Blood from a stone

Anything at all that comes to you.’ He smiled and thanked them for their time and their help, and left the hotel without bothering to get their addresses. The hotel would have them, anyway, should he need to confirm anything, not that they had said anything that he could imagine would need confirmation. A thickset, Mediterranean man with hairy hands and another, shorter, one no one could describe, but no witness who had seen either one of them fire a gun.

The mist had not cleared. In fact, it appeared to have grown thicker, so Brunetti was careful to keep the facades of the buildings on his left in sight as he walked down the riva. The mist caused him to pass through the rows of bacharelle without seeing them. This added to the uneasiness he always felt when he walked past them and their vendors, so unlike the comfortable familiarity he felt in the rest of the city. He did not bother to analyse this sensation, was aware of it only in some atavistic, danger- sensing part of his mind. Once beyond them and past the facade of the Pieta, the feeling disappeared, just as the mist was beginning to do.

Brunetti arrived at the Questura a little after nine and asked the man on the switchboard if anyone had called with information about the dead man. He was told that no calls had come in. On the first floor he found Signorina Elettra’s office empty, which caused him some surprise. The fact that her — and his — immediate superior, Vice- Questore Giuseppe Patta, had not arrived at his place of work, on the contrary, came as no surprise whatsoever. Brunetti stopped in at the officers’ room and asked Pucetti, who was alone there, to come upstairs with him.

Once in his office, Brunetti asked the young officer where Ispettore Vianello was, but Pucetti had no idea. Vianello had come in just after eight, made a few phone calls, then left, saying he would be back before lunchtime.

‘No idea?’ Brunetti asked when they were both seated, unwilling to compromise the young man by asking him outright if he had eavesdropped on Vianello’s conversations.

‘No, sir. I was taking a call, so I couldn’t hear what he said.’ Brunetti was relieved to see that Pucetti no longer sat stiffly erect when speaking to him; sometimes he even went so far as to cross his legs. The young officer had begun to look at home in his uniform, less like some fresh-faced schoolboy dressed for Carnevale.

‘Was it about this dead man, do you know?’

Pucetti thought a moment, then said, ‘I’d guess not, sir. He seemed very relaxed about whatever it was.’

Changing topic, Brunetti said, ‘I asked when I came in, but no one’s called, which means we have no idea who he is or where he was from.’

‘Senegal, probably,’ Pucetti suggested.

‘I know. That’s likely, but we need to be sure if we want to have any hope of identifying him. He had no papers on him, and the fact that no one has called to identify him or to report that one of the vu cumpra is missing means we aren’t going to get any help from the rest of them.’ He was conscious of how dismissive that sounded of an entire class of people, ‘the rest of them’, but he had no time now to concern himself with niceties of expression. ‘So we have to find out who he was, and to do that we need someone who has contact with the others.’

‘Someone they trust?’ Pucetti asked.

‘Or fear,’ Brunetti said, not much liking the sound of that, either.

‘Who?’

‘Whom they fear is probably easier,’ Brunetti answered. ‘I’d say we start with the people who rent rooms to them. Then we try the wholesalers who sell them the bags. Then the officers here who have arrested them,’ he said, holding up a finger as he named each group.

‘It might be easier to start with us, sir. That is, those of us who have arrested them,’ Pucetti said, adding, ‘Because we’re right here, if for no other reason.’

‘Of course,’ Brunetti said. ‘That technician get the photos done yet?’

‘Not that I know of, sir,’ Pucetti answered, starting to get to his feet, ‘but I could go down to the lab and see if he’s got them.’

‘Yes. Do,’ Brunetti told him. ‘And see if there’s any sign of Signorina Elettra while you’re down there, would you?’

Pucetti saluted and was gone. Brunetti took the paper out of his briefcase and finished reading the first section, looking in vain for any sort of editorial comment on the death. That was sure to come, he knew.

By the time he started the second section, the first page of which carried a longer, though no more informative, story about the murder, Pucetti was back, carrying in his hand a thick pile of full page photos.

Quickly Brunetti flipped through them, discarding the photos of the whole body in place and selecting those taken from each side and from front on. The man’s eyes were closed, and the solemnity of his face was such that no one who saw the photos would expect him ever to open them again.

‘Handsome devil, wasn’t he?’ Pucetti asked, looking down at the photos. ‘How old would you say he was?’

‘I doubt he was more than thirty,’ Brunetti said.

Pucetti nodded in agreement. ‘Who’d want to do something like that to one of these guys? They don’t cause any real trouble.’

‘You ever arrest one?’ Brunetti asked.

‘A couple,’ Pucetti said. ‘But that doesn’t mean they aren’t good people.’

‘Does Savarini say that?’ Brunetti asked.

Pucetti paused a moment, then finally answered, ‘That’s different.’

‘And Novello?’

‘Why wouldn’t he?’

‘Because they broke his finger the last time he was sent to arrest them.’

‘It was an accident, sir,’ said an affronted Pucetti. ‘He grabbed the big sports bag that held everything the man wanted to sell, and the guy did what anyone would do: he tried to yank it back. Savarini’s finger was in the strap, and when the vu cumpra pulled at it, he broke his finger. But it wasn’t like the guy intended to do it.’

‘So it’s not broken?’ Brunetti asked, curious to see how Pucetti would answer.

‘No, of course it’s broken. Only he didn’t mean to do it, and Savarini doesn’t bear him any ill will. I know because he told me so. Besides,’ continued an even more heated Pucetti, ‘he was one of the cops who jumped into the canal to save the one who fell in.’

‘While trying to evade arrest, if memory serves,’ Brunetti remarked.

Pucetti started to speak but stopped and gave Brunetti a long look, then asked, ‘Are you playing with me, sir?’

Brunetti laughed.

6

An hour later, Pucetti and Brunetti had shown the photos to most of the officers at the Questura. Halfway through the process, Brunetti began to notice an unsettling correlation between their political affiliations and their responses. Most of those he knew to be sympathetic to the current government displayed little sympathy for, indeed, little interest in, the dead man. The further left on the political spectrum, the more likely it was that people would display sympathy for the man in the photo. Only two officers, both of them women, showed real sorrow that a man so young should have been killed.

Gravini, who had been in the squad that had made the last raid on the ambulanti, thought he recognized the man in the photo but also said he was sure he had never seen him among the vu cumpra he had arrested.

They were down in the officers’ squad room, so Brunetti gave an inquiring glance around and asked, ‘Do you have photos of those who have been?’

‘Rubini has all the papers in his office, sir,’ the sergeant answered. ‘Arrest reports, copies of their passports, their permessi di soggiorno, at least for those who have them, and copies of the letters