Friends in High Places

fainter now, even here, where the boy had been lying for no one knew how long. ‘You two go and have a coffee. I’ll have a look at that,’ he said, waving towards the wallet and papers. ‘Then I’ll lock up and come down.’

Neither objected. When they were gone, Brunetti picked up the wallet and blew on it to remove some of the fine grey powder. It contained fifty-seven thousand lire. There was another two thousand, seven hundred in coins on the table, where someone had put it after taking it from Marco’s pockets. Inside he found Marco’s Carta d’identita, which gave his birthdate. With a sudden motion, he swept all of the money and paper on the desk into his hand and stuffed it into the pocket of his jacket. He had seen a set of keys on the table just inside the door. Carefully checking that all of the shutters held fast, he closed them and then the windows of the apartment. He locked the door and went downstairs.

Outside, Vianello was standing by an old man, leaning forward to listen to whatever he had to say. When he saw Brunetti emerge, he patted the old man on the arm and turned away. As Brunetti approached, Vianello shook his head. ‘No one saw anything. No one knows anything.’

13

With Vianello and the men from the technical squad, Brunetti rode back to the Questura on the police boat, glad of the air and the wind that, he hoped, would blow them free of the smell they had taken with them from the apartment. None of them mentioned it, but Brunetti knew he would not feel entirely clean until he had stripped himself of every piece of clothing he had worn that day and stood for a long time under the cleansing water of a shower. Even in the burgeoning heat of this late spring day, he longed equally for hot, steaming water and the hard feel of a rough cloth against every centimetre of his body.

The technicians carried the means of Marco’s death back to the Questura with them and, even though there was little chance of getting a second set of prints from the syringe that had killed him, there was some hope that the plastic bag he’d left lying on the kitchen table would provide them with something, even a fragment that might be matched with prints already on file.

When they arrived at the Questura, the pilot brought the boat in too quickly, slamming it up against the landing so hard that they were jostled about on the deck. One of the technicians grabbed Brunetti’s shoulder to prevent himself from falling down the steps and into the cabin. The pilot cut the motor and jumped ashore, grabbing the end of the rope that would anchor the boat to the landing deck and keeping himself busy with the knots. A silent Brunetti led the others off the boat and into the Questura.

Brunetti went directly to Signorina Elettra’s small office. She was talking on the phone when he came in, and when she saw him, she held up a hand, signalling him to wait. He came in slowly, concerned that he would carry in with him the terrible smell that still filled his imagination, if not his clothing. He noticed that the window was open, so he went and stood by it, beside a large vase of lilies whose oily sweetness filled the air around them with a sickly odour he had always loathed.

Sensing his restlessness, Signorina Elettra glanced across at him, held the receiver away from her ear and waved her other hand in the air, as if to suggest her lack of patience with the caller. She pulled the receiver back to her ear and muttered, ‘Si’ a few times without letting her impatience show in her voice. A minute passed, she held the phone away again, and then pulled it suddenly toward her, said thank you and goodbye, and hung up.

‘All that to tell me why he can’t come tonight,’ was all she offered by way of explanation. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to cause Brunetti to wonder what and where. And who. He said nothing.

‘How was it?’ she asked.

‘Bad,’ Brunetti answered. ‘He was twenty. And no one knows how long he’d been there.’

‘In this heat,’ she said, not as a question but as an expression of general sympathy.

Brunetti nodded. ‘It was drugs, an overdose.’

She said nothing to this but closed her eyes and then said, ‘I’ve been asking some people I know about drugs, but they all say the same thing, that Venice is a very small market.’ She paused, then added, ‘But it must be big enough for someone to have sold this boy whatever killed him.’ How strange, it seemed to Brunetti, to hear her refer to Marco as a ‘boy’: she couldn’t be much more than a decade older herself.

‘I have to call his parents,’ Brunetti said.

She looked at her watch, and Brunetti looked at his, amazed to discover that it was only ten past one. Death made real time meaningless, and it seemed to him that he had spent days in the apartment.

‘Why don’t you wait a little while, sir?’ Before he could ask, she explained. ‘That way, the father might be there and they’ll have finished lunch. It would be better for them if they were together when you tell them.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I hadn’t thought of that. I’ll wait.’ He had no idea of what he would do to fill the time between now and then.

Signorina Elettra reached forward and touched something on her computer. It made a sudden droning noise, and then the screen went blank. ‘I thought I’d stop now and go and have un’ ombra before lunch. Would you like to join me, sir?’ She smiled at her own flagrant boldness: a married man, her boss, and she was inviting him for a drink.

Brunetti, moved by the charity of it, said, ‘Yes, I’d like that, Signorina.’

* * * *

He made the call a little after two. A woman answered the phone, and Brunetti asked to speak to Signor Landi. He breathed silent, directionless thanks when she displayed no curiosity and said she’d get her husband.

‘Landi,’ a deep voice answered.

‘Signor Landi,’ Brunetti said, ‘This is Commissario Guido Brunetti. I’m calling from the Questura of Venice.’

Before he could go on, Landi cut him off, his own voice suddenly tight and loud. ‘Is it Marco?’

‘Yes, Signor Landi, it is.’

‘How bad is it?’ Landi asked in a softer voice.

‘I’m afraid it couldn’t be worse, Signor Landi.’

Silence drifted across the line. Brunetti imagined the man, the newspaper in his hand, standing at the phone and looking back toward the kitchen, where his wife was clearing up after the last peaceful meal she would ever have.

Landi’s voice grew almost inaudible, but there was only one thing he could have asked, so Brunetti filled in the missing sounds. ‘Is he dead?’

‘Yes, I’m sorry to tell you, he is.’

There was another pause, this one even longer, and then Landi asked, ‘When?’

‘We found him today.’

‘Who did?’

‘The police. A neighbour called.’ Brunetti could not bring himself to give the details or to talk about the time that had passed since Marco died. ‘He said he hadn’t seen Marco recently and called us to check on the apartment. When we did, we found him.’

‘Was it drugs?’

No autopsy had been performed. The mechanism of the state had not yet considered the evidence surrounding the boy’s death, had not weighed and considered it and brought judgement as to the cause of his death; thus it would be rash and so irresponsible as to merit official reprimand for an officer of the law to venture his own opinion in this matter. ‘Yes,’ Brunetti said.

The man on the other end of the line was crying. Brunetti heard the long, deep gasps as he choked on his grief and fought for air. A minute passed. Brunetti held the phone away from him and looked off to the left, where a plaque on the wall gave the names of police officers who had died in the First World War. He started to read their names, the dates of their birth and the dates of their death. One had been only twenty, the same age as Marco.