Friends in High Places

unexceptional children?’

It had been a painful evening for everyone except, strangely enough, Maria, who had seemed unaware of how tedious the others found her behaviour.

With childlike candour, Brunetti asked, ‘This isn’t turning into an argument, is it?’

Paola put her head back against the sofa and laughed outright. ‘No, it isn’t.’ She added, ‘I suppose my tone shows how little real sympathy I have for her. And the guilt I feel about that.’ She waited to see how Brunetti reacted to her confession, and then continued, ‘There were a lot of things she could have done, but she chose not to. She refused to have anyone help her with the kids so that she could work even part time in someone else’s office; then she let her membership in the dental association lapse; then she gradually lost interest in anything that didn’t have to do with the two boys; and then she got fat.’

When he was sure she was finished, Brunetti observed, ‘I’m not sure how you’re going to take this, but those sound suspiciously like the arguments I’ve heard lots of faithless husbands give.’

‘For being faithless?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m sure they are.’ Her tone was determined but not in any way angry.

Clearly she was not going to add to that, so he asked, ‘And?’

‘And nothing. Life offered her a series of choices that might have made things different, and she made the choices she did. My guess is that each of those choices made the next one inevitable, once she agreed to stop working and to move out of Venice, but she still made them when no one, as you said, was pointing a gun at her head.’

‘I feel sorry for her,’ Brunetti said. ‘For them both.’

Paola, head resting against the back of the sofa, closed her eyes and said, ‘So do I,’ After a long time, she asked, ‘Are you glad I kept my job?’

He gave this the consideration it deserved and answered, ‘Not particularly; I’m just happy you didn’t get fat.’

11

The next day, Patta did not appear at the Questura, and the only explanation he gave was to call Signorina Elettra and tell her what had, by then, become self-evident: he would not be there. Signorina Elettra asked no questions, but she did call Brunetti to tell him that the Vice-Questore’s absence left him in charge, the Questore being on vacation in Ireland.

At nine, Vianello called to say that he had already got Rossi’s keys from the hospital and been to see his apartment. Nothing seemed out of place, and the only papers were bills and receipts. He’d found an address book by the phone, and Pucetti was in the process of calling everyone listed in it. So far, the only relative was an uncle in Vicenza, who had already been called by the hospital and was taking care of the funeral. Bocchese, the lab technician, called soon after this to say he was sending one of the officers up to Brunetti’s office with Rossi’s wallet.

‘Anything on it?’

‘No, only his own prints and some that came off that kid who found him.’

Immediately curious about the possibility that there might be another witness, Brunetti asked, ‘Kid?’

‘The officer, the young one. I don’t know his name. They’re all kids to me.’

‘Franchi.’

‘If you say so,’ Bocchese said with little interest. ‘I’ve got his prints on file here, and they match the others on the wallet.’

‘Anything else?’

‘No. I didn’t look at the stuff inside, just lifted the prints.’

A young officer, one of the new ones Brunetti found it so difficult to call by name, appeared at his door. At Brunetti’s wave, he came in and placed the wallet, still wrapped in a plastic bag, on the desk.

Brunetti shifted the phone, clamping it under his chin, and picked up the envelope. Opening it, he asked Bocchese, ‘Any prints inside?’

‘I said those were the only prints,’ the technician said and hung up.

Brunetti put the phone down. A Carabiniere colonel had once remarked that Bocchese was so good that he could find fingerprints even on a substance as oily as a politician’s soul, and so he was given more latitude than most of the other people working in the Questura. Brunetti had long since become accustomed to the man’s constant irascibility; indeed, years of exposure had dulled him to it. His surliness was compensated for by the flawless efficiency of his work, which had more than once held up to the fierce scepticism of defence attorneys.

Brunetti zipped open the envelope and tilted the wallet on to the desk. It was curved, having taken on the shape of Rossi’s hip, against which it must have been kept for years. The brown leather was creased down the middle and a small strip of the binding had been rubbed away, exposing a thin grey cord. He opened the wallet and pressed it flat on his desk. A series of slots on the left side held four plastic cards: Visa, Standa, his identification card from the Ufficio Catasto, and his Carta Venezia that would qualify Rossi to pay the lower fare imposed on residents by the transport system. He pulled them out and studied the photo that appeared on the last two. It had been impressed into the cards by some sort of holographic process and so lapsed into invisibility when the light struck it from certain angles, but it was definitely Rossi.

On the right side of the wallet was a small change purse, its flap held closed by a brass snap. Brunetti opened it and poured the change out on to his desk. There were some of the new thousand-lire pieces, a few five- hundred-lire coins, and one of each of the three different sized one-hundred-lire coins currently in circulation. Did other people find it as strange as he did that there should be three different sizes? What could explain such madness?

Brunetti pulled apart the back section of the wallet and lifted out the banknotes. They were arranged in strict order, with the largest bills toward the back of the wallet, descending to the thousand-lire bills at the front. He counted the notes: one hundred and eighty-seven thousand lire.

He pulled the back section apart to see if he had overlooked anything, but there was nothing else. He slipped his fingers into the slot on the left side and pulled out some unused vaporetto tickets, a receipt from a bar for three thousand, three hundred lire, and some eight-hundred-lire stamps. On the other side he found another receipt from a bar, on the back of which was written a phone number. As it did not begin with 52, 27, or 72, he assumed it was not a Venice number, though no city code was given. And that was all. No names, no note from the deceased man, leaving a message to be read in the event that something happened to him, none of those things that never really are found in the wallets of people who may have died by wilful violence.

Brunetti put the money back into the wallet, the wallet back into the plastic bag. He pulled the telephone across the desk and dialled Rizzardi’s number. The autopsy should have been done by now, and he was curious to know more about that strange indentation on Rossi’s forehead.

The doctor answered the phone on the second ring, and they exchanged polite greetings. Rizzardi then said, ‘You calling about Rossi?’ When Brunetti said he was, Rizzardi said, ‘Good. If you hadn’t called me, I would have called you.’

‘Why?’

‘The wound. Well, the two wounds. On his head.’

‘What about them?’

‘One’s flat, and cement’s ground into it. That happened when he hit the pavement. But to the left of it there’s another one, tubular. That is, it was made by something cylindrical, like the pipes used to build the impalcatura they put up around the building, though the circumference seems smaller than the pipes I remember seeing on those things.’

‘And?’

‘And there’s no rust at all in the wound. Those pipes are usually filthy with all sorts of dirt and rust and paint, but the wound had no sign of any of those things.’