Death in a Strange Country (11 page)

‘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.’