shortest steps. Once he stopped, shook his head as if in answer to a
question neither of the others could hear, and then allowed himself to
be led forward again.
Seeing Pucetti emerge from a corridor on the other side of the
courtyard, Brunetti raised his free hand and signalled him over. When
the uniformed officer reached them, Brunetti stepped aside and Pucetti
slipped his arm under Moro's, who seemed not to register the change.
Take him back to the launch Brunetti said to both of them, and then to
Vianello, 'Go home with him.'
Pucetti gave Brunetti an inquiring glance.
'Help Vianello take the doctor to the boat and then come back here
Brunetti said, deciding that Pucetti's intelligence and native
curiosity, to make no mention of his nearness in age to the cadets,
would help in questioning them. The two officers set off, Moro moving
jerkily, as though unaware of their presence.
Brunetti watched them leave the courtyard. The boys shot occasional
glances in his direction, but they had only to catch his eye to look
away instantly or to adjust their gaze as though they were busy
studying the far wall and really didn't notice him standing there.
When Pucetti came back a few minutes later, Brunetti told him to find
out if anything unusual had happened the night before and to get a
sense of what sort of boy young Moro had been as well as of how he was
regarded by his classmates. Brunetti knew that these questions had to
be asked now, before their memories of the previous night's events
began to influence one another and before the boy's death had time to
register and thus transform everything the cadets had to say about him
into the sort of saccharine nonsense that
accompanies the retelling of the stories of the saints and martyrs.
Hearing the two-tone wail of an approaching siren, Brunetti went out on
to the Riva to wait for the scene of crime team. The white police
launch drew up to the side of the canal; four uniformed officers
stepped off then reached back on board for the boxes and bags filled
with their equipment.
Two more men then stepped off. Brunetti waved to them, and they picked
up their equipment and started in his direction. When they reached
him, Brunetti asked Santini, the chief technician, 'Who's coming?'
All of the men on the scene of crime team shared Brunetti's preference
for Dottor Rizzardi, so it was with a special tone of voice that
Santini answered, 'Venturi', consciously omitting the man's title.
'Ah/ answered Brunetti before he turned and led the men into the
courtyard of the Academy. Just inside, he told them the body was
upstairs, then led them to the third floor and along the corridor to
the open door of the bathroom.
Brunetti chose not to go back inside with them, though not out of a
professional concern with the purity of the scene of the death. Leaving
them to it, he returned to the courtyard.
There was no sign of Pucetti, and all of the cadets had disappeared.
Either they had been summoned to classes or had retreated to their
rooms: in either case, they had removed themselves from the vicinity of
the police.
He went back up to Bembo's office and knocked at the door. Hearing no
response, he knocked again, then tried the handle. The door was
locked. He knocked again but no one answered.
Brunetti walked back to the central staircase, stopping to open each of
the doors in the corridor. Behind them stood classrooms: one with
charts and maps on the walls, another with algebraic formulae covering
two blackboards, and a third with an enormous blackboard covered by a
complicated
diagram filled with arrows and bars, the sort of design usually found
in history books to illustrate troop movements during battles.
In ordinary circumstances, Brunetti would have paused to study this,
as, over the decades, he had read accounts of scores, perhaps hundreds,
of battles, but today the diagram and its meaning held no interest for
him, and he closed the door. He climbed to the third floor where,
decades ago, the servants would have lived, and there he found what he
wanted: the dormitories. At least that was what he thought they had to
be: doors set not too close to one another, a printed card bearing two
family names slipped into a neat plastic holder to the left of each.
He knocked at the first. No response. The same with the second. At
the third, he thought he heard a faint noise from inside and so,
without bothering to read the names on the card, he pushed the door
open. A young man sat at a desk in front of the single window, his
back to Brunetti, moving about in his chair as though trying to escape
from it or perhaps in the grip of some sort of seizure. Brunetti
stepped into the room, reluctant to approach and startle the boy into
some worse reaction but alarmed by his violent motions.
Suddenly, the boy bent his head towards the desk, thrust out his arm,
and slapped his palm on the surface three times, singing out, 'Yaah,
yaah, yaah,' drawing out the final noise until, as Brunetti could hear
even across the room, the drummer played a final extended riff, which
the boy accompanied, beating out the rhythm with his fingers on the
