Death in a Strange Country

made it because he had missed lunch.

‘I’ll eat when I get back.’

‘All right, I’ll feed the kids and wait for you.’

‘Thanks, Paola. I won’t be late.’

‘I’ll wait,’ she said and replaced the receiver.

As soon as the line was clear, he called down to the second floor and asked if Bonsuan had come back yet. The pilot was just coming in, and Brunetti asked that he come up to his office.

A few minutes later, Danilo Bonsuan came into Brunetti’s office. Rough-hewn and robust, he looked like a man who lived on the water but who would never think of drinking the stuff. Brunetti pointed to the chair in front of his desk. Bonsuan lowered himself into the chair, stiff-jointed after decades on board and around boats. Brunetti knew better than to expect him to volunteer information, not because he was reluctant but simply because he didn’t have the habit of speaking unless there was some practical purpose to be served by doing so.

‘Danilo, the woman saw him at about five-thirty, dead, low tide. Doctor Rizzardi said he had been in the water about five or six hours; that’s how long he was dead.’ Brunetti paused, giving the other man time to begin to visualize the waterways near the hospital. ‘There’s no sign of a weapon in the canal where we found him.’

Bonsuan didn’t bother to comment on this. No one would bother to throw away a good knife, especially not where they had just used it to kill someone.

Brunetti took this as spoken and added, ‘So he might have been killed somewhere else.’

‘Probably was,’ Bonsuan said, breaking his silence.

‘Where?’

‘Five, six hours?’ Bonsuan asked. When Brunetti nodded, the pilot put his head back and closed his eyes, and Brunetti could almost see the tide chart of the laguna that he studied. Bonsuan remained like that for a few minutes. Once he shook his head in a brief negative, dismissing some possibility that Brunetti would never learn about. Finally he opened his eyes and said, ‘There are two places where it could have been. Behind Santa Marina. You know that dead calle that leads down to the Rio Santa Marina, behind the new hotel?’

Brunetti nodded. It was a quiet place, a dead end.

The other is Calle Cocco.’ When Brunetti seemed puzzled, Bonsuan explained, ‘It’s one of those two blind calle that lead off of Calle Lunga, where it heads out of Campo Santa Maria Formosa. Goes right down to the water.’

Though Bonsuan’s description made him recognize where the calle was, even allowed him to recall the entrance to it, past which he must have walked hundreds of times, Brunetti could not remember ever having actually walked down the calle. No one would, not unless they lived in it, for it was, as Bonsuan pointed out, a dead: end that led to the water and ended there.

‘Either one would be a perfect place,’ Bonsuan suggested. ‘No one ever passes either one of them, not at that hour.’

‘And the tides?’

‘Last night they were very weak. No real pull in them. And a body catches on things; that slows it down. It could have been either one of those two places.’

‘Any other?’

‘It might have been one of the other calle that lead into the Canal of Santa Marina, but those are the two best places if all we’ve got is five or six hours for him to drift.’ It seemed that Bonsuan had finished, but then he added, ‘Unless he used a boat,’ leaving it to Brunetti to infer that he meant the killer.

‘That’s possible, isn’t it?’ Brunetti agreed, though he thought it unlikely. Boats meant motors, and late at night that meant angry heads stuck out of windows to see who it was making all the noise.

‘Thanks, Danilo. Would you tell the divers to go over those two places - it can wait until the morning - and take a look? And ask Vianello to send a team over to check both of those places to see if there’s any sign that it was done there.’

Bonsuan pushed himself up from his chair, knees creaking audibly. He nodded.

‘Who’s down there who can take me to Piazzale Roma and then out to the cemetery?’

‘Monetti,’ Bonsuan responded, naming one of the other pilots.

‘Could you tell him I’d like to leave in about ten minutes?’

With a nod and a mumbled, ‘Yes, sir,’ Bonsuan was gone.

Brunetti suddenly noticed how hungry he was. All he’d eaten since the morning were three sandwiches, well, less than that, since Orso had eaten one of them. He pulled open the bottom drawer of his desk, hoping to find something there, a box of buranei, the s-shaped cookies he loved and usually had to fight the children for, an old candy bar, anything, but it was as empty as it had been the last time he looked.

It would have to be coffee, then. But that would mean having Monetti stop the boat. It was a measure of his hunger, the irritation he felt at this simple problem. But then he thought of the women down in the Ufficio Stranieri; they usually had something to give him if he went begging for food.

He left his office and went down the back staircase to the ground floor, pushing his way through the large double doors and into the office. Sylvia, small and dark, and Anita, tall, blonde, and stunning, sat at their desks opposite one another, leafing through the papers that seemed never to disappear from their desks.

‘Buona sera,’ they both said as he came in, then bowed again to the green-covered files that sprawled out in front of them.

‘Do you have anything to eat?’ he asked with more hunger than grace.

Sylvia smiled and shook her head without speaking; he came into the office only to beg food or to tell them that one of their applicants for a work or residence permit had been arrested and could be removed from their lists and files.

‘Don’t you get fed at home?’ Anita asked, but at the same time she was pulling open one of the drawers in her desk. From it she pulled a brown paper bag. Opening it, she took out one, then two, then three ripe pears and placed them at the front of her desk, within easy reach of his hand.

Three years ago, an Algerian who had been denied a residence permit had gone berserk in the office when he was given the news, grabbed Anita by the shoulders, and pulled her across her desk. He was holding her there, screaming in her face in hysterical Arabic, when Brunetti had come in to ask for a file. Instantly, he had wrapped an arm around the man’s neck and choked him until he released Anita, who had fallen free to her desk, terrified and sobbing. No one had ever referred to the incident since then, but he knew he could always find something to eat in her desk;

‘Thanks, Anita,’ he said and picked up one of the pears. He plucked out the stem and bit into the pear, ripe and perfect. In five quick bites, it was gone, and he reached for the second one. A bit less ripe, it was still sweet and soft. Juggling the two damp cores in his left hand, he took the third pear, thanked her again, and went out of the office, now fortified for the ride to Piazzale Roma and his meeting with Doctor Peters. Captain Peters.

* * * *

4

He got to the Carabinieri station at Piazzale Roma at twenty minutes before seven, leaving Monetti in the launch to wait for him to come back aboard with the doctor. He realized, although it no doubt made a statement about his prejudices, that he found it more comfortable to think of her as a doctor than as a captain. He had called ahead, so the Carabinieri knew he was coming. It was the usual bunch, most of them Southerners, who seemed never to leave the smoke-filled station, the purpose of which Brunetti could never understand. Carabinieri had nothing to do with traffic, but traffic was all there was at Piazzale Roma: cars, campers, taxis, and, especially during the summer, endless rows of buses parked there just long enough to disgorge their heavy cargoes of tourists. Just this last summer there had been added to them a new sort of vehicle, the diesel-burning, fume- spewing buses that lumbered there overnight from a newly freed Eastern Europe and from which emerged, dazed with travel and lack of sleep, scores of thousands of very polite, very poor, very stocky tourists, who spent a single day in Venice and left it dazzled by the beauty they had seen in that one day. Here they had their first taste of capitalism triumphant, and they were too thrilled by it to realize that much of it was no more than papier-mache masks from Taiwan and lace woven in Korea.

He went into the station and exchanged friendly greetings with the two officers on duty. ‘No sign of her yet, La Capitana,’ one of them said, then added a scornful chuckle at the idea that a woman