Friends in High Places

pair of rabbits behind a fat oleander, peering curiously at the viewer, both of them seeming content and well fed. He replaced the drawing and picked up another, this one apparently for some other project because it showed a severely modern house, cantilevered out over an open space that could have been a canyon or a cliff. Brunetti studied the drawing, noticing the rabbits again, this time quizzically looking out from behind what appeared to be a piece of modern sculpture on the lawn in front of the house. He set it down and leafed through more of Marco’s drawings. In each of them, the rabbits appeared, sometimes almost impossible to find, so cleverly had they been hidden: once in the window of an apartment building, once peering through the windshield of a car parked in front of a house. Brunetti wondered how Marco’s professors would have greeted the appearance of the rabbits in each new assignment, whether it would have amused or annoyed them. And then he allowed himself to wonder about the boy who put them there, in every drawing. Why rabbits? And why two of them?

He turned his attention from the drawings to a handwritten letter to the left of them. It bore no return address and was postmarked from somewhere in the province of Trento. The postmark was smudged, making the name of the town illegible. He glanced quickly down the page and saw that it was signed ‘Mamma’.

Brunetti looked away a moment before he began to read. It contained the usual family news: Papa busy with the spring planting; Maria, whom Brunetti inferred must be Marco’s younger sister, doing well in school. Briciola had run after the postman again; she herself was well and hoped that Marco was studying and doing well at school and not having any more trouble. No, Signora, your Marco will never have any trouble again, but all that you will have now, and for the rest of your lives, is loss and pain and the terrible sense that you somehow failed this boy. And no matter how deep your knowledge that you were not responsible for it, your certainty that you were will always be deeper and more absolute.

He set the letter down and quickly went through the rest of the papers on the desk. There were more letters from the boy’s mother, but Brunetti did not read them. Finally, in the top drawer of the pine dresser to the left of the table, he found an address book, and in it he found Marco’s parents’ address and phone number. He slipped the small book into the side pocket of his jacket.

A sound at the door made him turn around to see Gianpaolo Guerriero, Rizzardi’s assistant. To Brunetti, Guerriero’s ambition was easily read on his lean young face and in the quickness of his every gesture, or perhaps it was nothing more than that Brunetti knew him to be ambitious and so saw that quality – Brunetti could never bring himself to call it a virtue – in everything the man did. Brunetti wanted to like him because he had seen that he was respectful of the dead with whom he worked, but there was a humourless sincerity in the man that made it difficult for Brunetti to feel toward him anything stronger than respect. Like his superior, he was a careful dresser and today wore a grey woollen suit which complemented his elegant good looks. Behind him came two white-clad attendants from the morgue. Brunetti nodded towards the kitchen, and the men went inside, taking their rolled-up stretcher with them.

‘Don’t touch anything,’ Guerriero called unnecessarily after them. He gave Brunetti his hand.

‘They told me it was an overdose,’ Guerriero said.

‘It looks like it.’ No sounds came from the other room.

Guerriero went into the kitchen, carrying a bag Brunetti couldn’t help noticing bore the Prada logo.

Brunetti remained in the living room and, while he waited for Guerriero to finish, propped himself on the table on his outstretched palms and looked down again at Marco’s drawings. He wanted to smile at the rabbits, but he could not.

Guerriero was inside the room no more than a few minutes. He paused at the door to remove the surgical mask he had put on. ‘If it was heroin,’ the doctor said, ‘and I think it was, it would have been instant. You saw him: he didn’t even have time to get the needle out of his arm.’

Brunetti asked, ‘What would do that to him? Or why would it, if he was an addict?’

Guerriero considered this then answered, ‘If it was heroin, it could have had just about any sort of crap mixed up in it. That could have done it. Or, if he hadn’t been using it for a while, then it could have been no more than an over-reaction to a dosage that wouldn’t have harmed him while he was using it regularly. That is, if he got some stuff that was particularly pure.’

‘What do you think?’ Brunetti asked, and when he saw Guerriero begin to give an automatic, no doubt cautious, reply, he raised his hand and added, ‘entirely unofficially’.

Guerriero thought about this for a long time before he answered, and Brunetti couldn’t escape the idea that the young doctor was weighing up the professional consequences of being discovered to have made an entirely unofficial judgement. Finally, he said, ‘I think it might be the second.’

Brunetti didn’t prod, simply stood there and waited for him to continue.

‘I didn’t check the entire body,’ Guerriero said. ‘Just the arms, but there are no fresh marks, though there are a lot of old ones. If he’s been using heroin recently, he would have been using his arms. Addicts tend to use the same place. I’d say he’s been off the stuff for a couple of months.’

‘But then he went back to it?’

‘Yes, it would seem so. I’ll be able to tell you more after I have a better look at him.’

‘Thank you, Dottore,’ Brunetti said. ‘Will they take him out now?’

‘Yes. I’ve told them to put him in a bag. With the windows open, it should be better in here soon.’

‘Good. Thank you.’

Guerriero raised a hand in acknowledgement.

‘When can you do the autopsy?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Tomorrow morning, most likely. Things are slow at the hospital at the moment. It’s strange, the way so few people die in the spring.

‘I left his wallet and the things from his pockets on the kitchen table,’ Guerriero went on, opening his bag and stuffing the surgical mask inside.

‘Thank you. Call me when you have anything, will you?’

‘Of course,’ Guerriero said and, after shaking hands in farewell, left the apartment.

During their brief conversation, Brunetti had been aware of sounds coming from the kitchen. As soon as Guerriero was gone, the two attendants emerged, stretcher now unrolled and filled with its bagged burden, suspended between them. With an effort of will, Brunetti kept himself from thinking about how they would manipulate their burden down the narrow, twisting steps of the building. The men nodded in his direction but did not stop.

The sound of their departure growing fainter as they descended the stairs, Brunetti went back into the kitchen.

The taller of the two technicians – Brunetti thought his name was Santini but wasn’t sure – looked up and said, ‘Nothing here, sir.’

‘You check his papers?’ Brunetti asked, indicating the wallet and small pile of crumpled papers and coins that lay on the table.

Santini’s partner answered for him. ‘No, sir. We thought you’d want to do that.’

‘How many more rooms are there?’ Brunetti asked.

Santini pointed toward the back of the apartment. ‘Just the bathroom. He must have slept on that sofa in the other room.’

‘Anything in the bathroom?’

Santini left it to the other to answer. ‘No needles in there, sir, no sign of them. Just the regular stuff you’d expect to find in a bathroom: aspirin, shaving cream, a package of plastic razors; no drug paraphernalia at all.’

Brunetti found it interesting that the technician should comment on this and so asked, ‘What do you make of it?’

‘I’d say the kid was clean,’ he answered without hesitation. Brunetti glanced at Santini, who nodded in agreement with his partner. The other continued, ‘We’ve seen a lot of these kids, and most of them are a mess. Sores all over their bodies, not just their arms.’ He raised a hand and waved it back and forth a few times, as if brushing away the memory of the young bodies he’d seen, lying in their drug-bought deaths. ‘But this kid didn’t have any other fresh marks.’ No one spoke for a time.

Santini finally asked, ‘Is there anything else you’d like us to do, sir?’

‘No, I don’t think so.’ He noticed that both of them were no longer wearing their masks and that the smell was