Death in a Strange Country

‘I’ll be in my office for an hour or so. Let me know what happens in the hospital, if It’s Ruffolo.’ He started to leave the office, but Rossi called out after him.

‘One thing, sir, a phone call came for you last night.’

‘Who was it?’

‘I don’t know, sir. The operator said the call came at about eleven. A woman. She asked for you by name, but she didn’t speak Italian, or very little. He said something else, but I don’t remember what it was.’

‘I’ll stop and talk to him on the way up,’ Brunetti said and left the office. Instead of taking the stairs, he stopped at the end of the corridor and went into the cubicle where the telephone operator sat. He was a young police recruit, fresh-faced and probably all of eighteen. Brunetti couldn’t remember his name.

When he saw Brunetti, he leaped to his feet, dragging with him the wire that attached his headphones to the switchboard. ‘Good morning, sir.’

‘Good morning. Please sit down.’

The young man did, poised nervously on the edge of his chair.

‘Rossi tells me a phone call came for me last night.’

‘Yes, sir,’ the recruit said, fighting the urge to jump to his feet when addressing a superior.

‘Did you take the call?’

‘Yes sir.’ Then, to prevent Brunetti from asking why he was still there twelve hours later, the young man explained, ‘I was taking Monico’s shift, sir. He’s sick/  .’

Uninterested in this detail, Brunetti asked, ‘What did she say?’

‘She asked for you by name, sir. But she didn’t speak more than a little bit of Italian.’

‘Do you remember exactly what she said?’

‘Yes, sir,’ he said, fumbling at some papers on the desk in front of the switchboard. ‘I have it written down here.’ He pushed papers aside and came up with a single sheet, from which he read, ‘She asked for you, but she didn’t give her name or anything. I asked her for her name, but she didn’t answer me, or she didn’t understand. I told her that you weren’t here, but then she asked for you again.’

‘Was she speaking English?’

‘I think so, sir, but she only spoke a few words and I couldn’t understand her. I told her to speak in Italian.’

‘What else did she say?’

‘She said something that sounded like “basta”, or it could have been “pasta”, or “posta”.’

‘Anything else?’

‘No, sir. Just that. And then she hung up.’

‘How did she sound?’

The boy thought about this for a while and finally answered, ‘She didn’t sound anything in particular, sir. Just disappointed that you weren’t here, I’d say.’

‘All right. If she calls back, put her call through to me or to Rossi. He speaks English.’

‘Yes, sir,’ the young man said. When Brunetti turned to leave the room, the temptation proved irresistible, and the young man jumped to his feet to salute Brunetti’s retreating back.

A woman, one who spoke very little Italian. ‘Molto poco’, he remembered the doctor saying. He also remembered something his father had once told him about fishing, when it had been possible to fish in the laguna, that it was bad to flick the bait, that it scared the fish away. So he would wait. She was there for six months, at any rate, and he wasn’t going anywhere. If she didn’t call again, he’d call the hospital on Monday and ask to speak to her.

And now Ruffolo was out and back in business. A petty thief and burglar, Ruffolo had been in and out of jail for the last ten years, twice put there by Brunetti. His parents had moved up from Naples years ago, bringing with them this delinquent child. His father had drunk himself to death, but not before instilling in his only son the principle that the Ruffolos were not meant for things as ordinary as work, or trade, not even study. True fruit of his father’s loins, Giuseppe had never worked, the only trade he had ever practised was in stolen objects, and all he had ever studied was how best to open a lock or break into a house. If he was back at work so soon after being released, two years in prison had apparently not been wasted on him.

Brunetti, however, couldn’t keep himself from liking both the mother and the son. Peppino seemed not to hold Brunetti personally responsible for having arrested him, and Signora Concetta, once the pinking shears incident was forgotten, had been grateful for Brunetti’s testimony at Ruffolo’s trial that he had avoided the use of any force or threat of violence in the commission of his crimes. It was probably that testimony that had helped limit the sentence for burglary to only two years.

He didn’t have to send down to the record office for Ruffolo’s file. Sooner or later, he would turn up at his mother’s apartment, or at Ivana’s, and Giuseppe would soon be back inside, there to become more practised in crime, more fully confirmed in his doom.

As soon as he got to his office, he began to look for Rizzardi’s report on the autopsy of the young American. When they spoke, the pathologist had said nothing about the presence of drugs in the blood, and Brunetti had not asked that question specifically at the time of the autopsy. He found the report on his desk, opened it, and began to page through. Just as Rizzardi had threatened, its language was virtually impenetrable. On the second page, he found what he thought might be the answer, though it was hard to tell in the midst of the long Latin terms and tortured syntax. He read it through three times and, by then, was reasonably sure that it meant that there had been no traces of drugs of any sort in his blood. He would have been surprised if the autopsy had discovered anything different.

The intercom buzzer on his phone sounded. He answered with a prompt, ‘Yes, sir.’