Death in a Strange Country (2 page)

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.’