Death in a Strange Country cgb-2

by Donna Leon

  ‘Have you any ideas?’

  ‘Nothing definite,’ Brunetti answered and ate a shrimp.

  ‘Drugs?’ asked Paola’s father, displaying a worldliness superior to his friend’s.

  Brunetti repeated his ‘Perhaps’, and ate a few more shrimp, delighted to find them fresh and sweet.

  At the sound of the word ‘drugs’, Paola’s mother turned to them and asked them what they were talking about.

  ‘Guido’s latest murder,’ her husband said, making it sound, somehow, as though it were one he had committed rather than one he had been sent to solve. ‘I’m sure it will turn out to have been a street crime. What do they call them in America - a “mugging”?’ He sounded surprisingly like Patta.

  Because Signora Pastore had heard nothing about the murder, her husband had to repeat the whole story, turning to Brunetti occasionally to ask about details or for confirmation of fact. Brunetti didn’t mind this at all, for it made the meal pass more quickly than it usually did. And so, with talk of murder and mayhem, they ate their way through risotto, mixed grilled fish, four vegetables, salad, tiramisù, and coffee.

  While the men sipped at their grappa, Doctor Pastore, as he did each year, asked the ladies if they cared to join him in the Casinò below. When they agreed, he responded with a delight new-minted each year and pulled from the inner pocket of his jacket three small suede bags, which he placed in front of them.

  As she did each year, Paola protested, ‘Oh, Dottore, you shouldn’t,’ which, as usual, she said while busily opening the bag to reveal the Casinò chips which the bags always contained. Brunetti noticed the same combination he did each year and knew that the total would be two hundred thousand lire for each woman, enough to divert them while Doctor Pastore spent an hour or two playing blackjack and usually winning back far more than he had provided for the ladies’ amusement.

  The three men rose from the table, held the chairs of the women, and the six of them started for the Casinò gaming rooms on the floor below.

  Because they couldn’t all fit into the elevator, the women were put inside while the men decided to use the main staircase to go down to the main gambling hall. Brunetti found Count Orazio on his right and tried to think of something to say to his father-in-law.

  ‘Did you know that Richard Wagner died here?’ he asked, forgetting now how it was that he knew this, since Wagner was hardly a composer he liked.

  ‘Yes,’ the Count answered. ‘Hardly soon enough.’

  And then, luckily, they were in the main gaming room, and Count Orazio joined his wife to watch as she played roulette, taking leave of Brunetti with a friendly smile and something that flirted with being a bow.

  Brunetti had first been to a Casinò not in his native Venice, where no one but compulsive or professional gamblers paid any attention to the tables, but in Las Vegas, where he had stopped while driving across America many years ago. Because his first experience of gambling had been there, he always associated the practice with bright lights, loud music, and the high whoops of those who won or lost. He remembered a stage show, helium-filled balloons bouncing against the ceilings, people dressed in T-shirts, jeans, shorts. Consequently, though he came here to the Casinò each year, he was always surprised to find the atmosphere somewhere between that of an art museum and, worse, a church. Few people smiled, voices were never raised above a whisper, and no one ever appeared to be having any fun. In the midst of this solemnity, he missed the honest shouts of victory or defeat, the wild shrieks of joy that came with changes of fortune.

  None of that here, no indeed. Men and women, all well-dressed, hushed to reverent silence, ringed the roulette table, putting down chips across the felt board. Silence, pause, then the croupier gave the wheel a sharp turn, dropped the ball in, and all eyes riveted themselves upon the whirl of metal and colour, stuck there as it slowed, slowed, slowed to a halt. Snake-like, the croupier’s rake crept up and down the board, sweeping in the losers’ chips and nudging a few to the winner. And then again the same motions, the flurry, the spin, and those eyes, fixed, nailed to the spinning wheel. Why, he wondered, did so many of these men wear rings on their little fingers?

  He drifted into the next room, vaguely aware that he had become separated from his party, curious to observe. In an inner room, he came upon the blackjack tables and saw Doctor Pastore already seated there, a middling pile of chips stacked with surgical neatness in front of him. As Brunetti watched, he called for a card, drew a six, stopped, waited while the other players drew, then flipped his cards over to display a seven and an eight to accompany the six. His pile of chips grew; Brunetti turned away.

  Everyone seemed to be smoking. One player at the baccarat table had two cigarettes burning in an ashtray in front of him, a third hanging from his lower lip. Smoke was everywhere: in his eyes, his hair, his clothing; it floated in a cloud that could be cut and stirred by a hand. He moved to the bar and bought himself a grappa, not really wanting it, but bored with watching the play.

  He sat on a plush velvet sofa and watched the players in the room, occasionally sipping at the glass in his hand. He closed his eyes and allowed himself to drift for a few minutes. He felt the sofa move beside him and, without opening his eyes or moving his head from where it rested against the back of the sofa, he knew it was Paola. She took his glass, sipped at it, then gave it back to him.

  ‘Tired?’ she asked.

  He nodded, suddenly too tired to speak.

  ‘All right. Come with me and we’ll have one more round at roulette, and then we can go home.’

  He turned his head, opened his eyes, and smiled at her. ‘I love you, Paola,’ he said, then bowed his head and sipped at his grappa. How many years had it been since he had said that? He glanced up at her, almost shyly. She grinned and leaned over and kissed him on the mouth. ‘Come on,’ she said, getting to her feet and reaching down to pull him up. ‘Let’s lose this money, and then we’ll go home.’ She had five chips in her hand, each worth fifty thousand lire, which meant she had been winning. She handed him two, keeping the others for herself.

  Back in the main gaming room, they had to wait a few minutes before they could worm themselves up beside the roulette table and, when they were there, he waited two turns until, for no reason he could name, it seemed the right time to play. Stacking the two chips one on top of the other in his hand, he placed them blindly on the board, then looked down and saw that they rested on number 28, a number that had no significance whatsoever for him. Paola placed hers on the black.

  Spin, watch, wait, and, as he knew it would, the ball slipped into its rightful place in number 28, and he won more than three million lire. Almost a month’s salary, a vacation for them this summer, a computer for Chiara. He watched as the croupier’s rake came sliding towards him, chugging those chips across the felt until they stopped in front of him. He scooped them up, smiled at Paola, and, in the loudest voice heard in the Casinò in years, shouted, in English, ‘Hot damn.’

  * * * *

  10

  He saw no sense in bothering to go to the Questura the next morning and, instead, stayed at home until it was time to get the train to Vicenza. He did, however, call Maggiore Ambrogiani and ask that the driver be sent to get him at the station.

  As the train crossed over the causeway and away from the city, he looked off into the distance and saw, visible only rarely these days, the mountains, not yet snow-covered but, he hoped, soon to be. This was the third dry year, with little rain in the spring, none in the summer, and bad harvests in the autumn. The farmers had their hopes pinned on winter snows this year, and he recalled the saying of the peasants of the Friuli, a grim, hard-working people: ‘Sotto la neve, pane; sotto la pioggia, fame.’ Yes, the winter snows would bring bread, releasing their trapped waters slowly during the growing season, while rain, which ran off quickly, brought only hunger.

  He hadn’t bothered with a briefcase today; it was unlikely he would find bags of cocaine two days in a row, but he had bought a
paper at the train station, and he read through it as the train took him across the flat plain towards Vicenza. There was no mention of the dead American today, his place taken by a crime of passion in Modena, a dentist who had strangled a woman who refused to marry him and then shot himself. He spent the rest of the trip reading the political news, knowing as much when he arrived in Vicenza as when he left Venice.

  The same driver was waiting for him in front of the station, but this time he got out to open the door for Brunetti. At the gate, he stopped without being told to do so and waited while the Carabiniere wrote out a pass for Brunetti. ‘Where would you like to go, sir?’

  ‘Where’s the Office of Public Health?’ he asked.

  ‘In the hospital.’

  ‘Then let’s go there.’

  The driver took him up the long main street of the base, and Brunetti felt himself to be in a foreign country. Pine trees lined the street on both sides. The car rode past men and women in shorts, riding bicycles or pushing babies in pushchairs. Joggers loped by; they even drove past a swimming-pool, still filled with water but empty of swimmers.

  The driver pulled up in front of yet another undistinguished cement building. ‘Vicenza Field Hospital’, Brunetti read. ‘In there, sir,’ the driver said, pulling into a parking space designated for the handicapped and cutting the engine.

  Inside, he found himself in front of a low, curved reception desk. A young woman looked up, smiled, and asked, ‘Yes, sir, may I help you?’

  ‘I’m looking for the Office of Public Health.’

  ‘Take the corridor behind me, turn right, then it’s the third door on the left,’ she said, then turned to a pregnant woman in uniform who had come in and stood beside him. Brunetti walked away from the desk in the direction given and did not, he thought proudly to himself, did not turn to look at the woman in uniform, the pregnant woman in uniform.

  He stopped in front of the third door, clearly marked ‘Public Health’, and knocked. No one answered, so he knocked again. Still no one answered, so he tried the knob, and, noting that it was a knob and not a handle, opened the door and went in. The small room held three metal desks, each with a chair drawn up in front of it, and two filing cabinets, from the top of both of which straggled long, tired-looking plants much in need of both water and dusting. On the wall hung the now predictable bulletin board, this one covered with notices and charts. Two of the desks were covered with the normal detritus of office work: papers, forms, folders, pens, pencils. The third held a computer terminal and keyboard but, for the rest, was conspicuously bare. Brunetti seated himself in the chair that was clearly intended for visitors. One of the phones - each desk had one - rang and went on ringing seven times, then stopped. Brunetti waited a few minutes then went to the door and stepped back out into the corridor. A nurse was walking by, and Brunetti asked her if she knew where the people from the office were.

  ‘Should be right back, sir,’ she answered in the internationally recognized code by which fellow workers cover for one another with strangers who might or might not have been sent there to find out who was at work and who was not. He stepped back inside and closed the door.

  As in any office, there were the usual cartoons, postcards, and handwritten notes interspersed with official notices. The cartoons all seemed to have soldiers or doctors, and many of the postcards had either minarets or archaeological sites. He unpinned the first and found that Bob said hello from the Blue Mosque. The second told him that Bob liked the Colosseum. But the third, which showed a camel in front of the Pyramids, revealed, far more interestingly, that M and T were finished with the inspection of the kitchens and would be back on Tuesday. He pinned this one back and stepped away from the board.

  ‘May I help you?’ a voice said behind him.

  He recognized her voice, turned, and she recognized him. ‘Mr Brunetti, what are you doing here?’ Her surprise was both genuine and strong.

  ‘Good morning, Doctor Peters. I told you I’d come out to see if I could learn more about Sergeant Foster. I was told this was the Office of Public Health, so I came down here in the hopes of meeting someone who worked with him. But, as you can see,’ he said, gesturing around the empty office and taking two steps that further distanced him from the board, ‘no one is here.’

  ‘They’re all at a meeting,’ she explained. ‘Trying to figure out a way to divide up the work until we get a replacement for Mike.’

  ‘Aren’t you at the meeting?’ he asked.

  In response, she pulled a stethoscope out of the breast pocket of her white lab coat and said, ‘Remember, I’m a paediatrician.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘They ought to be back here very soon,’ she volunteered. ‘Who did you want to speak to?’

  ‘I don’t know. Whoever worked most closely with him.’

  ‘I told you, Mike pretty much had charge of the office himself.’

  ‘So it wouldn’t help me to talk to anyone?’

  ‘I can’t answer that for you, Mr Brunetti, since I don’t know what it is you want to find out.’

  Brunetti assumed her irritation was the result of nervousness, so he dropped the subject and asked, instead, ‘Do you know if sergeant Foster drank?’

  ‘Drank?’

  ‘Alcohol.’

  ‘Very little.’

  ‘And drugs?’

  ‘What sort of drugs?’

  ‘Illegal drugs.’

  ‘No.’ Her voice was firm, her conviction absolute.

  ‘You sound very certain.’

  ‘I’m certain because I knew him, and I’m also certain because I’m his commanding officer, and I see his medical record.’

  ‘Is that something that would normally appear in a medical report?’ Brunetti asked.

  She nodded. ‘We can be tested, any of us in the Army, at any time, for drug use. Most of us get a urine test once a year.’

  ‘Even officers?’

  ‘Even officers.’

  ‘Even doctors?’

  ‘Even doctors.’

  ‘And you saw the results of his?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘When was the last one?’

  ‘I don’t remember. Sometime this summer, I think.’ She shifted some folders from one hand to the other. ‘I don’t know why you’re asking this. Mike never used drugs. Just the opposite. He was dead set against them. We used to argue about it.’

  ‘How? Why?’

  ‘I see no problem with them. I’m not interested in them myself, but if people want to use them, then I think they ought to be allowed to.’ When Brunetti said nothing, she continued, ‘Look, I’m supposed to be taking care of little kids, but we’re short-staffed here, so I see a lot of their mothers as well, and a lot of them ask me to renew their prescription for Valium and Librium. If I refuse because I think they’re taking too much of them, they just wait a day or two and go down the hall and have an appointment with a different doctor, and sooner or later, someone’s going to give them what they want. A lot of them would be better off if they could just smoke a joint now and then.’

  Brunetti wondered how well these opinions were received by both medical and military authorities, but he thought it best to keep the question to himself. After all, it was not Doctor Peters’ opinion about the use of drugs that he was interested in; it was whether Sergeant Foster had used them or not. And, not at all incidentally, why she had lied about going on a trip with him.

  Behind her, the door opened and a stocky middle-aged man in a green uniform came in. He seemed to be surprised to see Brunetti there, but he clearly recognized the doctor.

  ‘Is the meeting over, Ron?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, paused, looked up at Brunetti and, not sure who he might be, added, ‘m’am.’

  Doctor Peters turned to Brunetti. ‘This is First Sergeant Wolf,’ she said. ‘Sergeant, this is Commissario Brunetti, from the Venice police. He’s come out to ask some questions about Mike.’

  After the two men had shaken hands
and exchanged pleasantries, Doctor Peters said, ‘Perhaps Sergeant Wolf can give you a clearer idea of what Sergeant Foster did, Mr Brunetti. He’s in charge of all of the contacts that the hospital has off-post.’ She turned towards the door. ‘I’ll leave you with him and get back to my patients.’ Brunetti nodded in her direction, but she had turned away from them and left the office quickly.

  ‘What is it you wanted to know, Commissario?’ Sergeant Wolf asked, then added, less formally, ‘Would you like to come back to my office?’

  ‘Don’t you work here?’

  ‘No. I’m part of the administrative staff of the hospital. Our offices are on the other side of the building.’