Donna Leon - Beastly Things

‘Is it common?’ Brunetti asked.

‘No, not at all. I think there’s only a few hundred cases in the literature.’ He shrugged. ‘We really don’t know very much.’

‘Anything else?’

‘He was dragged along a rough surface,’ the pathologist said, leading Brunetti to the bottom of the table and lifting the sheet. He pointed to the back of the dead man’s heel, where the skin was scratched and broken. ‘There’s evidence on his lower back, as well.’

‘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.

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?’