Beastly Things (2 page)

‘Of what?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Someone grabbed him under the shoulders and dragged him across a floor, I’d say. There’s no gravel in the wound,’ he said, ‘so it was probably a stone floor.’ To clarify things, Rizzardi added, ‘He was wearing only one shoe, a loafer. That suggests the other one was pulled off.’

Brunetti took a few steps back to the man’s head and looked down at the bearded face. ‘Does he have light eyes?’ he asked

Rizzardi glanced at him, his surprise evident. ‘Blue. How did you know?’

‘I didn’t,’ Brunetti answered.

‘Then why did you ask?’

‘I think I’ve seen him somewhere,’ Brunetti answered. He stared at the man, his face, the beard, the broad column of his neck. But memory failed him, beyond his certainty about the eyes.

‘If you did see him, you’d be likely to remember him, wouldn’t you?’ The man’s body was sufficient answer to Rizzardi’s question.

Brunetti nodded. ‘I know, but if I think about him, nothing’s there.’ His failure to remember something as exceptional as this man’s appearance bothered Brunetti more than he wanted to admit. Had he seen a photo, a mug shot, or had it been a print in something he’d read? He’d leafed through Lombroso’s vile book a few years ago: did this man do nothing more than remind him of one of those carriers of ‘hereditary criminality’?

But the Lombroso prints had been in black and white; would eyes have shown up as light or dark? Brunetti searched for the image his memory must have held, stared at the opposite wall to try to aid it. But nothing came, no clear image of a blue-eyed man, neither this one nor any other.

Instead, his memory filled almost to suffocation with the unsummoned picture of his mother, slumped in her chair, staring at him with vacant eyes that failed to know him.

‘Guido?’ he heard someone say and turned to see the familiar face of Rizzardi.

‘You all right?’

Brunetti forced a smile and said, ‘Yes. I was just trying to remember where I might have seen him.’

‘Leave it alone for a while and it might come back,’ Rizzardi suggested. ‘Happens to me all the time. I can’t remember someone’s name, and I start through the alphabet – A, B, C – and often when I get to the first letter of their name, it comes back to me.’

‘Is it age?’ Brunetti asked with studied lack of interest.

‘I certainly hope so,’ Rizzardi answered lightly. ‘I had a wonderful memory in medical school: you can’t get through without it: all those bones, those nerves, the muscles …’

‘The diseases,’ volunteered Brunetti.

‘Yes, those too. But just remembering all the parts of this,’ the pathologist said, flipping the backs of his hands down the front of his own body, ‘that’s a triumph.’ Then, more reflectively, ‘But what’s inside, that’s a miracle.’

‘Miracle?’ Brunetti asked.

‘In a manner of speaking,’ Rizzardi said. ‘Something wonderful.’ Rizzardi looked at his friend and must have seen something he liked, or trusted, for he went on, ‘If you think about it, the most ordinary things we do – picking up a glass, tying our shoes, whistling … they’re all tiny miracles.’

‘Then why do you do what you do?’ Brunetti asked, surprising himself with the question.

‘What?’ Rizzardi asked. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘Work with people after the miracles are over,’ Brunetti said for want of a better way to say it.

There was a long pause before Rizzardi answered. At last he said, ‘I never thought of it that way.’ He looked down at his own hands, turned them over and studied the palms for a moment. ‘Maybe it’s because what I do
lets
me see more clearly the way things work, the things that make the miracles possible.’

As if suddenly embarrassed, Rizzardi clasped his hands together and said, ‘The men who brought him in said there were no papers. No identification. Nothing.’

‘Clothing?’

Rizzardi shrugged. ‘They bring them in here naked. Your men must have taken everything back to the lab.’

Brunetti made a noise of agreement or understanding or perhaps of thanks. ‘I’ll go over there and have a look. The report I read said they found him at about six.’

Rizzardi shook his head. ‘I don’t know anything about that, only that he was the first one today.’

Surprised – this was Venice, after all – Brunetti asked, ‘How many more were there?’

Rizzardi nodded towards the two fully draped figures on the other side of the room. ‘Those old people over there.’

‘How old?’

‘The son says his father was ninety-three, his mother ninety.’

‘What happened?’ Brunetti asked. He had read the papers that morning, but no mention had been made of their deaths.

‘One of them made coffee last night. The pot was in the sink. The flame went out, but the gas was still on.’ Rizzardi added, ‘It was an old stove, the kind you need a match for.’

Then, before Brunetti could speak, the doctor went on, ‘The neighbour upstairs smelled gas and called the firemen, and when they went in they found the place full of gas, the two of them dead on top of the bed. The cups and saucers were beside them.’

In the face of Brunetti’s silence, Rizzardi added, ‘It’s a good thing the place didn’t blow up.’

‘It’s a strange place for people to drink coffee,’ Brunetti said.

Rizzardi gave his friend a sharp look. ‘She had Alzheimer’s and he didn’t have the money to put her anywhere,’ then added, ‘The son has three kids and lives in a two-bedroom apartment in Mogliano.’

Brunetti said nothing.

‘The son told me,’ Rizzardi continued, ‘that his father said he couldn’t take care of her any more, not the way he wanted to.’

‘Said?’

‘He left a note. Said he didn’t want people to think he was losing his memory and had forgotten to turn the gas off.’ Rizzardi turned away from the dead and moved towards the door. ‘He had a pension of five hundred and twelve Euros, and she had five hundred and eight.’ Then, like doom itself, he added, ‘Their rent was seven hundred and fifty a month.’

‘I see,’ Brunetti said.

Rizzardi opened the door and let them into the corridor of the hospital.

2

THEY WALKED DOWN
the corridor in companionable silence, Brunetti’s thoughts divided between his own lingering terror at his mother’s fate and Rizzardi’s talk of a ‘miracle’. Well, who better to contemplate that than someone who had it under his hands every day?

He considered the note the old man had left for his son, words written from the heart of something Brunetti found so fearful that he could not bear to name it. It had been deliberately willed, this opting out of life, and the old man had chosen it for both of them. But first he had made their coffee. With a deliberate lurch of his mind, Brunetti freed himself from the room where the two old people had drunk their coffee and the inevitability of the choice that had moved them from that place to the chill room where he had seen them.

He turned to Rizzardi and asked, ‘Is there a way I could use this Marlung disease – if he’s being treated for it – as a way to find out who he is?’

‘Madelung,’ Rizzardi corrected automatically, then went on, ‘You might send an official request for information to the hospitals with centres for genetic diseases, with a description of him.’ Then, after a moment’s reflection, the doctor added, ‘Assuming he’s been diagnosed, that is.’

Thinking back to the man he had seen on the table, Brunetti asked, ‘But how could he not be? Diagnosed, that is. You saw his neck, the size of him.’

Outside the door to his office, Rizzardi turned to Brunetti and said, ‘Guido, there are people walking around everywhere with symptoms of serious disease so visible they’d cause any doctor’s hair to catch fire if they saw them.’

‘And?’ Brunetti asked.

‘And they tell themselves it’s nothing, that it will go away if they just ignore it. They’ll stop coughing, the bleeding will stop, the thing on their leg will disappear.’

‘And?’

‘And sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn’t.’

‘And if it doesn’t?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Then I get to see them,’ Rizzardi said grimly. He gave himself a shake, as if, like Brunetti, he wanted to free himself of certain thoughts, and added, ‘I know someone at Padova who might know about Madelung: I’ll call her. That’s the likely place someone from the Veneto would go.’

And if he’s not from the Veneto? Brunetti found himself wondering, but he said nothing to the pathologist. Instead, he thanked him and asked if he wanted to go down to the bar for a coffee.

‘No, thanks. Like yours, my life is filled with papers and reports, and I planned to waste the rest of my morning reading them and writing them.’

Brunetti accepted his decision with a nod and started
towards
the main entrance of the hospital. A lifetime of good health had done nothing to counter the effects of imagination; thus Brunetti was often subject to the attacks of diseases to which he had not been exposed and of which he displayed no symptoms. Paola was the only person he had ever told about this, though his mother, while she was still capable of knowing things, had known, or at least suspected. Paola managed to see the absurdity of his uneasiness: it is too much to call them fears, since a large part of him was never persuaded that he actually had the disease in question.

His imagination scorned banal things like heart disease or flu, often upping the ante and giving himself West Nile Fever or meningitis. Malaria, once. Diabetes, though unknown in his family, was an old and frequently visiting friend. Part of him knew these diseases served as lightning rods to keep his mind from suspecting that any loss of memory, however momentary, was the first symptom of what he really feared. Better a night mulling over the bizarre symptoms of dengue fever than the flash of alarm that came when he failed to remember the number of Vianello’s
telefonino
.

Brunetti turned his thoughts to the man with the neck: he had begun to think of him in those terms. His eyes were blue, which meant Brunetti must have seen him somewhere or seen a photo of him: nothing else would explain his certainty.

Mind on autopilot, Brunetti continued towards the Questura. Crossing over Rio di S. Giovanni, he checked the waters for signs of the seaweed that had, during the last few years, been snaking its way deeper into the heart of the city. He consulted his mental map and saw that it would drift up the Rio dei Greci, if it came. Certainly there was enough of it and to spare slopping out there against
Riva
degli Schiavoni: it hardly needed a strong tide to propel it into the viscera of the city.

He noticed it then, unruly patches floating towards him on the incoming tide. He remembered seeing, a decade ago, the flat-nosed boats with their front-end scoops, chugging about in the
laguna
, dining on the giant drifts of seaweed. Where had they gone and what were they doing now, those odd little boats, silly and stunted but oh, so voraciously useful? He had crossed the causeway on a train last week, flanked by vast islands of floating weed. Boats skirted them; birds avoided them; nothing could survive beneath them. Did no one else notice, or was everyone meant to pretend they weren’t there? Or was the jurisdiction of the waters of the
laguna
divided up among warring authorities – the city, the region, the province, the Magistrate of the Waters – parcelled and wrapped up so tightly as to make motion impossible?

As Brunetti walked, his thoughts unrolled and wandered where they chose. In the past, when he encountered a person he had met somewhere, he occasionally recognized them without remembering who they were. Often, along with that physical recognition came the memory of an emotional aura – he could think of no more apt term – they had left with him. He knew he liked them or disliked them, though the reasons for that feeling had disappeared along with their identity.

Seeing the man with the neck – he had to stop calling him that – had made Brunetti uneasy, for the emotional aura that had come with the memory of the colour of his eyes was uncertain, bringing with it a sense of Brunetti’s desire to help him. It was impossible to sort his way through this. The place where he had just seen the man made it obvious that someone had failed to help him or that he had failed to help himself, but there was no
reconstructing
now whether it was the sight of him earlier that day or the sense of having seen him before that had prompted this urge in Brunetti.

Still mulling this over, he entered the Questura and headed towards his office. About to start up the final flight of steps, he turned back and went into the room shared by members of the uniformed branch. Pucetti sat at the computer, his attention riveted to the screen as his hands flew over the keys. Brunetti stopped just inside the door. Pucetti might as well have been on some other planet, so little was he conscious of the room in which he sat.

As Brunetti watched, Pucetti’s body grew ever tenser, his breathing tighter. The young officer began to mutter to himself, or perhaps to the computer. Without warning, Pucetti’s face, and then his body, relaxed. He pulled his hands from the keys, stared a moment at the screen, then raised his right hand, index finger extended, and jabbed at a single key in the manner of a jazz pianist hitting the final note he knew would bring the audience to its feet.

Pucetti’s hand bounced away from the keys and stopped, forgotten, at the level of his ear, his eyes still on the screen. Whatever he saw there lifted him to his feet, both arms jammed above his head in the gesture made by every triumphant athlete Brunetti had ever seen on the sports page. ‘Got you, you bastard!’ the young officer shouted, waving his fists wildly over his head and shifting his weight back and forth on his feet. It wasn’t a war dance, but it was close. Alvise and Riverre, standing together at the other side of the room, turned towards the noise and motion, their surprise evident.

Brunetti took a few steps into the room. ‘What have you done, Pucetti?’ he asked, then added, ‘Who’d you get?’

Pucetti, radiant with a mixture of glee and triumph that took a decade off his face, turned to his superior. ‘Those bastards at the airport,’ he said, punctuating his statement with two quick uppercuts into the air above his head.