Death in a Strange Country

‘The train stops there, doesn’t it?’ Brunetti asked, already planning.

‘Only the local. When do you want to see him?’

‘Tomorrow morning.’

‘Hold on a minute; I’ve got the schedule here.’ While Brunetti waited, he heard the phone being set down for a moment, then Ambrogiani’s voice. ‘There’s one that leaves Venice at eight; gets into Grisignano at eight-forty- three.’

‘And before that?’

‘Six-twenty-four.’

‘Can you have someone meet that?’

‘Guido, that gets in at seven-thirty,’ Ambrogiani said, voice almost pleading.

‘I want to speak to him at his house, and I don’t want him to leave before I get a chance to talk to him.’

‘Guido, you can’t go barging in on people’s homes at seven-thirty in the morning, even if they are Americans.’

‘If you give me the address, maybe I can get a car here.’ Even as he said it, he knew it was impossible; news of the request was bound to get back to Patta, and that was bound to cause nothing but trouble.

‘You’re a stubborn devil, aren’t you?’ Ambrogiani asked, but with more respect than anger in his voice. ‘All right, I’ll meet the train. I’ll bring my own car; that way we can park near his house and not have the entire neighbourhood wondering what we’re doing there.’ Brunetti, to whom cars were alien, strange things, hadn’t stopped to consider this, how a car that clearly belonged either to the Carabinieri or the police was bound to cause a stir in any small neighbourhood.

‘Thanks, Giancarlo. I appreciate it.’

‘I would certainly hope so. Seven-thirty on Saturday morning,’ Ambrogiani said with disbelief and replaced the receiver before Brunetti could say anything else. Well, at least he didn’t have to carry a dozen red carnations.

The next morning, he managed to get to the station on time to have a coffee before the train left, so he was reasonably civil to Ambrogiani when he met him at the tiny station of Grisignano. The Maggiore looked surprisingly fresh and alert, as though he had been up for hours, something that Brunetti found, in his current mood, faintly annoying. Opposite the station, they stopped at a bar, and each had a coffee and a brioche, the Maggiore signalling to the barman with his chin that he wanted a dash of grappa added to his coffee. ‘It’s not far from here,’ Ambrogiani said. ‘A few kilometres. They live in a semi-detached house. On the other side there’s the landlord and his family.’ Seeing Brunetti’s inquisitive gaze, he explained. ‘I had someone come out and ask a few questions. Not much to say. Three kids. They’ve lived there for more than three years, always pay their rent on time, get on well with the landlord. His wife’s Italian, so that helps things in the neighbourhood.’

‘And the boy?’

‘He’s here, back from the hospital in Germany.’

‘And how is he?’

‘He began school in September. Nothing seems to be wrong with him, but one of the neighbours says he has a nasty scar on his arm. Like he was burned.’

Brunetti finished his coffee, put the cup down on the counter, and said, ‘Let’s go out to their house, and I’ll tell you what I know.’

As they drove though the sleepy lanes and tree-lined roads, Brunetti explained to Ambrogiani what he had learned from the books he read, told him about the Xerox copy of the medical report on Kayman’s son, and about the article in the medical journal.

‘It sounds like she, or Foster, put it together. But that still doesn’t explain why they were both killed.’

‘You think they were, too?’ Brunetti asked.

Ambrogiani turned his attention from the road and looked at Brunetti. ‘I never believed Foster was killed in a robbery, and I don’t believe in an overdose. No matter how good both of them were made to look.’

Ambrogiani turned into an even smaller road and pulled up a hundred metres before a white cement house that stood back from the road, surrounded by a metal fence. The double entry doors to the semi-detached house opened from a porch raised above the doors of twin garages. In the driveway two bicycles lay, one beside the other, with the complete abandon that only bicycles could achieve.

‘Tell me more about these chemicals,’ Ambrogiani said when he turned off the engine. ‘I tried to find out something about them last night, but no one I asked seemed to know anything precise about them, except that they were dangerous.’

‘I don’t know that I learned much more from what I read,’ Brunetti admitted. ‘There’s a whole spectrum of them, a real death cocktail. It’s easy to produce them, and most factories seem to need some of them, or create them doing whatever it is they do, but the trouble comes in getting rid of them. It used to be possible to dump them just about anywhere, but now it’s harder. Too many people complained about having them in their backyards.’

‘Wasn’t there something in the paper a few years ago, about a ship, Karen B or something like that, that got as far as Africa and got turned around, ended up in Genoa?’

When Ambrogiani mentioned it, Brunetti remembered it and remembered the headlines about the ‘Ship of Poisons’, a freighter that had tried to unload its cargo in some African port but was refused permission to dock. So the boat sailed around in the Mediterranean for what seemed like weeks, the Press as fond of it as it was of those crazy porpoises who tried to swim up the Tiber every couple of years. Finally, the Karen B had docked at Genoa, and that had been the end of it. As efficiently as if she had gone down in the waters of the Mediterranean, the Karen B sank off the pages of the newspapers and from the screens of Italian television. And the poisons she had been carrying, an entire boatload of lethal substances, had just as completely disappeared, no one to know or ask how. Or where.

‘Yes. But I don’t remember what her cargo was,’ Brunetti said.

‘We’ve never had a case of it out here,’ Ambrogiani said, not feeling it necessary to explain that ‘we’ were the