Blood from a stone

20

About an hour after Brunetti got back to his office, his phone rang. He answered with his name.
‘I asked that person,’ Sandrini said without introduction. ‘That is, I got him talking about that subject, and he said the job was given to people from Rome, who were sent up to do it.’
‘What about the guns? They have metal detectors at the airports now, you know,’ Brunetti said, irritated by Sandrini’s attempt to speak in code and hoping to irritate him, too. Getting a gun in Venice would be no problem to men with the right connections.
‘You ever hear about the train?’ Sandrini asked savagely. ‘It runs on metal tracks, goes back and forth between here and Rome. Goes choo choo choo.’
Ignoring his remark, Brunetti asked, ‘Is that all he said, that they were from Rome?’
‘What did you expect me to do, ask for their names and addresses, and maybe a confession to make things easier for you?’ Sandrini shouted, all thought of code or discretion tossed aside. ‘Of course that’s all he said. I’m not going to ask him about it directly, not after mentioning it once. He’d smell that a kilometre away.’
Brunetti had to admit Sandrini was right: there was no way he could ask his father-in-law about the killers without calling down suspicion on himself. He might have been able to talk his way out of the time with the prostitute: after all, some Mafiosi had survived the suspicion of adultery. But none of them, at least to Brunetti’s knowledge, had survived the suspicion of disloyalty.
‘Thank you,’ Brunetti said.
‘What?’ Sandrini demanded. ‘I risk my life and you say “thank you”.’ That was followed by a number of remarks calling into question the virtue of Brunetti’s mother as well as that of the Madonna, whereupon Brunetti thought it expedient to replace the receiver.
‘Roma, Roma, Roma,’ Brunetti whispered under his breath. In the past, he would have expected killers to come from farther south, but this was a multi-cultural world now, so hit-men could come from anywhere. He thought back over what Sandrini had said: they had been sent up from Rome to do the job. The fact that his father-in-law knew about it certainly implied that the killers were Mafia hit-men, but it did not necessarily mean that the Mafia had ordered the killing. He wondered if there were some pleasant freemasonry among hired killers and if, even when they were not involved, they knew what their fellow killers got up to, perhaps even sat around in small groups and speculated about how much their colleagues might have been paid for various jobs. The grotesqueness of this idea did not negate its possibility.
His phone rang again, and when he answered he was surprised to find himself speaking to his wife. ‘You never call me here,’ he said.
‘Almost never.’
‘All right, almost never. What is it?’
‘The university.’
‘The exams?’ he asked, certain that she had come upon some information about her colleagues in the Department of the Science of Law and had not been able to wait until that evening to tell him.
‘Exams?’ she asked, her confusion audible.
‘In the Science of Law Department,’ he said.
‘No, no, I don’t know anything about that. It’s about your black man.’
Though he was tempted to object that the black man was hardly his black man, Brunetti asked merely, ‘What about him?’
‘I did what you asked: asked my friend, and he mentioned someone he used to work with who’s a specialist in this sort of thing.’
‘What sort of thing?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Fetishes. He tells me this woman is the European expert on African fetishes.’ The fact that Paola made no comment on the strangeness of this discipline suggested to Brunetti that she found it a perfectly legitimate field of expertise, and that in its turn suggested that she was spending too much time among academics.
‘And?’
‘And I have her number in Geneva,’ Paola answered, ‘and you should call her and ask.’
‘Geneva?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Afraid of speaking French?’
‘About something as complicated as all of this, yes,’ he said.
‘Don’t worry,’ Paola said. ‘She’s Swiss.’
‘And that means?’
‘They speak everything,’ she said, gave him the number, and hung up.
So it turned out to be with Professor Winter: she spoke some Italian, good English and German, and, it seemed, the languages of the five African regions in which she did research. To his surprise, she displayed no curiosity about why the police were asking her to help identify a dead man, only asked Brunetti to describe the object he wanted identified.
‘It’s a kind of pattern, made of triangles,’ he said in English. ‘It’s on a carved wooden head, about five centimetres tall, that looks like it was broken off something, probably a statue. And on a man’s body.’
‘Where?’ she asked.
‘On his stomach.’
‘And the head: is it a man or a woman?’ she asked.
‘A woman, I think.’
‘You say you have this object?’
‘Yes,’ Brunetti said. ‘And there are photos,’ he added. ‘Of the body, as well.’
He waited for her to speak, but when she remained silent, he asked, ‘Is there any information you might give me, Professor, however tentative, from what I’ve told you?’
After a brief hesitation, she said, ‘Not until I see the photos. Anything I said now would just be speculation.’
Brunetti was struck by how much she sounded like the worst of Paola’s colleagues, the ones who saw information as something to be measured out and bestowed only on the deserving.
‘Excuse me,’ Professor Winter said, and her voice moved away from the phone as she spoke to someone in the room with her. After a moment, she returned and said, ‘Can you send me the photos?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good,’ she answered and gave him her email address, spelling it out. ‘Could they be sent to me soon?’ she asked.
‘I’d prefer to send you the actual photos,’ Brunetti said, giving no explanation. ‘If you give me the university address, I can post them to you today.’ He had Rizzardi’s photo of the mark on the man’s body, and he had already used a police Polaroid to take a photo of the head.
‘Ah,’ Professor Winter said. She gave him her address at the university and then added, ‘Perhaps things are done differently in Switzerland.’
‘Are you familiar with police work, Professor?’
‘Not particularly, no,’ she said neutrally. ‘I’ve been asked a few times to identify objects or people who have been killed, based on what I know about Africa.’
‘Oh, I see,’ Brunetti said, then asked, ‘Often?’
‘Not in Switzerland, no. By Interpol,’ she answered.
‘Is it common, then, that Africans are killed in Europe?’ he asked, as surprised as he was curious.
‘Not as often as they are in Africa,’ she answered coolly.
‘And why are they killed, if I might ask?’
‘That’s for the police,’ she answered. ‘My part is merely to help them in their attempt to identify the dead.’
‘Men?’ he asked.
‘Just as often women, unfortunately,’ she replied.
It was evident to Brunetti that Professor Winter was tiring of his questions, and so he said, ‘I’ll have the photos sent as quickly as I can, Professor. I’d appreciate it if you could tell us where you think the pattern comes from.’
‘Anything I can do to help,’ she said politely and hung up.
He depressed the receiver, dialled the squad room, and asked if Pucetti was there. The officer who answered said Pucetti was just leaving to answer a call and set the phone down noisily. When Pucetti picked it up a few moments later, Brunetti asked him to come up to his office. While he waited for him, Brunetti addressed an envelope to Professor Winter and enclosed photos of the wooden head and of the scar on the dead man’s stomach. Just before he sealed it, Brunetti decided to slip one of the photos of the man’s face inside.
Pucetti knocked and came in, and when Brunetti explained what he wanted him to do, Pucetti said he was on his way to answer a call about a burglary at a pharmacy in Santa Croce, then added that there was no real hurry to get there, so he could have the boat stop at the post office on the way.
‘Fabio and Carlo?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Who else breaks into pharmacies?’ Pucetti’s question was entirely rhetorical, but his anger was real. Fabio Villatico and Carlo Renda were two local drug addicts, both in the terminal stages of AIDS and who thus could not be sent to prison. During the day they begged money from tourists and at night, if their begging failed to raise the necessary cash, they broke into pharmacies and stole drugs, mixing themselves intravenous cocktails that as often contained cold and flu remedies as anything else. The results of their experiments had landed them in the Emergency Room countless times, and each time they had survived, though the doctors at the hospital had long since declared their immune systems so fragile that the first cold or bout of flu was sure to carry them off.
In the face of Pucetti’s obvious disgust at the two men, Brunetti said nothing about his own awkward sympathy for them. Neither had ever held a job, neither of them appeared to have had a lucid interval in the last decade, but still neither had ever resorted to violence, not even verbal resistance to the abuse they sometimes encountered.
‘Overnight express?’ Pucetti asked, recalling Brunetti’s attention.
‘Yes. And thank you, Pucetti.’
The officer saluted and left, leaving Brunetti faintly troubled by the difference in their response to the two drug addicts. Pucetti’s was the generation that was all in favour of sentiment, sharing other people’s pain, voicing compassion for the downtrodden, yet Brunetti often found in them traces of a ruthlessness that chilled his spirit and made him fearful for the future. He wondered if the cheap sentimentality of television and film had sent them into some sort of emotional insulin shock and suffocated their ability to feel empathy with the unappealing victims of the mess that real life created.
Carlo was festooned with badly drawn tattoos and moved about the city with the nervous eagerness of a crab, while Fabio often stank of urine and was a stranger to reason. In all the years he had known them, Brunetti had never given them money and longed to see them removed from the streets, but passing by them filled him with a vague unease, as though he were somehow responsible for their plight.
To distract himself from thoughts of the two doomed men, Brunetti checked the internal police phone list and dialled Moretti’s number.
‘Ah, Commissario,’ he said when Brunetti gave his name. ‘I’ve wanted to call you all day, but we’ve been invaded.’
‘Tourists?’ Brunetti asked, intending it as a joke.
‘Gypsies. There must be a gang in town: we’ve had nine people in here this morning, all telling the same old story: the little kids with the newspapers.’
‘I thought they used that in Rome,’ Brunetti said, remembering what it was like to be surrounded by a band of small children, all waving papers in front of their faces and yelling to distract the victim long enough for another one of them to grab wallet or purse.
‘They do, but they use it here now, too, it seems.’
‘Have you got any of them?’ Brunetti asked.
‘So far, three, but they’re all minors or look as though they are, so all we can do is ask their names and record them. Then they make a phone call, and soon someone with the same last name comes and picks them up and takes them away.’ Moretti let out a disgusted sigh and added, ‘I don’t even bother any more to tell them they have to send the kids to school, just like I don’t bother to tell the adults we arrest that they have to leave the country within forty-eight hours. The last time I told someone that, he laughed at me, right in my face.’ Another pause. ‘It’s a good thing I didn’t hit him.’
‘No sense in that, is there?’ Brunetti asked neutrally.
‘Of course not. But there are times when it would feel so good to be able to do it.’
‘Not worth it, though, is it?’
‘Of course not. But that doesn’t stop me wanting to.’
Thinking it better to change the subject, Brunetti said, ‘Was it about that black man? Did you remember where you saw him?’
‘No, I didn’t, but Cattaneo did.’ Before Brunetti could ask, he continued, ‘We were out on a call one night about two months ago. Late, maybe two in the morning, and some guy came out of a bar and came running after us. He said he wanted us to come back with him because there was going to be a fight. It was over near Campo Santa Margherita. But by the time we got there, there wasn’t much left of the argument.’
‘And he was there?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Yes, and I’d say it was a good thing it was stopped before it got any worse.’
‘Why?’
‘The other two. Both of them were twice his size. The only thing that stopped it going any further, I think, was the other people in the bar. Well, and then we walked in, and that helped quiet things down.’
‘This was at two in the morning?’ Brunetti asked, making no attempt to disguise his astonishment.
‘Times have changed, Commissario,’ Moretti said, but then qualified that by adding, ‘or maybe it’s only the area around Campo Santa Margherita that’s changed. All those bars, the pizzerias, the music places. It’s never quiet there at night any more. Some of them are open until two or three in the morning.’
Brunetti interrupted him by asking, ‘And the black man?’
‘There were a couple of men in the bar, standing between him and two others, the ones I’d say he’d been arguing with, keeping them apart.’ Moretti considered this, then added, ‘I don’t think it was much of anything, really. As I said, it looked like things had quieted down before we got there: no chairs turned over, nothing broken. Just this atmosphere in the air and three other men – might have been four of them – standing between them and sort of holding them apart.’
‘Did you learn what the argument was about?’
‘No. One of the others – I guess I could call him one of the peacekeepers – said the men had been sitting at a table, talking, when they started to argue. He said the black guy got up and headed for the door, and the men with him went after him and tried to pull him back to the table. That’s when this guy saw us walk by and came out to get us.’
‘How long before you went inside?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Couple of minutes, I’d say.’
‘You said Cattaneo remembered him?’
‘Yes. I showed him the picture, and he recognized him immediately. And then I did, too, once he reminded me. It was the same guy.’
‘What did you do?’ Brunetti asked.
‘We asked to see their papers.’
‘And.’
‘And he had a permesso di soggiorno.’
‘What did it say?’ Brunetti asked.
‘It gave his name and place of birth,’ Moretti said, and then added, ‘I suppose.’
‘Why only suppose?’
‘Because I don’t remember any of the details.’ Before Brunetti could question this, Moretti said, ‘I must look at a hundred of them a week, sir. I look to see that the seal is right and the photo matches the person and hasn’t been tampered with, but the names are strange, and I usually don’t pay attention to the country where they’re from.’ Then he added, ‘Cattaneo can’t remember, either.’ Sensing Brunetti’s disappointment, the sergeant said, ‘All I remember is the accent.’
‘What accent?’
‘When this guy spoke Italian – he spoke it pretty well – he had an accent.’
‘And?’ Brunetti asked, then, ‘He was an African, wasn’t he?’
‘Yes, of course, but his accent was different. I mean the Senegalesi all sound pretty much the same: some French, some of their own language. We all recognize the accent by now; those of us who arrest them. But this guy’s was different.’
‘Different how?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. It just sounded strange.’ Moretti hesitated, as if trying to recapture the sound, but the memory was clearly beyond his reach, and all he said was, ‘No, I can’t describe it better than that.’
‘And Cattaneo?’
‘I asked. He said he wasn’t even aware of it.’
Brunetti let this go and asked, ‘And the other men? Were they black, too?’
‘No. Italian. Both of them had carte d’identità,’ Moretti answered.
‘Do you remember anything about them?’
‘No, only that they weren’t Venetian.’
‘Where did they come from?’
‘Rome.’