Friends In High Places

by Donna Leon

  ‘Would it be easy to do?’ Brunetti asked, and when dal Carlo seemed not to understand, he prompted: ‘Take a bribe?’

  He all but expected dal Carlo to say he had never thought of such a thing, in which case Brunetti didn’t know if he could stop himself from laughing. They were, after all, in a city office. But the engineer restrained himself and said, eventually, ‘I suppose it would be possible.’

  Brunetti was silent for a long time, so long that dal Carlo was finally forced to ask, ‘Why are you asking these questions, Commissario?’

  At last Brunetti said, ‘We’re not completely satisfied,’ having found it always far more effective to speak in the plural, ‘that Rossi’s death was an accident.’

  This time, dal Carlo could not hide his surprise, though there was no way of knowing if it was surprise at the possibility or surprise that the police had discovered it. As various ideas played through his mind, he gave Brunetti a sly glance that reminded him of the look Zecchino had given him.

  With the idea of the young drug addict in his mind, Brunetti said, ‘We might have a witness that it was something else.’

  ‘A witness?’ Dal Carlo repeated in a loud, disbelieving voice, as though he had never heard the word.

  ‘Yes, someone there at the building.’ Brunetti got to his feet suddenly. ‘Thank you for your help, Dottore,’ he said, extending his hand. Dal Carlo, obviously disconcerted by the strange turn the conversation had taken, pushed himself to his feet and shot out his hand. His grip was less hearty than when they had come in.

  After opening the door he finally gave voice to his surprise. ‘I find it incredible,’ he said. ‘No one would have killed him. There’s no reason for such a thing. And that building’s empty. How could anyone have seen what happened?’

  When neither Brunetti nor Vianello spoke, dal Carlo walked through the door, ignoring Signorina Dolfin, busy at her computer, and saw the two policemen to the outer door of the office. None of them bothered with farewells.

  21

  BRUNETTI SLEPT BADLY that night, waking himself repeatedly with memories of the day. He realized that Zecchino had probably lied about Rossi’s murder and had seen or heard far more than he admitted; why else had he become so evasive? The endless night dragged in other things: Patta’s refusal to see his son’s behaviour as criminal; his friend Luca’s lack of sympathy for his wife; the general incompetence that handicapped his every working day. Yet it was the thought of the two young girls that most troubled him, one so reduced by life that she would consent to sex with Zecchino in that squalid place and the other trapped between grief for Marco’s death and the guilty knowledge of what had caused it. Experience had beaten any trace of the cavalier out of Brunetti, but still he could not rid himself of a grinding pity for these girls.

  Had the first one been upstairs when he found Zecchino? He had been so intent on fleeing the house that he had not gone up to the attic to see if anyone else was there. The fact that Zecchino was coming down the stairs did not mean he was going out; he could just as easily have been on his way to investigate the noise made by Brunetti’s arrival, leaving the girl behind him in the attic. At least Pucetti had provided a name for the second one: Anna Maria Ratti, who lived with her parents and brother in Castello and was an architectural student at the university.

  It was some time after he heard the four o’clock bells ring that he decided to go back to the house that morning and try to talk to Zecchino again; soon after, he fell into a peaceful sleep, waking only after Paola had left for the university and the children had gone to school.

  After he dressed, he called the Questura to tell them he would be late in arriving and went back to the bedroom to try to find his pistol. He pulled a chair over to the armadio, climbed up, and saw on the top shelf the box his father had brought back from Russia at the end of the war. The padlock was in place on the hasp on the front of the box, but he had no idea where he had put the key. He pulled the box down from the shelf, carried it over and set it down on the bed. A piece of paper was taped to the top, on it a message printed in Chiara’s clear hand: ‘Papà – Raffi and I are not supposed to know that the key is taped to the back of the painting in Mamma’s study. Baci.’

  He went and got the key, wondering if he should add something to her note; no, better not to encourage her. He unlocked the box and removed the pistol, loaded it, and slipped it into the leather holster he had clipped to his belt earlier. He put the box back in the closet and left the house.

  The calle, as had been the case both times he had come here before, was empty, and there was still no sign of activity on the scaffolding. He pulled the metal hasp free from the wood and went into the building, this time leaving the door open behind him. He made no attempt to soften his footsteps or disguise in any way the sound of his arrival. He stopped at the bottom of the steps and called up, ‘Zecchino, it’s the police. I’m coming up.’

  He waited for a moment, but no answering sound or shout came from above. Regretting that he had forgotten to bring a flashlight and glad of what little light came in from the open door behind him, he walked up to the first floor. There was still no sound from above. He went up to the second floor, then the third, and paused on the landing. He opened the shutters of two windows, providing enough light for him to see his way back to the staircase and up to the attic.

  Brunetti paused at the top. There were doors on either side of the landing and a third one at the end of a short corridor. A good deal of light filtered in from a broken shutter on his left. He waited, called out Zecchino’s name again, and then, strangely comforted by the silence, went to the first door on the right.

  The room was empty; that is, no one was inside, though there were some boxes of tools, a pair of sawhorses, and a discarded pair of lime-covered painter’s pants. The door opposite led to the same sort of cluttered emptiness. That left only the door at the end of the corridor.

  Inside, as he had hoped, he found Zecchino, and he also found the girl. In the light that sneaked down from a dirty skylight in the roof, he saw her for the first time, lying on top of Zecchino. They must have killed him first, or else he had given up and fallen under the rain of blows, and she had fought on, quite vainly, only to fall in the end on top of him.

  ‘Gesù bambino,’ Brunetti said softly as he saw them and resisted the urge to make the sign of the cross. There they were, a pair of limp figures, already shrunken in that special way death makes people look smaller. A dark halo of dried blood extended around their heads, which lay close together like puppies or young lovers.

  He could see the back of Zecchino’s head and the girl’s face, or, more accurately, what was left of her face. Both of them appeared to have been battered to death: Zecchino’s skull had lost all rotundity; her nose was gone, destroyed by a blow so violent that all that remained was a shard of cartilege lying across her left cheek.

  Brunetti turned away from them and looked around the room. A pile of stained mattresses was heaped against one wall. Beside it lay the pieces of clothing – he realized only when he looked back at the dead couple that they were half naked – which they had discarded in their haste to do whatever it was they did on those mattresses. He saw a bloody syringe and the memory rushed at him of a poem Paola had read to him once in which the poet tried to seduce a woman by telling her that their blood was mingled inside the flea that had drunk blood from both of them. At the time, he’d thought it an insane way to view the union of man and woman, but it was no more insane than the needle that lay on the floor. Beside it lay a few discarded plastic envelopes, probably not much bigger than the ones that had been found in the pocket of Roberto Patta’s jacket.

  Downstairs, he pulled out the telefonino he had thought to carry that day and called the Questura, telling them what he had found and where to come to find him. The voice of professionalism told him to return to the room where the two young people lay and see what else he could discover. He chose to remain deaf to it and, instead, stood idly in a patch
of sun in front of the building opposite while he waited for the others to come.

  They eventually did, and he dispatched them upstairs, though he resisted the temptation to tell them that, as there were no workers in the building that day, they could get on with their investigation of the scene. There was nothing to be gained from a cheap gibe, and it would make no difference to them to learn that they had been duped the last time.

  He asked who they’d called to examine the bodies and was glad to learn it was Rizzardi. He didn’t move when the men went into the building and was still standing there twenty minutes later when the pathologist arrived. They nodded at one another by way of greeting.

  ‘Another one?’ Rizzardi asked.

  ‘Two,’ Brunetti said, turning toward the building and leading the way.

  The two men made their way upstairs with little difficulty, the shutters all open now and light flooding in. At the top of the stairs they were drawn, moth-like, to the bright lights of the technicians that spilled out of the room and down the corridor, beckoning them to come and see this new proof of the fragility of the body, the vanity of hope.

  Inside, Rizzardi went over and examined the bodies from above. Then he slipped on a pair of rubber gloves and bent down to touch the girl’s, and then the boy’s, throat. He set his leather bag on the floor and squatted down beside the girl, then reached across her body and slowly rolled her away from the boy and on to her back. She lay, staring up at the ceiling, and one shattered hand came drifting across her body and slapped down on to the floor, startling Brunetti, who had chosen to avert his eyes.

  He came closer and stood above Rizzardi, looking down. Her short hair was hennaed a dark red and lay close to her head, greasy and dirty. He noticed that her teeth, which showed through the slit of her bloody mouth, were glistening and perfect. Blood had hardened around her mouth, though the flow from her savaged nose had apparently run into her eyes as she lay on the floor. Had she been pretty? Had she been plain?

  Rizzardi placed a hand on Zecchino’s chin and tilted his head toward the light. ‘They were both killed by blows to the head,’ he said, pointing to a place on the left of Zecchino’s forehead. ‘It’s not easy to do and requires a lot of strength. Or a lot of blows. And the dying isn’t quick. But at least they don’t feel much, not after the first few blows.’ He looked at the girl again, turned her face to the side to examine a darkening concavity at the back of her head. He looked down at two marks on her upper arms. ‘I’d say she was held while she was hit, possibly with a piece of wood, or maybe a pipe.’

  Neither of them thought it necessary to comment on this or to add, ‘Like Rossi.’

  Rizzardi got to his feet, slipped off the gloves, and put them in the pocket of his jacket.

  ‘When can you do it?’ was all Brunetti could think of to say.

  ‘This afternoon, I think.’ Rizzardi knew better than to ask Brunetti if he wanted to attend. ‘If you call me after five, I should know something.’ Before Brunetti could respond, Rizzardi added, ‘But it won’t be much, not much more than what we see here.’

  After Rizzardi had left, the crime team began their deadly parody of domesticity: sweeping, dusting, picking up small things that had fallen to the floor and seeing that they were put in safe places. Brunetti forced himself to go through the pockets of the young people, first the discarded clothing that lay beside and atop the mattresses, then, after he’d accepted a pair of lab gloves from Del Vecchio, the clothing that they still wore. In the breast pocket of Zecchino’s shirt, he found three more plastic envelopes, each containing white powder. He passed them to Del Vecchio, who carefully labelled them and placed them inside his evidence kit.

  Rizzardi, he was glad to see, had closed their eyes. Zecchino’s naked legs reminded him of the legs he’d seen in photos of those stick figures standing at the front gates of concentration camps: there was only skin and sinew, little sign of muscle. And how knobby his knees were. One pelvic bone was exposed, cutting sharp. Red pustules covered both of his thighs, though Brunetti couldn’t tell if they were suppurating scars from old injections or symptoms of skin disease. The girl, though alarmingly thin and almost breastless, was not as cadaverous as Zecchino. At the realization that both were now, and for ever, cadaverous, Brunetti turned away from them and went downstairs.

  Because he was in charge of this part of the investigation, the least he could do for the dead was remain until the bodies had been removed and the lab teams were satisfied that they had found, sampled, and examined everything that might be of future use to the police in finding the killers. He walked to the end of the calle and looked across at the garden on the other side, glad that forsythia always succeeded in looking so happy, however hastily dressed.

  They would have to ask, of course, canvass the area and see who could remember seeing anyone going into the calle or into the building. When he turned around, he saw that a small group of people had already gathered at the other end of the calle, where it opened out on a larger street, and he started toward them, the first questions already forming in his mind.

  As he expected, no one had seen anything, neither that day nor at any time in the last few weeks. No one had any idea that it was possible to get into the building. No one had ever seen Zecchino, nor could they remember ever having seen a girl. Since there was no way to force them to speak, Brunetti didn’t make the effort to disbelieve them, but he knew from long experience that, when dealing with the police, few Italians could remember much beyond their own names.

  The other questioning could wait until after lunch or the evening, when the people in the buildings in the area could be expected to be at home. But no one, he knew, would admit having seen anything. The word would quickly spread that two drug addicts had died in the building, and it would be the rare person who would see their deaths as anything special, certainly not as something worth the trouble of being questioned by the police. Why put up with endless hours of being treated as a suspect? Why run the risk of having to take the time off from work to be asked further questions or to attend a trial?

  He knew the police were not viewed with anything even approaching sympathy by the general public; he knew how badly the police treated them, no matter how they fell into the orbit of an investigation, either as suspect or witness. For years he had tried to train the men under him to treat witnesses as people who were willing to be of help, as, in a sense, colleagues, only to walk past questioning rooms where they were being hectored, threatened, verbally abused. No wonder people fled in fear from the very idea of providing information to the police: he’d do the same.

  The thought of lunch was intolerable: so was the idea of taking the memory of what he had just seen into the company of his family. He called Paola then went back to the Questura and sat there, doing whatever he could to dull his mind with routine, waiting for Rizzardi to call. It would not be news, the cause of their deaths, but it would at least be information, and he could put that in a file and perhaps take comfort from having imposed this small bit of order upon the chaos of sudden death.

  For the next four hours, he sorted through two months’ backlog of papers and reports, neatly writing his initials at the bottom of folders he’d examined without understanding. It took him all afternoon, but he cleared his desk of papers, even went so far as to take them down to Signorina Elettra’s office and, in her absence, leave her a note, asking that she see to their filing or consignment to whoever was due to read them next.

  When this was done, he went down to the bar at the bridge and had a glass of mineral water and a toasted cheese sandwich. He picked up that day’s Gazzettino from the counter and saw, in the second section, the article he had planted. As he expected, it said far more than he had, suggesting that arrest was imminent, conviction inescapable, and the drug trade in the Veneto effectively destroyed. He dropped the paper and went back to the Questura, noticing on the way that the sparse yellow tops of forsythia were pushing their way over the top of the wall on the other side
of the canal.

  At his desk, he checked his watch and saw that it was late enough to call Rizzardi. He was just reaching for the phone when it rang.

  ‘Guido,’ the pathologist began with no introduction, ‘when you looked at those kids this morning, after I left, did you remember to wear gloves?’

  It took a moment for Brunetti to overcome his surprise, and he had to think for a moment before he remembered. ‘Yes. Del Vecchio gave me a pair.’

  Rizzardi asked a second question. ‘Did you see her teeth?’

  Again, Brunetti had to put himself back in the room. ‘I noticed only that it looked as if they were all there, not like with most drug addicts. Why do you want to know?’

  ‘There was blood on her teeth and in her mouth,’ Rizzardi explained.

  The words took Brunetti back to that squalid room and the two figures draped across one another. ‘I know. It was all over her face.’

  ‘That was her blood,’ Rizzardi said, putting heavy emphasis on the pronoun. Before Brunetti could question him, he went on, ‘The blood in her mouth was someone else’s.’

  ‘Zecchino’s?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh, my God, she bit him,’ Brunetti said, and then asked, ‘Did you get enough to . . .’ and stopped, uncertain about just what it was Rizzardi would be able to get. He’d read endless reports about DNA matching and blood and semen samples that could be used as evidence, but he lacked both the scientific knowledge to understand how it all worked as well as the intellectual curiosity to care about anything other than the fact that it could be done and that positive identifications could be made from the results.

  ‘Yes,’ Rizzardi answered. ‘If you can find me the person, I have enough to match him to the blood in her mouth.’ Rizzardi paused and Brunetti could tell from the tension on the line that he had much more to say.