Blood from a stone

‘What did you expect me to do, ask for their names and addresses, and maybe a confession to make things easier for you?’ Sandrini shouted, all thought of code or discretion tossed aside. ‘Of course that’s all he said. I’m not going to ask him about it directly, not after mentioning it once. He’d smell that a kilometre away.’

Brunetti had to admit Sandrini was right: there was no way he could ask his father-in-law about the killers without calling down suspicion on himself. He might have been able to talk his way out of the time with the prostitute: after all, some Mafiosi had survived the suspicion of adultery. But none of them, at least to Brunetti’s knowledge, had survived the suspicion of disloyalty.

‘Thank you,’ Brunetti said.

‘What?’ Sandrini demanded. ‘I risk my life and you say “thank you”.’ That was followed by a number of remarks calling into question the virtue of Brunetti’s mother as well as that of the Madonna, whereupon Brunetti thought it expedient to replace the receiver.

‘Roma, Roma, Roma,’ Brunetti whispered under his breath. In the past, he would have expected killers to come from farther south, but this was a multi-cultural world now, so hit-men could come from anywhere. He thought back over what Sandrini had said: they had been sent up from Rome to do the job. The fact that his father-in-law knew about it certainly implied that the killers were Mafia hit-men, but it did not necessarily mean that the Mafia had ordered the killing. He wondered if there were some pleasant freemasonry among hired killers and if, even when they were not involved, they knew what their fellow killers got up to, perhaps even sat around in small groups and speculated about how much their colleagues might have been paid for various jobs. The grotesqueness of this idea did not negate its possibility.

His phone rang again, and when he answered he was surprised to find himself speaking to his wife. ‘You never call me here,’ he said.

‘Almost never.’

‘All right, almost never. What is it?’

‘The university.’

‘The exams?’ he asked, certain that she had come upon some information about her colleagues in the Department of the Science of Law and had not been able to wait until that evening to tell him.

‘Exams?’ she asked, her confusion audible.

‘In the Science of Law Department,’ he said.

‘No, no, I don’t know anything about that. It’s about your black man.’

Though he was tempted to object that the black man was hardly his black man, Brunetti asked merely, ‘What about him?’

‘I did what you asked: asked my friend, and he mentioned someone he used to work with who’s a specialist in this sort of thing.’

‘What sort of thing?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Fetishes. He tells me this woman is the European expert on African fetishes.’ The fact that Paola made no comment on the strangeness of this discipline suggested to Brunetti that she found it a perfectly legitimate field of expertise, and that in its turn suggested that she was spending too much time among academics.

‘And?’

‘And I have her number in Geneva,’ Paola answered, ‘and you should call her and ask.’

‘Geneva?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Afraid of speaking French?’

‘About something as complicated as all of this, yes,’ he said.

‘Don’t worry,’ Paola said. ‘She’s Swiss.’

‘And that means?’

‘They speak everything,’ she said, gave him the number, and hung up.

So it turned out to be with Professor Winter: she spoke some Italian, good English and German, and, it seemed, the languages of the five African regions in which she did research. To his surprise, she displayed no curiosity about why the police were asking her to help identify a dead man, only asked Brunetti to describe the object he wanted identified.

‘It’s a kind of pattern, made of triangles,’ he said in English. ‘It’s on a carved wooden head, about five centimetres tall, that looks like it was broken off something, probably a statue. And on a man’s body.’

‘Where?’ she asked.

‘On his stomach.’

‘And the head: is it a man or a woman?’ she asked.

‘A woman, I think.’

‘You say you have this object?’

‘Yes,’ Brunetti said. ‘And there are photos,’ he added. ‘Of the body, as well.’

He waited for her to speak, but when she remained silent, he asked, ‘Is there any information you might give me, Professor, however tentative, from what I’ve told you?’

After a brief hesitation, she said, ‘Not until I see the photos. Anything I said now would just be speculation.’

Brunetti was struck by how much she sounded like the worst of Paola’s colleagues, the ones who saw information as something to be measured out and bestowed only on the deserving.

‘Excuse me,’ Professor Winter said, and her voice moved away from the phone as she spoke to someone in the room with her. After a moment, she returned and said, ‘Can you send me the photos?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good,’ she answered and gave him her email address, spelling it out. ‘Could they be sent to me soon?’ she asked.

‘I’d prefer to send you the actual photos,’ Brunetti said, giving no explanation. ‘If you give me the university address, I can post them to you today.’ He had Rizzardi’s photo of the mark on the man’s body, and he had already used a police Polaroid to take a photo of the head.

‘Ah,’ Professor Winter said. She gave him her address at the university and then added, ‘Perhaps things are done differently in Switzerland.’

‘Are you familiar with police work, Professor?’

‘Not particularly, no,’ she said neutrally. ‘I’ve been asked a few times to identify objects or people who have been killed, based on what I know about Africa.’

‘Oh, I see,’ Brunetti said, then asked, ‘Often?’

‘Not in Switzerland, no. By Interpol,’ she answered.

‘Is it common, then, that Africans are killed in Europe?’ he asked, as surprised as he was curious.

‘Not as often as they are in Africa,’ she answered coolly.

‘And why are they killed, if I might ask?’

‘That’s for the police,’ she answered. ‘My part is merely to help them in their attempt to identify the dead.’

‘Men?’ he asked.

‘Just as often women, unfortunately,’ she replied.

It was evident to Brunetti that Professor Winter was tiring of his questions, and so he said, ‘I’ll have the photos sent as quickly as I can, Professor. I’d appreciate it if you could tell us where you think the pattern comes from.’

‘Anything I can do to help,’ she said politely and hung up.

He depressed the receiver, dialled the squad room, and asked if Pucetti was there. The officer who answered said Pucetti was just leaving to answer a call and set the phone down noisily. When Pucetti picked it up a few moments later, Brunetti asked him to come up to his office. While he waited for him, Brunetti addressed an envelope to Professor Winter and enclosed photos of the wooden head and of the scar on the dead man’s stomach. Just before he sealed it, Brunetti decided to slip one of the photos of the man’s face inside.

Pucetti knocked and came in, and when Brunetti explained what he wanted him to do, Pucetti said he was on his way to answer a call about a burglary at a pharmacy in Santa Croce, then added that there was no real hurry to get there, so he could have the boat stop at the post office on the way.

‘Fabio and Carlo?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Who else breaks into pharmacies?’ Pucetti’s question was entirely rhetorical, but his anger was real. Fabio