‘Thanks, Paola. I’ll see you about seven.’

‘Ciao, Guido,’ and she was gone, back to William Faulkner, leaving him free to work and equally free of guilt about the demands of that work.

It was almost five and still the Americans hadn’t called back. For a moment, he was tempted to call them, but he resisted the impulse. If one of their soldiers was missing, they’d have to contact him. After all, to put it bluntly, he had the body.

He searched through the personnel reports that still lay in front of him until he found those of Luciani and Rossi. In both of them, he added a note that they had behaved far beyond the ordinary in going into the canal to pull the body out. They could have waited for a boat or could have used poles, but they had done something he didn’t know if he would have had the courage, or the will, to do and had gone into that water to pull him ashore.

The phone rang. ‘Brunetti.’

‘This is Captain Duncan. We’ve cheeked all the duty stations, and we have one man who didn’t show up for work today. He meets your description. I sent someone to check his apartment, but there’s no sign of him, so I’d like to send someone to take a look at the body.’

‘When, Captain?’

‘Tonight, if possible.’

‘Certainly. How will you send him?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘I’d like to know how you’ll send him, by train or by car, so that I can send someone to meet him.’

‘Oh, I see.’ Duncan answered. ‘By car.’

‘Then I’ll send someone to Piazzale Roma. There’s a Carabinieri station there, to the right as you enter the Piazzale.’

‘All right. The car will be here in about fifteen minutes, so they ought to be there in a bit less than an hour, about quarter to seven.’

‘We’ll have a launch waiting. Hell have to go out to the cemetery to identify the body. Will it be someone who knew the man, Captain?’ Brunetti knew from long experience how difficult it was to recognize the dead from a photograph.

‘Yes, it’s his commanding officer at the hospital.’

‘The hospital?’

‘The man who’s missing is our Public Health Inspector, Sergeant Foster.’

‘Could you give me the name of the man who’s coming?’

‘Captain Peters. Terry Peters. And Commissario,’ Duncan added, ‘the Captain is a woman.’ There was more than a trace of smugness in his voice as he added, ‘And Captain Peters is also Doctor Peters.’

What was he meant to do, Brunetti wondered, fall over on his side because the Americans allowed women into their army? Or because they also allowed them to be doctors? Instead, he decided to out-Herod Herod and become the classic Italian who couldn’t resist the lure of anything, so long as it came in a skirt, even the skirt of a military uniform. ‘Very good, Captain. In that case, I’ll go myself to meet Captain Peters. Doctor Peters.’

Duncan took a few seconds to answer, but all he said was, ‘That’s very thoughtful of you, Mr Brunetti. I’ll tell the Captain to ask for you.’

‘Yes. Do,’ Brunetti said and hung up without waiting for the other man to say goodbye. His tone, he realized without regret, had been too strong; as often happened with him, he had allowed himself to be sucked into resentment by what he thought lay between the lines of what he heard. In the past, both during Interpol seminars that had included Americans and during three months of training in Washington, he had often come up against this national sense of moral superiority, this belief so common among Americans that it had somehow been given to them to serve as a glistening moral light in a world dark with error. Perhaps that was not the case here; perhaps he was misinterpreting Duncan’s tone, and the captain had meant to do no more than help Brunetti avoid embarrassment. It’so, then his response had certainly done everything possible to confirm any cliché about hot-blooded, thin-skinned Italians.

Shaking his head in chagrin, he dialled an outside line and then his home number.

‘Pronto,’ Paola responded after three rings.

‘This time I called,’ he said without introduction.

‘Which means you’ll be late.’

‘I’ve got to go to Piazzale Roma to meet an American captain who’s coming from Vicenza to identify the body. I shouldn’t be too late, not much past nine. She’s supposed to get here by seven.’

‘She?’

‘Yes, she,’ Brunetti said. ‘My reaction was the same. She’s also a doctor.’

‘It is a world of miracles in which we live,’ Paola said. ‘Both a captain and a doctor. She had better be very good at both because she’s making you miss polenta and liver.’ It was one of his favourites, and she had probably made it because he had missed lunch.

‘I’ll eat when I get back.’

‘All right, I’ll feed the kids and wait for you.’

‘Thanks, Paola. I won’t be late.’

‘I’ll wait,’ she said and replaced the receiver.

As soon as the line was clear, he called down to the second floor and asked if Bonsuan had come back yet. The pilot was just coming in, and Brunetti asked that he come up to his office.

A few minutes later, Danilo Bonsuan came into Brunetti’s office. Rough-hewn and robust, he looked like a man who lived on the water but who would never think of drinking the stuff. Brunetti pointed to the chair in front of his desk. Bonsuan lowered himself into the chair, stiff-jointed after decades on board and around boats. Brunetti knew better than to expect him to volunteer information, not because he was reluctant but simply because he didn’t have the habit of speaking unless there was some practical purpose to be served by doing so.

‘Danilo, the woman saw him at about five-thirty, dead, low tide. Doctor Rizzardi said he had been in the water about five or six hours; that’s how long he was dead.’ Brunetti paused, giving the other man time to begin to visualize the waterways near the hospital. ‘There’s no sign of a weapon in the canal where we found him.’

Bonsuan didn’t bother to comment on this. No one would bother to throw away a good knife, especially not where they had just used it to kill someone.

Brunetti took this as spoken and added, ‘So he might have been killed somewhere else.’

‘Probably was,’ Bonsuan said, breaking his silence.

‘Where?’

‘Five, six hours?’ Bonsuan asked. When Brunetti nodded, the pilot put his head back and closed his eyes, and Brunetti could almost see the tide chart of the laguna that he studied. Bonsuan remained like that for a few minutes. Once he shook his head in a brief negative, dismissing some possibility that Brunetti would never learn about. Finally he opened his eyes and said, ‘There are two places where it could have been. Behind Santa Marina. You know that dead calle that leads down to the Rio Santa Marina, behind the new hotel?’

Brunetti nodded. It was a quiet place, a dead end.

The other is Calle Cocco.’ When Brunetti seemed puzzled, Bonsuan explained, ‘It’s one of those two blind calle that lead off of Calle Lunga, where it heads out of Campo Santa Maria Formosa. Goes right down to the water.’

Though Bonsuan’s description made him recognize where the calle was, even allowed him to recall the entrance to it, past which he must have walked hundreds of times, Brunetti could not remember ever having actually walked down the calle. No one would, not unless they lived in it, for it was, as Bonsuan pointed out, a dead: end that led to the water and ended there.

‘Either one would be a perfect place,’ Bonsuan suggested. ‘No one ever passes either one of them, not at that hour.’

‘And the tides?’

‘Last night they were very weak. No real pull in them. And a body catches on things; that slows it down. It could have been either one of those two places.’

‘Any other?’

‘It might have been one of the other calle that lead into the Canal of Santa Marina, but those are the two best places if all we’ve got is five or six hours for him to drift.’ It seemed that Bonsuan had finished, but then he added, ‘Unless he used a boat,’ leaving it to Brunetti to infer that he meant the killer.

‘That’s possible, isn’t it?’ Brunetti agreed, though he thought it unlikely. Boats meant motors, and late at night that meant angry heads stuck out of windows to see who it was making all the noise.

‘Thanks, Danilo. Would you tell the divers to go over those two places - it can wait until the morning - and take a look? And ask Vianello to send a team over to check both of those places to see if there’s any sign that it was done there.’

Bonsuan pushed himself up from his chair, knees creaking audibly. He nodded.

‘Who’s down there who can take me to Piazzale Roma and then out to the cemetery?’

‘Monetti,’ Bonsuan responded, naming one of the other pilots.

‘Could you tell him I’d like to leave in about ten minutes?’

With a nod and a mumbled, ‘Yes, sir,’ Bonsuan was gone.

Brunetti suddenly noticed how hungry he was. All he’d eaten since the morning were three sandwiches, well, less than that, since Orso had eaten one of them. He pulled open the bottom drawer of his desk, hoping to find something there, a box of buranei, the s-shaped cookies he loved and usually had to fight the children for, an old candy bar, anything, but it was as empty as it had been the last time he looked.

It would have to be coffee, then. But that would mean having Monetti stop the boat. It was a measure of his hunger, the irritation he felt at this simple problem. But then he thought of the women down in the Ufficio Stranieri; they usually had something to give him if he went begging for food.

He left his office and went down the back staircase to the ground floor, pushing his way through the large double doors and into the office. Sylvia, small and dark, and Anita, tall, blonde, and stunning, sat at their desks opposite one another, leafing through the papers that seemed never to disappear from their desks.

‘Buona sera,’ they both said as he came in, then bowed again to the green-covered files that sprawled out in front of them.

‘Do you have anything to eat?’ he asked with more hunger than grace.

Sylvia smiled and shook her head without speaking; he came into the office only to beg food or to tell them that one of their applicants for a work or residence permit had been arrested and could be removed from their lists and files.

‘Don’t you get fed at home?’ Anita asked, but at the same time she was pulling open one of the drawers in her desk. From it she pulled a brown paper bag. Opening it, she took out one, then two, then three ripe pears and placed them at the front of her desk, within easy reach of his hand.

Three years ago, an Algerian who had been denied a residence permit had gone berserk in the office when he was given the news, grabbed Anita by the shoulders, and pulled her across her desk. He was holding her there, screaming in her face in hysterical Arabic, when Brunetti had come in to ask for a file. Instantly, he had wrapped an arm around the man’s neck and choked him until he released Anita, who had fallen free to her desk, terrified and sobbing. No one had ever referred to the incident since then, but he knew he could always find something to eat in her desk;

‘Thanks, Anita,’ he said and picked up one of the pears. He plucked out the stem and bit into the pear, ripe and perfect. In five quick bites, it was gone, and he reached for the second one. A bit less ripe, it was still sweet and soft. Juggling the two damp cores in his left hand, he took the third pear, thanked her again, and went out of the office, now fortified for the ride to Piazzale Roma and his meeting with Doctor Peters. Captain Peters.

* * * *

4

He got to the Carabinieri station at Piazzale Roma at twenty minutes before seven, leaving Monetti in the launch to wait for him to come back aboard with the doctor. He realized, although it no doubt made a statement about his prejudices, that he found it more comfortable to think of her as a doctor than as a captain. He had called ahead, so the Carabinieri knew he was coming. It was the usual bunch, most of them Southerners, who seemed never to leave the smoke-filled station, the purpose of which Brunetti could never understand. Carabinieri had nothing to do with traffic, but traffic was all there was at Piazzale Roma: cars, campers, taxis, and, especially during the summer, endless rows of buses parked there just long enough to disgorge their heavy cargoes of tourists. Just this last summer there had been added to them a new sort of vehicle, the diesel-burning, fume-spewing buses that lumbered there overnight from a newly freed Eastern Europe and from which emerged, dazed with travel and lack of sleep, scores of thousands of very polite, very poor, very stocky tourists, who spent a single day in Venice and left it dazzled by the beauty they had seen in that one day. Here they had their first taste of capitalism triumphant, and they were too thrilled by it to realize that much of it was no more than papier-mâché masks from Taiwan and lace woven in Korea.

He went into the station and exchanged friendly greetings with the two officers on duty. ‘No sign of her yet, La Capitana,’ one of them said, then added a scornful chuckle at the idea that a woman could be an officer. At the sound of it, Brunetti determined to address her, at least It’she came anywhere within hearing of these two, by her rank and to give her every sign of the respect to which her rank entitled her. Not for the first time, he cringed when he saw his own prejudices manifest in other people.

He engaged in a few desultory remarks with the Carabinieri. What chance did Napott have of winning this Weekend? Would Maradona ever play again? Would the government fall? He stood looking out of the glass door and watched the waves of traffic flow into the Piazzale. Pedestrians danced and wove their way through the cars and buses. No one paid the least attention to the zebra crossing or to the white lines that were meant to indicate the separation of lanes. And yet the traffic flowed smoothly and quickly.

A light green sedan cut across the bus lane and drew up behind the two blue and white Carabinieri vehicles. It was an almost anonymous rectangle, devoid of markings or rooftop light, its only distinguishing mark a number plate which read ‘AFI Official’. The driver’s door opened, and a uniformed soldier emerged. He bent and opened the door behind him and held it while a young woman in a dark-green uniform got out. As soon as she stood clear of the car, she put on her uniform cap and looked around her, then over towards the Carabinieri station.

Without bothering to say goodbye to the men inside, Brunetti left the station and went towards the car. ‘Doctor Peters?’ he said as he approached.

She looked up at the sound of her name and took a step towards him. As he came up, she held out her hand and shook his briefly. She appeared to be in her late twenties, with curly dark-brown hair that pushed back against the pressure of her hat. Her eyes were chestnut, her skin still brown from a summer tan. Had she smiled, she would have been even prettier. Instead, she looked at him directly, mouth pulled into a tense straight line, and asked, ‘Are you the police inspector?’

‘Commissario Brunetti. I have a boat here. It will take us out to San Michele.’ Seeing her confusion, he explained, ‘The cemetery island. The body’s been taken there.’

Without waiting for her reply, he pointed in the direction of the mooring and led the way across the road. She paused long enough to say something to the driver and then followed him. At the water’s edge, he pointed to the blue and white police boat moored to the embankment. ‘If you’ll come this way, Doctor,’ he said, stepping from the pavement and onto the deck of the boat. She came up close behind him and accepted his hand. The skirt of her uniform fell just a few inches below her knees. Her legs were good, tanned and muscular, the ankles slim. With no hesitation, she gripped his hand and allowed herself to be helped on board the boat. As soon as they were down in the cabin and seated, Monetti backed out of the mooring and turned the boat up the Grand Canal. He took them quickly past the railway station, blue light turning, and turned left into the Canale della Misericordia, beyond the outlet of which lay the cemetery island.

Usually, when he had to take people foreign to Venice on a police launch, Brunetti busied himself by pointing out sights and points of interest along the way. This time, however, he contented himself with the most formal of openings. ‘I hope you had no trouble in getting here, Doctor.’

She looked down at the strip of green carpeting on the floor between them and muttered something he took to be a ‘no’ but said nothing further. He noticed that she occasionally took a deep breath in an effort to calm herself, a strange response in someone who was, after all, a doctor.

As It’she had read his thoughts, she glanced up at him, smiled a very pretty smile, and said, ‘It’s different, when you know the person. In medical school, they’re strangers, so it’s easy to keep a professional distance.’ She paused for a long time. ‘And people my age don’t usually die.’

That was certainly true enough. ‘Did you work together for a long time?’ Brunetti asked.

She nodded and began to answer, but before she could say anything, the boat gave a sudden lurch. She grabbed the front of her seat with both hands and shot him a frightened glance.

‘We’ve moved out into the laguna, into open water. Don’t worry, it’s nothing to be afraid of.’

‘I’m not a good sailor. I was born in North Dakota, and there’s not a lot of water there. I never even learned how to swim.’ Her smile was weak, but it was back in place.

‘Did you and Mr Foster work together for a long time?’

‘Sergeant,’ she corrected him automatically. ‘Yes, ever since I got to Vicenza, about seven months ago. He really runs everything. They just need an officer to be in charge. And to sign papers.’

‘To take the blame?’ he asked with a smile.

‘Yes, yes, I suppose you could say that. But nothing’s ever gone wrong. Not with Mike. He’s very good at his job.’ Her voice was warm. Praise? Affection?

Below them, the engine slowed to an even purr, and then there came the heavy thump as they slid into the dock at the cemetery. He stood and went up the narrow stairway to the open deck, pausing at the top to hold one side of the swinging door open to allow the doctor to pass through it. Monetti was busy wrapping the mooring lines around one of the wooden pilings that stuck up at a crazy angle from the waters of the laguna,

Brunetti stepped ashore and held out his arm. She placed her hand on it, then leaned heavily on it as she leaped to the shore beside him. He noticed that she carried neither handbag nor briefcase, perhaps having left it in the car or in the boat.

The cemetery closed at four, so Brunetti had to ring the bell that stood to the right of the large wooden doors. After a few minutes, the door on the right side was pulled open by a man in a dark blue uniform, and Brunetti gave his name. The man held the door open, then closed it after them. Brunetti led their way through the main entrance and paused at the watchman’s window, where he announced himself and showed his warrant card. The watchman signalled for them to continue down tine open arcade to the right. Brunetti nodded. He knew the way.

When they stepped through the door and into the building that held the morgue, Brunetti felt the sudden drop in temperature. Doctor Peters apparently did as well, for she brought her arms together across her chest and lowered her head. A white-uniformed attendant sat at a plain wooden desk at the end of a long corridor. He got to his feet as they approached, careful to place his book face down in front of him. ‘Commissario Brunetti?’ he asked.

Brunetti nodded. ‘This is the doctor from the American base,’ he added, nodding to the young woman at his side. To one who had looked so frequently upon the face of death, the sight of a young woman in a military uniform was hardly worthy of notice, so the attendant passed quickly in front of them and opened the heavy wooden door that stood to his left.

‘I knew you were coming, so I brought him out,’ he said as he led them towards a metal gurney that stood on one side of the room. All three of them recognized what was under the white cloth. When they drew up next to the body, the young man looked at Doctor Peters. She nodded. When he pulled the cloth back, she looked at the face of the dead man, and Brunetti looked at hers. For the first few moments, her own remained absolutely still and expressionless, then she closed her eyes and pulled her upper lip between her teeth. It’she was trying to bite back tears, she failed, for they welled up and seeped out of her eyes. ‘Mike, Mike,’ she whispered and turned away from the body.

Brunetti nodded to the attendant, and he drew the cloth back across the young man’s face.

Brunetti felt her hand on his arm, her grip surprisingly strong. ‘What killed him?’

He stepped back, intending to turn and lead her from the room, but her grip tightened and she repeated, voice insistent, ‘What killed him?’

Brunetti placed his hand on top of hers and said, ‘Come outside.’

Before he had any idea what she was doing, she pushed past him and grabbed at the cloth that covered the body of the young man, ripping it away to expose his body to the waist. The giant incision of the autopsy, running from navel to neck, was sewn together with large stitches. Unsewn and seeming quite harmless when compared to the enormous incision of the autopsy was the small horizontal line that had killed him.

Her voice came out as a low moan, and she repeated the name, ‘Mike, Mike,’ drawing the sound out in a long, keening wail. She stood beside the body, curiously straight and rigid, and the noise continued to come from her.

The attendant stepped quickly in front of her and fastidiously replaced the cloth, covering both wounds and then the face.

She turned to face Brunetti, and he saw that her eyes were filled with tears, but he saw something else in them that looked like nothing so much as terror, sheer animal terror.

‘Are you all right, Doctor?’ he asked, voice low, careful not to touch her or approach her in any way.

She nodded, and the look of whatever it was passed from her eyes. Abruptly she turned and headed back towards the door of the mortuary. A few feet from it, she stopped suddenly, looked around her as It’surprised to find herself where she was, and ran towards a sink that stood against the far wall. She was violently sick into it, retched repeatedly until she stood at the sink, arms braced to support herself, leaning down above it, panting.

The attendant suddenly appeared beside her and handed her a white cotton towel. She took it with a nod and wiped at her face with it. With strange gentleness, the man took her arm and led her to another sink a few metres down the same wall. He turned on the hot-water tap, then the cold, and placed his hand under the water until it reached a temperature suitable for him. When it did, he reached out and held the towel white Doctor Peters washed her face and rinsed her mouth with a handful of water, and then another. When she was done, he handed her the towel again, shut off both laps, and left the room by the door on the other side.

She folded the towel and draped it over the edge of the sink. Making her way back to Brunetti, she avoided looking to her left, where the body still lay on me gurney, covered now.

When she got near, he turned and led the way to the door, held it open for her as they passed into the warmer evening air. As they walked down under the long arcade, she said, ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know why that happened. I’ve certainly seen autopsies. I’ve even done autopsies.’ She shook her head a few times as they walked. He half saw the gesture from his greater height beside her.

If only to complete the formality, he asked, ‘Is that Sergeant Foster?’

‘Yes, it is,’ she answered with no hesitation, but he sensed that she was struggling to keep her voice calm and level. Even her walk was more rigid than it had been when they went in, as It’she had let the uniform take over and direct her motions.

When they passed through the gate of the cemetery, Brunetti led her over to where Monetti had moored the boat. He sat inside the cabin, reading his newspaper. When he saw them approach, he folded it and moved to the stern, where he pulled on the mooring rope to bring the boat close enough for them to be able to climb on board easily.

This time she stepped onto the boat and went immediately down the stairs into the cabin. Pausing only long enough to whisper to Monetti, ‘Take as much time as you can going back,’ he followed her down into the cabin.

She sat farther forward this time, turned to face out of the front windows. The sun had already set, and the afterglow provided very little light by which to see the skyline of the city, off to their left. He took his place opposite her, noticing how straight and stiff she sat.

‘There will be a lot of formalities, but I imagine we can release the body tomorrow.’

She nodded to acknowledge that she heard him.

‘What will the Army do?’

‘Excuse me?’ she said.

‘What will the Army do in a case like this?’ he repeated.

‘Well send the body home, to his family.’

‘No, I don’t mean about the body. I mean about the investigation.’

At that, she turned and looked him in the eyes. Her confusion, he believed, was feigned. ‘I don’t understand. What investigation?’

‘To find out why he was killed.’

‘But I thought it was robbery,’ She said, asking for confirmation of that belief.

‘It might have been,’ he said, ‘bat I doubt it.’

She looked away from him when he said that and stared out of the window, but the panorama of Venice had been swallowed by the night, and all she saw there was her own reflection.

‘I don’t know anything about that,’ she said, voice insistent.

To Brunetti, it sounded as It’she believed she could make this be true, if only she repeated it often and insistently enough. ‘What kind of man was he?’ he asked.

For a moment, she didn’t answer, but when she did, Brunetti found her answer strange, ‘Honest. He was an honest man.’ It was a strange thing to say about a man so young.

He waited to see It’she would say anything more. When she didn’t, he asked, ‘How well did you know him?’

He watched, not her face, but its reflection in the window of the boat. She was no longer crying, but a fixed sadness had settled on her features. She took a deep breath and answered, ‘I knew him very well.’ But then her voice changed, grew more casual and offhand. ‘We worked together for seven months.’ And that was all she said.

‘What sort of work did he do? Captain Duncan said he was the Public Health Inspector, but I’m not sure I have any idea what that means.’

She noticed that their eyes met in the window, so she turned to face him directly. ‘He had to inspect the apartments where we live. We Americans, that is. Or if there were any complaints about tenants by their landlords, he had to go and investigate them.’

‘Anything else?’

‘He had to go to the embassies serviced by our hospital. In Egypt, Poland, Yugoslavia, and inspect the kitchens, see that they were clean.’

‘So he travelled a lot?’

‘A fair amount, yes.’

‘Did he like his work?’

Without hesitation and with great emphasis, she said, ‘Yes, he did. He thought it was very important.’

‘And you were his superior officer?’

Her smile was very small. ‘You could say that, I suppose. I’m really a paediatrician; they just gave me the job in public health so that they’d have an officer’s signature, and a doctor’s, in the right places. Mike ran the office almost completely by himself. Occasionally, he’d give me something to sign, or he’d ask me to write a request for supplies. Things get done faster if an officer asks for them.’

‘Did you ever go on any of these trips, these trips to the embassies, together?’

It’she found that a strange question, he had no way of telling, for she turned away from him and again stared out of the window. ‘No, Mike always went alone.’ Without warning, she stood and went towards the steps at the back of the cabin. ‘Does your driver, or whatever he is, know the way? It seems like it’s taking us an awful long time to get back.’ She pushed open one of the doors and looked carefully to either side of them, but the buildings that lined the canal were anonymous to her.

‘Yes, it takes longer to get back,’ Brunetti lied easily. ‘Many of the canals are one way, so we have to go all the way around the station to get to Piazzale Roma.’ He saw that they were just entering the Canale di Cannaregio. In five minutes, perhaps less, they would be there.

She pushed her way outside and stood on deck. A sudden gust of wind pulled at her cap, and she crushed it to her head with one hand, then removed it and held it at her side. With its stiffness removed, she was revealed as more than pretty.

He came up the steps and stood beside her. They made the right turn into the Grand Canal. ‘It’s very beautiful,’ she said. Then, changing her tone, she asked, ‘Why do you speak English so well?’

‘I studied it in school, and at the university, and I spent some time in the States.’

‘You speak it very well.’

‘Thank you. Do you speak Italian?’

‘Un poco,’ she replied, then smiled and added, ‘molto poco.’

Ahead of them he saw the moorings of Piazzale Roma. He stepped in front of her and grabbed the mooring rope to hold it ready while Monetti pulled up next to the piling. He flipped it over the top of the pole and tied it in an expert knot. Monetti cut the engine and Brunetti jumped to the dock. She took his hand with easy familiarity and followed him from the boat. Together, they went towards the car that was still parked in front of the Carabinieri station.

The driver, when he saw her approaching, scrambled out of the front seat, saluted, and opened the back door of the car. She pulled the skirt of her uniform under her and slipped into the back seat. Brunetti put out a restraining hand and stopped the driver from closing the door after her. ‘Thank you for coming, Doctor,’ he said, bowing down, one hand on the roof of the car, to speak to her.

‘You’re welcome,’ she said and didn’t bother with thanking him for having taken her to San Michele.

‘I’ll look forward to seeing you in Vicenza,’ he said and watched for her reaction.

It was sudden and strong, and he saw a flash of that same fear he had seen when she first looked at the wound that had killed Foster. ‘Why?’

His smile was bland. ‘Perhaps I can find out more about why he was killed.’

She reached in front of him and pulled at the door. He had no choice but to step back from its closing weight. It slammed shut, she leaned across the seat and said something to the driver, and the car moved away. He stood and watched as it inserted itself into the traffic flowing out of Piazzale Roma, up the graded road towards the causeway. At the top, it disappeared from his sight, an anonymous pale green vehicle going back to the mainland after a trip to Venice.

* * * *

5

Without bothering to glance into the Carabinieri station to see if his return with the Captain had been noticed, Brunetti went back to the boat, where he found Monetti returned to his newspaper. Years ago, a foreigner - he couldn’t now remember who it was - had remarked on how slowly Italians read. Ever since then, whenever he observed someone nursing a single newspaper all the way from Venice to Milan, Brunetti thought of this; Monetti had certainly had a good deal of time, but he appeared still to be in the first pages. Perhaps boredom had forced him to begin reading through it a second time.

‘Thanks, Monetti,’ he said, stepping onto the deck.

The young man looked up and smiled. ‘I tried to slow her down as much as possible, sir. But it’s crazy, with all these maniacs who get right on your tail and follow too closely.’ Brunetti had been in his thirties when he learned to drive, forced to do it when he was posted to Naples for a three-year assignment. He did it with trepidation, and he drove badly, slowed by caution, and too often enraged by those same maniacs, the variety who drove cars, not boats.

‘Would you mind taking me up to San Silvestro?’ he asked.

‘I’ll take you right to the end of the calle if you’d like, sir.’

‘Thanks, Monetti. I would.’

Brunetti flipped the rope up over the top of the piling and wrapped it carefully around the metal stanchion on the side of the boat. He moved ahead and stood beside Monetti as they started up the Grand Canal. Little that was to be seen down at this end of the city interested Brunetti, surely as close to a slum as the island had. They passed the railway station, a building that surprised by its drabness.

It would have been easy for Brunetti to grow indifferent to the beauty of the city, to walk in the midst of it, looking and not really seeing. But then it always happened: a window he had never noticed before would swim into his ken, or the sun would gleam in an archway, and he would actually feel his heart tighten in response to something infinitely more complex than beauty. He supposed, when he bothered to think about it, that it had something to do with language, with the fact that there were fewer than eighty thousand people who lived in the city, and perhaps with the fact that he had gone to kindergarten in a fifteenth-century palazzo. He missed this city when he was away from it, much in the same way he missed Paola, and he felt complete and whole only while he was here. One glance around him, as they sped up the canal, was proof of the wisdom of all of this. He had never spoken of this to anyone. No foreigner would understand; any Venetian would find it redundant.

Soon after they passed under the Rialto, Monetti pulled the boat over to the right. At the end of the long calle that led up to Brunetti’s building, he slipped the engine into neutral, hovered for the briefest of instants beside the embankment, and let Brunetti jump to shore. Even before Brunetti could turn to wave his thanks, Monetti was gone, swinging around, back down the way he had come, blue light flashing as he took himself home to dinner.

Brunetti walked up the calle, legs tired with all the jumping on and off boats that he seemed to have been doing all day, since the first boat had picked him up here more than twelve hours ago. He opened the enormous door into the building and closed it quietly behind him. The narrow stairway that hairpinned its way up to the top of the building served as a perfect trumpet of sound, and they could, even four floors above, hear it whenever it slammed. Four floors. The thought burdened him.

By the time he reached the final turn in the staircase, he could smell the onions, and that did a great deal to make the last flight easier. He glanced at his watch before he put his key into the door. Nine-thirty. Chiara would still be awake, so he could at least kiss her good night and ask her It’she had done her homework. If Raffaele were there, he could hardly risk the first, and the second would be futile.

‘Ciao, Papà,’ Chiara called from the living room. He put his jacket in the cupboard and went down the corridor to the living room. Chiara lolled in an easy chair, looking up from a book that lay open in her lap.

As he walked into the room, he automatically switched on the track lighting above her. ‘You want to go blind?’ he asked, probably for the seven hundredth-time.

‘Oh, Papà, I can see enough to read.’

He bent over her and kissed her on the cheek she held up to him. ‘What are you reading, Angel?’

‘It’s a book Mamma gave me. It’s fabulous. It’s about this governess who goes to work for a man, and they fall in love, but he’s got this crazy wife locked up in the attic, so he can’t marry her, even though they’re really in love. I just got to the part where there’s a fire. I hope she burns up.’

‘Who, Chiara?’ he asked. ‘The governess or the wife?’

‘The wife, silly.’

‘Why?’

‘So Jane Eyre,’ she said, making a hash of the name, ‘can marry Mister Rochester,’ to whose name she did equal violence.

He was about to ask another question, but she had gone back to the fire, so he went into the kitchen, where Paola was bent over the open door of the washing-machine.

‘Ciao, Guido,’ she said, standing. ‘Dinner in ten minutes.’ She kissed him, turned back to the stove, where onions were browning in a pool of oil.

‘I just had a literary discussion with our daughter,’ he said. ‘She was explaining the plot of a great classic of English literature to me. I think it might be better for her if we forced her to watch the Brazilian soap operas on television. She’s in there, rooting for the fire to kill Mrs Rochester.’

‘Oh, come on, Guido, everyone roots for the fire when they read Jane Eyre.’ She stirred the onions around in the pan and added, ‘Well, at least the first time they read it. It isn’t until later that they realize what a cunning, self-righteous little bitch Jane Eyre really is.’

‘Is that the kind of thing you tell your students?’ he asked, opening a cabinet and pulling out a bottle of Pinot Noir.

The liver lay sliced and waiting on a plate beside the frying pan. Paola slipped a slotted ladle under it and flipped half into the pan, then stepped back to avoid the spitting oil. She shrugged. Classes at the university had just resumed, and she obviously didn’t want to think about students on her own time.

Stirring, she asked, ‘What was the captain-doctor like?’

He pulled down two glasses and poured wine into both. He leaned back against the worktop, handed her one, sipped, answered, ‘Very young and very nervous.’ Seeing that Paola continued to stir, he added, ‘And very pretty.’

Hearing that, she sipped at the glass she held in one hand and looked at him.

‘Nervous about what?’ She took another sip of the wine, held the glass up to the light, and said, ‘This isn’t as good as what we got from Mario, is it?’

‘No,’ he agreed. ‘But your cousin Mario is so busy making a name for himself in the international wine trade that he doesn’t have time to bother with orders as small as ours.’

‘He would if we paid him on time,’ she snapped.

‘Paola, come on. That was six months ago.’

‘And it was more than six months that we kept him waiting to be paid.’

‘Paola, I’m sorry. I thought I’d paid him, and then I forgot about it. I apologized to him.’

She set the glass down and gave the liver a quick jab.

‘Paola, it was only two hundred thousand lire. That’s not going to send your cousin Mario to the poorhouse.’

‘Why do you always call him, “my cousin Mario?”‘

Brunetti came within a hair’s breadth of saying, ‘Because he’s your cousin and his name is Mario,’ but, instead, set his glass down-on the worktop and put his arms around her. For a long time, she remained stiff, leaning away from him. He increased the pressure of his arms around her, and she relaxed, leaned against him, and put her head back against his chest.

They stayed like that until she poked him in the ribs with the end of the spoon and said, ‘liver’s burning.’

He released her and picked up his glass again.

‘I don’t know what she’s nervous about, but it upset her to see the corpse.’

‘Wouldn’t anyone be upset to see a dead man, especially someone they knew?’

‘No, it was more than that. I’m sure there was something between them.’

‘What sort of something?’

‘The usual sort.’

‘Well, you said she was pretty.’

He smiled. ‘Very pretty,’ She smiled. ‘And very,’ he began, searching for the right word. The right one didn’t make any sense. ‘And very frightened.’

‘Why do you say that?’ Paola asked, carrying the pan to the table and setting it down on a ceramic tile. ‘Frightened about what? That she’d be suspected of killing him?’

From beside the stove, he took the large wooden cutting board and carried it to the table. He sat and lifted the kitchen towel spread across the board and exposed the half-wheel of golden polenta that lay, suit warm and now grown firm, beneath it She brought a salad and the bottle of wine, pouring them both more before she sat down.

‘No, I don’t think it’s that,’ he said, and spooned liver and onions onto his plate, then added a broad wedge of polenta. He speared a piece of liver with his fork, pushed onions on top of it with his knife, and began to eat. As was his habit, he said nothing until his plate was empty. When the liver was gone and he was mopping the juice up with what remained of his second helping of polenta, he said; ‘I think she might know, or have some idea about, who killed him. Or why he was killed.’

‘Why?’

‘If you’d seen her look when she saw him. No, not when she saw that he was dead and that it was really Foster, but when she saw what killed him she was on the edge of panic. She got sick.’

‘Sick?’

‘Threw up.’

‘Right there?’

‘Yes. Strange, isn’t it?’

Paola thought for a while before she answered. She finished her wine, poured herself another half-glass. ‘Yes. It’s a strange reaction to death. And she’s a doctor?’ He nodded. ‘Makes no sense. What could she be afraid of?’

‘Anything for dessert?’

‘Figs.’

‘I love you.’

‘You mean you love figs,’ she said and smiled.

There were six of them, perfect and moist with sweetness. He took his knife and began to peel one. When he was done, juice running down both hands, he cut it in half and handed the larger piece to her.

He crammed most of the other into his mouth and wiped at the juice that ran down his chin. He finished the fig, ate two more, wiped at his mouth again, cleaned his hands on his napkin, and said, ‘If you give me a small glass of port, I’ll die a happy man.’

Getting up from the table, she asked, ‘What else could she be afraid of?’

‘As you said, that she might be suspected of having something to do with it. Or because she did have something to do with it.’

She pulled down a squat bottle of port, but before she poured it into two tiny glasses, she took the plates from the table and placed them in the sink. When that was done, she poured them both glasses of port and brought them back to the table. Sweet, it caught up with the lingering taste of fig. A happy man. ‘But I don’t think ifs either of those.’

‘Why?’

He shrugged. ‘She doesn’t seem like a murderer to me.’

‘Because she’s pretty?’ Paola asked and sipped at her port.

He was about to answer that it was because she was a doctor, but then he remembered what Rizzardi had said, that the person who killed the young man knew where to put the knife. A doctor would know that. ‘Maybe,’ he said, then changed the subject and asked, ‘Is Raffi here?’ He looked at his watch. After ten. His son knew he was supposed to be home by ten on school nights.

‘Not unless he came in while we were eating,’ she answered.

‘No, he didn’t,’ Brunetti answered, sure of the answer, unsure of how he knew.

It was late, they’d had a bottle of wine, glorious figs, and perfect port. Neither of them wanted to talk about their son. He’d still be there and still be theirs in the morning.

‘Should I put those in the sink for you?’ he asked, meaning the dishes but not meaning the question.

‘No. I’ll do it. You go and tell Chiara to go to bed.’ The dishes would have been less trouble.

‘Fire out?’ he asked when he walked into the living room.

She didn’t hear him. She was hundreds of miles and years away from him. She sat slouched low in the chair, her legs stretched out before her. On the arm of the chair were two apple cores, a packet of biscuits on the floor beside her.

‘Chiara,’ he said, then louder, ‘Chiara.’

She glanced up from the page, not seeing him for a moment, then registering that it was her father. She looked immediately down at the page, forgetting him.

‘Chiara, it’s time to go to bed.’

She turned a page.

‘Chiara, did you hear me? It’s time to go to bed.’

Still reading, she pushed herself up from the chair with one hand. At the bottom of a page, she paused long enough to look up from the book and give him a kiss, then she was gone, finger in the page. He lacked the courage to tell her to leave the book behind. Well, if he got up to the night, he could turn her light off.

Paola came into the living room. She bent and turned off the light beside the chair, picked up the apple cores and the packet of biscuits, and went back into the kitchen. Brunetti switched off the light and went down the corridor towards the bedroom.

* * * *

6

Brunetti got to the Questura at eight the next morning, stopping to get the papers on the way. The murder had made the eleventh page of the Corriere, which gave it only two paragraphs, had not made it into La Repubblica, understandable enough on a day that was the anniversary of one of the bloodier terrorist bombings of the Sixties, but had made it to the front page of the second section of Il Gazzettino, just to the left of a story, this one with a photo, about three young men who had died when their car slammed into a tree on the state highway between Dolo and Mestre.

The article said that the young man, whose name was given as Michele Fooster, was the apparent victim of a robbery. Drugs were suspected, though the article, in the manner of the Gazzettino, didn’t bother to specify what they were suspected of. Brunetti sometimes reflected that it was a good thing for Italy that a responsible Press was not one of the requirements for entry into the Common Market.

Inside the main door of the Questura, the usual human line snaked its way out of the Ufficio Stranieri, crowded with badly dressed and poorly shod immigrants from Northern Africa and newly freed Eastern Europe. Brunetti could never see that line without a surge of historical irony: three generations of his own family had fled Italy, seeking their fortunes in places as far apart as Australia and Argentina. And now, in a Europe transformed by recent events, Italy had become the El Dorado of new waves of still poorer, still darker immigrants. Many of his friends spoke of these people with contempt, disgust, even anger, but Brunetti could never see them without superimposing upon them the fantasy image of his own ancestors, standing in similar lines, themselves badly dressed, ill-shod, making a hash of the language. And, like these poor devils here, willing to clean the mess and raise the children of anyone who would pay them.

He went up the steps to his fourth-floor office, saying good-morning to one or two people, nodding to others. When he reached the office, he checked to see if there were any new papers on his desk. Nothing had arrived yet, so he considered himself free to do with the day whatever he saw fit. And that was to reach for his phone and ask to be connected with the Carabinieri station at the American base in Vicenza.

This number proved considerably easier to find and, within minutes, he was speaking to Maggiore Ambrogiani, who told Brunetti that he had been put in charge of the Italian investigation into Foster’s murder.

‘Italian?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Well, Italian as different from the investigation that the Americans will conduct themselves.’

‘Does that mean there are going to be problems of jurisdiction?’ Brunetti asked.

‘No, I don’t think so,’ the Maggiore answered. ‘You people in Venice, the civil police, are in charge of the investigation there. But you’ll need the permission or help of the Americans for anything you might want to do out here.’

‘In Vicenza?’

Ambrogiani laughed. ‘No, I don’t want to give mat impression. Only here, on the base. So long as you are in Vicenza, the city, then we’re in charge, the Carabinieri. But once you come onto this base, they take over, and it’s the Americans who will help you.’

‘You make it sound as if you have some doubts about that, Maggiore,’ Brunetti said.

‘No, no doubts. Not at all.’

‘Then I’ve misinterpreted your tone.’ But he thought that he hadn’t, not at all. ‘I’d like to come out there and speak to the people who knew him, worked with him.’

‘They’re Americans, most of them,’ Ambrogiani said, leaving it to Brunetti to infer the possibilities of difficulty with language.

‘My English is all right.’

‘Then you should have no trouble talking to them.’

‘When would it be possible for me to come there?’

‘This morning? This afternoon? Whenever you please, Commissario.’

From his bottom drawer, Brunetti grabbed a railway timetable and flipped through it, looking for the Venice-Milan line. There was a train leaving in an hour. ‘I can take the nine-twenty-five.’

‘Fine. I’ll send a car to meet you.’

‘Thank you, Maggiore.’

‘A pleasure, Commissario. A pleasure. I look forward to meeting you.’

They exchanged courtesies, and Brunetti replaced the receiver. The first thing he did was go across to the cupboard that stood against the far wall. He opened it and began to hunt through the things piled and tossed on the bottom: a pair of boots, three light bulbs in separate boxes, an extension cord, a few old magazines, and a brown leather briefcase. He pulled out the briefcase and dusted it off with his hand. Carrying it back to his desk, he put the newspapers inside, then added a few files he had still to read. From his front drawer, he took a two-week-old copy of Panorama and threw it in.

The ride was a familiar one, along the route to Milan, through a checkered pattern of cornfields burned to painful darkness by the summer drought. He sat on the right side of the train to avoid the slanting sun that still burned through, even though it was September and the ferocity of the summer was gone. At Padova, the second stop, scores of university students crowded off the train, carrying their new text books as though they were magic talismans that would carry them to a sure, better future. He remembered mat feeling, that yearly renewal of optimism that used to come to him while he was at the university, as if each year’s virgin notebooks carried with them the promise of a better year, a brighter destiny.

At Vicenza, he got down from the train and looked along the platform for someone in uniform. Seeing no one, he went down the steps, through the tunnel that ran under the tracks, and up into the station. In front of it he saw the dark blue sedan marked ‘Carabinieri’, parked in an arrogant, unnecessary diagonal in front of the station, the driver engaged equally in a cigarette and the pink pages of the Gazzettino dello Sport.

Brunetti tapped on the back window. The driver turned his head languidly, stabbed out his cigarette, and reached back to unlock the door. As he opened the door, Brunetti thought about how different things were here in the North. In Southern Italy, any Carabiniere who heard an unexpected noise from the back of his car would immediately be on the floor of the car or crouched on the pavement beside it, gun in hand, perhaps already firing at the source of the noise. But here, in sleepy Vicenza, all he did was reach, without question, to allow the stranger into his car.

‘Inspector Bonnini?’ the driver asked.’

‘Commissario Brunetti.’

‘From Venice?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good morning. I’ll take you to the base.’

‘Is it far?’

‘Five minutes.’ Saying this, the driver set the paper on the seat beside him, the latest triumph of Schilacci displayed for a soccer-loving public, and put the car in gear. Bothering to look neither right nor left, he tore out of the station car park, cutting directly into the traffic that flowed past. He skirted the city, cutting back towards the east, in the direction from which Brunetti had come.

Brunetti had not been to Vicenza for at least a decade, but he remembered it as one of the loveliest cities in Italy, its centre filled with narrow, twisting streets along which crowded Renaissance and Baroque palazzi, jumbled together with no regard for symmetry, chronology, or plan. Instead of this, they swung past an immense concrete football stadium, over a high railway bridge, then along one of the new viales that had sprung up all over mainland Italy in acknowledgement of the final triumph of the automobile.

Without signalling, the driver suddenly cut to the left and started down a narrow road lined on the right by a wire-topped cement wall. Behind it, Brunetti saw an immense dish-shaped communications antenna. The car swept in a broad curve to the right, and in front of them Brunetti saw an open gate, beside which stood a number of armed guards. There were two uniformed Carabinieri, machine guns dangling casually at their sides, and an American soldier in combat fatigues. The driver slowed, gave a desultory wave to the machine guns, which waved and dipped in acknowledgement, then followed the car onto the base with their hollow-tipped barrels. The American, Brunetti observed, followed them with his eyes but made no attempt to stop them. A quick right turn, another, and they drew up in front of a low cement building. ‘This is our headquarters,’ the driver said. ‘Maggiore Ambrogiani’s office is the fourth one on the right.’

Brunetti thanked him and went into the low building. The floor appeared to be cement, the walls lined with bulletin boards upon which notices in both English and Italian were posted. On his left, he saw a sign for ‘MP Station’. A bit further on, he saw a door with the name ‘Ambrogiani’ printed on a card beside it. No title, just the name. He knocked, waited for the shouted ‘Avanti!’, and went in. Desk, two windows, a plant in desperate need of water, a calendar, and behind the desk, a bull of a man whose neck was in open revolt against the tight collar of his uniform shirt. His broad shoulders pushed against the fabric of his uniform jacket; even his wrists seemed too tightly enclosed by the sleeves. On his shoulders, Brunetti saw the squat tower and single star of a major. He rose when Brunetti walked in, glanced at the watch that grabbed at his wrist, and said, ‘Commissario Brunetti?’

‘Yes.’

The smile that filled the Carabiniere’s face was almost angelic in its warmth and simplicity. My God, the man had dimples! ‘I’m glad you could come all the way from Venice about this.’ He came around his desk, surprisingly graceful, and pulled a chair up in front. ‘Here, please have a seat. Would you like some coffee? Please put your briefcase on the desk.’ He waited for Brunetti to answer.

‘Yes, coffee would be good.’

The Maggiore went to the door, opened it, and said to someone in the hall, ‘Pino, bring us two coffees and a bottle of mineral water.’

He came back into the room and took his place behind his desk. ‘I’m sorry we couldn’t send a car all the way to Venice to get you, but it’s difficult, these days, to get an authorization to move out of the province. I hope your trip was comfortable.’

It was necessary, Brunetti knew from long experience, to spend the proper amount of time on these things, to poke and prod about, to take the measure of the other person, and the only way to do this was with niceties and politeness.

‘No trouble at all with the train. Right on time. Padova filled with university students.’

‘My son’s at the university there,’ Ambrogiani volunteered.

‘Really? What faculty?’

‘Medicine,’ Ambrogiani said and shook his head.

‘Isn’t it a good faculty?’ Brunetti asked, honestly puzzled. He’d always been told that the University of Padova had the best medical school in the country.

‘No, it’s not that,’ the Maggiore answered and smiled. ‘I’m not pleased with his choice of medicine as a career.’

‘What?’ Brunetti asked. This was the Italian dream, a policeman with a son in medical school. ‘Why?’

‘I wanted him to be a painter.’ He shook his head again, sadly. ‘But, instead, he wants to be a doctor.’

‘A painter?’

‘Yes,’ Ambrogiani answered. Then, with a dimpled smile, he added, ‘And not of houses.’ He gestured behind him, and Brunetti saw that the walls were patterned with small paintings, almost all seascapes, some of them of ruined castles, all of them done in a delicate style that imitated the eighteenth-century Neapolitan school.

‘Your son’s?’

‘No,’ Ambrogiani said, ‘that one over there.’ He pointed to the left of the door, where Brunetti saw a portrait of an old woman staring boldly at the viewer, a half-peeled apple held between her hands. It lacked the delicacy of the others, though it was good in a pretty, conventional sense.

If the others had been by the son, Brunetti would have understood the man’s regret that he had chosen to study medicine. As it was, the boy had clearly made the right choice. ‘It’s very good,’ he lied. ‘And the others?’

‘Oh, I did them. But years ago, when I was a student.’ First, the dimples, and now these soft, delicate paintings. Perhaps this American base was to be a place of surprises.

There came a quiet knock at the door, which opened before Ambrogiani could reply. A uniformed corporal came into the room, carrying a tray with two coffees, glasses, and a bottle of mineral water. He set the tray on Ambrogiani’s desk and left.

‘It’s still hot like summer,’ Ambrogiani said. ‘Better to drink a lot of water.’

He leaned forward, handed Brunetti his coffee, then took his own. When they had drunk the coffee and each had a glass of water in his hand, Brunetti believed they could begin to talk. ‘Is anything known about this American, Sergeant Foster?’

Ambrogiani poked a fat finger at a slim file that sat at the side of his desk,apparently the file on the dead American. ‘Nothing. Not from us. The Americans won’t, of course, give us the file they have on him. That is,’ he quickly amended, ‘if they have a file on him.’

‘Why not?’

‘It’s a long story,’ Ambrogiani said, with a slight hesitation that made it evident he wanted to be prodded.

Ever-willing to oblige, Brunetti asked, ‘Why?’

Ambrogiani shifted around in his chair, body clearly too big for it. He poked at the file, sipped at his water, set the glass down, poked again at the file. ‘The Americans have been here, you understand, since the war ended. They’ve been on this base, and it’s grown bigger and continues to grow bigger. There are thousands of them, and their families.’ Brunetti wondered what the point of this long introduction would be. ‘Because they have been here so long, and perhaps because there are so many of them, they tend to be, well, they tend to see this base as theirs, though the treaty makes it clear that this is still Italian territory. Still. Part of Italy.’ He shifted around again.

‘Is there trouble?’ Brunetti asked. ‘With them?’

‘After a long pause, Ambrogiani answered, ‘No. Not exactly trouble. You know how Americans are.’

Brunetti had heard that many times, about Germans, Slavs, the British. Everyone assumed that other groups ‘were’ a certain way, though no one ever seemed to agree just what the way was. He raised his chin in an inquisitive gesture, prompting the Maggiore to continue.

‘It’s not arrogance, not really. I don’t think they have the confidence it takes for real arrogance, not the way the Germans do. It’s more like a sense of ownership, as if all of this, all of Italy, were somehow theirs. As if, by believing they kept it safe, they thought it was theirs.’

‘Do they really keep it safe?’ Brunetti asked.

Ambrogiani laughed. ‘I suppose they did, after the war. And perhaps during the Sixties. But I’m not sure that, with the way the world is now, a few thousand paratroopers in Northern Italy is going to make much of a difference.’

‘Are these popular feelings?’ Brunetti asked. ‘I mean among the military, the Carabinieri?’

‘Yes, I think they are. But you have to understand the way me Americans see things.’

To Brunetti, it was a revelation to hear the man speak like this. In a country where most public institutions were no longer worthy of respect, only the Carabinieri had managed to save themselves and were still generally believed to be above corruption. This no sooner granted, than popular opinion had to compromise it and had transformed these same Carabinieri into the butt of popular myth, the classic buffoons who never understood anything and whose legendary stupidity provided glee to the entire nation. Yet here was one of them, trying to explain the other person’s point of view. And apparently understanding it. Remarkable.

‘What do we have as a military here in Italy?’ Ambrogiani asked, his question clearly rhetorical. ‘We’re all volunteers, the Carabinieri. But the Army - they’ve all been drafted, except for the few who choose it as a career. They’re kids, eighteen, nineteen, and they no more want to be soldiers than they want to . . .’ Here he paused and searched for a simile that would do justice. ‘Than they want to do the dishes and make their own beds, which is what they have to do, probably for the first time in their lives, while they’re in the service. It’s a year and a half lost, thrown away, when they could be working or studying. They go through a brutal, stupid training, and they spend a brutal, stupid year, dressed in shabby uniforms and not getting paid enough to keep themselves in cigarettes.’ Brunetti knew all this. He’d done his eighteen months.

Ambrogiani was quick to sense Brunetti’s waning interest ‘I say this because it explains how the Americans see us here. Their boys, and girls, I suppose, all volunteer. It’s a career for them. They like it. They get paid for it, paid enough to live. And many of them take pride in it. And here, what do they see? Boys who would rather be playing soccer or going to the cinema, but who have to do work they despise instead, and who therefore do it badly. So they assume that we’re all lazy.’

‘And so?’ Brunetti asked, cutting him short.

‘And so,’ Ambrogiani repeated, ‘they don’t understand us and therefore think badly of us for reasons that we can’t understand.’

‘You ought to be able to understand them. You’re a military man.’ Brunetti said.

Ambrogiani shrugged, as if to suggest that, first and foremost, he was an Italian.

‘Is it unusual, that they wouldn’t show you a file if they had one?’

‘No. They tend not to help us much in things like this.’

‘I’m not sure what you mean by “things like this”, Maggiore.’

‘Crimes that they get involved in away from the base.’

Certainly this could be said to apply to the young man lying dead in Venice, but Brunetti found the wording strange. ‘Are they frequent?’

‘No, not really. A few years ago, some Americans were involved in a murder. An African. They beat him to death with wooden boards. They were drunk. The African danced with a white woman.’

‘Protecting their woman?’ Brunetti asked, making no attempt to disguise his sarcasm.

‘No,’ Ambrogiani said. ‘They were black. The men who killed him were black.’

‘What happened to them?’

‘Two of them got twelve years. One of them was found innocent and released.’

‘Who tried them, them or us?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Luckily for them, we did.’

‘Why luckily?’

‘Because they were tried in a civil court. The sentences are much lighter. And the charge was manslaughter. He provoked them, beat on their car and shouted at them. So the judges ruled that they had been responding to a threat.’

‘How many of them were there?’

‘Three soldiers and a civilian.’

‘Some threat.’ Brunetti said.

‘The judges ruled that it was. And took it into consideration. The Americans would have sent them away for twenty, thirty years. Military justice is nothing to joke with. Besides, they were black.’

‘Does that still matter?’

A shrug. A raised eyebrow. Another shrug. ‘The Americans will tell you it doesn’t.’ Ambrogiani took another sip of water. ‘How long will you be here?’

‘Today. Tomorrow. Are there other things like this?’

‘Occasionally. Usually they handle crime on the base, handle it themselves, unless it gets too big or it breaks an Italian law. Then we get a part of it.’

‘Like the principal?’ Brunetti asked, remembering a case that had made national headlines a few years ago, something about the principal of their grammar school being accused and convicted of child abuse, the details of which were very cloudy in his memory.

‘Yes, like him. But usually they handle things themselves.’