Death in a Strange Country (14 page)

Driving more quickly than
the other cars on the base, they headed towards the front gate and passed through
it. Outside, they turned right and headed back towards the city, again passing
over the railway bridge. At the bottom, they turned left, then right, and
pulled up in front of a five-storey building set back a few metres from the
street. Parked opposite the gate they saw a dark-green Jeep, two soldiers in
American uniform sitting in the front seat. Brunetti approached them. One of
them climbed down from the Jeep.

‘I’m Commissario
Brunetti, from Venice,’ he said, resuming his real rank, then added, ‘Major
Butterworth sent me out to take a look at Foster’s apartment.’ Perhaps not the
truth, but certainly related to it.

The soldier sketched out
something that might have been a salute, reached into his pocket, and handed
Brunetti a set of keys. ‘The red one is the front door, sir,’ the soldier said.
‘Apartment 3B, on the third floor. Elevator to your right as you go in.’ Inside
this building, he took the elevator, feeling hemmed in and uncomfortable in its
closeness. The door to 3B stood directly opposite the elevator and opened
easily with the key.

He pushed open the door
and noticed the usual marble floors. Doors opened off a central corridor at the
end of which another door stood ajar. The room on the right was a bathroom, the
one on the left a small kitchen. Both were clean, the objects in them
well-ordered. He noticed, however, that the kitchen held an enormous
refrigerator and a large four-ring stove, beside which stood an equally
outsized washing-machine, both of the electrical appliances plugged into a
transformer that broke down the 220 Italian current to the 110 of America. Did
they bring these appliances all the way from America with them? Little space
was left in the kitchen for a small square table, at which only two chairs
stood. The wall held the gas-burning neater which seemed to provide both hot
water and heat for the radiators in the apartment.

The next doors opened
into two bedrooms. One held a double bed and a large cupboard. The other had
been turned into a study and held a desk with a computer keyboard and screen
attached to a printer. Shelves held books and some stereo equipment, under
which was neatly lined a row of compact discs. He checked the books: most
appeared to be textbooks, the rest books about travel and - could it be? - religion.
He pulled down some of these and took a closer look.
The Christian Life in
an Age of Doubt, Spiritual Transcendence,
and
Jesus: the Ideal Life.
The
author of the last was Revd Michael Foster. His father?

The music was, he
thought, rock. Some of the names he recognized from having heard Raffaele and
Chiara mention them; he doubted that he would recognize the music.

He switched on the CD
player and pushed the ‘Eject’ button on the control panel. Like a patient
showing his tongue to a doctor, it opened and slid out the playing panel.
Empty. He closed the panel and switched off the machine. He switched on the
amplifier and tape deck. Panel lights glowed, showing they both worked. He
turned them off. He switched the computer on, watched the letters appear on the
screen, then switched it off.

The clothes in the closet
were no more forthcoming. He found three complete uniforms, jackets still in
the plastic laundry bags, each carefully lined up beside a pair of dark-green
trousers. The rack also held a few pairs of jeans, neatly folded over hangers,
three or four shirts, and a dark blue suit made out of some synthetic material.
Almost absent-mindedly, Brunetti checked the pockets of the jacket and all the
trousers, but there was nothing; no loose change, no papers, no comb. Either
Sergeant Foster was a very neat young man, or the Americans had been here
before him.

He went back into the
bathroom, removed the lid from the top of the toilet, glanced into the empty
tank, then replaced the lid. He opened the door to the mirror-fronted medicine
chest, opened a bottle or two.

In the kitchen, he opened
the top section of the outsized refrigerator. Ice. Nothing more. Below, a few
apples, an open bottle of white wine, and some ageing cheese in a plastic
wrapper. The oven held only three empty pans; the washing-machine was empty. He
stood with his back against the worktop and looked slowly around the room. From
the top drawer under the worktop he took a knife, then pulled one of the wooden
chairs from the table and placed it under the water heater. He climbed up onto
the chair and used the knife to loosen the screws that held the front panel to
the heater. As they came loose, he dropped the screws into his jacket pocket.
When he pulled the last one out, he slipped the knife into his pocket and
shifted the panel from side to side until it came loose in his hands. He set it
down on the chair, leaning it against his leg.

Two plastic bags were
taped to the inside of the wall of the water heater. They contained fine white
powder, about a kilo of it, he judged. He took his handkerchief from his pocket
and, wrapping his hand in it, pulled first one bag loose, then the other. Just
to be sure of what he already knew, he pulled open the ziplock top of one of
the bags, wet the tip of his index finger and tapped it onto the powder. When
he put his finger to his tongue, he tasted the slightly metallic, unmistakable
tang of cocaine.
 
                     
               

He leaned down and set
the two bags on the counter. Then he lifted the front panel back into place,
careful to line it up accurately with the holes in the body of the heater.
Slowly, he fitted in the four screws and turned them back into place.
Carefully, he turned the grooves in the top screws to perfect horizontals, the
two below into equally precise verticals.

He glanced at his watch.
He had been inside the apartment fifteen minutes. The Americans had had a day
and a half to go through the apartment; the Italian police had had just as much
time. Yet Brunetti had found the two packages in less than quarter of an hour.

He opened the door to one
of the wall cabinets and saw only three or four dinner plates. He looked under
the sink and found what he wanted, two plastic bags. Still covering his hand
with his handkerchief, he placed a bag of cocaine inside each of the larger
plastic bags and placed them in the two inner pockets of his jacket. He wiped
the knife clean on the sleeve of his jacket and replaced it in the drawer, then
used his handkerchief to wipe the surface of the heater clean of all prints.

He left the apartment,
locking the door behind him. Outside, he approached tine American soldiers in
the Jeep, smiling comfortably at them. ‘Thank you,’ he said and handed the key
back to the man who had given it to him.

‘Well?’ the soldier
asked.

‘Nothing. I just wanted
to see how he lived.’ If the soldier was surprised by Brunetti’s answer, he
gave no indication of it.

Brunetti walked back to
his car, got in, and told the driver to take him to the train station. He caught
the three-fifteen Intercity train from Milan and prepared to spend the trip
back to Venice as he had spent the trip out, sitting and looking out of the
window of the train while thinking about why a young American soldier would
have been murdered. But now he had a new thought to add to that one: why would
drugs have been planted in his apartment after his death? And who would have
planted them?

* *
* *

8

As his train pulled out of the Vicenza train station,
Brunetti walked towards the front, searching for an empty compartment in the
first-class section. The two plastic packages weighed down his inner pockets,
and he hunched forward in an attempt to disguise their bulk. Finally, in the
first car, he found an empty compartment and sat near the window, then got up
to slide the door closed. He put his briefcase on the seat beside him and
debated whether to transfer the packages or not. As he sat debating, the door
to the compartment was abruptly pulled open by a man in uniform. For a
hallucinogenic instant, Brunetti saw his career in ruins, himself in jail, but
then the man asked for his ticket, and Brunetti was saved.

When the conductor left,
Brunetti concentrated on keeping himself from reaching inside his jacket or
from checking with his elbows to see that the two packages were still in place.
He seldom had to deal with drugs in his work, but he knew enough to realize,
that he was carrying at least a few hundred million lire in each pocket: a new
apartment in one and early retirement in the other. The idea had little
attraction for him. He would gladly have traded both packages to know who had
put them where he found them. Though he had no idea of who, the reason why was
pretty clear: what better motive for murder than drugs and drug dealing, and
what better proof of drug dealing than the presence of a kilo of cocaine hidden
in a man’s home? And who better to find it than the policeman from Venice, who,
if only because of geography, could not possibly have had any involvement with
the crime or the dead man? And what could that young soldier have been involved
in that a kilo of cocaine would be used to call attention away from it?

At Padova, an elderly
woman came into the compartment and sat, reading a magazine, until Mestre
station, where she got out, without even having spoken to or looked at
Brunetti. When the train pulled into Venice station, Brunetti picked up his
briefcase and left the train, checking to see if any of the people who had got
onto the train in Vicenza got down from the train with him. In front of the
station, he walked to the right, towards the number one boat, got as far as the
landing dock, then stopped and looked back at the clock that stood on tike
other side of the station. Abruptly, he changed direction and walked towards
the other side of tine
piazza
in front of the station, to the dock where
the number two boat stopped. No one followed him.

A few minutes later, the
boat came from the right, and he was the only person to get on. At four-thirty,
there were few people on the boat. He walked down the steps and through the
rear cabin, out to the aft deck, where he was alone. The boat pulled away from
the embankment and under the Bridge of the Scalzi, up the Grand Canal towards
the Rialto and its final stop.

Through the glass doors, Brunetti
saw that the four people sitting in the inner cabin were all busy reading their
newspapers. He set his briefcase on the chair beside him, propped the lid open,
and reached into his inner pocket, pulling out one of the envelopes. Carefully,
touching only its comers, he peeled it open. Turning sideways, the better to
examine the façade of the Natural History Museum, he slid his hand under the
railing and emptied the white powder into the waters of the canal. He slipped
the empty bag into his briefcase and repeated the process with the second.
During the golden age of the Most Serene Republic, the Doge used to perform an
elaborate yearly ceremony, tossing a gold ring into the waters of the Grand
Canal to solemnize the wedding of the city to the waters that gave it life,
wealth, and power. But never, Brunetti thought, had such great wealth been
deliberately offered to any waters.

From the Rialto, he
walked back to the Questura and went directly to the lab. Bocchese was there, sharpening
a pair of scissors at one of the many machines that only he seemed able to
operate. He turned the machine off when he saw Brunetti and set the scissors on
the counter in front of him.

Brunetti put his
briefcase beside the scissors, opened it, and pulled out, careful to touch them
only at the corners, the two plastic bags. He set them beside the scissors. ‘Could
you see if the American’s prints are on these?’ he asked. Bocchese nodded. ‘I’ll
come down and you can tell me, all right?’ Brunetti said.

The technician nodded again.
‘It’s like that, huh?’

‘Yes.’

‘Would you like me to
lose the bags after I get the prints off them?’ Bocchese asked.

‘What bags?’

Bocchese reached for the
scissors. ‘As soon as I finish this,’ he said. He flipped a switch, and the
wheel of the machine spun into life again. Brunetti’s muttered thanks were
drowned out by the high-pitched rasp of metal against metal as Bocchese went
back to sharpening the scissors.

Deciding that it would be
better to go and speak to Patta than be told to do so, Brunetti took the front
steps and stopped outside his superior’s door. He knocked, heard a noise, and
opened the door. As he did so, he realized, belatedly, that the sound he had
heard had not been an invitation to enter.