‘Yes,’ Brunetti answered. ‘How’d you know?’ He had detected no scent of alcohol; perhaps it had been covered by the other smell coming from the body, left for who knows how long in a heated room.
Rizzardi led them out to the living room, where the technicians were doing their job: collecting, photographing, putting small bits of things into plastic envelopes. Rizzardi removed his gloves and put them in his pocket. Brunetti wondered how many of them he’d taken home with him over the years.
‘If they’ve been drinking long enough,’ Rizzardi said, finally answering Brunetti’s question, ‘they all take on the same look. You come to see it. Both outside and inside.’
The doctor shook his head as at some private thought and Brunetti asked, ‘What are you thinking about?’
‘If you know enough about the human body, you come to see it as a miracle. And when you look at the bodies of some of them – like him – who have drunk for years, perhaps all their lives, and you see what the drinking’s done to them, and in spite of it all they were still alive, then you know it really is a miracle.’
They shook hands and Rizzardi left, but not before finding Bocchese in the kitchen and saying goodbye to him.
Brunetti stayed behind, watching the technicians work, until the men from the hospital arrived with their plastic coffin. While they waited, one of the technicians went through the dead man’s pockets and removed a wallet, a telefonino, and a handkerchief much in need of washing. Brunetti watched him place them in separate plastic bags and zip them closed. The technician nodded to the men from the hospital, who put the dead man into the coffin and left the apartment.
The technical squad remained another half-hour, until Bocchese came back and told Brunetti they were finished and he could now move around freely and touch whatever he wanted in the apartment. The two of them shook hands, and Bocchese led his squad down the stairs and out to the waiting boat.
Brunetti, still wearing his plastic gloves, went back into the bedroom, careful where he stepped, and opened the doors of the wardrobe. He saw two jackets, neither of them particularly clean, and a dark grey woollen coat with worn cuffs. Two pairs of shoes rested on the bottom of the closet. The drawers on the bottom held three pullovers and a few polyester shirts. The underwear was grey and unpleasant looking.
Brunetti went through the rest of the apartment. The only printed words he saw were the receipts from Cavanis’ monthly pension payment – 662.87 euros, and how was a person meant to live on that? – and a circular from the local parish, inviting all residents to meet the new parroco. The refrigerator, at least thirty years old, held another two-litre bottle of wine, this one white, and a packet of petrified cheese.
The shelf above the sink in the bathroom held a grimy glass, a packet of aspirin, and a bar of kitchen soap. The bathtub was disgusting.
Nothing else. For all that his presence was evident in his possessions, Cavanis could have moved in that same day or the day before, yet he had been there long enough for the man in the bar to find his behaviour with the keys normal.
Brunetti left, locking the door behind him, and went downstairs. He went back to the bridge and to the other side, then along the canal and into the bar.
When the barman saw him, he said, sounding offended, ‘You didn’t tell me you were a policeman.’
‘It wasn’t necessary. He hadn’t done anything wrong.’ He asked for a coffee.
The man shrugged, as though to say he wasn’t angry, really: he was just saying it.
He made the coffee and placed it in front of Brunetti, then pushed the bowl of sugar envelopes along the counter towards him.
‘Was he really murdered?’ the barman couldn’t stop himself from asking.
‘It would seem so,’ Brunetti answered.
‘Ah, the poor devil,’ he said with real feeling, then surprised Brunetti by saying, ‘I hope at least he was drunk when it happened.’
‘Why is that?’
The barman had to think a while before he found the words for his answer. ‘Because he wouldn’t be so afraid. Maybe.’ He shook his head again and repeated, ‘Poor devil.’
Brunetti sensed another person at his side and turned to see a sandy-haired man a few years older than himself.
‘It’s really true? Someone killed Pietro?’ he asked.
Brunetti nodded, and finished his coffee. ‘Did you know him?’ he asked the man to his left.
‘Well, there’s knowing and there’s knowing,’ the man said and waved towards the place on the bar in front of him. The barman reached for a bottle of white wine and poured him a small glass.
He picked it up and drank it down as though it were water.
‘Was he a friend?’ Brunetti asked with feigned innocence.
‘Sort of,’ he said and pushed the glass across the counter.
Brunetti gestured to the barman, and a second glass appeared in front of him. When both were filled, Brunetti tipped it in the direction of the man beside him, then quickly downed half of it. He found it less good than the coffee.