Blood from a stone - Donna Leon

‘I’ve got clothes in my locker, sir,’ Pucetti said, getting to his feet. ‘So I can go over now, soon as I’ve changed.’

Brunetti went back to his office, burdened by the weight of what he was forced to do. Secret phone calls, coded messages, policemen shedding their uniforms in order to do their jobs. ‘We’re all mad, we’re all mad,’ he caught himself muttering as he climbed the steps. Next thing he knew, he’d be wearing a disguise to come to work and setting up bank accounts in the Channel Islands. It helped, he realized, to expand it all to the reductio ad absurdum, for to consider their behaviour objectively would be to summon despair.

Vianello came in, saying as he entered, ‘She said someone managed to get into her computer and destroy things.’ Before Brunetti could ask, he said, ‘No, not her physical computer, but into her files. She said whoever did it was very sophisticated.’

‘What was destroyed?’ Brunetti asked.

‘The autopsy report that was attached to the email. And the original report of the crime.’

‘And the other things? The addresses of Bertolli and Cuzzoni?’ Brunetti asked, alarmed that whoever had destroyed the other files would have found these and known where their investigation was heading. Which, he reflected with sudden cynicism, was considerably more than he knew.

Vianello shook his head in what Brunetti interpreted as a gesture of relief. ‘She said she had it all hidden, not only the addresses, but copies of the original report and the one from the pathologist — God knows where: in a folder of recipes, for all I know. She said the autopsy report and the original crime report were the only things on her computer that anyone could find.’

Brunetti had no option but to believe her and hope that she was right.

‘Can she find out who did it?’ he asked.

‘I think that’s what she’s trying to do now.’

Brunetti went around his desk and sat down. ‘I think the only thing to do now is to make it look like we’ve stopped,’ he said.

‘Patta will never believe it,’ Vianello objected.

‘If there’s no sign that we’re doing anything, then he’ll have to believe it.’

Vianello’s glance displayed his scepticism, but he said nothing.

‘I called Rizzardi,’ Brunetti said. ‘He said he found something.’

‘What?’

‘He didn’t say. Only that it was interesting and I ought to see it. So I sent Pucetti over.’ Brunetti translated the rather childish code of his conversation with the pathologist.

‘You called him from here?’ Vianello asked, unable to disguise his astonishment.

Brunetti explained about Signor Rossi’s telefonino and gave the number to Vianello.

‘So this is what we’re reduced to?’ Vianello asked, just as Pucetti came in, wearing Doc Marten boots and a long leather coat.

Neither man commented on Pucetti’s attire. The young officer placed an envelope on Brunetti’s desk then stood there, looking uncertain what to do with himself. Brunetti waved him to a chair.

From the envelope Brunetti pulled out a sheet of paper folded around a few photos and one other sheet of paper, which, when opened, was revealed to be the form the police used to take a set of fingerprints. On the paper around the photos he recognized Rizzardi’s handwriting. ‘When I got to the operating theatre, I was told the autopsy had already been performed, but the report was not available. So I took some photos of the dead man’s body: my comments on the back of each. The fingerprints on the enclosed form are his: I took them. I suggest you compare them with the ones taken during the autopsy to see if they are the same.’

A thick horizontal line served as signature. And below this was written, ‘Dottor Venturi did the autopsy.’

Brunetti took the photos and dealt them out in a row on his desk. In the first of them, Brunetti recognized the man’s face, eyes closed, features relaxed in what, to those who have not seen the faces of the dead, appeared to be sleep.

The next photo took a moment to interpret, for initially it looked like two speckled sculptures wearing oddly symmetrical headdresses. As Brunetti looked, the image revealed itself as the soles of the dead man’s feet, the headdresses his toes. He bent nearer to examine the speckles, each of them circular and about the size of the tip of his finger and all of them pink in contrast to the pale soles of the man’s feet. He turned the photo over and read, ‘These are cigarette burns. They are fully healed, but my guess is that they are not much older than a year or two.’ Brunetti flipped the photo back; knowing now, they all saw it.

The next was of the inside of the man’s right thigh, where the same circular pattern ran from the knee to the point where the leg joined the trunk. There might have been twenty of them. ‘Oddio,’ Pucetti whispered in horror at the terrible vulnerability revealed by the photo.

The next photo was a mirror image, this time of the inside of the left thigh. The three men stood in a silent line in front of the photos, each reluctant to speak.

The last photo showed what appeared to be another scar; the neat hole beneath it placed it at the centre of the man’s stomach. Brunetti recognized the pattern: the same four triangles of the Maltese cross that was carved on the forehead of the wooden head from the man’s jeans. The thin lines of the raised flesh were darker than the skin that served as smooth background to the pattern, yet the scar was utterly without menace and spoke of ritual, not pain. He turned the photo over and read, ‘This scar is considerably older. Tribal scarification of some sort.’

Brunetti leaned forward and slipped the photos back into a pile. He took the fingerprint form and handed it to Pucetti, saying, ‘Take this down to the lab and give it to Bocchese — but only if he’s alone — and ask him to compare it to the set in the autopsy report.’ He remembered the missing files and added, ‘If he’s still got them.’

‘Do we know he was given a set of prints?’ Vianello interrupted.

Brunetti, who should have checked, had not. He nodded in acknowledgement of Vianello’s remark and added to Pucetti, ‘Ask him. If he never received any, then ask him to see if he can get an identification.’ As the young man turned away, Brunetti added, ‘Discreetly.’

When Pucetti was gone, Vianello looked at the photos Brunetti still held, and asked, ‘Torture?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why? The diamonds?’

‘Yes,’ Brunetti agreed, then added, ‘Or whatever he was going to buy with them.’

17

Brunetti and Vianello knew that they needed to find out who the man was or at least where he came from before they could have any idea of what he was likely to have done with the money he made from the diamonds. Instinctively, they shied away from reference to the marks of torture on the man’s body.

After almost twenty minutes had elapsed, Brunetti called down to the lab and asked to speak to Pucetti. ‘And?’ he asked when Pucetti picked up the phone.

‘There was nothing to compare that sample to, sir,’ Pucetti began. ‘Bocchese said he was never sent anything.’

A soft ‘Ah’ was all Brunetti would allow himself, and then he said, ‘If you’ve spoken to Bocchese, you can return to your normal duties.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Pucetti said and hung up.

Brunetti told Vianello what Pucetti had said; the inspector echoed Brunetti’s soft exclamation of surprise.

‘We have to go and talk to them again,’ Brunetti said without preamble, getting to his feet. Neither of them wanted to bother with the launch and thus call attention to their arrival in the neighbourhood, nor did they want there to be any possible record at the Questura of their destination. They walked quickly, unconsciously choosing the same streets and shortcuts on their way to Castello.

Brunetti let himself into the building with the keys Cuzzoni had given him. The two men paused just inside the door, listening for sounds from the apartments above. It was not yet noon, so the men were likely still to be there, waiting for the shops to close and thus signal them to set up their own transient workplaces. Together they climbed the steps and stood on either side of the door to the apartment on the first floor, silent and listening.

Nothing but silence, the sound both of them had heard outside the doors of many empty apartments but also from rooms in which waited the frightened or the dangerous. Their communication was wordless, even invisible. Brunetti moved in front of the door and slipped a key into the lock: Vianello pulled out the pistol Brunetti had not known he was carrying. He turned the key as softly as he could, but it did not move. He pulled it out, took the second pair of keys, and tried the smaller one from that set. This time he felt the key begin to move, and as he turned it, he nodded to Vianello. Brunetti turned the handle and pushed on the door; Vianello edged him aside and shoved open the door with his foot, then crouched low and moved quickly into the room.

The chaos that lay before them spoke of flight and search, but it had nothing to say of violence. The men in the apartment had decamped, done so, it seemed, suddenly and absolutely. The furniture in the living room stood upright; in the kitchen a few cooking pots and some cutlery remained, and three plates covered with some sort of red stew stood on the table. Packages of food had been removed from the cabinets and poured out on to the table amidst the plates: rice and flour overlapped in small dunes, and on the floor an empty box of tea bags sat on top of its contents.

As they moved farther back into the apartment they saw that all personal items had been removed: there was not so much as a stray sock to indicate who might once have lived here; only the camp-beds in one room indicated their number. One bed was upturned and the others shifted around, as if someone had wanted to see or retrieve what was under them. In the bathroom, a bottle of aspirin lay in the sink, its soggy contents slowly decomposing.

Abandoning any attempt at silence, they went to the apartment above, but it looked much the same as the first: all personal sign of former occupancy was gone, and what had been left behind had been roughly searched through.

After a quick look through the second apartment and without any expressed agreement to do so, they went up to the top floor. The door stood open, and here they found signs of greater wreckage, evidence of a search which the paucity of objects must have rendered short. The box of foodstuffs sat at the end of the bed, its contents spilled beside it. The peanuts and biscuits were heaped together in a small mound on the bed cover, their plastic wrappers thrown to the floor. The piece of Asiago, covered now with a thin film of white mould, lay beside the box.

‘Have you got an evidence bag with you?’ Brunetti asked.

‘No. Maybe my handkerchief?’ Vianello asked and pulled it from the side pocket of his overcoat. He spread it open on the bed and bent over to pick up the plastic wrappers, careful to lift them at the corners by the tips of his fingers. When they were wrapped in the handkerchief, Vianello pulled a plastic shopping bag from his other pocket. Yellow, it blared BILLA in red letters that would have been visible a block away; Vianello slipped the handkerchief inside.

‘Bocchese?’ he asked.

Brunetti nodded. ‘Results to me. Privately.’

‘Worth taking anything from downstairs?’ Vianello asked.

‘Maybe the rice and flour packages,’ Brunetti suggested.

When they had done that, they left the house, having carefully locked all the doors behind them and automatically starting a conversation about the weekend’s soccer results as they went out into the calle. A man who was walking by glanced at them, but hearing Vianello say ‘Inter’ gave them no further attention and turned into the bar on the corner.

By the time they got back to the Questura, they had decided how they would proceed. Vianello went down the corridor to the lab and Bocchese, and Brunetti went up to his office to phone a colleague at the San Marco sub-station, where the arrest records of the vu cumprà were kept, and asked if he could go over to talk to him.

Moretti, a short man with retreating hair, was waiting for him in his office. In all the years they had worked together, Brunetti had never seen him out of uniform or, for that matter, beyond the confines of this building. The desk was as Brunetti remembered it: a phone, a single open file in front of the seated sergeant, and to his left an ornate frame containing a photo of Moretti’s wife, who had died three years before.

The two men shook hands and spoke of unimportant things for a moment. Brunetti declined the offer of coffee, agreed that it was indeed very cold, and then told Moretti he needed information about the vu cumprà.

Deadpan, giving no indication of how he viewed the issue, Moretti said, ‘We’ve been told to refer to them as ambulanti.’

With equal impassivity, Brunetti said, ‘About the ambulanti, then.’

‘What would you like to know?’ Moretti asked.

Brunetti took a photo from the inside pocket of his jacket and leaned forward to place it in front of Moretti. ‘This is the man who was shot the other night. Do you recognize him, or do you remember ever arresting him?’

Moretti slid the photo closer and looked at it, then picked it up and angled it a bit so that more light fell on the man’s features. ‘I’ve seen him, yes,’ he said, his voice pulling out the syllables. ‘But I don’t know that we ever arrested him.’

‘Could you have seen him on the street, then?’ Brunetti inquired.

‘No.’ Moretti’s answer was so quick Brunetti was startled by it. Seeing that, Moretti explained. ‘I try never to go to the places where they are. It bothers me to see them and not be able to do anything about it.’

‘What do you mean, not do anything about it?’ Brunetti asked, honestly puzzled.

‘I can’t arrest them by myself, when I’m not in uniform, and when I have no order to do so. It bothers me to see them there, breaking the law, so I avoid them if I can.’ Brunetti heard the anger in the other man’s voice but chose to ignore it. He waited to see if Moretti would remember where he had seen the dead man. He watched the uniformed man study the photo, watched as his eyes moved off to the middle distance, then back to the photo.

Moretti got to his feet. ‘Wait here a couple of minutes, and I’ll see if anyone else recognizes him.’ When he got to the door, he turned and said, ‘Sure you don’t want a coffee, Commissario?’

‘Thanks, Moretti, but no.’ And the sergeant disappeared, leaving Brunetti to wait. In order to pass the time, Brunetti got to his feet and went over to the noticeboard next to the door and read the various Ministry bulletins pinned there. Opening for a job in Messina — as if anyone in their right mind would want to go there. Description of the proper way to wear the new bulletproof vests: Brunetti wondered if there could be more than one way to wear them. Duty roster for the coming Christmas holiday, which reminded him of his date with Paola at four.