Friends in High Places (14 page)

‘No.’ Rizzardi’s answer was so immediate that Brunetti realized he must have been waiting for the question. He waited for Brunetti to go on. But Brunetti could think of nothing better to ask than a vague, ‘Anything else?’

‘No. He was healthy and would have lived a long time.’

‘Poor devil.’

‘The man in the morgue said you knew him. Was he a friend?’

Brunetti didn’t hesitate. ‘Yes, he was.’

* * * *

12

Brunetti called the office of Telecom and identified himself as a police officer. He explained that he was trying to trace a phone number but lacked the city code, as he had only the last seven digits, and asked if Telecom could give him the names of the cities where this number existed. Without thinking of verifying the authenticity of his call, without so much as the suggestion that she call him back at the Questura, the woman asked him to hang on a moment while she consulted her computer, and put him on hold. At least there was no music. She was quickly back and told him that the possibilities were Piacenza, Ferrara, Aquilea, and Messina.

Brunetti then asked to be given the names of the people for whom those four numbers were listed, at which point the woman retreated behind Telecom rules, the law of privacy, and ‘approved policy’. She explained that she needed a phone call from the police or from some other organ of the state. Patiently, keeping his voice calm, Brunetti explained again that he was a commissario of police: she could call him at the Questura of Venice. When she asked for the number, Brunetti resisted the temptation to ask if she might not be better advised to check the number in the phone book to be sure she was in fact calling the Questura. Instead, he gave her the number, repeated his name, and hung up. The phone rang almost immediately, and the woman read out four names and addresses.

The names told him nothing. The Piacenza number was a car rental agency, that of Ferrara was for joint names that could be a business office or even a shop. The other two were, presumably, private residences. He dialled the Piacenza number, waited, and when the phone was answered by a man, said he was calling from the Venice police and would like them to check their records and see if they had rented a car to or were familiar with a man called Franco Rossi from Venice. The man asked Brunetti to hold on, covered the phone, and spoke to someone else. A woman then asked him to repeat his request. After he had, he was again told to wait a moment. The moment stretched into a few minutes, but eventually the woman came back and said she was sorry to report they had no record of a client by that name.

On the Ferrara number there was only a message announcing that he had reached the office of Gavini and Cappelli and asking him to leave his name, number, and the reason for his call. He hung up.

In Aquilea he reached what sounded like an old woman who said she had never heard of Franco Rossi. The Messina number was no longer in service.

He had found no driver’s licence in Rossi’s wallet. Even though many Venetians didn’t drive, he might still have had one: the absence of roads was hardly enough to prevent an Italian from exercising his lust for speed. He called down to the drivers’ licence office and was told that licences had been given to nine Franco Rossis. Brunetti checked Rossi’s identification card from the Ufficio Catasto and gave Rossi’s date of birth: no licence had been issued to him.

He tried the number in Ferrara again, but there was still no answer. His phone rang.

‘Commissario?’ It was Vianello.

‘Yes.’

‘We’ve just had a call from the station over in Cannaregio.’

‘The one by Tre Archi?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘What is it?’

‘They responded to a call from a man who said there was a smell coming from the apartment above his, a bad smell.’

Brunetti waited; it took very little imagination to know what was coming: police commissari were not called about bad plumbing or abandoned garbage.

‘He was a student,’ Vianello said, cutting off further speculation.

‘What was it?’

‘It looks like an overdose. At least that’s what they said.’

‘How long ago did the call come in?’

‘About ten minutes.’

‘I’ll come along.’

When they left the Questura, Brunetti was surprised by the heat. Strangely enough, although he always knew the day and usually the date, he very often had to pause to recall whether it was spring or autumn. So when he felt the heat of the day, he had to shake himself free of this strange disorientation before he recalled that it was spring and that the growing heat was to be expected.

There was a different pilot that day, Pertile, a man Brunetti found
antipatico.
They climbed aboard, Brunetti and Vianello and the two men from the technical squad. One of them cast off and they headed out into the
bacino
and then quickly turned back into the Arsenale Canal. Pertile turned on the siren and sped through the dead calm waters of the Arsenale, cutting in front of a 52 vaporetto that was just pulling away from the Tana boat stop. ‘This isn’t a nuclear evacuation, Pertile,’ Brunetti said.

The pilot looked back at the men on deck, lowered one hand from the wheel, and the noise of the siren was cut off. It seemed to Brunetti that the pilot urged the boat to greater speed, but he stopped himself from saying anything. At the back of the Arsenale, Pertile swung sharply to the left and past the usual stops: the hospital, Fondamenta Nuove, La Madonna dell’Orto, San Alvise, and then turned into the beginning of the Cannaregio Canal. Just after the first boat stop, they saw a police officer standing on the
riva
and waving to them as they approached.

Vianello tossed him the rope, and he bent to fix it to an iron ring. When he saw Brunetti, the officer on the
riva
saluted, then extended a hand to help him from the boat.

‘Where is he?’ Brunetti asked as soon as his feet were again on firm ground.

‘Down this
calle,
sir,’ he said, turning away from Brunetti and into a narrow street that ran back from the water toward the interior of Cannaregio.

The others filed off the boat, and Vianello turned to tell Pertile to wait for them. Brunetti walking next to the officer, the others in single file behind them, they started down the narrow
calle.

They didn’t have far to go, and they didn’t have any trouble in finding the right house: about twenty metres along, a small crowd of people stood clustered in front of a doorway, in which a uniformed officer stood, arms folded.

As Brunetti approached, a man broke away from the crowd but made no attempt to walk toward the policemen. He simply moved away from the others and stood still, hands on his hips, watching the police draw near. He was tall, almost cadaverous, and had the worst drinker’s nose Brunetti had ever seen: inflamed, enlarged, pitted, and virtually blue at the end. It made Brunetti think of faces he’d once seen in a painting by some Dutch Master - was it of Christ carrying His cross? - horrible, distorted faces boding nothing but pain and evil for all who came within their malignant compass.

In a low voice, Brunetti asked, ‘That the man who found him?’

‘Yes, sir,’ answered the policeman who had met the boat. ‘He lives on the first floor.’

They approached the man, who stuffed his hands into his pockets and started to rock back and forth on his heels, as if he had important work to get on with and resented the police for keeping him from it.

Brunetti stopped in front of him. ‘Good morning, sir. Is it you who called us?’ he asked.

‘Yes, I did. I’m surprised you took the trouble to get here so fast,’ he said, his voice as filled with rancour and hostility as his breath was with alcohol and coffee.

‘You live below him?’ Brunetti asked neutrally.

‘Yeah, I’ve been there for seven years, and if that shit, my landlord, thinks he can get me out by giving me an eviction notice, I’ll tell him where he can shove it.’ He spoke with the accent of Giudecca and, like many of the natives of that island, seemed to think that scurrility was as essential to speech as air to breathing.

‘How long has he lived here?’

‘Doesn’t live here any more, does he?’ the man asked and bent over to engage in a prolonged laugh that ended in a bout of coughing.

‘How long
had
he lived here?’ Brunetti asked when the man stopped coughing.

The man stood upright and took a closer look at Brunetti. In his turn, Brunetti observed the white patches that peeled away from the reddened skin of the man’s face and the yellowed eyes that told of jaundice.

‘A couple of months. You’ll have to ask the landlord. I just saw him on the stairs.’

‘Did anyone come to visit him?’

‘I don’t know,’ the man said with sudden truculence. ‘I keep my business to myself. Besides, he was a student. I don’t have anything to say to people like that. Little shits, think they know everything.’

‘Did he behave like that?’ Brunetti asked.

The man considered this for a moment, surprised at having to examine a specific case to see if it conformed to his general prejudice. After a long time, he said, ‘No, but like I told you, I just saw him a few times.’

‘Give your name to the sergeant, please,’ Brunetti said and turned away, indicating the young man who had greeted the boat. He walked up the two steps that led to the front door, where he was saluted by the officer standing there. From behind him he heard the man he’d questioned call out, ‘His name was Marco.’

When Vianello approached, Brunetti asked him to see what he could learn from the people in the neighbourhood. The sergeant turned away and the officer stepped forward. ‘Second floor, sir,’ he said.

Brunetti looked up the narrow staircase. Behind him, the policeman snapped on the light, but the low-wattage bulb made little difference, as if reluctant to illuminate the general squalor. Paint and cement had flaked off the walls and been kicked into small dunes on either side by the people who used the stairs. Here and there, cigarette butts and bits of paper lay on top of or stuck out from the dunes.

Brunetti climbed the steps. The smell met him on the first landing. Close, dense, penetrating, it spoke of rot and vileness and something inhumanly unclean. As he drew closer to the second floor, the smell grew stronger, and Brunetti had a terrible moment in which he visualized the avalanche of molecules, falling over him, clinging to his clothing, cascading into his nose and throat, always carrying with it the horrible reminder of mortality.

A third policeman, looking very pale in the dim light, stood at the door to the apartment. Brunetti was sorry to see that it was closed because it meant the smell would be much worse when they opened it again. The officer saluted and stepped away very quickly, and didn’t stop until he was four steps from the door.

‘You can go downstairs,’ Brunetti said, aware that the boy must have been there for almost an hour. ‘Go outside.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ he said and saluted again before walking very quickly around Brunetti and launching himself down the stairs.

Behind him, Brunetti heard the various clumps and clatters of the technical team as they carried up their bags of tools.

He resisted the impulse to draw a deep breath; instead he drew up his courage and reached for the door. Before he could open it, however, one of the technical men called out, ‘Commissario, take this first.’ When Brunetti turned, the man was ripping open the plastic covering around a surgical mask. He handed one to Brunetti, then one to his colleague. They all slipped the elastic strings around their ears and pulled the masks up over their mouths and noses, all of them glad to breathe in the sharp odour of the chemicals with which the masks had been treated.

Brunetti opened the door, and the smell assaulted them, slicing through the chemicals. He glanced up and saw that all of the windows had been opened, probably by the police, and that the crime scene was, in a sense, contaminated. There was, however, little need to protect this scene; Cerberus himself would have fled, howling, from the smell.