Death in a Strange Country (7 page)

‘Danilo, the woman saw
him at about five-thirty, dead, low tide. Doctor Rizzardi said he had been in
the water about five or six hours; that’s how long he was dead.’ Brunetti
paused, giving the other man time to begin to visualize the waterways near the
hospital. ‘There’s no sign of a weapon in the canal where we found him.’

Bonsuan didn’t bother to
comment on this. No one would bother to throw away a good knife, especially not
where they had just used it to kill someone.

Brunetti took this as
spoken and added, ‘So he might have been killed somewhere else.’

‘Probably was,’ Bonsuan
said, breaking his silence.

‘Where?’

‘Five, six hours?’ Bonsuan
asked. When Brunetti nodded, the pilot put his head back and closed his eyes,
and Brunetti could almost see the tide chart of the
laguna
that he
studied. Bonsuan remained like that for a few minutes. Once he shook his head
in a brief negative, dismissing some possibility that Brunetti would never
learn about. Finally he opened his eyes and said, ‘There are two places where
it could have been. Behind Santa Marina. You know that dead
calle
that
leads down to the Rio Santa Marina, behind the new hotel?’

Brunetti nodded. It was a
quiet place, a dead end.

The other is Calle Cocco.’
When Brunetti seemed puzzled, Bonsuan explained, ‘It’s one of those two blind
calle
that lead off of Calle Lunga, where it heads out of Campo Santa Maria
Formosa. Goes right down to the water.’

Though Bonsuan’s
description made him recognize where the
calle
was, even allowed him to
recall the entrance to it, past which he must have walked hundreds of times,
Brunetti could not remember ever having actually walked down the
calle.
No
one would, not unless they lived in
it, for it was, as Bonsuan pointed
out, a dead: end that led to the water and ended there.

‘Either one would be a
perfect place,’ Bonsuan suggested. ‘No one ever passes either one of them, not
at that hour.’

‘And the tides?’

‘Last night they were
very weak. No real pull in them. And a body catches on things; that slows it
down. It could have been either one of those two places.’

‘Any other?’

‘It might have been one
of the other
calle
that lead into the Canal of Santa Marina, but those
are the two best places if all we’ve got is five or six hours for him to drift.’
It seemed that Bonsuan had finished, but then he added, ‘Unless he used a boat,’
leaving it to Brunetti to infer that he meant the killer.

‘That’s possible, isn’t
it?’ Brunetti agreed, though he thought it unlikely. Boats meant motors, and
late at night that meant angry heads stuck out of windows to see who it was
making all the noise.

‘Thanks, Danilo. Would
you tell the divers to go over those two places - it can wait until the morning
- and take a look? And ask Vianello to send a team over to check both of those
places to see if there’s any sign that it was done there.’

Bonsuan pushed himself up
from his chair, knees creaking audibly. He nodded.

‘Who’s down there who can
take me to Piazzale Roma and then out to the cemetery?’

‘Monetti,’ Bonsuan
responded, naming one of the other pilots.

‘Could you tell him I’d
like to leave in about ten minutes?’

With a nod and a mumbled,
‘Yes, sir,’ Bonsuan was gone.

Brunetti suddenly noticed
how hungry he was. All he’d eaten since the morning were three sandwiches,
well, less than that, since Orso had eaten one of them. He pulled open the
bottom drawer of his desk, hoping to find something there, a box of
buranei,
the s-shaped cookies he loved and usually had to fight the children for, an
old candy bar, anything, but it was as empty as it had been the last time he
looked.

It would have to be
coffee, then. But that would mean having Monetti stop the boat. It was a measure
of his hunger, the irritation he felt at this simple problem. But then he
thought of the women down in the Ufficio Stranieri; they usually had something
to give him if he went begging for food.

He left his office and
went down the back staircase to the ground floor, pushing his way through the
large double doors and into the office. Sylvia, small and dark, and Anita,
tall, blonde, and stunning, sat at their desks opposite one another, leafing
through the papers that seemed never to disappear from their desks.

‘Buona sera,’
they both said as he came
in, then bowed again to the green-covered files that sprawled out in front of
them.

‘Do you have anything to
eat?’ he asked with more hunger than grace.

Sylvia smiled and shook
her head without speaking; he came into the office only to beg food or to tell
them that one of their applicants for a work or residence permit had been
arrested and could be removed from their lists and files.

‘Don’t you get fed at
home?’ Anita asked, but at the same time she was pulling open one of the
drawers in her desk. From it she pulled a brown paper bag. Opening it, she took
out one, then two, then three ripe pears and placed them at the front of her
desk, within easy reach of his hand.

Three years ago, an
Algerian who had been denied a residence permit had gone berserk in the office
when he was given the news, grabbed Anita by the shoulders, and pulled her
across her desk. He was holding her there, screaming in her face in hysterical
Arabic, when Brunetti had come in to ask for a file. Instantly, he had wrapped
an arm around the man’s neck and choked him until he released Anita, who had
fallen free to her desk, terrified and sobbing. No one had ever referred to the
incident since then, but he knew he could always find something to eat in her
desk;

‘Thanks, Anita,’ he said
and picked up one of the pears. He plucked out the stem and bit into the pear,
ripe and perfect. In five quick bites, it was gone, and he reached for the
second one. A bit less ripe, it was still sweet and soft. Juggling the two damp
cores in his left hand, he took the third pear, thanked her again, and went out
of the office, now fortified for the ride to Piazzale Roma and his meeting with
Doctor Peters. Captain Peters.

* *
* *

4

He got to the Carabinieri station at Piazzale Roma at
twenty minutes before seven, leaving Monetti in the launch to wait for him to
come back aboard with the doctor. He realized, although it no doubt made a
statement about his prejudices, that he found it more comfortable to think of
her as a doctor than as a captain. He had called ahead, so the Carabinieri knew
he was coming. It was the usual bunch, most of them Southerners, who seemed
never to leave the smoke-filled station, the purpose of which Brunetti could
never understand. Carabinieri had nothing to do with traffic, but traffic was
all there was at Piazzale Roma: cars, campers, taxis, and, especially during
the summer, endless rows of buses parked there just long enough to disgorge
their heavy cargoes of tourists. Just this last summer there had been added to
them a new sort of vehicle, the diesel-burning, fume-spewing buses that
lumbered there overnight from a newly freed Eastern Europe and from which
emerged, dazed with travel and lack of sleep, scores of thousands of very
polite, very poor, very stocky tourists, who spent a single day in Venice and
left it dazzled by the beauty they had seen in that one day. Here they had
their first taste of capitalism triumphant, and they were too thrilled by it to
realize that much of it was no more than papier-mâché masks from Taiwan and
lace woven in Korea.

He went into the station
and exchanged friendly greetings with the two officers on duty. ‘No sign of her
yet,
La Capitana,’
one of them said, then added a scornful chuckle at
the idea that a woman could be an officer. At the sound of it, Brunetti
determined to address her, at least It’she came anywhere within hearing of
these two, by her rank and to give her every sign of the respect to which her
rank entitled her. Not for the first time, he cringed when he saw his own
prejudices manifest in other people.

He engaged in a few
desultory remarks with the Carabinieri. What chance did Napott have of winning
this Weekend? Would Maradona ever play again? Would the government fall? He
stood looking out of the glass door and watched the waves of traffic flow into
the Piazzale. Pedestrians danced and wove their way through the cars and buses.
No one paid the least attention to the zebra crossing or to the white lines
that were meant to indicate the separation of lanes. And yet the traffic flowed
smoothly and quickly.

A light green sedan cut
across the bus lane and drew up behind the two blue and white Carabinieri
vehicles. It was an almost anonymous rectangle, devoid of markings or rooftop
light, its only distinguishing mark a number plate which read ‘AFI Official’.
The driver’s door opened, and a uniformed soldier emerged. He bent and opened
the door behind him and held it while a young woman in a dark-green uniform got
out. As soon as she stood clear of the car, she put on her uniform cap and
looked around her, then over towards the Carabinieri station.

Without bothering to say
goodbye to the men inside, Brunetti left the station and went towards the car. ‘Doctor
Peters?’ he said as he approached.

She looked up at the
sound of her name and took a step towards him. As he came up, she held out her
hand and shook his briefly. She appeared to be in her late twenties, with curly
dark-brown hair that pushed back against the pressure of her hat. Her eyes were
chestnut, her skin still brown from a summer tan. Had she smiled, she would
have been even prettier. Instead, she looked at him directly, mouth pulled into
a tense straight line, and asked, ‘Are you the police inspector?’

‘Commissario Brunetti. I
have a boat here. It will take us out to San Michele.’ Seeing her confusion, he
explained, ‘The cemetery island. The body’s been taken there.’

Without waiting for her
reply, he pointed in the direction of the mooring and led the way across the
road. She paused long enough to say something to the driver and then followed
him. At the water’s edge, he pointed to the blue and white police boat moored
to the embankment. ‘If you’ll come this way, Doctor,’ he said, stepping from
the pavement and onto the deck of the boat. She came up close behind him and
accepted his hand. The skirt of her uniform fell just a few inches below her
knees. Her legs were good, tanned and muscular, the ankles slim. With no
hesitation, she gripped his hand and allowed herself to be helped on board the
boat. As soon as they were down in the cabin and seated, Monetti backed out of
the mooring and turned the boat up the Grand Canal. He took them quickly past
the railway station, blue light turning, and turned left into the Canale della
Misericordia, beyond the outlet of which lay the cemetery island.

Usually, when he had to
take people foreign to Venice on a police launch, Brunetti busied himself by
pointing out sights and points of interest along the way. This time, however,
he contented himself with the most formal of openings. ‘I hope you had no
trouble in getting here, Doctor.’
               
     

She looked down at the
strip of green carpeting on the floor between them and muttered something he
took to be a ‘no’ but said nothing further. He noticed that she occasionally
took a deep breath in an effort to calm herself, a strange response in someone
who was, after all, a doctor.

As It’she had read his
thoughts, she glanced up at him, smiled a very pretty smile, and said, ‘It’s
different, when you know the person. In medical school, they’re strangers, so
it’s easy to keep a professional distance.’ She paused for a long time. ‘And
people my age don’t usually die.’

That was certainly true
enough. ‘Did you work together for a long time?’ Brunetti asked.

She nodded and began to
answer, but before she could say anything, the boat gave a sudden lurch. She
grabbed the front of her seat with both hands and shot him a frightened glance.

‘We’ve moved out into the
laguna,
into open water. Don’t worry, it’s nothing to be afraid of.’