Brunetti thought for a moment, then asked, ‘Will you call me when it finishes?’
‘Do you want to see him?’
‘No. But I’d like to know how long their meeting lasts.’
‘I’ll call,’ she said, and Brunetti went up to his office.
He spent the next hour alternately reading the paper, which he opened across his desk, making no attempt to hide it, and walking to the window to stare for long minutes down into Campo San Lorenzo. The black men reappeared in neither place. Restless, he opened first one drawer of his desk and then the others and pulled out any object or paper he could justify throwing away. Within half an hour, his wastepaper basket was full and the open newspaper was covered with an assortment of objects he either could not identify or lacked the will to throw away.
His phone rang. Thinking it was Signorina Elettra, he answered by saying, ‘Are they gone?’
‘It’s Bocchese, sir,’ the technician said. ‘I think you better come down here,’ he added, and hung up.
Brunetti picked up the newspaper by its corners and dumped the objects back into his bottom drawer, kicked it shut, and went downstairs.
When Brunetti entered the laboratory, Bocchese was sitting at his desk, a place where Brunetti seldom saw him. The technician was always so caught up in cleaning, measuring, weighing things that it had never occurred to Brunetti that there might come a time when he simply sat and did nothing. ‘What is it?’ Brunetti asked. ‘Those fingerprints?’
‘Yes,’ Bocchese said. ‘There’s no match in the Interpol files for the dead man. Nowhere — neither in personnel files nor among people with a criminal record.’ He waited for Brunetti to digest this and then added, ‘But. .’ When he saw Brunetti’s eyes flash towards him, he continued, ‘a flag went up when his prints were submitted, saying all requests for information should immediately be forwarded to our Ministry of the Interior.’
‘Did that happen?’ Brunetti asked, worried about the consequences.
Bocchese gave a small cough of audibly false modesty. ‘My friend thought it kinder not to burden them with his request.’
‘Ah, I see,’ Brunetti said, and he did.
‘He did say, though, that he had one other place he would try to look, but it might take some time.’ Before Brunetti could speak, the technician said, ‘No, I didn’t ask.’
Bocchese waved a hand in what might have been a comment on the reliability of friends and then said, ‘He also gave me a very strange answer about the print that was found at that house.’
‘What did your friend say?’ Brunetti asked, coming closer to the desk but not sitting.
‘The print is a match for one that belonged to Michele Paci, who was an officer with the DIGOS until three years ago.’
‘Belonged?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Yes. He died.’
Bocchese gave this time to sink in and then said, ‘When he told me, I asked him if it was possible that there had been a mix-up. But he told me he’d had the same reaction, so he’d checked it again. It’s a perfect match, probably because the DIGOS are so careful about taking prints when they set up files on their employees.’
‘Died how?’
‘The record doesn’t say. The entry says’ — and here Bocchese looked down at some papers on his desk — ‘“killed in the course of duty”.’
‘Then what’s his fingerprint doing on the door? And on that bag?’
The best Bocchese could do was shrug. ‘I checked it myself when his answer came in. The match is perfect. If the one in the Ministry files is his real print, then so are the other two.’
‘And that means he’s not dead?’
With not much of a smile, Bocchese said, ‘Unless he really did lend his hand to someone.’
‘You ever come across something like this?’ Brunetti asked.
‘No.’
‘Would it be possible for someone to have left it there deliberately? Someone else, that is?’ Brunetti asked, though it made no sense.
Bocchese dismissed the possibility.
‘So he’s alive?’ Brunetti asked.
‘I’d say so.’
‘And Interpol? Any results from them?’
‘They have no match for the print.’
‘Don’t they have the prints of other member police forces on file?’
‘I’d always thought so,’ Bocchese said. ‘But perhaps not DIGOS because they’re not exactly police.’
After a long silence, Brunetti asked, ‘You trust your friend?’
‘Not to tell anyone?’
‘Yes.’
‘As much as I trust anyone,’ Bocchese answered, adding, ‘which isn’t very much.’ When he saw Brunetti’s pained response to this, he added, ‘He won’t tell anyone. Besides, it’s illegal, what he did.’
Brunetti walked slowly back to his office, trying to make some sense of what Bocchese had told him. If the fingerprints had indeed been left there by an agent of the Italian Secret Service, Brunetti was into an investigation that could lead anywhere. He considered this for a moment, and then quickly realized how much more likely it was that the investigation would lead nowhere. Recent history was filled with examples of
It nagged at Brunetti: if the man was not dead, then who had faked his death, his employer or himself? Or both? In any case, what sort of retirement had the man gone to? He’d been in the apartment of the dead man, perhaps both before and after his death. Brunetti forced himself to stop speculating about what else the man might have done.
On an impulse, ignoring the fact that he had asked Signorina Elettra to phone him, he left the Questura and walked down towards Castello. Perhaps the black men had gone to earth in their apartment. He tried to concentrate on what he saw as he walked, intentionally chose an indirect route in the hope that it would divert him from the thought of the dead man and the man who was not dead.
As he knew was likely to be the case, the shutters were closed on the windows of the house, and a padlock hung from the door. He had nothing to lose, so he went down to the bar on the corner and asked for a coffee. The same card game was in progress, though the players had shifted it to a table nearer the back of the bar.
‘You were in here before,’ the barman said, ‘Filippo’s friend.’ He said it with a certain amusement.
Brunetti thanked him for the coffee. ‘I really am, you know,’ he said. ‘But I’m also with the police.’
‘I thought so,’ the barman said, obviously pleased with himself. ‘We all did.’
Brunetti grinned and shrugged, downed his coffee and put a five-Euro note on the bar.
As the other man looked for change, he said, ‘You wanted to know about the Africans, didn’t you?’
‘Yes. I’m trying to find out who killed that man last week.’
‘That poor devil in Santo Stefano?’ the barman asked, as though he had Venice confused with some more wildly violent place, where it was necessary to specify the location of a recent murder.
‘Yes.’
‘Lot of people want to know about them, it seems,’ the barman said, making himself sound like someone in a film who expected the detective to do a double-take.
Much as he would have liked to please him, Brunetti said only, ‘Such as?’
‘There was a man in here asking about them a couple of days before he was killed.’
‘But you didn’t tell me about this then.’
‘You didn’t ask,’ the barman said, ‘and you didn’t say you were a cop.’
Brunetti nodded to acknowledge the man’s point. ‘Would you tell me about him?’ he asked in a perfectly conversational voice.
‘He wasn’t from here,’ the barman began. ‘Let me ask,’ he said and turned to the card players. ‘Luca, that guy who asked about the
