Death in a Strange Country (22 page)

Rossi snorted at this.

‘I know, I know. She’d
lie to the Pope if it would save her little Peppino. Well, who’s to blame her?
He
is
her only son. Besides, I’d like to see the old battle-axe again; I
don’t think I’ve seen her more than twice since the last time I arrested him.’

‘She tried to get you
with scissors then, didn’t she, sir?’ Rossi asked.

‘Well, her heart really
wasn’t in it, and Peppino was there to stop her.’ He grinned outright at the
memory, certainly one of the most absurd moments in his career. ‘Besides, they
were only pinking shears.’

‘She’s a piece of work,
Signora Concetta.’

‘Indeed,’ Brunetti
agreed. ‘And get someone to keep an eye on that girlfriend of his. What’s her
name?’

‘Ivana
Something-or-Other.’

‘Yes, her.’

‘You want us to talk to
her, sir?’

‘No, she’d just say she
hasn’t seen him. Speak to those people who live under her. They turned Ruffolo
in last time. Maybe they’d let us put someone in the apartment until he shows
up. Ask them.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Anything else?’

‘No, nothing.’

‘I’ll be in my office for
an hour or so. Let me know what happens in the hospital, if It’s Ruffolo.’ He
started to leave the office, but Rossi called out after him.

‘One thing, sir, a phone
call came for you last night.’

‘Who was it?’

‘I don’t know, sir. The
operator said the call came at about eleven. A woman. She asked for you by
name, but she didn’t speak Italian, or very little. He said something else, but
I don’t remember what it was.’

‘I’ll stop and talk to
him on the way up,’ Brunetti said and left the office. Instead of taking the
stairs, he stopped at the end of the corridor and went into the cubicle where
the telephone operator sat. He was a young police recruit, fresh-faced and
probably all of eighteen. Brunetti couldn’t remember his name.

When he saw Brunetti, he
leaped to his feet, dragging with him the wire that attached his headphones to
the switchboard. ‘Good morning, sir.’

‘Good morning. Please sit
down.’

The young man did, poised
nervously on the edge of his chair.

‘Rossi tells me a phone
call came for me last night.’

‘Yes, sir,’ the recruit
said, fighting the urge to jump to his feet when addressing a superior.

‘Did you take the call?’

‘Yes sir.’ Then, to
prevent Brunetti from asking why he was still there twelve hours later, the
young man explained, ‘I was taking Monico’s shift, sir. He’s sick/
  .’    
                     
 

Uninterested in this
detail, Brunetti asked, ‘What did she say?’

‘She asked for you by
name, sir. But she didn’t speak more than a little bit of Italian.’

‘Do you remember exactly
what she said?’

‘Yes, sir,’ he said,
fumbling at some papers on the desk in front of the switchboard. ‘I have it
written down here.’ He pushed papers aside and came up with a single sheet,
from which he read, ‘She asked for you, but she didn’t give her name or
anything. I asked her for her name, but she didn’t answer me, or she didn’t
understand. I told her that you weren’t here, but then she asked for you again.’

‘Was she speaking
English?’

‘I think so, sir, but she
only spoke a few words and I couldn’t understand her. I told her to speak in
Italian.’

‘What else did she say?’

‘She said something that
sounded like
“basta”,
or it could have been
“pasta”,
or
“posta”.’

‘Anything else?’

‘No, sir. Just that. And
then she hung up.’

‘How did she sound?’

The boy thought about
this for a while and finally answered, ‘She didn’t sound anything in
particular, sir. Just disappointed that you weren’t here, I’d say.’

‘All right. If she calls
back, put her call through to me or to Rossi. He speaks English.’

‘Yes, sir,’ the young man
said. When Brunetti turned to leave the room, the temptation proved
irresistible, and the young man jumped to his feet to salute Brunetti’s
retreating back.

A woman, one who spoke
very little Italian.
‘Molto poco’,
he remembered the doctor saying. He
also remembered something his father had once told him about fishing, when it
had been possible to fish in the
laguna,
that it was bad to flick the
bait, that it scared the fish away. So he would wait. She was there for six
months, at any rate, and he wasn’t going anywhere. If she didn’t call again, he’d
call the hospital on Monday and ask to speak to her.

And now Ruffolo was out
and back in business. A petty thief and burglar, Ruffolo had been in and out of
jail for the last ten years, twice put there by Brunetti. His parents had moved
up from Naples years ago, bringing with them this delinquent child. His father
had drunk himself to death, but not before instilling in his only son the
principle that the Ruffolos were not meant for things as ordinary as work, or
trade, not even study. True fruit of his father’s loins, Giuseppe had never
worked, the only trade he had ever practised was in stolen objects, and all he
had ever studied was how best to open a lock or break into a house. If he was
back at work so soon after being released, two years in prison had apparently
not been wasted on him.

Brunetti, however, couldn’t
keep himself from liking both the mother and the son. Peppino seemed not to
hold Brunetti personally responsible for having arrested him, and Signora
Concetta, once the pinking shears incident was forgotten, had been grateful for
Brunetti’s testimony at Ruffolo’s trial that he had avoided the use of any
force or threat of violence in the commission of his crimes. It was probably
that testimony that had helped limit the sentence for burglary to only two
years.

He didn’t have to send
down to the record office for Ruffolo’s file. Sooner or later, he would turn up
at his mother’s apartment, or at Ivana’s, and Giuseppe would soon be back
inside, there to become more practised in crime, more fully confirmed in his
doom.

As soon as he got to his
office, he began to look for Rizzardi’s report on the autopsy of the young
American. When they spoke, the pathologist had said nothing about the presence
of drugs in the blood, and Brunetti had not asked that question specifically at
the time of the autopsy. He found the report on his desk, opened it, and began
to page through. Just as Rizzardi had threatened, its language was virtually
impenetrable. On the
second page, he found what he thought might be the
answer, though it was hard to tell in the midst of the long Latin terms and
tortured syntax. He read it through three times and, by then, was reasonably
sure that it meant that there had been no traces of drugs of any sort in his
blood. He would have been surprised if the autopsy had discovered anything
different.

The intercom buzzer on
his phone sounded. He answered with a prompt, ‘Yes, sir.’

Patta didn’t bother
asking him how he knew who was calling, a sure sign that the call was
important. ‘I’d like to speak to you, Commissario.’ The use of the title, rather
than his name, emphasized the importance of the call.

Brunetti said that he
would go immediately down to the Vice-Questore’s office. Patta was a man of
limited moods, each one clearly legible, and this was one that Brunetti needed
to read carefully.

When he went into Patta’s
office Brunetti found his superior sitting behind his empty desk, hands folded
in front of him. Usually, Patta made the attempt to create the appearance of
diligence, even if it was no more than an empty file in front of him. Today there
was nothing, just a serious, one might even say solemn, face and a pair of
folded hands. The spicy odour of some omnisexual cologne wafted out from Patta,
whose face, this morning, appeared to have been oiled rather than shaved.
Brunetti walked over to the desk and stood in front of it, wondering how long
Patta would remain silent, a technique he frequently employed when he wanted to
stress the importance of what he had to say.

At least a full minute
passed before Patta said, ‘Sit down, Commissario.’ The repeated use of the
title told Brunetti that what he was going to hear would be unpleasant in some
way and that Patta knew it.

‘I’d like to talk to you
about this robbery,’ Patta said with no preamble as soon as Brunetti was
seated.

Brunetti suspected he did
not mean this most recent one, on the Grand Canal, even though the victim was
an industrialist from Milan. An assault on a person of that importance would
usually be enough to drive Patta to almost any excess in the appearance of
diligence.

‘Yes, sir,’ Brunetti
said.

‘I learned today that you
made another trip out to Vicenza.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Why was that necessary?
Don’t you have enough to do here in Venice?’

Brunetti steeled himself,
knowing that, despite their previous conversation, he would have to explain everything
all over again. ‘I wanted to speak to some of the people who knew him, sir.’

‘Didn’t you do that the
first day you were there?’

‘No, sir, there wasn’t
time.’

‘You didn’t say anything
about that when you came back that afternoon.’ When Brunetti didn’t respond,
Patta asked, ‘Why didn’t you do that the first day?’

‘There wasn’t time, sir.’

‘You were back here by
six. There would have been plenty of time to stay out there and finish things
up that afternoon.’

Only with difficulty did
Brunetti stop himself from displaying his astonishment that Patta would recall
a detail such as the time Brunetti had returned from Vicenza. This was the man,
after all, who could not be depended upon to name more than two or three of the
uniformed police.

‘I didn’t get to it, sir.’

‘What happened when you
went back?’

‘I
spoke to Foster’s
commanding officer and to one of the men who worked with him.’

‘And what did you learn?’

‘Nothing substantial,
sir.’

Patta glared across the
desk at him. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘I didn’t learn anything
about why a person would want to kill him.’

Patta threw his hands up
in the air and let out a great sigh of exasperation. ‘That’s exactly the point,
Brunetti. There is no reason why anyone would want to kill him, which is why
you didn’t find it. And, I might add, why you aren’t going to find it. Because
it isn’t there. He was killed for his money, and the proof of that is the fact
that his wallet wasn’t found on him.’ One of his shoes wasn’t found with him,
either. Did that mean he was killed for a size 11 Reebok?

Patta opened his top
drawer and pulled out a few sheets of paper. ‘I think you’ve wasted more than
enough time chasing out to Vicenza, Brunetti. I don’t like the idea of your
bothering the Americans about this. The crime happened here, and the killer
will be found here.’ Patta made that last sound firmly terminal. He picked up
one of the papers and glanced at it. ‘I’d like you to make better use of your
time from now on.’

‘And how might I do that,
sir?’

Patta peered at him, then
back at the paper. ‘I’m assigning you to the investigation of this break-in on
the Grand Canal.’ Brunetti was certain that the location of that crime, and the
suggestion it made about the wealth of the victim, was more than enough to make
it seem, to Patta, far more important in real terms than mere murder,
especially when that victim was not even an officer.