Death in a Strange Country

his veins, blood that must certainly have been mixed with the waters of the laguna, carrying an instinctive knowledge of the tides and currents that would have allowed him to navigate the canals of the city with his eyes closed.

Bonsuan, stocky and heavy-bearded, acknowledged Brunetti’s arrival with a nod, as much an acknowledgement of the hour as of his superior. Puccetti scrambled onto deck, joining a pair of uniformed policemen already there. One of them flicked the mooring cable free of the piling, and Bonsuan backed the boat quickly out into tine Grand Canal, then swung it sharply around and back up towards the Rialto Bridge. They swept under the bridge and swung into a one-way canal on the right. Soon after that, they cut to the left, then again to the right. Brunetti stood on the deck, collar raised against the wind and the early-morning chill. Boats moored on either side of the canals bobbed in their wake, and others, coming in from San Erasmo with fresh fruit and vegetables, pulled to the side and hugged the buildings at the sight of their flashing blue light.

Finally, they turned into the Rio dei Mendicanti, the canal that flowed beside the hospital and out into the laguna, just opposite the cemetery. The proximity of the cemetery to the hospital was probably accidental; to most Venetians, however, particularly those who had survived treatment at the hospital, the location of the cemetery was a silent comment upon the proficiency of the hospital staff.

Halfway down the canal, clustered on the right, Brunetti saw a small group of people drawn up close to the edge of the embankment. Bonsuan stopped the boat fifty metres from the crowd in what Brunetti knew would be, by now, an entirely vain attempt to keep any evidence at the site free from the effects of their arrival.

One of the officers approached the boat and held out a hand to Brunetti to help him climb ashore. ‘Buon giorno, Signor Commissario. We got him out, but, as you can see, we’ve already got company.’ He gestured to nine or ten people crowding around something on the pavement, their bodies obscuring it from Brunetti’s sight.

The officer turned back towards the crowd, saying as he walked, ‘All right. Move back. Police.’ At the approach of the two men, not at the command, the crowd pulled back.

On the pavement, Brunetti saw the body of a young man lying on his back, eyes open to the morning light. Beside him stood two policemen, uniforms soaked to their shoulders. Both of them saluted when they saw Brunetti. When their hands returned to their sides, water trickled to the ground beneath them. He recognized them, Luciani and Rossi, both good men.

‘Well?’ Brunetti asked, looking down at the dead man.

Luciani, the senior of the two, answered. ‘He was floating in the canal when we got here, Dottore. A man in that house,’ he said, pointing to an ochre building on the other side of the canal, ‘called us. His wife saw him.’

Brunetti turned and looked across at the house. ‘Fourth floor,’ Luciani explained. Brunetti cast his eyes up, just in time to see a form pull back from the window. As he stared at the building and at those beside it, he noticed a number of dark shadows at the windows. Some retreated when he looked at them, others did not.

Brunetti turned back to Luciani and nodded to him to continue. ‘He was near the steps, but we had to go in and pull him out. I put him on his back, to try to revive him. But there was no hope, sir. It looks like he’s been dead a long time.’ He sounded apologetic, almost as if his failure to breathe life back into the young man had somehow added to the finality of his death.

‘Did you check the body?’Brunetti asked.

‘No, sir. When we saw that there was nothing we could do, we thought it would be best to leave him for the doctor.’

‘Good, good,’ Brunetti muttered. Luciani shivered, either with cold or the awareness of his failure, and small drops of water fell to the pavement below him.

‘You two get yourselves off home. Have a bath, get something to eat. And drink something against the chill.’ Both men smiled at this, grateful for the suggestion. ‘And take the launch. Bonsuan will take you home, both of you.’

The men thanked him and pushed their way through the crowd, which had grown larger in the few minutes Brunetti had been there. He gestured to one of the uniformed men who had come with him on the launch and told him, ‘Move these people back, then get their names and addresses, all of them. Ask them when they got here, if they heard or saw anything strange this morning. Then send them home.’ He hated the ghouls who always gathered at the scenes of death and could never understand the fascination so many of them had with it, especially in its more violent manifestations.

He looked again at the face of the young man on the pavement, now the object of so many pitiless stares. He was a handsome man, with short blond hair made darker by the water that still puddled around him. His eyes were a clear, limpid blue, his face symmetrical, nose narrow and fine.

Behind him, Brunetti heard the voices of the police as they began to move the crowd back. He called Puccetti over to him, ignoring the new salute the young man gave him. ‘Puccetti, go over to that row of houses on the other side of the canal and see if anyone heard or saw anything.’

‘For what time, sir?’

Brunetti thought for a moment, considering the moon. It had been new two nights ago: the tides would not have been strong enough to carry the body very far at all. He would have to ask Bonsuan about last night’s tides. The hands of the dead man were strangely shrivelled and white, a sure sign he had been in the water for a long time. Once he knew how long the young man had been dead, he’d leave it to Bonsuan to calculate how far he could have drifted. And from where. In the meantime, there was Puccetti. ‘Ask them for any time last night. And get some barriers set up. Send those people home if you can.’ Little chance of that, he knew. Venice had few events like this to offer its citizens; they would leave only reluctantly.

He heard the sound of another boat approaching. A second white police launch, blue light pulsing round, pulled into the canal and stopped at the same mooring Bonsuan had used. This one also carried three men in uniform and one in civilian clothing. Like sunflowers, the faces of the crowd turned from the sun of their attention, the dead man, and swirled around towards the men who jumped down from the boat and approached the crowd.

At their head walked Doctor Ettore Rizzardi, the Coroner for the city. Unperturbed by the stares he was receiving. Doctor Rizzardi approached and extended his hand in a friendly fashion to Brunetti. ‘Buon di, Guido. What is it?’

Brunetti stepped aside so that Rizzardi could see what lay at their feet. ‘He was in the canal. Luciani and Rossi pulled him out, but there was nothing they could do. Luciani tried, but it was too late.’

Rizzardi nodded and grunted at this. The shrivelled skin of the hands told him how late it had been for any help.

‘It looks like he’s been in there for a long time, Ettore. But I’m sure you can tell me better.’

Taking this compliment as no more than his due, Rizzardi turned his full attention to the corpse. As he bent over the body, the whispers of the crowd grew even more sibilant. He ignored them, placed his bag carefully in a dry spot near the body, and stooped down over the corpse.

Brunetti wheeled around and walked towards the people who stood in what had now become the front rank of the crowd.

‘If you’ve given your names and addresses, you can go. There’s nothing more to see. So you can go, all of you.’ An old man with a grizzled beard bent sharply to the left to look past Brunetti and see what the doctor was doing over the body. ‘I said you can go.’ Brunetti spoke directly to the old man. He straightened up, glanced at Brunetti with complete lack of interest, then bent back down, interested only in the doctor. An old woman yanked angrily at the leash of her terrier and went off, visibly outraged by yet more evidence of police brutality. The uniformed men moved slowly among the crowd, turning them gently with a word or a hand on the shoulder, gradually forcing them to move away, abandoning the area to the police, The last to leave was the old man with the beard, who moved only as far as the iron railing enclosing the base of the statue of Colleoni, against which he leaned, refusing to abandon the campo or his rights as a citizen.

‘Guido, come here a moment,’ Rizzardi called from behind him.

Brunetti turned and went to stand beside the kneeling doctor, who held back the dead man’s shirt. About five inches above his waist, on the left side, Brunetti saw a horizontal line, jagged at the edges, flesh strangely greyish-blue. He knelt beside Rizzardi in a chill pool of water to get a closer look. The cut was about as long as his thumb and now, probably because of the body’s long immersion, gaped open, curiously bloodless.

‘This isn’t some tourist who got drunk and fell into a canal, Guido.’