The Golden Egg (4 page)

‘Suicide?' repeated an astonished Brunetti. ‘But he was a deaf mute. And he may have been retarded.' He had no idea why those two things should exclude the possibility of suicide, but they did.

‘I'm not sure I see the connection,' Rizzardi answered mildly. ‘If anything, I'd think those poor devils would be more likely to kill themselves than the rest of us. At least we have the comfort of complaining about our lives and having people listen to us.'

‘Are you joking, Ettore?' Brunetti asked.

After a brief pause, Rizzardi said, ‘I might have been, when I said it, but I think it's true. I don't know about you, but it helps me to be able to complain or to be angry and have people tell me I'm right to think the way I do.'

‘Me, too,' Brunetti agreed. Then he asked, ‘How'd he die?'

‘It started out the most peaceful way, and then it got ugly,' the pathologist said.

‘What does that mean?'

‘He took sleeping pills, quite a lot of them, with what I think was hot chocolate and something sweet: biscuits or cake. And a lot of these pills are brightly coloured.'

‘Excuse me?'

‘You said he might have been retarded,' the pathologist explained. ‘The pills might have looked like sweets to him.'

Brunetti considered this possibility and then asked, ‘And then?'

‘He fell asleep on his back, and then he started to vomit,' Rizzardi began, paused and then asked, ‘You know what happens, don't you?'

‘Yes.'

It was some time before Rizzardi spoke again. ‘It must be awful. You think you're going to go to sleep peacefully, and then you end up choking to death. Poor devil. Terrible. Terrible.'

It had happened to Brunetti only once, choking, when he was a young man and a piece of bread got caught in his throat. Luckily, he'd been eating in a trattoria, and even more luckily, the waiter serving the next table had dropped the plates he was carrying and grabbed Brunetti from behind, yanking him to his feet and enclosing him in an iron grip. A terrified Brunetti had coughed up the piece of bread, followed quickly by everything he had eaten that day. Draped across the table, his sleeve in a plate of pasta, Brunetti had slowly gasped himself back to life and, returned to it, had been astonished to find himself in an almost empty room.

Decades later, he could still remember the terror that had gripped him and the certainty that he was going to die. One thing that had astonished him at the time was his perception that everything was happening with courtly slowness. His hands had moved at a snail's pace to grasp his own throat; the plates the waiter let fall when he started towards Brunetti had floated to the floor as slowly as snowflakes. And the sharp jolt of pressure to his chest that had saved his life had taken for ever to come.

He still remembered that strange prolongation of time, and the sense, when he looked up from the table, breathing almost normally, that time had slipped back to its normal pace.

‘ . . . no sign of organic damage,' he heard Rizzardi say.

‘What?' Brunetti asked.

‘I didn't find any sign of organic damage.'

‘But he died,' said a confused Brunetti, trying to recall what little he knew of physiology. ‘Choking would stop the oxygen, wouldn't it?' Beyond that, he had no idea what the actual cause of death would be. Lack of oxygen to the brain? Or to the lungs and then to the brain? But what did that
do
?

‘Oh, there was that,' Rizzardi said. ‘I was talking about his ears. I didn't see any sign of injury or scarring from illness that would have caused the deafness.' The pathologist continued, reflectively, ‘But if it was genetic, then there'd be nothing to see, anyway. There was no sign of damage to his vocal cords, either.'

Brunetti, still puzzled as to what the actual physical cause of death might have been, didn't react to this and only asked, ‘Would the pills have killed him, anyway? Even without the choking?'

‘I think so.'

‘Only think?'

With a voice into which he put an almost parental calm, Rizzardi said, ‘I'm waiting for the results of the lab tests.'

‘Let me know when you get them, will you?' Brunetti asked.

‘I'll send the report to you,' Rizzardi said, then added, as if he had the power to read Brunetti's mind, ‘The choking cuts off oxygen to the brain, and that shuts down the whole system. It can happen in a few minutes. That's enough.' That said, the pathologist put down the phone.

The very words, ‘a few minutes', renewed Brunetti's memory of and terror at his own experience. What would it be like to choke for minutes? And had this poor dead man experienced the bizarre elasticization of time?

Brunetti had time to tell Paola only the bare facts of the man's death before the kids arrived for lunch, which put an end to the subject. Over a salad of carpaccio of red beet, ruccola and parmigiano, Chiara asked permission to go on a school trip to Padova that coming Saturday, and over involtini of chicken breast, which she ignored and replaced with cheese, her parents gave their permission for her to go. As soon as everyone was finished, Chiara went to her room to study, and Raffi went off to play soccer with friends on what the family agreed was probably going to be one of the few remaining mild afternoons of the autumn. Brunetti returned to the Questura.

Signorina Elettra had left before lunch, having selected herself as the person to attend an afternoon presentation by the Guardia di Finanza on the newest techniques for detecting and combating identity theft and computer hacking. When Brunetti had learned of this, he had expected protest from those police officers who might more rightfully have been chosen to attend. Not a whimper.

Had it been any other employee, Brunetti realized, he would have looked askance at her self-selection, but the ways of Signorina Elettra, though they were not beyond reproach, were assuredly beyond question: like his sense
of time when he had choked on the piece of bread, her prerogatives had expanded.

Dutifully, Brunetti spent the afternoon going through the files that had accumulated on his desk during the last weeks, reading through them methodically, or at least allowing his eyes to pass methodically over the words. Because he had lived for more than two decades with a woman who responded to infelicities of language with the ardour of a shark greeted by a bleeding wound, Brunetti's interest was kept alive, if not by the subject matter of the documents, then by the language in which these subjects were presented. A man who had beaten his wife senseless, causing her to lose the sight of one eye, spoke during his questioning of his ‘difficulty in sustaining a life-affirming relationship'; the wife of a prominent lawyer, caught at the doors of the Armani shop wearing a short leather jacket with the price tags carefully sliced from it, maintained that she had ‘serious problems in recognizing the arbitrary distinctions in ownership between shop and client', and maintained that she was, anyway, merely stepping into the
calle
to see how the colour looked in the light of day. The fact that the bag she wore across her shoulder held five T-shirts and two pairs of slacks did nothing to clarify her rhetoric, though it did clarify the situation. It had taken her husband less than two hours to arrive at the Questura with a certificate from a psychiatrist, attesting the woman's pre-existing ‘difficulties in ownership assignment', and thus she had been released.

Brunetti suspected he should be troubled, or at least embarrassed, by the amusement these phrases provoked in him, especially in the first case, but he was not. Politicians made no discernible sense when they spoke, few doctors used the word ‘cancer' with patients who had it, and the word ‘immigrant' could no longer be prefaced by ‘illegal'. Detach language from meaning, and the world was yours.

Shaking his head when he found himself entertaining thoughts like this, he got to his feet and walked over to the window. The cat condominium still stood in front of
the church of San Lorenzo. At this distance, Brunetti could not see any of the residents in front of it, but the sight of the tiny structure cheered him, as it always did. Unruly creatures, cats, and profoundly, incorrigibly disobedient. Were Paola not allergic, they would have one, perhaps two. Out loud, he found himself saying, in English, as did she, ‘“For he is an instrument for the children to learn benevolence upon.”' And so they are, Brunetti supposed.

He returned to his desk and to the reports, forcing himself, like a swimmer in icy water, to stick at it and move ahead, though his destination seemed to move farther off, the more he struggled to reach it. It was a call from Paola that hauled him to the shore.

‘I called Donata Masi,' she said, naming a colleague from the university who lived in Campo dei Frari and thus, Brunetti realized, close to the dry cleaner's.

‘What did she tell you?' he asked, knowing what the subject matter had to be.

‘That he wasn't the son of either of the women there. She said she asked about him, years ago, and they told her they let him pretend to work there because they felt sorry for him.'

‘Pretend how?' Brunetti asked.

‘Oh, you know. Folding clothes up and sometimes taking parcels home for people. Ironing flat things.' He wanted to ask how this could have gone on for years, with never an official inspection of the place to see who was working there, but his wife was hardly the person to know, and so he let it pass.

‘Anything else?' he asked.

‘No,' Paola said, sounding disappointed. ‘I asked her if she knew his family, but she clammed up and said she didn't want to get involved. So I changed the subject and asked her about a committee meeting we have tomorrow.'

Brunetti wasted no time by asking what it was Donata didn't want to get involved in. The possibility that officialdom in any of its manifestations might interest itself in a matter – any matter – was enough to cause a cordon sanitaire to form around the subject. People stopped talking, people knew nothing, people forgot. Let
officialdom
be represented in the form of the police, and forgetting quickly turned into total amnesia. The newspapers had recently been filled with accounts of women who had been raped by the Carabinieri who had arrested them or, in some cases, who had been raped by the officers to whom they had gone to report a crime. Trust the police?

‘And so?' he asked.

‘So I don't know what to do,' Paola admitted.

He allowed his sadness to seep into his voice and said, ‘There's nothing you can do, Paola.'

It took her a moment to answer. ‘The least I can do is let his family know he's remembered by some of us. Not just by the women in the dry cleaner's, but by some of us who saw him all these years.'

‘And what will that do?' he asked. He knew he should not, but at times he lost all patience with her eternal desire to do the noble thing.

‘It won't
do
anything, Guido,' she said fiercely. ‘It's not supposed to
do
anything. He's dead, so there's nothing anyone can
do
. But at least there can be some acknow­ledgement that people knew him and that he wasn't just some poor dumb creature passing through life without anyone paying attention to him.'

The little Brunetti had observed of the dead man suggested that this last description was in fact closer to the truth, but he lacked the will to say it. He evaded confrontation by saying, ‘I'll ask downstairs and call the ambulance service and see what information they have about his family. If he has any. His name was Davide Cavanella.' Before she could ask, he said, ‘Rizzardi gave it to me.'

‘Was he allowed to live alone?' she burst out.

‘Paola,' Brunetti said with great steadiness, ‘I'll make a few phone calls and see what I can find out about him. All right?' It wasn't a test of wills, not really, but it was a test of whether she could still be reeled back from
the edge of the verbal excess she invariably regretted.

Her silence told Brunetti that she was as aware as he of how each of them was expecting the other to behave. ‘All right,' she said at last. ‘Call me . . .' she started to say, and then changed it to, ‘No, tell me about it when you get home.'

He used an affectionate name and replaced the receiver.

He phoned downstairs first to find out if the call about the man's death had come to the Questura. Nothing of the kind, he was told. The Ospedale Civile gave a similar answer and referred him to the Carabinieri at Riva degli Schiavoni. After some time, they told him that they had received a call at 6.13 that morning and, informed that the person was dead, had sent the city hearse which was under the authority of the Ulss system, though it hadn't been sent from the hospital.

Brunetti took a few deep breaths to restore himself to the calm necessary to deal with bureaucracy and dialled
the number the Carabinieri had given him. And it was from them that he finally learned the address of the dead man: San Polo 2364. As was often the case, the number meant nothing to Brunetti until he had looked in
Calli, Campielli e Canali
, where he saw that it was in one of the small
calli
beyond Campo San Stin.

He opened his bottom drawer and started to pull out the phone book, irritated with himself that he had not thought of this simple solution first. His hand stopped when he remembered that the man was deaf: perhaps it was no solution at all. But perhaps he lived with a family member: someone must be able to answer a phone. Brunetti looked at the far wall and summoned up the memory of the man: expressionless face, forever concentrated on something no one else could see, or hear; mouth always a bit open, perhaps to aid breathing; a restless lack of coordination that affected his walk and the way he repeatedly patted the cloth when he tried to fold the garments in the back room of the dry cleaner's.

He opened the book and looked through the Cs until he found Cavanella, Ana, at that address. Before even deciding to do it or knowing why he should want to, Brunetti dialled the number. It rang six times before a deep voice that was probably a woman's answered with ‘
Sì
.' There was no interrogation in the word, no curiosity.

‘Signora Cavanella,' Brunetti began.

‘
Sì
,' she repeated.

‘This is Commissario Guido Brunetti. I'm calling
to . . . .' Before he could finish the sentence, Brunetti was speaking to silence: the woman had replaced the phone.

He looked at his watch. It was just after five, so if he assigned himself the task of going to speak to her in person, he would be so close to home when he finished the
interview
that there would be no sense in his returning to the Questura.

He took the Number Two to San Tomà, walked past the Frari, down the bridge and along the canal towards Campo San Stin. He crossed it and turned right at the second
calle
. The name he wanted was on the third door on the left. He rang it and waited.

After what seemed a long time, he heard a shutter open above him. Brunetti stepped back and looked up. A woman with a cloud of too-red hair stood at the first floor window, looking down at him.

‘Who are you?' she asked with no preliminaries and less grace.

‘I'm Commissario Brunetti, Signora,' he answered politely, suddenly not at all sure just how it was he had ended up here, staring up at her uninviting expression. ‘There are some questions we have to ask you,' he improvised. As he spoke, he studied her face – she was barely five metres from him – looking for signs of resemblance to a man he had to confess he barely remembered and, aside from his odd, robotic movements, probably would not have recognized.

‘About what?' she asked. Brunetti wondered what she thought the police might have come to ask about, but then his mind caught up with the absolute lack of emotion in her question and it occurred to him that she might have been pushed – either by grief or the drugs used to combat it – into a place beyond all emotion or the ability to register it.

He backed into the
calle
, so that he could speak to her without having to look almost directly above himself.

‘What do you want?' she asked.

‘To speak to you, Signora,' he said, though he had still given no conscious thought to what he wanted to say to her.

She considered his statement, said ‘
Va bene
', then closed the window and turned away.

Brunetti returned to the door and waited; and continued to wait. After a few minutes, the door was pulled open. The woman stepped forward and stood in the doorway, repeating, ‘What do you want?' Her voice was neutral, devoid of interest. He could have been trying to sell her a set of cooking pots or to convert her to the love of Jesus.

‘First, to express my condolences, Signora, and then to ask if there is any help you might need from any agency of the city.' Brunetti knew he had only the authority of humanity to offer the first and no authority whatsoever to offer the second. But he had told Paola he would try to help, and he would do that in whatever form he could.

She looked at him directly and Brunetti had the strange sensation that she was waiting for his words to be played back so that she could understand what they meant. In a situation such as this, Brunetti's first impulse was usually to speak again, but he remained silent, curious to see how long it would take her to answer him. A long time passed: she looked blankly at him, while Brunetti studied her.

She might have been in her fifties, but he wasn't sure at which end of them he found her. The red hair stopped two centimetres from her scalp and slipped into white for the rest of the way home. Her eyes were a clear blue, the skin around them virtually unlined. Her nose and well-defined cheekbones were further evidence that she might once have been a great beauty. And it was in the angled line of those bones that he caught a fleeting glimpse of the dead man.

She was taller than average, though the thickening around her waist suggested that she might once have been taller still. Her hands, he noticed, had inordinately short fingers and the shiny skin that comes to hands that have spent a lot of time in hot water.

Brunetti realized that she had no intention of speaking: he could stand there for the rest of the afternoon and still she would not say anything to him. ‘Would you like to come to see Davide, Signora?' he finally asked.

At the mention of the name, she took a half-step backwards, as though trying to escape the name or the grief it brought her. She held up one of those thick, work-branded hands to ward off his words, stepped back into the house, and closed the door.