corner, where he had a sandwich and a glass of wine, not at all pleased with either. Though everyone in the bar knew who he was, no one asked him about the death, though one old man did rustle his newspaper suggestively. Brunetti walked down to the San Zaccaria stop and caught the number 5 boat, which would take him to the cemetery island of San Michele, cutting through the Arsenate and along the back side of the island. He seldom visited the cemetery, somehow not having acquired the cult of the dead so common among Italians.
He had come here in the past; in fact, one of his first memories was of being taken here as a child to help tend the grave of his grandmother, killed in Treviso during the Allied bombing of that city during the war. He remembered how colorful the graves were, blanketed with flowers, and how neat, each precise rectangle separated from the others by razor-edged patches of green. And, in the midst of this, how grim the people, almost all women, who came carrying those armloads of flowers. How drab and shabby they were, as if all their love for color and neatness was exhausted by the need to care for those spirits in the ground, leaving none left over for themselves.
And now, some thirty-five years later, the graves were just as neat, the flowers still explosive with color, but the people who passed among the graves looked as if they belonged to the world of the living, were no longer those wraiths of the postwar years. His father’s grave was easily found, not too far from Stravinsky. The Russian was safe; he would remain there, untouched, for as long as the cemetery remained or people remembered his music. His father’s tenancy was far more precarious, for the time was arriving when his grave would be opened and his bones taken to be put in an ossuary in one of the long, crowded walls of the cemetery.
The plot, however, was neatly tended; his brother was more conscientious than he. The carnations that stood in the glass vase set in the earth of the grave were new; the frost of three nights earlier would have killed any that had been placed here before. He bent down and brushed aside a few leaves that the wind had blown up against the vase. He straightened up, then stooped to pick up a cigarette butt that lay beside the headstone. He stood again and looked at the picture displayed upon the front of the stone. He saw his own eyes, his own jaw, and the too-big ears that had skipped over him and his brother and gone, instead, to their sons.
At the office of the cemetery, he announced his name and his rank and was shown into a small waiting room by a man who told him to wait, the doctor would be with him soon. There was nothing to read in the room, so he contented himself with looking out the only window, which gave onto the enclosed cloister about which the buildings of the cemetery had been built.
At the beginning of his career, Brunetti had asked to attend the autopsy of the victim of the first murder he had investigated, a prostitute killed by her pimp. He had watched intently as the body was rolled into the operating theater, stared fascinated as the white sheet was pulled back from her nearly perfect body. And as the doctor raised the scalpel above the flesh, ready to begin the long butterfly incision, Brunetti had pitched forward and fainted amid the medical students with whom he sat. They had calmly carried him out into the hall and left him, groggy, on a chair before hurrying back to watch. Since then, he had seen the victims of many murders, seen the human body rent by knives, guns, even bombs, but he had never learned to look on them calmly, and he could never again bring himself to watch the calculated violation of an autopsy.
The door to the small waiting room opened, and Rizzardi, dressed as impeccably as he had been the night before, entered. He smelled of expensive soap, not of the carbolic that Brunetti couldn’t help associating with his work.
‘Good afternoon, Guido,’ he said, and extended a hand. ‘I’m sorry you bothered to come all the way out here. I could easily have phoned you with what little I learned.’
‘That’s all right, Ettore; I wanted to come out anyway. And there won’t be anything until those fools in the lab give me a report. And it’s certainly too soon to speak to the widow.’
‘Then let me give you what I have,’ the doctor said, closing his eyes and beginning to recite from memory. Brunetti removed the notebook from his pocket and took down what he heard. ‘The man was in excellent health. If I didn’t know his age, seventy-four, I would have guessed him to be at least ten years younger, early sixties, perhaps even late fifties. Muscles in excellent tone, probably through exercise added to a generally healthy body. No sign of disease in the internal organs. He can’t have been a drinker; liver was perfect. Strange to see in a man his age. Didn’t smoke, though I think he might have, years ago, and stopped. I’d say he was good for another ten or twenty years.’ Finished, he opened his eyes and looked at Brunetti.
‘And the cause of death?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Potassium cyanide. In the coffee. I’d estimate he ingested about thirty milligrams, more than enough to kill him.’ He paused for a moment, then added, ‘I’d never actually seen it before. Remarkable effect.’ His voice trailed off, and he lapsed into a reverie that Brunetti found unsettling.
After a moment, Brunetti asked, ‘Is it as quick as I’ve read it is?’
‘Yes, I think it is,’ the doctor answered. ‘As I said, I’ve never seen a case before, not a real one. I’d just read about it.’
‘Instantaneous?’
Rizzardi thought for a moment before he answered. ‘Yes, I suppose it is, or so close as to make it the same thing. He might have had a moment to realize what was happening, but he would have thought it was a stroke or a heart attack. In any case, well before he could have realized what it was, he would have been dead.’
‘What’s the actual cause of death?’
‘Everything stops. Everything simply stops working: heart, lungs, brain.’
‘In seconds?’
‘Yes. Five. Ten at the most.’
‘No wonder they use it,’ Brunetti said.
‘Who?’
‘Spies, in spy novels. With capsules hidden in hollow teeth.’
‘Um,’ Rizzardi muttered. If he found Brunetti’s comparison at all strange, he gave no indication of it. ‘Yes, there’s no question that it’s fast, but there are others that are much more deadly.’ In response to Brunetti’s raised eyebrows, he explained, ‘Botulism. The same amount that killed him could probably kill half of Italy.’
There seemed little to be gained from this subject, regardless of the doctor’s evident enthusiasm for it, so Brunetti asked, ‘Is there anything else?’
‘It looks like he’s been under treatment for the last few weeks. Do you know if he had a cold or flu or something like that.’
‘No,’ Brunetti said, shaking his head. ‘We don’t know anything yet. Why?’
‘There were signs of injections. There was no indication of drug abuse, so I imagine it was antibiotics, perhaps a vitamin, some normal procedure. In fact, the traces were so faint that it might not even have been injections; they could have been simple bruises.’
‘But not drugs?’
‘No, not likely,’ the doctor said. ‘He could easily have given himself an injection in the right hip—he was right-handed—but a right-handed person can’t give himself an injection in the right arm or left buttock, at least not where I found the mark. And as I said, he was in excellent health. I would have seen signs of drug use, if there had been any.’ He paused a moment and then added, ‘Besides, I’m not even sure that’s what they are. In my report, I’ll simply enter them as subcutaneous bleeding.’ Brunetti could tell from his voice that he considered the marks a triviality and already regretted mentioning them.
‘Anything else?’
‘No, nothing. Whoever did this robbed him of at least another ten years of life.’
As was usual with him, Rizzardi displayed, and probably felt, no curiosity whatsoever about who might have committed the crime. In the years he’d known him, Brunetti had never heard the doctor ask about the criminal. At limes, he had become interested in, even fascinated by, a particularly inventive means of death, but he seemed never to care about who had done it or if the person had been found.
‘Thanks, Ettore,’ Brunetti said, and shook the doctor’s hand. ‘I wish they would work this fast in the lab.’
‘I doubt that their curiosity is as compelling as mine,’ Rizzardi said, again confirming Brunetti in the belief that he would never understand the man.
* * * *
