Friends In High Places

by Donna Leon

  ‘You know he was in the hospital?’ Brunetti asked by way of answer.

  ‘Yes. I read the article in the Gazzettino this morning. I’m going to see him as soon as I finish,’ he said, waving toward the table, where his lunch sat, slowly growing cold. ‘How is he?’

  ‘I’m afraid I have bad news for you,’ Brunetti began, using the formulaic introduction he’d become so familiar with in the last decades. When he saw that Caberlotto understood, he continued, ‘He never came out of the coma and died this morning.’

  Caberlotto murmured something and put one hand to his mouth, pressing his fingers against his lips. ‘I didn’t know. The poor boy.’

  Brunetti paused for a moment, then asked softly, ‘Did you know him well?’

  Ignoring the question, Caberlotto asked, ‘Is it true that he fell? That he fell and hit his head?’

  Brunetti nodded.

  ‘He fell?’ Caberlotto insisted.

  ‘Yes. Why do you ask?’

  Again, Caberlotto did not respond directly. ‘Ah, the poor boy,’ he repeated, shaking his head. ‘I never would have believed something like this could have happened. He was always so cautious.’

  ‘On the job, do you mean?’

  Caberlotto looked across at Brunetti and said, ‘No, about everything. He was just . . . well, he was just like that: cautious. He worked in that office, and part of their job means they have to go out and keep an eye on what’s being done, but he preferred to stay in the office and work with the plans and projects, seeing how buildings were put together, or how they would be when they were put back together after a restoration. It’s what he loved, that part of the job. He said that.’

  Remembering the visit Rossi had made to his own home, Brunetti said, ‘But I thought part of his job was to visit sites, to inspect houses that had building violations.’

  Caberlotto shrugged. ‘I know he had to go to houses sometimes, but the impression I got was that he did that only to be able to explain things to the owners so that they’d understand what was happening.’ Caberlotto paused, perhaps trying to recall conversations with Rossi, but then went on. ‘I didn’t know him all that well. We were neighbours, so we’d talk on the street sometimes or have a drink together. That was when he told me about liking to study the plans.’

  ‘You said he was always so cautious,’ Brunetti prompted.

  ‘About everything,’ Caberlotto said and seemed almost to smile at the memory. ‘I used to joke with him about it. He’d never carry a box downstairs. He said he needed to see both feet when he walked.’ He paused, as though considering whether to continue, and then did. ‘One time he had a light bulb blow up on him, and he called me to get the name of an electrician. I asked him what it was, and when he told me, I told him to change the bulb himself. All you’ve got to do is wrap some tape backwards around a piece of cardboard and stick it in the base of the bulb and unscrew it. But he said he was afraid to touch it.’ Caberlotto stopped.

  ‘What happened?’ Brunetti prodded.

  ‘It was a Sunday, so it would have been impossible to get someone, anyway. So I went up and did it for him. I just turned off the current and took the broken bulb out.’ He looked across at Brunetti and made a turning gesture with his right hand. ‘I did it just like I’d told him, with the tape, and it came right out. It took about five seconds, but there was no way he could have done it himself. He wouldn’t have used that room until he could find an electrician, just would have let it stay dark.’ He smiled and glanced across at Brunetti. ‘It’s not really that he was afraid, you see. It’s just the way he was.’

  ‘Was he married?’ Brunetti asked.

  Caberlotto shook his head.

  ‘A girlfriend?’

  ‘No, not that either.’

  Had he known Caberlotto better, Brunetti would have asked about a boyfriend. ‘Parents?’

  ‘I don’t know. If he still has them, I don’t think they’re in Venice. He never spoke of them, and he was always here on holidays.’

  ‘Friends?’

  Caberlotto gave this some thought and then said, ‘I’d see him on the street with people occasionally. Or having a drink. You know the way it is. But I don’t remember anyone in particular or seeing him with the same person.’ Brunetti made no answer to this, so Caberlotto tried to explain. ‘We weren’t really friends, you know, so I guess I would see him and not really pay much attention, just recognize him.’

  Brunetti asked, ‘Did people come here?’

  ‘I suppose so. I don’t have much of an idea of who comes in and out. I hear people going up and down, but I never know who they are.’ Suddenly he asked, ‘But why are you here?’

  ‘I knew him, too,’ Brunetti answered. ‘So when I found out he was dead, I came to talk to his family, but I came as a friend, nothing more than that.’ Caberlotto didn’t think to question why Brunetti, if he was a friend of Rossi’s, should know so little about him.

  Brunetti got to his feet. ‘I’ll leave you to finish your lunch, Signor Caberlotto,’ he said, extending his hand.

  Caberlotto took it and returned the pressure. He went with Brunetti down the hall to the outer door and pulled it open. There, standing on the higher step and looking down at Brunetti, he said, ‘He was a good man. I didn’t know him well, but I liked him. He always said kind things about people.’ He leaned forward and placed his hand on Brunetti’s sleeve, as if to impress him with the importance of what he had just said, and then he closed the door.

  8

  ON THE WAY back to the Questura, Brunetti stopped to call Paola and tell her he wouldn’t be home for lunch, then went into a small trattoria and ate a plate of pasta he didn’t taste and a few pieces of chicken that served only as fuel to propel him into the afternoon. When he returned to work, he found a note on his desk, saying that Vice-Questore Patta wanted to see him in his office at four.

  He called the hospital and left a message with Dottor Rizzardi’s secretary, asking the pathologist if he’d perform the autopsy on Francesco Rossi himself, then made another call that set in motion the bureaucratic process that would order that autopsy to be performed. He went down to the officers’ room to see if his assistant, Sergeant Vianello, was there. He was, at his desk, a thick file open before him. Though he wasn’t much taller than his superior, Vianello seemed somehow to take up much more space.

  He looked up when Brunetti came in and started to get to his feet, but Brunetti waved him back to his seat. Then, noticing the three other officers who were there, he changed his mind and gave a quick lift of his chin to Vianello, then nodded in the direction of the door. The sergeant closed the file and followed Brunetti up to his office.

  When they were seated facing one another, Brunetti asked, ‘Did you see the story about the man who fell from the scaffolding over in Santa Croce?’

  ‘The one from the Ufficio Catasto?’ Vianello asked, but it really wasn’t a question. When Brunetti confirmed that it was, Vianello asked, ‘What about it?’

  ‘He called me on Friday,’ Brunetti said and paused to allow Vianello to question him. When he did not, Brunetti went on, ‘He said he wanted to talk to me about something that was going on at his office, but he was calling me on his telefonino, and when I told him it wasn’t secure, he said he’d call me back.’

  ‘And didn’t?’ Vianello interrupted.

  ‘No,’ said Brunetti with a shake of his head. ‘I waited here until after seven. I even left my home number, in case he called, but he didn’t. And then, this morning, I saw his picture in the paper. I went over to the hospital as soon as I saw it, but it was too late.’ He stopped and again waited for Vianello to comment.

  ‘Why did you go to the hospital, sir?’

  ‘He was afraid of heights.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘When he came to my apartment, he . . .’ Brunetti began, but Vianello cut him off.

  ‘He came to your apartment? When?’

  ‘Months ago. It was about the plans or the reco
rds they have for my apartment. Or that they don’t have. It doesn’t really matter; anyway, he came and asked to see some papers. They’d sent me a letter. But it’s not important why he came; what’s important is what happened when he was there.’

  Vianello said nothing, but his curiosity was written large on his broad face.

  ‘I asked him, when we were talking about the building, to come out on the terrace and have a look at the windows in the apartment below ours. I thought they’d show that both floors had been added at the same time, and that, if they had, it might affect their decision about the apartment.’ As he spoke, Brunetti realized he had no idea at all what decision, if any, the Ufficio Catasto had come to.

  ‘I was out there, leaning over and looking down at the windows on the floor below us, and when I turned back to him, it was as if I’d shown him a viper. He was paralysed.’ When he saw the scepticism with which Vianello greeted this, he temporized, ‘Well, that’s what it looked like to me. Frightened, at any rate.’ He stopped talking and glanced at Vianello.

  Vianello said nothing.

  ‘If you had seen him, you’d understand what I mean,’ Brunetti said. ‘The idea of leaning over the terrace terrified him.’

  ‘And so?’ Vianello asked.

  ‘And so there was no way he would dare to go out on scaffolding, and even less that he would do it alone.’

  ‘Did he say anything?’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Being afraid of heights?’

  ‘Vianello, I just told you. He didn’t have to say anything; it was written all over his face. He was terrified. If a person is that frightened of something, he can’t do it. It’s impossible.’

  Vianello tried a different tack. ‘But he didn’t say anything to you, sir. That’s what I’m trying to make you see. Well, make you consider. You don’t know it was the idea of looking over the side of the terrace that frightened him. It could have been something else.’

  ‘Of course it could have been something else,’ Brunetti admitted with exasperation and disbelief. ‘But it wasn’t. I saw him. I talked to him.’

  Gracious, Vianello asked, ‘And so?’

  ‘And so if he didn’t go up that scaffolding willingly, he didn’t fall off it accidentally.’

  ‘You think he was killed?’

  ‘I don’t know that that’s true,’ Brunetti admitted. ‘But I don’t think he went there willingly, or if he went to the place willingly, he didn’t go out on the scaffolding because he wanted to.’

  ‘Have you seen it?’

  ‘The scaffolding?’

  Vianello nodded.

  ‘There’s been no time.’

  Vianello pushed back the sleeve of his jacket and looked at his watch. ‘There’s time now, sir.’

  ‘The Vice-Questore wants me in his office at four,’ Brunetti answered, glancing down at his own watch. He had twenty minutes to wait before his meeting. He caught Vianello’s look. ‘Yes,’ Brunetti said, ‘let’s go.’

  They stopped in the officers’ room and picked up Vianello’s copy of that day’s Gazzettino, which gave the address of the building in Santa Croce. They also picked up Montisi, the chief pilot, and told him they wanted to go over to Santa Croce. On the way, the two men standing on the deck of the police boat studied a street directory and found the number, on a calle that led off of Campo Angelo Raffaele. The boat took them toward the end of the Zattere, in the waters beyond which loomed an enormous ship, moored to the embankment and dwarfing the area beside it.

  ‘My God, what’s that?’ Vianello asked as their boat approached.

  ‘It’s that cruise ship that was built here. It’s said to be the biggest in the world.’

  ‘It’s horrible,’ Vianello said, head back and staring at its upper decks, which loomed almost twenty metres above them. ‘What’s it doing here?’

  ‘Bringing money to the city, Sergeant,’ Brunetti observed drily.

  Vianello looked down at the water and then up to the rooftops of the city. ‘What whores we are,’ he said. Brunetti did not see fit to demur.

  Montisi pulled to a stop not far from the enormous ship, stepped off the boat, and began tying it to the mushroom-shaped metal stanchion on the embankment, so thick it must have been intended for larger boats. As he got off, Brunetti said to the pilot, ‘Montisi, there’s no need for you to wait for us. I don’t know how long we’ll be.’

  ‘I’ll wait if you don’t mind, sir,’ the older man answered, then added, ‘I’d rather be here than back there.’ Montisi was only a few years short of retirement and had begun to speak his mind as the date began to loom, however distantly, on the horizon.

  The agreement of the others with Montisi’s sentiments was no less strong for remaining unspoken. Together, they turned from the boat and walked back toward the campo, a part of the city Brunetti seldom visited. He and Paola used to eat in a small fish restaurant over here, but it had changed hands a few years ago, and the quality of the food had rapidly deteriorated, so they’d stopped coming. Brunetti had had a girlfriend who lived over here, but that had been when he was still a student, and she had died some years ago.

  They crossed the bridge and walked through Campo San Sebastiano, toward the large area of Campo Angelo Raffaele. Vianello, leading the way, turned immediately into a calle on the left, and up ahead they saw the scaffolding attached to the façade of the last building in the row, a four-storey house that looked as if it had been abandoned for years. They studied the signs of its emptiness: the leprous paint peeling away from the dark green shutters; the gaps in the marble gutters that would allow water to pound down on to the street and probably into the house itself; the broken piece of rusted antenna hanging out a metre from the edge of the roof. There was, at least for people born in Venice – which means born with an interest in the buying and selling of houses – an emptiness about the house which would have registered on them even if they had not been paying particular attention.

  As far as they could tell, the scaffolding was abandoned: all the shutters were tightly closed. There was no evidence that work was being conducted here, nor was there any sign that a man had injured himself fatally, though Brunetti was not at all sure how he thought that fact would be indicated.

  Brunetti stepped back from the building until he was leaning against the wall of the one opposite. He studied the entire façade, but there was no sign of life. He crossed the calle, turned, and this time studied the building that faced the scaffolding. It too showed the same signs of abandonment. He looked to his left: the calle ended in a canal, and beyond it was a large garden.

  Vianello had, at his own pace, duplicated Brunetti’s actions and had given the same attention to both buildings and to the garden. He came and stood next to Brunetti. ‘It’s possible, isn’t it, sir?’

  Brunetti nodded in acknowledgement, and thanks. ‘No one would notice a thing. There’s no one in the building that looks across at the scaffolding, and there’s no sign that anyone is taking care of the garden. So there was no one to see him fall,’ he said.

  ‘If he fell,’ Vianello added.

  There was a long pause, and then Brunetti asked, ‘Do we have anything on it?’

  ‘Not that I know of. It was reported as an accident, I think, so the Vigili Urbani from San Polo would have come over to have a look. And if they decided that it was, an accident, I mean, that would have been the end of it.’

  ‘I think we’d better go and talk to them,’ Brunetti pushed himself away from the wall and turned to the door of the house. A padlock and chain were attached to a circle of iron set into the lintel to hold the door to the marble frame.

  How did he get inside to get up on the scaffolding?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘Maybe the Vigili can tell us that,’ Vianello said.

  They couldn’t. Montisi took them over in the boat, up the Rio di San Agostino to the police station near Campo San Stin. The policeman at the door recognized them both and took them at once to Lieutenant Turcati, the offi
cer in charge. He was a dark-haired man whose uniform seemed to have been made for him by a tailor. This was enough for Brunetti to treat him with formality and address him by rank.

  When they were seated and after listening to what Brunetti had to say, Turcati had the file on Rossi brought up. The man who called about Rossi had also called for an ambulance after phoning the police. Because the much-nearer Giustiniani had no ambulances available, Rossi had been taken to the Ospedale Civile.

  ‘Is he here? Officer Franchi?’ Brunetti asked, reading the name at the bottom of the report.

  ‘Why?’ the lieutenant asked.

  ‘I’d like him to describe a few things to me,’ Brunetti answered.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Why he thought it was an accident. Whether Rossi had keys to the building in his pocket. Whether there was blood on the scaffolding.’

  ‘I see,’ the lieutenant said, and reached for his phone.

  While they waited for Franchi, Turcati asked if they would like coffee, but both men refused.

  After a few minutes of idle talk, a young policeman came in. He had blond hair cut so short as almost not to be there and looked barely old enough to need to shave. He saluted the lieutenant and stood to attention, not looking at either Brunetti or Vianello. Ah, that’s the way Lieutenant Turcati runs his shop, Brunetti thought.

  ‘These men have some questions for you, Franchi,’ Turcati said.

  The policeman stood a bit more easily, but Brunetti saw little evidence that he had relaxed.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ he said but still did not look towards them.

  ‘Officer Franchi,’ Brunetti began, ‘your report on the finding of the man over near Angelo Raffaele is very clear, but I have a few questions I’d like to ask you about it.’

  Still facing the lieutenant, Franchi said, ‘Yes, sir?’

  ‘Did you search the man’s pockets?’

  ‘No, sir. I got there just as the men from the ambulance did. They picked him up and put him on a stretcher and were taking him toward the boat.’ Brunetti did not ask the policeman why it had taken him the same time to travel the short distance from the police station as for the ambulance to cross the entire city.