Blood from a stone

2

The police arrived with a speed that astonished the Italian bystanders as much as it scandalized the Americans. To Venetians, half an hour did not seem a long time for the police to organize a boat and a squad of technicians and officers and reach Campo Santo Stefano, but by that time most of the Americans had drifted away in exasperation, telling one another that they would meet back at the hotel. No one bothered to keep an eye on the crime scene, so by the time the police finally did arrive, most of the bags had disappeared from the sheets, even from the one on which the body lay. Some of those who stole the dead man’s bags left red footprints on his sheet; one set disappeared towards Rialto in a bloody trail.
The first officer on the scene, Alvise, approached the small crowd that still stood near the dead man and ordered them to move back. He walked over to the man’s body and stood, looking down at him as if confused as to what to do now that he could see the victim. Finally, a lab technician asked him to move aside while he set up a wooden stanchion, and then another, and then another until they ringed the sheet. From one of the boxes the technicians had brought to the scene he took a roll of red and white striped tape and ran it through slots in the tops of the wooden stanchions until a clear demarcation had been created between the body and the rest of the world.
Alvise went over to a man who was standing by the steps of the church and demanded, ‘Who are you?’
‘Riccardo Lombardi,’ the man answered. He was tall, about fifty, well-dressed, the sort of person who sat behind a desk and gave orders, or so thought Alvise.
‘What are you doing here?’
Surprised at the policeman’s tone, the man answered, ‘I was walking by, and I saw this crowd, so I stopped.’
‘Did you see who did it?’
‘Did what?’
It occurred to Alvise only then that he had no idea what had been done, only that the Questura had received a call, saying that a black man was dead in Campo Santo Stefano. ‘Can you show me some identification?’ Alvise demanded.
The man took out his wallet and extracted his carta d’identità. Silently, he handed it to Alvise, who glanced at it before handing it back. ‘Did you see anything?’ he asked in the same voice.
‘I told you, officer. I was walking by, and I saw these people standing around here, so I stopped to look. Nothing more.’
‘All right. You can go,’ Alvise said in a tone that suggested the man really had no choice. Alvise turned away from him and went back to the crime team, where the photographers were already packing up their equipment.
‘Find anything?’ he asked one of the technicians.
Santini, who was on his knees, running his gloved hands over the paving stones in search of shell casings, looked up at Alvise and said, ‘A dead man,’ before returning to his search.
Not deterred by the answer, Alvise pulled out a notebook from the inside pocket of his uniform parka. He flipped it open, took out a pen, and wrote ‘Campo Santo Stefano’. He studied what he had written, glanced at his watch, added ‘20.58’, capped the pen, and returned both notebook and pen to his pocket.
From his right, he heard a familiar voice ask, ‘What’s going on, Alvise?’
Alvise raised a languid hand in something that resembled a salute and said, ‘I’m not sure, Commissario. We had a call, saying there was a dead man here, so we came over.’
His superior, Commissario Guido Brunetti, said, ‘I can see that, Alvise. What happened to cause the man to be dead?’
‘I don’t know, sir. We’re waiting for the doctor to get here.’
‘Who’s coming?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Who’s coming where, sir?’ Alvise asked, utterly at a loss.
‘Which doctor is coming? Do you know?’
‘I don’t know, sir. I was in such a hurry to get the team here that I told them at the Questura to call and have one of the doctors sent.’
Brunetti’s question was answered by the arrival of Dottor Ettore Rizzardi, medico legale of the city of Venice.
‘Ciao, Guido,’ Rizzardi said, shifting his bag to his left hand and offering his right. ‘What have we got?’
‘A dead man,’ Brunetti said. ‘I got the call at home, saying someone had been killed here, but nothing more than that. I just got here myself.’
‘Better have a look, then,’ Rizzardi said, turning towards the taped-off area. ‘You speak to anyone?’ he asked Brunetti.
‘No. Nothing.’ Talking to Alvise never counted.
Rizzardi bent and slipped under the tape, placing one hand on the pavement to do so, then held the tape up to make it easier for Brunetti to join him. The doctor turned to one of the technicians. ‘You’ve taken pictures?’
‘Sì, Dottore,’ the man answered. ‘From every side.’
‘All right, then,’ Rizzardi said, setting down his bag. He turned away, took out two pairs of thin plastic gloves and gave one pair to Brunetti. As they slipped them on, the doctor asked, ‘Give me a hand?’
They knelt on either side of the dead man. All that was visible was the right side of his face and his hands. Brunetti was struck by the very blackness of the man’s skin, then bemused by his own surprise: what other colour did he expect an African to be? Unlike the black Americans Brunetti had seen, with their shading from cocoa to copper, this man was the colour of ebony buffed to a high gloss.
Together, they reached under the body and turned the man on to his back. The intense cold had caused the blood to congeal. Their knees anchored the sheet, so when they moved him, his jacket stuck to the cloth and pulled away from both his body and the pavement with a sharp sucking sound. Hearing it, Rizzardi let the man’s shoulder fall back on to the ground; Brunetti lowered his side, saying nothing.
Points of blood-stiffened cloth stood up on the man’s chest, looking like the whorls a pastry chef’s fantasy might create on a birthday cake.
‘Sorry,’ Rizzardi said, either to Brunetti or the dead man. Still kneeling, he bent over and used a gloved finger to touch each of the holes in his parka. ‘Five of them,’ he said. ‘Looks like they really wanted to kill him.’
Brunetti saw that the dead man’s eyes were open; so too was his mouth, frozen in the panic that must have filled him at the first shot. He was a handsome young man, his teeth gleaming in striking contrast to that burnished skin. Brunetti slipped one hand into the right-hand pocket of the man’s parka, then the left. He found some small change and a used handkerchief. The inside pocket contained a pair of keys and a few Euro bills in small denominations. There was a ricevuta fiscale from a bar with a San Marco address, probably one of the bars in the campo. Nothing else.
‘Who’d want to kill a vu cumprà?’ Rizzardi asked, getting to his feet. ‘As if the poor devils don’t have enough as it is.’ He studied the man on the ground. ‘I can’t tell, looking at him like this, where they got him, but three of the holes are grouped pretty near the heart. One would have been enough to kill him.’ Stuffing his gloves into his pocket, Rizzardi asked, ‘Professional, you think?’
‘Looks like it to me,’ Brunetti answered, aware that this made the death even more confusing. He had never had to trouble himself with the vu cumprà because few of them were ever involved in serious crime, and those few cases had always fallen to other commissarios. Like most of the police, indeed, like most residents, Brunetti had always assumed that the men from Senegal were under the control of organized crime, the reason most often offered to explain their politeness in dealing with the public: so long as their manner did not call attention to them, few people would trouble to ask how they so successfully managed to remain invisible to and undisturbed by the authorities. Brunetti had come over the years no longer to notice them nor to remember when they had displaced the original French-speaking Algerian and Moroccan vu cumprà.
Though there was an occasional round-up and examination of documents, the vu cumprà had never attracted sufficient official attention to become the subject of one of Vice-Questore Patta’s ‘crime alerts’, which meant there had never been a serious attempt to address the patent illegality of their presence and their profession. They were left to ply their trade virtually untroubled by the forces of order, thus avoiding the bureaucratic nightmare that would surely result from any serious attempt to expel hundreds of undocumented aliens and return them to Senegal, the country from which most of them were believed to come.
Why then a killing like this, one that had the stamp of the professional all over it?
‘How old do you think he was?’ Brunetti asked for want of anything else to say.
‘I don’t know,’ Rizzardi answered with a puzzled shake of his head. ‘It’s hard for me to tell with blacks, not until I get inside them, but I’d guess in his early thirties, maybe younger.’
‘Do you have time?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Tomorrow afternoon, first thing. All right?’
Brunetti nodded.
Rizzardi leaned over and picked up his bag. Hefting it, he said, ‘I don’t know why I always bring this with me. It’s not as if I’m ever going to have to use it to save anyone.’ He thought about this, shrugged, and said, ‘Habit, I suppose.’ He put out his hand, shook Brunetti’s, and turned away.
Brunetti called to the technician who had taken the photos, ‘When you get him to the hospital, would you take a couple of shots of his face from different angles and get them to me as soon as you’ve got them developed?’
‘How many prints, sir?’
‘A dozen of each.’
‘Right. By tomorrow morning.’
Brunetti thanked him and waved over Alvise, who lurked just within earshot. ‘Did anyone see what happened?’ he asked.
‘No, sir.’
‘Who did you speak to?’
‘A man,’ Alvise answered, pointing in the direction of the church.
‘What was his name?’ Brunetti asked.
Alvise’s eyes widened in surprise he could not disguise. After a pause so long that anyone else would have found it embarrassing, the officer finally said, ‘I don’t remember, sir.’ At Brunetti’s silence, he protested, ‘He said he didn’t see anything, Commissario, so I didn’t need to take his name, did I?’
Brunetti turned to two white-coated attendants who were just arriving. ‘You can take him to the Ospedale, Mauro,’ he said. Then he added, ‘Officer Alvise will go with you.’
Alvise opened his mouth to protest, but Brunetti forestalled him by saying, ‘This way you can see if the hospital has admitted anyone with bullet wounds.’ It was unlikely, given the apparent accuracy of the five shots that had killed the African, but at least it would free him of Alvise’s presence.
‘Of course, Commissario,’ Alvise said, repeating his semi-salute. The officer watched as the two attendants stooped to pick up the body and place it on the stretcher, then led them back to their boat, walking purposefully, as though it was only through his intervention that they were sure of reaching it.
Turning, Brunetti called to a technician, who was now outside the taped circle, taking a close-up photo of the heel prints that led towards Rialto. ‘Is Alvise the only one who came?’
‘I think so, sir,’ the man answered. ‘Riverre was out on a domestic.’
‘Has anyone tried to find out if there were any witnesses?’ Brunetti asked.
The technician gave him a long look. ‘Alvise?’ was all he said before returning to his photos.
A group of teenagers stood against the wall of the garden. Brunetti approached them and asked, ‘Did any of you see what happened here?’
‘No, sir,’ one of them said, ‘we just got here now.’
Brunetti moved back to the cordoned area, where he saw three or four people. ‘Were any of you here when it happened?’ he asked.
Heads turned away, eyes glanced at the ground. ‘Did you see anything at all?’ he added, asking, not pleading.
A man at the back peeled himself away and started across the campo. Brunetti made no effort to stop him. As he stood there, the others dissolved until there was just one person left, an old woman who held herself upright only with the help of two canes. He knew her by sight, though she was usually in the company of two mangy old dogs. She balanced her right cane against her hip and beckoned him towards her. As he approached, he saw the wrinkled face, the dark eyes, the white bristles on her chin.
‘Yes, Signora?’ he asked. ‘Did you see something?’ Without thinking, he addressed her in Veneziano rather than Italian.
‘There were some Americans here when it happened.’
‘How did you know they were Americans, Signora?’ he asked.
‘They had white shoes and they were very loud,’ she answered.
‘When it happened?’ he insisted. ‘Were you here? Did you see?’
She took her right cane and lifted it to point in the direction of the pharmacy on the corner, about twenty metres away. ‘No, I was over there. Just coming in. I saw them, the Americans. They were walking this way, from the bridge, and then they all stopped to look at the stuff the vu cumprà had.’
‘And you, Signora?’
She moved her cane a few millimetres to the left. ‘I went into the bar.’
‘How long were you in there, Signora?’
‘Long enough.’
‘Long enough for what?’ he asked, smiling at her, not at all annoyed by her oblique answer.
‘Barbara, the owner, after about eight, she takes all the tramezzini that haven’t been sold, and she cuts them up into little pieces and puts them on the counter. If you buy a drink, you can eat all you want.’
This surprised Brunetti, unaccustomed as he was to such generosity from the owners of bars; from the owners of anything, for that matter.
‘She’s a good girl, Barbara,’ the old woman said. ‘I knew her mother.’
‘So how long do you think you were in there, Signora?’ he asked.
‘Maybe half an hour,’ she answered, then explained, ‘It’s my dinner, you see. I go there every night.’
‘Good to know, Signora. I’ll remember that if I’m ever over here.’
‘You’re over here now,’ she said, and when he didn’t respond, she went on: ‘The Americans, they went in there. Well, two of them did,’ she added, lifting the cane again and pointing at the bar.
‘They’re in the back, having hot chocolate. You could probably talk to them if you wanted to,’ she said.
‘Thank you, Signora,’ he said and turned towards the bar.
‘The prosciutto and carciofi is the best,’ she called after him.