Uniform Justice (3 page)

Bembo didn’t bother to acknowledge the request. ‘Seventeen, I believe,’ he said.

‘And his name, sir?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Ernesto Moro,’ Bembo replied.

Brunetti’s start of surprise at the mention of one of the city’s most famous names was entirely involuntary.

‘Yes,’ Bembo said, ‘Fernando’s son.’

Before his retirement from political life, Dottor Fernando Moro had for some years served as a Member of Parliament, one of the few men universally acknowledged to have filled that position honestly and honourably. The wags of Venice insisted that Moro had been moved from various committees because his honesty proved inconvenient to his colleagues: the instant it became evident that he was immune to the temptations of money and power, his incredulous fellow parliamentarians found reason to reassign him. His career was often cited as evidence of the survival of hope in the face of experience, for each chairman who found Moro appointed to his committee was certain that, this time, he could be induced to back those policies most certain to line the pockets of the few at the expense of the many.

But none of them, in three years, had
apparently
succeeded in corrupting Moro. Then, only two years ago, he had suddenly, and without explanation, renounced his parliamentary seat and returned full time to private medical practice.

‘Has he been informed?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Who?’ Bembo asked, clearly puzzled by Brunetti’s question.

‘His father.’

Bembo shook his head. ‘I don’t know. Isn’t that the job of the police?’

Brunetti, exercising great restraint, glanced at his watch and asked, ‘How long ago was the body discovered?’ Though he strove for neutrality, he failed to keep reproach out of his voice.

Bembo bristled. ‘This morning some time.’

‘What time?’

‘I don’t know. Shortly before the police were called.’

‘How shortly before?’

‘I have no idea. I was called at home.’

‘At what time?’ Brunetti asked, pencil poised over the page.

Bembo’s lips tightened in badly disguised irritation. ‘I’m not sure. About seven, I’d say.’

‘Were you already awake?’

‘Of course.’

‘And was it you who called the police?’

‘No, that had already been done by someone here.’

Brunetti uncrossed his legs and leaned forward. ‘Comandante, the call is registered as
having
come at seven twenty-six. That’s about half an hour after you were called and told the boy was dead.’ He paused to allow the man time to explain, but when Bembo made no attempt to do so, Brunetti continued, ‘Could you suggest an explanation for that?’

‘For what?’

‘For the delay of half an hour in informing the authorities of a suspicious death at the institution you direct.’

‘Suspicious?’ Bembo demanded.

‘Until the medical examiner has determined the cause of death, any death is suspicious.’

‘The boy committed suicide. Anyone can see that.’

‘Have you seen him?’

The Comandante did not answer immediately. He sat back in his chair and considered the man in front of him. Finally he answered, ‘Yes. I have. I came here when they called me and went to see him. He’d hanged himself.’

‘And the delay?’ Brunetti asked.

Bembo waved the question away. ‘I have no idea. They must have thought I would call the police, and I was sure they had.’

Letting this pass, Brunetti asked, ‘Do you have any idea who called?’

‘I just told you I don’t know,’ Bembo said. ‘Surely they must have given their name.’

‘Surely,’ Brunetti repeated and returned to the subject. ‘But no one has contacted Dottor Moro?’

Bembo shook his head.

Brunetti got to his feet. ‘I’ll go and see that someone does.’

Bembo didn’t bother to stand. Brunetti paused for a moment, curious to see if the Comandante would enforce his sense of the loftiness of his position by glancing down at something on his desk while he waited for Brunetti to leave. Not so. Bembo sat, empty hands resting on the top of his desk, eyes on Brunetti, waiting.

Brunetti slipped his notebook into the pocket of his jacket, placed the pencil carefully on the desk in front of Bembo, and left the Comandante’s office.

3

OUTSIDE BEMBO’S OFFICE
, Brunetti moved a few metres away from the door and pulled out his
telefonino
. He punched in 12 and was asking for Moro’s number when his attention was caught by loud male voices coming up the stairway.

‘Where’s my son?’ a loud voice demanded. A softer voice replied, but the other voice insisted, ‘Where is he?’ Saying nothing, Brunetti broke the connection and slipped the phone back into his pocket.

As he approached the stairs, the voices grew even louder. ‘I want to know where he is,’ the original voice shouted, refusing to be placated by whatever it was that was said to him.

When Brunetti started down the flight of stairs, he saw at the bottom a man of about his
own
age and size and recognized him instantly, having both seen his photo in the papers and been presented to him at official functions. Moro’s face was blade-thin, his cheekbones high and tilted at a Slavic angle. His eyes and complexion were dark and in sharp contrast to his hair, which was white and thick. He stood face to face with a younger man dressed in the same dark-blue uniform worn by the boys in the courtyard.

‘Dottor Moro,’ Brunetti said, continuing down the steps in their direction.

The doctor turned and looked up at Brunetti but gave no sign of recognition. His mouth was open and he appeared to breathe only with difficulty. Brunetti recognized the effect of shock and mounting anger at the opposition the young man was giving him.

‘I’m Brunetti, sir. Police,’ he said. When Moro made no response, Brunetti turned to the other man and said, ‘Where’s the boy?’

At this reinforcement of the demand, the young man gave in. ‘In the bathroom. Upstairs,’ he said, but grudgingly, as if neither man had the right to ask anything of him.

‘Where?’ Brunetti asked.

Vianello called from the staircase above them, waving back towards where he had come from, ‘He’s up here, sir.’

Brunetti glanced at Moro, whose attention was now directed at Vianello. He stood rooted to the spot, his mouth still roundly open and his breathing still audible to Brunetti.

He stepped forward and took the doctor’s arm in his. Saying nothing, Brunetti led him up the stairs after the retreating back of the slowly moving Vianello. At the third floor, Vianello paused to check that they were following, then moved down a corridor lined with many doors. At the end he turned right and continued down an identical one. Vianello opened a door with a round glass porthole. He caught Brunetti’s glance and gave a small nod, at the sight of which Moro’s arm tightened under Brunetti’s hand, though his steps did not falter.

The doctor passed in front of Vianello as though the Inspector were invisible. From the doorway, Brunetti saw only his back as he walked towards the far end of the bathroom, where something lay on the floor.

‘I cut him down, sir,’ Vianello said, putting a hand on his superior’s arm. ‘I know we’re not supposed to touch anything, but I couldn’t stand the idea that anyone who came to identify him would see him like that.’

Brunetti clasped Vianello’s arm and had time to say only ‘Good’, when a low animal noise came from the back of the room. Moro half lay, half knelt beside the body, cradling it in his arms. The noise came from him, beyond speech and beyond meaning. As they watched, Moro pulled the dead boy closer to him, gently moving the lolling head until it rested in the hollow between his own neck and shoulder. The noise turned to words, but neither Vianello nor Brunetti could understand what the man said.

They approached him together. Brunetti saw a man not far from himself in age and appearance, cradling in his arms the body of his only son, a boy about the same age as Brunetti’s own. Terror closed his eyes, and when he opened them he saw Vianello, kneeling behind the doctor, his arm across his shoulders, close to but not touching the dead boy. ‘Let him be, Dottore,’ Vianello said softly, increasing his pressure on the doctor’s back. ‘Let him be,’ he repeated and moved slowly to support the boy’s weight from the other side. Moro seemed not to understand, but then the combination of command and sympathy in Vianello’s voice penetrated his numbness, and, aided by Vianello, he lowered the upper half of his son’s body to the floor and knelt beside him, staring down at his distended face.

Vianello leaned over the body, lifted the edge of the military cape, and pulled it over the face. It wasn’t until then that Brunetti bent down and put a supporting hand under Moro’s arm and helped him rise unsteadily to his feet.

Vianello moved to the other side of the man, and together they left the bathroom and headed down the long corridor and then down the stairs and out into the courtyard. When they emerged, groups of uniformed boys still stood about. All of them glanced in the direction of the three men who emerged from the building and then as quickly glanced away.

Moro dragged his feet like a man in chains, capable of only the shortest steps. Once he
stopped
, shook his head as if in answer to a question neither of the others could hear, and then allowed himself to be led forward again.

Seeing Pucetti emerge from a corridor on the other side of the courtyard, Brunetti raised his free hand and signalled him over. When the uniformed officer reached them, Brunetti stepped aside and Pucetti slipped his arm under Moro’s, who seemed not to register the change. ‘Take him back to the launch,’ Brunetti said to both of them, and then to Vianello, ‘Go home with him.’

Pucetti gave Brunetti an inquiring glance.

‘Help Vianello take the doctor to the boat and then come back here,’ Brunetti said, deciding that Pucetti’s intelligence and native curiosity, to make no mention of his nearness in age to the cadets, would help in questioning them. The two officers set off, Moro moving jerkily, as though unaware of their presence.

Brunetti watched them leave the courtyard. The boys shot occasional glances in his direction, but they had only to catch his eye to look away instantly or to adjust their gaze as though they were busy studying the far wall and really didn’t notice him standing there.

When Pucetti came back a few minutes later, Brunetti told him to find out if anything unusual had happened the night before and to get a sense of what sort of boy young Moro had been as well as of how he was regarded by his classmates. Brunetti knew that these questions had to be asked now, before their memories of
the
previous night’s events began to influence one another and before the boy’s death had time to register and thus transform everything the cadets had to say about him into the sort of saccharine nonsense that accompanies the retelling of the stories of the saints and martyrs.

Hearing the two-tone wail of an approaching siren, Brunetti went out on to the
Riva
to wait for the scene of crime team. The white police launch drew up to the side of the canal; four uniformed officers stepped off then reached back on board for the boxes and bags filled with their equipment.

Two more men then stepped off. Brunetti waved to them, and they picked up their equipment and started in his direction. When they reached him, Brunetti asked Santini, the chief technician, ‘Who’s coming?’

All of the men on the scene of crime team shared Brunetti’s preference for Dottor Rizzardi, so it was with a special tone of voice that Santini answered, ‘Venturi’, consciously omitting the man’s title.

‘Ah,’ answered Brunetti before he turned and led the men into the courtyard of the Academy. Just inside, he told them the body was upstairs, then led them to the third floor and along the corridor to the open door of the bathroom.

Brunetti chose not to go back inside with them, though not out of a professional concern with the purity of the scene of the death. Leaving them to it, he returned to the courtyard.

There was no sign of Pucetti, and all of the
cadets
had disappeared. Either they had been summoned to classes or had retreated to their rooms: in either case, they had removed themselves from the vicinity of the police.

He went back up to Bembo’s office and knocked at the door. Hearing no response, he knocked again, then tried the handle. The door was locked. He knocked again but no one answered.

Brunetti walked back to the central staircase, stopping to open each of the doors in the corridor. Behind them stood classrooms: one with charts and maps on the walls, another with algebraic formulae covering two blackboards, and a third with an enormous blackboard covered by a complicated diagram filled with arrows and bars, the sort of design usually found in history books to illustrate troop movements during battles.

In ordinary circumstances, Brunetti would have paused to study this, as, over the decades, he had read accounts of scores, perhaps hundreds, of battles, but today the diagram and its meaning held no interest for him, and he closed the door. He climbed to the third floor where, decades ago, the servants would have lived, and there he found what he wanted: the dormitories. At least that was what he thought they had to be: doors set not too close to one another, a printed card bearing two family names slipped into a neat plastic holder to the left of each.

He knocked at the first. No response. The
same
with the second. At the third, he thought he heard a faint noise from inside and so, without bothering to read the names on the card, he pushed the door open. A young man sat at a desk in front of the single window, his back to Brunetti, moving about in his chair as though trying to escape from it or perhaps in the grip of some sort of seizure. Brunetti stepped into the room, reluctant to approach and startle the boy into some worse reaction but alarmed by his violent motions.

Suddenly, the boy bent his head towards the desk, thrust out his arm, and slapped his palm on the surface three times, singing out, ‘Yaah, yaah, yaah,’ drawing out the final noise until, as Brunetti could hear even across the room, the drummer played a final extended riff, which the boy accompanied, beating out the rhythm with his fingers on the edge of his desk.