Death in a Strange Country cgb-2

by Donna Leon

  Brunetti looked out of the back window of the car and saw that they were stopped diagonally in front of the right angle made by two shop fronts. Above one glass door, he saw ‘Food Mall’. Wasn’t that what lions did to their prey? The other sign read ‘Baskin Robbins’. Not at all optimistic, Brunetti asked, ‘Coffee?’

  The driver nodded at the second door, clearly eager for Brunetti to get out. When he did, the driver leaned back across the seat and said, ‘I’ll be back in ten minutes,’ then shut the door and pulled away sharply, leaving Brunetti on the curb, feeling strangely abandoned and alien. To the right of the second door he could now see a sign which read, ‘Capucino Bar’, the sign-maker apparently an American.

  Inside, he asked the woman behind the counter for a coffee then, knowing there would be no chance of lunch, asked for a brioche. It looked like pastry, felt like pastry, but tasted like cardboard. He placed three thousand-lire bills on the counter. The woman looked at the notes, looked up at him, took them, then placed on the counter the same coins he had found in the pockets of the dead man. For an instant, Brunetti wondered if she was attempting to give him some private signal, but a closer look at her face showed him that all she was doing was giving him the proper change.

  He left the place and went to stand outside, content to get a sense of the post while waiting for his driver to return. He sat on a bench in front of the shops and watched the people walking past.

  A few glanced at him as he sat there, dressed in suit and tie and clearly out of place among them. Many of the people who walked past him, men and women alike, wore uniform. Most of the others wore shorts and tennis shoes, and many of the women, too often those who shouldn’t have, wore halter tops. They appeared to be dressed either for war or for the beach. Most of the men were fit and powerful; many of the women were enormously, terrifyingly fat.

  Cars drove by slowly, their drivers searching for parking spaces: big cars, Japanese cars, cars with that same AFI number plate. Most had the windows raised, while from the air-conditioned interiors blared rock music in varying degrees of loudness.

  They strolled by, amiable and friendly, greeting one another and exchanging pleasant words, thoroughly at home in their little American village here in Italy.

  Ten minutes later, the driver pulled up in front of him. Brunetti got into the back seat. ‘Would you like to go to that address now, sir?’ the driver asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Brunetti said, a little tired of America.

  Driving more quickly than the other cars on the base, they headed towards the front gate and passed through it. Outside, they turned right and headed back towards the city, again passing over the railway bridge. At the bottom, they turned left, then right, and pulled up in front of a five-storey building set back a few metres from the street. Parked opposite the gate they saw a dark-green Jeep, two soldiers in American uniform sitting in the front seat. Brunetti approached them. One of them climbed down from the Jeep.

  ‘I’m Commissario Brunetti, from Venice,’ he said, resuming his real rank, then added, ‘Major Butterworth sent me out to take a look at Foster’s apartment.’ Perhaps not the truth, but certainly related to it.

  The soldier sketched out something that might have been a salute, reached into his pocket, and handed Brunetti a set of keys. ‘The red one is the front door, sir,’ the soldier said. ‘Apartment 3B, on the third floor. Elevator to your right as you go in.’ Inside this building, he took the elevator, feeling hemmed in and uncomfortable in its closeness. The door to 3B stood directly opposite the elevator and opened easily with the key.

  He pushed open the door and noticed the usual marble floors. Doors opened off a central corridor at the end of which another door stood ajar. The room on the right was a bathroom, the one on the left a small kitchen. Both were clean, the objects in them well-ordered. He noticed, however, that the kitchen held an enormous refrigerator and a large four-ring stove, beside which stood an equally outsized washing-machine, both of the electrical appliances plugged into a transformer that broke down the 220 Italian current to the 110 of America. Did they bring these appliances all the way from America with them? Little space was left in the kitchen for a small square table, at which only two chairs stood. The wall held the gas-burning neater which seemed to provide both hot water and heat for the radiators in the apartment.

  The next doors opened into two bedrooms. One held a double bed and a large cupboard. The other had been turned into a study and held a desk with a computer keyboard and screen attached to a printer. Shelves held books and some stereo equipment, under which was neatly lined a row of compact discs. He checked the books: most appeared to be textbooks, the rest books about travel and - could it be? - religion. He pulled down some of these and took a closer look. The Christian Life in an Age of Doubt, Spiritual Transcendence, and Jesus: the Ideal Life. The author of the last was Revd Michael Foster. His father?

  The music was, he thought, rock. Some of the names he recognized from having heard Raffaele and Chiara mention them; he doubted that he would recognize the music.

  He switched on the CD player and pushed the ‘Eject’ button on the control panel. Like a patient showing his tongue to a doctor, it opened and slid out the playing panel. Empty. He closed the panel and switched off the machine. He switched on the amplifier and tape deck. Panel lights glowed, showing they both worked. He turned them off. He switched the computer on, watched the letters appear on the screen, then switched it off.

  The clothes in the closet were no more forthcoming. He found three complete uniforms, jackets still in the plastic laundry bags, each carefully lined up beside a pair of dark-green trousers. The rack also held a few pairs of jeans, neatly folded over hangers, three or four shirts, and a dark blue suit made out of some synthetic material. Almost absent-mindedly, Brunetti checked the pockets of the jacket and all the trousers, but there was nothing; no loose change, no papers, no comb. Either Sergeant Foster was a very neat young man, or the Americans had been here before him.

  He went back into the bathroom, removed the lid from the top of the toilet, glanced into the empty tank, then replaced the lid. He opened the door to the mirror-fronted medicine chest, opened a bottle or two.

  In the kitchen, he opened the top section of the outsized refrigerator. Ice. Nothing more. Below, a few apples, an open bottle of white wine, and some ageing cheese in a plastic wrapper. The oven held only three empty pans; the washing-machine was empty. He stood with his back against the worktop and looked slowly around the room. From the top drawer under the worktop he took a knife, then pulled one of the wooden chairs from the table and placed it under the water heater. He climbed up onto the chair and used the knife to loosen the screws that held the front panel to the heater. As they came loose, he dropped the screws into his jacket pocket. When he pulled the last one out, he slipped the knife into his pocket and shifted the panel from side to side until it came loose in his hands. He set it down on the chair, leaning it against his leg.

  Two plastic bags were taped to the inside of the wall of the water heater. They contained fine white powder, about a kilo of it, he judged. He took his handkerchief from his pocket and, wrapping his hand in it, pulled first one bag loose, then the other. Just to be sure of what he already knew, he pulled open the ziplock top of one of the bags, wet the tip of his index finger and tapped it onto the powder. When he put his finger to his tongue, he tasted the slightly metallic, unmistakable tang of cocaine.

  He leaned down and set the two bags on the counter. Then he lifted the front panel back into place, careful to line it up accurately with the holes in the body of the heater. Slowly, he fitted in the four screws and turned them back into place. Carefully, he turned the grooves in the top screws to perfect horizontals, the two below into equally precise verticals.

  He glanced at his watch. He had been inside the apartment fifteen minutes. The Americans had had a day and a half to go through the apartment; the Italian police had had just as much time. Yet Brunetti had found the two packa
ges in less than quarter of an hour.

  He opened the door to one of the wall cabinets and saw only three or four dinner plates. He looked under the sink and found what he wanted, two plastic bags. Still covering his hand with his handkerchief, he placed a bag of cocaine inside each of the larger plastic bags and placed them in the two inner pockets of his jacket. He wiped the knife clean on the sleeve of his jacket and replaced it in the drawer, then used his handkerchief to wipe the surface of the heater clean of all prints.

  He left the apartment, locking the door behind him. Outside, he approached tine American soldiers in the Jeep, smiling comfortably at them. ‘Thank you,’ he said and handed the key back to the man who had given it to him.

  ‘Well?’ the soldier asked.

  ‘Nothing. I just wanted to see how he lived.’ If the soldier was surprised by Brunetti’s answer, he gave no indication of it.

  Brunetti walked back to his car, got in, and told the driver to take him to the train station. He caught the three-fifteen Intercity train from Milan and prepared to spend the trip back to Venice as he had spent the trip out, sitting and looking out of the window of the train while thinking about why a young American soldier would have been murdered. But now he had a new thought to add to that one: why would drugs have been planted in his apartment after his death? And who would have planted them?

  * * * *

  8

  As his train pulled out of the Vicenza train station, Brunetti walked towards the front, searching for an empty compartment in the first-class section. The two plastic packages weighed down his inner pockets, and he hunched forward in an attempt to disguise their bulk. Finally, in the first car, he found an empty compartment and sat near the window, then got up to slide the door closed. He put his briefcase on the seat beside him and debated whether to transfer the packages or not. As he sat debating, the door to the compartment was abruptly pulled open by a man in uniform. For a hallucinogenic instant, Brunetti saw his career in ruins, himself in jail, but then the man asked for his ticket, and Brunetti was saved.

  When the conductor left, Brunetti concentrated on keeping himself from reaching inside his jacket or from checking with his elbows to see that the two packages were still in place. He seldom had to deal with drugs in his work, but he knew enough to realize, that he was carrying at least a few hundred million lire in each pocket: a new apartment in one and early retirement in the other. The idea had little attraction for him. He would gladly have traded both packages to know who had put them where he found them. Though he had no idea of who, the reason why was pretty clear: what better motive for murder than drugs and drug dealing, and what better proof of drug dealing than the presence of a kilo of cocaine hidden in a man’s home? And who better to find it than the policeman from Venice, who, if only because of geography, could not possibly have had any involvement with the crime or the dead man? And what could that young soldier have been involved in that a kilo of cocaine would be used to call attention away from it?

  At Padova, an elderly woman came into the compartment and sat, reading a magazine, until Mestre station, where she got out, without even having spoken to or looked at Brunetti. When the train pulled into Venice station, Brunetti picked up his briefcase and left the train, checking to see if any of the people who had got onto the train in Vicenza got down from the train with him. In front of the station, he walked to the right, towards the number one boat, got as far as the landing dock, then stopped and looked back at the clock that stood on tike other side of the station. Abruptly, he changed direction and walked towards the other side of tine piazza in front of the station, to the dock where the number two boat stopped. No one followed him.

  A few minutes later, the boat came from the right, and he was the only person to get on. At four-thirty, there were few people on the boat. He walked down the steps and through the rear cabin, out to the aft deck, where he was alone. The boat pulled away from the embankment and under the Bridge of the Scalzi, up the Grand Canal towards the Rialto and its final stop.

  Through the glass doors, Brunetti saw that the four people sitting in the inner cabin were all busy reading their newspapers. He set his briefcase on the chair beside him, propped the lid open, and reached into his inner pocket, pulling out one of the envelopes. Carefully, touching only its comers, he peeled it open. Turning sideways, the better to examine the façade of the Natural History Museum, he slid his hand under the railing and emptied the white powder into the waters of the canal. He slipped the empty bag into his briefcase and repeated the process with the second. During the golden age of the Most Serene Republic, the Doge used to perform an elaborate yearly ceremony, tossing a gold ring into the waters of the Grand Canal to solemnize the wedding of the city to the waters that gave it life, wealth, and power. But never, Brunetti thought, had such great wealth been deliberately offered to any waters.

  From the Rialto, he walked back to the Questura and went directly to the lab. Bocchese was there, sharpening a pair of scissors at one of the many machines that only he seemed able to operate. He turned the machine off when he saw Brunetti and set the scissors on the counter in front of him.

  Brunetti put his briefcase beside the scissors, opened it, and pulled out, careful to touch them only at the corners, the two plastic bags. He set them beside the scissors. ‘Could you see if the American’s prints are on these?’ he asked. Bocchese nodded. ‘I’ll come down and you can tell me, all right?’ Brunetti said.

  The technician nodded again. ‘It’s like that, huh?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Would you like me to lose the bags after I get the prints off them?’ Bocchese asked.

  ‘What bags?’

  Bocchese reached for the scissors. ‘As soon as I finish this,’ he said. He flipped a switch, and the wheel of the machine spun into life again. Brunetti’s muttered thanks were drowned out by the high-pitched rasp of metal against metal as Bocchese went back to sharpening the scissors.

  Deciding that it would be better to go and speak to Patta than be told to do so, Brunetti took the front steps and stopped outside his superior’s door. He knocked, heard a noise, and opened the door. As he did so, he realized, belatedly, that the sound he had heard had not been an invitation to enter.

  The scene was a blending of cartoon cliché and every bureaucrat’s worst nightmare: in front of the window, the top two buttons of her blouse open, stood Anita, from the Ufficio Stranieri; a single step from her, and moving backward, stood a red-faced Vice-Questore Patta. Brunetti caught this in a glance and dropped his briefcase in an attempt to give Anita time to turn her back on the two men and button her blouse. As she did this, Brunetti knelt to retrieve the papers that had spilled from the briefcase, and Patta went to sit behind his desk: It took Anita as long to button her blouse as it did Brunetti to stuff the papers back into his briefcase.

  When everything was back where it should be, Patta said, using the formal ‘lei’, ‘Thank you, Signorina. I’ll have these papers taken down to you as soon as I sign them.’

  She nodded and made towards the door. As she walked past Brunetti, she gave him a wink and an enormous smile, both of which he ignored.

  When she was gone, Brunetti walked over to Patta’s desk. ‘I’ve just got back from Vicenza, sir. From the American base.’

  ‘Yes? What did you find?’ Patta asked, face still suffused with a residual blush that Brunetti had to force himself to ignore.

  ‘Nothing much. I took a look at his apartment.’

  ‘Did you find anything?’

  ‘No, sir. Nothing. I’d like to go back there tomorrow.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To speak to some of the people who knew him.’

  ‘What difference will that make? It’s clear that this is a simple case of a mugging that went too far. Who cares who knew him or what they have to say about him?’

  Brunetti recognized the signs of Patta’s growing indignation. If left unleashed, he would work himself up to forbidding Brunetti to continue the
investigation at Vicenza. Since a simple mugging was the most convenient explanation, it would be the one towards which Patta would direct his hopes and, consequently, the investigation.

  ‘I’m sure you’re right, sir. But I thought that, until we could find the person who did it, it wouldn’t hurt if we could give the impression that the source of the crime lay outside the city. You know how tourists are. Just the least little thing will frighten them and keep them away.’

  Did Patta’s rosy blush diminish discernibly at that, or was it just his imagination? ‘I’m glad to see you agree with me, Commissario.’ After a pause that could only be called pregnant, Patta added, ‘For once.’ He extended a well-manicured hand and straightened the folder at the centre of his desk. ‘Do you think there’s any connection with Vicenza?’

  Brunetti paused before he answered, delighted at the ease with which Patta was transferring the responsibility of the decision to him. ‘I don’t know, sir. But I don’t think it could hurt us here if we gave the impression that there was.’