but he had bought a paper at the train station, and he read through it as the train took him across the flat plain towards Vicenza. There was no mention of the dead American today, his place taken by a crime of passion in Modena, a dentist who had strangled a woman who refused to marry him and then shot himself. He spent the rest of the trip reading the political news, knowing as much when he arrived in Vicenza as when he left Venice.
The same driver was waiting for him in front of the station, but this time he got out to open the door for Brunetti. At the gate, he stopped without being told to do so and waited while the Carabiniere wrote out a pass for Brunetti. ‘Where would you like to go, sir?’
‘Where’s the Office of Public Health?’ he asked.
‘In the hospital.’
‘Then let’s go there.’
The driver took him up the long main street of the base, and Brunetti felt himself to be in a foreign country. Pine trees lined the street on both sides. The car rode past men and women in shorts, riding bicycles or pushing babies in pushchairs. Joggers loped by; they even drove past a swimming-pool, still filled with water but empty of swimmers.
The driver pulled up in front of yet another undistinguished cement building. ‘Vicenza Field Hospital’, Brunetti read. ‘In there, sir,’ the driver said, pulling into a parking space designated for the handicapped and cutting the engine.
Inside, he found himself in front of a low, curved reception desk. A young woman looked up, smiled, and asked, ‘Yes, sir, may I help you?’
‘I’m looking for the Office of Public Health.’
‘Take the corridor behind me, turn right, then it’s the third door on the left,’ she said, then turned to a pregnant woman in uniform who had come in and stood beside him. Brunetti walked away from the desk in the direction given and did not, he thought proudly to himself, did not turn to look at the woman in uniform, the pregnant woman in uniform.
He stopped in front of the third door, clearly marked ‘Public Health’, and knocked. No one answered, so he knocked again. Still no one answered, so he tried the knob, and, noting that it was a knob and not a handle, opened the door and went in. The small room held three metal desks, each with a chair drawn up in front of it, and two filing cabinets, from the top of both of which straggled long, tired-looking plants much in need of both water and dusting. On the wall hung the now predictable bulletin board, this one covered with notices and charts. Two of the desks were covered with the normal detritus of office work: papers, forms, folders, pens, pencils. The third held a computer terminal and keyboard but, for the rest, was conspicuously bare. Brunetti seated himself in the chair that was clearly intended for visitors. One of the phones - each desk had one - rang and went on ringing seven times, then stopped. Brunetti waited a few minutes then went to the door and stepped back out into the corridor. A nurse was walking by, and Brunetti asked her if she knew where the people from the office were.
‘Should be right back, sir,’ she answered in the internationally recognized code by which fellow workers cover for one another with strangers who might or might not have been sent there to find out who was at work and who was not. He stepped back inside and closed the door.
As in any office, there were the usual cartoons, postcards, and handwritten notes interspersed with official notices. The cartoons all seemed to have soldiers or doctors, and many of the postcards had either minarets or archaeological sites. He unpinned the first and found that Bob said hello from the Blue Mosque. The second told him that Bob liked the Colosseum. But the third, which showed a camel in front of the Pyramids, revealed, far more interestingly, that M and T were finished with the inspection of the kitchens and would be back on Tuesday. He pinned this one back and stepped away from the board.
‘May I help you?’ a voice said behind him.
He recognized her voice, turned, and she recognized him. ‘Mr Brunetti, what are you doing here?’ Her surprise was both genuine and strong.
‘Good morning, Doctor Peters. I told you I’d come out to see if I could learn more about Sergeant Foster. I was told this was the Office of Public Health, so I came down here in the hopes of meeting someone who worked with him. But, as you can see,’ he said, gesturing around the empty office and taking two steps that further distanced him from the board, ‘no one is here.’
‘They’re all at a meeting,’ she explained. ‘Trying to figure out a way to divide up the work until we get a replacement for Mike.’
‘Aren’t you at the meeting?’ he asked.
In response, she pulled a stethoscope out of the breast pocket of her white lab coat and said, ‘Remember, I’m a paediatrician.’
‘I see.’
‘They ought to be back here very soon,’ she volunteered. ‘Who did you want to speak to?’
‘I don’t know. Whoever worked most closely with him.’
‘I told you, Mike pretty much had charge of the office himself.’
‘So it wouldn’t help me to talk to anyone?’
‘I can’t answer that for you, Mr Brunetti, since I don’t know what it is you want to find out.’
Brunetti assumed her irritation was the result of nervousness, so he dropped the subject and asked, instead, ‘Do you know if sergeant Foster drank?’
‘Drank?’
‘Alcohol.’
‘Very little.’
‘And drugs?’
‘What sort of drugs?’
