Death in a Strange Country

by Donna Leon

  ‘Strange coincidence, isn’t it?’ Ambrogiani asked.

  ‘Did you know her?’

  ‘No, I didn’t. But one of my men works with an American policeman whose son was her patient. He said she was very good with the little boy. He broke his arm last year and got bad treatment at the beginning. Doctors and nurses rushed, too busy to tell him what they were doing; you know the story, so he was afraid of doctors, afraid they’d hurt him again. She was very kind with him, spent a lot of time. It seems she always made sure to schedule a double appointment for the boy, so she wouldn’t have to rush him.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean she didn’t use drugs, Maggiore,’ Brunetti said, trying to make it sound like he believed it.

  ‘No, it doesn’t, does it?’ Ambrogiani agreed.

  ‘What else did the report say?’

  ‘I don’t know. I haven’t seen a copy of it.’

  ‘Then how do you know what you’ve told me?’

  ‘I called Urbani.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Dottor Brunetti. An American soldier was murdered in Venice. Less than a week later, his commanding officer dies under mysterious circumstances. I’d be a fool if I didn’t suspect some sort of connection between the two events.’

  ‘When will you have a copy of the autopsy report?’

  ‘Probably this afternoon. Would you like me to call you?’

  ‘Yes. I’d appreciate that, Maggiore.’

  ‘Is there anything you think I should know?’ Ambrogiani asked.

  Ambrogiani was there, in daily contact with the Americans. Anything Brunetti told him was sure to become a fair trade. ‘They were lovers, and she was very frightened when she saw his body.’

  ‘Saw his body?’

  ‘Yes. She was sent to identify his body.’

  Ambrogiani’s silence suggested that he, too, saw this as a particularly subtle touch. ‘Did you speak to her after it?’ he finally asked.

  ‘Yes and no. I came back to the city on the boat with her, but she didn’t want to talk about it. It seemed to me at the time that she was afraid of something. She had the same reaction when I saw her out there.’

  ‘Was that when you came out here?’ Ambrogiani asked.

  ‘Yes. Friday.’

  ‘Do you have any idea what she was afraid of?’

  ‘No. None. She might have tried to call me here on Friday night. There was a phone message here at the Questura, from a woman who didn’t speak Italian. The operator who took the call doesn’t speak English and all he could understand was that she said, ‘Basta.’

  ‘Do you think it was she?’

  ‘It could have been. I’ve no idea. But the message makes no sense.’ Brunetti thought of Patta’s order and asked, ‘What’s going to happen out there?’

  ‘Their military police are going to try to find out where she got the heroin. There were other signs of drugs found with her, the ends of marijuana cigarettes, some hashish. And the autopsy showed that she had been drinking.’

  ‘They certainly didn’t leave any doubt, did they?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘There’s no sign that she was forced to take the injection.’

  ‘Those bruises?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘She fell.’

  ‘So it looks like she did it?’

  ‘Yes.’ Neither of them spoke for a while, then Ambrogiani asked, ‘Are you going to come out here?’

  ‘I’ve been told not to bother the Americans.’

  ‘Who told you?’

  ‘The Vice-Questore here in Venice.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘I’ll wait a few days, a week, then I’d like to come out there and speak to you. Do your men have contact with the Americans?’

  ‘Not much. We each keep to ourselves. But I’ll see what I can find out about her.’

  ‘Did any Italians work with them?’

  ‘I don’t think so. Why?’

  ‘I’m not sure. But both of them, especially Foster, had to travel for his job, going back and forth to places like Egypt.’

  ‘Drugs?’ Ambrogiani asked.

  ‘Could be. Or it could be something else.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t know. Drugs don’t feel right, somehow.’

  ‘What does feel right?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He looked up and saw Vianello at the door to his office. ‘Look, Maggiore, I’ve got someone here now. I’ll call you in a few days. We can decide then when I can go out there.’

  ‘All right. I’ll see what I can find out here.’

  Brunetti hung up and waved Vianello into the office. ‘Anything on Ruffolo?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, sir. Those people who live below his girlfriend said he was there last week. They saw him a few times on the steps, but they haven’t seen him for three or four days. Do you want me to speak to her, sir?’

  ‘Yes, maybe you’d better. Tell her that it’s different from the other times. Viscardi has been assaulted, so that changes everything, especially for her if she’s hiding him or knows where he is.’

  ‘You think it will work?’

  ‘On Ivana?’ Brunetti asked sarcastically.

  ‘Well, no, I suppose it won’t,’ Vianello agreed. ‘But I’ll try it anyway. Besides, I’d rather talk to her than to the mother. At least I can understand what she says, even though every word of it is a lie.’

  When Vianello had left to go and try to interview Ivana, Brunetti went back to the window, but after a few minutes he found that unsatisfactory and went to sit at his desk. Ignoring the files that had been placed there during the morning, he sat and considered the various possibilities. The first one, that it had been an overdose, he dismissed out of hand. Suicide, too, was impossible. In the past, he had seen distraught lovers who saw no possibility of a future life without the other person, but she was not one of them. Those two possibilities excluded, the only one that remained was murder.

  To accomplish it, however, would have taken some planning, for he ruled out luck in these things. There were those bruises – not for a second did he believe in a fall – someone could have held her while she was given the injection. The autopsy showed that she had been drinking; how much did a person have to drink to be so deeply asleep as not to feel a needle or to be so fuddled as not to be able to resist it? More importantly, who would she have drunk with, who would she have felt so comfortable with? Not a lover; hers had just been killed. A friend, then, and who were the friends of Americans abroad? Who did they trust if not other Americans? And all of that pointed back to the base and her job, for Brunetti was certain that the answer, whatever it was, lay there.

  17

  Three days passed during which Brunetti did almost nothing. At the Questura, he went through the motions of his job: looking at papers, signing them, filling out a staffing projection for the next year without giving a thought to the fact that Patta was supposed to do it. At home, he talked to Paola and the children, who were all too busy with the start of the new school year to realize how inattentive he was. Even the search for Ruffolo didn’t interest him much at all, certain as he was that someone so foolish and rash was sure soon to make a mistake that would put him in the hands of the police yet again.

  He did not call Ambrogiani, and in his meetings with Patta, he made no mention of the murders, one that had so quickly been forgotten by the Press, and one that had never been called a murder, or of the base in Vicenza. So frequently as to be almost obsessive, he played over scenes with the young doctor, caught flashes of her in his memory: stepping up out of the boat and giving him her hand; arms braced against the sink in the morgue, body racked by the spasms of her shock; smiling when she told him that, in six months, she would begin her life.

  It was the nature of police work that he never knew the victims whose deaths he investigated. Much as he came to know them intimately, to know about them in work, in bed, and in death, he had never known any of them in this life, and so he felt a special link to Doctor Peters and,
because of that link, a special responsibility to find her murderer.

  On Thursday morning, he checked with Vianello and Rossi when he got to the Questura, but there had still been no sign of Ruffolo. Viscardi had gone back to Milan, after giving written descriptions of the two men, one very tall and one with a beard, to both the insurance company and the police. It appeared that they had forced their way into the palazzo, for the locks on the side door had been picked, the padlock that held a metal grating in place filed through. Though Brunetti had not spoken to Viscardi, his talks with Vianello and Fosco had been enough to persuade him that there had been no robbery, well, not a robbery of anything other than the insurance company’s money.

  A little after ten, one of the secretaries from downstairs brought the mail around to the offices on the top floor and placed a few letters and a magazine-sized manila envelope on his desk.

  The letters were the usual things: invitations to conferences, attempts to sell him special life insurance, responses to questions he had sent to various police departments in other parts of the country. After he read them, he picked up the envelope and examined it. A narrow band of stamps ran across the top of the envelope; there must have been twenty of them. All the same, they carried a small American flag and were marked with the denomination of twenty-nine cents. The envelope was addressed to him, by his name, but the only address was ‘Questura, Venice, Italy’. He could think of no one in America who would be writing to him. There was no return address.

  He tore the envelope open, reached in, and pulled out a magazine. He glanced at the cover and recognized the medical review Doctor Peters had pulled from his hands when she found him reading it in her office. He leafed through it, paused for a moment at those grotesque photos, then continued through the magazine. Towards the end, he found three sheets of paper, obviously a Xerox copy of some other original, slipped between the pages of the magazine. He took them out and placed them on his desk.

  At the top, he read ‘Medical Report’ and then, below it, saw the boxes meant to hold information about the name, age, and rank of the patient. This one carried the name of Daniel Kayman, whose year of birth was given as 1984. There followed three pages of information about his medical history, starting with measles in 1989, a series of bloody noses in the winter of 1990, a broken finger in 1991, and, on the last two pages, a series of visits, starting two months ago, for a skin rash on his left arm. As Brunetti read, he watched the rash grow larger, deeper, and more confusing to the three doctors who had attempted to deal with it.

  On 8 July, the boy had been seen for the first time by Doctor Peters. Her neat, slanted handwriting said that the rash was ‘of unknown origin’ but had broken out after the boy got home from a picnic with his parents. It covered the underside of his arm from wrist to elbow, was dark purple, but did not itch. The prescribed treatment was a medicated skin cream.

  Three days later, the boy was back, the rash worse. It was now oozing a yellow liquid and had grown painful, and the boy was running a high fever. Doctor Peters suggested a consultation with a dermatologist at the local Vicenza hospital, but the parents refused to let the child see an Italian doctor. She prescribed a new cream, this one with cortisone, and an antibiotic to bring the fever down.

  After only two days, the boy was brought back to the hospital and seen by a different doctor, Girrard, who noted in the record that the boy was in considerable pain. The rash now seemed to be a burn and had moved up his arm, spreading towards his shoulder. His hand was swollen and painful. The fever was unchanged.

  A Doctor Grancheck, apparently a dermatologist, had looked at the boy and suggested he be immediately transferred to the Army hospital in Landstuhl, Germany.

  The day after this visit, the boy was sent to Germany on a medical evacuation flight. Nothing else was written in the body of the report, but Doctor Peters’ neat script had pencilled a single notation in the margin, next to the remark that the boy’s rash now appeared to be a burn. It read ‘PCB’ and carried after it ‘FPJ, March.’

  He checked the date, but he knew what it would be even before he looked at it. Family Practice Journal, the March issue. He opened the magazine and began to read. He noticed that the editorial board was almost all men, that men had written most of the articles, and that the articles listed in the Table of Contents dealt with everything from the article about feet that had so horrified him to one that dealt with the increase in the incidence of tuberculosis as a result of the AIDS epidemic. There was even an article about the transmission of parasites from domestic pets to children.

  Seeing no help in the Table of Contents, he began to read from the first page, including all the ads and the letters to the editors. It was on page 62, a brief reference to a case that had been reported in Newark, New Jersey, of a young child, a girl, who had been playing in an empty car park and had stepped into what she thought was a puddle of oil leaked from an abandoned car. The liquid had spilled over the top of her shoe and soaked through her sock. The next day, she developed a rash on the foot, which soon changed into something that had every appearance of a burn and which gradually spread up her leg to her knee. The child had a high fever. All treatment proved futile until a public health official went to the car park and took a sample of the liquid, which proved to be heavy in PCBs, which had leaked there from barrels of toxic waste dumped there. Though the burns eventually healed, the child’s doctors were fearful for her future because of the neurological and genetic damage that had often been noted in animal experimentation with substances containing PCBs.

  He set the magazine aside and went back to the medical record, reading it through a second time. The symptoms were identical, though no mention was made of where or how the child had made the original contact with the substance that must have produced the rash. ‘While on a picnic with his family,’ was the only thing the record said. Nor did the record carry any report of the treatment given to the child in Germany.

  He picked up the envelope and examined it. The stamps were cancelled by a circular imprint that bore, within it, the words ‘Army Postal System’ and Saturday’s date. So, sometime on Friday or Saturday, she had put this in the mail for him, then tried to call him. It hadn’t been ‘Basta’ or ‘Pasta’, but ‘Posta’, to alert him to its arrival in the mail. What had happened to warn her? To make her send these papers off to him?

  He remembered something Butterworth had said about Foster; it was his job to see that used X-rays were taken away from the hospital. He had said something about other objects and substances, but he had said nothing about what they were or where they were dumped. Surely, the Americans would have to know.

  This had to be the connecting link between the two deaths or else she would not have sent the envelope to him, then tried to call. The child had been her patient, but then he had been taken away and sent up to Germany, and there the medical record ended. He had the child’s last name, and Ambrogiani would certainly have access to a list of all the Americans stationed at the base, so it would be easy enough to learn if the boy’s family was still there. And if they weren’t?

  He picked up the phone and asked the operator to get him Maggiore Ambrogiani at the American base in Vicenza. While he waited for the call to go through, he tried to think of a way all of this could be made to connect, hoping that it would lead him to whoever it was had pushed the needle into the doctor’s arm.

  Ambrogiani answered by giving his name. He showed no surprise when Brunetti told him who it was, merely held the line and allowed the silence to lengthen.

  ‘Has there been any progress there?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘They seem to have instituted a whole new series of drug tests. Everyone is subject to it, even the commander of the hospital. The rumour is he had to go into the men’s room and give a urine sample while one of the doctors waited outside. Apparently, they’ve done more than a hundred this week.’

  ‘With what results?’

  ‘Oh, none yet. All of the samples have to be sent up to
Germany, to the hospitals there, to be tested. Then the results come down after a month or so.’

  ‘And they’re accurate?’ Brunetti asked, amazed that any organization could or would trust results that passed through so many hands, over so long a period of time.

  ‘They seem to believe so. If the test is positive, they simply throw you out.’

  ‘Who’s being tested?’

  ‘There’s no pattern. The only ones they’re leaving alone are the ones who keep coming back from the Middle East.’

  ‘Because they’re heroes?’ Brunetti asked.

  No, because they’re afraid too many of them will test positive. Drugs are as easy to get in that part of the world as they were in Vietnam, and apparently they’re afraid it will create too much bad publicity if all of their heroes come back with souvenirs in their bloodstreams.’

  ‘Is it still given out that it was an overdose?’

  ‘Absolutely. One of my men told me her family wouldn’t even come to accompany the body back to America.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘They sent it back. But it went back alone.’

  Brunetti told himself it didn’t matter. The dead didn’t care about such things; it made no difference to them how they were treated or what the living thought of them. But he didn’t believe this.

  ‘I’d like you to try to get some information for me, Maggiore.’

  ‘If I can. Gladly.’

  ‘I’d like to know if there’s a soldier stationed there named Kayman.’ He spelled the name for Ambrogiani. ‘He has a son, nine years old, who was a patient of Doctor Peters. The boy was sent up to a hospital in Germany, at Landstuhl. I’d like to know if the parents are still there, and if they are, I’d like to be able to speak to them.’

  ‘Unofficial, all of this?’

  ‘Very.’

  ‘Can you tell me what it’s about?’

  ‘I’m not sure. She sent me a copy of the boy’s medical file, and an article about PCBs.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Toxic chemicals. I’m not sure what they’re made of or what they do, but I know disposing of them is difficult. And they’re corrosive. The child had a rash on his arm, probably caused by exposure to them.’