Brunetti raised his voice and asked, 'Do you have a doctor here?'
Obviously the question confused Rocich, who said, 'What?'
'A doctor? Do you have a doctor?' 'Why you ask?'
Brunetti put on an air of irritated patience. 'Because I want to know. I want to know if you have a doctor, if you have a family doctor.' Again, the word 'family' slipped into his conversation and into his mind. Before Rocich could refuse, Brunetti said. 'There are records, Signor Rocich. I don't want to have to waste more time looking for them.'
'Calfi, he doctor for all,' Rocich answered, waving a hand backwards over the entire camp.
Brunetti went to the unnecessary trouble of pulling out his notebook and writing down the doctor's name.
Rocich couldn't let it go. 'Why you want?'
'Your daughter was sick when she died,' he said. True enough. 'And the police doctor wants to see the blood records of the people here.'
He wondered how much of this Rocich understood. Apparently enough for him to ask, 'Why?'
'Because when the doctor checks all the blood types he will see who she got the disease from,' Brunetti lied.
Rocich's response was involuntary. His eyes widened, and his head whipped around towards the door of the caravan, but by the time he looked, no one was standing at the door or at the window and the caravan gave every evidence of being empty. When Rocich looked back at
Brunetti, the nomad's expression was blank. ‘I no understand,' he said.
'It doesn't matter,' Brunetti said, 'whether you do or you don't. But we want to check.'
Rocich turned away from him then and went back up the stairs of the caravan. He went inside and closed the door. Brunetti had the driver take him back to Piazzale Roma.
25
'You think he believed you?' Paola asked Brunetti that evening as they sat in the living room, the children in their rooms and the house quiet with the late-night stillness that encourages people to abandon the day and go to bed.
‘I don't know what he believed,' Brunetti said, taking another sip of the plum liqueur that one of his paid informants had given him for Christmas the year before. The man, who owned three fishing boats in Chioggia, had proven a very useful source of information on the traffic in contraband cigarettes coming in from Montenegro, and so Brunetti and his colleagues in the Guardia di Finanza never expressed any curiosity about the source of the seemingly endless supply of distilled liqueurs -all in unmarked bottles – with which he brightened the holiday season of numerous members of the forces of order.
'Tell me again exactly what you said to him’ Paola asked but then interrupted herself, holding up her glass: 'You think he makes this himself?'
'I've no idea’ Brunetti admitted. 'But it's certainly better than anything I've ever bought that had a tax stamp on it.'
'Pity, then’ Paola said.
'Pity what?'
'That he doesn't make it legally'
'So he could make more of it?' Brunetti asked, really not understanding.
'Something like that, I suppose’ Paola said. 'Or that we could buy it openly and eliminate your sense that you owe him a favour every time he gives it to you.'
'He's been paid enough’ Brunetti said, giving no explanation of what that might mean. 'Besides, you know how hard it is to open a business, especially one where he'd have to get the licences to produce alcohol. No, he's better doing it the way he does.'
'Protected by the police?' she asked, using the vocal equivalent of a poke with a stick.
'And the Guardia di Finanza’ Brunetti added complacently. 'Don't forget them.'
She emptied her glass, set it on the table, and said, this time employing the voice she used when she had been bested, 'All right. But going back to this Gypsy, tell me again exactly what you said to him.'
Brunetti cradled the small glass between his hands. 'That she had a disease when she died. Which is true enough’ he added, realizing that it was only with Paola that he could feel comfortable talking about this. 'And that a doctor would be able to tell who she got the disease from by looking at blood types.' Brunetti had spoken impulsively, hoping that Rocich would somehow have heard enough garbled talk about disease transmission to have some vague inkling that it was possible to trace the source of a disease in this manner. And that he knew what sort of disease the girl had or was likely to have had.
'But how could anyone believe something like that?' Paola asked, making no attempt to disguise her scepticism.
Brunetti could only shrug. 'There's no telling what people will believe.'
Paola considered this for some time, then said, 'You're probably right. God knows what's percolating in the heads of most people.' She gave a weary shake of her own. 'I've got students who think you can't get pregnant the first time you have sex.'
'And I've arrested people who think you can get AIDS from hairbrushes,' Brunetti added.
'So what will you do?'
'No one's claimed the body,' Brunetti said, not by way of answer to her question; more just to say it and see what she thought. 'Or at least no one had yesterday, when I spoke to Rizzardi.'
'What's her family waiting for?'
'God knows,' Brunetti answered. Her family.
'What will happen?'
Brunetti had no answer. The idea that a parent could know that their child was lying dead, no matter where, and not rush to the body was one he found impossible to comprehend. This was the basis of Hecuba's final lament, he knew: ‘I, homeless, childless, and the one to lay you in your grave, you so young and miserably dead.' He had read that just last night and had been forced to put the book aside, the play unfinished.
He would have to call Rizzardi's office again to see if the child's body had been taken away. He knew the urge to do it immediately was futile: no one would be at the morgue at this hour, and it was hardly a matter about which he could disturb the pathologist at home.
'Guido?' Paola asked. 'Are you all right?'
'Yes, yes,' he said, dragging his spirit back to their conversation. 'I was thinking about the girl.' He still lacked the courage to tell Paola he had been dreaming about the child, as well.
'What will happen?'
'If?'
'If no one claims her.'
'I don't know,' he admitted. It had happened in the past, when bodies found in the water had not been identified: then it became the responsibility of the city to see to burying them, a mass said over their nameless corpse in the hope that they were Catholic and perhaps in the added hope that this would make some difference.
In this case, however, where the dead person had been identified and yet remained unclaimed, Brunetti had no idea how to proceed: indeed, he had no idea if a correct procedure existed. Even this heartless state had not been able to imagine people who would not claim their dead. He had no idea of the child's religion. He knew that Muslims buried their dead quickly, and Christians would certainly have done it by now, yet still she rested unburied in her drawer in the hospital's morgue.
Brunetti set his glass on the table and stood. 'Shall we go to bed?' he asked, suddenly feeling very tired.
‘I think we'd better,' Paola agreed. She raised a hand, inviting him to take it and help her to her feet. She had never done this before, and he was unable to disguise his surprise. Seeing this, she said, 'You are my shield and buckler, Guide' Usually, she said such things as jokes, but tonight she sounded serious.
'Against what?' he asked as he drew her towards him.
