by Donna Leon
He turned his attention from the drawings to a handwritten letter to the left of them. It bore no return address and was postmarked from somewhere in the province of Trento. The postmark was smudged, making the name of the town illegible. He glanced quickly down the page and saw that it was signed ‘Mamma’.
Brunetti looked away a moment before he began to read. It contained the usual family news: Pap à busy with the spring planting; Maria, whom Brunetti inferred must be Marco’s younger sister, doing well in school. Briciola had run after the postman again; she herself was well and hoped that Marco was studying and doing well at school and not having any more trouble. No, Signora, your Marco will never have any trouble again, but all that you will have now, and for the rest of your lives, is loss and pain and the terrible sense that you somehow failed this boy. And no matter how deep your knowledge that you were not responsible for it, your certainty that you were will always be deeper and more absolute.
He set the letter down and quickly went through the rest of the papers on the desk. There were more letters from the boy’s mother, but Brunetti did not read them. Finally, in the top drawer of the pine dresser to the left of the table, he found an address book, and in it he found Marco’s parents’ address and phone number. He slipped the small book into the side pocket of his jacket.
A sound at the door made him turn around to see Gianpaolo Guerriero, Rizzardi’s assistant. To Brunetti, Guerriero’s ambition was easily read on his lean young face and in the quickness of his every gesture, or perhaps it was nothing more than that Brunetti knew him to be ambitious and so saw that quality - Brunetti could never bring himself to call it a virtue - in everything the man did. Brunetti wanted to like him because he had seen that he was respectful of the dead with whom he worked, but there was a humourless sincerity in the man that made it difficult for Brunetti to feel toward him anything stronger than respect. Like his superior, he was a careful dresser and today wore a grey woollen suit which complemented his elegant good looks. Behind him came two white-clad attendants from the morgue. Brunetti nodded towards the kitchen, and the men went inside, taking their rolled-up stretcher with them.
‘Don’t touch anything,’ Guerriero called unnecessarily after them. He gave Brunetti his hand.
‘They told me it was an overdose,’ Guerriero said.
‘It looks like it.’ No sounds came from the other room.
Guerriero went into the kitchen, carrying a bag Brunetti couldn’t help noticing bore the Prada logo.
Brunetti remained in the living room and, while he waited for Guerriero to finish, propped himself on the table on his outstretched palms and looked down again at Marco’s drawings. He wanted to smile at the rabbits, but he could not.
Guerriero was inside the room no more than a few minutes. He paused at the door to remove the surgical mask he had put on. ‘If it was heroin,’ the doctor said, ‘and I think it was, it would have been instant. You saw him: he didn’t even have time to get the needle out of his arm.’
Brunetti asked, ‘What would do that to him? Or why would it, if he was an addict?’
Guerriero considered this then answered, ‘If it was heroin, it could have had just about any sort of crap mixed up in it. That could have done it. Or, if he hadn’t been using it for a while, then it could have been no more than an over-reaction to a dosage that wouldn’t have harmed him while he was using it regularly. That is, if he got some stuff that was particularly pure.’
‘What do you think?’ Brunetti asked, and when he saw Guerriero begin to give an automatic, no doubt cautious, reply, he raised his hand and added, ‘entirely unofficially’.
Guerriero thought about this for a long time before he answered, and Brunetti couldn’t escape the idea that the young doctor was weighing up the professional consequences of being discovered to have made an entirely unofficial judgement. Finally, he said, ‘I think it might be the second.’
Brunetti didn’t prod, simply stood there and waited for him to continue.
‘I didn’t check the entire body,’ Guerriero said. ‘Just the arms, but there are no fresh marks, though there are a lot of old ones. If he’s been using heroin recently, he would have been using his arms. Addicts tend to use the same place. I’d say he’s been off the stuff for a couple of months.’
‘But then he went back to it?’
‘Yes, it would seem so. I’ll be able to tell you more after I have a better look at him.’
‘Thank you, Dottore,’ Brunetti said. ‘Will they take him out now?’
‘Yes. I’ve told them to put him in a bag. With the windows open, it should be better in here soon.’
‘Good. Thank you.’
Guerriero raised a hand in acknowledgement.
‘When can you do the autopsy?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Tomorrow morning, most likely. Things are slow at the hospital at the moment. It’s strange, the way so few people die in the spring.
‘I left his wallet and the things from his pockets on the kitchen table,’ Guerriero went on, opening his bag and stuffing the surgical mask inside.
‘Thank you. Call me when you have anything, will you?’
‘Of course,’ Guerriero said and, after shaking hands in farewell, left the apartment.
During their brief conversation, Brunetti had been aware of sounds coming from the kitchen. As soon as Guerriero was gone, the two attendants emerged, stretcher now unrolled and filled with its bagged burden, suspended between them. With an effort of will, Brunetti kept himself from thinking about how they would manipulate their burden down the narrow, twisting steps of the building. The men nodded in his direction but did not stop.
The sound of their departure growing fainter as they descended the stairs, Brunetti went back into the kitchen.
The taller of the two technicians - Brunetti thought his name was Santini but wasn’t sure - looked up and said, ‘Nothing here, sir.’
‘You check his papers?’ Brunetti asked, indicating the wallet and small pile of crumpled papers and coins that lay on the table.
Santini’s partner answered for him. ‘No, sir. We thought you’d want to do that.’
‘How many more rooms are there?’ Brunetti asked.
Santini pointed toward the back of the apartment. ‘Just the bathroom. He must have slept on that sofa in the other room.’
‘Anything in the bathroom?’
Santini left it to the other to answer. ‘No needles in there, sir, no sign of them. Just the regular stuff you’d expect to find in a bathroom: aspirin, shaving cream, a package of plastic razors; no drug paraphernalia at all.’
Brunetti found it interesting that the technician should comment on this and so asked, ‘What do you make of it?’
‘I’d say the kid was clean,’ he answered without hesitation. Brunetti glanced at Santini, who nodded in agreement with his partner. The other continued, ‘We’ve seen a lot of these kids, and most of them are a mess. Sores all over their bodies, not just their arms.’ He raised a hand and waved it back and forth a few times, as if brushing away the memory of the young bodies he’d seen, lying in their drug-bought deaths. ‘But this kid didn’t have any other fresh marks.’ No one spoke for a time.
Santini finally asked, ‘Is there anything else you’d like us to do, sir?’
‘No, I don’t think so.’ He noticed that both of them were no longer wearing their masks and that the smell was fainter now, even here, where the boy had been lying for no one knew how long. ‘You two go and have a coffee. I’ll have a look at that,’ he said, waving towards the wallet and papers. ‘Then I’ll lock up and come down.’
Neither objected. When they were gone, Brunetti picked up the wallet and blew on it to remove some of the fine grey powder. It contained fifty-seven thousand lire. There was another two thousand, seven hundred in coins on the table, where someone had put it after taking it from Marco’s pockets. Inside he found Marco’s Carta d’identità, which gave his birthdate. With a sudden motion, he swept all of the m
oney and paper on the desk into his hand and stuffed it into the pocket of his jacket. He had seen a set of keys on the table just inside the door. Carefully checking that all of the shutters held fast, he closed them and then the windows of the apartment. He locked the door and went downstairs.
Outside, Vianello was standing by an old man, leaning forward to listen to whatever he had to say. When he saw Brunetti emerge, he patted the old man on the arm and turned away. As Brunetti approached, Vianello shook his head. ‘No one saw anything. No one knows anything.’
* * * *
13
With Vianello and the men from the technical squad, Brunetti rode back to the Questura on the police boat, glad of the air and the wind that, he hoped, would blow them free of the smell they had taken with them from the apartment. None of them mentioned it, but Brunetti knew he would not feel entirely clean until he had stripped himself of every piece of clothing he had worn that day and stood for a long time under the cleansing water of a shower. Even in the burgeoning heat of this late spring day, he longed equally for hot, steaming water and the hard feel of a rough cloth against every centimetre of his body.
The technicians carried the means of Marco’s death back to the Questura with them and, even though there was little chance of getting a second set of prints from the syringe that had killed him, there was some hope that the plastic bag he’d left lying on the kitchen table would provide them with something, even a fragment that might be matched with prints already on file.
When they arrived at the Questura, the pilot brought the boat in too quickly, slamming it up against the landing so hard that they were jostled about on the deck. One of the technicians grabbed Brunetti’s shoulder to prevent himself from falling down the steps and into the cabin. The pilot cut the motor and jumped ashore, grabbing the end of the rope that would anchor the boat to the landing deck and keeping himself busy with the knots. A silent Brunetti led the others off the boat and into the Questura.
Brunetti went directly to Signorina Elettra’s small office. She was talking on the phone when he came in, and when she saw him, she held up a hand, signalling him to wait. He came in slowly, concerned that he would carry in with him the terrible smell that still filled his imagination, if not his clothing. He noticed that the window was open, so he went and stood by it, beside a large vase of lilies whose oily sweetness filled the air around them with a sickly odour he had always loathed.
Sensing his restlessness, Signorina Elettra glanced across at him, held the receiver away from her ear and waved her other hand in the air, as if to suggest her lack of patience with the caller. She pulled the receiver back to her ear and muttered, ‘Si’ a few times without letting her impatience show in her voice. A minute passed, she held the phone away again, and then pulled it suddenly toward her, said thank you and goodbye, and hung up.
‘All that to tell me why he can’t come tonight,’ was all she offered by way of explanation. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to cause Brunetti to wonder what and where. And who. He said nothing.
‘How was it?’ she asked.
‘Bad,’ Brunetti answered. ‘He was twenty. And no one knows how long he’d been there.’
‘In this heat,’ she said, not as a question but as an expression of general sympathy.
Brunetti nodded. ‘It was drugs, an overdose.’
She said nothing to this but closed her eyes and then said, ‘I’ve been asking some people I know about drugs, but they all say the same thing, that Venice is a very small market.’ She paused, then added, ‘But it must be big enough for someone to have sold this boy whatever killed him.’ How strange, it seemed to Brunetti, to hear her refer to Marco as a ‘boy’: she couldn’t be much more than a decade older herself.
‘I have to call his parents,’ Brunetti said.
She looked at her watch, and Brunetti looked at his, amazed to discover that it was only ten past one. Death made real time meaningless, and it seemed to him that he had spent days in the apartment.
‘Why don’t you wait a little while, sir?’ Before he could ask, she explained. ‘That way, the father might be there and they’ll have finished lunch. It would be better for them if they were together when you tell them.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I hadn’t thought of that. I’ll wait.’ He had no idea of what he would do to fill the time between now and then.
Signorina Elettra reached forward and touched something on her computer. It made a sudden droning noise, and then the screen went blank. ‘I thought I’d stop now and go and have un’ ombra before lunch. Would you like to join me, sir?’ She smiled at her own flagrant boldness: a married man, her boss, and she was inviting him for a drink.
Brunetti, moved by the charity of it, said, ‘Yes, I’d like that, Signorina.’
* * * *
He made the call a little after two. A woman answered the phone, and Brunetti asked to speak to Signor Landi. He breathed silent, directionless thanks when she displayed no curiosity and said she’d get her husband.
‘Landi,’ a deep voice answered.
‘Signor Landi,’ Brunetti said, ‘This is Commissario Guido Brunetti. I’m calling from the Questura of Venice.’
Before he could go on, Landi cut him off, his own voice suddenly tight and loud. ‘Is it Marco?’
‘Yes, Signor Landi, it is.’
‘How bad is it?’ Landi asked in a softer voice.
‘I’m afraid it couldn’t be worse, Signor Landi.’
Silence drifted across the line. Brunetti imagined the man, the newspaper in his hand, standing at the phone and looking back toward the kitchen, where his wife was clearing up after the last peaceful meal she would ever have.
Landi’s voice grew almost inaudible, but there was only one thing he could have asked, so Brunetti filled in the missing sounds. ‘Is he dead?’
‘Yes, I’m sorry to tell you, he is.’
There was another pause, this one even longer, and then Landi asked, ‘When?’
‘We found him today.’
‘Who did?’
‘The police. A neighbour called.’ Brunetti could not bring himself to give the details or to talk about the time that had passed since Marco died. ‘He said he hadn’t seen Marco recently and called us to check on the apartment. When we did, we found him.’
‘Was it drugs?’
No autopsy had been performed. The mechanism of the state had not yet considered the evidence surrounding the boy’s death, had not weighed and considered it and brought judgement as to the cause of his death; thus it would be rash and so irresponsible as to merit official reprimand for an officer of the law to venture his own opinion in this matter. ‘Yes,’ Brunetti said.
The man on the other end of the line was crying. Brunetti heard the long, deep gasps as he choked on his grief and fought for air. A minute passed. Brunetti held the phone away from him and looked off to the left, where a plaque on the wall gave the names of police officers who had died in the First World War. He started to read their names, the dates of their birth and the dates of their death. One had been only twenty, the same age as Marco.
From the receiver, he heard the dim sound of a higher voice, raised in curiosity or fear, but then the sound was cut off as Landi covered the phone with his hand. Another minute passed. Then he could hear Landi’s voice. Brunetti pulled the phone to his ear, but all he heard was Landi saying, ‘I’ll call you back’, and the connection was broken.
While he sat and waited, Brunetti considered the nature of this crime. If Guerriero was right and Marco had died because his body had grown unaccustomed to the terrible shock of heroin during the time he hadn’t been using it, then what crime had been committed other than the sale of a prohibited substance? And what sort of crime was that, to sell heroin to an addict, and where existed the judge to treat it as more than a misdemeanour? If, instead, the heroin that killed him had been laced with something dangerous or lethal, how to determine at what point along the trail that stretched from the poppy fields of
the East to the veins of the West that substance had been added, and by whom?
No matter how he considered it, there was no way Brunetti could see that this crime would have serious legal consequences. Nor could he see much likelihood that the identity of the person responsible would ever be discovered. And yet the young student who drew the whimsical rabbits and had the wit to hide them in different places in each of his drawings was no less dead for that.
He got up from his desk and stood at the window. The sun beat down on Campo San Lorenzo. All of the men who lived in the old-age home had answered the summons to sleep, leaving the campo to the cats and the people who crossed it at this hour. Brunetti leaned forward, resting his hands on the sill, and watched the campo as if in search of an omen. After half an hour, Landi called to say that he and his wife would arrive in Venice at seven that evening and asked how they could get to the Questura.
