He put the larger key into the green door. It opened easily, and Brunetti crossed the small entrance space and started up the stairs. He paused on the second landing, something he had begun doing on the steps to his own home.
Outside the door on the right, he saw Cavanis’ name, printed in a fine copperplate hand, on a piece of cardboard pinned to the left of the door. Politeness or territoriality made him ring the bell, wait, and then ring it again, longer. Familiar with the sleep of alcoholics, he then used the key to open the door, which was not double-locked.
‘Signor Cavanis,’ he called from the doorway. ‘Signor Cavanis.’ He waited, and his nose told him what he was going to find. He could have retreated into the corridor and called the crime squad, but instead he left the keys in the door, stuffed both hands into his pockets, and stepped into the room.
It smelled of cigarettes, of decades, eternities of the presence of a heavy smoker. It was a small room. Sofa, low table, facing them a television, all part of a shrine to the flat-faced god. This one was as enormous as it was old. As deep as it was wide, it was turned low but was still audible and was currently giving a blonde young woman in a pink angora sweater the chance to look adoringly at an elderly man in an expensive suit who sat opposite her as he lectured her never-dimming smile.
Brunetti looked for the remote control, but there was none to be found. It was not on the sofa or the table, and there were no other flat surfaces in the room. Nor were there knobs on the television: what you saw was what you got: local channel, fixed volume. How much local news and entertainment could a person stand before going mad?
There were no pictures and no reading material of any sort in the room, no rugs or decorations, and no other furniture. On the table were some plates and glasses, cups and saucers, apparently stacked and pushed aside as days passed. The plate that sat in the line of vision between the screen and the viewer’s chair held a dried-out piece of cheese, some prosciutto that had curved in on itself; beside it, pieces had been sliced from a loaf of white bread. The glass beside the plate was half full of red wine; the level had gone down as it evaporated in the overheated room, leaving a reddish stripe above the remaining wine.
Brunetti went into the small kitchen on the right. On the table sat an almost empty two-litre bottle of red wine. He did not bother to open the cabinets or the refrigerator but backed out and went to the door where he had seen the foot.
It was a large foot, wearing a man’s shoe, and it was lying on the floor, a grey sock that might once have been white exposed above it. Brunetti leaned forward and into the room. The grey-haired man lay on his left side, his head cushioned on his bent elbow. He could have been taking a nap, one leg stretched out, the other trapped and bent slightly under it. He could have been asleep were it not for the handle of a kitchen knife protruding from the right side of his neck and the pool of dried blood in which he lay. And the smell. Not even the years of smoke, which had discoloured the white door of the refrigerator and darkened the tiles in the kitchen, could cover or disguise that distinctive iron-rich smell, nor could they overpower the smell of rot that Brunetti sensed slowly sinking into his own clothing.
He backed away from the body and left the apartment and stood on the landing. He dialled Bocchese’s telefonino number and told the leader of the forensics squad what to prepare for, gave him the address, and told him to get a team there as quickly as he could and to bring a pathologist, if one was free.
‘I shouldn’t ask this,’ Bocchese said, ‘but did you touch anything?’
‘No,’ Brunetti said and broke the connection. He remained on the landing outside the apartment, trying to draw the line that would connect what he had just seen to something else. The dead man had saved Manuela from death, and this had come to the attention of the police. Cavanis had been there when it happened and had always denied – after having described it – that he had seen anyone try to harm Manuela. Nothing necessitated a link; nothing proved cause–effect; no straight line led from Rio San Boldo to Rio Marin.
Cavanis could have interrupted a burglar; one look back at the poverty of the room put an end to that idea. An enemy could have done it, although a man with enemies does not leave his keys with a barman and tell him to give them to whoever asks for them. Random violence? In Venice? The possibility didn’t remain in Brunetti’s mind long enough for him to find the energy to dismiss it.
Brunetti went downstairs and out into the sunlight to wait for the boat.