Blood from a stone

Nothing but silence, the sound both of them had heard outside the doors of many empty apartments but also from rooms in which waited the frightened or the dangerous. Their communication was wordless, even invisible. Brunetti moved in front of the door and slipped a key into the lock: Vianello pulled out the pistol Brunetti had not known he was carrying. He turned the key as softly as he could, but it did not move. He pulled it out, took the second pair of keys, and tried the smaller one from that set. This time he felt the key begin to move, and as he turned it, he nodded to Vianello. Brunetti turned the handle and pushed on the door; Vianello edged him aside and shoved open the door with his foot, then crouched low and moved quickly into the room.

The chaos that lay before them spoke of flight and search, but it had nothing to say of violence. The men in the apartment had decamped, done so, it seemed, suddenly and absolutely. The furniture in the living room stood upright; in the kitchen a few cooking pots and some cutlery remained, and three plates covered with some sort of red stew stood on the table. Packages of food had been removed from the cabinets and poured out on to the table amidst the plates: rice and flour overlapped in small dunes, and on the floor an empty box of tea bags sat on top of its contents.

As they moved farther back into the apartment they saw that all personal items had been removed: there was not so much as a stray sock to indicate who might once have lived here; only the camp-beds in one room indicated their number. One bed was upturned and the others shifted around, as if someone had wanted to see or retrieve what was under them. In the bathroom, a bottle of aspirin lay in the sink, its soggy contents slowly decomposing.

Abandoning any attempt at silence, they went to the apartment above, but it looked much the same as the first: all personal sign of former occupancy was gone, and what had been left behind had been roughly searched through.

After a quick look through the second apartment and without any expressed agreement to do so, they went up to the top floor. The door stood open, and here they found signs of greater wreckage, evidence of a search which the paucity of objects must have rendered short. The box of foodstuffs sat at the end of the bed, its contents spilled beside it. The peanuts and biscuits were heaped together in a small mound on the bed cover, their plastic wrappers thrown to the floor. The piece of Asiago, covered now with a thin film of white mould, lay beside the box.

‘Have you got an evidence bag with you?’ Brunetti asked.

‘No. Maybe my handkerchief?’ Vianello asked and pulled it from the side pocket of his overcoat. He spread it open on the bed and bent over to pick up the plastic wrappers, careful to lift them at the corners by the tips of his fingers. When they were wrapped in the handkerchief, Vianello pulled a plastic shopping bag from his other pocket. Yellow, it blared BILLA in red letters that would have been visible a block away; Vianello slipped the handkerchief inside.

‘Bocchese?’ he asked.

Brunetti nodded. ‘Results to me. Privately.’

‘Worth taking anything from downstairs?’ Vianello asked.

‘Maybe the rice and flour packages,’ Brunetti suggested.

When they had done that, they left the house, having carefully locked all the doors behind them and automatically starting a conversation about the weekend’s soccer results as they went out into the calle. A man who was walking by glanced at them, but hearing Vianello say ‘Inter’ gave them no further attention and turned into the bar on the corner.

By the time they got back to the Questura, they had decided how they would proceed. Vianello went down the corridor to the lab and Bocchese, and Brunetti went up to his office to phone a colleague at the San Marco sub- station, where the arrest records of the vu cumpra were kept, and asked if he could go over to talk to him.

Moretti, a short man with retreating hair, was waiting for him in his office. In all the years they had worked together, Brunetti had never seen him out of uniform or, for that matter, beyond the confines of this building. The desk was as Brunetti remembered it: a phone, a single open file in front of the seated sergeant, and to his left an ornate frame containing a photo of Moretti’s wife, who had died three years before.

The two men shook hands and spoke of unimportant things for a moment. Brunetti declined the offer of coffee, agreed that it was indeed very cold, and then told Moretti he needed information about the vu cumpra.

Deadpan, giving no indication of how he viewed the issue, Moretti said, ‘We’ve been told to refer to them as ambulanti.’

With equal impassivity, Brunetti said, ‘About the ambulanti, then.’

‘What would you like to know?’ Moretti asked.

Brunetti took a photo from the inside pocket of his jacket and leaned forward to place it in front of Moretti. ‘This is the man who was shot the other night. Do you recognize him, or do you remember ever arresting him?’

Moretti slid the photo closer and looked at it, then picked it up and angled it a bit so that more light fell on the man’s features. ‘I’ve seen him, yes,’ he said, his voice pulling out the syllables. ‘But I don’t know that we ever arrested him.’

‘Could you have seen him on the street, then?’ Brunetti inquired.

‘No.’ Moretti’s answer was so quick Brunetti was startled by it. Seeing that, Moretti explained. ‘I try never to go to the places where they are. It bothers me to see them and not be able to do anything about it.’

‘What do you mean, not do anything about it?’ Brunetti asked, honestly puzzled.

‘I can’t arrest them by myself, when I’m not in uniform, and when I have no order to do so. It bothers me to see them there, breaking the law, so I avoid them if I can.’ Brunetti heard the anger in the other man’s voice but chose to ignore it. He waited to see if Moretti would remember where he had seen the dead man. He watched the uniformed man study the photo, watched as his eyes moved off to the middle distance, then back to the photo.

Moretti got to his feet. ‘Wait here a couple of minutes, and I’ll see if anyone else recognizes him.’ When he got to the door, he turned and said, ‘Sure you don’t want a coffee, Commissario?’

‘Thanks, Moretti, but no.’ And the sergeant disappeared, leaving Brunetti to wait. In order to pass the time, Brunetti got to his feet and went over to the noticeboard next to the door and read the various Ministry bulletins pinned there. Opening for a job in Messina — as if anyone in their right mind would want to go there. Description of the proper way to wear the new bulletproof vests: Brunetti wondered if there could be more than one way to wear them. Duty roster for the coming Christmas holiday, which reminded him of his date with Paola at four.

He went back to his chair, curious as to what could be taking Moretti so long. He had seen only three officers downstairs when he came in: how long could it take them to look at a photo? He took out his notebook and found a blank page. At the top, he wrote ‘Christmas Gifts’, carefully underlined both words, and then, in small letters to the left, wrote, in a neat column, ‘Paola’, ‘Raffi’, and ‘Chiara’. Then he stopped, unable to think of anything else to write.

He was still staring at the names when Moretti came back into the office and sat at his desk. He held the photo out to Brunetti and shook his head. ‘No one recognizes him.’

Brunetti refused the photo with an upraised hand and said, ‘Keep it. I have more in my office. I’d like you to ask anyone who’s had anything to do with the ambulanti if they recognize him.’ Moretti nodded and Brunetti, remembering the years they had worked together amicably, said, ‘And I’d like you to talk only to me about this, not to anyone else.’ A glance showed him that Moretti, however curious about the reason for the remark, understood its meaning.

‘For whatever it’s worth,’ Moretti volunteered, ‘we’ve had no encouragement to look into his murder.’

‘And won’t have,’ Brunetti said shortly.

‘Ah,’ was the only comment Moretti permitted himself for a moment, and then added, ‘I’m up for retirement in two years, so I have less and less patience with being told which crimes I can and cannot investigate.’ He picked up the photo and looked at it again. ‘I know I’ve seen this face somewhere. . All I’ve got is a vague memory, and somehow it seems that it didn’t have anything to do with this,’ he said, waving the photo in a half-circle to indicate the police station.

‘What do you mean?’ Brunetti asked.

Moretti turned the photo to display the face to Brunetti. ‘Seeing him like this, with his eyes closed and knowing that he was murdered, I’m sorry for him. He’s young and he’s a victim. And the last time I saw him, he