Beastly Things Read online

  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.

  ‘The baggage handlers?’ Brunetti asked, though it was hardly necessary. He had been investigating them and arresting them for almost a decade.

  ‘Sì.’ Pucetti failed to restrain a hoot of wild success, and his dancing feet took two more triumphant steps.

  Alvise and Riverre, intrigued, moved towards them.

  ‘What did you do?’ Brunetti asked.

  With an act of will, Pucetti brought his feet together and lowered his hands. ‘I got into …’ he began and then, glancing at his fellow officers, said, enthusiasm fading from his voice, ‘some information about one of them, sir.’

  All excitement disappeared from Pucetti’s manner; Brunetti took the hint and responded with studied indifference. ‘Well, good for you. You must tell me about it some time.’ Then, to Alvise, ‘Could you come up to my office for a moment?’ He had no idea what to say to Alvise, so inadequate w
as the man’s ability to grasp anything he was told, but Brunetti sensed he had to distract the two officers from paying any attention to what Pucetti had said or attributing to it any importance.

  Alvise saluted and gave Riverre a look from which self-importance was not absent. ‘Riverre,’ Brunetti said, ‘could you go down to the man on the door and ask him if the package has arrived for me?’ To prepare for the inevitable, he added, ‘If it hasn’t come, don’t bother to tell me. It’ll come tomorrow.’

  Riverre loved tasks, and to the degree that they were simple and explained clearly, he could usually perform them. He too saluted and turned towards the door, leaving Brunetti to regret he had not thought of some request that would have got them both out of the room. ‘Come along, Alvise,’ he said.

  As Brunetti began to shepherd Alvise towards the door, Pucetti took his place at the computer and hit a few keys; Brunetti watched the screen grow dark.

  3

  BRUNETTI FOUND IT perversely fitting to be going upstairs with Alvise, since making conversation with him was so often an uphill climb. He tried to stay on the same step as the slower-moving officer so as not to make even more evident the difference in their height. ‘I wanted to ask you,’ Brunetti invented as they reached the top, ‘how you think the mood of the men is.’

  ‘Mood, sir?’ Alvise asked with eager curiosity. To show his willingness to cooperate, he gave a nervous smile to suggest he would do so as soon as he understood.

  ‘Whether they feel positive about the work and about being here,’ Brunetti said, as uncertain as Alvise apparently was about what he might mean by ‘mood’. Alvise fought to preserve his smile.

  ‘Since you’ve known many of them for so long, I thought they might have spoken to you.’

  ‘About what, sir?’

  Brunetti asked himself if anyone in possession of all his faculties would confide in Alvise or ask his opinion about anything. ‘Or you might have heard something.’ No sooner had Brunetti said that than it occurred to him that Alvise might take this as an invitation to spy and be offended by the offer, though for Alvise to take offence was as unlikely as his ability to see a hidden meaning in anything.

  Alvise stopped at Brunetti’s door and asked, ‘You mean, do they like it here, sir?’

  Brunetti put on an easy smile and said, ‘Yes, good way to put it, Alvise.’

  ‘I think some of us do and some of us don’t, sir,’ he said sagely, then hastened to add, ‘I’m one of the ones who do, sir. You can count on that.’

  Prolonging the smile, Brunetti said, ‘Oh, that was never in doubt: but I was curious about the others and hoped you’d know.’

  Alvise blushed. Then he said, voice hesitant, ‘I suppose you don’t want me to tell any of the boys you asked, eh?’

  ‘No, perhaps better not to,’ Brunetti answered; Alvise must have expected this answer, for no disappointment showed in his face. Conscious of how easily the kindness came into his voice, Brunetti asked, ‘Something else, Alvise?’

  The officer put his hands in the pockets of his trousers, looked at his shoes, as if to find the question he wanted to ask written there, looked at Brunetti, and said, ‘Could I tell my wife, sir? That you asked me?’ He placed unconscious emphasis on the final word.

  Only by force of will did Brunetti stop himself from putting his arm around Alvise’s shoulder to give him a hug. ‘Of course, Alvise. I’m sure I can trust her as much as I do you.’

  ‘Oh, much more, sir,’ Alvise said with accidental truth. Then, briskly, ‘Is that package big, sir?’

  Momentarily at a loss, Brunetti merely repeated, ‘Package?’

  ‘The one that’s coming, sir. If it is, I could help Riverre bring it up.’

  ‘Ah, of course,’ Brunetti said, feeling like the captain of the school soccer team asked by a first-year student if he wanted him to hold his ankles while he did sit-ups. Then, quickly, ‘No, thanks, Alvise. It’s very generous of you to offer, but it’s only an envelope with some files in it.’

  ‘All right, sir. But I thought I’d ask. In case it was. Heavy, that is.’

  ‘Thanks again,’ Brunetti said and opened the door to his office.

  The sight of a computer on his desk drove all lingering concern with Alvise and his sensibilities from Brunetti’s mind. He approached it with something between trepidation and curiosity. He had been told nothing: his request to have his own computer was so old that Brunetti had quite forgotten both about the request and the possibility that one of his own might someday materialize.

  He saw that the screen carried the command: ‘Please choose a password and confirm it. Then press “Enter”. If you want me to have the password, press “Enter” twice.’ Brunetti sat and studied the instructions, read them again, and considered their significance. Signorina Elettra – it could have been no one else – had organized this, had no doubt loaded the computer with those things he would need, and had set up a system that would make intrusion impossible. He began to consider the options: sooner or later, he would need advice, would work himself into a corner from which he would need to extricate himself. And she, being the mind behind the design, would be the one to help him. He did not know if she would need his password in order to untangle whatever mess he had made.

  And he didn’t care. He hit ‘Enter’ once, and then once again.

  The screen flickered. If he expected some acknowledgement from her to flash across the screen, he was disappointed: all that appeared was the usual list of icons for the programs available to him. He opened his email accounts, both the official one at the Questura and his personal account. The first held nothing of interest; the second was empty. He typed in Signorina Elettra’s work address, then the single word ‘Grazie’, and sent it off without signature. He waited for the answering ping of her reply, but nothing came.

  Brunetti, proud of himself for having hit that second ‘Enter’ without having given it much thought, was struck by how technology had colonized human emotions: to tell someone your password was now the equivalent of giving them the key to your heart. Or at least to your correspondence. Or your bank account. He knew Paola’s, always forgot it, and so had written it in his address book under James: ‘madamemerle’, no caps, all one word, an unsettling choice.

  He connected to the internet and was astonished by the speed of the connection. Soon no doubt he’d find it normal, and then he’d find it slow.

  He typed in the correct name of the disease, Madelung, and was instantly confronted with a series of articles in Italian and in English. He chose the first and, for the next twenty minutes, doggedly read through the symptoms and proposed treatments, learning little more than Rizzardi had told him. Almost always men, almost always drinkers, almost always without a cure, with quite a high concentration of the disease in Italy.

  He clicked the program closed and decided to take care of unfinished business: he called down to the officers’ room to ask Pucetti to come up. When the young man arrived, Brunetti gestured to the chair in front of his desk.

  Before sitting, Pucetti gave a look he could not disguise at Brunetti’s computer. His eyes shot to his superior and then back to the computer, as if he had difficulty pairing the one with the other. Brunetti resisted the impulse to smile and tell the young officer that, if he did his homework and kept his room clean, he’d let him take it for a ride. Instead, he said, ‘Tell me.’

  Pucetti did not bother pretending not to understand. ‘The one we’ve arrested three times – Buffaldi – has gone on two first-class cruises in the last two years. He has a new car parked in the garage at Piazzale Roma. And his wife bought a new apartment last year: declared price was 250,000 Euros, but the real price was 350,000.’ Pucetti held up a finger with each fact, then folded his hands and put them in his lap to signify that he had nothing else to say.

  ‘How did you get this information?’ Brunetti asked.

  The younger man looked down at his folded hands. ‘I had a look at his financial records.’

 
; ‘I think I could have figured that much out, Pucetti,’ Brunetti said in a calm voice. ‘How did you gain access to that information?’

  ‘I did it on my own, sir,’ Pucetti said in a firm voice. ‘She didn’t help me. Not at all.’

  Brunetti sighed. If a safe-cracker files off a layer of skin to sensitize his pupil’s fingertips or teaches him how to blow a lock, who’s responsible for opening the safe? Each time Brunetti himself used his burglar tools to open a door, how much responsibility fell to the thief who had taught him how to use them? And, given that Brunetti had passed this skill on to Vianello, who bore the guilt for every door the Inspector managed to open?

  ‘Your defence of Signorina Elettra is admirable, Pucetti, and your skill is a credit to her pedagogical capabilities.’ He refused to smile. ‘I had something more practical in mind with my question, however: what did you open and what information did you steal?’

  Brunetti watched Pucetti fight down his pride and his confusion at his superior’s apparent displeasure. ‘His credit card records, sir.’

  ‘And the apartment?’ Brunetti asked, forbearing to remark that most people did not buy apartments with credit cards.

  ‘I found out who the notary was who handled the sale.’

  Brunetti waited, irony carefully placed aside.

  ‘And I know someone who works in his office,’ Pucetti added.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘I’d rather not say, sir,’ Pucetti answered, his eyes in his lap.

  ‘Admirable sentiment,’ Brunetti said. ‘This person confirmed the difference in price?’

  Pucetti looked up at this. ‘She wasn’t sure, sir, but she said that when they discussed the sale with the notary, they made no secret that the difference in price would be at least a hundred thousand.’