Blood From A Stone Part 16

'You know him?' Brunetti asked, surprised to realize she might.

'Yes, for a number of years. He sometimes asks me for information.'

Helpless to resist, Brunetti asked, 'What sort of information?'

'Nothing to do with the police, sir, or with what I do here; I can a.s.sure you of that.' And that was all she said.

'You spoke to him?'

'Yes.'

'What did he say?'

'That he spoke to a number of people, and some of them said the man you asked about was a good man, and some of them said he was bad.' Brunetti felt a sudden jolt of anger: the c.u.maean Sibyl could do better than that, for G.o.d's sake.

He waited a moment for his anger to pa.s.s and asked, 'Didn't he express an opinion?'

'No,' she answered.

'Did he know him?' Brunetti asked, almost demanded.

'You'd have to ask him that, sir.'

Brunetti let his gaze wander off beyond her, to a photograph of a former Questore. 'Anything else?' he finally asked.

'I spent some time following the tracks of the person or persons who broke into my computer,' she said. 'The tracks lead back to Rome.'

'Where in Rome?' he asked peevishly. Instantly contrite, he added, 'Well done,' and smiled. He knew she would be pleased to be able to tell him it was the Ministry of the Interior, so he asked only, 'Who was it?'

'Il Ministero degli Esteri.'

'The Foreign Ministry?' he asked, unable to disguise his surprise.

'Yes.' Then, before he could ask, she added, 'I'm sure.'

Brunetti's imagination, already halfway up the steps of the Ministry of the Interior, had to hopscotch across the city to an entirely different building, and the mental list of possibilities he had prepared had to be tossed away and a new one prepared. For more than a decade, the two ministries had vied with one another in seeing who could best ignore the problem of illegal immigration, and when some disaster at sea or incident at the border made denial temporarily difficult, they switched to mutual recrimination and then to deceit. Numbers could be adjusted, nationalities altered, and the press could always be counted on to slap a photo of a bedraggled woman and child on to the front page, whereupon popular opinion would lapse into sentimentality long enough to allow the current s.h.i.+pload of refugees into the country, after which people lost interest in the subject, thus permitting the ministries to return to their normal policy of willed ignorance.

But that still did not explain the interference of the Foreign Ministry if Signorina Elettra said it was they, then so it was in a case of such apparent insignificance. He had no idea why they should choose to concern themselves with the murder of an itinerant street pedlar, though there were certainly many reasons why they might choose to concern themselves with the murder of a man in possession of six million Euros in diamonds.

'I've already started asking questions,' she said. During recent years, Brunetti's understanding of her methods had expanded sufficiently that he no longer pictured her sitting at her desk, making phone call after phone call or, like the Little Match Girl, walking from person to person in search of aid. This understanding, however, stopped far short of a firm grasp of the arcana of her contacts and of the skill with which she pilfered from the supposedly secret files of both government and private agencies. Not only government ministries were capable of willed ignorance.

'And Bocchese wants to see you,' she said.

That seemed to be all she wanted to tell him, so he thanked her and went down to Bocchese's office. On the steps, he encountered Gravini, who held up a hand both in greeting and to stop Brunetti.

'They're gone, sir, the ambulanti ambulanti,' he said, looking concerned, as if he feared Brunetti would hold him responsible for the men's disappearance. 'I spoke to my friend Muhammad, but he hasn't seen anyone from that group for days and says that their house is empty.'

'Does he have any idea of what might have happened to them?'

'No, sir. I asked him, but all he knew was that they were gone.' Gravini raised his hand again to display his disappointment and said, 'I'm sorry, sir.'

'That's all right, Gravini,' Brunetti said. Then he added, knowing that everything that was said in the Questura was repeated, 'We've been relieved of the case, so it doesn't matter any more.' He patted Gravini on the shoulder to show his good faith and continued down the stairs.

When he entered the lab, Brunetti found the technician bent over a microscope, the fingers of one hand busy adjusting a k.n.o.b on the long barrel.

Bocchese, one eye pressed to the instrument, made a noise that could have been a greeting or could just as easily have been a grunt of satisfaction at whatever he saw under the lens. Brunetti walked over and had a look at the plate of the microscope, expecting to see a gla.s.s slide. Instead, he saw a dark brown rectangle, half the size of a pack of cigarettes, that appeared to be metal of some sort.

'What's that?' he asked without thinking.

Bocchese didn't answer him. Adjusting the k.n.o.b, he studied the object for a few moments more, then drew back from the eyepiece, turned to Brunetti and said, 'Take a look.'

He slid down from the stool, and Brunetti took his place. He had looked at slides in the past, usually when Bocchese or Rizzardi wanted to show him some detail of human physiology or the processes that const.i.tuted its destruction.

He placed his right eye to the sculpted eyepiece and closed the other. All he saw was what appeared to be an enormous eye, but black and metallic, with a round hole in the centre as its iris. He braced his open palms on the table, blinked once, and looked again. The image still resembled an eye, with the thinnest of lines indicating the eyelashes.

He stood upright. 'What is it?'

Bocchese moved beside him and slid the metal piece from its place under the lens. 'Here, take a look,' he said, handing it to Brunetti.

The rectangle certainly had the weight of metal; on its surface Brunetti saw a sword-wielding knight mounted on a caparisoned horse no bigger than a postage stamp. The man's armour was carved in great detail, as was that of the horse. His head and face were covered by a helmet, but the horse wore only some sort of protection on its ears, and a thin line of damask material down the front of its face. It was the horse's eye, he realized, that he had seen. Without the magnification, he had to hold the plaque to the light to be able to see the tiny hole of the iris.

'What is it?' Brunetti asked again.

'I'd say it's from the studio of Moderno, which is what my friend wanted me to tell him.'

Utterly at a loss, Brunetti asked, 'What friend and why did he want you to tell him?'

'He collects these things. So do I. So whenever he's offered a really good piece, he asks me to check it for him to see that it's what the seller says it is.'

'But here?' Brunetti asked, indicating the laboratory.

'The microscope,' Bocchese said, giving it the sort of affectionate pat one might give a favourite dog. 'It's much better than the one I have at home, so I can see every detail. It helps me be certain.'

'You collect these?' Brunetti asked, holding the rectangle up close to his face, the better to examine the scene. The horse reared up, nostrils flared in fear or anger. The knight's left hand, covered in a thick mailed glove, pulled the reins tight while his right arm poised just at the farthest point of backward extension. In less than a second, both horse and man would crash forward, and G.o.d pity anything that stood before them.

Bocchese's answer was an exercise in caution. 'I've got a few.'

'It's beautiful,' Brunetti said, handing it back carefully. 'I've seen them in museums, but if you can't get close to them, then you can't really see the detail, can you?'

'No,' Bocchese agreed. 'And you miss the patina, and the feel of it.' To display that last, he held out his hand, the bronze piece cus.h.i.+oned in his palm, and hefted it up and down a few times. 'I'm glad you think it's beautiful.' Bocchese's expression was as warm as his voice had suddenly become.

Brunetti held his breath at the intimacy of the moment. In the years they had worked together, he had never doubted the technician's loyalty, but this was the first time Brunetti had seen him express a feeling stronger than the detached irony with which he chronically viewed human activity. 'Thank you for showing it to me,' was all Brunetti could think of to say.

'Niente, niente,' Bocchese said and pulled a metal box from his pocket. When he opened it, Brunetti saw that the inside was thickly padded, top and bottom, with some sort of soft material. Bocchese slipped the plaque inside, closed the box, and slipped it into the inside pocket of his jacket.

'She told you I wanted to see you?' the technician asked.

'Yes.'

'Come and have a look,' he said. He led Brunetti over to an examining table, where a number of photographs of fingerprints lay. Bocchese picked up one, flicked through the others with his forefinger, and pulled out another. He turned them over and checked what was written on the back, and then laid them side by side.

Brunetti saw the enlarged photographs of two single fingerprints. Like all prints, they looked identical to him. But he knew better than to say this to Bocchese.

'Do you see it?' Bocchese asked.

'See what?'

'That they're identical,' Bocchese said sharply, all trace of his former affability gone.

'Yes,' Brunetti said truthfully.

'They're both from that address in Castello,' Bocchese explained.

'Tell me more,' Brunetti said.

Bocchese turned the photos over, as if to remind himself which was which, and then put them back where they had been. 'Neither of these was in the apartment when you called and had Galli go over the first time, but both were there when he went back,' he said, tapping his own finger against the photo. He pointed to the second photo, 'And this was on the package of biscuits that Vianello brought me when you went back.'

'They're identical?' Brunetti asked.

'Same print, same hand,' Bocchese said.

'Same man, then,' Brunetti said.

'Unless he's in the habit of lending it to someone else, it is,' Bocchese said.

'Where, exactly, was this one?' Brunetti asked, tapping a finger against the first print.

Bocchese flipped it over again, studied the number and abbreviated words on the back, and said, 'In the room on the top floor.'

'Where, exactly?'

'On the handle of the door, on the bottom side. It's only a partial but it's enough for me to make a match. I a.s.sume he wiped the handle off, only he didn't wipe it all around, so he left the print,' he said, again tapping at the photo.'

He pointed to the second photo. 'As I told you, this was on the bag of biscuits. They were the only clear prints I found on the things Vianello brought me. The bag had a lot of grease on it. There were other smudges and partials, but nothing I could be sure about. Just this.' He paused, then added, 'I checked Galli's report. He wiped things clean after he checked the place, so the print went on to the bag after you were there.'

'Did you send them to Interpol?' Brunetti asked.

'Ah, Interpol,' Bocchese repeated, voice filled with the despair peculiar to those forced to deal with international bureaucracies. 'For what it's worth, even those of us down here have heard the rumours about the Ministry of the Interior, so, just to be sure, I sent them to a friend of mine who works in the lab in the Ministry, and I asked him if he could perhaps deal with it privately.' He paused a moment, then said, 'I sent him those other prints of the dead man.'

'What does that mean, "privately"?' Brunetti asked.

'Well,' Bocchese said, leaning back against the counter and folding his arms across his chest. 'If it were an official request, it would take a week or two. But this way I should hear from my friend tomorrow or the next day. And no copy will go to anyone else at the Ministry of the Interior.'

At times Brunetti asked himself why he bothered with official police channels at all, if he had to rely almost exclusively on private connections and friends.h.i.+ps in order to do his job. He wondered if it was like this in every country or every city. 'You think there exists a place where the police are left alone to get on with their job?' he asked Bocchese.

The technician appeared to treat this as a genuine question and gave it the consideration he thought it merited. Then he said, 'Maybe, but only in places where the government wants the police really to function, regardless of who's suspected or how important they are.' He saw Brunetti's expression, and added, with a smile, 'But I still vote Rifondazione Comunista, so I'm bound to see it that way, I suppose.'

Brunetti thanked him for his comments and the information and went back to his office, marvelling that he had, in that brief visit, learned more about Bocchese than he had in more than a decade.

20.

About an hour after Brunetti got back to his office, his phone rang. He answered with his name.

'I asked that person,' Sandrini said without introduction. 'That is, I got him talking about that subject, and he said the job was given to people from Rome, who were sent up to do it.'

'What about the guns? They have metal detectors at the airports now, you know,' Brunetti said, irritated by Sandrini's attempt to speak in code and hoping to irritate him, too. Getting a gun in Venice would be no problem to men with the right connections.

'You ever hear about the train?' Sandrini asked savagely. 'It runs on metal tracks, goes back and forth between here and Rome. Goes choo choo choo.'

Ignoring his remark, Brunetti asked, 'Is that all he said, that they were from Rome?'

'What did you expect me to do, ask for their names and addresses, and maybe a confession to make things easier for you?' Sandrini shouted, all thought of code or discretion tossed aside. 'Of course that's all he said. I'm not going to ask him about it directly, not after mentioning it once. He'd smell that a kilometre away.'

Brunetti had to admit Sandrini was right: there was no way he could ask his father-in-law about the killers without calling down suspicion on himself. He might have been able to talk his way out of the time with the prost.i.tute: after all, some Mafiosi had survived the suspicion of adultery. But none of them, at least to Brunetti's knowledge, had survived the suspicion of disloyalty.

'Thank you,' Brunetti said.

'What?' Sandrini demanded. 'I risk my life and you say "thank you".' That was followed by a number of remarks calling into question the virtue of Brunetti's mother as well as that of the Madonna, whereupon Brunetti thought it expedient to replace the receiver.

'Roma, Roma, Roma,' Brunetti whispered under his breath. In the past, he would have expected killers to come from farther south, but this was a multi-cultural world now, so hit-men could come from anywhere. He thought back over what Sandrini had said: they had been sent up from Rome to do the job. The fact that his father-in-law knew about it certainly implied that the killers were Mafia hit-men, but it did not necessarily mean that the Mafia had ordered the killing. He wondered if there were some pleasant freemasonry among hired killers and if, even when they were not involved, they knew what their fellow killers got up to, perhaps even sat around in small groups and speculated about how much their colleagues might have been paid for various jobs. The grotesqueness of this idea did not negate its possibility.

His phone rang again, and when he answered he was surprised to find himself speaking to his wife. 'You never call me here,' he said.

'Almost never.'

'All right, almost never. What is it?'

'The university.'

'The exams?' he asked, certain that she had come upon some information about her colleagues in the Department of the Science of Law and had not been able to wait until that evening to tell him.

'Exams?' she asked, her confusion audible.

'In the Science of Law Department,' he said.

'No, no, I don't know anything about that. It's about your black man.'

Though he was tempted to object that the black man was hardly his his black man, Brunetti asked merely, 'What about him?' black man, Brunetti asked merely, 'What about him?'

'I did what you asked: asked my friend, and he mentioned someone he used to work with who's a specialist in this sort of thing.'

'What sort of thing?' Brunetti asked.