The Golden Egg

7





When he reached his office the next day, he found a note on his desk, asking him to call Dottor Rizzardi. After he and the pathologist had exchanged greetings, Rizzardi said, ‘This Cavanella doesn’t exist.’

‘I beg your pardon,’ Brunetti said. ‘You did an autopsy on him yesterday.’

Rizzardi weighed that for sarcasm and apparently heard none. ‘I’m sorry, Guido; I was probably speaking for effect. The secretary here called the Ufficio Anagrafe to report his death, but they have no record of him at that address.’

‘Then he’s resident somewhere else,’ Brunetti said, almost embarrassed at having to state the obvious.

‘Not in the city,’ Rizzardi said tersely. ‘The office checked when we asked: he’s not now and has never been resident in Venice.’

‘Then in the Veneto, I’d guess,’ Brunetti said, thinking back to the very few words he had heard the mother say and recalling the telltale Veneto cadence.

‘That’s not our job, Guido,’ Rizzardi said with unexpected force. ‘We don’t have to identify them, only find the cause of death.’

‘I went to his home,’ Brunetti explained, ‘but his mother refused to talk to me.’

Rizzardi did not comment on that. He stated the rules: ‘Until we have an identification, we have to keep him here.’

‘I know,’ Brunetti answered. Then, thinking of how the man might be identified, he asked, ‘How old do you think he was?’

‘I’d guess he was in his early forties,’ Rizzardi said. Then, as an afterthought, letting the doctor in him speak, ‘He was in excellent physical condition. His teeth showed signs of very little work. No sign of surgery, organs in perfect shape.’

‘Are you sure about the age?’ Brunetti asked, amazed that a face could so long have remained untouched by time and care, but he knew better than to question the pathologist’s judgement.

‘It’s surprising, I know,’ Rizzardi agreed. ‘I’ve seen it before. The less contact people have with the world, the less they age.’

‘He wasn’t a hermit, Ettore,’ Brunetti said, trying for lightness.

‘All I know about him is what you told me, Guido: he was deaf and simple-minded,’ Rizzardi said. ‘I’ve seen cases of it before, and I’m trying to give you an explanation based on experience. With retarded people – or whatever we’re supposed to call them now – and the blind, they don’t seem to age the way the rest of us do, or at least their bodies don’t show it the way ours do.’ When Brunetti failed to comment, the pathologist clarified, ‘From looking at his organs, and his teeth, that’s my estimate.’

In some way Brunetti did not understand, Rizzardi’s explanation made sense. Less contact with the world: less suffering. But less joy. ‘Thanks, Ettore. It might help. I’ll try to confirm at least his name. I’ll call you when I do.’

‘It’s what was on the paper that came with him,’ Rizzardi said. ‘I don’t know anything more than that.’

‘I’ll call.’

‘Good,’ Rizzardi said, and was gone.

Brunetti pulled the cover sheet of a report on an attempted escape from the local prison towards him. Because the escape had failed, he saw no reason to keep or pass on the report. He flipped it over, wrote Cavanella’s name and address at the top, and began to make a list. He’d need to locate a birth certificate, or a baptismal certificate. There was the dead man’s carta d’identità, which would most likely be in his house, and a card for the medical services he was sure to have been receiving. Brunetti doubted that Davide Cavanella would have a criminal record, but he could check that, as well. School records.

He sat and puzzled over the places where a person might be hidden. He had played the game as a boy, he and his friends lurking and disappearing in the calli and entrance ways of his neighbourhood and, as they grew older, farther and farther from home. The memory came to him now of how he had hidden, one spring day, beneath the canvas cover of a boat moored not far from his home and managed to fall asleep under it.

It was a desperate, high-pitched voice calling his name that woke him and catapulted him out from under the cloth. His mother stood on the Fondamenta della Tana, wearing her house slippers and her apron, her hair hanging partly loose on one side. At the sudden sight of her amidst his friends, Brunetti saw the grey in her hair for the first time and noticed how very poorly she was dressed, with a patched apron and a sweater darned at both elbows. For the first time in his life, seeing her there, in front of his friends, Brunetti felt ashamed of her, and then of himself for feeling this.

When she saw him, his mother came to the edge of the riva and reached down a hand to help him scramble back up. Her grip was firm, and he was surprised that she could so easily haul him up beside her.

He stood in front of her, head bowed, almost as tall as she, and muttered, ‘I fell asleep, Mamma. I’m sorry.’

He had seen the looks on the faces of his friends. To be guests of her hospitality was one thing, but to see her out here, dressed for the kitchen and screaming her son’s name . . . that was quite different. What would they think of him? And of her?

He saw her right hand move, and he stood rigid, fearing the blow he knew he deserved. Instead, she ruffled his hair and said, ‘Then it’s a good thing I came and found you, isn’t it, tesoro, or else you might have been baked like a chicken in the oven down there and no one knowing what was happening to you.’ She waited for him to respond, perhaps to laugh, but he was paralysed by love and unable to speak.

‘And no one to baste you with olive oil, either,’ she said with a laugh. Taking his hand in hers, she turned and led him back towards home, inviting all of his friends to come back with them and have a piece of the cake she had just pulled out of the oven.

Had Davide Cavanella’s mother baked for him and his friends? Had she invited them back to the house in San Polo? Brunetti’s train of thought stopped on the riva of his imagination and asked him why he thought Davide Cavanella had friends. Apparently speechless, how could he communicate enough to make a friend other than by using sign, had he known to use it?

Brunetti drew lines from the pieces of information he thought he needed and connected them to the people or places that might provide them. Applications for all of his documents would be – or should be, he reminded himself – kept at the Ufficio Anagrafe. Their own files would have records of any arrests, though Brunetti still found this difficult to believe. Signorina Elettra could certainly find any other indications left to bureaucracy by Cavanella’s passing through this world.

But where could he find out if Davide had had any friends, and if his mother – if the woman who opened the door was his mother – had baked cakes for him or for him and his friends? He got to his feet and went downstairs to start Signorina Elettra in pursuit of the answers to the first questions.

Brunetti began by asking her if the presentation the previous day had been interesting.

Did she sniff? ‘Amateurs,’ she said, then looked up and asked, ‘What is it, Commissario?’

When he had explained that Cavanella was not registered as resident in the city, though he had lived there for decades, he handed her the list of the information he wanted.

She studied it for long moments, then set it to the side of her computer, saying, ‘You know you could do this officially.’ He did not understand the reluctance he sensed in her. Usually a chance to make a visit – an unauthorized visit, it must be admitted – to the database of any city office was to invite Signorina Elettra to a few hours at the fairground. ‘Or perhaps Pucetti, or even Vianello, could find all of this for you,’ she said, moving the list slightly to the left.

‘If you’d rather not,’ Brunetti began, giving voice to the unthinkable.

She placed the very tip of one red-nailed finger at

the centre of the list, smiled up at him, and said, ‘All right, Commissario: I’ll confess.’

He smiled his readiness.

‘A friend,’ she said, using the masculine form of the noun and thus rousing his interest, ‘is arriving at the airport at two, and I thought I might go out to meet him.’

‘Does he know where you work?’ Brunetti surprised them both by asking.

She answered almost without thinking. ‘Yes, I thought it best to tell him from the beginning.’

Interestinger and interestinger, Brunetti thought. The beginning of what? ‘Then perhaps Foa could take you out on the launch.’ Before she could question this, he explained, ‘He can drop you off and wait for you both. I think it’s good that we show the luggage handlers we’re still interested in them.’ The police had failed to stop the theft of property from suitcases for years now, and it was very unlikely that the sight of a police launch moored to the dock would have any effect on their continued depredations, but it was the best excuse he could come up with at such short notice.

‘But they’re over in the main terminal.’

‘The word will pass to them, you can be sure.’

She smiled. ‘I’d certainly hope so.’

‘Have Foa take you home,’ he added casually, perhaps too casually, for she looked at him and smiled.

‘I’ll have him take me to the Misericordia,’ she began, paused to allow Brunetti to try to remember how close to it she lived, and then added, ‘We can walk from there.’

Brunetti had long wondered what Signorina Elettra would think of his interest in her private life. It would be too much to say that her behaviour was at times provocative, just as it would be difficult to find a more suitable word to describe it. He had been too obvious in his offer of Foa’s help, but there was no way now for him to retract the offer.

He picked up the paper. ‘I’ll ask Pucetti to do it through official channels.’ Then, with a smile, he added, ‘The practice will be good for him.’

‘Probably slow him down,’ she said and got to her feet.

She stopped at the door and said over her shoulder, ‘It won’t be necessary for Foa to take me, Commissario: I’ve got some things to do first, so I’m leaving now.’ She did not explain what those things were, nor why she was leaving to do them four hours before she had to be at the airport. Brunetti raised a hand in acknowledgement and farewell, vowing to himself that he would tell no one what she had said.

He went to the officers’ squad room and explained the anomaly of Cavanella’s missing residence, then gave Pucetti the note of his name and address and the places where documents might be found. The young officer was puzzled to learn that Davide Cavanella was not registered as a resident of the city. ‘If you’ve seen him here for years, Commissario, then he’s got to be in the system somewhere,’ the younger man said. ‘If he was deaf, then he probably went to that school in Santa Croce. And there’s got to be some association for people who use sign.’ He added that to Brunetti’s list, expanding

the possibilities. ‘If they live near San Stin, maybe the parroco knew them. And if he worked at this dry cleaning place, then they’d have records.’ He added these to the list.

‘I suspect they let him stay there out of charity,’ Brunetti offered. He knew these women were his first good hope of discovering anything about the dead man. He tried to remember when he had first seen Davide – no, call him by his surname, as though he were a real adult and not a person frozen in childhood – Cavanella there. Ten years ago? Longer than that?

He asked Pucetti for a phone book, which the young officer produced from a drawer in his desk. Only one dry cleaner’s was listed in San Polo. Brunetti wrote the number in his notebook, reluctant to call them until he got back to his own office.

He handed the book to Pucetti, saying, ‘All right, check the Anagrafe, or the school, and call the parroco.’

‘How old was he?’ Pucetti asked, sitting down in front of one of the three computers in the room.

‘Rizzardi guessed him to be in his early forties.’

Pucetti raised his eyebrows. ‘I thought he was much younger.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know. I guess it was the way you talked about him.’ Pucetti shook his head and typed in the address for the Comune di Venezia.

Quickly he found the site of the Ufficio Anagrafe, but there seemed to be no way to search for the name of a person. Pucetti switched to another page, typed in the name, ‘Davide Cavanella’, glanced at the paper Brunetti had given him and copied the man’s address, but in the absence of a Codice Fiscale number the search could not progress.

Brunetti bent over the screen and asked Pucetti to scroll back to the opening page. When he saw the phone number, he picked up the phone and dialled it.

He gave his name and rank and said that he was calling to try to identify the dead man who had been found in San Polo the day before. He offered the woman he was speaking to the opportunity to call him back at the Questura, but she said that would not be necessary, and what was the man’s name?

‘Davide Cavanella, and he was probably in his early forties.’

‘Then,’ she said, ‘he would have been born in the seventies.’

‘Yes.’

‘We’re computerized back to the fifties,’ she said, a note of pride audible in her voice. ‘So if he was born here, we’ll have him.’

Brunetti contented himself with making a polite noise while he left her to it. The sounds she made came through the phone, a combination of humming and clicks of displeasure or surprise. After a few minutes, she spoke to him in the voice of a person whose attention was somewhere else. ‘I can’t find him, Commissario. Are you sure of the spelling? Cavanella with a final A?’

‘Yes.’

‘Davide?’ she asked.

‘Yes.’

Again a hum-filled pause, some soft clicks in the background, and then she was back. ‘I’m sorry, Commissario, but he wasn’t born in Venice or Mestre; not between 1965 and 1975, he wasn’t.’

‘Can you check the entire province?’ Brunetti asked.

This was the point when most bureaucrats tired of the novelty of answering questions for the police. Usually, they’d happily answer a few questions, do simple research if asked, but once things became complicated and time-consuming, they started naming supervisors and the need to get authorization or citing rules Brunetti always suspected they invented that instant.

‘I’m not authorized to do that, Commissario,’ she answered in a different voice, the voice he knew so well. ‘Not without an order from a magistrate.’

Brunetti thanked her and hung up.

Pucetti looked up, pulling his eyebrows together in interrogation.

‘Nothing, neither here nor in Mestre, from 1965 to 1975,’ Brunetti explained. Pucetti shrugged, as if this were the sort of answer bureaucracy always gave. ‘Can you,’ Brunetti began and then foundered on the appropriate verb. Get into? Access? Open? The real verb was ‘break into,’ but Brunetti was reluctant to use it, not wanting the corruption of subordinates added to his conscience. ‘Get further information from the social services?’

‘Of course, sir,’ Pucetti said, and Brunetti didn’t know if he was serving as an occasion of sin or as the person who lightened the weights carried by a racehorse. ‘I can even do it with this thing,’ he said, waving dismissive fingers over the keys and adding a noise that condemned the computer to ignominy. ‘It’s easy to find who’s collecting pensions.’ Then, in a voice from which all boasting was absent, Pucetti added, ‘Once you know how to do it.’ Brunetti nodded, his face impassive. ‘I’ll have a look around, sir,’ Pucetti said and turned to the screen.

‘Yes,’ Brunetti answered and said he would be in his office.

Upstairs, he turned on his own computer and started a search through the phone books of the provinces of Friuli and Treviso, but there were no listings for anyone with the surname Cavanella.

He called down to the front desk and asked the man on duty there to connect him with the office that saw to the sending of the hearse.

This was quickly done, the roster was checked, and within minutes Brunetti found himself talking to the pilot.

‘The call came from the Carabinieri a little before six, Commissario,’ the pilot, Enrico Forti, told him. ‘All they said was that a woman had called to say she had found her son dead in his bed and that we were to pick him up and take him to the hospital. That’s the routine, sir.’

‘And when you got there?’

‘She was at the door. People always are: I guess they hear us coming. The motor, you know.’

‘A woman with red hair?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘How was she?’ Brunetti asked.

After a moment, Forti said, ‘I’m not sure I understand what you mean, sir.’

‘How did she behave? Was she crying? Did she have trouble talking?’

The pilot was slow to answer Brunetti’s questions. Finally he said, ‘You have to understand, sir, that we answer all sorts of calls. Death hits people differently. You never know how it’ll affect them.’

Brunetti waited.

‘She was upset: you could see that. She said she had gone into his room and found him, and he was dead, and she called 118, and they told her we’d come.’

‘And so?’ Brunetti asked, trying to sound interested and not impatient.

‘She was crying. She let us in and took us up to the apartment and back to his room. And he was in his bed, just like she said. It was pretty ugly: it always is when they die like that, sir. So we covered him and put him in the carrier, and we took him down to the boat and to the hospital. For Dottor Rizzardi.’

‘Did she ask to go with you?’ Brunetti asked.

‘No, sir. She just stood there while we took him out, and then she closed the door before we took him to the boat.’

‘Do you remember what the room looked like?’ Brunetti asked.

Forti paused to remember and then said, ‘It was awfully small, sir, and with only one tiny window, and the house opposite is very close, so there wasn’t much light. Not that there would be, not that early.’ He glanced at Brunetti, then added, ‘It’s in my report, sir.’

‘Did the Carabinieri send a squad, do you know?’

‘Probably not, sir. We called them and told them it looked like an accident, so I doubt they’d bother.’

On the tip of Brunetti’s tongue was the temptation to remind Forti that doing one’s job – and checking the scene of an unaccounted death was included in that – was not dependent on whether it was a bother or not, but instead he thanked him for his information and hung up.

He found the phone number of the dry cleaner’s in his notebook and dialled; the phone was picked up on the fifth ring. ‘Lavasecco,’ a woman’s voice answered, not bothering with the name.

‘Buon dì, Signora,’ he said, ‘This is Commissario Brunetti.’

Instead of greeting him, she said, ‘Your wife’s jacket and three pairs of your slacks are ready, Commissario. But your grey jacket has a stain on the right sleeve that didn’t come out, so we’re putting it through again.’

‘Ah,’ said a momentarily confused Brunetti. ‘Thank you, Signora, but that’s not what I wanted to ask you about.’

‘Davide?’

‘Yes. I saw him in your shop over the years, and I wanted to come by and talk to you about him, you and your colleague.’

‘Renata doesn’t come in until after lunch, Commissario, if you want to talk to us both. This is a slow period for us: everyone’s got their winter things back already, and it’s too soon for them to be wearing them again. All we get these days is linen. People mostly wash their summer things themselves. Must be the financial crisis.’

In recent months, criminals had taken to blaming their activities on the financial crisis. The Euro sank; salaries remained the same. What else could I do but rob the bank? Brunetti wondered what next would be blamed on the financial crisis. Bad taste?

‘Of course, Signora. Thank you,’ Brunetti said, checked his watch, spent an hour reading through some of the papers on his desk, and then went home for lunch.