Death in a Strange Country cgb-2

by Donna Leon

  The pause with which his superior greeted this was artistic, his hesitation against any irregularity of procedure perfectly balanced against his desire to leave no stone unturned in the search for truth. He pulled his Mont Blanc Meisterstück from his breast pocket, opened the folder, and signed the three papers there, managing to make each repetition of the name more thoughtful and, at the same time, more decisive. ‘All right, Brunetti, if you think this is the best way to handle it, go to Vicenza again. We can’t have people afraid to come to Venice, can we?’

  ‘No, sir,’ Brunetti answered, his voice the very pattern of earnestness, ‘we certainly can’t.’ Maintaining the same level voice, Brunetti asked, ‘Will there be anything else, sir?’

  ‘No, that’s all, Brunetti. Give me a full report on what you find.’

  ‘Of course, sir,’ Brunetti said and turned towards the door, wondering what bromide Patta would find to hurl at his departing back.

  ‘We’ll bring the man to justice.’ Patta said.

  ‘We certainly will, sir,’ Brunetti said, only too eager to abet his superior’s use of the plural.

  He went back up to his office, leafed through the issue of Panorama that had been in the briefcase, and gave Bocchese about half an hour to check the prints. At the end of that time, he went back down to the lab, this time to find Bocchese holding the blade of a bread-knife up against the whirling disc of the machine. When he saw Brunetti, he switched off the machine but kept the knife in his hand, testing the blade against his thumb.

  ‘Is this an extra job you’ve got?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘No. My wife asks me to sharpen things every few months, and this is the best way to do it. If your wife would like me to sharpen anything for her, I’d be glad to.’

  Brunetti nodded his thanks. ‘Find anything?’

  ‘Yes. There’s a good set of prints on one of the bags.’

  ‘His?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Anyone else’s?’

  ‘There are one or two other prints, probably a woman’s.’

  ‘What about the second bag?’

  ‘Nothing. Clean. Wiped clean or handled only with gloves.’ Bocchese picked up a piece of paper and shaved a slice from it with the bread-knife. Satisfied, he set it down on the desk and turned to Brunetti. ‘I think the first bag had been used for something else before the . . .’ Bocchese stopped himself, not sure what could be said here. ‘... before the other substance was put in it.’

  ‘Used for what, originally?’

  ‘I can’t be sure, but it might have been cheese. There was a trace of some sort of oily residue on the inside. And that bag had clearly been handled more than the other, had creases in it, so I’d say it had been used for something else, then had the, uh, powder put in it.’

  When Brunetti said nothing, Bocchese asked, ‘Aren’t you surprised?’

  ‘No, I’m not.’

  Bocchese pulled a wooden-handled steak-knife from a paper bag to the left of the machine and felt its blade with his thumb. ‘Well, if there’s anything else I can do, just let me know. And tell your wife about the knives.’

  ‘Yes, thanks, Bocchese,’ Brunetti said. ‘What did you do with the bags?’

  Bocchese switched on the machine, raised the knife towards it, and looked up at Brunetti. ‘What bags?’

  * * * *

  9

  He saw no reason to remain in the Questura since there was little chance that he would get any new information until he returned to Vicenza, so he put his briefcase back in the bottom of the cupboard and left his office. As he walked from the front door, he quickly glanced both ways, searching for someone who seemed out of place. He cut to the left, heading towards Campo Maria Formosa and then to Rialto, using narrow back streets that would allow him to evade anyone who might be following him as well as the battalions of ravening tourists who invariably centred their attacks on the area around San Marco. Each year, it grew harder to have patience with them, to put up with their stop-and-go walking, with their insistence on walking three abreast, even in the narrowest calle. There were times when he wanted to scream at them, even push them aside, but he contented himself by taking out all of his aggression through the single expedient of refusing to stop or in any way alter his walking in order to allow them a photo opportunity. Because of this, he was sure his body, back, face, elbow appeared in hundreds of photos and videos; he sometimes contemplated the disappointed Germans, looking at their summer videos during the violence of a North Sea storm, as they watched a purposeful, dark-suited Italian walk in front of Tante Gerda or Onkel Fritz, blurring, if only for an instant, the vision of sunburned, Lederhosen-clad, sturdy thighs as they posed upon the Rialto Bridge, in front of the doors of the Basilica of San Marco, or beside a particularly charming cat. He lived here, damn it, so they could wait for their stupid pictures until he got past them, or they could take home a picture of a real Venetian, probably the closest any of them would come to making contact with the city in any significant way. And, oh yes, wasn’t he a happy man to take home to Paola? Especially during her first week of classes.

  To avoid this, he stopped in at Do Mori, his favourite bar, just a few steps from Rialto, and said hello to Roberto, the grey-haired proprietor. They exchanged a few words, and Brunetti asked for a glass of Cabernet, the only thing he felt like drinking. With it, he ate a few of the fried shrimp that were always available at the bar, then decided to have a tramezzino, thick with ham and artichoke. He had another glass of wine and, after it, he began to feel human, for the first time that day. Paola always accused him of becoming foul-tempered when he didn’t eat for a long time, and he was beginning to believe she might be right. He paid and left, cut back to Rugetta and continued towards his home.

  In front of Biancat, he stopped to study the flowers in the window. Signor Biancat saw him through the immense glass window, smiled arid nodded, so Brunetti went inside and asked for ten blue irises. As he wrapped them, Biancat talked about Thailand, from which he had just returned after a week-long conference of orchid breeders and growers. It seemed to Brunetti a strange way to spend a week, but then he reflected that he had, in the past, gone to both Dallas and Los Angeles for police seminars. Who was he to say that it was stranger to spend a week talking about orchids than about the incidence of sodomy among serial killers or the various objects used in rapes?

  The stairs to his apartment generally served as an accurate gauge of the state of his being. When he felt good, they hardly seemed to be there; when he felt tired, his legs counted out each of the ninety-four. Tonight, someone had clearly slipped in an extra flight or two.

  He opened the door, anticipating the smell of home, of food, of the varied odours he had come to attribute to this place where they lived. Instead, upon entering, he smelled only the odour of freshly-made coffee, hardly the thing longed for by a man who had just spent the whole day working in - yes - America.

  ‘Paola?’ he called and glanced down the corridor towards the kitchen. Her voice answered him from the other direction, from the bathroom, and then he smelled the sweet scent of bath salts that was carried down the hall towards him on a sea of moist, warm air. Almost eight at night, and she was taking a bath?

  He walked down the hall and stood outside the partly-open door. ‘You in there?’ he asked. The question was so stupid that she didn’t bother to answer it. Instead, she asked, ‘You going to wearyour grey suit?’

  ‘Grey suit?’ he repeated, stepping into the steam-filled room. He saw her towel-wrapped head, floating disembodied on a cloud of suds, as though it had been carefully placed there by the person who had decapitated her. ‘Grey suit?’ he repeated, thinking what an odd couple they would appear, he in his grey suit and she in her suds.

  Her eyes opened, the head turned towards him, and she gave him The Look, the one that always made him wonder if she was looking through him to where his suitcase lay in the attic, estimating how long it would take her to pack it for him. It was enough to remind him tha
t tonight was the night when they were to go to the Casinò, invited there, with her parents, by an old friend of her family. It meant a late dinner, hideously expensive, made worse, or better - he could never decide which - by the fact that the family friend paid for it with his golden, or was it platinum, credit card. And then there always followed an hour or so of gambling or, worse, watching other people gamble.

  Having been the investigating officer both times that the staff of the Casinò had been discovered at various sorts of peculation and having been, in both cases, the arresting officer, Brunetti hated the unctuous politeness with which he was treated by the Director and the staff. If he gambled and won, he wondered if the game had been fixed in his favour; if he lost, he had to consider the possibility that vengeance had been taken. In neither scenario did Brunetti bother to speculate on the nature of luck.

  ‘I thought I’d wear the dark blue one,’ he said, holding out the flowers and bending over the tub. ‘I brought you these.’

  The Look changed into The Smile, which could still, even after twenty years with her, occasionally reduce his knees to jelly. A hand, then an arm, lifted out of the water. She touched the back of his wrist, leaving it wet and warm, then pulled her arm back under the surface of bubbles. ‘I’ll be out in five minutes.’ Her eyes caught his and held. ‘If you’d been earlier, then you could have had a bath, too.’

  He laughed and broke the mood. ‘But then we would have been late for dinner.’ True enough. True enough. But he cursed the time he had lost by stopping for a drink. He left the bathroom and went down the long hall to the kitchen and placed the flowers in the sink, plugged it, and added enough water to cover their stems.

  In their bedroom, he saw that she had placed a long red dress across the bed. He didn’t remember the dress, but he seldom did remember them, and he thought it best not to mention it. If it turned out to be a new dress and he remarked on it, he would sound like he thought she was buying too many clothes, and if it was something she had worn before, he would sound like he paid no attention to her and hadn’t bothered to notice it before. He sighed at the eternal inequality of marriage, opened the closet, and decided that the grey suit would be better. He removed his trousers and jacket, took off his tie, and studied his shirt in the mirror, wondering if he could wear it that evening. Deciding against it, he took it off and draped it across the back of a chair, then began dressing himself anew, vaguely bothered with having to do it but too much an Italian to consider the possibility of not doing so.

  A few minutes later, Paola came into the bedroom, golden hair free, the towel now wrapped around her body, and walked to the dresser where she kept her underwear and sweaters. Casually, carelessly, she tossed the towel onto the bed and bent to open a drawer. Slipping a new tie under his collar and beginning to knot it, he studied her as she stepped into a pair of black panties, then pulled a bra around herself and hooked it. To distract himself, he thought of physics, which he had studied at the university. He doubted that he would ever understand the dynamics and stress forces of female undergarments: so many things to hold, support, keep in place. He finished knotting his tie and pulled his jacket from the closet. By the time he had it on, she was zipping the side of her dress and stepping into a pair of black shoes. His friends often complained of waiting eternities while their wives dressed or put on make-up; Paola always beat him to the door.

  She reached into her side of the closet and drew out a floor-length coat that looked like it was made of fish scales. For a moment, he caught her looking at the mink that hung at the end of a row of clothing, but she ignored it and closed the door. Her father had given her the mink for Christmas a few years ago, but she had not worn it for the last two years. Brunetti didn’t know if this was because it was already out of style - he assumed that furs did go out of style; certainly everything else his wife or daughter wore did - or because of the growing anti-fur sentiment expressed both in the Press and at his dinner-table.

  Two months ago, a quiet family dinner had exploded into a heated confrontation about the rights of animals, his children insisting that it was wrong to wear furs, that animals had the same rights as humans, and to deny this was to engage in ‘speciescentricity’, a term Brunetti was sure they had made up just to use against him in the argument. He had listened for ten minutes as the argument went back and forth between them and Paola, they demanding equal rights for all the species on the planet, she attempting to make a distinction between animals capable of reason and those which were not. Finally, out of patience with Paola for attempting rational opposition to an argument that seemed to him idiotic, he had reached over the table and poked with his fork at the chicken bones that lay at the side of his daughter’s plate. ‘We can’t wear them, but we can eat them, eh?’ he asked, got up, and went inside to read the paper and drink a grappa.

  In any case, the mink remained in the closet and they set out for the Casinò.

  They got off the vaporetto at the San Marcuola stop and walked down the narrow streets and over the hump-backed bridge that led to the iron gates of the Casinò, open now and extending a welcoming embrace to all who chose to enter. On the outer walls, the ones visible from the Grand Canal, were inscribed the words ‘Noh Nobis’, Not For Us, which, during the ages of the Republic, had declared the Casinò off-limits to Venetians. Only foreigners were to be fleeced; Venetians were to invest their money wisely and not squander it on dice and gaming. How he wished, this endless evening yawning out before him, that the rules of the Republic still pertained and could free him of the next few hours. They entered the marble-paved lobby, and immediately a tuxedoed assistant manager came from the entrance desk and greeted him by name. ‘Dottor Brunetti. Signora,’ - this with a bow that put a neat horizontal pleat in his red cummerbund. ‘We are honoured to have you here. Your party is in the restaurant.’ With a wave as graceful as the bow, he pointed to the right, to the single elevator that stood there, open and waiting. ‘If you’d come this way, I’ll take you to them.’

  Paola’s hand grabbed at his, squeezing it hard, cutting him off from saying that they knew the way. Instead, all three crowded into the tiny box of the elevator and smiled pleasant smiles at one another as it inched itself towards the top floor of the building.

  The elevator racketed to a halt, the assistant manager opened the twin doors and held them while Brunetti and Paola got off, then led them into the brightly lit restaurant. Brunetti looked around as he walked in, checking for the nearest exit and for anyone who looked capable of violence, a survey which he gave, entirely automatically, to any public room he entered. In a corner near a window that gave over the Grand Canal, he saw his parents-in-law and their friends, the Pastores, an elderly couple from Milan who were Paola’s Godparents and the oldest friends of her parents and who were, because of that, placed utterly beyond reproach or criticism.

  As he and Paola drew near the round table, both of the older men, dressed in dark suits which were identical in quality, however different in colour, rose to their feet. Paola’s father kissed her on the cheek, then shook Brunetti’s hand, while Doctor Pastore bent to kiss Paola’s hand and then embraced Brunetti and kissed him on both cheeks. Because he never felt fully at ease with the man, this display of intimacy always made Brunetti uncomfortable.

  One of the things that spoiled these dinners, this yearly ritual that he had inherited upon marrying Paola, was that he always arrived to find that dinner had been ordered by Doctor Pastore. The Doctor was, of course, solicitous, insisting that he hoped no one minded if he took the liberty of ordering, but it was the season for this, the season for that, truffles were at their best, the first mushrooms were just beginning to come in. And he was always right, and the meal was always delicious, but Brunetti disliked not being able to order what he wanted to eat, even if what he wanted turned out to be less good than what they ended up eating. And, each year, he chided himself for being stupid and pigheaded, yet he could not conquer the flash of irritation he felt when he arrived to find
that the meal was already planned and ordered, and he had not been consulted in the ordering of it. Male ego against male ego? Surely, it was nothing more than that. Questions of palate and cuisine had nothing whatsoever to do with it.

  There were the usual compliments, then the matter of where to sit. Brunetti ended up with his back to the window, Doctor Pastore to his left and Paola’s father directly opposite him.

  ‘How nice to see you again, Guido,’ Doctor Pastore said. ‘Orazio and I were just talking about you.’

  ‘Badly, I hope,’ Paola said and laughed, but then she turned her attention to her mother, who was fingering the material of her dress, a sign that it must be a new one, and to Signora Pastore, who sat with one of Paola’s hands still in hers.

  He gave the Doctor a polite, inquisitive glance. ‘We were talking about this American. You’re in charge of it, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes, Dottore, I am.’

  ‘Why would someone want to kill an American? He was a soldier, wasn’t he? Robbery? Revenge? Jealousy?’ Because the Doctor was Italian, nothing else came to his mind.

  ‘Perhaps,’ Brunetti said, answering all five questions with one word. He paused as two waiters approached the table with two large platters of seafood antipasto. They offered the platters, serving each person in turn. Idly, more interested in murder than the meal, the Doctor waited until everyone had been served and the food complimented and then returned to the initial subject.