by Donna Leon
Vezzani asked, ‘Why do they need a vet at a slaughterhouse? It’s not as if he’s there to save the lives of the animals, is it?’
‘To check that they’re healthy, and I imagine he also has to see that they slaughter them in a humane way,’ Brunetti said. ‘There’s got to be some EU regulation about that.’
‘Name the activity about which there is no EU regulation and win a prize,’ Vezzani said, gave a mock toast with his glass, and took a sip of water. Then, his glass still held in the air in front of him, ‘Did he have any trouble with clients at his practice?’
‘His wife didn’t know of any,’ Brunetti said, but then added, ‘She did say that some people were unhappy with the way their animals were treated. But that’s not trouble.’
‘I’ve heard people say awful things,’ Vianello jumped in to say. ‘Some of them would be capable of violence to anyone who hurt their animals. I think they’re nuts, but we don’t have a pet, so maybe I don’t understand.’
‘It does seem exaggerated,’ Vezzani agreed, ‘but I’ve lost the ability to understand what people do. If they’ll kill you because you damage their car,’ he said, referring to a recent case, ‘think what they’d do if you hurt their dachshund.’
‘You know where his clinic is?’ Brunetti asked. He put some coins on the table and got to his feet. ‘Via Motta 145. It seems he was living there, too.’
Vezzani stood, saying, ‘Yes, I know the place. Let’s go and talk to them.’
At one time, the clinic must have been a two-floor suburban residence large enough for two families. Similar houses stood on either side of it, each surrounded by a broad expanse of grassed land. As they slowed in front of it, they could hear the sound of a dog barking from behind the building, then another one answering: a human voice intervened; a door slammed, and then silence.
Vezzani had trouble parking the car. He drove ahead a hundred metres or so, but there were cars everywhere and no chance of finding a space. Is this, Brunetti wondered, what it is to live out here on terraferma? He turned to Vianello in the back seat; the two men exchanged a glance, but neither said a word.
With an irritated noise, Vezzani pulled the car into a sudden U-turn and drove back to the clinic. He parked on the wrong side of the road directly in front. He pulled down a plastic ticket from the windscreen, set it on the dashboard and got out of the car, slamming the door behind him. Brunetti and Vianello got out but did not slam the doors.
The three men walked up the short pavement to the front door. To one side a metal plaque bore the name ‘Clinica Amico Mio’, with below it the hours of operation. Dott. Andrea Nava was listed as the director.
Vezzani opened the door without ringing and entered; Brunetti and Vianello followed him inside. There was nothing, Brunetti realized, that could be done to eliminate the smell of the animals. He had smelled it before in the homes of friends of theirs who had pets, in the apartments of people he arrested, in abandoned buildings, and once in an antique shop where he had gone to question a witness. Sharp, rich with the tang of ammonia, it gave him the feeling that it would sink into his clothing and linger for hours after he left. And Nava had been living for some time above this.
The entrance was brightly lit, the floor covered with grey linoleum, and at one side stood a desk, behind which sat a young man in a white lab jacket. ‘Buon dì,’ he said, smiling. ‘May I help you?’
Vezzani stepped aside and allowed Brunetti to approach the desk. The boy could not have been eighteen and filled the air around him with a sense of health and well-being. Brunetti saw matched rows of perfect teeth, brown eyes so large his mind flashed to the description of ‘ox-eyed Hera’, even though he was looking at a boy. If roses had skin, his was the same.
‘We’re looking for the person in charge,’ Brunetti said, smiling back, as who could not?
‘Is it about your pet?’ the young man asked, not managing to sound as if he expected a positive response. He leaned to the side to see around them.
‘No,’ Brunetti said, letting his smile disappear. ‘It’s about Dottor Nava.’
At those words, the boy’s smile went the way of Brunetti’s, and he studied each of them more closely, as if in search of some new odour they might have carried into the room. ‘Have you seen him?’ he finally brought himself to ask.
‘Perhaps I could speak to the person in charge,’ Brunetti said.
The boy got to his feet, suddenly in a hurry. ‘That would be Signora Baroni,’ he said. ‘I’ll get her.’ Abruptly he turned away from them to open a door just behind him. Leaving it open, he walked down a short corridor and entered a room on the right. Animal sounds came from the open door: barking and a thumping sound that could have been anything.
After less than a minute, a woman emerged and came towards them. Leaving the door open behind her, she approached Brunetti, who was closest to her. Though her face suggested she was a generation older than the receptionist, there was no sign of this in the ease and fluidity of her motions.
‘Clara Baroni,’ she said, shaking Brunetti’s hand and nodding to the others. ‘I’m Dottor Nava’s assistant. Luca said you came to talk about him. Do you know where he is?’
Brunetti was struck by the awkwardness of the situation, the four of them standing in the room. It did not seem the best setting for what he had to say, but he saw no alternative. ‘We’ve just come from speaking to Dottor Nava’s wife,’ he began. Then, in case it was still necessary, ‘We’re policemen.’
She nodded, encouraging him.
‘The doctor’s been killed.’ He could find no better way to say it.
‘How?’ she asked, face blank with shock. ‘In an accident?’
‘No, Signora. Not an accident,’ Brunetti said evasively. ‘He had no identification, so it’s taken us this long to trace him.’ As he spoke to her, the focus of her eyes drifted away from him while she studied some interior place. She braced herself with one hand against the receptionist’s desk. None of the men said anything.
After what seemed an interminable time, she stood upright and turned back to Brunetti. ‘Not an accident?’ she asked.
‘It doesn’t appear that way, Signora,’ Brunetti said.
Like a dog coming out of the water, she gave a shake of her entire body and asked in a tight voice, ‘What was it, then?’
‘He was the victim of a crime.’
She bit at her upper lip. ‘Was he the man in Venice?’
‘Yes,’ Brunetti said, wondering why, if she had had any suspicion, she had not contacted them. ‘Why do you ask that, Signora?’
‘Because no one’s heard from him for two days, and even his wife doesn’t know where he is.’
‘Did you call us, Signora?’
‘The police?’ she asked in honest astonishment.
Brunetti was tempted to ask her who else, but he resisted temptation and answered with a simple ‘Yes.’
As if she were only now aware of the three men standing in the room, she said, ‘Perhaps we could go back to my office.’
They followed her down a corridor, where the smell of animal grew even stronger, and into the room on the right. Against one wall, the receptionist sat in a straight-backed chair, a black and white rabbit on his lap. The rabbit had only one ear but, aside from that, seemed well-fed and sleek. A large grey cat was asleep in the sun on the windowsill behind them. It opened one eye when they came in but then closed it.
At their arrival, the boy leaned down and set the rabbit on the ground, then left the room without speaking. The rabbit hopped over to Vianello and sniffed at the bottom of his trousers, then did the same with Vezzani’s, and then Brunetti’s. Unsatisfied, it hopped over to Signora Baroni and raised itself on its hind legs against her leg. Brunetti was surprised to see that its front paws reached well above her knees.
She bent down and picked it up, saying, ‘Come on, Livio.’ The animal settled comfortably into her arms. She went and sat behind her desk. Vianello leaned against the windowsill, leaving
the two chairs in front of the desk to the commissari. As soon as Signora Baroni sat and created a lap, the rabbit fell asleep in it.
As if there had been no interruption, the woman said, the fingers of one hand idly scratching the belly of the rabbit, ‘I didn’t call because Andrea’s been gone from here only one full day, and then again today. I was going to call his wife again, but then you came.’ Her attention left the rabbit and she looked at all three of them in turn, as if to assure herself that they were all listening and had understood. ‘Then, when you said he’d been the victim of a crime, my first thought, obviously, was that man in Venice.’
‘Why “obviously”, Signora?’ Brunetti asked in a pleasant voice.
Her fingers returned their attentions to the rabbit, which appeared to have been transformed into a piece of splay-legged drapery. ‘Because the article said the man had not been identified, and Andrea’s missing, and you’re the police, and you’re here. So that’s the conclusion I came to.’ She shifted the rabbit, who refused to emerge from his coma, to her other knee and asked, ‘Am I mistaken?’
Brunetti said, ‘We don’t have a definite identification yet,’ but quickly added, ‘There’s little doubt, but we need a positive identification.’ He told himself he had forgotten to ask Nava’s wife, but that was not the truth.
‘Who has to do it?’ she asked.
‘Someone who knew him well.’
‘Does it have to be a relative?’
‘Not necessarily, no.’
‘His wife’s the obvious person, isn’t she?’
‘Yes.’
Signora Baroni picked up the rabbit, shook him into something resembling consciousness, and lowered him gently on to his feet. He hopped as far as the wall beside her, stretched out on the floor, and was immediately asleep. She sat upright, met Brunetti’s eyes, and said, ‘Could I do it? I worked with him for six years.’
‘Yes, of course,’ he said. ‘Why?’
‘It would be too much for Anna.’
Though he was surprised, Brunetti was relieved that Nava’s wife would be spared at least this.
Signora Baroni seemed to know a great deal about Nava’s life, both personal and professional. Yes, she knew about his separation from his wife, and yes, she thought he was not happy with his job at the slaughterhouse. Here she sighed and added that Nava had made it clear that, no matter how disagreeable he might find the job, he felt obliged to keep it in order, among other reasons, she explained, ‘to pay my salary here’. Saying that, she closed her eyes for a moment and rubbed at her forehead with her fingers.
‘He said it as a joke, of course,’ she said, looking up at Vianello. ‘But it wasn’t.’
Brunetti asked, ‘Did he say anything else about his work there, Signora?’
She reached down and picked up the sleeping rabbit, whose eyes did not open. She began to stroke the rabbit’s single ear. Finally she said, ‘He never told me, but I think it was more than the job that was bothering him.’
‘Do you have any idea what it might have been?’ Brunetti asked.
She shrugged, disturbing the rabbit with the motion. It jumped to the floor again but this time walked over to a radiator and lay down beside it.
‘I suppose it was a woman,’ she said at last. ‘It usually is, isn’t it?’
None of the men answered her.
‘He never spoke about it, if that’s what you want to know. And I didn’t ask him because I didn’t want to know. It was none of my business.’
After that, she explained to them what her business was: make appointments; send samples to the labs and register the results for each animal; send bills and keep the accounts; occasionally help with exams and treatments. Luca and another assistant, who was not there that day, greeted patients, fed the animals, and helped Doctor Nava with procedures; no, he had never been threatened by the owner of a pet, though some had been distressed by the death of their animals. On the contrary, most people saw his concern for their pets and liked him as a result.
Yes, he lived upstairs, had been there for the last three months or so. When Brunetti told her that they had keys and wanted to have a look at his apartment, she said she saw no reason why they couldn’t do so.
She led them to a door at the far end of the corridor, explaining, ‘Because it was originally all one house, the entrance to his apartment is from here.’
Brunetti thanked her and opened the door with a key from the set that had been in Nava’s pocket and that he had taken from the evidence room. At the top of the stairs another door, unlocked, opened into a large, open space running from the back of the building clear to the front, as though the original builders had stopped before dividing it into separate rooms. To say it was sparsely furnished was to understate the case: a two-seat sofa faced a small television placed on the floor, a neat pile of DVDs on the floor in front of it. A wooden table stood in front of the window that gave on to the back of the house and provided a view of the houses opposite. To the left of the window was a two-ring electric cooker on a narrow wooden table; frequent scrubbing had worn away the enamel. Clean pots hung from hooks above a small sink. On top of a small refrigerator was a ceramic bowl filled with apples.
A single bed stood under the eaves at the back of the room, blanket and sheet tucked in with military precision. Opposite it, along the other wall, was another bed covered with a tightly tucked Mickey Mouse blanket and a hillock of toy animals.
A cardboard wardrobe stood against the back wall. Brunetti looked inside and saw a few suits and an overcoat whose weight was turning the closet’s crossbar into a U. Below these were a few pairs of small sneakers and to their right three pairs of larger shoes, one pair of which, Brunetti observed, were well-worn brown tasselled loafers. Plastic-wrapped white shirts lay stacked on a shelf above the clothes bar. The shelf below held the neatly folded underwear and clothing of a small boy.
The bathroom was just as spartan as the rest of the apartment but surprised Brunetti by being very clean. In fact, the apartment held no empty cups, old clothing, food wrappers, dirty plates, or any of the detritus Brunetti associated with the homes of the abandoned or solitary.
A few magazines and books lay on the table next to the man’s bed. Brunetti drifted over and picked them up. There was a book about vegetarianism and, stuck into it, a photocopied chart of the combinations of grains and vegetables that would best create protein and amino acids. There was a printout of an article about lead poisoning and what appeared to be a veterinarian textbook on bovine diseases. Brunetti flicked through this, looked at two photos, and set the book down again.
The other men walked around the apartment, but neither stooped to pick up anything interesting or stopped to point out an object or an incongruity. The bathroom held nothing but soap, razors, and towels. A chest of drawers at the end of the bed held clean and folded men’s underwear and, in the bottom drawer, clean towels and sheets.
There was none of the mess left behind by the permanent residence of a child. Only the clothing said anything about the persons using the apartment, and all it said was that it was a man of a certain size and a small boy.
‘You think it’s just the way he lived, or has someone been in here?’ Brunetti finally asked.
Vezzani shrugged, reluctant to answer. Vianello gave another long look around and then said, ‘I hate to say it, but I think he lived like this.’
‘Poor devil,’ Vezzani said. Soon after, none of them having found anything further to say, they left.
17
THE MEN AGREED it would be wiser to go to the slaughterhouse the following morning, when the place would be at work. As Vezzani drove them across the bridge to Piazzale Roma, Brunetti stared from the right side of the car at the vast industrial complex of Marghera. His thoughts were not on the daily ration of death pumped out by the chimneys he viewed but on the slaughterhouse and the idea of early morning as the best time for sudden death. Had not the KGB taken people off in the dark of night, their victims’ sense
s dulled with sleep?
The ringing of Vianello’s phone broke into these reflections, and from his seat in the back of the car the Inspector said, ‘That was Foa. He says he can’t pick us up. He’s docked below Patta’s place, waiting for him and his wife to come down. He’s got to take them to Burano.’
‘Police business, no doubt,’ Vezzani commented, giving evidence that Patta’s reputation extended even to the Questura in Mestre.
‘If the police have to investigate a restaurant, it is,’ Vianello answered. Brunetti told him to tell the pilot he was still waiting for a report on the tides for the night of Nava’s murder. Vianello passed on the message and snapped his phone closed.
‘You guys have any idea how lucky you are?’ Vezzani asked.
Brunetti turned to him and asked, ‘To work for Patta?’
Vezzani laughed. ‘No, to work in Venice. There’s hardly enough crime worth talking about.’ Before either of them could protest, he said, ‘I don’t mean this Nava guy, but in general. The worst criminals are the politicians, but since there’s nothing we can do about them, they don’t count. So what do you get? A few break-ins, some tourist who gets his wallet stolen? The guy who kills his wife and calls you up to confess? So you spend your days reading notices from the idiots in Rome, or waiting for the next Minister of the Interior to be arrested so you get a new boss and new notices, or you walk down the street to have a coffee and sit in the sun and read the newspaper.’ He tried to make it sound like a joke, but Brunetti suspected he meant every word of it.
Brunetti took a quick glance into the rear-view mirror but saw only Vianello’s left shoulder. In a level voice, he said, ‘People pray for rain. Perhaps we should pray for murder.’
Vezzani took his eyes off the road and glanced quickly at Brunetti, but there was nothing to read in Brunetti’s face, just as there had been nothing to read in his voice.
At Piazzale Roma, Brunetti and Vianello got out of the car and reached in to shake Vezzani’s hand, then Brunetti said they’d get one of their own drivers to take them to the slaughterhouse the next morning. Vezzani did not bother to protest, said goodbye, and drove off.
