Death in a Strange Country (8 page)

‘I’m not a good sailor. I
was born in North Dakota, and there’s not a lot of water there. I never even
learned how to swim.’ Her smile was weak, but it was back in place.

‘Did you and Mr Foster
work together for a long time?’

‘Sergeant,’ she corrected
him automatically. ‘Yes,
ever since I got to Vicenza, about seven months
ago. He really runs everything. They just need an officer to be in charge. And
to sign papers.’

‘To take the blame?’ he
asked with a smile.

‘Yes, yes, I suppose you
could say that. But nothing’s ever gone wrong. Not with Mike. He’s very good at
his job.’ Her voice was warm. Praise? Affection?

Below them, the engine
slowed to an even purr, and then there came the heavy thump as they slid into
the dock at the cemetery. He stood and went up the narrow stairway to the open
deck, pausing at the top to hold one side of the swinging door open to allow
the doctor to pass through it. Monetti was busy wrapping the mooring lines
around one of the wooden pilings that stuck up at a crazy angle from the waters
of the
laguna
,

Brunetti stepped ashore
and held out his arm. She placed her hand on it, then leaned heavily on it as
she leaped to the shore beside him. He noticed that she carried neither handbag
nor briefcase, perhaps having left it in the car or in the boat.

The cemetery closed at
four, so Brunetti had to ring the bell that stood to the right of the large
wooden doors. After a few minutes, the door on the right side was pulled open
by a man in a dark blue uniform, and Brunetti gave his name. The man held the
door open, then closed it after them. Brunetti led their way through the main
entrance and paused at the watchman’s window, where he announced himself and
showed his warrant card. The watchman signalled for them to continue down tine
open arcade to the right. Brunetti nodded. He knew the way.

When they stepped through
the door and into the building that held the morgue, Brunetti felt the sudden
drop in temperature. Doctor Peters apparently did as well, for she brought her
arms together across her chest and lowered her head. A white-uniformed
attendant sat at a plain wooden desk at the end of a long corridor. He got to
his feet as they approached, careful to place his book face down in front of
him. ‘Commissario Brunetti?’ he asked.
               
                     
       

Brunetti nodded. ‘This is
the doctor from the American base,’ he added, nodding to the young woman at his
side. To one who had looked so frequently upon the face of death, the sight of
a young woman in a military uniform was hardly worthy of notice, so the
attendant passed quickly in front of them and opened the heavy wooden door that
stood to his left.

‘I
knew you were coming, so
I brought him out,’ he said as he led them towards a metal gurney that stood on
one side of the room. All three of them recognized what was under the white
cloth. When they drew up next to the body, the young man looked at Doctor
Peters. She nodded. When he pulled the cloth back, she looked at the face of
the dead man, and Brunetti looked at hers. For the first few moments, her own
remained absolutely still and expressionless, then she closed her eyes and
pulled her upper lip between her teeth. It’she was trying to bite back tears,
she failed, for they welled up and seeped out of her eyes. ‘Mike, Mike,’ she
whispered and turned away from the body.

Brunetti nodded to the
attendant, and he drew the cloth back across the young man’s face.

Brunetti felt her hand on
his arm, her grip surprisingly strong. ‘What killed him?’

He stepped back,
intending to turn and lead her from the room, but her grip tightened and she
repeated, voice insistent, ‘What killed him?’

Brunetti placed his hand
on top of hers and said, ‘Come outside.’

Before he had any idea
what she was doing, she pushed past him and grabbed at the cloth that covered
the body of the young man, ripping it away to expose his body to the waist. The
giant incision of the autopsy, running from navel to neck, was sewn together
with large stitches. Unsewn and seeming quite harmless when compared to the
enormous incision of the autopsy was the small horizontal line that had killed
him.

Her voice came out as a
low moan, and she
repeated the name, ‘Mike, Mike,’ drawing the
sound
out in a long, keening wail. She stood beside the body, curiously straight and
rigid, and the noise continued to come from her.
         
                 

The attendant stepped
quickly in front of her and fastidiously replaced the cloth, covering both
wounds
and then the face.
 
                     
             

She turned to face
Brunetti, and he saw that her eyes were filled with tears, but he saw something
else in them that looked like nothing so much as terror, sheer animal terror.
     
                     
         

‘Are you all right,
Doctor?’ he asked, voice low, careful not to touch her or approach her in any
way.

She nodded, and the look
of whatever it was passed from her eyes. Abruptly she turned and headed back
towards the door of the mortuary. A few feet from it, she stopped suddenly,
looked around her as It’surprised to find herself where she was, and ran
towards a sink that stood against the far wall. She was violently sick into it,
retched repeatedly until she stood at the sink, arms braced to support herself,
leaning down above it, panting.

The attendant suddenly
appeared beside her and handed her a white cotton towel. She took it
with
a nod and wiped at her face with it. With strange gentleness, the man took her
arm and led her to another sink a few metres down the same wall. He turned on
the hot-water tap, then the cold, and placed his hand under the water until it
reached a temperature suitable for him. When it did, he reached out and held
the towel white Doctor Peters washed her face and rinsed her mouth with a handful
of water, and then another. When she was done, he handed her the towel again,
shut off both laps, and left the room by the door on the other side.

She folded the towel and
draped it over the edge of the sink. Making her way back to Brunetti, she avoided
looking to her left, where the body still lay on me gurney, covered now.

When she got near, he
turned and led the way to the door, held it open for her as they passed into
the warmer evening air. As they walked down under the long arcade, she said, ‘I’m
sorry. I don’t know why that happened. I’ve certainly seen autopsies. I’ve even
done
autopsies.’ She shook her head a few times as they walked. He half
saw the gesture from his greater height beside her.

If only to complete the
formality, he asked, ‘Is that Sergeant Foster?’

‘Yes, it is,’ she
answered with no hesitation, but he sensed that she was struggling to keep her
voice calm and level. Even her walk was more rigid than it had been when they
went in, as It’she had let the uniform take over and direct her motions.

When they passed through
the gate of the cemetery, Brunetti led her over to where Monetti had moored the
boat. He sat inside the cabin, reading his newspaper. When he saw them
approach, he folded it and moved to the stern, where he pulled on the mooring
rope to bring the boat close enough for them to be able to climb on board
easily.

This time she stepped
onto the boat and went immediately down the stairs into the cabin. Pausing only
long enough to whisper to Monetti, ‘Take as much time as you can going back,’
he followed her down into the cabin.

She sat farther forward
this time, turned to face out of the front windows. The sun had already set,
and the afterglow provided very little light by which to see the skyline of the
city, off to their left. He took his place opposite her, noticing how straight
and stiff she sat.

‘There will be a lot of
formalities, but I imagine we can release the body tomorrow.’

She nodded to acknowledge
that she heard him.

‘What will the Army do?’

‘Excuse me?’ she said.

‘What will the Army do in
a case like this?’ he repeated.

‘Well send the body home,
to his family.’

‘No, I don’t mean about
the body. I mean about the investigation.’

At that, she turned and
looked him in the eyes. Her confusion, he believed, was feigned. ‘I don’t
understand. What investigation?’

‘To find out why he was
killed.’

‘But I thought it was
robbery,’ She said, asking for confirmation of that belief.

‘It might have been,’ he
said, ‘bat I doubt it.’

She looked away from him
when he said that and stared out of the window, but the panorama of Venice had
been swallowed by the night, and all she saw there was her own reflection.

‘I don’t know anything
about that,’ she said, voice insistent.

To Brunetti, it sounded
as It’she believed she could make this be true, if only she repeated it often
and insistently enough. ‘What kind of man was he?’ he asked.

For a moment, she didn’t
answer, but when she did, Brunetti found her answer strange, ‘Honest. He was an
honest man.’ It was a strange thing to say about a man so young.

He waited to see It’she
would say anything more. When she didn’t, he asked, ‘How well did you know him?’

He watched, not her face,
but its reflection in the window of the boat. She was no longer crying, but a
fixed sadness had settled on her features. She took a deep breath and answered,
‘I knew him very well.’ But then her voice changed, grew more casual and
offhand. ‘We worked together for seven months.’ And that was all she said.

‘What sort of work did he
do? Captain Duncan said he was the Public Health Inspector, but I’m not sure I
have any idea what that means.’

She noticed that their
eyes met in the window, so she turned to face him directly. ‘He had to inspect
the apartments where we live. We Americans, that is. Or if there were any
complaints about tenants by their landlords, he had to go and investigate them.’

‘Anything else?’

‘He had to go to the
embassies serviced by our hospital. In Egypt, Poland, Yugoslavia, and inspect
the kitchens, see that they were clean.’

‘So he travelled a lot?’

‘A fair amount, yes.’

‘Did he like his work?’

Without hesitation and
with great emphasis, she said, ‘Yes, he did. He thought it was very important.’

‘And you were his
superior officer?’

Her smile was very small.
‘You could say that, I suppose. I’m really a paediatrician; they just gave me
the job in public health so that they’d have an officer’s signature, and a
doctor’s, in the right places. Mike ran the office almost completely by
himself. Occasionally, he’d give me something to sign, or he’d ask me to write
a request for supplies. Things get done faster if an officer asks for them.’

‘Did you ever go on any
of these trips, these trips to the embassies, together?’

It’she found that a
strange question, he had no way of telling, for she turned away from him and
again stared out of the window. ‘No, Mike always went alone.’ Without warning,
she stood and went towards the steps at the back of the cabin. ‘Does your
driver, or whatever he is, know the way? It seems like it’s taking us an awful
long time to get back.’ She pushed open one of the doors and looked carefully
to either side of them, but the buildings that lined the canal were anonymous
to her.

‘Yes, it takes longer to
get back,’ Brunetti lied easily. ‘Many of the canals are one way, so we have to
go all the way around the station to get to Piazzale Roma.’ He saw that they
were just entering the Canale di Cannaregio. In five minutes, perhaps less,
they would be there.