Death in a Strange Country (17 page)

None of that here, no
indeed. Men and women, all well-dressed, hushed to reverent silence, ringed the
roulette table, putting down chips across the felt board. Silence, pause, then
the croupier gave the wheel a sharp turn, dropped the ball in, and all eyes
riveted themselves upon the whirl of metal and colour, stuck there as it
slowed, slowed, slowed to a halt. Snake-like, the croupier’s rake crept up and
down the board, sweeping in the losers’ chips and nudging a few to the winner.
And then again the same motions, the flurry, the spin, and those eyes, fixed,
nailed to the spinning wheel. Why, he wondered, did so many of these men wear
rings on their little fingers?

He drifted into the next
room, vaguely aware that he had become separated from his party, curious to
observe. In an inner room, he came upon the blackjack tables and saw Doctor
Pastore already seated there, a middling pile of chips stacked with surgical
neatness in front of him. As Brunetti watched, he called for a card, drew a
six, stopped, waited while the other players drew, then flipped his cards over
to display a seven and an eight to accompany the six. His pile of chips grew;
Brunetti turned away.

Everyone seemed to be
smoking. One player at the baccarat table had two cigarettes burning in an
ashtray in front of him, a third hanging from his lower lip. Smoke was
everywhere: in his eyes, his hair, his clothing; it floated in a cloud that
could be cut and stirred by a hand. He moved to the bar and bought himself a
grappa, not really wanting it, but bored with watching the play.

He sat on a plush velvet
sofa and watched the players in the room, occasionally sipping at the glass in
his hand. He closed his eyes and allowed himself to drift for a few minutes. He
felt the sofa move beside him and, without opening his eyes or moving his head
from where it rested against the back of the sofa, he knew it was Paola. She
took his glass, sipped at it, then gave it back to him.

‘Tired?’ she asked.

He nodded, suddenly too
tired to speak.

‘All right. Come with me
and we’ll have one more round at roulette, and then we can go home.’

He turned his head,
opened his eyes, and smiled at her. ‘I love you, Paola,’ he said, then bowed
his head and sipped at his grappa. How many years had it been since he had said
that? He glanced up at her, almost shyly. She grinned and leaned over and
kissed him on the mouth. ‘Come on,’ she said, getting to her feet and reaching
down to pull him up. ‘Let’s lose this money, and then we’ll go home.’ She had
five chips in her hand, each worth fifty thousand lire, which meant she had
been winning. She handed him two, keeping the others for herself.

Back in the main gaming
room, they had to wait a few minutes before they could worm themselves up
beside the roulette table and, when they were there, he waited two turns until,
for no reason he could name, it seemed the right time to play. Stacking the two
chips one on top of the other in his hand, he placed them blindly on the board,
then looked down and saw that they rested on number 28, a number that had no
significance whatsoever for him. Paola placed hers on the black.

Spin, watch, wait, and, as
he knew it would, the ball slipped into its rightful place in number 28, and he
won more than three million lire. Almost a month’s salary, a vacation for them
this summer, a computer for Chiara. He watched as the croupier’s rake came
sliding towards him, chugging those chips across the felt until they stopped in
front of him. He scooped them up, smiled at Paola, and, in the loudest voice
heard in the Casinò in years, shouted, in English, ‘Hot damn.’

* *
* *

10

He saw no sense in bothering to go to the Questura the
next morning and, instead, stayed at home until it was time to get the train to
Vicenza. He did, however, call Maggiore Ambrogiani and ask that the driver be
sent to get him at the station.

As the train crossed over
the causeway and away from the city, he looked off into the distance and saw,
visible only rarely these days, the mountains, not yet snow-covered but, he
hoped, soon to be. This was the third dry year, with little rain in the spring,
none in the summer, and bad harvests in the autumn. The farmers had their hopes
pinned on winter snows this year, and he recalled the saying of the peasants of
the Friuli, a grim, hard-working people:
‘Sotto la neve, pane; sotto la
pioggia, fame.’
Yes, the winter snows would bring bread, releasing their
trapped waters slowly during the growing season, while rain, which ran off
quickly, brought only hunger.

He hadn’t bothered with a
briefcase today; it was unlikely he would find bags of cocaine two days in a
row, but he had bought a paper at the train station, and he read through it as
the train took him across the flat plain towards Vicenza. There was no mention
of the dead American today, his place taken by a crime of passion in Modena, a
dentist who had strangled a woman who refused to marry him and then shot
himself. He spent the rest of the trip reading the political news, knowing as
much when he arrived in Vicenza as when he left Venice.

The same driver was
waiting for him in front of the station, but this time he got out to open the
door for Brunetti. At the gate, he stopped without being told to do so and
waited while the Carabiniere wrote out a pass for Brunetti. ‘Where would you
like to go, sir?’

‘Where’s the Office of
Public Health?’ he asked.

‘In the hospital.’

‘Then let’s go there.’

The driver took him up
the long main street of the base, and Brunetti felt himself to be in a foreign
country. Pine trees lined the street on both sides. The car rode past men and
women in shorts, riding bicycles or pushing babies in pushchairs. Joggers loped
by; they even drove past a swimming-pool, still filled with water but empty of
swimmers.

The driver pulled up in
front of yet another undistinguished cement building. ‘Vicenza Field Hospital’,
Brunetti read. ‘In there, sir,’ the driver said, pulling into a parking space
designated for the handicapped and cutting the engine.

Inside, he found himself
in front of a low, curved reception desk. A young woman looked up, smiled, and
asked, ‘Yes, sir, may I help you?’

‘I’m looking for the
Office of Public Health.’

‘Take the corridor behind
me, turn right, then it’s the third door on the left,’ she said, then turned to
a pregnant woman in uniform who had come in and stood beside him. Brunetti
walked away from the desk in the direction given and did not, he thought
proudly to himself, did not turn to look at the woman in uniform, the pregnant
woman in uniform.

He stopped in front of
the third door, clearly marked ‘Public Health’, and knocked. No one answered,
so he knocked again. Still no one answered, so he tried the knob, and, noting
that it was a knob and not a handle, opened the door and went in. The small
room held three metal desks, each with a chair drawn up in front of it, and two
filing cabinets, from the top of both of which straggled long, tired-looking plants
much in need of both water and dusting. On the wall hung the now predictable
bulletin board, this one covered with notices and charts. Two of the desks were
covered with the normal detritus of office work: papers, forms, folders, pens,
pencils. The third held a computer terminal and keyboard but, for the rest, was
conspicuously bare. Brunetti seated himself in the chair that was clearly
intended for visitors. One of the phones - each desk had one - rang and went on
ringing seven times, then stopped. Brunetti waited a few minutes then went to
the door and stepped back out into the corridor. A nurse was walking by, and
Brunetti asked her if she knew where the people from the office were.

‘Should be right back,
sir,’ she answered in the internationally recognized code by which fellow
workers cover for one another with strangers who might or might not have been
sent there to find out who was at work and who was not. He stepped back inside
and closed the door.

As in any office, there
were the usual cartoons, postcards, and handwritten notes interspersed with
official notices. The cartoons all seemed to have soldiers or doctors, and many
of the postcards had either minarets or archaeological sites. He unpinned the
first and found that Bob said hello from the Blue Mosque. The second told him
that Bob liked the Colosseum. But the third, which showed a camel in front of
the Pyramids, revealed, far more interestingly, that M and T were finished with
the inspection of the kitchens and would be back on Tuesday. He pinned this one
back and stepped away from the board.

‘May I help you?’ a voice
said behind him.

He recognized her voice,
turned, and she recognized him. ‘Mr Brunetti, what are you doing here?’ Her
surprise was both genuine and strong.

‘Good morning, Doctor
Peters. I told you I’d come out to see if I could learn more about Sergeant
Foster. I was told this was the Office of Public Health, so I came down here in
the hopes of meeting someone who worked with him. But, as you can see,’ he
said, gesturing around the empty office and taking two steps that further
distanced him from the board, ‘no one is here.’

‘They’re all at a
meeting,’ she explained. ‘Trying to figure out a way to divide up the work
until we get a replacement for Mike.’

‘Aren’t you at the meeting?’
he asked.

In response, she pulled a
stethoscope out of the breast pocket of her white lab coat and said, ‘Remember,
I’m a paediatrician.’

‘I see.’

‘They ought to be back
here very soon,’ she volunteered. ‘Who did you want to speak to?’

‘I don’t know. Whoever
worked most closely with him.’

‘I
told you, Mike pretty
much had charge of the office himself.’

‘So it wouldn’t help me
to talk to anyone?’

‘I can’t answer that for
you, Mr Brunetti, since I don’t know what it is you want to find out.’

Brunetti assumed her
irritation was the result of nervousness, so he dropped the subject and asked,
instead, ‘Do you know if sergeant Foster drank?’

‘Drank?’

‘Alcohol.’

‘Very little.’

‘And drugs?’

‘What sort of drugs?’

‘Illegal drugs.’

‘No.’ Her voice was firm,
her conviction absolute.

‘You sound very certain.’

‘I’m certain because I
knew him, and I’m also certain because I’m his commanding officer, and I see
his medical record.’

‘Is that something that
would normally appear in a medical report?’ Brunetti asked.

She nodded. ‘We can be
tested, any of us in the Army, at any time, for drug use. Most of us get a
urine test once a year.’

‘Even officers?’

‘Even officers.’

‘Even doctors?’

‘Even doctors.’

‘And you saw the results
of his?’

‘Yes.’

‘When was the last one?’

‘I don’t remember.
Sometime this summer, I think.’ She shifted some folders from one hand to the
other. ‘I don’t know why you’re asking this. Mike never used drugs. Just the
opposite. He was dead set against them. We used to argue about it.’

‘How? Why?’

‘I
see no problem with them.
I’m not interested in them myself, but if people want to use them, then I think
they ought to be allowed to.’ When Brunetti said nothing, she continued, ‘Look,
I’m supposed to be taking care of little kids, but we’re short-staffed here, so
I see a lot of their mothers as well, and a lot of them ask me to renew their
prescription for Valium and Librium. If I refuse because I think they’re taking
too much of them, they just wait a day or two and go down the hall and have an
appointment with a different doctor, and sooner or later, someone’s going to
give them what they want. A lot of them would be better off if they could just
smoke a joint now and then.’