Friends in High Places (16 page)

Outside, Vianello was standing by an old man, leaning forward to listen to whatever he had to say. When he saw Brunetti emerge, he patted the old man on the arm and turned away. As Brunetti approached, Vianello shook his head. ‘No one saw anything. No one knows anything.’

* * * *

13

With Vianello and the men from the technical squad, Brunetti rode back to the Questura on the police boat, glad of the air and the wind that, he hoped, would blow them free of the smell they had taken with them from the apartment. None of them mentioned it, but Brunetti knew he would not feel entirely clean until he had stripped himself of every piece of clothing he had worn that day and stood for a long time under the cleansing water of a shower. Even in the burgeoning heat of this late spring day, he longed equally for hot, steaming water and the hard feel of a rough cloth against every centimetre of his body.

The technicians carried the means of Marco’s death back to the Questura with them and, even though there was little chance of getting a second set of prints from the syringe that had killed him, there was some hope that the plastic bag he’d left lying on the kitchen table would provide them with something, even a fragment that might be matched with prints already on file.

When they arrived at the Questura, the pilot brought the boat in too quickly, slamming it up against the landing so hard that they were jostled about on the deck. One of the technicians grabbed Brunetti’s shoulder to prevent himself from falling down the steps and into the cabin. The pilot cut the motor and jumped ashore, grabbing the end of the rope that would anchor the boat to the landing deck and keeping himself busy with the knots. A silent Brunetti led the others off the boat and into the Questura.

Brunetti went directly to Signorina Elettra’s small office. She was talking on the phone when he came in, and when she saw him, she held up a hand, signalling him to wait. He came in slowly, concerned that he would carry in with him the terrible smell that still filled his imagination, if not his clothing. He noticed that the window was open, so he went and stood by it, beside a large vase of lilies whose oily sweetness filled the air around them with a sickly odour he had always loathed.

Sensing his restlessness, Signorina Elettra glanced across at him, held the receiver away from her ear and waved her other hand in the air, as if to suggest her lack of patience with the caller. She pulled the receiver back to her ear and muttered,
‘Si’
a few times without letting her impatience show in her voice. A minute passed, she held the phone away again, and then pulled it suddenly toward her, said thank you and goodbye, and hung up.

‘All that to tell me why he can’t come tonight,’ was all she offered by way of explanation. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to cause Brunetti to wonder what and where. And who. He said nothing.

‘How was it?’ she asked.

‘Bad,’ Brunetti answered. ‘He was twenty. And no one knows how long he’d been there.’

‘In this heat,’ she said, not as a question but as an expression of general sympathy.

Brunetti nodded. ‘It was drugs, an overdose.’

She said nothing to this but closed her eyes and then said, ‘I’ve been asking some people I know about drugs, but they all say the same thing, that Venice is a very small market.’ She paused, then added, ‘But it must be big enough for someone to have sold this boy whatever killed him.’ How strange, it seemed to Brunetti, to hear her refer to Marco as a ‘boy’: she couldn’t be much more than a decade older herself.

‘I have to call his parents,’ Brunetti said.

She looked at her watch, and Brunetti looked at his, amazed to discover that it was only ten past one. Death made real time meaningless, and it seemed to him that he had spent days in the apartment.

‘Why don’t you wait a little while, sir?’ Before he could ask, she explained. ‘That way, the father might be there and they’ll have finished lunch. It would be better for them if they were together when you tell them.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I hadn’t thought of that. I’ll wait.’ He had no idea of what he would do to fill the time between now and then.

Signorina Elettra reached forward and touched something on her computer. It made a sudden droning noise, and then the screen went blank. ‘I thought I’d stop now and go and have
un’ ombra
before lunch. Would you like to join me, sir?’ She smiled at her own flagrant boldness: a married man, her boss, and she was inviting him for a drink.

Brunetti, moved by the charity of it, said, ‘Yes, I’d like that, Signorina.’

* * * *

He made the call a little after two. A woman answered the phone, and Brunetti asked to speak to Signor Landi. He breathed silent, directionless thanks when she displayed no curiosity and said she’d get her husband.

‘Landi,’ a deep voice answered.

‘Signor Landi,’ Brunetti said, ‘This is Commissario Guido Brunetti. I’m calling from the Questura of Venice.’

Before he could go on, Landi cut him off, his own voice suddenly tight and loud. ‘Is it Marco?’

‘Yes, Signor Landi, it is.’

‘How bad is it?’ Landi asked in a softer voice.

‘I’m afraid it couldn’t be worse, Signor Landi.’

Silence drifted across the line. Brunetti imagined the man, the newspaper in his hand, standing at the phone and looking back toward the kitchen, where his wife was clearing up after the last peaceful meal she would ever have.

Landi’s voice grew almost inaudible, but there was only one thing he could have asked, so Brunetti filled in the missing sounds. ‘Is he dead?’

‘Yes, I’m sorry to tell you, he is.’

There was another pause, this one even longer, and then Landi asked, ‘When?’

‘We found him today.’

‘Who did?’

‘The police. A neighbour called.’ Brunetti could not bring himself to give the details or to talk about the time that had passed since Marco died. ‘He said he hadn’t seen Marco recently and called us to check on the apartment. When we did, we found him.’

‘Was it drugs?’

No autopsy had been performed. The mechanism of the state had not yet considered the evidence surrounding the boy’s death, had not weighed and considered it and brought judgement as to the cause of his death; thus it would be rash and so irresponsible as to merit official reprimand for an officer of the law to venture his own opinion in this matter. ‘Yes,’ Brunetti said.

The man on the other end of the line was crying. Brunetti heard the long, deep gasps as he choked on his grief and fought for air. A minute passed. Brunetti held the phone away from him and looked off to the left, where a plaque on the wall gave the names of police officers who had died in the First World War. He started to read their names, the dates of their birth and the dates of their death. One had been only twenty, the same age as Marco.

From the receiver, he heard the dim sound of a higher voice, raised in curiosity or fear, but then the sound was cut off as Landi covered the phone with his hand. Another minute passed. Then he could hear Landi’s voice. Brunetti pulled the phone to his ear, but all he heard was Landi saying, ‘I’ll call you back’, and the connection was broken.

While he sat and waited, Brunetti considered the nature of this crime. If Guerriero was right and Marco had died because his body had grown unaccustomed to the terrible shock of heroin during the time he hadn’t been using it, then what crime had been committed other than the sale of a prohibited substance? And what sort of crime was that, to sell heroin to an addict, and where existed the judge to treat it as more than a misdemeanour? If, instead, the heroin that killed him had been laced with something dangerous or lethal, how to determine at what point along the trail that stretched from the poppy fields of the East to the veins of the West that substance had been added, and by whom?

No matter how he considered it, there was no way Brunetti could see that this crime would have serious legal consequences. Nor could he see much likelihood that the identity of the person responsible would ever be discovered. And yet the young student who drew the whimsical rabbits and had the wit to hide them in different places in each of his drawings was no less dead for that.

He got up from his desk and stood at the window. The sun beat down on Campo San Lorenzo. All of the men who lived in the old-age home had answered the summons to sleep, leaving the
campo
to the cats and the people who crossed it at this hour. Brunetti leaned forward, resting his hands on the sill, and watched the
campo
as if in search of an omen. After half an hour, Landi called to say that he and his wife would arrive in Venice at seven that evening and asked how they could get to the Questura.

When Landi answered that, yes, they would be coming by train, Brunetti said he would meet them and take them to the hospital by boat.

‘The hospital?’ Landi asked, hopeless hope springing into his voice.

‘I’m sorry, Signor Landi. It’s where they’re taken.’

‘Ah,’ was Landi’s only answer, and again he broke the connection.

Later that afternoon, Brunetti called a friend who ran a hotel in Campo Santa Marina and asked if he had a double room available that he would hold for some people who might stay the night. People called somewhere by disaster forgot about things like eating and sleeping and all those intrusive details showing that life continued.

He asked Vianello to come with him, telling himself it would be easier for the Landis to recognize the police if someone in uniform met their train, though part of him knew that Vianello was the best person to take along, for himself as much as for the Landis.

The train was on time, and Marco’s parents were easy to spot as they came down the platform. She was a tall, spare woman in a grey dress that had been badly wrinkled by the trip: she wore her hair in a small bun at the back of her head, a fashion that was decades out of date. Her husband held her arm, and anyone who saw them could see that it was not a gesture of courtesy or habit: she walked unsteadily, as if in the grip of drink or illness. Landi was short and muscular, with an iron-hard body that spoke of a lifetime spent at work, hard work. In other circumstances, Brunetti might have seen the contrast between them as comic, but not now. Landi’s face was to the darkness of leather; his pale hair provided thin protection to his scalp, which was tanned the same colour as his face. He had the look of a man who spent all of his days outside, and Brunetti remembered the mother’s letter about spring planting.

They saw Vianello’s uniform, and Landi led his wife toward it. Brunetti introduced himself and his sergeant and explained that they had a boat waiting. Only Landi shook hands; only he was capable of speech. His wife could do no more than nod toward them and wipe at her eyes with her left hand.

It was quickly done. At the hospital, Brunetti suggested that Signor Landi alone identify Marco, but they both insisted on going into the room to see their son. Brunetti and Vianello waited outside, neither speaking. When the Landis emerged, some minutes later, both were sobbing openly. Procedure demanded that some formal identification be made, that the person who identified the body do so in speech or writing to the accompanying official.

When they had calmed down, the only thing Brunetti said was, ‘I’ve taken the liberty of reserving you a room for the night, if you’d prefer to stay.’

Landi turned to his wife, but she shook her head.

‘No. We’ll go back, sir. I think it’s better. There’s a train at eight thirty. We checked before we came.’

He was right: it was better this way, Brunetti knew. Tomorrow would be the autopsy, and any parent should be spared that or the knowledge of that. He led them out the emergency entrance of the hospital and back to the police boat at the dock. Bonsuan saw them coming and had the boat unmoored even before they reached it. Vianello took Signora Landi’s arm and helped her on board and then down into the cabin. Brunetti took Landi’s arm as they stepped aboard but with gentle pressure stopped him from following his wife down the steps into the cabin.

As accustomed to boats as to breathing, Bonsuan moved them smoothly away from the dock, running the motor at a low speed so that their passage was virtually silent. Landi kept his eyes lowered toward the water, unwilling to look at this city that had taken his son’s life.