Death in a Strange Country

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Death in a
Strange Country

[Commissario
Brunetti 02]

By Donna
Leon

Scanned
& Proofed By MadMaxAU

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Volgi intorno lo squardo, oh sire, e vedi qual strage
orrenda nel tuo nobil regno, fa il crudo mostro. Ah mira allagate di sangue quelle
pubbliche vie. Ad ogni passo vedrai chi geme, e l’alma gonfia d’atro velen dal
corpo esala.

Gaze around you, oh sire, and see
what terrible destruction the cruel monster has wrought in your noble kingdom.
Look at the streets swamped in blood. At every step you see someone groaning,
the spirit leaving a corpse swollen with horrible poison.

Idomeneo

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1

The body floated face down in the murky water of the
canal. Gently, the ebbing tide tugged it along towards the open waters of the
laguna
that spread out beyond the end of the canal. The head bumped a few times
against the moss-covered steps of the embankment in front of the Basilica of
Santi Giovanni e Paolo, lodged there for a moment, then shifted free as the
feet swung out in a delicate balletic arc that pulled it loose and set it again
drifting towards the open waters and freedom.

Close by, the bells of
the church chimed four in the morning, and the waters slowed, as if ordered to
do so by the bell.

Gradually, they slowed
even more, until they reached that moment of utter stillness that separates the
tides, when the waters wait for the new tide to take over the day’s work.
Caught in the calm, the limp thing bobbed on the surface of the water,
dark-clad and invisible. Time passed in silence and then was broken by two men
who walked by, chatting in soft voices filled with the - easy sibilance of the
Venetian dialect. One of them pushed a low cart loaded with newspapers which he
was taking back to his newsstand to begin the day; the other was on his way to
work in the hospital that took up one entire side of the vast open
campo.

Out in the
laguna,
a
small boat puttered past, and the tiny waves it raised rippled up the canal and
toyed with the body, shifting it back up against the embankment wall.

As the bells chimed five,
a woman in one of the houses that overlooked the canal and faced onto the
campo
flung open the dark-green shutters of her kitchen and turned back to lower
the flaming gas under her coffee pot. Still not fully awake, she spooned sugar
into a small cup, flipped off the gas with a practised motion of her wrist, and
poured a thick stream of coffee into her cup. Cradling it in her hands, she
walked back to the open window and, as she had every morning for decades, looked
across at the giant equestrian statue of Colleoni, once the most fearsome of
all Venetian military leaders, now her nearest neighbour. For Bianca Pianaro,
this was the most peaceful moment of the day, and Colleoni, cast into eternal
bronze silence centuries ago, the perfect companion for this precious, secret
quarter-hour of silence.

Glad of its sharp warmth,
she sipped at her coffee, watching the pigeons that had already begun to peck
their way towards the base of the statue. Idly, she glanced directly below her,
to where her husband’s small boat bobbed in the dark-green water. It had rained
in the night, and she looked to see if the canvas tarpaulin that covered the
boat was still in place. If the tarpaulin had been pulled free by the wind,
Nino would have to go down and bail the boat out before he went to work. She
leaned out, providing herself a clear view of the bow. At first, she thought it
was a bag of rubbish, swept from the embankment by the night’s tide. But it was
strangely symmetrical, elongated, with two branches sweeping out on either side
of the central trunk, almost as if it were...

‘Oh,
Dio,’
she
gasped and let her coffee cup fall into the waters below, not far from the
strange shape floating face down in the canal. ‘Nino, Nino,’ she screamed,
turning back towards their bedroom. ‘There’s a body in the canal.’

It was this same message,
‘There’s a body in the canal’, that woke Guido Brunetti twenty minutes later.
He shifted up onto his left shoulder and pulled the phone onto the bed with him.
‘Where?’

‘Santi Giovanni e Paolo.
In front of the hospital, sir,’ answered the policeman who had called him as
soon as the call came into the Questura.

‘What happened? Who found
him?’ Brunetti asked, swinging his feet out from beneath the covers and sitting
up on the edge of the bed.

‘I don’t know, sir. A man
named Pianaro called to report it.’

‘So why did you call me?’
Brunetti asked, making no attempt to hide the irritation in his voice, the
clear result of the time indicated on the glowing face of the clock beside the
bed: five-thirty-one. ‘What about the night shift? Isn’t anyone there?’

‘They’ve all gone home,
sir. I called Bozzetti, but his wife said he wasn’t home yet.’ As he spoke, the
young man’s voice grew more and more uncertain. ‘So I called you, sir, because
I know you’re working day shift.’ Which, Brunetti reminded himself, began in
two and a half hours. He said nothing.

‘Are you there, sir?’

‘Yes, I’m here. And it’s
five-thirty.’

‘I
know, sir,’ the young man
bleated. ‘But I couldn’t find anyone else.’

‘All right. All right. I’ll
go down there and have a look. Send me a launch. Now.’ Remembering the hour and
the fact mat the night shift had already gone off duty, he asked, ‘Is there
anyone who can bring it?’

‘Yes, sir. Bonsuan just
came in. Shall I send him?’

‘Yes, right now. And call
the rest of the day shift. Tell them to meet me there.’

‘Yes, sir,’ the young man
responded, his relief audible at having someone take charge.

‘And call Doctor
Rizzardi. Ask him to meet me there as quickly as he can.’

‘Yes, sir. Anything else,
sir?’

‘No, nothing. But send
the launch. Right now. And tell the others, if they get there before I do, to
close things off. Don’t let anyone get near the body.’ Even as they spoke, how
much evidence was being, destroyed, cigarettes dropped on the ground, shoes
scuffed across the pavement? Without saying anything further, he hung up.

Beside him in the bed,
Paola moved and looked up at him with one eye, the other covered by a naked arm
against the invasion of light. She made a noise that long experience told him
was an inquisitive one.

‘A body. In a canal. They’re
coming to get me. I’ll call.’ The noise with which she acknowledged this was an
affirmative one. She rolled onto her stomach and was asleep immediately,
certainly the only person in the entire city uninterested in the fact that a
body had been found floating in one of the canals.

He dressed quickly,
decided not to spend the time shaving, and went into the kitchen to see if
there was time for coffee. He opened the lid of the Moka Express and saw about
an inch of coffee left over from the night before. Though he hated reheated
coffee, he poured it into a saucepan and put it on a high flame, standing over
it and waiting for it to boil. When it did, he poured the almost-viscous liquid
into a cup, spooned in three sugars, and downed it quickly.

The bell to the apartment
sounded, announcing the arrival of the police launch. He glanced at his watch.
Eight minutes before six. It must be Bonsuan; no one else was capable of
getting a boat here that quickly. He grabbed a wool jacket from the cupboard by
the front door. September mornings could be cold, and there was always the
chance of wind at Santi Giovanni e Paolo, so near to the open waters of the
laguna.

At the bottom of the five
flights of stairs, he pulled open the door to the building and found Puccetti,
a recruit who had been with the police for fewer than five months.

‘Buon giorno, Signor
Commissario,’
Puccetti
said brightly and saluted, making far more noise and motion than Brunetti
thought seemly at that hour.

Brunetti answered with a
wave and headed down the narrow
calle
on which he lived. At the edge of
the water, he saw the police launch moored to the landing, blue light flashing
rhythmically. At the wheel, he recognized Bonsuan, a police pilot who had the
blood of countless generations of Burano fishermen in his veins, blood that
must certainly have been mixed with the waters of the
laguna,
carrying
an instinctive knowledge of the tides and currents that would have allowed him
to navigate the canals of the city with his eyes closed.

Bonsuan, stocky and
heavy-bearded, acknowledged Brunetti’s arrival with a nod, as much an
acknowledgement of the hour as of his superior. Puccetti scrambled onto deck,
joining a pair of uniformed policemen already there. One of them flicked the
mooring cable free of the piling, and Bonsuan backed the boat quickly out into
tine Grand Canal, then swung it sharply around and back up towards the Rialto
Bridge. They swept under the bridge and swung into a one-way canal on the
right. Soon after that, they cut to the left, then again to the right. Brunetti
stood on the deck, collar raised against the wind and the early-morning chill.
Boats moored on either side of the canals bobbed in their wake, and others,
coming in from San Erasmo with fresh fruit and vegetables, pulled to the side
and hugged the buildings at the sight of their flashing blue light.